Contemporary fiction: literary and general

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Book SynopsisThe Blazing World is one of the most fascinating, unusual and astonishing pieces of literature in the English language. Written in 1666 by Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle, the story follows a young woman who is transported to a world of animal-people, becomes their empress, and eventually leads an invasion back into her own world, complete with bird-man bombardiers and submarine ships. The tale involves spirit possession, astral projection, the many-worlds theory, and an interdimensional otherworldly queer romance that is centuries ahead of its time. Featuring numerous full-page and spot illustrations, and housed in an elaborately die-cut and embossed slipcase, this is an heirloom edition designed to be a work of art in its own right. With an introduction by Brooke Bolander. 9x12", 138 pages.Trade Review"Rebekka Dunlap...has evoked an opulent phantasmagoria that heightens the impact of this unusual work...this superb book should be on every art book collector’s shelf." -- Karen Haber * LOCUS Magazine *

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Book SynopsisDick, a blunt and bawdy Philly sports fan, finds himself in an assisted living facility following a stroke. Determined to regain his independence, he does daily laps around the grounds with his quad cane. But when recovery never comes, and days swell into years, Dick finds purpose instead by studying his fellow residents, chronicling their odd obsessions and their nasty arguments, their breakdowns, their drunken debaucheries—and yes, even their sexual escapades. Dwell Here and Prosper is a gritty but heartfelt novel, heavily informed by the author’s father and his experiences in assisted living near Philadelphia in the 90s. With its set of memorable outcasts—a shady jokester who insists he worked for the FBI, a schizophrenic Catholic who roams local cemeteries at night in search of the Virgin Mary, a twenty-six-year-old whose teeth mysteriously fell out, a middle-aged alcoholic who prostitutes herself to other residents for booze and cigarettes—it’s a One Flew Over the Cuckoo''s Nest for a different generation and a different kind of institution. This timeless book offers a funny yet honest meditation on aging and community, and what it means to thrive in purgatory.

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Book SynopsisA relationship ends in the space between [ ]. Abe Lincoln and Edgar Allan Poe Two stroll the river in the afterlife, debating a second death. Two boys navigate jazz, baseball, and growing up in the second between the pitch and the swing. And a man from Living Dangerously sets off across the ocean on a pile of lobster traps, seeking the truth of the smoke on the wind. With If You [ ], author Colin Fleming breaks the unwritten rule of the short story collection. In over thirty different styles, Fleming delivers a punk rock triple album in book form—compositions that display a dizzying range of fearless artistry, from horror to hyper-experimental to a story disguised as a grocery list. Together, these pieces resonate with unexpected chords, exploring the breadth of human experience and affirming that that narrative is everywhere, if we are able and willing to see it.Trade ReviewPraise for Colin Fleming “Colin Fleming’s stories exhibit many of the qualities that have distinguished his criticism: namely, a fierce but disciplined intelligence, a singular view of society—and, sometimes, those who live in isolation from mainstream society—and a well-earned and convincing compassion. All of this, in a debut collection of stories written in eloquent prose, at once vivid, hypnotically precise, and always bursting with energy.” —Richard Burgin, Boulevard, and five-time Pushcart winner “Colin Fleming is a thoughtful and provocative maker of stories. Singular, he refuses to assimilate to any of the easy available trends. He can break into any life and find surprises—sudden moral convulsions, paradoxical resolutions. The characters have broad expressive range, and when they interact anything can—and does—happen. Fleming is a writer to stake out and shadow—to see where he goes, who he meets, where he gets his news.” —Sven Birkerts , editor of Agni

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Book SynopsisA hallucinatory exploration into the origins of humans and human language perfect for fans of Brian Evenson and Eimear McBride.Lucy, a young woman with an uncertain past, finds herself thrust into a mysterious anthropology museum that converts into a disco club each night. Moving through its labyrinthine galleries, she tries to construct an origin story for herself and for her species. But as the night progresses, her grip on language and identity slips away until the exhibit captions rupture the text, transporting us to East Africa, where the lives of three people—British anthropologist Mary Leakey, an Indian indentured laborer building the Uganda Railway, and a curator with too many secrets—interweave to reveal the darker side of the search for origins.Surreal, spiraling, and daringly innovative, Habilis is all at once a historical reconstruction, a psychological horror, a mystery, a ghost story, and a creation myth. But above all, it is a meditation on language, desire, and the stories we tell about ourselves—especially those that might unravel us.Trade Review“Habilis is a brilliant literary kaleidoscope, in which fragments of human framing of our ‘natural history’ leap, jostle, abut, overlap, and all with a keen sense of entertaining and colorful storytelling! Maybe I’m exactly the perfect reader for this book, but I smiled, nodded, gasped, laughed, and felt the poignant sting of pathos the whole way. What’s one more Lucy to stand in for all that we don’t understand? What’s one more attempt to make sense of eons of evolution, or one evening’s adventures? The collapse of scale and time here is impressive and unwaveringly illuminating, even if only of shadows. Huzzah!” —Thalia Field, author of Experimental Animals (A Reality Fiction) and Personhood“Flickering between taxa, Alyssa Quinn's unclassifiable book maps the shadows cast by the museum and the archive, pointing again and again "to that which isn't there." It imagines the tenseless ghosts who haunt the straight steel line of colonial logic and enacts a multi-directional movement that pleats time, the sentence, and meaning itself. Habilis is a record of bright fractures and irresolvable symbols, an anti-history, a poem that's a mirror, a stratigraphy of gaps.” —Joanna Ruocco, author of Dan and Field Glass“‘In the archive, I forget my name.’ Alyssa Quinn's artful, nimbly-made novel is studded with vital archaisms, from the DNA-ribbon of Mitochondrial Eve, blurry in its vitrine, to the Poughkeepsie train station, a remnant of Victorian red-brick optimism plunked on the Empire line. The contemporary protagonist, orphaned as a toddler, has come unstuck from time, drifting between incidents in her own life and historical and pre-historical narratives unspooling from specimens and artefacts from the unsavory history of anthropology. As insight, connection, shame and regret trade places across axes of colonialism, sexism, racist exploitation and personal loss, Habilis considers what it means to have a human hand, and to use it to comfort or to harm, to point to what is and isn't there.” —Joyelle McSweeney, author of Toxicon and Arachne“An ambitious and dynamic novel that collapses time and space, author and character, imagination and historical record, Alyssa Quinn's Habilis is a book about the affordances and limitations of language, museums, relationships, science, systems of classification, and—above all—storytelling. Here Quinn vacillates between fiction and fact with grace and nuance. Cerebral and sophisticated yet also full of pathos, Habilis is prismatic and shimmering with linguistic fervor, as much about Mary Leakey as it is about the ethics and aesthetics of what it means to compose a story -- and what remains in the wake of that act. A haunting and heartfelt debut.” —Lindsey Drager, author of The Archive of Alternate Endings“With great intelligence, compassion, and confidence, Alyssa Quinn's Habilis dazzingly remixes the fossil record of sometimes anxious, frequently pernicious fictions we tell ourselves about our place in the world, about who is genetically suited to hold positions of power and privilege, and about how, under a patriarchal, imperial rubric, the body's evolving morphologies equate to social destiny. Quinn's ingenious concept and challenging imagination engagingly transform the museum of so-called natural history into a surreal and unsettling house of mirrors, its glass eyes and vitrines no longer capable of distorting the human subject they seek to define, but rather making newly visible generations of suppressed narratives of ambition, care, and desire that provide a fresh perspective on our species' pasts and possible futures.” —Michael Mejia, author of TOKYO

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Book SynopsisAn intense, surreal story of family and growing up, perfect for fans of Matt Bell and The Immortalists.A mother clings to twin sons, desperate to keep them from becoming their father, a pirate forever sailing away. In this rain-soaked township, she will attempt to mummify them, piece by piece, to stop them from growing up, a hope founded in magic and immortality. Meanwhile, their father obsesses the seas with his own belief in ever-lasting life, learning too late that his heart belongs on shore.In Only and Ever This, a family must endure father loss, a mother’s grief, and roiling adolescence, slipping as it does into arcades, caves, and the young love for a ghostly girl up the street.Trade Review“J.A. Tyler’s Only & Ever This is a rollicking adventure about brotherhood and family, marriage and grief, childhood and piracy—perfect for fans of Peter Markus and Justin Torres and Stranger Things and Treasure Island. (As everyone should be.) This book hums with the sincerity of all true quests: don’t hesitate to answer its call.” —Matt Bell, author of Appleseed"A moving, lyrical cyclone of a book. This is a novel of bodies and families, ghosts and doubles, failures of presence and absence. I lingered on every page, until reminded of the miracle that even more waited ahead, underneath, around, within." —Jac Jemc, author of Empty Theatre and The Grip of It“On the surface it’s a sea tale, but deeper it’s something else. A fantasy mother who mummifies her children, a fantasy father always at sea, and a feast of other oddities. It’s a masterfully-written book that will make you think more than twice about everything.” —David Ohle, author of Motorman

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Book SynopsisWinner of the Dzanc Short Story Collection PrizeA near-future farmer battling environmental crises takes in a mysterious girl he finds on the roadside. A bus driver navigates through treacherous weather and memories of her tragic past as she races to save children from the end of the world. A woman keeps giving birth to children from different time periods. And a woman struggles with her young daughter mysteriously transforming into something wild and unruly, confronting themes of motherhood and family. In Girl Country, stories range from medieval Belgium to the near-future of the American Midwest, populated by mothers and monsters, mermaids and milkmaids, nuns and bus drivers—women in every walk of life, but particularly working-class women, navigating the intersection of the mundane and the magical. Perfect for fans of Orange World and Animal Wife, these are stories about women with teeth—wild and alive.Trade Review“In Girl Country, Jacqueline Vogtman tells stories of hope and connection in the face of terrifying forces. The stories range in time from the Middle Ages, to our present day, to a dystopian future that is uncannily recognizable. Her characters encounter threats from environmental collapse, economic divide, and social structures that repress and contain women. Yet the stories find illumination in the darkness as the characters bend toward empathy and connection. Read Girl Country, and you’ll see the world with a newly refreshed vision.” —Lawrence Coates, author of Camp Olvido

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Book SynopsisWith Lance Olsen’s signature flair, Absolute Away is an innovative narrative triptych, a story of one life reimagined. The first movement tells the story of Edie Metzger, a little Jewish girl who bit Hermann Göring’s lip so hard it bled at a Nazi book-burning rally in 1933. In the second, in 1956, grown Edie is the passenger clinging to the backseat of the Oldsmobile 88 convertible driven by Jackson Pollock, moments before it plunges off the road. In the third, the narrative embarks into an ever-unspooling universe of Edies that might have lived—Edie’s gender, past, and consciousness flying forever farther apart.Absolute Away is a novel about travel in its largest sense—about the self, the past, the future, aging, ideas, relationships, our own mortal being(s) as transitive verbs, and how what and who we are connects to everything else.

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Book SynopsisAn early American adage proclaimed: "The frontier was heaven for men and dogs face=Calibri>– hell for women and mules." Since the 1700s, when his name first appeared in print, Daniel Boone has been synonymous with America's westward expansion and life on the frontier. Traces is a retelling of Boone's saga through the eyes of his wife, Rebecca, and her two oldest daughters, Susannah and Jemima.Daniel became a mythic figure during his lifetime, but his fame fueled backwoods gossip that bedeviled the Boone women throughout their lives, most notably the widespread suspicion that one of Rebecca's children was fathered by Daniel's younger brother. Traces explores the origins of these rumors, exposes the harsh realities of frontier life, and gives voice to the women whose vibrant lives have been reduced to little more than scattered footnotes within the historical record. Daniel's restless wandering made the women eyewitnesses to the clash of cultures between the settlers and the indigenous tribes who fought to retain control of their native lands made life on the frontier an ongoing struggle for survival.Patricia L. Hudson gives voice to these women, each of whom were pioneers in their own right. The Boone women's joys and sorrows, as well as those of countless other forgotten women who braved the frontier, are invisibly woven into the fabric of America's early years and the story of this country's westward expansion.Table of ContentsAuthor's Note Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Chapter 23 Chapter 24 Chapter 25 Chapter 26 Chapter 27 Chapter 28 Chapter 29 Chapter 30 Chapter 31 Chapter 32 Chapter 33 Chapter 34 Chapter 35 Chapter 36 Chapter 37 Chapter 38 Afterword Acknowledgements

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Book SynopsisNo one really dies in the Metaverse or do they?It is the near future, and the virtual realities of the Metaverse are home to millions of hard-core game addicts called Meta Junkies. Shea Britton is one of them. The top player in a fantasy simulation game called the Land of Might and Magic, Shea’ s character, Darshana, is on a quest to rid the Land of an evil player known only as The Gray Warrior. The problem is, The Gray Warrior is hunting too, and he’ s not playing a game. He is killing in the real world. Shea is unaware of the danger she is in, and it is up to the FBI’ s Behavioral Analysis Unit’ s top profiler, Parker Reid, to stop the killer before he reaches her.

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Book SynopsisAfter a logics professor buys the house of her dreams, she must contend with unexplainable happenings. An ancient blue bottle appears to be at the root of the mysterious incidents, but is it?Miranda falls in love with her dream house but soon discovers it's an affair with complications. A lot of them. Rosewood is a centuries old, tumble-down, gambrel roofed charmer located in an isolated, coastal corner of Virginia referred to as strange. Known for long-standing and antiquated customs, an almost indecipherable brogue and possible witchcraft connections, Miranda shrugs all locational concerns aside to pursue her new love. When an archeological dig is undertaken at the property, a series of incidents commences that goes beyond just bumps in the night. Awakened one night by the eerie glow from a ring of fire around her house, Miranda must decide. Should she leave Rosewood or stay---and potentially pay the ultimate price?

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Book SynopsisFrom a remote village between Italy and the Austro-Hungarian Empire unrolls the intimate story of Teresa and Carlo, two young people whose paths cross and recross as they are first impelled by parents, then forced by sweeping world events to leave their childhood homes for lives they never imagined.  Having left her mother and cherished dog Allucio, in Ulfano, Teresa works as a domestic servant in a large villa in Trento. She survives the Great War in the occupied city by banding together in a makeshift family with the other servants of the owners who have fled to escape the occupation. Carlo, an American still new to Italy and who speaks bar

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Book SynopsisFifty years after the end of the Vietnam War, literary voices of the Vietnamese-American diaspora as well as Vietnam-based authors speak to the experience of those who left and those who stayed in THE COLORS OF APRIL, a collection of new short fiction curated by award-winning translators and editors Quan Manh Ha and Cab Tran. For much of the twentieth century, Vietnam played an outsized role on the global stage, charting the destinies of superpowers and reshaping the world's politics. Now fifty years after the end of the Vietnam War comes an anthology of fiction that finally speaks to the global Vietnamese experience: voices of both those who left and those who stayed, what was gained and lost in the half century since, andfor the generations that followedwhat it means to be Vietnamese. More than two dozen distinct literary voices are featured in this collection, including Viet Thanh Nguyen (Pulitzer Prize winner, The Sympathizer), Andrew Lam (PEN/Beyond Margins Award winner, Perfume Dreams), Barbara Tran (Lannan Foundation Award winner, In the Mynah Bird's Own Words), Vu Tran (Whiting Award winner, Dragonfish) and many more. The stories are as diverse in style, tone, and subject matter as the ancestral lands of the Vietnamese people. From the rubble of the Ancient Citadel in Qu?ng Tr? to the makeshift orphanages outside Sài Gòn, from Palo Alto to a tony Lincoln Park apartment in Chicago, the narratives straddle continents and generations, the political as well as the personal. But what they share is much greater than their differences. They speak to a common language, to a culture steeped in history and myth and storytelling that vividly captures the enduring spirit of the Vietnamese people. Editor Quan Manh Ha is Professor of English at the University of Montana and the co-translator of Other Moons: Vietnamese Short Stories of the American War and Its Aftermath, among other titles. Co-editor Cab Tran holds an MFA from University of Michigan's Helen Zell Writers' Program. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Vagabond: Bulgaria's English Monthly, Black Warrior Review, The Iconoclast, and elsewhere. He teaches fiction for Gotham Writers Workshop. In 2023, Ha and Tran co-translated and co-edited B?o Ninh's Hà N?i at Midnight. Complete list of contributors in alphabetical order: B?O Thuong, Thuy DINH, Ð? Th? Di?u Ng?c, Anvi HOÀNG, HOÀNG Phu?ng Mai, L?I Van Long, Andrew LAM, LÊ Phuong Anh, LÊ Vu Tru?ng Giang, LUU Vi Lân, Vi Khi NAO, NGÔ Th? Vinh, Annhien NGUYEN, NGUY?N Minh Chuyên, NGUY?N Huy Cu?ng, NGUY?N Th? Kim Hòa, NGUY?N M? N?, Phùng NGUY?N, NGUY?N Thu Trân, NGUY?N Ð?c Tùng, Viet Thanh NGUYEN, Kevin D. PHAM, Tuan PHAN, Gin TO, Barbara TRAN, Elizabeth TRAN, TR?N Th? Tú Ng?c, Vu TRAN, VAN Xuong, Christina VO, VU Cao Phan, and VUONG Tâm

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Book Synopsis?Hafner?s taut and utterly delightful debut is a novel of multitudes. . . . What a wonder of storytelling.??Weike Wang, New York TimesNew York Times Editor?s Choice * Good Morning America Reading Pick * LitHub Most Anticipated Book * Christian Science Monitor Summer Reading PickA delicious summer read filled with humor and surprise for readers of Anne Tyler and Kevin Wilson.When introverted Ethan Fawcett marries fun-loving Barb, so comfortable in the world, he has every reason to believe he will be delivered from a lifetime of solitude. She fills his world with a sense of adventure, expanding his horizons beyond his comfortable routine. To ease Ethan?s fears of becoming a father, Barb suggests they foster two young brothers, Tommy and Sam, and Ethan immediately falls in love with the boys.When the pandemic hits, he becomes obsessed with providing a perfect life for them. But instead of bringing Barb and Ethan closer together, the boys become a wedge in their relationship, as Ethan is unable to share with Barb a secret that has been haunting him since childhood. Then Ethan takes Tommy and Sam on a biking trip in Italy, and it becomes clear just how unusual Ethan and his boys are.

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Book SynopsisNEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICEAn incomparable storyteller serves up an enchanting concoction of art, love, and longingIn fifteen masterful stories, Frederic Tuten entertains questions of existential magnitude, pervasive yearning, and the creative impulse. A wealthy older woman reflects on her relationship with her drowned husband, a painter, as she awaits her own watery demise. An exhausted artist, feeling stuck, reads a book of criticism about allegory and symbolism before tossing her paintings out the window. Writing a book about the lives of artists he admires—Cezanne, Monet, Rousseau—a man imagines how each vignette could be a life lesson for his wife, the artist he perhaps admires the most. Whether set in Tuten’s beloved Lower East Side, Rome’s Borghese Gardens, or a French seaside resort, these stories shift seamlessly between the poignancy of memory into the logic of fairytales or dreams, demonstrating Tuten’s exceptional ability to transmute his passion for art and life to the page.Trade ReviewNew York Times “Editors’ Choice” selectionNew York Magazine “Approval Matrix” selectionBOMB Magazine “Gift Guide” selection“Intoxicating.” —New York Magazine“Engrossing. . . . Tuten’s prose is always vital, often dazzling. . . . The Bar at Twilight is neither normative nor predictable, and it bears the firm impress of the soul.” —New York Times Book Review“The Bar at Twilight is [Tuten’s] showcase, revisiting every strand of his bibliography with the benefit of hindsight and at the peak of his powers. . . . [It] is outgoing, lived-in, and gregarious. The word for this is generous.” —Bookforum“Tuten’s language is supple, elegant, and wonderfully descriptive. He is also very funny.” —Los Angeles Review of Books“Tuten has managed to reinvent himself in one stylistically daring work after another. . . . The Bar at Twilight is a sumptuous compendium of fables, pastiches, and stories in late style, all of them trussed up in a distinctively earthy, image-obsessed prose. At once riotous and soulful, saturated by a gentle, well-traveled tristesse, the stories feel both strikingly familiar and markedly fresh.” —Cleveland Review of Books“Subtly exultant. . . . The Bar at Twilight solidifies [Tuten’s] reputation as a distinctive, if overlooked, practitioner of literary art.” —East Hampton Star“Scintillating. . . . Tuten dazzles like the best of Jhumpa Lahiri, Alice Munro, and George Saunders. Here, with The Bar at Twilight, he is at the pinnacle of his craft.” —On the Seawall“The subtlety of [Tuten’s] storytelling is wonderful.” —North of Oxford“Heady and elegant. . . . The work of a gifted, resourceful writer: an old master.” —Kirkus Reviews“Heartfelt. . . . No matter whether Tuten is chronicling the creative or romantic lives of his characters, he renders their struggles with a sense of hope.” —Publishers Weekly“The music of Tuten’s prose speaks to my heart. His inimitable, imaginative, witty, romantic stories continue to haunt me.” —David Gilbert, author of The Normals and & Sons“Tuten’s stories are filled with art, dreams, yearning, and a past that he captures beautifully and deftly and then lets go. The Bar at Twilight is a wonderful, evocative collection.” —Meg Wolitzer, author of The Interestings and The Female Persuasion

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Book SynopsisThe long-awaited return of a quintessentially American storyteller“You’re as likely to be hit twice by lightning on a Monday as see a wood-chipper pull a man into its maw.”So begins North of Ordinary, John Rolfe Gardner''s virtuosic story collection of survivors getting by despite the odds in a shifting world. In these pages, we meet a nervous young apprentice to a weathered tree climber; a dangerously obsessed student at a Southern Bible college; an attractive schemer trying to build an audience for her tiny radio station; an undercover, cross-dressing lawman whose friendship changes the life of a deaf child in a suburban cul-de-sac; and an elderly Black mason whose knowledge of the town’s history harbors truths that shake his visitor’s foundation.Surprising, touching, and deeply humane, the ten stories of North of Ordinary offer an intimate, revelatory look at our fractured society and pull us to

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Book SynopsisA forensics team investigates the murder of a child and is drawn into a chilling international coverupThe body of a young boy is found floating in a city river with pollen in his lungs from a warm river valley far from the country where he died. Who is he? Why was he carrying only a library card and decorative clay bottle? How is it that he came so far, only to meet such a violent fate?A biological anthropologist and her husband, the forensic team’s translator, are tasked by their agency to gather evidence from the far away country and deliver an explanation—preferably one that suits the political regimes of both countries. But as the scientists’ clandestine, parallel study of recent mass graves brings them closer to finding a link between the boy and “the disappeared,” the full forces of bureaucracy, fatalism, and forgetting are marshalled against them.

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Book SynopsisA pioneer of artificial intelligence rebuilds the love of her life, but when she discovers he’s been feeding incriminating civilian information to the Chinese government, she’ll have to decide whether to keep or kill him.When approached by a Chinese tech company, Virginia Samson is moved to give them her beloved’s algorithm so they can create an AI companion for the aging population. Soon her digital lost love starts spying on Chinese citizens, funneling the information to the Chinese government. When Virginia frantically tries to rebuild him, she uncovers his terrible secret, forcing her to relive their beautiful and tragic love affair.Afterword explores what it means to be human and is a moving testament to the deeply human desire for belonging, companionship, and love. Trade Review“Schuyler makes palpable the love between Haru and Virginia, which informs Virginia’s conflicted desire to keep his memory alive and leads to many clever insights (“The definition of human should include the word ‘flaw’ in it”). This will move readers.”Publisher’s Weekly"Afterword offers up every literary treat imaginable: a wildly inventive plot that keeps you turning pages, characters who steal your heart, big ideas that engage your mind, and gorgeous prose that delights your senses. I’m a big fan of Nina Schuyler and this is her best book yet!" Ellen Sussman, author of The New York Times bestseller, French Lessons "Nina Schuyler’s novel Afterword is riveting - I could not put it down. Suspenseful, poetic and deeply moving, the novel explores humanity and artificial intelligence and what it means to love someone. I was immediately drawn to the lives of Haru and Virginia, their separate and shared histories. With a surgeon’s precision, Ms. Schuyler has written another exemplary story."Devi S. Laskar, Author of The Atlas of Reds and Blues and Circa“Schuyler’s prose is beautifully elegant and understated, with every detail made to count in weaving a rich emotional tapestry.” Catherine Brady, winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction “A lyrical, haunting tale… Schuyler skillfully strips away her translator character’s primary language, and sends her on a journey of self-discovery to Japan. You’ll be thankful you followed.” Lalita Tademy, author of The New York Times bestsellers, Cane River and Red River"This beautiful book is so many things, an intimate love story and a powerful study on grief, a gripping mystery that examines the limits and possibilities of technology, and within that a deeper mystery, the ultimate black box problem: what it is to love—and truly know—someone." Katie Flynn, author of The Companions“Afterword is so propulsive and mysterious I found myself speeding up, but at the same time so patient and well-observed, I had to slow down. Take a sentence like this: “An old woman, with a hunched back and a white cardigan sweater buttoned all the way up, is standing in front of the rows of yogurt, muttering something about vanilla.” You see what I mean? Nina Schuyler has an outstanding sense of story. You fall into this novel and you stay there.”Peter Orner, Still No Word From You: Notes in the Margin

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Book SynopsisWinner of the 2023 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, selected by Manuel Muñoz.Imagine a space where cities and municipalities are delineated only by letters. A place in flux, a freewheeling confluence that does not commit to being American, Korea, or even Korean American. This is where God-Disease takes place. Strange things happen here. Identities warp and shift; sometimes they vanish altogether. In the titular story, a museum insect curator returns to her birth town, J Municipality, feeling empty and searching for answers to her mother's absence; was it insanity that plagued her, or was it shin-byeonggod-disease? Equal parts Southern Korean Gothic and slipstream, the collection is a meditation on language, identity, and names, and how deceptively fragile they can be.

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Book SynopsisOn Little Great Island, climate change is disrupting both life and loveAfter offending the powerful pastor of a cult, Mari McGavin has to flee with her six-year-old son. With no money and no place else to go, she returns to the tiny Maine island where she grew up—a place she swore she’d never see again. There Mari runs into her lifelong friend Harry Richardson, one of the island’s summer residents, now back himself to sell his family’s summer home. Mari and Harry’s lives intertwine once again, setting off a chain of events as unexpected and life altering as the shifts in climate affecting the whole ecosystem of the island…from generations of fishing families to the lobsters and the butterflies. Little Great Island Illustrates in microcosm the greatest changes of our time and the unyielding power of love.

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Book SynopsisCharlotte Salomon Paints Her LifeInspired by the life and work of Charlotte Salomon, this novel shows an artist intent on pursuing her art against all odds. As a young German-Jewish art student at The Berlin Art Academy during Hitler?s rise to power in 1938, Charlotte?s first place prize is denied because she is a Jew, her enrollment annulled. After Kristallnacht, she is sent from Berlin into exile with her grandparents.When Charlotte?s grandmother leaps to her death, her Old World grandfather shocks her with the family secret, a legacy of female suicides. She struggles against her grandfather?s insistence that suicide, not art, is her destiny too.Haunted by the encroaching terror of the Third Reich and the threat of psychological disintegration, Charlotte clings to her determination to become a serious modernist painter, to complete her monumental work ?Life? Or Theater?? and get it into safekeeping in a race against time before capture by the Nazis.

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Book SynopsisWith a one-way ticket to Scotland, the story begins...The entire rural town of Locharbert is abuzz because Hollywood director Steve McNaught is moving in. Putting two failed marriages, three sons, and a drinking problem behind him, he embarks on a quest for the uncomplicated life of his ancestors in the home of his distant relative, Mrs. McPhealy. But from the start, the newcomer is eyed with suspicion, not least by ex-hippy and local midwife, Georgie. Drawing on his well-honed charm, Steve tries to woo her, and though there is spark, she sends him packing ... until she doesn’t. Everything would be on track, if Steve could only lose his tendency to see the world through a camera lens, if only the funny local characters, like the tinkers on the shore or the randy postmistress, weren’t begging to be put on the screen. Georgie warns him against turning her town into a film set, but the die is already cast. He makes matters worse by buying up the dilapidated cottage by the shore where Georgie grew up and which she has always hoped to restore. Rejected and dejected, his drinking back in full swing, he packs up his film reels and returns to California. And then, months later, in the daft days of Hogmanay, Steve reappears, sober and brandishing his newly edited film. The secret life of Locharbert is about to tumble out.

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Book SynopsisBig-hearted, kaleidoscopic, and honest, The Enumerations explores the far-reaching legacies of mental illness and trauma, and the children left to pick up the pieces of their parents’ emotional lives.Noah Groome counts to five. At seventeen, he can do more than that, but counting everything in fives—from the steps he takes to the minutes in the day—keeps his raging anxiety at bay. The voice in his head, which he calls The Dark, controls everything he does. And it’s getting worse.His increasingly severe OCD impacts every member of Noah’s family: his mother Kate, desperate for comfort as her home life falls apart; his father Dominic, who retreats emotionally as old demons rise to the surface; his protective little sister Maddie, forced to be the happy child; and most of all Noah, a troubled teenager trying to protect his loved ones from himself.Following a violent incident at school, Noah is sent to rehab in Cape Town, where he meets Juliet, a rebellious girl with a sex addiction who isn''t afraid of the voice in Noah’s head. As bonds are made and long-held secrets are revealed, Noah is not the only one who will find healing.

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Book SynopsisA raucous, macabre tale of failure from the filmmaker-turned-writer whose work has garnered cultish attention in recent yearsGeorges Maman is a down-and-out actor sinking into despair and no longer able to scrape by, failing to make his mark even in the porno industry; Dagonard is a loudmouthed camera assistant who executes his refusal to read a room with almost surgical skill. Their paths cross one evening in a bar, and the two proceed to share a night in Paris: drink, dinner and psychological torture. Drawing from his own aborted career as an assistant director in the film industry, Jean-Pierre Martinet's last novel (before he quit writing) describes a sordid, cynical and disturbingly humorous descent into the hell of failure and the company we keep there. With Their Hearts in Their Boots is joined by At the Back of the Courtyard on the Right, an equally dark and lengthy poetic essay inspired by the work of Henri Calet, a kindred literary spirit whose dimmed star Martinet helped to resuscitate through his brief career as a literary critic.Jean-Pierre Martinet (194493) wrote only a handful of novels, including what is largely regarded as his masterpiece: the psychosexual study of horror and madness Jérôme.William Boyle is from Brooklyn. His books include Gravesend, which was nominated for the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière in France.

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Book SynopsisSteeped in sardonic pessimism, this ode to sterility was one of the author's own favorite novels of his careerJoris-Karl Huysmans' semi-autobiographical third novel, first published in French in 1881, signaled the beginning of his break from the naturalism of Émile Zola and his turn toward a new naturalism that laid out the negative consequences of determinism. Domesticity tells the tale of the novelist André Jayant and the artist Cyprien Tibaille, two men struggling between the urges of the body and the urges of the soul, and with the failure of matrimony or artistic endeavor to fulfill the needs of either. More than a psychological character study, though, Domesticity stands as one of the most memorable portraits of late 19th-century Paris and its sad, futile affairs of the heart.Earning a wage through a career in the French civil service, Joris-Karl Huysmans (18481907) quietly explored the extremes of human nature and artifice through a series of books that influenced a number of literary movements: from the grimy naturalism of Marthe to the cornerstone of the decadent movement, Against Nature and the Satanist classic Down There, to the dream-ridden Surrealist favorite Becalmed.

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