The Ecco/Amistad Summer 2013 Fiction Sampler features excerpts from our upcoming novels and story collections:Southern Cross the Dog by Bill ChengPeripatetic Coffin by Ethan RutherfordTogether Tea by Marjan KamaliThe Son by Philipp MeyerThe Impossible Lives of Greta Wells by Andrew Sean GreerTampa by Alissa NuttingVisitation Street by Ivy PochodaIn The Son—an epic, multigenerational saga of power, blood, and land—Philipp Meyer maps the legacy of violence in the American west and presents an intimate portrait of one family across two centuries.The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells (heralded as "wonderful" by John Irving) beautifully wrestles with the impossibility of "what could be" as a woman with nowhere left to turn undergoes radical electroshock therapy.In Together Tea, we meet a loving mother who is determined to make her daughter's life work out: one Excel spreadsheet at a time.The stories in The Peripatetic Coffin (which Alice Sebold called «100% Grade-A storytelling») examine the ways in which the world we think we know can unexpectedly reveal its darker contours.In the "beautifully written and epic" (Nathan Englander) Southern Cross the Dog, three childhood friends cope with the devastating aftermath of the Great Flood of 1927 in Mississippi.Visitation Street is "urban opera writ large" (Dennis Lehane); the novel explores the reactions of a blue-collar community after a teenaged girl mysteriously disappears from the banks of their rough-hewn waterfront.And in Tampa, we inhabit the mind of Celeste—a smoldering 26-year-old middle school teacher who unrepentantly recounts her elaborate and sociopathically determined seduction of her 14-year-old student.
