Stephen King once said that books are portable magic. Ran Walker decided to take this phrase a bit more literally in his third short story collection, bringing to life vibrant new landscapes of both the strange and the familiar.

A writer finds himself in a love triangle where one of the women is a ghost. A woman discovers that her cure for alopecia has unintended consequences. An artist paints a woman he has been dreaming about, only to

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"Shortly after being diagnosed with terminal cancer, FBI Agent Janet Maclin is facing her toughest case yet. She is assigned to help NYPD detectives, Quincy Cavanaugh and Phee Freeman who are investigating a series of gruesome hate crimes that threaten a city on the brink of a race war. As the body count mounts, time is running out for Maclin in more ways than one"--

"All heroes have fatal flaws and a moment of defining hubris, but few rise from the ashes to achieve greater heights. In 1884, Deputy U.S. Marshal Bass Reeves was arrested for murder and placed among his own prisoners in the federal jail in Fort Smith, Arkansas, known infamously as Hell on the Border. It was the single greatest setback of his illustrious career, but it wouldn't be his last mistake or trial by fire. We now meet Reeves again in the...

Two best friends. Seven years of pining. One explosive summer...

Romance is weakness, and Jasmine Allen doesn't have time for either. Lifelong cynic Jas is the queen of one-night things—until a plumbing disaster screws everything up and leaves her temporarily homeless. Luckily, she has someone to turn to: her best friend Rahul.

For seven years, Rahul Khan has followed three simple rules.

Don't touch Jasmine

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Sula and Nel are born in the Bottom—a small town at the top of a hill. Sula is wild, and daring; she does what she wants, while Nel is well-mannered, a mamma’s girl with a questioning heart. Growing up they forge a bond stronger than anything, stronger even than the dark secret they have to bear. Strong enough, it seems, to last a lifetime—until, decades later, as the girls become women, Sula’s anarchy leads to a betrayal...

A man bears witness to his grandfather's deathbed confessions, which reveal his family's long-buried history and his involvement in a mail-order novelty company, World War II, and the space program.

In 1923, fifteen-year-old Hattie Shepherd flees Georgia and settles in Philadelphia, hoping for a chance at a better life. Instead, she marries a man who will bring her nothing but disappointment and watches helplessly as her firstborn twins succumb to an illness a few pennies could have prevented. Hattie gives birth to nine more children whom she raises with grit and mettle and not an ounce of the tenderness they crave. She vows to prepare them for...

"Ephram Jenkins has never forgotten the beautiful girl with the long braids running through the piney woods of Liberty, their small East Texas town. Young Ruby, "the kind of pretty it hurt to look at, " is already quite damaged, but Ephram is forcibly drawn to her. As soon as she becomes a young woman and has any power of her own, Ruby flees suffocating Liberty for the bright pull of 1950s New York City. Years later, when a funeral forces her to return...

From one of the most brilliant and provocative literary figures of the past century comes a groundbreaking novel set among the bohemian bars and nightclubs of 1950s Paris, about love and the fear of love—“a book that belongs in the top rank of fiction” (The Atlantic).

One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years
In the 1950s Paris of American expatriates, liaisons,...

A three-act play concerned with the tensions in a middle-class African American family living on Chicago's Southside in the 1950s.