Showing results by publisher "Red Hen Press" in All Categories

When Rain Hurts is the story of one mother’s quest to find a magical path of healing and forgiveness for her son, a boy so damaged by the double whammy of prenatal alcohol abuse and the stark rigors of Russian orphanage life that he was feral by the time of his adoption at age three. Bizarre behaviors, irrational thoughts, and dangerous preoccupations were the norm - no amount of love, it turns out, can untangle the effects of fetal alcohol syndrome.

This full collection of 56 poems reflecting on the concept of self, loss, fragility, and the constructs we must create in order to face the transient nature of life was named a finalist in the National Poetry Series, The New Issues Poetry Prize, The Four Way Books Intro Prize, and others.

By 2030, experts predict two-thirds of people living on this planet will not have enough water, a situation expected to result in the deaths of millions and an unprecedented rise in military conflicts. Can we as individuals hope to reverse these dire predictions? Award-winning author and water activist Florencia Ramirez believes we can if our conservation efforts focus on the 70 percent of freshwater flowing to the fields and ranches that grow our food. Eat Less Water takes the listener on a journey to meet America's food producers growing food with less water.

The thirteen stories in Birds of Paradise Lost shimmer with humor and pathos as they chronicle the anguish and joy and bravery of America's newest Americans, the troubled lives of those who fled Vietnam and remade themselves in the San Francisco Bay Area. The past memories of war and its aftermath; of murder, arrest, re-education camps, and new economic zones; of escape and shipwreck and atrocity are ever present in these wise and compassionate stories.

On a chilly November morning, 88-year-old Iris Blum goes missing from Azalea Court, a six-bungalow development on the grounds of a long-closed state mental hospital. Her husband, Asher Blum, was the last head psychiatrist at the hospital and is writing a book about the treatment of mental illness. Their daughter Lexi, the neighbors, and police detective McPhee suspect Dr. Blum of being involved in Iris’ disappearance.

Losing Helen is a first-person narrative essay by Carol Becker of a daughter's profound journey through the many phases in the process of losing her 98-year-old mother. As an only child, she must assume complete responsibility for the often absurd but necessary planning that illness and death require. At the same time, she must struggle with her overwhelming grief and confusion, trying to make sense of her mother's life and her own. As she gradually comes to accept the inevitable loss, she focuses instead on finding ways to ensure a dignified and respectful passage.

Daring yet aimless, smart but slightly strange, Cake Time's young female protagonist keeps making slippery choices, sliding into the dangerous space where curiosity melds with fear and desires turn into dirty messes. In "How Not to Have an Abortion" the teenage narrator looks for a ride from the clinic between her AP exams. In "Easy Target", the now-college-grad agrees to go to a swingers party with a handsome stranger. A decade later, in "Glow" she is suddenly confronted by the disturbing and thrilling fact of her lover's secret daughter.

Don’t Go Crazy Without Me tells the tragicomic coming-of-age story of a girl who grew up under the seductive sway of her outrageously eccentric father. He taught her how to have fun; he also taught her to fear food poisoning, other children’s infectious diseases, and the contaminating propensities of the world at large. Alienated from her emotionally distant mother, the girl bonded closely with her father and his worldview. When he plunged from neurotic to full-blown psychotic, she nearly followed him.

Rosa and Esther march through downtown Detroit in August 1968 to protest the war in Vietnam. When a bloodied teenager reports that mounted police are beating protesters a few blocks away, the young women hurry to offer assistance. They try to stop the violence, but an officer is injured and the sisters are arrested. Rosa sees an opportunity to protest the war in court. Esther has an infant daughter and wants to avoid prison, which means accepting a plea bargain and testifying against her sister.

The Switchback family has inhabited Crawford County since before the War Between the States, and it has eked out an existence, and even prospered, by virtue of hard work and honesty. Peter Switchback, Jr., is the current inhabitant of the family estate and caretaker of the farm and in many ways stands as a symbolic paragon of virtue. The Morgan family has been in Crawford County at least as long as the Switchback family and has made its way in the world by means of greed, pride, and dishonesty.

A HalfMan Dreaming conjures into existence an apocalyptic story line that takes its narrator, Lupe, from a childhood encounter with the Enola Gay on the edge of the Californian desert, to the war in Vietnam, to prison in Detroit. Filled with confusion, anger, and shame at the things he has seen and done, Lupe struggles to find his way out of the maze of violence and racism that is postwar America.

On the morning before Halloween in 2007, Sarah receives a phone call from her husband’s arborist colleague: Matt, her spouse of seven years and father of their two small children, has been severely injured by a falling tree branch while working in a neighborhood east of Seattle. Visions of their future go dark as she learns to care for the man she depended on for support. Faced with choices about how to behave through this unexpected journey, she takes as many steps back as she does forward and begins a rite of passage she never imagined.

Set in the 1980s in the rural community of Bidarkee Bay, Alaska, Wander is the story of Patrice “Pete” Nash, a young broadcast reporter who finds herself facing the winter alone after her husband, Nate, accepts a job on “the slope". As Pete pursues the next big breaking news story, she strikes up a friendship with the new guy in town, the Ivy League-educated Ren, who recites poetry and lives in the family-owned, vacant inn. Their friendship offers a glimpse of a different kind of life. But unbeknown to Pete, Ren has come to Alaska for his own dark reason.

The thirteen stories in Chris Tarry’s richly imagined debut, How To Carry Bigfoot Home, lay bare the insurmountable forces that determine who we are and who we become. From an out-of-work dragon-slaying father in “Here Be Dragons” to a family arguing aboard a rocket ship in “Topics in Advanced Rocketry,” the stories use fantastic settings, blazing wit, and imaginative circumstances to explore very human truths. The stories work to reconcile the public self with the private heart. To contemplate the monsters we carry home and lay bare for the ones we love the most.

Winner of the 2017 Red Hen Press Women’s Prose Prize, Like Wings, Your Hands is both a philosophical novel and a coming-of-age story, exploring a mother-son relationship in the context of disability and interdependence....

Death of a Circus tells the story of the Bringlebright Circus, a small fictional troupe traveling the US in the early 20th century, an era when circuses are falling out of favor and only the largest shows are enduring. Initially, the audiobook follows Lor Cole, a young African American man from Connecticut who dreams of leaving behind his provincial past and making a name for himself as a high-wire walker. Upon joining Bringlebright, however, Lor quickly learns the characters who join him under the Big Top have their own stories to tell.

Welcome to the peculiar and headlong world of Brian Doyle's fiction, where the odd is happening all the time, reported upon by characters of every sort and stripe. Swirling voices and skeins of story, laughter and rage, ferocious attention to detail and sweeping nuttiness, tears and chortling - these stories will remind listeners of the late giant David Foster Wallace, in their straightforward accounts of anything-but-straightforward events and of modern short story pioneer Raymond Carver, a bit, in their blunt, unadorned dialogue.

As a major hurricane threatens the northeast, math professor Gandalf Cohen is abducted by federal agents and flown to a secret interrogation center off the coast of Maine. Austin Coombs, a young local resident, is a newly hired civilian guard assigned to the detention center. Henry Ames, a man of personal secrets, is the FBI special agent in charge of Gandalf's case and doubts the professor's terrorist involvement; Tobias, his second-in-command, disagrees, preferring violent interrogation. As the hurricane slams the shore, conflict detonates and each character must choose a side.

Ronnie works in the geriatric hospital in which her stroke-afflicted father lives, but Medicare patients such as he are being forced to leave, and she decides now is the time to attend to some mysterious, unfinished business involving the remains of her brother and mother, whose shocking deaths have so cruelly oppressed her. But their odd quest is interrupted by a pack of violent suburban teens. Rescued by a handsome and enigmatic migrant worker advocate, Ronnie and her father follow his lead and seek shelter deep in the canyons.

As Ethan and Jeremiah Mueller lose friends and neighbors to the front lines of World War II, the boys try to make sense of the mounting darkness with their imaginations. In a private, laconic language, they invent stories that mirror the irrational world around them: A chaplain with bad news becomes the Angel of Death, skeletal Nazis lurk around the corner, and the ghost of a dead playmate taps at their bedroom window in the night.