Here is a novel of import and style, set in 1915-1917, the years of the Ottoman Turkish government’s brutal campaign that resulted in the deaths of more than a million Armenians. Through a series of chapters that have the weight and economy of poetry, Micheline Aharonian Marcom introduces us to the stories of Anaguil, an Armenian girl taken in by Turkish neighbors after the death of her parents who now views the remains of her world through a Muslim veil; Sargis, a poet hidden away in his mother’s attic, dressed in women’s clothing, and steadily going mad; Lucine, a servant and lover of the American consul; Maritsa, a rage-filled Muslim wife who becomes a whore; and Dickran, an infant left behind under a tree on the long exodus from an Armenian village, who reaches with tiny hands to touch the stars and dies with his name unrecorded. Through these lives, we witness the vanishing of a people.

Three Apples Fell From Heaven is an elegy to the final days of Orientalism and an elegant memorial to the victims of the twentieth century’s first genocide. Together, the stories of these lives form a narrative mosaic—faceted, complex, richly textured, a devastating tableau.

A masterful, fabulously realized depiction of the internal dislocation of a refugee—a fictional self-portrait that is at once lyrical and phantasmagorical, hallucinatory, and searingly acute.

Marcom's second novel, The Daydreaming Boy, carries forward from her first book the story of the refugees from the twentieth century's first genocide, the Turkish government's brutal campaign that resulted in the deaths of more than a million Armenians. Vahé Tcheubjian is an upstanding, unremarkable member of the Armenian community of Beirut in the 1960s. He and his wife attend concerts, dinners, partake of the sophisticated, continental culture that marked pre-civil war Beirut as a cosmopolitan capital on the Mediterranean, the "Paris of the Middle East." But inside, he is in turmoil—wracked by memories of the escape from the campaign of genocide, the years spent in an Armenian orphanage, the brutalities of his fellow orphans, ferocious and desperate and unloved. Vahé seeks refuge in an outrageous and graphic fantasy life that flirts dangerously with emotional catastrophe, just as the Beirut he has come to adopt as his home edges toward destruction.

In the tradition of Oliver Sacks's The Island of the Colorblind, Rosemary Mahoney tells the story of Braille Without Borders, the first school for the blind in Tibet, and of Sabriye Tenberken, the remarkable blind woman who founded the school. Fascinated and impressed by what she learned from the blind children of Tibet, Mahoney was moved to investigate further the cultural history of blindness. As part of her research, she spent three months teaching at Tenberken's international training center for blind adults in Kerala, India, an experience that reveals both the shocking oppression endured by the world's blind, as well as their great resilience, integrity, ingenuity, and strength. By living among the blind, Rosemary Mahoney enables us to see them in fascinating close up, revealing their particular "quality of ease that seems to broadcast a fundamental connection to the world." Having read For the Benefit of Those Who See you will never see the world in quite the same way again.

When Rosemary Mahoney, in 1998, took a solo trip down the Nile in a seven-foot rowboat, she discovered modern Egypt for herself. As a rower, she faced crocodiles and testy river currents; as a female, she confronted deeply-held beliefs about foreign women while cautiously remaining open to genuine friendship; and, as a traveler, she experienced events that ranged from the humorous to the hair-raising—including an encounter that began as one of the most frightening of her life and ended as an edifying and chastening lesson in human nature and cultural misunderstanding. Whether she's meeting Nubians and Egyptians, or finding connections to Westerners who traveled up the Nile in earlier times—Florence Nightingale and Gustave Flaubert among them—Mahoney's informed curiosity about the world never ceases to captivate the reader.

In a stunning new collection of poems of transport and transcendence, African-American poet Nathaniel Mackey's "asthmatic song of aspiration" scuttles across cultures and histories—from America to Andalucía, from Ethiopia to Vienna—in a sexy, beautiful adaptive dance.

Part antiphonal rant, part rhythmic whisper, Nathaniel Mackey's new collection of poems, Splay Anthem, takes the reader to uncharted poetic spaces. Divided into three sections—"Braid," "Fray," and "Nub" (one referent Mackey notes in his stellar Introduction: "the imperial, flailing republic of Nub the United States has become, the shrunken place the earth has become, planet Nub")—Splay Anthem weaves together two ongoing serial poems Mackey has been writing for over twenty years, "Song of the Andoumboulou" and "Mu" (though "mu no more itself / than Andoumboulou"). In the cosmology of the Dogon of West Africa, the Andoumboulou are progenitor spirits, and the song of the Andoumboulou is a song addressed to the spirits, a funeral song, a song of rebirth. "Mu," too, splays with meaning: muni bird, Greek muthos, a Sun Ra tune, a continent once thought to have existed in the Pacific. With the vibrancy of a Miró painting, Mackey's poems trace the lost tribe of "we" through waking and dreamtime, through a multitude of geographies, cultures, histories, and musical traditions, as poetry here serves as the intersection of everything, myth's music, spirit lift.

The Great American Jazz Novel by Nathaniel Mackey, winner of the 2006 National Book Award, Bass Cathedral is volume 4 of the multi-part epistolary novel, From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate.

Los Angeles, October 1982: Molimo m'Atet, formerly known as the The Mystic Horn Society, is preparing to release its new album Orphic Bend. The members of the jazz ensemble—Aunt Nancy, Djamilaa, Drennette, Lambert, N., and Penguin—are witness to a strange occurrence: while listening to their test pressing, the moment Aunt Nancy's bass solo begins a balloon emerges from the vinyl, bearing a mysterious message: I dreamt you were gone . . .

Through letters N. writes to a figure called Angel of Dust, the ever-mutating story unfolds, leaving no musician or listener untouched. Thought balloons morph into mute-stereoptic emanations; N. encounters a master mouthpiece-maker; Drennette leaves Penguin dateless; Lambert's kicking it around with Melanie—much is abuzz but something else is happening to the ensemble. The music seems to be living them. N. suffers cowrie shell attacks and they are all stranded on an Orphic Shore. Socio-political forces are at play or has this always been the essence and accident of the music's resilience? And Hotel Didjeridoo must be resurrected, but how? Myth spins music spins thought spins sex—Mackey's post-bop boxless box set is, as the Utne Reader wrote, "Avant-garde literature you can love: an evolving multivolume novel of the jazz world that plays with language and ideas the way Thelonious Monk plays with flatted fifths."

In his first collection of stories, Ralph Lombreglia writes about being young and unsettled, about trying to connect and not always making it—or succeeding in startling ways.

"'Inn Essence,' the tale of a young American salad chef among a group of Thai waiters, is the highlight of this collection; other standouts include 'Purification,' in which a fishing trip becomes a metaphor for life, and 'Museum of Love,' a send-up of modern culture . . . Original, at times whimsical, the stories . . . are deft and biting entertainment." —Publishers Weekly

In Make Me Work, Lombreglia offers nine new stories, many of them first published in The New Yorker or The Atlantic. With a delightful spontaneity that belies meticulous craft, Lombreglia presents a kaleidoscopic array of characters—young and old, male and female—captured at surprising, revealing moments of their lives. In the title story, a man finds himself, while having his hair cut, at the mercy of the best friend he betrayed. In "Late Early Man," video producers stumble from the marvels of technology into the miracle of life; in the sequel, "Heavy Lifting," the process is unforgettably reversed. "A Half Hour with God's Heroes" portrays a sharp, earthy working-class mother who tries to use the powers of a saint to escape her delinquent son. And in "Piltdown Man, Later Proved to Be a Hoax," the mysteries of race and class confront two schoolboys who play at an insane asylum. Heartfelt and charming, funny and serious, Make Me Work is a dazzling performance by a writer with "an unerring sense of the ridiculous, and a very subtle tenderness, too" (Richard Bausch, USA Today).

In luminous prose, award-winning author Yiyun Li weaves together the lives of unforgettable characters who are forced to make moral choices, and choices for survival, in China in the late 1970s. As morning dawns on the provincial city of Muddy River, a spirited young woman, Gu Shan, once a devoted follower of Chairman Mao, has renounced her faith in Communism. Now a political prisoner, she is to be executed for her dissent. While Gu Shan’s distraught mother makes bold decisions, her father begins to retreat into memories. Neither of them imagines that their daughter’s death will have profound and far-reaching effects, in Muddy River and beyond. Among the characters affected are Kai, a beautiful radio announcer who is married to a man from a powerful family; Tong, a lonely seven-year-old boy; and Nini, a hungry young girl. Beijing is being rocked by the Democratic Wall Movement, an anti-Communist groundswell designed to move the country toward a more enlightened and open society, but the government backlash will be severe. In this spellbinding novel, the brilliant Yiyun Li gives us a powerful and beautiful portrait of human courage and despair in dramatic times.

Brilliant and original, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers introduces a remarkable new writer whose breathtaking stories are set in China and among Chinese Americans in the United States. In this rich, astonishing collection, Yiyun Li illuminates how mythology, politics, history, and culture intersect with personality to create fate. From the bustling heart of Beijing, to a fast-food restaurant in Chicago, to the barren expanse of Inner Mongolia, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers reveals worlds both foreign and familiar, with heartbreaking honesty and in beautiful prose.

“Immortality,” winner of The Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize for new writers, tells the story of a young man who bears a striking resemblance to a dictator and so finds a calling to immortality. In “The Princess of Nebraska,” a man and a woman who were both in love with a young actor in China meet again in America and try to reconcile the lost love with their new lives. “After a Life” illuminates the vagaries of marriage, parenthood, and gender, unfolding the story of a couple who keep a daughter hidden from the world. And in “A Thousand Years of Good Prayers,” in which a man visits America for the first time to see his recently divorced daughter, only to discover that all is not as it seems, Li boldly explores the effects of communism on language, faith, and an entire people, underlining transformation in its many meanings and incarnations. These and other daring stories form a mesmerizing tapestry of revelatory fiction by an unforgettable writer.