Erin Stalcup

Keen imagines that the ancient Irish custom of hiring women to mourn at funerals has continued into the modern day, and follows the most famous keener in world, Maeve McNamara, during the height of her career. Told in a plural first-person point of view, this book follows the group of people who adore Maeve. Through watching Maeve perform mourning, this collective voice thinks about grief, fame, community, and what we can know about ourselves and others. When a prot g appears and asks Maeve to train her, ideas about race and gender-and ideas about who belongs to what communities, and the tradition of the art of lamentation-all begin to shift and swerve. A hybrid novel/ars poetica/autobiographical essay, Keen attempts to grapple with lineage and innovation, heritage, and what no longer serves us.

Fans today may be surprised to learn Scott Russell Sanders was previously one of the brightest science-fiction newcomers of the 1980s. In Dancing in Dreamtime, he returns to his roots, exploring both inner and outer space in a speculative collection of short stories. At a time when humankind faces unprecedented, global-scale challenges from climate change, loss of biodiversity, dwindling vital resources, and widespread wars, this collection of planetary tales will strike a poignant chord with the reader. Sanders has created worlds where death tolls rise due to dream deprivation, where animals only exist in mechanical form, and where poisoned air forces people to live in biodomes. Never before has Sanders's writing been so relevant and never before have the lessons in these stories been so important.

In this exquisite debut short story collection, people with unusual jobs and lives embark on extraordinary journeys. A taboo romance breaks the laws of gravity. Albert Einstein writes letters to the daughter he abandoned. A female physicist meets Stephen Hawking in a bar. . . . In the closing novella, All Those Stairs, an elevator operator with a genius IQ rides up and down all day enclosed in a metal box. Author Erin Stalcup explores these lives with remarkable compassion, depth, and insight examining loss and longing, and how our bodies and minds can be both weighted and freed. And Yet It Moves is a powerful combination of both absurdist and realist—stories that literally defy gravity.