New Releases by Laura Moriarty

Critics and readers everywhere stood up and took notice when Laura Moriarty''s captivating debut novel hit the stores in June ''03. Janet Maslin of the New York Times praised The Center of Everything as "warm" and "beguiling." USA Today compared the scrappy yet tender-hearted Evelyn Bucknow to Scout Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird. It garnered extensive national attention; from Entertainment Weekly to the Boston Globe and the San Francisco Chronicle, the press raved about the wisdom and poignancy of Moriarty''s writing. The Book-of-the-Month Club snatched it up as a Main Selection, as did the Literary Guild. It was a USA Today Summer Reading Pick, a BookSense Top 10 Pick, and a BN.com book club feature title. And still, months after The Center of Everything''s original publication date, reviews and features of the book continue to run nationwide.

Controversies in Victimology features original works of noted scholars and practitioners, aiming to shed light on the debates over, the media attention on, and the psychology behind victimization. This book discusses the controversies from all sides of the debate, and attempts to reconcile the issues in order to move the field forward.

In The Rest of Her Life, Laura Moriarty delivers a luminous, compassionate, and provocative look at how mothers and daughters with the best intentions can be blind to the harm they do to one another. Leigh is the mother of high-achieving, popular high school senior Kara. Their relationship is already strained for reasons Leigh does not fully understand when, in a moment of carelessness, Kara makes a mistake that ends in tragedy -- the effects of which not only divide Leigh''s family, but polarize the entire community. We see the story from Leigh''s perspective, as she grapples with the hard reality of what her daughter has done and the devastating consequences her actions have on the family of another teenage girl in town, all while struggling to protect Kara in the face of rising public outcry. Like the best works of Jane Hamilton, Jodi Picoult, and Alice Sebold, Laura Moriarty''s The Rest of Her Life is a novel of complex moral dilemma, filled with nuanced characters and a page-turning plot that makes readers ask themselves, "What would I do"

Offers hard-to-find pieces from twelve collections as well as new pieces by the American poet.

Stella Nemo, the most appealing sort of sophisticated naif, plunges her paper ship, the Nautilus, into deepest, blackest space, crossing into the fraught domains of other planets and other minds, beaming requests for information to Ada Byron (a clone and psychic information scientist), and dreaming of the renaissance poet Thomas Wyatt (who exists as data). Stella''s mission: to attempt to think and to write without being disturbed, derailed or killed.

Poetry. In this NUDE MEMOIR -- a roving gallery of nude torsos, nude cadaver toes, nude female lover and dead male lover, nude bride undoing God''s and Duchamp''s imposed abstract nakedness -- a woman is born. She is born of words formed when ''a sex (is) offered to a face.'' She is terrible and she is wonderful. She is film noir married to Baroque. She is sentences, magnificance, lust. She is an edifice of loss amterializing and de-materializing on a line between poetry and prose that Laura Moriarty casts with the hand of a magician. I, too, dream of stripping bare this figure that the poet has so gorgeously decked out, to get to the heart of her namelessness. NUDE MEMOIR is an entrancing work of love, mourning, and resistance by a major poet -- Gail Scott.

Fiction. Cunning is the story of various impossible women -- Elizabeth I, Mary of Scotland, the 19th century courtesan Lola Montez, Sarah Winchester and Sarah Winnemucca, the men they use and are used by, and the fabled lands they covet and colonize, California and Ireland (Kevin Killian). These are cunning women; this is cunning writing: ''She is a low cunning witch, '' he claimed, which, not knowing what he meant, made her believe that cunning was the word for what she did for what she had done. For what she was. Written in short chapters and gorgeous, propelled sentences, poet Laura Moriarty''s novelistic foray into history, geography, the female, asks to be read in one delicious sitting. In the geography of the masque, everything is exposed. There is a handwritten quality to the age which is also true of the play. Our attendance is mandatory in the sense that we will not feel part of life if we are left out. The absent ones are remembered and then not (from The Masque of ''The World'').

Poetry. "THE CASE, besides being a mystery to be solved (where is the dead beloved, what happened to him?) and a literal case or box containing items (as with Duchamp''s Boxes) pertinent to the larger work (the ''wedding''; or past and present lives) also strikes the reader as a private enclosure in which the poet confronts herself and what has happened. This space is sometimes theatrical or artifact-like, sometimes inclusive of the natural world; real objects and present experience can take part in the confrontation. Experience is encountered not described, the present is what it''s like when it''s happening even if it''s pain. Though THE CASE is a private domain it isn''t exclusive: the poet is alone thinking, yet others feel nearby in their warmth. THE CASE is appropriately muted, but not reticent. Its colors seem wisely chosen. It''s full of light, ocean light, house light, the light of a shadow puppet show. The subject of the book isn''t at all darkness, it''s the peculiarly lit and peculiarly gracious space in which rituals of loss take place." Alice Notley"

Poetry Chapbook. SPICER''S CITY is 6 prose-poems which have to do with men, names, war, the city, films, relations, ends, lacks of end, means and meanings. The drama of recognition is a story without names. The double, the ambivalent, the uncertain, these are the categories we must accept. Only something like a mineral garden is left. (from Laura) Only something like poems, nourishment in paragraphs, names of musings and experiences, experiments, attempts, which ask us to consider: What have I said? What have I done? In a story about memory do the memories make any difference? (from 12 O''clock High)

"An Avec Sampler" features new work by seven writers -- of poetry and experimental fiction -- who have been featured in editor Cydney Chadwick''s critically acclaimed magazine Avec, out of Penngrove, California. Included are selections from Laura Moriarty''s The Case, a selection of five poems by Chris Stroffolino, Laynie Browne from The Agency Of Wind, George Albon from Step, Stephen-Paul Martin from Not Quite Fiction, five stories by Lissa McLaughlin, and three stories by Susan Smith Nash.

Poetry. "If poems can be profoundly emotional - illuminating the persistently difficult zero of experience - these poems are. Precise, compelling, moving, simple, yet in places skirting the edges of what can be said, the writing in SYMMETRY feels absolutely necessary. Its toughness, honesty and eyes-open confrontation with the unnameable may make you weep"-Norman Fischer.

Poems.

Poems.