Excerpt from Brass by Xhenet Aliu, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Across the street, one sign remained lit in a plaza with a half dozen storefronts, a rent-to-own center that had managed to stick around a couple of years, even though the refrigerators people rented to own must've been hard to fill after the grocery store in the plaza had gone out of business. Next door to the Ross a floodlight shone from the garage where people brought their Dodge K-cars that had broken down on the way to the rent-to-own center, where they were shopping in the first place because they couldn't afford to buy refrigerators outright after putting their paychecks into last month's car repairs. And next door to the garage was a dingy twenty-four-hour laundromat, where people washed their linens while waiting for the estimates from the mechanic, bleaching the brown halos left behind on their pillowcases after sweaty, sleepless nights worrying about where the next rent-to-own payment would come from if they couldn't get to work without their K-cars.

Excerpted from Brass by Xhenet Aliu. Copyright © 2018 by Xhenet Aliu. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.