Family life in the author's childhood home was not pretty, yet no one seemed to notice, and no one did anything about it. As an adult, she took up the challenge to find out what might have helped her mother fight her battle of self-destruction.

A turf war between neighbors leads to a small-town crisis in this sharply observed debut novel perfect for fans of Tom Perrotta, Meg Wolitzer, and Celeste Ng. The white elephant looms large over the town of Willard Park: a newly-constructed behemoth of a home, it towers over the quaint houses, including Allison and Ted Millers’ tiny hundred year old home. When owner Nick Cox cuts down the Millers’ precious red maple—in an effort to make his unsightly property more appealing to buyers—their once serene town becomes a battleground. While tensions between Ted and Nick escalate, other dysfunctions abound: Allison finds herself compulsively drawn to the man who threatens to upend her quietly organized life. A lawyer with a pot habit and a serious mid-life crisis skirts his responsibilities. And in a quest for popularity, a teenage girl gets caught up in a not-so-harmless prank. Newcomers and longtime residents alike clash in conflicting pursuits of the American Dream, with trees mysteriously uprooted, fingers pointed, and lines drawn. White Elephant is a tangled-web tale of a community on the verge and its all-too-human inhabitants, who long to connect but can’t seem to find the words. It's a story about opposing sides struggling to find a middle ground—a parable for our times.

Examines churches and chapels built on campuses during the twentieth century to reveal declining role of religion within the mission of the modern American university.

A couple’s future hangs in the balance as they wait for a train in a Spanish café in this short story by a Nobel and Pulitzer Prize–winning author. At a small café in rural Spain, a man and woman have a conversation while they wait for their train to Madrid. The subtle, casual nature of their talk masks a more complicated situation that could endanger the future of their relationship. First published in the 1927 collection Men Without Women, “Hills Like White Elephants” exemplifies Ernest Hemingway’s style of spare, tight prose that continues to win readers over to this day.

Sarah-Jane and her two cousins try to uncover the identity of the mysterious old woman who makes the sock monkeys sold at the local craft store.

Images of Reetika Vazirani's native India intertwine with memories of her American adolescence in this prize-winning collection of poems.

“Angelo Lacuesta’s stories are a state-of-the-art reckoning of modern-day realities. Refined and cosmopolitan in tone and diction, they manifest a global, nay, universal awareness of the delicate nuances of relations, from the quirky to the erotic. Subtle in their underpinnings, these savvy narratives locate characters in myriad depths of provenance. From the upbeat to the downbeat, the cadence of imaginative contretemps bespeaks an old soul with a fresh voice. Marvelously, this collection can only augur well for contemporary Philippine fiction in English.” — Alfred A. Yuson, author of Poems Singkwenta’y Cinco

Run-Run is an orphan in old Siam who struggled to make a living as an elephant trainer with Walking Mountain, his beloved old elephant. A cruel prince complicates his already harsh life by giving him a gift that is also a curse - a white elephant. Somehow, Run-Run must take care of the elephant at his own expense. But how?

The atom contains energy beyond all imagination and President Eisenhower’s plan was to benefit all of mankind. Once America discovered the use of atomic energy for peaceful purposes, some rather extraordinary people leaped at the opportunity capitalize from this new technology; this is their story. White Elephants is about these people and the hardships they encountered; the story of how an amazing technology became such a burden on our nation through the trials of these not so ordinary men and women who built the White Elephants we call our nuclear power plants.

White elephants are the odd, old, and discarded things that end up at yard sales and flea markets—and Katie Haegele loves them all. Well, an awful lot of them, anyway. She lives a few blocks from the house she grew up in, and every summer she and her mother scour the neighborhood tag sales, looking for treasure. In this unusual, touching memoir, she chronicles the places they go and the things they find there, describing every detail in her singular, charming voice. In the end she finds more than just ugly table lamps and frilly aprons, ultimately discovering a real friendship with her mother, a deeper connection to her father, whose death left a hole in her life—and even a bit of romance.