The Permanent Press: 217 books

W. H. Auden takes you to Auden’s home in Austria to ask him questions; the conversation on the lawn that one dreams of. A fine tribute.” —Bestseller

The Velvet Butterfly is the third in a series of introductions to some of our major literary figures by the noted cultural journalist and foreign correspondent Alan Levy.

In his daily wanderings around Willemstad, Curaçao, an old man comes into contact with the underbelly of society: drunks, bums, thieves, and drop-outs. He stays out as late as possible because he is afraid of his fearful dreams about the horse of John—as described in the Apocalypse.

Set in the 1940s, in a narrow-minded small town, Rhonda the Rubber Woman focuses on working class women who mange to achieve grace and dignity despite their status; ordinary women working in traditional women’s jobs who attempt to cope with men who love, but also abuse, harass, and belittle them, in ways that still resonate today.

Harriet Scott Chessman’s Ohio Angels is an intimate and a lyrical story about friendship and family struggles. Hallie, a painter who now lives in Brooklyn, returns to her family home in Ohio, where she unearths a secret about her parents. Her discovery sheds light on her mother’s depression, which...

When twenty-year-old Jess discovers that her mother has woven their family history from lies, she begins searching for her sperm donor daddy. In the sixties, when Jess was born, it was still common practice to recruit sperm donors from among medical students. Jess identifies her father in his class yearbook and runs away from home to find him as a practicing MD.

East Justice is a small fictional town in rural Iowa, which harbors a tiny enclave of Jewish families. Among them lives Grace, a young woman with the cauterized “tongue of a bird,” farmer, quilter, and keeper of family secrets.   Through a succession of lucid scenes delivered in the measured...

As a young man, Dr. Nathan Kline enjoys excellent health, good looks, and a prestigious Park Avenue ophthalmology practice. He is also blessed with a gorgeous young wife, abundant friends, and two infant daughters who adore him. But whoever appreciates what comes so easily? “We take notice of our...

Gulliver Quick begins with the title character’s death. Immediately thereafter, five women present at the scene claim to be the sole murderer, thus establishing the exciting backdrop to a detailed chronological account of Quick’s colorful, turbulent life as a prominent artist whose appetites are...

This magical novel about urban mixed-blood Indian life has as its narrator-protagonist, Albert “Alley” Hummingbird, a self-conscious, overweight, shy college student who hides his feelings with humor, and who longs to reconcile the two cultures that have formed him.

In the memoir As I Walked Out One Evening Donald Wetzel explores what it is like to enter into the realm of old age. He approaches the changes within his life with the same sense of humor and of awe with which he approaches everything. He is looking for clues. Running through his family is a propensity...

An anthology of seventy poets writing west of the Mississippi, including William Pitt Root, Alberto Rios, Naomi Shihab Nye, Jim Simmerman, and Sandra Alcosser.

Love-battered Budge Moss, the once-prominent author now largely forgotten by the reading public, emerges from his crisis of separation and pending divorce under the protective wing of Matty Klein, an elderly widow in whose home—and heart—he now resides.

Hilary Masters’s eighth novel explores a continent of abandonment—of a child by a parent, of a people by their country, and of ideals by the nation founded upon them.