Books published by Jaded Ibis Press, LLC

It's 1977. Bannen, Georgia, nestled amid pine forests, is rife with contrasts: natural beauty and racial tension, small-town charm and long-term poverty. An unsettling place for a Black man who fled it years ago and has since traveled the world. But Greer Michaels has to come home, to care for his dying mother. And that means he'll have to reckon with the devastating secret that drove him out in the first place. Greer's story is intertwined with those of the people around him: His mother, Elizabeth, who once had a dazzling singing voice but fell silent years ago. Their neighbor Esse, who has turned to religion after her own traumatic past. Esse's teenaged daughter, Ceiley, an insatiable reader with a burning curiosity about life beyond Bannen's town limits. Written in spare and lyrical prose, As a River moves back and forth across decades, evoking the mysterious play of memory as it touches upon shame and redemption, despair and connection. An exploration of family secrets rooted in the turbulent history of the segregated South, As a River is ultimately about our struggles to understand each other, and the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive.

In The Through, Adrian and her partner Ben navigate the strange and dangerous magic of a black ghost town, Okahika, that exists somewhere between Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and the other-world of flying slave ships and mothers back from the dead. This narrative interrogates blackness in the New South, including the ways in which it is haunted and revisited by the old. It also engages with love and trauma, exploring how we keep ourselves hidden and allow ourselves to know each other in our most intimate relationships.Adrian was born and raised in New Orleans, in a home where she felt desperately alone in her experiences. Sexually abused at a young age, Adrian manifested her "ice twin," "a frozen soul who orbited the same small brown body gasping under the man from behind the fence." From then on, Adrian developed a protective chill that safeguarded her from searing pain.Then came Katrina. The storm swallowed up everything that she loved and hated. After being rescued from her roof and spending time in a mental rehabilitation facility before finding her way to Tuscaloosa and back in contact with her old boyfriend, Ben.Ben and Adrian are not in an ideal partnership-they seem to want different things-Adrian is an entrepreneur with her own business, as Ben listlessly adjuncts at the local university while waiting to become a writer. They withhold and outright lie to each other, while also trying to find the tenderness they used to share.The Through, as folk call it, used to be called Okahika, a black community that existed outside of Tuscaloosa's grid-without street names or formal recognition. Okahika is a town that exists in many different states, a space that's connected by energy and history, a space that's all at once gone and there, waiting. All throughout the novel there are symbols of/from/to Okahika and their pasts-the cicadas that seem to be eternally buzzing, the couple's cat, Free Cookie, who may be the pied piper of Okahika, the Katrina cross that keeps cutting its way into Adrian's hand, and the Yemaya, a slave ship that flies over the town, in and out of the liminal space of the Through, and pulls the couple on a terrifying journey.Inside The Through, Ben sees the Yemaya for the first time, while on the other side of town, Adrian sees the ship as she drives across a bridge. Adrian, Ben and Jenkins, a college friend who comes to visit during it all, are quite literally pulled on an otherworldly journey by this ship, making stops along the way-to meet Adrian's maybe-mother, her ice twin, both presumably back from the dead, Jenkins' Granny Mary, who is full of magic and soothsaying, and watch the destruction of the city they live in, including their home.In the end we are left with growth, but at a high cost. Jenkins is dead and Ben and Adrian are separated, caught in different Okahika's across the country. Adrian's Okahika seems like a cousin to her hometown of New Orleans, where she's forced to process the war-weary past that waits for her there, while Ben is in the familiar Okahika, tasked with finding Adrian, but only if he can contribute to her healing. As Ben reflects, "Some kinds of love, like some kinds of pain, make us weak. Some kinds make us grow. Others plunge us into deep places-some pain, some joy, some regrets. But always from that deep place." And indeed, The Through builds that deep place and pulls us all in.

In a slightly alternate near-future, women are forming vigilante groups to wreak vengeance on rapists, child abusers, and murderers of women. Averil Parnell, a female Catholic priest, faces a dilemma: per the Golden Rule she should advise forgiveness, but as the lone survivor of an infamous massacre of women seminarians, she understands their anger. Her life becomes more complicated when she embarks on an obsessive affair with a younger man and grapples with disturbing religious visions. She had wanted to be a scholar, before the trauma of the massacre. Later, all she wanted was a quiet life as a parish priest. But now she finds she has become a mystic, and a central figure in the social upheaval that's gathering momentum all over the world. The novel taps into a tradition of works that explore the inner lives of religious mystics (such as Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow; Ron Hansen's Mariette in Ecstasy; Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory), but also engages broad social/political issues, similar to wide-ranging literary epics like The Poisonwood Bible and Midnight's Children. Kingdom of Women spans decades and delves into multiple points of view, not only highlighting the personal evolution of a complex, troubled individual but also exploring larger themes like the ethical implications of the use of violence against oppression, and the tension between justice and mercy, revenge and forgiveness.

Where does fiction begin and truth end? How does the telling of a white lie (adding or subtracting a year from one's age) mutate into a darker complication (concealing a misdemeanor, stealing, or betraying a loved one)? Or worse, how does a small untruth transmogrify into a criminal act (fraud or attempted murder)? Moreover, when two different people are spinning the same narrative, whose version of the truth is to be believed? The excavation of an opaque past is the forensic aspect of this memoir, which attempts to answer such questions by uncovering the truth about one woman, Dolores Buxton, for whom the construction of artifice was so quotidian and whose lies became such a trap that, rather than tell the truth, she committed suicide.The story, set mostly in an ever-changing Manhattan, unfolds in reverse chronology. The memoir uses diaries, court transcripts and records, interviews, historical documents, and letters to reconstruct five pivotal events in Dolores Buxton's life: her 1989 suicide; the 1969 Supreme Court decree that finalized her separation from her only child; a 1958 indictment for attempted murder; a day in 1953 as a young executive in the cosmetics industry (and the anniversary of her mother's death of multiple sclerosis); and her birth in 1929 (on the eve of the Great Depression), to a Jewish confidence man and his younger, Catholic wife.Author Kim Dana Kupperman is Dolores's daughter; her relentless probing unveils her mother's bondage to the difficult legacy of her forebears. In the process of seeking to describe and grasp the constellation of circumstance and human interaction that results in criminal behavior, she attains, if not clear answers, at least a sense of redemption for having tried to understand what drove her mother to the desperation she chose to inhabit.