It's the summer of 1972 and girlhood has never been more fraught, but Darcy Steinke captures all of it with an intimate, startling grace. When Jesse’s family moves to Roanoke, Virginia, in the summer of 1972, she’s twelve years old and already mindful of the schism between innocence and femininity, the gap between childhood and the world of adults. Her father, a former pastor, cycles through spiritual disciplines as quickly as he cycles through jobs. Her mother is chronically dissatisfied, glumly fetishizing the Kennedys and anyone else who symbolizes status and wealth. The residents of the Bent Tree housing development may not seem like beacons of the secret knowledge that Jesse is looking for, but they’re all she’s got. Her neighbor tans on the front lawn and tells tales of her married lover; her classmate playacts being a Bunny at Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Club; the boy she’s interested in fantasizes about moving to Hollywood and befriending David Soul. In the midst of her half-understanding, Jesse finds space to set up her room with her secret treasures: a Venus Flytrap, her Cher 45s, and The Big Book of Burial Rites. But outside await new sexual mores, muddled social customs, and confused spirituality. It’s a terrifying time―in the shadow of Manson and the hangover from the idealistic sixties―when alienation overtakes liberation. Girlhood has never been more fraught than in Jesse’s telling, its expectations threatening to turn at any point into delicious risk, or real danger. Darcey Steinke captures all of this with an intimate, startling grace.

Product Description: "I became riveted by Steinke's tone, a steady, lovely, hallowed, patient, things-in-themselves hum…[Easter Everywhere is] a delicately wrought little volume…This is a beautiful book." ―New York Times Book Review In this critically beloved and piercing memoir, Darcey Steinke, a minister's daughter, recounts her lifelong struggle to find religion...read more

The author of Suicide Blonde offers a poignant memoir of growing up the daughter of a minister and a former beauty queen; the influence of the mysteries of life and religion, her father's struggles with his parish and faith, and her mother's breakdown on her childhood; and her own changing ideas about religion and personal journey back toward a living faith.

Product Description: Mary is a new mother transformed by the birth of her baby; Walter, a lonely gay Episcopal priest, privately struggles with his contradictory desires; and John, a monk who has left his monastery after fifteen years, craves intimacy with a woman...read more

Sixteen-year-old Eddie, who spends summers on an island with his mother, falls in love with a spirited island girl as his mother, forced to choose between two men, takes to the sea for solace, in a new edition of the debut novel by the author of Suicide Blonde. Reprint.

Product Description: Vanity Fair called this intensely erotic story of a young woman's sexual and psychological odyssey "a provocative tour through the dark side." Jesse, a beautiful twenty-nine-year-old, is adrift in San Francisco's demimonde of sexually ambiguous, bourbon-drinking, drug-taking outsiders...read more

A collection of remarkable and wonderfully eclectic original essays and meditations--by Madison Smartt Bell, Benjamin Cheever, Kim Wozencraft, and other notable writers--offers a fascinating range of probing and very personal interpretations of what Christianity means today. Reprint. 15,000 first printing.

Set in the strip malls and duplexes on the back side of suburbia, the story of two girls follows the adventures Ginger, a troubled minister's daughter, and Sandy Patrick, who has been abducted from summer camp. Reprint. NYT. LJ. K.

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