“Three years ago my husband gave me two-thirds of an exceptionally beautiful and sacred mountain. I disputed whether he owned it in the first place, but I accepted through treaty his offer of the majority portion.”

This gift is only the first volley in the border dispute between two countries a husband and wife have each imagined for themselves. End of the Fire Cult alternates between tales of her Marmoral and his Belgrave. When a third country threatens to invade both Marmoral and Belgrave, the couple must decide how to defend themselves. End of the Fire Cult examines culture and change, while also telling the story of the waning days of a modern marriage.

Jody McAuliffe’s poetic and darkly funny first novel achieves a vivid realization of the age of Romanticism, when suicide was an option of beauty. Heinrich von Kleist, an electrifyingly modern writer, desperate for recognition from the artistic power broker of the time—his moralistic rival Goethe—is driven finally to a notorious act of violence: murder suicide. The seven chapter titles bear the names of his potential suicide partners: if you love him, you must die with him. The story moves between Kleist and his sister Ulrike, between an eighteenth century madness and an eighteenth century reasonableness, between extreme ambition and intense family pressure to succeed. Ulrike, in an effort to fill the hole in her life made by her brother’s death, reads his autobiographical manuscript, The Story of My Soul, and journeys to the center of his obsessive desire for immortality. McAuliffe completely enters the mindset of an artist/suicide in prose so tight it feels coiled. Reading the novel is like experiencing a dream – seemingly rooted in the reality of its characters, but unsettling in its insistence on picking at the scabs of our greatest anxieties.

Swift meets Gombrowicz in this comic-philosophical memoir of a traveler stumbling through Europe, falling in and out of new experiences and discoursing on individuality, literature, films, growing up, and the purpose of travel.

Like his gorgeous Long Rowing Unto Morning, The King of Sweden centers on a woman who is simply misunderstood by a world where innocents are fooled into a myriad of seductions that lead to the unraveling of the most human of human hearts. It is Lock’s great artistry to make such suffering beautiful and necessary and to make out of this language an artifact that forces us to feel the inner turbulence of the characters who inhabit this masterful book.

In this, his fifth full-length book, Norman Lock paints the portrait of a lonely everywoman, a plain Jane who spends days pushing a mop and nights drinking tea, sitting her sadness on her elbow “by the window looking out. Out, where all is hurrying over the rainy streets.” Lock paints the portrait of an “old woman with a cracked face” who, as a child, was teased to tears. Now, years later, in the last phase of her life, she is preparing for her own long rowing into death.

Jane lives alone in a room that she calls “mine and locked.” She tells us a secret about “the boy who put his hand on me, then went away never to come back.” She returns to the image of this moment in recollected tranquility, again and again, and it becomes increasingly menacing the more often the refrain is used. But her world wasn’t always so dark and alienating. It could also be quite poetic. This passage from her childhood, the happy part of it, stands on its own as a poem-in-prose.  Currently Out of Stock.