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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 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 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.

Sylvia Barrett arrives at New York City's Calvin Coolidge High fresh from earning literature degrees at Hunter College and eager to shape young minds. Instead she encounters broken windows, a lack of supplies, a stifling bureaucracy, and students with no interest in Chaucer. Her bumpy yet ultimately rewarding journey is narrated through an extraordinary collection of correspondence—sternly worded yet nonsensical administrative memos, furtive notes of wisdom from teacher to teacher, “polio consent slips,” and student homework assignments that unwittingly speak from the heart. An instant bestseller when it was first published in 1964, Up the Down Staircase remains as poignant, devastating, laugh-out-loud funny, and relevant today as ever. It timelessly depicts a beleaguered public school system redeemed by teachers who love to teach and students who long to be recognized.

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.

A LOCUS AWARD FINALISTONE OF THE GUARDIAN'S BEST SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY BOOKS OF 2017A surreal debut novel set in a world shaped by language in the tradition of Margaret Atwood and Ursula K. Le Guin. Vanja, an information assistant, is sent from her home city of Essre to the austere, wintry colony of Amatka with an assignment to collect intelligence for the government. Immediately she feels that something strange is going on: people act oddly in Amatka, and citizens are monitored for signs of subversion. Intending to stay just a short while, Vanja falls in love with her housemate, Nina, and prolongs her visit. But when she stumbles on evidence of a growing threat to the colony, and a cover-up by its administration, she embarks on an investigation that puts her at tremendous risk.In Karin Tidbeck's world, everyone is suspect, no one is safe, and nothing—not even language, nor the very fabric of reality—can be taken for granted. Amatka is a beguiling and wholly original novel about freedom, love, and artistic creation by a captivating new voice.

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!

Originally published in 1935, this is Pulitzer Prize winner Edna Ferber's sprawling novel of Wisconsin's logging days, when fortunes—and families—were made and broken over king lumber.Barney Glasgow, who had fought his way up from chore-boy in the lumber camps of Iron Ridge to lumber king of Wisconsin, is fifty-three and has much reason to be content when the granddaughter of his old friend, Swan Bostrom, disrupts his life. But destiny provides an ironic escape from folly, and Barney's son carries on the story—a story which was to end in those fatal months that closed the year 1929. Rich with the vibrant qualities of life itself, this is more than the story of Barney Glasgow and his children. It is the story of lumber, and the story of the making and breaking of a fortune, during one of the most fascinating periods in the history of Wisconsin, and of the nation.

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 ridiculed night editor for a prestigious newspaper.An overburdened nuclear engineer.A female fighter pilot.A religiously impassioned young reporter. A sergeant major thrust into the responsibilities of a secretive command. Moving from a newsroom in the American capital to a cockpit over Afghanistan, from an Iranian cemetery to a military intelligence office in suburban Washington, The Room and The Chair by Lorraine Adams—award-winning author of Harbor—is an unforgettable, groundbreaking novel about the often overlooked actors in today's dangerous world.

R. K. Narayan (1906—2001) witnessed nearly a century of change in his native India and captured it in fiction of uncommon warmth and vibrancy. The Bachelor of Arts is a poignant coming-of-age novel about a young man flush with first love, but whose freedom to pursue it is hindered by the fixed ideas of his traditional Hindu family. This pioneering novel, luminous in its detail and refreshingly free of artifice, is a gift to twentieth-century literature.

William and Molly lead a life of small pleasures, riddles at the kitchen table, and games of string and orange peels. All around them a city rages with war. When the uprising began, William's wife was taken, leaving him alone with their young daughter. They keep their heads down and try to remain unnoticed as police patrol the streets, enforcing a curfew and arresting citizens. But when an old friend seeks William out, claiming to know what happened to his wife, William must risk everything. He ventures out after dark, and young Molly is left to play, reconstructing his dangerous voyage, his past, and their future. An astounding portrait of fierce love within a world of random violence, The Curfew is a mesmerizing feat of literary imagination.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A hopeful, speculative short story collection about how humanity grapples in a world transformed by climate change.“Climate fiction does not owe readers hope, but through humor and humanity Hyde manages to present a harsh reality without descending into despair, offering a space for mourning and for reimagining life in a permanently changed world. Each of the 15 stories is swiftly paced and engaging, rich with detail, highlighting and celebrating nature as it borders on the unnatural.” —The New York Times Book ReviewA vast caravan of RVs roams the United States. A girl grows a unicorn horn, complicating her small-town friendships and big city ambitions. A young lady on a spaceship bonds with her AI warden while trying to avoid an arranged marriage. In Allegra Hyde's universe nothing is as it seems, yet the challenges encountered in these pages mirror those we face in our modern age. Spanning the length of our very solar system, the fifteen stories in this collection explore a myriad of potential futures through the concept of “global weirding,” planetary and social disruptions due to climate change. In unexpected and genre-defying ways, this revelatory collection reminds us that our world is precious, and that protecting it has the potential to bring us all together.

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR • A'brilliant...essential and surprisingly thrilling book about motherhood'(The New York Times) and the early postpartum days, following a woman struggling with maternal fear and its looming madness and showing how difficult and fragile those days can be—and how vital love is to pull anyone out from the dark“A radical novel...I'm obsessed with this book.” —Jessamine Chan, New York Times bestselling author of The School for Good MothersThere is the before and the after. Withering in the maternal prison of her apartment, a new mother finds herself spiraling into a state of complete disaffection. As a translator, she is usually happy to spend her days as the invisible interpreter. But now home alone with her newborn, she is ill at ease with this state of perpetual giving, carrying, feeding. The instinct to keep her baby safe conflicts with the intrusive thoughts of causing the baby harm, and she struggles to reclaim her identity just as it seems to dissolve from underneath her.Feeling isolated from her supportive but ineffectual husband, she strikes up a tentative friendship with her ailing upstairs neighbour, Peter, who hushes the baby with his oxygen tank in tow. But they are both running out of time; something is soon to crack. Joyful early days of her pregnancy mingle with the anxious arrival of the baby, and culminate in a painful confrontation – mostly, between our narrator and herself. Striking and emotive, The Nursery documents the slow process of staggering back towards the simple pleasures of life and reentering the world after post-partum depression.

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.

The early collection that contains some of Hemingway's most famous short stories, touching on many of his favorite subjects—bullfighting, prizefighting, infidelity, divorce, and death.Hemingway had already made a mark on the literary world with his earliest stories, and his second collection shows him solidifying his mastery of the form. Published in 1927, Men Without Women contains enduringly popular stories that have come to be pillars of his literary reputation, including “The Killers,” “Hills Like White Elephants,” and “In Another Country.”

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 FOR FICTION AND THE NEW AMERICAN VOICES AWARD • A BOOKLIST BEST BOOK OF 2023 • 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.

GMA BUZZ PICK • INTERNATIONAL BEST SELLER AND AWARD WINNER • A haunting, virtuosic debut novel about two young men who fall in love during World War I • “Will live in your mind long after you've closed the final pages.” —Maggie O'Farrell, best-selling author of Hamnet and The Marriage PortraitA Best Book of the Year: The New Yorker, The Washington Post, NPR“In Memoriam is the story of a great tragedy, but it is also a moving portrait of young love, and there is often a lightness to the book.”—The New York TimesIt's 1914, and World War I is ceaselessly churning through thousands of young men on both sides of the fight. The violence of the front feels far away to Henry Gaunt, Sidney Ellwood and the rest of their classmates, safely ensconced in their idyllic boarding school in the English countryside. News of the heroic deaths of their friends only makes the war more exciting.Gaunt, half German, is busy fighting his own private battle--an all-consuming infatuation with his best friend, the glamorous, charming Ellwood--without a clue that Ellwood is pining for him in return. When Gaunt's family asks him to enlist to forestall the anti-German sentiment they face, Gaunt does so immediately, relieved to escape his overwhelming feelings for Ellwood. To Gaunt's horror, Ellwood rushes to join him at the front, and the rest of their classmates soon follow. Now death surrounds them in all its grim reality, often inches away, and no one knows who will be next.An epic tale of both the devastating tragedies of war and the forbidden romance that blooms in its grip, In Memoriam is a breathtaking debut.

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.

A feminist literary landmark: the daring story of a woman's search for personal freedom that was so controversial in 1899 that it ended its author's career.With an effortless, sure-handed artistry, Kate Chopin tells the story of Edna Pontellier, a young mother and model wife, whose romantic involvement with a young man at a seaside resort allows her for the first time to imagine a freer life. Upon her return to New Orleans, Edna leaves her husband's home for her own cottage, pursues her artistic ambitions, and begins an affair, only to discover that the constraints of social custom are more powerful than she had thought. Contemporary readers were shocked by the frank, unapologetic treatment of adultery in The Awakening, but over the ensuing century the novel went on to achieve the status of a classic for its visionary prescience and narrative brilliance.

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 •'Sublime.'—New York Times Book Review'Brilliantly sharp, funny, and thought-provoking, the gripping story of a woman trying to find her way in our chaotic world.'—Madeline Miller, bestselling author of CirceBroke English teacher Penelope Schleeman is as surprised as anyone when her feminist, eco-warrior novel American Mermaid becomes a best-seller. But when Hollywood insists she convert her fierce, androgynous protagonist into to a teen sex object in a clamshell bra, strange things start to happen. Is Penelope losing her mind, or has her fictional mermaid come to life, enacting revenge against society's limited view of what a woman can and should be? American Mermaid follows a young woman braving the casual slights and cruel calculations of a winner-take-all society and discovering a beating heart in her own fiction: a new kind of hero who fights to keep her voice and choose her place. A hilarious story about deep things, American Mermaid asks how far we'll go to protect the parts of ourselves that are not for sale.

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.

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.

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.

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.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the bestselling, award-winning author of The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments, a dazzling collection of short stories that look deeply into the heart of family relationships, marriage, loss and memory, and what it means to spend a life together'If you consider yourself an Atwood fan and have only read her novels: Get your act together. You've been missing out.” —The New York Times Book Review, Rebecca Makkai, best-selling author of The Great BelieversMargaret Atwood has established herself as one of the most visionary and canonical authors in the world. This collection of fifteen extraordinary stories—some of which have appeared in The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine—explore the full warp and weft of experience, speaking to our unique times with Atwood's characteristic insight, wit and intellect. The two intrepid sisters of the title story grapple with loss and memory on a perfect summer evening; “Impatient Griselda” explores alienation and miscommunication with a fresh twist on a folkloric classic; and “My Evil Mother” touches on the fantastical, examining a mother-daughter relationship in which the mother purports to be a witch. At the heart of the collection are seven extraordinary stories that follow a married couple across the decades, the moments big and small that make up a long life of uncommon love—and what comes after.Returning to short fiction for the first time since her 2014 collection Stone Mattress, Atwood showcases both her creativity and her humanity in these remarkable tales which by turns delight, illuminate, and quietly devastate.

A NEW YORK TIMES MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK • An enchanting novel about Ro, a woman tossed overboard by heartbreak and loss, who has to find her way back to stable shores with the help of a giant Pacific octopus at the mall aquarium where she works.“Immersively beautiful.... A kaleidoscope of originality.'—Weike Wang, acclaimed author of Joan is OkayRo is stuck. She's just entered her thirties, she's estranged from her mother, and her boyfriend has just left her to join a mission to Mars. Her days are spent dragging herself to her menial job at the aquarium, and her nights are spent drinking sharktinis (Mountain Dew and copious amounts of gin, plus a hint of jalapeño). With her best friend pulling away to focus on her upcoming wedding, Ro's only companion is Dolores, a giant Pacific octopus who also happens to be Ro's last remaining link to her father, a marine biologist who disappeared while on an expedition when Ro was a teenager.When Dolores is sold to a wealthy investor intent on moving her to a private aquarium, Ro finds herself on the precipice of self-destruction. Wading through memories of her youth, Ro realizes she can either lose herself in the undertow of reminiscence, or finally come to terms with her childhood trauma, recommit to those around her, and find her place in an ever-changing world.

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.

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.

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.

This Pulitzer Prize-winning, fable-like short novel—by the author of Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth—has been beloved around the world for nearly a century.This splendid and profoundly moving novel begins with a simple and seemingly senseless tragedy.'On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below.'A traveling monk, Brother Juniper, witnesses the catastrophe and becomes obsessed with investigating the lives of the five victims in order to prove that their deaths had meaning. His mission is doomed to fail, but over the course of the story, the five unlucky individuals—a noblewoman, a maid, an orphan, an old man, and a child—come to life for the reader in all of their glorious complexity. Their intertwined lives—snuffed out in one shattering moment—illuminate the biggest questions that we can ask ourselves about the nature of love and meaning of the human condition.

The basis for the Academy-Award®-nominated major motion picture. In this short story from Haruki Murakami's bestselling collection, Men Without Women, a widowed actor hires a twenty-year-old woman to be his chauffeur. Despite her reserved nature, the actor finds comfort in her stable presence, and a friendship blossoms as they slowly reveal their pasts. Crafted with delicacy and precision, Drive My Car is a meditative exploration of the need for human connection and our innate desire to be understood -- even when we least expect it.

From one of America's most beloved storytellers: a dazzling tapestry of love and faith, memory and imagination that questions what it means to look back and accept one's place in history. In 1971, Harley Mann revisits his childhood, recounting his family's move to Florida's swamplands—mere miles away from what would become Disney World—to join a community of Shakers.“Eerily timely. Can what's gone wrong in the past offer keys to the future? The Magic Kingdom confronts our longings for Paradise; also the inner serpents that are to be found in all such enchanted gardens.” —Margaret Atwood, author of The Testaments, via TwitterProperty speculator Harley Mann begins recording his life story onto a reel-to-reel machine, reflecting on his youth in the early twentieth century. He recounts that after his father's sudden death, his family migrated down to Florida to join a Shaker colony. Led by Elder John, a generous man with a mysterious past, the colony devoted itself to labor, faith, and charity, rejecting all temptations that lay beyond the property. Though this way of life initially saved Harley and his family from complete ruin, when Harley began falling in love with Sadie Pratt, a consumptive patient living on the grounds, his loyalty to the Shakers and their conservative worldview grew strained and, ultimately, broke.As Harley dictates his story across more than half a century—meditating on youth, Florida's everchanging landscape, and the search for an American utopia—the truth about Sadie, Elder John, and the Shakers comes to light, clarifying the past and present alike. With an expert eye and stunning vision, Russell Banks delivers a wholly captivating portrait of a man navigating Americana and the passage of time.

From the best-selling, award-winning author of The Sense of an Ending, a magnetic tale that centers on the presence of a vivid and particular woman, whose loss becomes the occasion for a man's deeper examination of love, friendship, and biography.'I'll remember Elizabeth Finch when most other characters I've met this year have faded.'–John Self, The TimesThis beautiful, spare novel of platonic unrequited love springs into being around the singular character of the stoic, exacting Professor Elizabeth Finch. Neil, the narrator, takes her class “Culture and Civilisation,” taught not for undergraduates but for adults of all ages; we are drawn into his intellectual crush on this private, withholding, yet commanding woman. While other personal relationships and even his family drift from Neil's grasp, Elizabeth's application of her material to the matter of daily living remains important to him, even after her death, in a way that nothing else does. In Elizabeth Finch, we are treated to everything we cherish in Barnes: his eye for the unorthodox forms love can take between two people, a compelling swerve into nonfictional material (this time, through Neil's obsessive study of Julian the Apostate, following on notes Elizabeth left for him to discover after her death), and the forcefully moving undercurrent of history, and biography in particular, as nourishment and guide in our current lives.

AN NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • Two teenagers, in love and insane, journey across the United States in this Bonnie and Clyde–like adventure, pursuing a warped American dream, where Elvis is still king and the corn dog is the “backbone of this great country.” “There is a typo on page 14. Other than that, this book is perfect.” —Bill Callahan“He told her he was a one-woman man and she was it for him. Teal said that was good because he was it for her. It and It. Both of them were It.” Kody Rawlee Green is stuck in juvie. Tella “Teal Cartwheels” Carticelli is packing her bags for Rome--on the orders of her parents, who want her as far from Kody as possible. But teenage love is too strong a force for the obstacles of reality. And the highway beckons. Leaving their abusive pasts behind them in Jersey, Kody and Teal set off on a cross-country road trip equal parts self-destruction and self-discovery, making their way, one stolen car at a time, toward bigger, wider, bluer skies. Along the road, of course, there's time to stop at Graceland, classic diners, a fairgrounds that smells of “pony shit and kettle corn,'and time for run-ins with outsize personalities like the reincarnated Grand Canyon tour guide Dead Bob and the spurious Montana rancher Bill Gold. On their heels, all the while, is Teal's brother, Neil Carticelli, who's abandoned his post in the navy to rescue the sister he left behind. But does she really need saving? These all too American tropes find new expression in Bud Smith's own freewheeling prose—and in Rae Buleri's original illustrations—filling Teenager with humor, poetry, and a joy that's palpable in every unforgettable sentence. A VINTAGE ORIGINAL

In this revelatory story about first love from Karen Russell's Orange World, a young man falls in love with a two thousand year old girl that he's extracted from a mass of peat in a Northern European bog. Through a darkly comic lens, Russell explores the vertigo of falling in and out of love, and the way that our shallow projections and fairytale fantasies can cover over the mysterious reality of another human being. A Vintage Short.