LeapLit

Joan Connor's collection investigates love and loss, sex, family, and the ways they echo back through memory, sometimes to comfort and sometimes to bite. Some comic, some dark, the stories range from lyrical to laugh-out-loud funny. The title story is a mock self-help manual on how to fall out of love. "Men in Brown" is a rollicking account of a woman infatuated with her UPS man. "Aground" is a dark account of male lust and violence on a lonely island in Maine. Joan Connor is a professor at Ohio University and at Fairfield University's low residency MFA program. She received the AWP award for her collection History Lessons, and the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize for The World Before Mirrors. Her two earlier collections are We Who Live Apart and Here on Old Route 7.

A young couple sets out to build a life together in an unstable world haunted by monsters, plagued by disasters, full of longing--but also one of transformation, wonder, and delight, peopled by the likes of Noah, Bob Dylan, the Virgin Mary, and Anne Frank. Hovering between reality and fantasy, whimsy and darkness, these linked fables describe a universe both surreal and familiar.

Meet Alex and Alex, as compelling a Russian portrait as the two sides of Raskolnikov. He is-or they are-a dark-caped anti-hero, conjoined twins stalking, counterfeiting, fleeing the iron curtain, delightfully innocent, seeking what everyone seeks: love, hope, and redemption.

Mussolini clones that won't stay dead. The power to re-create others--forever. Memory and identity are no longer unique. Trapped inside the cloning facility at a time when humans are undergoing their final death rattle on a prion-infected earth, Fausto struggles to re-create the world he once knew. Or did he ever know it?