Now Available: The Authenticity Experiment by Kate Carroll de Gutes. Kate Carroll de Gutes decided to spend a while doing what most of us don't do: tell the truth. Tell the truth to herself and then to everyone else, and the truth turns out to be funny, hard, sad, sweet, tough, confusing, tender and sharp. It's your truth, too.

In this collection of portraits, the eye is the vital “lamp of the body,” a spiritual organ Jessie van Eerden uses to craft essays that are as much encounters as they are likenesses, as much being seen as seeing. The author’s religious tradition and the rural landscape of Terra Alta, West Virginia are two backgrounds that are neither chosen nor fully understood, but van Eerden’s attention to these matters becomes its own form of devotion, a longing to see and to believe—the longing itself taking on the robustness of faith.

Joel Allegretti's Platypus presents the reader with, among other treats, a cento meant to be in the voice of Victor Frankenstein, a ghazal composed of the generic names of psychotropic drugs, and a tribute to the thirty-three villains from the 1960s Batman TV series. Featuring poems, short stories, Fluxus-inspired instruction pieces, and even text art, Platypus is a hybrid work named after the ultimate hybrid animal.

These events on September 11, 2011 and the government’s subsequent “War on Terror” refueled long-standing negative stereotypes about Muslims and Islam among many Americans. And yet thousands of practicing Muslims continued to serve or chose to enlist in the U.S. military during these years. In Service in a Time of Suspicion, fifteen such service members talk about what it means to be Muslim, American, and a uniformed member of the armed services in the twenty-first century. These honest accounts remind us of our shared humanity.