In these short stories, Jack D. Forbes captures the remarkable breadth and variety of American Indian life. Drawing on his skills as scholar and native activist, and, above all, as artist, Forbes enlarges our sense of how American Indians experience themselves and the world around them.

Though all the main characters are of Indian descent, each is a unique combination of tribal origin, social status, age, and life-style-from native elder and college professor to lesbian barmaid and Chicano adolescent. Nevertheless the U.S. government (and perhaps white society as a whole) narrows the definition of "Indian."

"Blueprints for Building Better Girls "delves into the lives of an eclectic cast of archetypal female characters--from the high school slut to the good girl, the struggling artist to the college party girl, the wife who yearns for a child to the reluctant mother--mapping America's shifting cultural landscape from the late 1970s to the present day. Its interconnected stories explore the commonly shared but rarely spoken of experiences that build girls into women and women into wives and mothers. In revealing all their vulnerabilities and twisting our preconceived notions of who they are, Elissa Schappell alters how we think about the nature of female identity and how it evolves.

If a machine could predict how you would die, would you want to know? This is the tantalizing premise of This Is How You Die, the brilliant follow-up anthology to the self-published bestseller, Machine of Death.
THIS IS HOW YOU DIE
Stories of the Inscrutable, Infallible, Inescapable Machine of Death
The machines started popping up around the world. The offer was tempting: with a simple blood test, anyone could know how they would die. But the machines didn't give dates or specific circumstances-just a single word or phrase. DROWNED, CANCER, OLD AGE, CHOKED ON A HANDFUL OF POPCORN. And though the predictions were always accurate, they were also often frustratingly vague. OLD AGE, it turned out, could mean either dying of natural causes, or being shot by an elderly, bedridden man in a botched home invasion. The machines held onto that old-world sense of irony in death: you can know how it's going to happen, but you'll still be surprised when it does.
This addictive anthology--sinister, witty, existential, and fascinating--collects the best of the thousands of story submissions the editors received in the wake of the success of the first volume, and exceeds the first in every way.

Urban 2 picks up where the previous collection left off: collating and capturing new writing about the current urban experience of young South Africans across the board. Featuring a new writing from a large cross section of South Africans, this collection once again seeks to tap into the mind set and attitudes of what is really happening out there in the streets of this country. It reaches the soft underbelly of the city mind, and reveals that not all is angst, doom and gloom in the South Africa of today.