Andromeda Romano-Lax

In a tour-de-force tapestry of science fiction and historical fiction, Andromeda Romano-Lax presents a story set in Japan and Taiwan that spans a century of empire, conquest, progress, and destruction. 2029: In Japan, a historically mono-cultural nation, childbirth rates are at an all-time low and the elderly are living increasingly longer lives. This population crisis has precipitated the mass immigration of foreign medical workers from all over Asia, as well as the development of finely tuned artificial intelligence to step in where humans fall short. In Tokyo, Angelica Navarro, a Filipina nurse who has been in Japan for the last five years, works as caretaker for Sayoko Itou, a moody, secretive woman about to turn 100 years old. One day, Sayoko receives a present: a cutting-edge robot "friend" that will teach itself to anticipate Sayoko's every need. Angelica wonders if she is about to be forced out of her much-needed job by an inanimate object--one with a preternatural ability to uncover the most deeply buried secrets of the humans around it. Meanwhile, Sayoko becomes attached to the machine. The old woman has been hiding secrets of her own for almost a century--and she's too old to want to keep them anymore. What she reveals is a hundred-year saga of forbidden love, hidden identities, and the horrific legacy of WWII and Japanese colonialism--a confession that will tear apart her own life and Angelica's. Is the helper robot the worst thing that could have happened to the two women--or is it forcing the changes they both desperately needed?

Plum Rains

Ruth McClintock is obsessed with the past. For nearly a decade, she has been studying Annie Oakley, convinced that the legendary sharpshooter experienced a scarring event in childhood that led her to fight for the right of every American woman to own and operate a gun. This fruitless search has cost Ruth her doctorate, a book deal, and her fiance. But Ruth may finally have the evidence she is looking for. She has managed to hunt down a journal purporting to be a 'true account' of Oakley's midlife struggles, including secret visits to a psychoanalyst and the desire for vengeance against the 'Wolves,' or those who have wronged her.

Annie and the Wolves

"In 1920, when she graduated from Vassar College with her degree in psychology, Rosalie Rayner took a coveted position at the Johns Hopkins research lab to assist the charismatic John B. Watson, the man who pioneered behaviorist psychology. Together, John Watson and Rosalie Rayner conducted experiments on hundreds of babies to prove behaviorist principles of nurture over nature. They also embarked on a scandalous affair that cost them both their jobs. The Watsons' bestselling parenting book, Psychological Care of Infant and Child, which emphasized emotional detachment, affected the upbringings of generations of American children but Rosalie, now a mother herself, had to confront its tenets personally. With Behave, Andromeda Romano-Lax offers a fictional biography of Rosalie Rayner Watson, a woman whose lab work is now widely repudiated but who in her time was at the cutting edge of parenting psychology. This novel is in turns moving and horrifying, a thought-provoking and page-turning read about the meaning of motherhood"--

Behave

Deepest Lake

Chronicles the lifelong friendship and rivalry between Feliu Delargo, a Catalan cellist, and eccentric piano prodigy Justo Al-Cerraz, a relationship that is dramatically transformed by the arrival in their lives of Aviva, an Italian violinist with a haunt

The Spanish Bow

The Deepest Lake

Dispatched by the Third Reich to collect a classical Roman marble statue and relinquish it to Gestapo custody, Ernst Vogler discovers that his escorts are pursuing nefarious side agendas and leaving him to fend for himself.

The Detour

In this atmospheric thriller set at a luxury memoir-writing workshop on the shores of Lake Atitlán, Guatemala, a grieving mother goes undercover to investigate her daughter’s mysterious death. Rose, the mother of twentysomething aspiring writer Jules, has waited three months for answers about her daughter’s death. Why was she swimming alone when she feared the water? Why did she stop texting days before she was last seen? When the official investigation rules the death an accidental drowning, the body possibly lost forever in Central America’s deepest lake, an unsatisfied Rose travels to the memoir workshop herself. She hopes to draw her own conclusion—and find closure. When Rose arrives, she is swept into the curious world created by her daughter’s literary hero, the famous writing teacher Eva Marshall, a charismatic woman known for her candid—and controversial—memoirs. As Rose uncovers details about the days leading up to Jules’s disappearance, she begins to suspect that this glamorous retreat package is hiding ugly truths. Is Lake Atitlán a place where traumatized women come to heal or a place where deeper injury is inflicted? The Deepest Lake is both a sharp look at the sometimes toxic, exclusionary world of high-class writing workshops and an achingly poignant view of a mother’s grief.

A twisty, jaw-dropping psychological thriller that unravels a mother's worst nightmare—that her child is capable of terrible violence—when her teenage son becomes a suspect in the murder of two classmates, from the author of The Deepest Lake. “Timely and terrifyingly real, What Boys Learn is not to be missed.”—Mary Kubica, New York Times bestselling author of It's Not Her Over one terrible weekend, two teenage girls are found dead in a wealthy Chicago suburb. As the community mourns, Abby Rosso, the girls’ high school counselor, begins to suspect that her son was secretly involved in their lives—and possibly, their deaths. Abby doesn’t want to believe Benjamin hurt anyone. But she’s seen the warning signs before. Two decades ago, her brother was imprisoned for a disturbing crime—he was only a little older than Benjamin is now. And Abby has more troubling memories from her own adolescence that confirm what boys and men are capable of. As Abby searches for the truth about what happened to her students, she’s forced to face the question: Has she been making excuses for Benjamin for years? Swirling with sharp questions about family and masculinity, What Boys Learn unravels a mother’s worst fears.

What Boys Learn

Patrick O'Neil

Steve Heller

Wendy C. Ortiz

Yuvi Zalkow

Daniel José Older

Susan Southard

Elizabeth Earley

Bernadette Murphy

Laraine Herring

Jillian Lauren

Naomi Benaron

Joan Dempsey

Tara Ison

Noriko Nakada

Alistair McCartney

Gayle Brandeis

Michael Passafiume

Adrian Ernesto Cepeda

Dawna Kemper

Wendy Hudson

Rochelle Newman

Gordon Lee Johnson

F. Douglas Brown

Anna Scotti

Antoinette Brim

Jose Hernandez Diaz

Valentina Gnup

Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo

Steve De Jarnatt

Lauren Schmidt

Topper Lilien

Lisbeth Andriessen

Deborah Bauer

Antonia Crane

Tammy Delatorre

Jacqueline Heinze

LaToya Jordan

Hazel Kight Witham

David Bumpus

Raymond Gaston

Katelyn Keating

Lise Quintana

Arielle Silver

Wendy Dutwin

Seth Fischer

Michael Leal García

Khadija Anderson

Angela Brommel

M. L. Brown

Joe Jiménez

Tanya Ko Hong

Shelly Krehbiel

Gina Loring

Allie Marini

Maiana Minahal

Jim Natal

Daniel G. Reinhold

Chrys Tobey

Reyan Grande

2017 marked the 20th anniversary of the founding of the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Antioch University Los Angeles. We commemorated this occasion with a special edition of our journal. Lunch Ticket Special: Celebrating 20 Years of Antioch¿s MFA in Creative Writing features new and previously published works by Antioch MFA alumni.

Celebrating 20 Years of Antioch's MFA in Creative Writing

Lunch Ticket Special

A “compelling” novel of art, danger, and one man’s adventure in pre-World War II Italy, from the author of Plum Rains (Library Journal). Ernst Vogler is twenty-six years old in 1938 when he is sent to Rome by his employer—the Third Reich’s Sonderprojekt, which is collecting the great art of Europe and bringing it to Germany for the Führer. Vogler is to collect a famous Classical Roman marble statue, The Discus Thrower, and get it to the German border, where it will be turned over to the Gestapo. It is a simple, three-day job. Things start to go wrong almost immediately. The Italian twin brothers who have been hired to escort Vogler to the border seem to have priorities besides the task at hand—wild romances, perhaps even criminal jobs on the side—and Vogler quickly loses control of the assignment. The twins set off on a dangerous detour and Vogler realizes he will be lucky to escape this venture with his life, let alone his job. With nothing left to lose, the young German gives himself up to the Italian adventure, to the surprising love and inevitable losses along the way. From the celebrated author of The Spanish Bow and Behave, The Detour is a bittersweet novel about artistic obsession, misplaced idealism, diversions, and second chances, set along the beautiful back-roads of northern Italy.

A Novel

"Annie Oakley's Wild West Americana and time travel come together in this genre-defying novel that explores trauma and the cost of female revenge. Ruth McClintock is obsessed with the past. For nearly a decade, she has been studying Annie Oakley, convinced that the legendary sharpshooter experienced a scarring event in adolescence that led her to fight for the right of every American woman to own and operate a gun. This fruitless search has cost Ruth her doctorate, a book deal, and her fiancâe. But Ruth may finally have the evidence she is looking for. She has managed to hunt down a journal purporting to be a "true account" of Oakley's midlife struggles, including secret visits to psychologist Josef Breuer and the desire for vengeance against the "Wolves," or the men who have wronged her. With the help of Reece, a tech-savvy senior at the local high school, Ruth attempts to establish the journal's provenance, but she begins to have out-of-body episodes that she soon believes to be time travel, taking her through Annie's lived experiences. As she solves Annie's mysteries, she also confronts her own, from the reasons behind her teenage sister's suicide to visions of a tragedy in her Minnesota town that she might be able to prevent"--

Der Bogen des Cellisten

Andromeda Romano-Lax

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