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Twentysomething Essays by Twentysomething Writers

The book features 29 essays on topics ranging from the serious–obsessive–compulsive disorder, rape, being gay when your mom is homophobic–to the more lighthearted, or what one might call the Universal Overachieved Twentysomething Experience, such as moving back in with your parents, discovering New York, and moving to Brooklyn, and how to explain to the kids you tutor in Harlem that you've accepted a freelance writing assignment that puts you up at the St. Regis for a few days.

What It Means to Love You by Stephen Elliott

Three characters in search of a life while on the skids in Chicago form the core of Elliott’s graphic and grim second outing, based in part, like his Life Without Consequences (2001), on the author’s own downtrodden youth in that city. Anthony is a hard-working but aging dancer in male joints on Halsted Street; Brooke is a runaway teenaged call girl catering to the corporate trade; Lance, her boyfriend, is a good-looking, mentally unbalanced stripper and addict. Two years earlier, Lance brought 15-year-old Brooke away from her bleak, upper-class life in Michigan to the slovenly apartment they share, and where he steals her money and abuses her. They encounter Anthony in the Stolen Pony, a strip-dive he’s been forced to work in as age slowly but surely robs him of his appeal. Brooke reaches out to him even though he’s twice her age and wants no friends, and when Lance is jailed for being disorderly, she comes to rely on him. Lance is raped in jail, taking it out on Brooke when he’s released, so that she leaves him, going back home with the belief that she can be her father’s girlfriend. Her overweight, depressed mother still being in residence complicates her plan, but Brooke succeeds in bringing her rock-ribbed Republican dad down—which only disgusts her. So she returns to Chicago to be with Anthony on whatever terms he’ll have her, finding that he’s finally given up dancing to work the door at a different club. Lance, meanwhile, has vanished into Chicago’s Wasteland, where, homeless and addicted, his violent nature more than meets its match. Crackling with authenticity even as it overflows with despair: this isn’t easy reading, but the raw power on its pages can’t be denied.

A Life without Consequences by Stephen Elliott

"A Life Without Consequences is about Paul, a ward of the court stuck in various juvenile institutions. He meets Tanya when they are fourteen and locked up in Chicago's Henry Horner Adolescent Psychiatric Unit, a psychiatric facility primarily for runaways and the very poor. Because it costs the state the same whether the children are in locked facilities or specialized foster homes, there is very little impetus for the state to move the children once they are inside." "Paul and Tanya are separated for four years, Tanya to a prison downstate, Paul to group homes in the city. Paul rebels against the system and against his own adolescence. A self determined kid with a record, Paul tries to succeed in schools where children aren't taught to read. He tries to get straight in homes where drug abuse and violence are the norm. He tries to find affection in families where the children are constantly being moved and the guardians are paid six dollars an hour to look after kids they have no stake in or relation to. This is a book about commitment. This is a book about adolescence and growing up set against the backdrop of a juvenile system pre-programmed to fail. This is a book about children that have been forgotten and have nowhere else to go." A Life Without Consequences is a semi-autobiographical novel from emerging author Stephen Elliott, a former ward of the court and current Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.

Rampage by Susan Taylor Chehak

Once again, Chehak has mined her Midwestern roots and produced a highly charged novel where the questions of the present are inextricably bound up with the secrets of the past. In this novel, Chehak sets her story in a small town called Rampage, and as its name implies, it is a place where much violence converges on those whose lives are bound up in its dark history. Madlen Cramer has come back home with her two young children to be reunited with her childhood friend Rafe, the sexy drifter who has abducted a four-year-old girl from an abusive foster family, leaving the parents for dead. During this hot Iowa summer, the past will refuse to stay past as painful truths begin to emerge: about Rafe's own foster family; about Madlen's marriage, whose bonds had begun to unravel in the months before her husband's tragic accident; and about her beautiful self-absorbed mother, whose passions bring about the devastating entanglement of two families in an embrace that cannot be undone until Rafe has gone on the rampage that will destroy everything in sight and leave readers breathless. A master of the Midwestern gothic, Susan Taylor Chehak is that rare writer who brings the closely observed detail to a level of storytelling that has earned her both an Edgar nomination and the praise of critics nationwide. Rampage is for people who understand, on every level, that you really can't go home again.

Dancing on Glass by Susan Taylor Chehak

This startling novel is a tale of illicit passion, transgression, and retribution, set in the very heart of middle America. Bader Von Vechten's marriage to Katherine Craig unites the leading families of Cedar Hill and promises to heal the wounds of three generations. But when Bader commences a love affair with a beautiful young man, Katherine is goaded to the desperate act that will change their lives irrevocably, setting in motion the series of tragic events that will play themselves out over two generations. Only twenty-five years later, in the wake of death, murder, and disgrace, can Bader, changed almost beyond recognition, return to Cedar Hill. There a chance encounter affords Bader his last hope for human contact -- and redemption.

Psychologically uncompromising and emotionally gripping, Dancing on Glass is a bold novel that sweeps the reader along from its unforgettable opening scene to its climactic ending. A brilliant evocation of the passion and violence that lurk beneath the surface of smalltown life, it marks a significant step forward in the career of a writer whose fiction has already been hailed as masterly.

Smithereens by Susan Taylor Chehak

This compelling novel, set once again in the heartland of America, pairs two unlikely friends in a dark tale of seduction and murder. It is May Caldwell's sixteenth summer, and life couldn't be more dull in Linwood, Iowa. Vaguely suicidal and haunted by half-remembered scenes from her early childhood, May is a girl waiting for her life to happen. And happen it does with the unexpected arrival of Frances Anne Crane, a.k.a. Frankie, a girl with too much past and nothing to lose. Together they seduce an older man as Frankie awakens all that May has been holding inside: the mystery of her uncle Brodie's illicit past, the painful truth of her grandparents' slow dissolutions, and her own emerging sexuality. Where Frankie leads, May follows, and what's left is a murder no one can pin, a family's buried past resurfaced in a wild night of mayhem, and May's safe world blown to smithereens in this unforgettable tale of betrayal and desire.

>Harmony by Susan Taylor Chehak

This powerful novel of love and adultery recounts the story of Clodine Wheeler and the small Midwestern town where she was born and raised. As Clodine tells of her upbringing, courtship, and marriage, her narrative circles ever closer to the troubling secret and shocking death that stand at its center. It is a tale of passion and domestic violence -- and their incalculable consequences.

No one knows exactly when Lilly Duke, wife of a convicted killer, arrived to seek refuge in a cabin on the sore of Harmony Lake, but her arrival changes Clodine's life forever. At first Lilly finds no friends except Clodine -- and Clodine's wayward husband, Galen. But after her child's body is found drifting on the lake, the town crowds to Lilly's aid. Still, no one can explain what Lilly was doing when her baby crept out of the cabin. The answer to this question leads to the shattering climax of this unforgettable novel.

The Truth about Annie D. by Susan Taylor Chehak

(originally titled The Story of Annie D.)

In this old-fashioned tale of murder and retribution we meet a strong-minded woman who has always feared for her family and tried to protect her father and her two sons. Annie D., the narrator of this fine first novel, was raised in Nebraska, all flat farmland and cornfields, except along its rivers. Widowed and living in the town of Wizen River, she tends to her beloved garden and enjoys frequent visits from her old high school friend, Phoebe Tucker. Then one fine morning Phoebe drives her Chevy off the road, into a ditch, and up an oak tree, and Annie D. is forced to take stock. Despite what Annie D. says, life in Wizen River appears to by idyllic. But we learn that the idyll has been disrupted by two violent killings, and when a third young woman is found strangled and raped, we trust to Annie D., with her sharp tongue and good heart, to make sense of it all. Nominated for an Edgar Award; New York Times Notable Book of the Year.

Don Quixote Meets the Mob: The Craft of Fiction and the Art of Life by Susan Taylor Chehak

Some of Our Favorite Books, Recently Read

Birds in Fall by Brad Kessler

One fall night off the coast of a remote island in Nova Scotia, an airplane plummets to the sea as an innkeeper watches from the shore. Miles away in New York City, ornithologist Ana Gathreaux works in a darkened room full of sparrows, testing their migratory instincts. Soon, Ana will be bound for Trachis Island, along with other relatives of victims who converge on the site of the tragedy. As the search for survivors envelops the island, the mourning families gather at the inn, waiting for news of those they have lost. Here among strangers, and watched over by innkeeper Kevin Gearns, they form an unusual community, struggling for comfort and consolation. A Taiwanese couple sets out fruit for their daughter's ghost. A Bulgarian man plays piano in the dark, sending the music to his lost wife, a cellist. Two Dutch teenagers, a brother and sister, rage against their parents' death. An Iranian exile, mourning his niece, recites the Persian tales that carry the wisdom of centuries. At the center of Birds in Fall lies Ana Gathreaux, whose story Brad Kessler tells with deep compassion: from her days in the field with her husband, observing and banding migratory birds, to her enduring grief and gradual reengagement with life. Kessler's knowledge of the natural world, music, and myth enriches every page of this hauntingly beautiful and moving novel about solitude, love, losing your way, and finding something like home.

There Will Never Be Another You by Caroline See

Accomplished author Carolyn See triumphantly returns to fiction- seven years after her last novel was published- with this provocative, vibrantly written new novel. Set in a security-obsessed world that eerily mirrors our own, There Will Never Be Another You captures the paranoia and propaganda of a volatile time and place in which humanity's divisions run deep and society sits on edge- and one Southern California family faces profound crises from within and without. It is a moment in the near future when the global threat of terror has cultivated rage, apathy, and panic across the country. People fear that "anybody could be armed, or have a bomb. Or a disease. Or all three." For Phil, a dermatologist at the UCLA hospital, it is a time of unease and uncertainty, in stark contrast to the days when he coasted through life on his good looks, a modicum of charm, and only haphazard effort. Now Phil must deal with his mother, Edith, who's been grieving over the death of her husband for several years and only recently has thought to reconnect with a family that seems to have other priorities. Phil's energies are already divvied up among his belligerent children, his wayward wife, and his unreliable mistress. Then Phil's life takes a dramatic turn: He is recruited for a top-secret team whose task is to act quickly in the event of a biological or chemical attack. The assignment just may provide him with a renewed sense of purpose. Yet dire circumstances force Phil to make profound decisionsthat will affect not just himself and his loved ones but the entire country. It is a chance for an ordinary man to rise from mediocrity to heroism- and at which failure would prove to be catastrophic. Foreboding and all too plausible, There Will Never Be Another You is a cautionary novel of family and society, where a naïve past is replaced by a menacing future in which distinguishing between reality and imagination proves to be more challenging than ever.

The Secret Memoirs of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis by Ruth Francisco

Who was Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis? She was a wife, mother, artist, editor, and world traveler. A bright young woman who rose to unparalleled celebrity. One of the world's most inspiring and influential women of her day, she has become arguably the most important female icon of all time. Yet she also was a woman of passion and deep emotions, who wanted to experience all that life had to give. How did she feel about it all? She never told. Jackie said quite famously, "I want to live my life, not record it." Jackie remains elusive, her interior life hidden, her soul masked behind sunglasses and an enigmatic smile. For the first time, these fictional memoirs tell Jackie's story in Jackie's voice—with all her joy and wit, grief and bitterness, gentleness and fortitude. Ruth Francisco boldly plunges into the subtext of Jackie's public life, psychology, and sexuality, beyond her dazzling mythic exterior, reimagining Jackie's feelings and thoughts between the lines of recorded history. In this riveting epic tale, we follow Jackie's journey from her privileged yet wrenching youth, through the exaltation and suffering of her marriage to John F. Kennedy, to the shattering despair of her losses, exile, and loneliness. As she learns to forgive her jealous rival, Maria Callas, and her abusive second husband, Aristotle Onassis, Jackie begins to find redemption, ultimately discovering peace through her children and her work. Powerful, poignant, and inspiring, The Secret Memoirs of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis is a sweeping novel, a mythic fable of the trials and tribulations of the female soul.

Lick Creek by Brad Kessler

Set in the remote mining country of West Virginia in the late twenties, Lick Creek is the story of a fiery young woman, Emily Jenkins, and what happens when progress - and tragedy - comes to her family's farm. Brad Kessler has a generous and keen eye for natural landscape and its power in human life. In his first novel, he explores the complex intersections of faith, tradition, and innovation. After the coal mine deaths of her father, brother, and the first man she loved, Emily struggles to support herself and her mother. When construction begins on the power lines, she blames the intruders for everything that has gone awry - for her mother's increasing withdrawal from life and for lives already lost. Then, an electrical worker is struck by lightning. Brought to their farmhouse unconscious and badly injured, Joseph is taken in by Emily's mother, and Emily is seduced by the mystery of his past, his immigration from Russia, his own mother's deportations, and the world of immigrants forced to flee persecution in their homelands.

The Woodcutter's Christmas by Brad Kessler

"For anyone who's ever felt a twinge of sadness at tossing their drying fir or spruce on the curb the week after Christmas, a few strands of tinsel still clinging to its branches; for all of us who know there's a human being beneath the rough surface appearance of each individual we rush past on the crowded streets; The Woodcutter's Christmas offers a yuletime tale full of meaning." "Each year a New York City family looks forward to the day in early December when the Woodcutter arrives and sets up his Christmas trees on the sidewalk beneath their apartment windows. Cheerful yet mysterious, the Woodcutter seems more at home with his trees than with other humans. Every year, his trees sold, he packs up his truck on Christmas Eve and heads back to Vermont." Then one year, The Woodcutter doesn't show up: no smell of balsam, no colored lights, no lawn chair, not so much as a fir needle. Several years pass and he and his trees begin to fade from memory until a Vermont vacation takes the family past his home. Acting on a half-remembered invitation, they discover the Woodcutter's isolated cabin, and are treated to the haunting and heartwarming story of the night the abandoned trees cried out and the Woodcutter's heart was changed forever.

Confessions of a Death Maiden by Ruth Francisco

Most people don't know that deathmaidens exist. It is a silent profession, unmentionable, yet omnipresent as the quiet night. You are familiar with midwives who grab slippery armpits and pull babies screaming into this world. My job is not so different. Actually, it's the exact opposite. I serve as midwife to the dying. Like the midwife, I help people pass into the next reality. Just as a baby is not expected to slide into this world of its own accord, so no one should have to die unassisted, to wither away alone in a hospital. Often I am called by a hospice to assist during the final hours of death labor. I don't kill people, nor do I help them pass on with drugs of any kind. I cannot minister someone to the next world before their time, no more than a midwife can slap life into a stillborn baby. Like a religious call, a career as a deathmaiden is not something you choose: It chooses you....

Good Morning Darkness by Ruth Francisco

Everybody was in love with Laura: the Mexican fisherman who admired her through her kitchen window in the predawn darkness, the boyfriend who refused to take no for an answer, the detective who instructed her in martial arts, and the creepy boss who harassed her. Then one day Laura disappears. When the fisherman finds a woman's severed arm on the beach, he is convinced it belonged to Laura. And her self-defense teacher, LAPD Detective Sergeant Reggie Brooks, also begins to wonder if Laura is alive or dead. With no evidence of foul play, he unofficially looks for the preternaturally beautiful woman who haunts his dreams. But as he travels the lonely coastal highway in an obsessive search for answers, Brooks will soon find himself in a dark, terrifying place of unthinkable acts, irrational behavior, and premeditated murder...

An Exaltation of Forms, Edited by Annie Finch and Kathrine Varnes

At once handbook, reader, and guide to the literary tastes and wisdom of poets, An Exaltation of Forms is an indispensable resource certain to find a dedicated audience among poetry lovers. The editors invited over fifty contemporary poets to select a poetic meter, stanza, or form, describe it, recount its history, and provide favorite examples. The essays represent a remarkably diverse range of literary styles and approaches, and show how the forms of contemporary English-language poetry derive from a wealth of different traditions. The forms range from hendecasyllabics to prose poetry, haiku to procedural poetry, sonnets to blues, rap to fractal verse. The range of poets included is equally impressive—from Amiri Baraka to John Frederick Nims, from Maxine Kumin to Marilyn Hacker, from Agha Shahid Ali to Pat Mora, from W. D. Snodgrass to Charles Bernstein. Achieving this level of eclecticism is a remarkable feat, especially given the strong opinions held by members of the various camps (e.g., the New Formalists, LANGUAGE poets, feminist and multicultural poets) that exist within today's poetry community. Poets who might never occupy the same room here occupy the same pages, perhaps for the first time. The net effect is a book that will surprise, inform, and delight a wide range of readers, whether as reference book, pleasure reading, or classroom text.

Subject to Change by Marilyn L. Taylor

A sprightly collection of formal poems about an unusually wide range of subjects. Taylor writes with a light but incisive touch, rendering her poems with a warmth that is unafraid to dig into the darker regions of experience.

The Handyman by Carolyn See

The Handyman is the story of Bob Hampton, an aspiring young painter who has had to face the humbling fact that he doesn't know what to paint. And how are you supposed to be an artist in this world if you don't have a vision? Bob trades in his artist's palette for a minivan full of house paints, hammers, and nails, and sets about earning a little cash as a handyman. Although he turns out to be very bad at fixing the things he's hired to fix, Bob demonstrates quite a knack for fixing the lives of the people around him. In the midst of his jerry-built repairs and inspired home improvements, Bob meets an extraordinary cast of characters - rendered in all their delightful eccentricity and human frailty as only Carolyn See can - each of whom shows Bob the true scope of his own remarkable talent. There's Angela Landry, a house wife with far too much time on her hands, a sexpot of a stepdaughter, and a son in need of attention; Jamie Walker, whose allergy-prone and ADD-afflicted children keep a menagerie of scaly pets that far exceed Jamie's managerial skills; Valerie LeClerc, older, sadder, and certainly wiser than Bob; and Hank and Ben, who leave a narrow-minded Midwest only to find unremitting illness and isolation in the California of their dreams.

Dreaming: Hard Luck & Good Times in America by Carolyn See

In this bittersweet and beautifully written memoir Carolyn See embarks on nothing less than a reevaluation of the American Dream. "This is a history," she writes, "of how drugs and drink have worked in our family for the last fifty - actually it turned out to be closer to a hundred - years. In varying degrees, it's history seen through a purple haze. It's full of secrets and chaos and distortions, and secretly remembered joys. I'm beginning to think it may be the unwritten history of America." Although it features a clan in which dysfunction was something of a family tradition, Dreaming is no "victim's story" or temperance tract. With a wry humor and not a trace of self-pity, See writes of fights and breakups and hard times, but also of celebration and optimism in the face of adversity. The story of See's own family speaks for the countless people who reached for the shining American vision, found it eluded their grasp, and then tried to make what they had glitter as best they could. Dreaming is about yearning, imagining, and reinventing oneself, about rolling with the punches and continuing on. In this fiercely funny and deeply empathetic book, See shows us that the wild life, for better and worse, has made us what we are.

Golden Days by Carolyn See

Golden Days is a major novel from one of the most provocative voices on the American literary scene. Linking the recent past with an imagined future, Carolyn See captures life in Los Angeles in the 70s and 80s. This marvelously imaginative, hilarious, and original work offers fresh insights into the way we were, the way we are, and the way we could up.

Making a Literary Life: Advice for Writers and Other Dreamers by Carolyn See

As Carolyn See says, writing guides are like preachers on Sunday - there may be a lot of them, but you can't have too many and there's always an audience of the faithful. And while Making a Literary Life is ostensibly a book that teaches you how to write, it really teaches you how to make your interior life into your exterior life, how to find and join that community of like-minded souls you're sure is out there somewhere.