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In his uproarious first novel Martin Amis, author of the bestselling London Fields, gave us one of the most noxiously believable -- and curiously touching -- adolescents ever to sniffle and lust his way through the pages of contemporary fiction. On the brink of twenty, Charles High-way preps desultorily for Oxford, cheerfully loathes his father, and meticulously plots the seduction of a girl named Rachel -- a girl who sorely tests the mettle of his cynicism when he finds himself falling in love with her.

“A diverse and glorious selection... a gift of imagination, wit, and wonder. The collection is filled with miniature masterpieces.... This must-have anthology is a treasure trove not to be missed.” —Library Journal (starred review)The prestigious annual story anthology, featuring prize-winning stories by Kate DiCamillo, Jess Walter, Dave Eggers, Allegra Goodman, Jai Chakrabarti, Francisco Gonzalez, and more.Continuing a century-long tradition of cutting-edge literary excellence, this year's edition contains twenty prizewinning stories chosen from the thousands published in magazines over the previous year. Guest editor Amor Towles has brought his own refreshing perspective to the prize, selecting stories by an engaging mix of celebrated names and emerging voices. The winning stories are accompanied by an introduction by Towles, observations from the winning writers on what inspired them, and an extensive resource list of magazines that publish short fiction.THE WINNING STORIES“Roy,” Emma Binder“The Soccer Balls of Mr. Kurz,” Michele Mari (translated from the Italian by Brian Robert Moore)“Orphans,” Brad Felver“The Home Visit,” Morris Collins“The Import,” Jai Chakrabarti“Didi,” Amber Caron“Serranos,” Francisco González“Hiding Spot,” Caroline Kim“Junior,” Katherine D. Stutzman“My Good Friend,” Juliana Leite (translated from the Portuguese by Zoë Perry)'The Castle of Rose Tellin,” Kate DiCamillo'Rain,” Colin Barrett“Marital Problems,” Robin Romm“The Last Grownup,” Allegra Goodman“The Honor of Your Presence,” Dave Eggers“The Paper Artist,” E. K. Ota“The Room-Service Waiter,” Tom Crewe“Seeing Through Maps,” Madeline ffitch“The Dark,” Jess Walter“Mobilization,” Allegra Hyde

A Contemporary Classics hardcover edition of Virginia Woolf's fantastical novel about an Elizabethan nobleman who lives for three centuries and transitions into a woman. With a new introduction by Jeanette Winterson.Woolf's most lighthearted novel is a playful and exuberant romp through history. As a teenage nobleman, Orlando spends his days in revelry at the colorful Tudor court of Queen Elizabeth and his nights in writing earnest poetry. A favorite of the elderly queen, he falls in love with and is jilted by a wayward Russian princess. Two kings later, having reached his thirties, Orlando is sent to serve as ambassador to Constantinople, where he awakens one day to find himself in the body of a woman. The Lady Orlando takes this circumstance in stride and returns to England, where she engages in love affairs with both men and women, consorts with the famous poets of each age, finds happiness with an unconventional husband, and at last achieves publication of her own epic poem in the year 1928, the same year that Woolf published her novel. With its blend of fantastical adventure and satirical wit, Orlando was an immediate popular and critical success, one whose status as a classic has only grown with time. Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. Contemporary Classics include an introduction, a select bibliography, and a chronology of the author's life and times.

A Contemporary Classics hardcover edition of the groundbreaking classic novel of the Black experience in America that is still remarkably relevant more than a century later.First published anonymously in 1912, this resolutely unsentimental novel gave many white readers their first glimpse of the double standards—and double consciousness—experienced by Black people in modern America. Republished in 1927, at the height of the Harlem Renaissance, with an introduction by Carl Van Vechten, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man became a pioneering document of African-American culture and an eloquent model for later novelists ranging from Zora Neale Hurston to Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison. Narrated by a man whose light skin enables him to'pass'for white, the novel describes a journey through the strata of Black society at the turn of the century—from a cigar factory in Jacksonville to an elite gambling club in New York, from genteel aristocrats to the musicians who hammered out the rhythms of ragtime. The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man is a complex and moving examination of the question of race and an unsparing look at what it meant to forge an identity as a man in a culture that recognized nothing but color. Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. Contemporary Classics include an introduction, a select bibliography, and a chronology of the author's life and times.

The highly acclaimed author of Landslide delivers “[an] intricate, delicate-as-rice-paper novel'(O, The Oprah Magazine) about an ex-pat in China who embarks on a journey that takes her into the darkest corners of addiction, marriage, and motherhood. When Elsey's husband, Lukas, hands her a brochure for a weeklong mountain retreat, she knows he is really giving her an ultimatum: Go, or we're done. Once a successful painter, Elsey set down roots in China after falling in love with Lukas. Now, with two young daughters and unable to find a balance between her identities as artist, mother, and wife, Elsey fills her days worrying, drinking, and descending into boredom and unhappiness. So she agrees to go. There, she meets a group of men and women who will forever alter the way she understands herself and her marriage. Written in a voice at once wry, sensual, blunt, and hypnotic, Elsey Come Home is a modern odyssey and a quietly dynamic portrait of contemporary womanhood.

From the bestselling author of Station Eleven and Sea of Tranquility—when Lilia Albert was a child, her father appeared on the doorstep of her mother's house and took her away. Now, haunted by an inability to remember much about her early childhood, Lilia moves restlessly from city to city, abandoning lovers and eluding the private detective who has dedicated a career to following close behind. Then comes Eli. When Lilia goes out for a paper and fails to return to their Brooklyn apartment, he follows her to Montreal, not knowing whether he wants to disappear, too, or help her find her way home. But what he discovers is a deeper mystery, one that will set past and present spinning toward collision.Look for Emily St. John Mandel's bestselling new novel, Sea of Tranquility!

The first novel from the Nobel Prize-winning author lays the foundation for The Stranger, telling the story of an Algerian clerk who kills a man in cold blood. In A Happy Death, written when Albert Camus was in his early twenties and retrieved from his private papers following his death in 1960, revealed himself to an extent that he never would in his later fiction. For if A Happy Death is the study of a rule-bound being shattering the fetters of his existence, it is also a remarkably candid portrait of its author as a young man.As the novel follows the protagonist, Patrice Mersault, to his victim's house -- and then, fleeing, in a journey that takes him through stages of exile, hedonism, privation, and death -it gives us a glimpse into the imagination of one of the great writers of the twentieth century. For here is the young Camus himself, in love with the sea and sun, enraptured by women yet disdainful of romantic love, and already formulating the philosophy of action and moral responsibility that would make him central to the thought of our time.Translated from the French by Richard Howard

A brilliant novel that captures the dusty, dark, and beautiful world of small-time horse racing, where trainers, jockeys, grooms and grifters vie for what little luck is offered at a run-down West Virginia track. Tommy Hansel has a plan: run four horses, all better than they look on paper, at long odds at Indian Mound Downs, then grab the purse -- or cash a bet -- and run before anyone's the wiser. At his side is Maggie Koderer, who finds herself powerfully drawn to the gorgeous, used up animals of the cheap track. She also lands in the cross-hairs of leading trainer Joe Dale Bigg. But as news of Tommy's plan spreads, from veteran groom Medicine Ed, to loan shark Two-Tie, to Kidstuff the blacksmith, it's Maggie, not Tommy or the handlers of legendary stakes horse Lord of Misrule, who will find what's valuable in a world where everything has a price.From the Trade Paperback edition.

The scientist Roithamer has dedicated the last six years of his life to “the Cone,” an edifice of mathematically exact construction that he has erected in the center of his family's estate in honor of his beloved sister. Not long after its completion, he takes his own life. As an unnamed friend pieces together—literally, from thousands of slips of papers and one troubling manuscript—the puzzle of Rotheimer's breakdown, what emerges is the story of a genius ceaselessly compelled to correct and refine his perceptions until the only logical conclusion is the negation of his own soul. Considered by many critics to be Thomas Bernhard's masterpiece, Correction is a cunningly crafted and unforgettable meditation on the tension between the desire for perfection and the knowledge that it is unattainable.

An original and radiant novel about grief, obsession, and the need for meaning from the author of The Family, a finalist for the National Book Award.When his young son dies in a freak accident, Gerard struggles to find a reason in the smallest of details, including the scrap of paper containing the Sanskrit alphabet that is found at the site. Latching on to this final “clue,” he delves into the origins of Indo-European alphabets, his fascination taking him to England, Greece, and finally, to an ancient site in the Syrian desert where the alphabet was born some 4000 years ago. Along the way he meets other grieving parents, who accompany him on a journey that extends beyond historical knowledge and right into the heart of love and loss.

Richard Winslow is in a rut. His marriage is over and he is alone, teaching poetry as a visiting professor in Montana and continuing to avoid actually writing himself. He drinks to oblivion every night.At this freezing college, in the dead of winter, Winslow meets Erika, one of his poetry students. What begins with office hours and Jim Beam in paper cups becomes a road trip as they travel through Utah and Arizona. Long haunted by thoughts of death, both Erika and Winslow begin to glimpse the power life can hold if they will only open up to the shame, beauty, and heartbreak of it all.

Martin Arkenhout found his true calling on a lonely Florida highway -- with a sharp rock to the skull of an injured friend. He didn't just take the boy's life; he went on to live it. When that life became too risky, he found another, and another, changing his name, papers and style at will, until he chose the wrong life -- a scholarly thief on the run from the determined and troubled John Costa. The two men will meet, and there will be murder. But there is something much worse: the sweet seduction of taking another's life to be your own. Chillingly suspenseful, brilliantly executed and truly disturbing, Taking Lives is an entertainment to make you think and shiver.

From the New York Times bestselling author of Swing Time and one of the most revered writers of her generation comes an'intelligent... exquisitely clever [novel] about fame, mortality, and the triumph of image over reality” (The Boston Globe).Alex-Li Tandem sells autographs. His business is to hunt for names on paper, collect them, sell them, and occasionally fake them—all to give the people what they want: a little piece of Fame. But what does Alex want? Only the return of his father, the end of religion, something for his headache, three different girls, infinite grace, and the rare autograph of forties movie actress Kitty Alexander. With fries. The Autograph Man is a deeply funny existential tour around the hollow trappings of modernity: celebrity, cinema, and the ugly triumph of symbol over experience. It offers further proof that Zadie Smith is one of the most staggeringly talented writers of her generation.

A poignant, uplifting, heartbreaking love story from the beloved bestselling, Pulitzer Prize–winning author:'To read a novel by Anne Tyler is to fall in love'(PEOPLE).Thirty-eight-year-old Jeremy Pauling has never left home. He lives on the top floor of a Baltimore row house where he creates collages of little people snipped from wrapping paper. His elderly mother putters in the rooms below, until her death. And it is then that Jeremy is forced to take in Mary Tell and her child as boarders. Mary is unaware of how much courage it takes Jeremy to look her in the eye. For Jeremy, like one of his paper creations, is fragile and easily torn—especially when he's falling in love....

An'engrossing, affecting, and singular'(Publishers Weekly) debut novel about love, family, queerness, and losing your mind in the modern world.While god is sending her signs through Instagram and Spotify demanding she break up with her girlfriend, Norma meets with a new therapist for one reason: she really needs to write again. With only one chapter missing in her manuscript, Norma is desperate to know if she needs to leave her girlfriend in order to write The Last Story. The new therapist diagnoses Norma with Depersonalization/Derealization Disorder, but Norma isn't having it. It's just Oblivion. Haunted by SSRI side effects and life becoming less hazily fictional by the day, Norma has never felt crazier. Does anyone else see the world's poorly crafted plotline? Like, who even wrote this story? Norma begins sharing her manuscript with her therapist, hoping to connect the dissociative dots once and for all—or at least enough so that Google ads stop giving her panic attacks. But soon Norma is questioning everything she's ever believed about life, writing, and love. And then there's Norma's girlfriend, the one with a crack of light in her eyes. Could she be Oblivion's antagonist, the manuscript's savior? Or is she just a human? Told alternately through Norma's barely fictional fiction and her crackling stream of consciousness, Please Stop Trying To Leave Me is an honest, comedic, horrifying, and heart-wrenching story about existing in today's world, challenging all we've been taught about the distance between fiction and reality, sanity and insanity, mental illness and healing.

Celebrating the Centenary of James Baldwin's birth, a box set of Baldwin's principal novels, featuring Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovanni's Room, and If Beale Street Could Talk. These deluxe editions feature new introductions by Roxane Gay, Kevin Young, and Brit Bennett. Originally published in 1953, Go Tell It on the Mountain was James Baldwin's first major work, based in part on his own childhood. With lyrical precision and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy's discovery of the terms of his identity as the stepson of the minister of a Pentecostal storefront church in Harlem.Giovanni's Room is set in the Paris of the 1950s, where a young American expatriate finds himself caught between his repressed desires and conventional morality. One of the first novels to openly explore the theme of homosexuality, it paved the way for generations of gay and lesbian novelists.And If Beale Street Could Talk is a stunning love story about a young Black woman whose life is torn apart when her lover is wrongly accused of a crime --a profoundly moving novel about love in the face of injustice that is as socially resonant today as it was when it was first published.

In Victorian-era Louisville, the Home for Friendless Women is run by benevolent benefactors with one mission: to reform the fallen women who live there into pious mothers and wives through religious lessons and hard work. For Ruth, a college student who's expelled after a campus sexual assault, the Home is a purgatory to endure before she can get her life back. For Belle, a queer sex worker who exchanged her bed at a brothel for one in the Home, it's a safe place to rest her feet until she can track down her missing lover. And for Minnie, the daughter of the religious couple who founded the charity, the Home is her mother's idea of a cautionary tale. But as Minnie prepares for the Home's silver anniversary party, she finds herself questioning the true cost of good intentions—and grappling with a terrible secret that has the power to unravel the Home entirely.

Introduction by Jeffrey Eugenides • Nominated as one of America's best-loved novels by PBS's The Great American Read Written in his distinctively dazzling manner, Oscar Wilde's story of a fashionable young man who sells his soul for eternal youth and beauty is the author's most popular work. The tale of Dorian Gray's moral disintegration caused a scandal when it first appeared in 1890, but though Wilde was attacked for the novel's corrupting influence, he responded that there is, in fact, “a terrible moral in Dorian Gray.” Just a few years later, the book and the aesthetic/moral dilemma it presented became issues in the trials occasioned by Wilde's homosexual liaisons, which resulted in his imprisonment. Of Dorian Gray's relationship to autobiography, Wilde noted in a letter, “Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry what the world thinks me: Dorian what I would like to be—in other ages, perhaps.”

Long cherished by readers of all ages: the hilarious account of an incorrigible truant and a powerful parable of innocence in conflict with the fallen adult world—from the author of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and'the father of American literature'(William Faukner, Nobel Prize-Winning Author).'All modern literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn… It's the best book we've had. All American writing comes from that.'—Ernest Hemingway, Nobel Prize-Winning Author of The Sun Also RisesThe mighty Mississippi River of the antebellum South gives the novel both its colorful backdrop and its narrative shape, as the runaways Huck and Jim—a young rebel against civilization allied with an escaped slave—drift down its length on a flimsy raft. Their journey, at times rollickingly funny but always deadly serious in its potential consequences, takes them ever deeper into the slave-holding South, and our appreciation of their shared humanity grows as we watch them travel physically farther from yet morally closer to the freedom they both passionately seek.

SOON TO BE A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE STARRING THE CROWN'S EMMA CORRIN AND UNBROKEN'S JACK O'CONNELLIntroduction by Kathryn Harrison Inspired by the long-standing affair between D. H. Lawrence's German wife and an Italian peasant, Lady Chatterley's Lover follows the intense passions of Constance Chatterley. Trapped in an unhappy marriage to an aristocratic mine owner whose war wounds have left him paralyzed and impotent, Constance enters into a liaison with the gamekeeper Mellors. Frank Kermode called the book D. H. Lawrence's “great achievement,” Anaïs Nin described it as “his best novel,” and Archibald MacLeish hailed it as “one of the most important works of fiction of the century.” Along with an incisive Introduction by Kathryn Harrison, this Modern Library edition includes the transcript of the judge's decision in the famous 1959 obscenity trial that allowed Lady Chatterley's Lover to be published in the United States.

This third collection of Fitzgerald's extremely popular short stories was published in 1926, in the wake of his most famous novel, The Great Gatsby. Though his novels have become enduring classics, in his own time F. Scott Fitzgerald was primarily famous as a gifted and prolific writer of short stories, which were regularly published in the most popular periodicals of the day. This third collection of his tales, All the Sad Young Men, contains some of his most admired stories, including'Absolution,''The Rich Boy,'and the haunting'Winter Dreams.'These stories riff on the same themes that animated his great novels, and together they produce a scintillating portrait of America at the height of the Jazz Age.

Maugham's 1915 masterpiece—hailed by Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time—is the coming-of-age story of a sensitive young man consumed by an unrequited passion. With a new introduction by Abraham Verghese, author of Cutting for Stone.Born with a clubfoot, Philip is orphaned as a child and raised by unsympathetic relatives. Sent to a boarding school where he has difficulty fitting in, he grows up with an intense longing for love, art, and experience. After failing to become an artist in Paris, he begins medical studies in London, where he meets Mildred, a cold-hearted waitress with whom he falls into a powerful, tortured, life-altering love affair. The most autobiographical of Maugham's works, Of Human Bondage is a brilliant and deeply moving portrayal of the price of passion and the universal desire for connection.

A poignant and evocative novel that explores the bounds of familial love, the high stakes of parenthood, and the tenuous divide between fiction and reality.Thirteen years ago, Sylvia Gray's young daughter, Faye, attacked her babysitter in order to impress the Kingman, a monster she and her best friend had encountered on the Internet. When the now twenty-three-year-old Faye goes missing, leaving her toddler behind, Sylvia launches a search that propels her back into the past and back into the Kingman's orbit. With the help of her estranged husband and a sister she hasn't spoken to in years, Sylvia draws dangerously closer not only to Faye, but also to the truth about the monster that once inspired her. Will Sylvia be able to reach her daughter before history repeats itself? Or will it be Sylvia, this time, who loses her grip on reality and succumbs to the dark powers of this monstrous fiction?Both literary and suspenseful, Monsters We Have Made confronts the terrors of parenthood and examines the boundaries of love. Most importantly, it reminds us of the power of stories to shape our lives.

An odyssey through time in which past and future combine and re-combine to give the arc of a full life, by the'brilliant'(The New Yorker) author of A Different Drummer.'[A] lost giant of American literature.'—The New YorkerThe linked'2 novelas, 3 stories, and a little play'that make up DIS//INTEGRATION follow the life journeys of Charles'Chig'Dunford from his Nanny Eva sermonizing from her front porch, when he is only seventeen, to his peripatetic studies in Reupeo (an anagram of Europe) as a college student, to his unsettled bachelorhood as an English professor at a small Vermont college, where he continues to struggle to finish his life-long study of the Reupeonese author Dupukshamin and find true love.Along the way, as Chig's sentimental education unfolds, we meet an array of memorable characters: John Hoenir, the Hemingway-esque expatriate novelist who takes Chig under his wing; Wendy Whitman, an actress passing for white, who breaks Chig's heart; Merry, his troubled teen-age niece who Chig, in middle-age, agrees to look after; Raymond Winograd, the villainous department chair; Renka Bravo, the alluring dancer who might just make Chig an honest man; and one hundred Africans mysteriously chained together in the lower decks of Chig's homeward-bound transatlantic liner.

In Laura Restrepo's stunning novel, a feud between two Colombian drug families escalates into a bloody, high-stakes war that will leave no one in its path untouched. The Barragáns and the Monsalves are rival clans, each steeped in wealth and power, each subject only to laws of their own making. The similarities end there. While the Barragáns, headed by the brutal Nando, remain tied to the ancient traditions, the Monsalves grapple with whether or not to follow Mani, their charismatic and conflicted leader, into a modern age in which even fewer rules apply. As both clans ponder the profits they might reap from an expanding global cocaine trade, Nando and Mani are faced with the consequences of their violent pasts--and forced, by their disillusioned women and the prices on their heads, to reckon with the possibility that nothing will be left once all their bullets have found their targets. Rife with sensual detail, this epic story of lust, betrayal, and revenge is as timeless as interfamily conflict and as immediate as today's news.

Gripping, insightful, and deft, The Distance Between Us by Maggie O'Farrell is a haunting story of the way our families shape our lives, from the award-winning author of Hamnet and The Marriage Portrait.On a cold February afternoon, Stella catches sight of a man she hasn't seen for many years, but instantly recognises. Or thinks she does. At the same moment on the other side of the globe, in the middle of a crowd of Chinese New Year revellers, Jake realises that things are becoming dangerous.They know nothing of one another's existence, but both Stella and Jake flee their lives: Jake in search of a place so remote it doesn't appear on any map, and Stella for a destination in Scotland, the significance of which only her sister, Nina, will understand.

A blazingly propulsive novel from the prize-winning author of In Our Mad and Furious City, following a captured jihadist and poet-preacher as he recounts his path to international notorietyWho is Yahya Bas? Revolutionary poet, notorious jihadist, misbegotten son, self-styled idiot-boy. When the enigmatic Yahya finds himself languishing in a detention center after fleeing the conflict in Syria, he has many questions to face.What was he doing in the desert? Why did he betray his home country? What led him to write the incendiary verses that launched him into international infamy? Mister, his interrogator, wants answers. So Yahya resolves to tell his own story, in his own words, and on his own terms.Mister, Mister is what follows: a coming-of-age story of radical self-invention, a quest for a long-lost father, and a discovery of another way to live in the shadow of war. Brash, biting, yet ultimately tender and bracingly imaginative, Mister, Mister follows a child of the tumultuous 90s and the ravaged aughts as he becomes the unwitting voice of a generation.Who is Yahya Bas? An anti-hero for our modern era, in which we've just begun to survey the wreckage of the West's forever-wars.

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Marriage Portrait and Hamnet comes an intense, unnerving and passionate story of betrayal, loss and love, with all the frisson and psychological intensity of Rebecca.When Lily moves into new boyfriend Marcus's apartment and plunges headlong into their relationship, she must contend with an intangible, hostile presence—Marcus's ex-girlfriend, Sinead. As Lily and Marcus become more deeply involved, Lily becomes obsessed with Sinead's fate and thinks she sees her everywhere. She must question not only her sanity, but whether the man she loves is someone she can, or should, be with at all.

In this darkly comic story about how we value female labor—and don't—a new mother becomes embroiled in danger when her friend, a controversial entrepreneur, goes missing.When her daughter Lotte was born, Dani had welcomed the chance to be a stay-at-home mother. To be good at something, for once. But now Dani can't stop thinking about her seemingly healthy husband, Clark, dropping dead. Not because she hates him (not right now, anyway) but because it's become abundantly clear to Dani that if he dies, she and Lotte will be left destitute. And then Dani discovers The Temple. Ostensibly a yoga center, The Temple and its guardian, Renata, are committed to helping people reach their full potential. And if that sometimes requires sex work, so be it. Finally, Dani has found something she could be good at, even great at; meaningful work that will protect her and Lotte from poverty, and provide true economic independence from Clark.Just as Dani is preparing to embrace this opportunity, Renata disappears. And Dani discovers there might be something else she's good at: uncovering secrets.

NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • AN NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • From the legendary actor and best-selling author: a novel about the making of a star-studded, multimillion-dollar superhero action film...and the humble comic books that inspired it. Funny, touching, and wonderfully thought-provoking, while also capturing the changes in America and American culture since World War II.'Wild, ambitious and exceptionally enjoyable.'—Matt Haig, best-selling author The Midnight Library, The Humans and Reasons to Stay AlivePart One of this story takes place in 1947. A troubled soldier, returning from the war, meets his talented five-year-old nephew, leaves an indelible impression, and then disappears for twenty-three years.Cut to 1970: The nephew, now drawing underground comic books in Oakland, California, reconnects with his uncle and, remembering the comic book he saw when he was five, draws a new version with his uncle as a World War II fighting hero. Cut to the present day: A commercially successful director discovers the 1970 comic book and decides to turn it into a contemporary superhero movie.Cue the cast: We meet the film's extremely difficult male star, his wonderful leading lady, the eccentric writer/director, the producer, the gofer production assistant, and everyone else on both sides of the camera.Bonus material: Interspersed throughout are three comic books that are featured in the story—all created by Tom Hanks himself—including the comic book that becomes the official tie-in to this novel's'major motion picture masterpiece.'

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2024 CAROL SHIELDS PRIZE, THE NEW AMERICAN VOICES AWARD, & THE BROOKYLN PUBLIC LIBRARY PRIZE • Set in the Arab immigrant enclave of Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, following three siblings coming of age over the course of one Ramadan,'a moving look at family, survival, and celebration'(Hanif Abdurraqib, author of A Little Devil in America).'Breathtaking.” —New York Times Book Review'A gorgeously written and profoundly intimate debut.'—Etaf Rum, author of New York Times bestseller A Woman Is No ManIt's the holy month of Ramadan, and twin sisters Amira and Lina are about to graduate high school in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. On the precipice of adulthood, they plan to embark on a summer of teenage revelry, trying on new identities and testing the limits of what they can get away with while still under their parents'roof. But the twins'expectations of a summer of freedom collide with their older brother's return from prison, whose mysterious behavior threatens to undo the delicate family balance.Meanwhile, outside the family's apartment, a storm is brewing in Bay Ridge. A raid on a local business sparks a protest that brings the Arab community together, and a senseless act of violence threatens to tear them apart. Everyone's motives are called into question as an alarming sense of disquiet pervades the neighborhood. With everything spiraling out of control, how will Amira and Lina know who they can trust?A gorgeously written, intimate family story and a polyphonic portrait of life under the specter of Islamophobia, Between Two Moons challenges the reader to interrogate their own assumptions, asking questions of allegiance to faith, family, and community, and what it means to be a young Muslim in America.

Faulkner's second novel is a high-spirited satiric romp set on an ill-fated pleasure cruise out of New Orleans.Wealthy Mrs. Maurier, the widowed heiress of an old New Orleans family, likes to collect'artistic types.'When she plans a multi-day outing on her yacht and manages to corral aboard a group that includes a melancholic poet, a brooding sculptor, a self-important writer, her unconventional young niece, and assorted other odd characters, the results are both disastrous and hilarious. When the ship runs aground near an overheated swamp, the pretensions and frustrations of its various passengers reach a fever pitch. Faulkner's lyrical descriptions, witty dialogue, and forays into fluid stream-of-consciousness demonstrate in lighter form the literary techniques that the young author later came to be so celebrated for.

William Faulkner's first novel is one of the most compelling works of American fiction to emerge from the First World War.A wounded veteran's homecoming is at the center of Faulkner's first novel. Badly scarred in body and mind, and unable to remember much, Donald Mahon is brought home at the end of the World War I by a fellow soldier and a young war widow they befriend on the train. Mahon's arrival is a shock to his hometown, however, for he had long since been reported dead. His flighty young fiancee is caught between her revulsion at his condition and her sense of duty, while Mahon's father greets his unexpected survival first with joy and then with a determined denial of what his grievous injuries mean. As events unfold, alliances are formed and broken, sacrifices are made, and Faulkner deftly invests his heartbreaking tale with some of the deeper themes that would come to mark his later masterpieces.

The prestigious annual story anthology includes prize-winning stories by Jamil Jan Kochai, David Ryan, Kirstin Valdez Quade, Lisa Taddeo, Ling Ma, Catherine Lacey, and Cristina Rivera Garza.“[A] standout collection.... Dazzling performances from some of today's most exciting writers.... This is one of the best fiction anthologies in years.” —Publishers Weekly starred review Continuing a century-long tradition of cutting-edge literary excellence, this year's edition contains twenty prizewinning stories chosen from the thousands published in magazines over the previous year. Guest editor Lauren Groff has brought her own refreshing perspective to the prize, selecting stories by an engaging mix of celebrated names and emerging voices and including several stories in translation. The winning stories are accompanied by an introduction by Groff, observations from the winning writers on what inspired them, and an extensive resource list of magazines that publish short fiction. AN ANCHOR BOOKS ORIGINAL. THE WINNING STORIES: “Office Hours,” by Ling Ma “Man Mountain,” by Catherine Lacey “Me, Rory and Aurora,” by Jonas Eika, translated from the Danish by Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg “The Complete,” by Gabriel Smith “The Haunting of Hajji Hotak,'by Jamil Jan Kochai “Wisconsin,” by Lisa Taddeo “Ira & the Whale,” by Rachel B. Glaser “The Commander's Teeth,” by Naomi Shuyama-Gómez “The Mad People of Paris,” Rodrigo Blanco Calderón, translated from the Spanish by Thomas Bunstead “Snake & Submarine,” by Shelby Kinney-Lang “The Mother,” by Jacob M'hango “The Hollow,” by'Pemi Aguda “Dream Man,” by Cristina Rivera Garza, translated from the Spanish by Francisca González-Arias “The Locksmith,” by Grey Wolfe LaJoie “After Hours at the Acacia Park Pool,” by Kirstin Valdez Quade “Happy Is a Doing Word,” by Arinze Ifeakandu “Elision,” by David Ryan “Xífù,” by K-Ming Chang “Temporary Housing,” by Kathleen Alcott “The Blackhills,” by Eamon McGuinness

AN NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • James Ellroy—Demon Dog of American Letters—goes straight to the tragic heart of 1962 Hollywood with a wild riff on the Marilyn Monroe death myth in an astonishing, behind-the-headlines crime epic.Los Angeles, August 4, 1962. The city broils through a midsummer heat wave. Marilyn Monroe ODs. A B-movie starlet is kidnapped. The overhyped LAPD overreacts. Chief Bill Parker's looking for some getback. The Monroe deal looks like a moneymaker. He calls in Freddy Otash. The freewheeling Freddy O: tainted ex-cop, defrocked private eye, dope fiend, and freelance extortionist. A man who lives by the maxim “Opportunity is love.” Freddy gets to work. He dimly perceives Marilyn Monroe's death and the kidnapped starlet to be a poisonous riddle that only he has the guts and the brains to untangle. We are with him as he tears through all those who block his path to the truth. We are with him as he penetrates the faux-sunshine of Jack and Bobby Kennedy and the shuck of Camelot. We are with him as he falters, and grasps for love beyond opportunity. We are with him as he tracks Marilyn Monroe's horrific last charade through a nightmare L.A. that he served to create — and as he confronts his complicity and his own raging madness. It's the Summer of'62, baby. Freddy O's got a hot date with history. The savage Sixties are ready to pop. It's just a shot away.The Enchanters is a transcendent work of American popular fiction. It is James Ellroy at his most crazed, brilliant, provocative, profanely hilarious, and stop-your-heart tender. It is a luminous psychological drama and an unparalleled thrill ride. It is, resoundingly, the great American crime novel.

A dazzling collection of eleven interconnected stories from the bestselling, award-winning author of Shrines of Gaiety and Life After Life, with everything that readers love about her novels—the inventiveness, the verbal felicity, the sharp observations on human nature, and the deeply satisfying emotional wallop.Nothing is quite as it seems in this collection of eleven dazzling stories. We meet a queen who makes a bargain she cannot keep; a secretary who watches over the life she has just left; a man who bets on a horse that may—or may not—have spoken to him. Everything that readers love about the novels of Kate Atkinson is here—the inventiveness, the verbal felicity, the sharp observations on human nature, and the deeply satisfying emotional wallop. A startling and funny feast for the imagination, these stories conjure a multiverse of subtly connected worlds while illuminating the webs of chance and connection among us all.

The final novel from Spain's most acclaimed writer, a novel about a charismatic half-Spanish, half-English man who is recruited by British intelligence • “Marías's best work.” —El País“Compelling, hypnotic, and exciting at the same time.” —Los Angeles Review of Books Retired spy Tomás Nevinson—once an agent for the British Secret Service, now living a quiet life in his hometown, Madrid—is approached by his former handler, Bertram Tupra, with an offer to bring him back in from the cold for one last assignment.The mission: to go undercover again, in a small Spanish town, to find out which of three women who moved there a decade ago is in fact a terrorist trained by the IRA, on the run after masterminding several deadly attacks.Everything about the assignment is shadowy, from exactly who is in charge, to the question of what “justice” Nevinson will need to mete out once he unmasks the terrorist. But, lured by the appeal of being back on the inside, he accepts the job.Nevinson soon becomes intimately involved with each of the three women. How—or whom—to choose among them? Under increasing pressure, he must choose, and then act...Charting a world in which right and wrong, good and evil, are irreparably blurred, Javier Marías takes us on a journey of rare and unforgettable suspense in this, the final novel written before his untimely passing.

A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF THE YEAR • An emotionally rich collection of short stories, painting a fascinating portrait of contemporary India and its diaspora and a yearning rendering of the people and places we call home, from a major new literary talent.“A full-hearted, brilliant debut of necessary beauty.” —Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, author of Chain-Gang All-Stars and New York Times bestseller Friday Black'Injam's stories made me want to cast all else aside and return home.” —Megha Majumdar, author of A BurningVivid, vibrant, and unwaveringly affecting, The Best Possible Experience brings us intimate, impeccably realized accounts of individuals living in one of the most populous countries in the world and in its American diaspora—all haunted, in every sense of the word, by a loss of home. Classically elegant in prose and consistently modern in outlook, Nishanth Injam's stories ques­tion what it means to have a home and to return home, and show, above all, that home is not a place so much as it is people who are ready to accept you as you are. We see a young man trapped on a bus on the way to visit his parents as his fellow pas­sengers vanish into the restroom. A family, newly in America, determined to host a perfect luncheon for their son's white classmate—with no idea what to serve him. A woman who returns to a small vil­lage in India every summer to visit the grandfather who raised her, a man who lives with the ghosts of his son and his wife. And a man preparing for his green card interview with the American woman he has paid to marry him. A sui generis talent, Injam first started writing after coming to the United States from India in his twenties. The Best Possible Experience, his profoundly personal debut collection, delivers a universal in­quiry into the idea of belonging and preserves in writing the home he left behind, before it was lost

A masterful collection of stories that plumb the depths of everyday life to reveal the shifting tides and hidden undercurrents of ordinary relationships—Tessa Hadley is'one of the greatest stylists alive'(Ron Charles, Washington Post).A Best Book of the Year: TIME, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, Vogue“Hadley is pure magic and After the Funeral is a triumph.”—Lily King, New York Times best-selling author of Writers & Lovers and EuphoriaIn each of these twelve stories, small events have huge consequences. Heloise's father died in a car crash when she was a little girl; at a dinner party in her forties, she meets someone connected to that long-ago tragedy. Two estranged sisters cross paths at a posh hotel and pretend not to recognize each other. Janie's bohemian mother plans to marry a man close to Janie's own age—everything changes when an accident interrupts the wedding party. A daughter caring for her elderly mother during the pandemic becomes obsessed with the woman next door; in the wake of his best friend's death, a man must reassess his affair with the friend's wife. Cecilia, a teenager, wakes one morning in Florence on vacation with her parents and sees them for the first time through disenchanted eyes.As psychologically astute as they are emotionally rich, these stories illuminate the enduring conflicts between responsibility and freedom, power and desire, convention and subversion, reality and dreams. A vital addition to Tessa Hadley's celebrated body of work, After the Funeral and Other Stories showcases what Colm Tóibín describes as'Tessa Hadley's extraordinary skill at making both surface life and deep interiors come fully alive.'

A NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • A NEW YORKER ESSENTIAL READ • From “one of the most acute and lasting writers of her generation” (The New York Times)—a ghost story set in the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, an elegiac consideration of grief, devotion (filial and romantic), and the vanishing and persistence of all things—seen and unseen.A Best Book of the Year: The New Yorker, NPR, Vulture, Lit Hub“Who else but Lorrie Moore could make, in razor-sharp irresistible prose, a ghost story about death buoyant with life?” —PEOPLE “Is it an allegory? Is it real? It doesn't matter...[It's] a novel with big questions, no answers, and it's absolutely brilliant.” —Lit Hub “[A] triumph of tone and, ultimately, of the imagination.” —The Guardian Lorrie Moore's first novel since A Gate at the Stairs—a daring, meditative exploration of love and death, passion and grief, and what it means to be haunted by the past, both by history and the human heartA teacher visiting his dying brother in the Bronx. A mysterious journal from the nineteenth century stolen from a boarding house. A therapy clown and an assassin, both presumed dead, but perhaps not dead at all...With her distinctive, irresistible wordplay and singular wry humor and wisdom, Lorrie Moore has given us a magic box of longing and surprise as she writes about love and rebirth and the pull towards life. Bold, meditative, theatrical, this new novel is an inventive, poetic portrait of lovers and siblings as it questions the stories we have been told which may or may not be true.I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home takes us through a trap door, into a windswept, imagined journey to the tragic-comic landscape that is, unmistakably, the world of Lorrie Moore.

A WALL STREET JOURNAL TOP TEN BOOK OF THE YEAR • This immersive, brilliantly subversive historical novel, inspired by a true story, is “set in 1855, follows 25-year-old Sarah Browne as she…heads west to the Minnesota Territory…When the Sioux Uprising of 1862 erupts…Sarah and her children are captured, but protected by the Sioux. Sarah sympathizes with her captors, and slips into the gap between her two worlds” (TIME).“The story has it all: the bloody hell of war…revenge, corruption, injustice. Even some romance…A vivid tale of frontier adventure and peril.” —Minneapolis Star-TribuneOne of our most compelling and sensual writers brings to life a devastating Native American revolt and the woman caught in the middle of the conflict in this novel about a seminal and shameful moment in America's conquest of the West.In the summer of 1855, Sarah Brinton abandons her husband and child to make the long and difficult journey from Rhode Island to Minnesota Territory, where she plans to reunite with a childhood friend. When she arrives at a small frontier post on the edge of the prairie without family or friends and with no prospect of work or money, she quickly remarries and has two children. Anticipating unease and hardship at the Indian Agency, where her husband Dr. John Brinton is the new resident physician, Sarah instead finds acceptance and kinship among the Sioux women at a nearby reservation.The Sioux tribes, however, are wary of the white settlers and resent the rampant theft of their land. Promised payments by the federal government are never made, and starvation and disease soon begin to decimate their community. Tragically and inevitably, this leads to the Sioux Uprising of 1862. During the conflict, Sarah and her children are abducted by the Sioux, who protect her, but because she sympathizes with her captors, Sarah becomes an outcast to the white settlers. In the end, she is lost to both worlds.Intimate and raw, The Lost Wife is a searing tale of the conquest of the American West.

Available in English for the very first time, a powerful, poignant novel about three half sisters in post-war Japan, from the Nobel Prize-winning author of Snow Country.With the Second World War only a few years in the past, and Japan still reeling from its effects, two sisters—born to the same father but different mothers—struggle to make sense of the new world in which they are coming of age. Asako, the younger, has become obsessed with locating a third sibling, while also experiencing love for the first time. While Momoko, their father's first child—haunted by the loss of her kamikaze boyfriend and their final, disturbing days together—seeks comfort in a series of unhealthy romances. And both sisters find themselves unable to outrun the legacies of their late mothers. A thoughtful, probing novel about the enduring traumas of war, the unbreakable bonds of family, and the inescapability of the past, The Rainbow is a searing, melancholy work from one of Japan's greatest writers. A VINTAGE ORIGINAL.

A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • This magisterial, intimate look at Black womanhood'follows three women whose various traumas haunt them literally and metaphorically, as it explores what it means to be a Black woman in America today'(The New York Times Book Review, Editor's Choice).A middle-aged woman feed slots at a secret back-room parlor. A new mother descends into a devastating postpartum depression, wracked with the fear that she is unable to protect her children. A daughter returns home to join the other women in her family waging spiritual combat with the ghosts of their past. An Autobiography of Skin is a dazzling and masterful portrait of interconnected generations in the South from a singular new voice, offering a raw and tender view into the interior lives of Black women. It is at once a powerful look at how experiences are carried inside the body, inside the flesh and skin, and a joyous testament to how healing can be found within—in love, mercy, gratitude, and freedom.

NOBEL PRIZE WINNER • A monumental work of erudition and irony, sexual tension and intellectual ferment, The Magic Mountain is an enduring classic.With this dizzyingly rich novel of ideas, Thomas Mann rose to the front ranks of the great modern novelists, winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929. The Magic Mountain takes place in an exclusive tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss Alps–a community devoted to sickness that serves as a fictional microcosm for Europe in the days before the First World War.To this hermetic and otherworldly realm comes Hans Castorp, an “ordinary young man” who arrives for a short visit and ends up staying for seven years, during which he succumbs both to the lure of eros and to the intoxication of ideas.

Zero-sum games are played for lethal stakes in these arresting stories by one of America's most acclaimed writers, the award-winning, best-selling author of BlondeA brilliant young philosophy student bent on seducing her famous philosopher-mentor finds herself outmaneuvered; diabolically clever high school girls wreak a particularly apt sort of vengeance on sexual predators in their community; a woman stalked by a would-be killer may be confiding in the wrong former lover; a young woman is morbidly obsessed by her unfamiliar new role as “mother.” In the collection's longest story, a much-praised cutting-edge writer cruelly experiments with “drafts” of his own suicide.In these powerfully wrought stories that hold a mirror up to our time, Joyce Carol Oates has created a world of erotic obsession, thwarted idealism, and ever-shifting identities. Provocative and stunning, Zero-Sum reinforces Oates's standing as a literary treasure and an artist of the mysterious interior life.

A NEW YORK TIMES TOP TEN BOOK OF THE YEAR • FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN FICTION • A READ WITH JENNA BOOK CLUB PICK • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Two top women gladiators fight for their freedom within a depraved private prison system not so far-removed from America's own in this explosive, hotly-anticipated debut novel from the New York Times bestselling author of Friday Black • LONGLISTED FOR THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE“This book is so good. Brutal subject matter, beautiful writing. This one is from the heart.” —Stephen KingA Best Book of the Year: The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, Elle, Esquire, Chicago Tribune, Lit Hub, Kirkus Reviews“Like Orwell's 1984 and Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, Adjei-Brenyah's book presents a dystopian vision so…illuminating that it should permanently shift our understanding of who we are and what we're capable of doing.” —The Washington PostShe felt their eyes, all those executioners…Loretta Thurwar and Hamara “Hurricane Staxxx” Stacker are the stars of the Chain-Gang All-Stars, the cornerstone of CAPE, or Criminal Action Penal Entertainment, a highly popular, highly controversial profit-raising program in America's increasingly dominant private prison industry. It's the return of the gladiators, and prisoners are com­peting for the ultimate prize: their freedom. In CAPE, prisoners travel as Links in Chain-Gangs, competing in death matches before packed arenas with righteous protestors at the gates. Thur­war and Staxxx, both teammates and lovers, are the fan favorites. And if all goes well, Thurwar will be free in just a few matches, a fact she carries as heavily as her lethal hammer. As she prepares to leave her fellow Links, Thurwar considers how she might help preserve their humanity, in defiance of these so-called games. But CAPE's corporate own­ers will stop at nothing to protect their status quo, and the obstacles they lay in Thurwar's path have devastating consequences. Moving from the Links in the field to the protestors, to the CAPE employees and beyond, Chain-Gang All-Stars is a kaleidoscopic, excoriating look at the American prison system's unholy alli­ance of systemic racism, unchecked capitalism, and mass incarceration, and a clear-eyed reckoning with what freedom in this country really means from a “new and necessary American voice” (Tommy Orange, The New York Times Book Review).

WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION NOMINEE • Best Book of the Month: The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Book Riot, CrimeReads • An elegant and hypnotic new novel of obsession that centers on the real unsolved mystery of the 1951 mass poisoning of a French village, by the Booker Prize–nominated author of The Water Cure'Intoxicating, sumptuous, and savage.”—Alexandra Kleeman, acclaimed author of Something New Under the SunStill reeling in the aftermath of the deadliest war the world had ever seen, the small town of Pont-Saint-Esprit collectively lost its mind. Some historians believe the mysterious illness and violent hallucinations were caused by spoiled bread; others claim it was the result of covert government testing on the local population.In that town lived a woman named Elodie. She was the baker's wife: a plain, unremarkable person who yearned to transcend her dull existence. So when a charismatic new couple arrived in town, the forceful ambassador and his sharp-toothed wife, Violet, Elodie was quickly drawn into their orbit. Thus began a dangerous game of cat and mouse--but who was the predator and on whom did they prey?Audacious and mesmerizing, Cursed Bread is a fevered confession, an entry into memory's hall of mirrors, and an erotic fable of transformation. Sophie Mackintosh spins a darkly gleaming tale of a town gripped by hysteria, envy like poison in the blood, and desire that burns and consumes.

The award-winning translators bring us the complete plays of the most acclaimed Russian writer of the Romantic era.Known as the father of Russian literature, Alexander Pushkin was celebrated for his dramas as well as his poetry and stories. His most famous play is Boris Godunov (later adapted into a popular opera by Mussorgsky), a tale of ambition and murder centered on the sixteenth-century Tsar who preceded the Romanovs. Pushkin was inspired by the example of Shakespeare to create this panoramic drama, with its richly varied cast of characters and artful blend of comic and tragic scenes. Pushkin's shorter forays into verse drama include The Water Nymph, A Scene from Faust, and the four brief plays known as the Little Tragedies: The Miserly Knight, set in medieval France; Mozart and Salieri, which inspired the popular film Amadeus; The Stone Guest, a tale of Don Juan in Madrid; and A Feast in a Time of Plague, in which a group of revelers defy quarantine in plague-ridden London. These new translations of the complete plays, from the award-winning translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, freshly reveal the range of Pushkin's enduring artistry.

From the award-winning, best-selling author of When I Was Puerto Rican, a powerful novel of family, race, faith, sex, and disaster that moves between Puerto Rico and the Bronx, revealing the lives and loves of five women and the secret that binds them togetherThey refer to themselves as “las Madres,” a close-knit group of women who, with their daughters, have created a family based on friendship and blood ties.Their story begins in Puerto Rico in 1975 when fifteen-year-old Luz, the tallest girl in her dance academy and the only Black one in a sea of petite, light-skinned, delicate swans, is seriously injured in a car accident. Tragically, her brilliant, multilingual scientist parents are both killed in the crash. Now orphaned, Luz navigates the pressures of adolescence and copes with the aftershock of a brain injury, when two new friends enter her life, Ada and Shirley. Luz's days are consumed with aches and pains, and her memory of the accident is wiped clean, but she suffers spells that send her mind to times and places she can't share with others.In 2017, in the Bronx, Luz's adult daughter, Marysol, wishes she better understood her. But how can she when her mother barely remembers her own life? To help, Ada and Shirley's daughter, Graciela, suggests a vacation in Puerto Rico for the extended group, as an opportunity for Luz to unearth long-buried memories and for Marysol to learn more about her mother's early life. But despite all their careful planning, two hurricanes, back-to-back, disrupt their homecoming, and a secret is revealed that blows their lives wide open. In a voice that sings with warmth, humor, friendship, and pride, celebrated author Esmeralda Santiago unspools a story of women's sexuality, shame, disability, and love within a community rocked by disaster.

A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • A novel about womanhood, modern family, and the interior landscape of maternal life, as seen through the life of a young wife and mother on a single day.At night, Maisie Moore dreams that her life is perfect: the looming mortgages and credit card debt have magically vanished, and she can raise her four children, including newborn Esme, on an undulating current of maternal bliss, by turns oceanic and overwhelming, but awash in awe and wonder. Then she jolts awake and, after checking that her husband and baby are asleep beside her, remembers the real-world money problems to be resolved amid the long days of grocery shopping, gymnastics practices, and soccer games. From this moment, Eliza Minot draws readers into the psyche of the perceptive and warmhearted Maisie, who yearns to understand the world around her and overflows with fierce love for her growing family. Unfolding over the course of a single day in which Maisie and her husband take their children to pick apples, In the Orchard is luminous, masterfully crafted, revelatory—a shining exploration of motherhood, childhood, and love.