Dzanc Books: 412 books

Desire Provoked is an amusing look at modern living, while also a meditation on fatherhood, marriage and ambition. The cartographer protagonist of the novel, Sam Adams, can't seem to map out his own life while he maps everything else for a living.

The themes woven through The Woman in the Oil Field involve action and passivity and the different perspectives they inspire. Tracy Daugherty's characters walk the margins of life; seeking the safe periphery from which they assess their friends, lovers, and relatives who lead real lives. Daugherty treats perspective and insight as topics in themselves.

Now Molly Knows is a novel about a girl's sexual discovery, from early teens and high school through college and on up into marriage. It's set in the American fifties.

An obscure author, drawn in by the mysterious Guild of St. Cooper, must rewrite the history of a dying city. But the changes become greater than those he set out to make, and the story quickly unspools backward into an alternate history-a world populated by giant rhododendrons, space aliens, and TV's...

"It's truly powerful, and acrid, and barbed, and filled with wonderful, and unexpected, turns of phrase and above all it's shocking in its directness and understated anger and sadness and fear… it's an amazing piece of writing."-Cynthia OzickImagine being told before the age of forty that...

Byrd is a contemporary novel about a woman who bears and surrenders a son, her only child, without telling his father, little imagining how the secret will shape their lives. Through letters and spare, precisely observed vignettes, the book examines how a 33-year-old birth mother comes to make, and live with, the most difficult, intimate, and far reaching of choices.

In The One You Get: Portrait of a Family Organism, Jason Tougaw marries neuroscience and family lore to tell his story of growing up gay in 1970s Southern California, raised by hippies who had “dropped out” in the late sixties and couldn’t seem to find their way back in. “There’s something...

Jaffe captures the chaos of the protagonist's sudden downturn in his personal life, dealing with an ex-wife who makes his life miserable, and trying to keep his children happy in the midst of it all. He finds release for his frustrations through the violence of his bookie job as he tries to make sense of what happened to his life.

Leebron's compelling third novel brings us into the world of domestic unease as two couples and their joined families wrestle with empathy's limitations in the uncompromising teeth of mortality.

A disturbing novel of domestic unease, part thriller and part psychological drama, from a young American writer of exceptional talent

"Every woman gets a call like this sooner or later. The phone rings, a man says: 'This is a voice from your past.'" The opening of the compelling title story of Merrill Joan Gerber's collection sets the tone for each of the thirteen remarkable pieces therein, two of them previously unpublished. Set mostly...

The marvel of this gritty and propulsive first novel is that Darren DeFrain, right out of the gates, has staked claim on a wild new territory of desperate love, alienation, heartbreak, and redemption. A stranger in his own land, our hero Brian is driving across America to find himself or to lose himself,...

Winner of the Ribalow Prize from Hadassah Magazine, Merrill Joan Gerber superbly evokes an anguished child's faltering steps toward consciousness... Gerber has written often-and grippingly-of tormented families… but never as daringly as here."In this brutally candid, semiautobiographical novel, Gerber...

After inheriting a home there, a young man in the south of France meets a woman and falls in love with her, despite her protestations that he will soon turn into a "maggot person"--a human skin stuffed with maggots and topped by a still functioning brain. Michael begins experiencing severe pains, and the young woman's prophecy begins to take hold.