Catalog
NEW! 50 Over 50
50 Over 50: A Celebration of Established and Emerging Women Writers is a superb collection of poetry, essays, and fiction by women over age 50. This anthology features work by notable authors like Robin Black, Bonnie Jo Campbell, J.C. Todd, Vickie A. Carr, and Rachel Pastan. While many of the writers included are emerging authors, all of the work has something funny, thoughtful, and compelling to say about sex, family, loss, and love. The books will be on sale at PS Books and Philadelphia Stories events and online at Amazon and IndieBound.
NEW! Come As You Are
Come As You Are by Christine Weiser is a novel about balancing work, family, and a chick rock trio. Ten years earlier, these thirty-something women were best friends who played in the late ‘90s Philadelphia girl group, Broad Street. Time and circumstances drove them apart, but when they get an invitation to play an esteemed national tour, they put aside their differences to reform their old band. Click here to order a copy.
When copyw
riter Anne Kaier stops traffic to rescue a stray cat, neither she nor the cat knows what lies in store. Readers will lose themselves in this witty, true-life story of how a beguiling cat called Henry helps a single woman make a home in the amped-up city. But first, how will she lure Henry out from under the bed—when not even her spicy ten-year-old nephew can help? Available locally and online through Barnes & Noble and Amazon
“Pet lovers will lap up every word of this charming and candid story of a single woman opening her heart and home to an emotionally complicated cat. Like the best pet memoirs, it is what we learn about the human experience that matters most.”
—John Grogan, author of Marley & Me
“Home with Henry features an outer story—the rescue of a stray cat—but beneath waits a deeper tale, the truth that sometimes the things we reach out to save end up saving us.”
—Curtis Smith, Best American Short Stories author
Best American Essays notable author Anne Kaier has published in Alaska Quarterly Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Kenyon Review, and Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability, an ALA Notable Book for 2012. Malade, a memoir about sexuality, disability, and the shrine at Lourdes, is out from: www.shebooks.net. Anne lives in Center City, Philadelphia and teaches at Arcadia University and Rosemont College. She has a Ph.D. from Harvard University.
Available here and at select local bookshops.
Visit www.annekaier.com for a book trailer and free features including the pamphlet “Tall Tails: How to Write About Your Cat.”
Philadelphia Stories’ tenth anniversary anthology brings together some of the best short fiction, poetry, and essays published by the magazine, in print and online, between 2004 and 2014. This volume includes work by Philadelphia-area writers as well as by winners of the magazine’s national contests—the Marguerite McGlinn Prize for Fiction and the Sandy Crimmins National Prize for Poetry. Available here.
Extraordinary Gifts: Remarkable Women of the Delaware Valley
Edited by Melissa Tevere, Tara S. Smith, Carla Spataro, and Courtney Bambrick
Extraordinary Gifts: Remarkable Women of the Delaware Valley combines original visual art with poems and short fiction inspired by twenty remarkable Delaware Valley women. Some of these women—Louisa May Alcott, Margaret Mead, and Marian Anderson among them—are well known. Others, such as Alice Steer Wilson, Dorothy P. Miller, and Helga Testorf, might be less familiar. But none of them allowed the limitations of society’s expectations for their gender to stop them from fulfilling their potential—and all of them paved the way for the dozens of contemporary female writers, poets, and artists featured in this book. Extraordinary Gifts spans centuries of local history and global shifts as it explores timeless themes of love, loss, creativity, achievement, and sacrifice through the stories of these remarkable women. Read more here: http://www.philadelphiastories.org/extraordinary-gifts-book-release-party
Available here
Feig: a novel
Second Oldest: A Poetic History of Philadelphia
PS Books is pleased to announce the publication of Second Oldest: A Poetic History of Philadelphia by Blythe Davenport. The poems in Second Oldest tell the story of the city and her people, past and present, through fresh and haunting images.
“Blythe Davenport’s mastery of the intricate and unexpected image guides us back and forth from past to present in her poetic portraits of the Philadelphia landscape. She fills her poems with voices, places, and lines like ‘the sun flexes his supernova arm, punching/a perfect round brilliant/in the bruised evening sky.’ This is a book well worth reading and rereading for its informed voice, its subtlety, its grace.” —Donna Wolf-Palacio, author of What I Don’t Know
Available here
In Forgotten Philadelphia, artists and writers reimagine the stories told in these silent spaces of Philadelphia history. Included in this volume of work is poetry by J.C. Todd, Kim Gek and Lin Short, stories by Sarah Rose Etter, Michelle Reale, and art by Anna Norton and Kip Deeds. To order your copy of Forgotten Philadelphia, ($30 hardback) email info@philadephiastories.org.
Order titles by clicking on the book covers below.
Flash
Mad to Live by Randall Brown
Originally published in a limited edition by Flume Press in 2008, Randall Brown’s award-winning (very) short fiction collection, Mad To Live, sold out almost immediately. Fortunately for Brown’s fans (and soon-to-be fans), PS Books has published this deluxe edition of Mad To Live — complete with new cover art and four “bonus tracks” not included in the Flume edition!
Stripped: An Anthology of Anonymous Flash
Stripped is a collection with a twist. Yes, the fiction contained herein includes works from some of the best-known names in flash fiction as well as the work of emerging writers, but the bylines have been removed so you can’t tell who wrote what. What’s more, the stories hinge largely on gender roles — but with the authors’ identites stripped from their stories, editor Nicole Monaghan has created a bit of a guessing game. Did a woman, for example, write that piece about ambivalence toward motherhood? Or was it a man? More to the point, does it really matter? Or is there something bigger going on when men and women stretch their minds and imagine what it might be like to be the other? Authors include Meg Tuite, Michelle Reale, Myfanwy Collins, Tara L. Masih, Marc Schuster, Michael Martone, Nathan Alling Long, Curtis Smith, and Randall Brown.
Broad Street by Christine Weiser
Christine Weiser’s debut novel follows the fictive all-girl underground rock-group, Broad Street, through the highs and lows of struggling for success in the male-dominated Philadelphia rock scene.
“Weiser’s now given birth to Broad Street, the terrific Philadelphia rock roman a clef…Weiser, who has already completed a sequel, is a real writer who gets Kit’s interior voice down in clean, concise prose.” – Philadelphia Inquirer
“As the story unravels, chronicling their ascent from early gigs at seedy clubs to opening slots at the Trocadero, Broad Street becomes in many ways a journey toward self-realization and empowerment.” – The Intelligencer
“Broad Street reads like a Philly High Fidelity.” – Shawn McBride, author of Green Grass Grace
Public Displays of Affectation
Set in Philadelphia and its immediate suburbs, Shaun Haurin’s debut collection explores the intricacies of the human heart and the complex emotions that bind us together even as they threaten to tear us apart.
“Haurin’s skillful use of language in this collection of stories makes familiar subjects—new love, old love, faithful and unfaithful love–seem vivid, strange, and exciting. This is a book I genuinely enjoyed reading.” – Liz Moore, author of The Words of Every Song and Heft
“With a keen eye for the telling detail and a well-tuned ear for dialogue, Shaun Haurin explores the myriad shades of gray that shroud adulthood and haunt the contemporary heart. A compelling and emotionally intelligent collection.” – Marc Schuster, author of The Grievers
Kiss: Poems by Alison Hicks
“With her precise ear for just the right descriptive word, Alison Hicks’s poems
enlarge daily life. Whether running into the father of a childhood friend who
committed suicide, or meditating on Chekhov, or reciting the mantra of drugs
used to treat migraines, Hicks transforms daily experience into something
larger and more transcendent. Her poems glow.” – Kim Roberts, author of
Animal Magnetism, The Kimnama, and The Wishbone Galaxy
Locus Mentis: Poems by MaryAnn Miller
“You’ve got to revel in MaryAnn Miller’s poems: their wild variety, humor,
dead-on truth. Their poetic high-jinks—fractured sonnet, sestina, musical free
verse. Their vivid detail seen through a painter’s trained eye. With wit, verve
and devastating delicacy, the language peels back the layers of a long life of
looking hard to reveal the human coordinates of a mind alive with all it has
taken in. Locus Mentis affirms the difficult abundance of life lived in the real time of catastrophe and joy and in the transformative no-time of making art.” – J.C. Todd, author of What Space This Body
Songs the Sea Has Sung in Me: Poems by P.C. Scheponik
P.C. Scheponik’s previous volumes include Psalms to Padre Pio, And the Sun Still Dared to Shine, and A Storm by Any Other Name. His work has also appeared in a number of literary journals including One Trick Pony, The Thirteenth Warrior Review, Blue Ink Press, Asterius Press, and Black Bear Review. In Songs the Sea Has Sung in Me, Scheponik turns his attention to the healing and redemptive power of the sea and, in so doing, offers hope and inspiration to a world in desperate need of both.
A Storm by Any Other Name: Poems by P.C. Scheponik
PC Scheponik’s previous volumes include Psalms to Padre Pio and And the Sun Still Dared to Shine, a collection of poems remembering the Holocaust. His work has also appeared in a number of literary journals including One Trick Pony, The Thirteenth Warrior Review, Blue Ink Press, Asterius Press, and Black Bear Review. In A Storm by Any Other Name, Scheponik turns to themes of family, faith, nature, and healing to produce poetry that is at once transcendent and accessible, moving and provocative.
To Befriend a Fox: Poems by Richard William Pearce
The late Richard Pearce was a poet’s poet. The content of his work runs the gamut — one minute meditating on the paintings of Edward Hopper, the next playfully recalling a time he made “sidewalk angels” in wet cement. Yet Pearce also had a dark side, as chronicled in much of his later work. Though by no means “complete,” To Befriend a Fox represents the first time a significant portion of Pearce’s poetry has been collected in a single anthology.
The Best of Philadelphia Stories: Volume 2
The Best of Philadelphia Stories: Volume 2 includes the best of the magazine and online content from Spring 2007-Summer 2009. Encompassing fiction, poetry, and personal essays, Volume 1 (now out of print) garnered glowing reviews from all of Philadelphia’s newspapers of record, and was described by The Philadelphia Inquirer as “A Collection that Loves You Back.” Following in the first volume’s footsteps, Volume 2 includes work by David Sanders, Autumn Konopka, and Helen Mallon, the winner of the 2008 Philadelphia Stories essay contest.
Prompted: Stories, Poems, Essays from The Greater Philadelphia Wordshop Studio
This anthology comes from students who participated in Alison Hicks’ Greater Philadelphia Wordshop Studio, which has worked with nearly 200 Delaware Valley writers. This first anthology includes fiction, poetry, and essays and showcases the best of the varied and diverse voices that have enriched and delighted the workshop over the past thirteen years. Prompted is edited by Greater Philadelphia Wordshop Studio Director Alison Hicks, the author of the novella Love: A Story of Images and Falling Dreams, a volume of poetry.
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