People move to New York looking for magic and nothing will convince them it isn't there.

Charles Thomas Tester hustles to put food on the table, keep the roof over his father's head, from Harlem to Flushing Meadows to Red Hook. He knows what magic a suit can cast, the invisibility a guitar case can provide, and the curse written on his skin that attracts the eye of wealthy white folks and their cops. But when he delivers an occult tome to a reclusive sorceress in the heart of Queens, Tom opens a door to a deeper realm of magic, and earns the attention of things best left sleeping.

A storm that might swallow the world is building in Brooklyn. Will Black Tom live to see it break?

In The Passage and The Twelve, Justin Cronin brilliantly imagined the fall of civilization and humanity’s desperate fight to survive. Now all is quiet on the horizon—but does silence promise the nightmare’s end or the second coming of unspeakable darkness? At last, this bestselling epic races to its breathtaking finale.

The Twelve have been destroyed and the hundred-year reign of darkness that descended upon the world has ended. The survivors are stepping outside their walls, determined to build society anew—and daring to dream of a hopeful future.

But far from them, in a dead metropolis, he waits: Zero. The First. Father of the Twelve. The anguish that shattered his human life haunts him, and the hatred spawned by his transformation burns bright. His fury will be quenched only when he destroys Amy—humanity’s only hope, the Girl from Nowhere who grew up to rise against him.

One last time light and dark will clash, and at last Amy and her friends will know their fate.

Every year there are one or two commencement speeches that strike a chord with audiences far greater than the student bodies for which they are intended. In 2015 Mary Karr’s speech to the graduating class of Syracuse University caught fire, hailed across the Internet as one of the most memorable in recent years, and lighting up the Twittersphere.

In Now Go Out There, Karr explains why having your heart broken is just as—if not more—important than falling in love; why getting what you want often scares you more than not getting it; how those experiences that appear to be the worst cannot be so easily categorized; and how to cope with the setbacks that inevitably befall all of us. “Don’t make the mistake of comparing your twisted up insides to other people’s blow-dried outsides,” she cautions. “Even the most privileged person in this stadium suffers the torments of the damned just going about the business of being human.”

An ideal—and beautifully designed—gift for a graduate or for anyone looking for some down-to-earth life advice, Now Go Out There is destined to become a classic.

In a turbulent world, C.D. Wright evokes a rebellious and dissonant ethos with characteristic genre-bending and expanding long-form poems. Accessing journalistic writing alongside filmic narratives, Wright ranges across seven poetic sequences, including a collaborative suite responding to photographic documentation of murder sites in New Orleans. ShallCross shows plain as day that C.D. Wright is our most thrilling and innovative poet.

Douglas Kearney writes, "If my writing makes a mess of things, it's not to flee understanding, but to map (mis-)understanding as a verb."

The map's guide is Mess and Mess and, in which Kearney defines the terms that member his poetics, taking even prefixes as a call for semantic inquiry. Within are essays that explore "the Negrotesque," gloss specific poems and poetry collections, the inspirations (from life, literature, and otherwise) he drew upon when putting his pen to the page—as well as studies and drafts from his journals. Simultaneously playful and cutting, Kearney's collection interrogates that which inspires, troubles, and recurs in his work, the mess(es) there.

Hardly War, Don Mee Choi's major second collection, defies history, national identity, and militarism. Using artifacts from Choi's father, a professional photographer during the Korean and Vietnam wars, she combines memoir, image, and opera to explore her paternal relationship and heritage. Here poetry and geopolitics are inseparable twin sisters, conjoined to the belly of a warring empire.

The title cloud of Matt Donavan’s extraordinary nonfiction debut, A Cloud of Unusual Size and Shape, refers to the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius that in 79 AD buried the city of Pompeii under twenty feet of ash. Today a remarkable 2.5 million people a year visit the ruins of the Italian city. It’s no surprise, then, that Donovan found the sacred place a site of inspiration and power, devoting six pieces to exploring the homes and villas that have been preserved. Donavan takes off from various points in the Roman ruins to explore the inconstancy of any given moment alongside the processes used to make casts of the vacancies left by the city’s dead to create positive monuments to their last gestures.

Nothing seems to be beyond the reach of this stunningly original writer. The pleasures he delivers in A Cloud of Unusual Size and Shape have to do with the purity of his imagination, the flawless connections he makes from antiquity to the present, from personal experience to historical events, from architecture to art installation to literature. The redemptive power of beauty hovers over this spectacular work, reminding us that darkness and light make an inextricable pattern over our lives. Matt Donovan finds that the delicate balance to honor both, to find the subtle but ineffable rhythms between ruin and redemption, is to find what ultimately makes life worthwhile, what gives meaning to the sorrow and joy of being human.

After inheriting 400 novels of pornography written by his father in the 1970s and ‘80s, critically acclaimed author Chris Offutt sets out to make sense of a complicated father-son relationship in this carefully observed, beautifully written memoir.

“Clearing Dad’s office felt like prospecting within his brain. As I sorted, like an archaeologist, backward through time, I saw a remarkable mind at work, a life lived on its own terms.”

When Andrew Offutt died, his son, Chris, inherited a desk, a rifle, and 1800 pounds of porn. Andrew had been considered the “king of twentieth century smut,” a career that began as a strategy to pay for his son’s orthodontic needs and soon took on a life of its own, peaking during the ‘70s when the commercial popularity of the erotic novel was at its height.

With his dutiful wife serving as typist, Andrew wrote from their home in the Kentucky hills, locked away in an office no one dared intrude upon. In this fashion he wrote 400 novels, ranging from pirate porn and ghost porn, to historical porn and time travel porn, to secret agent porn and zombie porn. The more he wrote, the more intense his ambition became, and the more difficult it was for his children to penetrate his world.

Over one long summer in his hometown, helping his mother move out of the house, Chris began to examine his deceased father’s possessions and realized he finally had an opportunity to come to grips with the mercurial man he always feared but never understood. Offutt takes us on the journey with him, showing us how only in his father’s absence could he truly make sense of the man and his legacy. This riveting, evocatively told memoir of a deeply complex father-son relationship proves again why the New York Times Book Review said, “Offut’s obvious kin are Richard Ford, Tobias Wolff, and Ernest Hemingway.”

When Terry White, a former deputy sheriff and a failed politician, goes broke in the 2007-2008 financial crisis, he takes a job working for the UN, helping to train the Haitian police. He's sent to the remote town of Jérémie, where there are more coffin makers than restaurants, more donkeys than cars, and the dirt roads all slope down sooner or later to the postcard sea. Terry is swept up in the town's complex politics when he befriends an earnest, reforming American-educated judge. Soon he convinces the judge to oppose the corrupt but charismatic Sénateur Maxim Bayard in an upcoming election. When Terry falls in love with the judge's wife, the electoral drama threatens to become a disaster.

Tense, atmospheric, tightly plotted, and surprisingly funny, Peacekeeping confirms Berlinski's gifts as a storyteller. Like his first novel, Fieldwork, it explores a part of the world that we neither understand nor control—and takes us into the depths of the human soul, where the thirst for power and the need for love can overrun judgment and morality.