Dzanc Books: 412 books

Set in a busted Massachusetts mill town circa 1986, The Castaway Lounge is the story of Jackson "Applejack" Thibedeaux. Cocaine dealer, womanizer, and tough-guy-for-hire, Applejack is weary of the wrong life and trying to leave it behind. But all bets are off when a young pole dancer ends up dead...

A novel exploring the connection between grief and love, this is the story of Ellie Lowell, a college graduate shattered by her mother's sudden death, whose return to the rural North Carolina town of her childhood marks the beginning of an obsessive, destructive love affair.

Claire moves from New Mexico to New York City hoping to find independence and some direction for her life. It's not until she meets her next door neighbor, the dazzling Jade, and begins to follow Jade's lifestyle that she feels connected to the city. As she continually needs to tweak herself to keep...

Everyday Psychokillers reaches to the edge of the psychoanalytical and jolts the reader back to daily life. The reader becomes the killer, the watcher, the person on the verge, hiding behind an everyday face.

Memory. Regret. Revenge. Forgiveness.Steven Gillis’s second novel, The Weight of Nothing, explores these issues through the eyes of Bailey Finne, a gifted pianist who has nonetheless forsaken his talent to become a perpetual graduate student in art history. Niles Kelly, his somnambulistic friend with...

In Gillis’s first short story collection after a trio of novels, most of his characters are train wrecks in progress; each story is truly original in nature.PRAISE“Gillis’s stories are illuminatingly strange, filled with power, electric, and will stay with you long after you think you’ve gone...

Walter Brimm is a financial advisor in his mid-thirties, husband to Gee, a university professor, and father to a seven-year-old daughter, Rea. His life appears nearly perfect, but this proves an illusion as slowly his world unravels; his actions and reactions to specific events cost him his job, his...

In the three-part title story of The Art of the Knock, a travelling salesman knocks with inventive delight on the stubborn, closed doors of his prospective customers-people who find themselves on the wrong side of their own invisible doors. In the face of their mutual solitudes, they devise odd, personal...

Stories of the downtrodden 90's written with both authority and language and structure that are uncommon.

In this powerful love story that takes place on a Turkish sailing vessel, Lily, a professor at a Florida college, finds herself required to be the companion of her newly widowed mother as they take a cruise along the Turkish coastline on a small sailing ketch. Expecting to endure, though not enjoy, this...

Stephen-Paul Martin has been called "one of our great deadpan humorists," by Eric Basso and "North America's foremost master of the short story" by Vernon Frazer. Marjorie Perloff has described his writing as "wildly comic," and Fanny Howe has called his stories "magnificent and entertaining." In CHANGING...

This 1987 winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Award contains 12 stories that focus on contemporary Americans: their fragile relationships, their interest in activism and their experiences with rape, drugs and homosexuality.

A collection of sixteen short stories provides an extraordinary journey into the human soul that explores the uneasiness of individuals as they cope with experiences outside of themselves.

In this, his third collection, Tracy Daugherty focuses on social and cultural forces shaping people's intimate behavior. Set in Texas and Oklahoma, the stories and novella suggest that even politics is a kind of family squabble whose elusive solutions often come from unexpected quarters. In "Power Lines,"...