The Gift is, in many ways, the antiAtocha?where Lerner's narrator fails to achieve a profound experience of art, Browning's has an intense intellectual and emotional response to music, dance, and performance. Meaning isn't just accessible to her, it's also movingly conveyed to the reader. Here, art is one of the love stories. This is a book about performance art, yes, but it's also funny and suspenseful. The narrator's friendship with Sami, a musician in Berlin, takes place virtually, and the negotiation of their growing intimacy, as well as the question of who Sami really is, is the tension that propels the book. What's extraordinary about The Gift is the seriousness with which it takes the idea of joy, the idea of offering something, unbidden, to a stranger, the idea of making something purely out of love. It takes some very heady ideas about performance art, Occupy, and gift economies and makes them beautiful. Browning's work as an artist offers a range of opportunities for nontraditional promotion?collaborations with video artists, events at venues like Judson Church, and creative use of the ukulele covers that play such a prominent part in the book, and already live on her soundcloud page.

Birdie Mae Hayes is eight years old and lives in a small town in Alabama with her mama; daddy; and little brother, Bubba. Her best friend, Sally Rose Hope, lives just five houses down from her. They have been best friends since the day they were born. Birdie Mae always seems to know when something bad is going to happen. An awful feeling comes over her, and she knows there is nothing she can do about it. The worst part is that awful feeling she gets is never wrong. When Birdie Mae gets that feeling on the first day of school, she knows for sure that her first day as a third-grader isn't going to be good. In fact, she knows it's going to be very bad.