Iconic explorers and settlers are made intimately human as they plow through the un-navigated boundaries of their worlds to give shape to modern geography, philosophy, and science. As Ferdinand Magellan sets out on his final voyage, he forms an unlikely friendship with a rich scholar who harbors feelings for the captain, but in the end cannot save Magellan from his own greed. Balboa's peek at the South Sea may never have happened if it wasn't for his loyal and vicious dog, Leonico, and an unavoidable urge to relieve himself. And Captain Zimri Coffin is plagued by sleepless nights after reading Frankenstein, that is until his crew rescues two shipwrecked Englishmen who carry rumor of a giant and deadly white whale lurking in the depths of the ocean.

With her signature blend of sophistication and savagery, darkness and humor, Sabina Murray investigates the complexities of faith, the lure of the unknown, and the elusive mingling of history and legend.

Avery is no stranger to the weight of loss, the way it shapes and defines the expanse of a life. The death of her sister, when Avery was just a child herself, engulfed her and her family—a mother driven mad, a father who disappeared, and all the while, neighbors and friends ignoring and surviving. The loss shades Avery's full being, becoming a deep part of her past and her future.As a young woman, Avery's life in Eastern Oregon ranch country is filled with an acquired family: her partner Davis Lovell, a ranch hand and father figure; Lennie, Lovell's daughter; and Davis's grandparents. When Avery suffers the loss of her and Davis's newborn child, it triggers and revives in her a familiar sense of guilt, one she has carried since childhood over the disintegration of her family. Written with the precision of Cynthia Ozick and the blunt passion of Alice Munro, this riveting story takes place on a landscape—the deserts of Eastern Oregon—itself a deeply important character in this remarkable first novel.

Known for her audacity and inimitable style, Zora Neale Hurston is widely acknowledged as the forerunner for writers such as Toni Morrison and Alice Walker. This anthology draws together superb selections from her essays, short stories, journalism, folklore, and autobiography.

One of the most respected writers of hard SF, it has been more than ten years since Joan Slonczewski's last novel. Now she returns with a spectacular tour de force of the college of the future, in orbit. Jennifer Ramos Kennedy, a girl from a rich and politically influential family (a distant relation descended from the famous Kennedy clan), whose twin brother has died in an accident and left her bereft, is about to enter her freshman year at Frontera College. Frontera is an exciting school built with media money, and a bit from tribal casinos too, dedicated to educating the best and brightest of this future world. We accompany Jenny as she proceeds through her early days at school, encountering surprises and wonders and some unpleasant problems. The Earth is altered by global warming, and an invasive alien species called ultraphytes threatens the surviving ecosystem. Jenny is being raised for great things, but while she's in school she just wants to do her homework, go on a few dates, and get by. The world that Jenny is living in is one of the most fascinating and creative in contemporary SF, and the problems Jenny faces will involve every reader, young and old.

Joan Slonczewski lives in Gambier, Ohio and chairs the department of biology at Kenyon College. She is the author of several previous novels, including the feminist science fiction classic A Door Into Ocean.

In 1908 two young women—the authors of this book—accepted Indian Service appointments as field matrons for the Karok Indians in the Klamath and Salmon River country of northern California. Although the area had been the scene of a gold rush some fifty years earlier, they write in the foreword, "the social life of the Indian—what he believed and the way he felt about things—was very little affected by white influence. The older Indians still had the spaced tatoo marks on their forearms, by which they could measure the length of the string of wampum required to buy a wife. . . . The white men we knew on the Rivers were pioneers of the Old West. . . . All around us was gold country, the land of the saloon and of the six-shooter. Our friends and neighbors carried guns as a matter of course, and used them on occasion. But the account given in these pages is not of these occurrences but of everyday life on the frontier in an Indian village, and what Indians and badmen did and said when they were not engaged in wiping out their friends and neighbors. It is also the account of our own two years in Indian country where, in the sixty-mile stretch between Happy Camp and Orleans, we were the only white women, and most of the time quite scared enough to satisfy anybody."

Mary Ellicott Arnold and Mabel Reed, who had met as children, were an adventurous and devoted twosome for nearly seventy years. Most of their papers from which this work was drawn are located at the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College.

Inheritance explores America's mixed racial history through the lives of four families whose fates are intertwined across several generations from slavery to the present. The novel is a story of our shared inheritance, a history we forget or deny at our peril; it is a story of what it means, in this nation's history and present, to be "mixed" racially, the history of that identity, and how it is connected to the meaning and history of whiteness.

Jane Lazarre is a writer of fiction and non-fiction, including memoir, journalism and essay. She is the author of four previous novels including: Some Kind of Innocence and Worlds Beyond My Control.

Unlike the heroines of domestic fiction, Katherine Karlin's women face their biggest challenges outside of the house. The characters in this debut collection encompass a broad range of experience: a struggling young woman in post-Katrina New Orleans persuades a welder to teach her his trade; an orchestra oboist hears a confession from a beloved teacher; an idealistic aerobics instructor decamps for revolution- era Nicaragua to pick coffee on a farming collective. In each of these stories, Karlin offers rare insight into the place of work in the lives of women, her narrators keenly observant and attuned to the humor that arises when life doesn't turn out as planned. But even more remarkable is the fullness with which she renders characters who make us wonder how they've escaped the notice of other writers. In unadorned prose that evokes complete worlds with deceptive ease, Karlin shows us people immersed in the negotiations of survival, just at the edge of being able to make sense of their lives.

Eleven minutes passed before Delaney Maxwell was pulled from the icy waters of a Maine lake by her best friend Decker Phillips. By then her heart had stopped beating. Her brain had stopped working. She was dead. And yet she somehow defied medical precedent to come back seemingly fine—despite the scans that showed significant brain damage. Everyone wants Delaney to be all right, but she knows she's far from normal. Pulled by strange sensations she can't control or explain, Delaney finds herself drawn to the dying. Is her altered brain now predicting death, or causing it? Then Delaney meets Troy Varga, who recently emerged from a coma with similar abilities. At first she's reassured to find someone who understands the strangeness of her new existence, but Delaney soon discovers that Troy's motives aren't quite what she thought. Is their gift a miracle, a freak of nature—or something much more frightening?