Laguna Beach, California, 2010. Alireza Courdee, a fourteen-year-old straight-A student and chemistry whiz, takes his first hit of pot. In as long as it takes to inhale and exhale, he is transformed from the high-achieving son of Iranian immigrants into a happy-go-lucky stoner. He loses his virginity, takes up surfing, and sneaks away to all-night raves. For the first time, Reza—now Rez—feels like an American teen. Life is smooth; even lying to his strict father comes easily.

But then he changes again, falling out with the bad boy surfers and in with a group of kids more awake to the world around them, who share his background, and whose ideas fill him with a very different sense of purpose. Within a year, Reza and two friends are making their way to Syria to join in the fight.

Timely, nuanced, and emotionally forceful, A Good Country is a gorgeous meditation on modern life, religious radicalization, and a young man caught among vastly different worlds. What we are left with at the dramatic end is not an assessment of good or evil, east versus west, but a lingering question that applies to all souls: Does a person decide how to live, or is their life decided for them?

In her first new collection in five years—her most exhilarating, personal, and formally inventive to date—Graham explores the limits of the human and the uneasy seductions of the post-human. Conjuring an array of voices and perspectives—from bots, to the holy shroud, to the ocean floor, to a medium transmitting from beyond the grave—these poems give urgent form to the ever-increasing pace of transformation of our planet and ourselves. As it navigates cyber life, 3D-printed “life,” life after death, biologically, chemically, and electronically modified life, Fast lights up the border of our new condition as individuals and as a species on the brink.

The Dark Net is real. An anonymous and often criminal arena that exists in the secret, far reaches of the Web, some use it to manage Bitcoins, pirate movies and music, or traffic in drugs and stolen goods. And now, an ancient darkness is gathering there as well. These demons are threatening to spread virally into the real world unless they can be stopped by members of a ragtag crew:

Twelve-year-old Hannah, who has been fitted with the Mirage, a high-tech visual prosthetic to combat her blindness, wonders why she sees shadows surrounding some people.

A technophobic journalist named Lela has stumbled upon a story nobody wants her to uncover.

Mike Juniper—a one-time child evangelist who suffers from personal and literal demons—has an arsenal of weapons stored in the basement of the homeless shelter he runs.

And Derek, a hacker with a cause, believes himself a soldier of the Internet, part of a cyber army akin to Anonymous.

They have no idea what the Dark Net really contains.

"'What do I see' when I look into the eyes of another? What kind of exchange takes place when that look is returned? The poems in Elizabeth Arnold's devastating Skeleton Coast investigate the ways we are formed by such encounters—especially, at the core of the collection, by encounters with evil in the face of a person one loves, or has loved, or has wanted to love. These poems alternate between spare, psychological explorations and more expansive descriptions of difficult terrain: the Sahara, Egyptian ruins, and the dry riverbeds of the Skeleton Coast in the title sequence. The goal is to read what is truly there, as if we are all wrecks and deserts, to understand our dislocation from the forces that have made us and the sources that might feed us. What is buried is both violence and clarity, 'like a fault deep in the ground / with its / inexact though statistically measurable need / to relieve stress over time.' The vistas and profundities are Jamesian here, the poems scrupulous in their exploration of ethical weights and balances. Each poem is like a delicately fused mechanism, twisting around both still and moving parts, which the reader tracks silently on the way to inevitable, impeccable detonations." —Jennifer Clarvoe

With funky tempos and stretched, staggering lines, Matt Donovan's new sequence interrogates the ways our daily lives teem with beauty and loss. Using figures engrained in American culture to portray collisions of pleasure with tragedy, he summons singers Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday, athlete Babe Ruth, painters Paul Cezanne and John Singer Sargent, and musicians John Coltrane and Lou Reed to offer evidence for what creation can cost. A beloved music teacher who died prematurely is extolled by re-enacting his passion for both Bach and Scott Joplin, and the promise of a first pregnancy is juxtaposed with a surge of family funerals. As "each day lurches us toward ... / things dying, things newborn," the poet of Rapture & the Big Bam can be either a companion in mourning or a celebrant of unbeaten anticipation.

Short story writer, novelist and essayist Josip Novakovich returns with his first collection of stories since being named a finalist for the 2013 Man Booker International Prize. In Heritage of Smoke, he explores the themes of war and exile, of religiosity and existentialism, that have defined his fiction and earned him a place among the most admired international writers addressing contemporary literature's most pressing questions. Masterpieces such "When the Saints Come", "White Mustache", and "Acorns", unflinching in their humanity and realism, take us into the recent Balkan wars and their aftermath. In between, dry humor and world-weary wisdom infuse such exile preoccupations as soccer, terrorism, and cigarettes. Taken together, this latest collection comprises a bravely intelligent mosaic of what it means to be torn from one's country and to reinvent oneself.

In her first nonfiction book, award-winning novelist Yiyun Li explores a question we ask ourselves: How does one make life livable?
 
Startlingly original and shining with quiet wisdom, this is a luminous account of a life lived with books. Written over two years while the author battled suicidal depression, Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life is a painful and yet richly affirming examination of what makes life worth living. Li takes us on a journey through the deepest themes that bind William Trevor, Katherine Mansfield, and other writers together. The title chapter in this book was chosen by John Jeremiah Sullivan for The Best American Essays 2014.

Samrat Upadhyay's thrilling new collection brings stories of thieves, lovers, political prisoners, fractured families, and of Nepali-Americans attempting to navigate the strange customs of the United States. It reaffirms Upadhyay's brilliant contributions to the international literature of exile.