Schuyler's essential collection has at its core a nearly book-length poem in which the elements of letter writing, autobiography, and fable combine to transfigure poet and audience, past and present, and suffering and pleasure. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize.

With a profound gift for capturing the absurd in life, and a deadpan wisdom that comes from surviving a surreal childhood in the Socialist Workers Party, Saïd Sayrafiezadeh has crafted an unsentimental, funny, heartbreaking memoir. Saïd’s Iranian-born father and American Jewish mother had one thing in common: their unshakable conviction that the workers’ revolution was coming. Separated since their son was nine months old, they each pursued a dream of the perfect socialist society. Pinballing with his mother between makeshift Pittsburgh apartments, falling asleep at party meetings, longing for the luxuries he’s taught to despise, Saïd waits for the revolution that never, ever arrives. “Soon,” his mother assures him, while his long-absent father quixotically runs as a socialist candidate for president in an Iran about to fall under the ayatollahs. Then comes the hostage crisis. The uproar that follows is the first time Saïd hears the word “Iran” in school. There he is suddenly forced to confront the combustible stew of his identity: as an American, an Iranian, a Jew, a socialist . . . and a middle-school kid who loves football and video games.

Poised perfectly between tragedy and farce, here is a story by a brilliant young writer struggling to break away from the powerful mythologies of his upbringing and create a life—and a voice—of his own. Saïd Sayrafiezadeh’s memoir is unforgettable.

When The New Yorker published a short story by Saïd Sayrafiezadeh in 2010, it marked the emergence of a startling new voice in fiction. In this astonishing book, Sayrafiezadeh conjures up a nameless American city and its unmoored denizens: a call-center employee jealous of the attention lavished on a co-worker newly returned from a foreign war; a history teacher dealing with a classroom of maliciously indifferent students; a grocery store janitor caught up in a romantic relationship with a kleptomaniac customer. These men’s struggles and fleeting triumphs—with women, with cruel bosses, with the morning commute—are transformed into storytelling that is both universally resonant and wonderfully strange. Sometimes the effect is hilarious, as when a would-be suitor tries to take his sheltered, religious date on a tunnel of love carnival ride. Other times it’s devastating, as in the unforgettable story that gives the book its title: A soldier on his last routine patrol on a deserted mountain path finally encounters “the enemy” he’s long sought a glimpse of.

Upon giving the author the Whiting Writers’ Award for his memoir, When Skateboards Will Be Free, the judges hailed his writing as “intelligent, funny, utterly unsmug and unpreening.” These fiercely original stories show their author employing his considerable gifts to offer a lens on our collective dreams and anxieties, casting them in a revelatory new light.

The acclaimed author of Low Life reinvents the memoir in a cunning, lyrical book that is at once a personal history and a meditation on the construction of identity. Born in Belgium but raised in New Jersey, Luc Sante transformed himself from a pious, timid Belgian boy into a loutish American adolescent, who eschewed French while fantasizing about the pop star Françoise Hardy. To show how this transformation came about—and why it remained incomplete—The Factory of Facts combines family anecdote and ancestral legend; detailed forays into Belgian history, language, and religion; and deft synopses of the American character.

Luc Sante's Low Life is a portrait of America's greatest city, the riotous and anarchic breeding ground of modernity. This is not the familiar saga of mansions, avenues, and robber barons, but the messy, turbulent, often murderous story of the city's slums; the teeming streets—scene of innumerable cons and crimes whose cramped and overcrowded housing is still a prominent feature of the cityscape.Low Life voyages through Manhattan from four different directions. Part One examines the actual topography of Manhattan from 1840 to 1919; Part Two, the era's opportunities for vice and entertainment—theaters and saloons, opium and cocaine dens, gambling and prostitution; Part Three investigates the forces of law and order which did and didn't work to contain the illegalities; Part Four counterposes the city's tides of revolt and idealism against the city as it actually was. Low Life provides an arresting and entertaining view of what New York was actually like in its salad days. But it's more than simpy a book about New York. It's one of the most provocative books about urban life ever written—an evocation of the mythology of the quintessential modern metropplois, which has much to say not only about New York's past but about the present and future of all cities.

Matilde Anselm, professor of cardiac anesthesiology, arrives in Paris from New York to be part of a surgery team in the winter of 1990, as manifestations against the First Gulf War are raging in the streets. Even as her concerns mount over the shadowy protocols surrounding the planned heart transplant, and even as she falls in love with the Arab diplomat in charge of those protocols, a surprise inheritance—a mysterious Paris apartment and a trove of love letters from the Spanish Civil War, bequeathed to her by a stranger—sweep her through a hidden Paris and into the labyrinth of her own buried past. As the diplomat and the apartment reluctantly reveal their secrets, the tragedies they unearth open a further mystery, the enigma that has haunted Matilde’s life. In the end she is left devastated, liberated, and, for the very first time, herself. Paris Twilight grapples with the meaning of love, the sin of suicide, and the mystery of family in a masterful fiction debut, a dizzying tale of personal transformation.

An account of one young woman's emergence from a tragic childhood describes how, after spending her early years trapped in a chair in a closed room, Genie learned to walk, chew, and speak, with the help of the scientists who adopted her. As the scientists study her, hoping to gain new insight into language acquisition and development, the book raises questions about the line between aid and exploitation.

Michael Ryan’s first collection in fifteen years shows the acclaimed poet at the height of his powers. Highlighting the wit and passion displayed throughout his career, Ryan’s latest work comprises fifty-seven poems from three award-winning volumes and thirty-one new poems. In both dramatic lyrics and complex narratives, Ryan renders the world with startling clarity, freshness, and intimacy. New and Selected Poems is filled with the stuff of everyday life, and as The New York Times Book Review said, it “include[s] pain and fear but also surprise, joy, laughter, everything human.”

"Ryan speaks plainly of plain things, and the result is remarkable poetry. Avoiding agenda, he uses colloquial language bent slightly to his needs—'he saw that this was the way / they could no longer talk together''—to discover the particular resonance of each event, whether bicycling, freeing a bird from a chimney, or reflecting on a burglary. The discovery is often delivered with a punch at poem's end. Thus, losing his contacts when swimming 'to get skinny,' the poet is reminded of a 'friend diving at dusk / in that mountain lake for his daughter / and what came to him when his hands / sank into the cold mud at the bottom.' Occasionally, the punch is not so decisive, but most of the time Ryan is remarkably on target. A fresh new collection from one of the most distinctive poets writing today." —Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal