Fiction. Was Benjamin L. E. Bonneville, captain of the U.S. Army, granted a two-year leave to try his hand as a fur trader in the Rocky Mountain West? Or did his superiors have ulterior motives, tasking Bonneville to spy on the British in the Pacific Northwest? The Bonneville expedition began in Missouri and made its way to the Oregon country, territory at the time shared through mutual agreement by the U.S. and Great Britain. Yet the British presence there caused grave concerns about the geographic boundaries of our nation. This fictional account of the Bonneville expedition brings to life the difficult trek facing Bonneville and his men in their encounters with Native Americans and their struggles against the harsh elements on their westward journey to Oregon.

West of Green River: a novel of the Bonneville Expedition 1832-1835

Literature & Fiction

Keenan, Jerry

United States

Owl Canyon Press

Fiction. A high school girl nearly drowns during a bicycle "tour for the cure" for breast cancer. A father checks his mentally ill son into the emergency room. A lawyer reexamines his past and present in light of a horrific car crash that killed three high school classmates. These long and short stories all focus upon events which transcend the characters' day-to-day existences, events which move them towards new states of understanding or being, towards new lives which will emerge to take the place of the old.

The Afterlife Road: And Other Stories

Austin, Brice

Short Stories & Anthologies

Fiction. Army sharpshooter and deserter Cooper Chance is trapped. Recruited from Iraq to fight in an African country ravaged by a chronic civil war, Cooper wants nothing more than to go home. Unfortunately, the only thing awaiting him in America is jail, and Cooper is acutely claustrophobic. Whether he likes it or not, he now leads the life of a mercenary, in a gritty world filled with thugs, prostitutes, and corrupt cops. To survive his desperate circumstances, Cooper trades diamonds. One day he wanders into a diamond shop, where he meets Sadiq, a young merchant as lost in the world as he is. As they fall in love, Cooper has no idea Sadiq has ulterior motives. Meanwhile huge oil reserves are discovered nearby, and the CIA offers Cooper a way home without jail time if he agrees to carry out a risky, high-stakes mission. Cooper will do anything to get home--except sell his soul to the devil. But when a teenage prostitute he has promised to save suddenly disappears, Cooper finally relents. Unfortunately, he has no idea that unexpected consequences await.

Cooper's Promise

Timothy Jay Smith

A terrorist threat for Easter Sunday in Jerusalem sets off a chain of events that weave together the lives of an American journalist, Israeli war hero, Palestinian farmer, and Arab-Christian grocer.Alerted to a suicide bomb plot, Major Jakov Levy orders the border with Gaza Strip closed. Unable to get his produce to market, Amin Mousa dumps truckloads of tomatoes in a refugee camp. David Kessler, an American journalist, sees it reported on television and goes to Gaza for Amin's story.Hamas militants plot to smuggle a bomb out in David's car and retrieve it when he returns home, but he's unexpectedly detoured on the way. Meanwhile, a cell member confesses to the plot, and the race is on to find David and retrieve the bomb before the terrorists can.Ultimately A VISION OF ANGELS is a story of reconciliation and hope, but not before events as tragic as a modern passion play change the lives of four families forever.

A Vision of Angels

Literary Nonfiction. Memoir. One day during his ninth-grade Speech class Kelly Daniels's outlaw, soul-surfer father appears at school unannounced and pulls the boy from class. Speeding down the freeway, Daniels's father admits that he has been involved in a crime, but he does not remember how it happened. He'd been up for days on cocaine and booze, he explains, and the next thing he knew he woke up in jail with a bad feeling. It was almost a relief when the guard told him he'd killed his cousin Barkley, a drug kingpin of sorts. "I'm sorry to lay this on you," he tells the stunned boy, "but I'm not going to be around to watch your back. Barkley has a son your age...and this kid might come after you someday. You're going to have to learn to look after yourself." A few days later, the father skips bail and flees the country. "Forget about him," everybody says. But the boy doesn't forget. Someday, he believes, they'll find each other, the fugitive father and the dreamy son, and together they'll surf perfect, faraway waves. "Daniels more or less raised himself, as the son of Christian cultists fallen on hard times in the California desert in the 1970s.... [H]e writes about those years of poverty and lost wandering with a nuanced objectivity that is wise as only very good writers can be wise: He draws beauty out of humiliation and fear with the precision and evocative power of his language and the relentlessness of his gaze."—Jaimy Gordon "In [his work] you'll encounter a writer of dynamic prose, of expertly modulated sentences, and pitch perfect, often hilarious dialogue; a writer with a haunting sense of atmosphere, and considerable narrative invention."—Stuart Dybek

Cloudbreak, California

Biographies & Memoirs

Daniels, Kelly

Regional U.S.

Fiction. Eighteen year old Eddie believes finding a girlfriend will solve his loneliness. He has always been shy around girls and, because of his self doubt, he has never dated. He has spent his teenage years in his bedroom by himself, watching TV, listening to music and looking at his baseball cards. But when he meets April and her family everything changes. Eddie's love for April and his desire to break away from his past completely blind him to the serious problems with April and her family. His need to belong prevents Eddie from seeing that April's family has its own deep-rooted psychological problems. Undaunted, Eddie makes up his mind to work harder and harder to make April see that he loves her no matter what, and that nothing she does will change his mind.

The Poor Sucker

DeLong, Kelly

Teen & Young Adult

Three years after the sudden, mysterious death of their 1-year-old daughter Lily, Josef Coleman, a high-strung New York surgeon, and his editor wife Claudia Macinnes remain mired in anguish and grief. Their mourning has left them reaching out for different things in different ways: Josef for a primal, physical connection that Claudia can no longer bear, and Claudia for a connection of the soul that Josef has never really known how to offer. To numb his pain and attempt to fill the gaping hole of loss, Josef turns to a young surgical nurse named Kiera; Claudia, meanwhile, is drawn into what seems like an unrequited fantasy about her psychotherapist, Stuart. The time she spends in his office -- this sole "other room" where she can allow herself to project into the future -- becomes a rare bright spot in her weeks. The couple’s extended families soon become implicated in the unraveling of their lives. Bit by bit, haunting pasts and their impact on the present are revealed, as is the chilling truth about Lily’s death. Interwoven with Claudia’s meticulous journal entries offering glimpses of a sunnier future, the story ultimately takes a surprising turn reaffirming that in tragedy’s wake lie redemption, reckoning and peace.

The Other Room

Triedman, Kim

Contemporary

The NO BARS AND A DEAD BATTERY fiction anthology features the winning entries from the 2018 Owl Canyon Press Short Story Hackathon challenge. The collection contains 26 stories chosen from over 900 entries, a mix of both seasoned and emerging writers whose astonishing and entertaining works span the wide ranging landcape of emotions from happiness to grief.

No Bars and A Dead Battery: The Summer 2018 Owl Canyon Press Short Story Hackathon Contest Winners

Literary

The 27 Stories fiction anthology features the winning entries from the Winter 2018 Owl Canyon Press Short Story Hackathon challenge. The collection contains 27 stories chosen from over 950 entries, a mix of both seasoned and emerging writers whose astonishing and entertaining works span the wide ranging landcape of emotions from happiness to grief.

27 Stories: The Winter 2018 Owl Canyon Press Hackathon Contest Winners

Donald, Ryan

Rita Sommers-Flanagan

Virginia Brackett

"This collection of short stories is about finding a third space, a place of mind that offers time for thought and translation. The narrators in these stories consider "thing theory" and memory and artifacts, especially photographs, observing the way objects and words become metaphors for something else. The narrators listen as things and events "sound" themselves and restructure meanings. This is a collection that searches for correspondences and contemplates absence and explores Virginia Woolfs idea that nothing is only one thing"--

Goose Summer: Stories by Carol Samson

Carol Reese Samson

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Owl Canyon Press publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Owl Canyon Press