persona, and how that changes in the face of dreams thwarted and rearranged.

The beauty of Triangle Ray is its attention to the details that inform Ray's life, the same details by which any of us measure the passage of time. Experiences shape, erode and transform Ray, and it's the reader's privilege to witness his myriad transformations. --Linnie Greene, freelance writer

Discover: The stories in Triangle Ray chronicle in telling detail how the ambitions and the life of an African American man in the South are shaped.

Dzanc,
$15.95,
paperback, 9781938103377

My Name Is Lucy Barton

by Elizabeth Strout

My Name Is Lucy Barton
by
Elizabeth Strout

In My Name Is Lucy Barton, an introspective and largely independent writer looks back on a pivotal time in her life, the 1980s, when she was a patient in a New YorkCity hospital for nine weeks. A bacterial infection after a "simple" appendectomy kept then-30-year-old Lucy Barton away from her husband, two daughters and their home in the West Village. While the writer lay hospitalized, her mother--whom she hadn't spoken to in many years--came to visit from Amgash, Ill., Lucy's rural hometown. With mother sitting vigil at her daughter's bedside--the Chrysler Building gleaming through the hospital window like a beckoning lighthouse--Lucy mentally navigates her way through the darkness of her illness, her New York City existence and her estrangement from her Illinois upbringing. Mother and daughter pass the time by reminiscing and telling stories, painful remembrances that gradually reveal their strained, emotionally distant relationship and the difficult childhood Lucy endured amid poverty, loneliness and ostracism.

In short, stream-of-consciousness flashbacks, Lucy