Fiction. Named one of Kirkus Reviews' Best Fiction Books of 2014. Each of the characters in SCOUTING FOR THE REAPER faces an unanticipated challenge: transporting a truckload of penguins across the country, arranging a proper Jewish burial for the remains of Gregor Samsa, and selling tombstones dressed as a Girl Scout. These stories explore the domestic and professional adventures of people in over their heads, while leavening their struggles with humor. "Jacob Appel's stories echo with secrets. There are the secrets we keep from those closest to us, of course. Our parents, our doctors, our clergy, our ex-wives and unrequited loves. Any run of the mill story has those. Good stories traffic in the kind of secrets we keep from ourselves. Why, for instance, what and who we love are so close in content and character to what we can't abide. Appel's that kind of trafficker. Even better, throughout this fine collection, he is most concerned with still another kind of secret: that which, when revealed, doesn't solve anything. Like the very best stories, they carry the mystery forward. Revelation, in the end, isn't an end at all. It's a beginning. SCOUTING FOR THE REAPER is full of such revelations. Here's hoping it signals the beginning of a long string of books penned by this talented polymath."--TJ Beitelman

Review "There is a lovely and unexpected alchemy in these verses that veer from the stars to suburbia, from the sublime to sweaty reality, and leave traces of each in the other. Roberts has a powerful range: equally adept at ferocity and fragility, and a host of other apparent opposites, she is a borderless writer and an absolute joy to read." - June Sylvester Saraceno"Suzanne Roberts' poems in Plotting Temporality are songs of the body, the erotic imperative of flesh, the brutal finality of bone. Roberts' poems forcefully invoke "our night, our moon, but never, / never our dawn," their language striving to shape and illuminate our haunted movements--a caress, a spouse's hand pushed away, a figure approaching from the shadows, embraced with fateful longing." --Gaylord Brewer Product Description Suzanne Roberts is the author of three previous books of poetry, Shameless (2007), Nothing to You (2008), and Three Hours to Burn a Body: Poems on Travel (2011). She is also the author of a memoir, Almost Somewhere: 28 Days on the John Muir Trail (University of Nebraska Press, 2012). She holds a doctorate in literature and the environment from the University of Nevada-Reno and currently teaches at Lake Tahoe Community College in South Lake Tahoe, California. For more information, please visit her website at www.suzanneroberts.org From the Back Cover The poems in Plotting Temporality are songs of the body, the erotic imperative of flesh, the brutal finality of bone. These poems flicker with shadow and light, sometimes igniting into bold vision, sometimes mapping what is missing, drawing new shapes from the natural world, giving the familiar a new dimension, a mystery that compels us to follow. About the Author Suzanne Roberts is the author of the memoir Almost Somewhere: Twenty-Eight Days on the John Muir Trail, as well as three previous collections of poetry: Shameless, Nothing to You, and Three Hours to Burn a Body: Poems on Travel. She teaches at Lake Tahoe Community College and for the low residency MFA in creative writing at Sierra Nevada College.

Set in a small town that houses little more than a research lab and an engineering school, the body of the lab's director is found in a pit used for maternal deprivation experiments with monkeys. A few days later, a graduate student is found murdered as well. Are these deaths connected? And who's responsible for these murders? Written by one of America's greatest poets, this mystery is a scathing social commentary with a criminal twist. Maxine Kumin is the author of poetry, novels, short stories, essays and a number of children's books. She has received several awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Poets' Prize, the Levinson Prize, and most recently, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. She lives in Warner, New Hampshire.