In Argall, the third novel in his Seven Dreams series, William T. Vollmann alternates between extravagant Elizabethan language and gritty realism in an attempt to dig beneath the legend surrounding Pocahontas, John Smith, and the founding of the Jamestown colony in Virginia—as well as the betrayals, disappointments, and atrocities behind it. With the same panoramic vision, mythic sensibility, and stylistic daring that he brought to the previous novels in the Seven Dreams series—hailed upon its inception as "the most important literary project of the '90s" (The Washington Post)—Vollmann continues his hugely original fictional history of the clash of Native Americans and Europeans in the New World. In reconstructing America's past as tragedy, nightmare, and bloody spectacle, Vollmann does nothing less than reinvent the American novel.

With emotional precision and narrative subtlety, The Royal Ghosts features characters trying to reconcile their true desires with the forces at work in Nepali society. Against the backdrop of the violent Maoist insurgencies that have claimed thousands of lives, these characters struggle with their duties to their aging parents, an oppressive caste system, and the complexities of arranged marriage. In the end, they manage to find peace and connection, often where they least expect it—with the people directly in front of them. These stories brilliantly examine not only Kathmandu during a time of political crisis and cultural transformation but also the effects of that city on the individual consciousness.

Acclaimed and award-winning author Samrat Upadhyay—the first Nepali-born fiction writer writing in English to be published in the West—has crafted a spare, understated work examining a taboo subject: a scorned wife’s obsession with her husband’s illegitimate son.

When Didi discovers that her husband, the Masterji, has been hiding his beautiful lover and their young son Tarun in a nearby city, she takes the Masterji back into her grasp and expels his second family. Tarun’s mother, heartsick and devastated, slowly begins to lose her mind, and Tarun turns to Didi for the mothering he longs for. But as Tarun gets older, Didi’s domination of the boy turns from the emotional to the physical, and the damages she inflicts spiral outward, threatening to destroy Tarun’s one true chance at true happiness. Potent, disturbing, and gorgeously stark in its execution, The City Son is a novel not soon forgotten.

Called "a Buddhist Chekhov" by the San Francisco Chronicle, Samrat Upadhyay's writing has been praised by Amitav Ghosh and Suketu Mehta, and compared with the work of Akhil Sharma and Jhumpa Lahiri.

Upadhyay's new novel, Buddha's Orphans, uses Nepal's political upheavals of the past century as a backdrop to the story of an orphan boy, Raja, and the girl he is fated to love, Nilu, a daughter of privilege.Their love story scandalizes both families and takes readers through time and across the globe, through the loss of and search for children, and through several generations, hinting that perhaps old bends can, in fact, be righted in future branches of a family tree. Buddha's Orphans is a novel permeated with the sense of how we are irreparably connected to the mothers who birthed us and of the way events of the past, even those we are ignorant of, inevitably haunt the present. But most of all it is an engrossing, unconventional love story and a seductive and transporting read.

Jack Turner grew up with an image of the Tetons engraved in his mind. As a young man, he climbed the peaks of this singular range with basic climbing gear and friends. Later in life, he led treks in India, Pakistan, Nepal, China, Tibet, and Peru, but he always returned to the mountains of his youth: the Tetons. Teewinot is his ode to forty years in the mountains that he loves. This is a book about a mountain range, its climbs, its weather, and the glory of the wild. It is also about a small group of climbers—nomads who inhabit the Teton Range each summer, and who know it as intimately as it will ever be known. Teewinot is a remarkable account of what it is like to live and work in these spectacular mountains. It has something for everyone—spellbinding accounts of dangerous and deadly climbs, unbridled awe at the beauty of nature, and an extreme passion for the environmental issues facing America today. In this series of recollections, one of America's most beautiful national parks comes alive with beauty, mystery, and power.

The mysterious and timeless world of the desert Southwest is vividly brought to life in these rare, hand-tinted photographs from the historic Rainbow Bridge/Monument Valley Expedition of 1933-38.

Readers of The New Yorker know Judy Troy's characters well—they're small-town, blue-collar Americans, young and old, who look for romance at the Paradise Valley K-Mart, contemplate the universe in a trailer park, or go snake-shooting in the desert. Not much comes easily to them, even if life often holds surprises. Yet they endure, for the difficulties of just getting by in a world that sometimes seems beyond their control are offset by the healing power of love. Together for the first time in Mourning Doves, their struggles are all the more poignant, and their pleasures, enchanting. In these stories, set in the West, the Southwest, and the South, Judy Troy conjures the marvelous from the mundane, stirring the reader without ever resorting to sentimentality. This stunning debut will delight her fans and promises to win a greater following for a rare, young talent.

Trachtenberg, a recovering Casanova, takes the reader on a fascinating journey inside the Casanova complex, telling what a life of migratory sexuality is really like and who the women are that make it possible. He describes the syndrome as a true compulsive disorder, similar to alcoholism.

From “a genuine American Dostoevsky” (The Washington Post): a dazzling, funny, bittersweet exploration of the mysteries of relationship, both human and animal.

When his favorite cat Biscuit goes missing, Peter Trachtenberg sets out to find her. The journey takes him 700 miles and many years into his past—into the history of his relationships with cats and the history of his relationship with his wife F., who may herself be on the verge of disappearing. What ensues is a work that recalls travel narratives from The Incredible Journey to W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn. Trachtenberg ponders the mysteries of feline intelligence (why do cats score worse on some tests than pigeons?), the origins of their domestication, and their terrible treatment during the Middle Ages. He also looks at the riddle of why any of us loves whom we love and all the unforeseen places to which that devotion leads us.

In The Way People Run, Christopher Tilghman returns to his beloved home terrain: the matters of the heart, our most difficult truths, and the quiet, rugged regions of Chesapeake Bay and the American West. Compared by critics to Fitzgerald, Styron and Faulkner, Tilghman works his subtle emotional magic on the rough and reflective characters in these long stories. In the title piece, chosen by Robert Stone for the Best American Short Stories, a man goes west in search of a new job, only to find his hold on his family slipping in the process. In "Something Important" a man reunites with his long-lost brother, and discovers a dark truth about his own wife. And in "Things Left Undone," chosen by Tobias Wolff for the Best American Short Stories, a young couple struggles to survive a shattering tragedy.