We are delighted to announce the release of a brand new digitalculturebooks series: 21st Century Prose. This series celebrates prose that breaks the rules, bends conventions, and reconfigures genre. The following 21st Century Prose titles are now available:
Full Metal Jhacket by Matthew Derby
Following his celebrated debut collection, Super Flat Times, Matthew Derby delivers a disturbing new set of stories that plunges us into a lonely heartland of misfits, outcasts, and would-be assassins who lurk in the shadows, searching for connection and meaning in all the wrong places.
A Heart Beating Hard by Lauren Foss Goodman
A Heart Beating Hard is about looking long and deep into the invisible life of a person we too often pass by. It is the story of Marjorie, who works in the Store and does her best to go on with the days; of Margie, growing up in Apartment #2 with the sounds of Ma and Gram and Him all around; and of Marge, who should never have been, who should have been helped.
Settlers of Unassigned Lands by Charles McLeod
In these seven stories spanning the Midwest to California, Charles McLeod brings us characters estranged from their homelands and locked in conflict with their past and present selves. Alternating between the comic, the tragic, and the neurotic—and often all three at once—McLeod’s second collection transports readers from the American mainstream to the dark edges of cities and the heartland’s lost, forgotten towns, into the lives of people trying to decipher if they can escape their pasts, and at what cost.
All books are freely available to read online. Print copies of the books may be purchased from the University of Michigan Press.