Books in the Permafrost Prize Series series

"For seventeen years, During-the-Event, or D.E., has lived free in a pastoral life with his grandfather in North Dakota. But when death reaches their outpost. D.E. is forced on a journey that will change his life--and reveal surprises about his past"--

A woman is a series of shifting possibilities. The frame that contained her in the morning can transform into something completely different by afternoon. The roles she's called on to play mutate over the years and throughout a lifetime. And her very place in the world is called into constant negotiation. In this swirl of contradictions, finding her own self--her core--can be a bewildering journey. Woman Prime is about the fundamental human wish to settle into an authentic self, a "prime" identity. It follows one woman through her roles--child, adult, wife, mother--and shows how she must remake herself through each new stage. Like many women, the speaker believed that leaving her parent's home, falling in love, and raising children would reveal the essential core of herself. Instead, she learns that those she loves can fail her and that she must embrace a world full of flickering and conflicting expectations for women. Woman Prime is about every woman and no woman--a mutable voice that will still resonate with anyone trying to reconcile their flawed and complicated selves.

Delving into the chaotic sublime of fatherhood, the revelations of youth, and the consequences of history, this book features poems that are joined by fictional monologues from historical figures and cultural icons, juxtaposing personal history with our shared one.

In award-winning writer Becky Hagenston's third collection of stories, Scavengers, a woman obsessed with reality shows meets a sorority girl on a very personal scavenger hunt. A man discovers that his father suddenly believes in lake monsters. A woman goes to St. Petersburg, Russia and tries to lose herself in museums and palaces to avoid dealing with her husband's near fatal accident. A grown-up Hansel tries hard to be a good father. A young girl begins to suspect that the seances taking place in her basement aren't as harmless as they seem. Hagenston builds worlds of startling emotional complexity, always aware of her characters' darkly humorous circumstances. From Mississippi to Arizona to Russia, the ordinary (a family deals with a grandmother's illness) to the bizarre (a hand puppet takes over a small town), the characters in these stories find themselves faced with the choice to either make sense of the past or run from it. But what do you take with you when you decide to move on?