With three novels and two short story collections published, Kevin Barry has steadily established his stature as one of the finest writers not just in Ireland but in the English language. All of his prodigious gifts of language, character and setting in these 11 exquisite stories transport the reader to an Ireland both timeless and recognizably modern. Shot through with dark humor and the uncanny power of the primal and unchanging Irish landscape, the stories in THAT OLD COUNTRY MUSIC represent some of the finest fiction being written today.

Nearly a year after his brother died in a tragic accident, 18-year-old Anton Addison-Rice is still wounded --- physically and emotionally. Alone for the holidays, he catches a glimpse of his neighbor Edith across the street one evening and realizes she’s in danger. Anton is determined to help Edith leave her abusive marriage. Frightened and 15 years Anton’s senior, Edith is slow to trust. But when she needs a safe place to stay, she lets down her guard, and an unlikely friendship grows. As Anton falls in love, Edith fears both her husband finding her and Anton getting hurt. She must disappear without telling anyone where she’s going. What would happen, though, if one day their paths should cross again?

One year ago, the person Olivia adores most in the world, her father, left home for a meditation retreat in the mountains and never returned. Yearning to make sense of his shocking departure and to escape her overbearing mother, Olivia runs away from home and retraces his path to a place known as the Levitation Center. Once there, she enrolls in their summer program for troubled teens and finds herself drawn into the company of a close-knit trio of girls who are determined to finally achieve enlightenment --- and learn to levitate, to defy the weight of their bodies, to experience ultimate lightness. But it becomes increasingly clear that this is an advanced and perilous practice, and there’s a chance not all of them will survive.

In the years after Christ's crucifixion, Paul of Tarsus, a prosperous tentmaker and Jewish scholar, took it upon himself to persecute the small groups of his followers that sprung up. But on the road to Damascus, he had some sort of blinding vision, a profound conversion experience that transformed Paul into the most effective and influential messenger Christianity has ever had. In THE DAMASCUS ROAD, novelist Jay Parini brings this fascinating and ever-controversial figure to full human life, capturing his visionary passions and vast contradictions.

In the city of Houston --- a sprawling, diverse microcosm of America --- the son of a black mother and a Latino father is coming of age. He's working at his family's restaurant, weathering his brother's blows, resenting his older sister's absence. And discovering he likes boys. Around him, others live and thrive and die in Houston's myriad neighborhoods: a young woman whose affair detonates across an apartment complex, a ragtag baseball team, a group of young hustlers, hurricane survivors, a local drug dealer who takes a Guatemalan teen under his wing, a reluctant chupacabra.

At 28, Stephanie Land turned to housekeeping to make ends meet. With a tenacious grip on her dream to provide her daughter the very best life possible, Stephanie worked days and took classes online to earn a college degree, and began to write relentlessly. She wrote the true stories that weren't being told: the stories of overworked and underpaid Americans. Of living on food stamps to eat. Of the government programs that provided her housing, but that doubled as halfway houses. The aloof government employees who called her lucky for receiving assistance. She wrote to remember the fight, to eventually cut through the deep-rooted stigmas of the working poor. MAID explores the underbelly of upper-middle-class America and the reality of what it's like to be in service to them.

Devastatingly handsome, broad-shouldered and clean-cut, Rock Hudson reigned supreme as the king of Hollywood throughout the ’50s and ’60s. In a more conservative era, his wholesome, straight arrow screen image was at odds with his closeted homosexuality. Mark Griffin provides new details concerning Hudson’s troubled relationships with wife Phyllis Gates and boyfriend Marc Christian. And here, for the first time, is an in-depth exploration of Hudson’s classic films, including Written on the Wind, A Farewell to Arms and the cult favorite Seconds. With unprecedented access to private journals, personal correspondence and production files, Griffin pays homage to the idol whose life and death had a lasting impact on American culture.

What happens when a genius of a painter meets a wealthy autograph dealer in New York City? Will they live happily ever after, or will their worlds collide? Only Davis Jarvey, our gifted painter, will know for sure on that dreaded day when he is forced to make...Mercury's Choice.

When poet and writer Joy Davidman began writing letters to C. S. Lewis --- known as Jack --- she was looking for spiritual answers, not love. Love, after all, wasn’t holding together her crumbling marriage. Everything about New Yorker Joy seemed ill-matched for an Oxford don and the beloved writer of Narnia, yet their minds bonded over their letters. Embarking on the adventure of her life, Joy traveled from America to England and back again, facing heartbreak and poverty, discovering friendship and faith, and --- against all odds --- finding a love that even the threat of death couldn’t destroy.

BAD CALL is Mike Scardino's account of the summers he spent working as an "ambulance attendant" on the mean streets of late-1960s New York. Fueled by adrenaline and Sabrett's hot dogs, young Mike spends his days speeding from one chaotic emergency to another. His adventures take him into the middle of incipient race riots, to the scene of a plane crash at JFK airport and into private lives all over Queens, where New Yorkers are suffering, and dying, in unimaginable ways. Learning on the job, Mike encounters all manner of freakish accidents, meets countless unforgettable New York characters, falls in love, is nearly murdered, and gets an early and indelible education in the impermanence of life and the cruelty of chance.