Four Way Books: 10 books

How do we find the courage to change? In The Exit Coach, a collection of six stories and a novella, the characters arrive at an impasse that requires them to step out of the wreckage of their habituated lives. It is the entrance of an unexpected voice—a visitor from France, a retired talent scout,...

From Epicurus to Sam Cooke, the Daily News to Roots, Digest draws from the present and the past to form an intellectual, American identity. In poems that forge their own styles and strategies, we experience dialogues between the written word and other art forms. Within this dialogue we hear Ben Jonson,...

Literal as well as metaphorical monsters inhabit this book of 38 innovative fictions. Here the reader will encounter not only zombies and ghosts, but a lyrical dream braided into a brutal and sorrowful real world. Monsters’ vision embodies the heartbreakingly private and depressingly public—and the funny flipside of it all.

Hatter’s artful, moving novel looks closely at the murder of a young black woman and her family’s devastation. Old—and new—questions about race and civil rights in 21st Century America arise alongside the unfolding story of Malawi and those who live in the wake of her loss.

A hybrid collection comprised of short stories, flash fiction, and prose poems, the works in 57 Octaves Below Middle C enact the dilemma of self-forgetting. This book is for any reader who hears the states of dissonance that are disturbing and natural aspects of the human comedy.

When Ketzel Weinrach’s beloved brother Potsie goes missing in Las Vegas, she not only must try to find him, she must confront her family’s shady history and their ties to the legendary Jewish mob, Murder, Inc., as well as her troubling relationship to her cousin Perry (who runs a strip club on...

These new stories from Iowa Short Fiction Award–winner Pourciau reveal the day-to-day drama of various characters through their interior monologues. As readers become engaged in a character’s viewpoint and voice, they may begin to see the story from a different perspective than the narrator’s....

Listen is a book where characters ask readers to do just that: listen to their stories, especially because many aren’t the type of people who often get listened to—even though they should. These characters’ trials, missed connections, and sundry challenges are full of surprises—some good,...

A novel told in short stories, The Affliction is an astounding fiction debut by an award-winning poet full of memorable characters across America and the Caribbean. Young beautifully weaves together the elaborate stories of many while holding together a clear focus: people are not always as they seem.

In a bizarre love triangle, a man becomes increasingly desperate for the attention of a woman obsessed with her little dog. A hapless unromantic develops an algorithm to help him succeed at dating. And a divorcee becomes consumed with jealousy when a man she likes begins to date her 60 year old mother....