What can we learn from an ordinary life observed with extraordinary skill? In THE IRISH GOODBYE, Beth Ann Fennelly writes of the small moments that shape a life, in the process dignifying the diminutive through the act of attention. Fennelly explores her roles as a friend, wife, mother and daughter, documenting a brush with an old flame or the devastating death of her sister in crystalline, precise sentences. The longer essays concern Fennelly’s relationships --- with a beloved mother-in-law, a decades-long friendship between five former college roommates, an artist who paints a series of nude portraits in Fennelly’s town, for which she poses. Interspersed between these longer memoirs are sections of flash nonfiction, a form Fennelly innovated in the genre-defying HEATING & COOLING. 

Set against the backdrop of the historic flooding of the Mississippi River, THE TILTED WORLD --- written by Tom Franklin, the acclaimed author of the New York Times bestseller CROOKED LETTER, CROOKED LETTER, and award-winning poet Beth Ann Fennelly --- is an extraordinary tale of murder and moonshine, sandbagging and saboteurs, and a man and a woman who find unexpected love.