About Apron Apocalypse:

Best-selling novelist and poet Jeanette Lynes lights up these lyric essays with her inimitable wit and verve, making inspired and surprising sense of her past, her obsessions, and her restless wanderings in search of home.

In these deeply entertaining essays, Jeanette Lynes throws out sentences like glittering lifelines to her past self. She brings her rural childhood to life again, drawing insights painful and uplifting from the mire of poverty and seclusion. She charts the challenging internal weather of her post-divorce campus life as a creative writing prof. And in a pivotal essay on aprons, Lynes brilliantly stitches together the loneliness and depression of rural farmwives with the hopeful mothers — like hers — fighting heroically to raise their kids on next to nothing on a hard-scrabble farm.

About Carpenter Creek:

Acclaimed novelist and beloved raconteur Fred Stenson has written a contemporary novel about the stories we tell ourselves, and the stories we tell those we love or want to love — and the gap between these versions of who we are, where lives take flight or flounder. Set in the stunningly beautiful countryside where the plains meet the Rockies, where the oil industry operates uneasily beside sprawling ranch land, and where a mean dry wind can set the whole world ablaze.