In these fourteen essays, Fraser focuses on women in love affairs, friendships, marriages, and families; in relation to one another and to the talented men who so often rendered them invisible. In Ornament and Silence we see Virginia Woolf, haunted and eventually destroyed by the sexual secrets of her childhood. We meet Flaubert's theatrically importunate mistress, Louise Colet, the one woman who could briefly slip past the master's misogyny. Fraser offers vibrant portraits of the Russian novelist Nina Berberova and the English naturalist Miriam Rothschild. And here is Fraser herself, learning her craft at The New Yorker, tending her English garden and—on every page—delighting us with the manifold felicities of her prose.

From the author of Freedom, a richly realistic and darkly hilarious masterpiece about a family breakdown in an age of easy fixes. After fifty years as a wife and mother, Enid Lambert is ready to have some fun. Unfortunately her husband, Alfred, is losing his sanity, and their children have long since fled for the catastrophes of their own lives. As Alfred's condition worsens and the Lamberts are forced to face their secrets and failures, Enid sets her heart on one last family Christmas. Bringing the old world of civic virtue and sexual inhibition into violent collision with the era of hands-off parenting, do-it-yourself mental healthcare and globalised greed, The Corrections confirms Jonathan Franzen as one of the most brilliant interpreters of the American soul.

In his first novel since The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen has given us an epic of contemporary love and marriage. Freedom comically and tragically captures the temptations and burdens of liberty: the thrills of teenage lust, the shaken compromises of middle age, the wages of suburban sprawl, the heavy weight of empire. In charting the mistakes and joys of Walter and Patty Berglund as they struggle to learn how to live in an ever more confusing world, Franzen has produced an indelible and deeply moving portrait of our time.

The well-meaning protagonists of Brief Encounters with Che Guevara are caught—to both disastrous and hilarious effect—in the maelstrom of political and social upheaval surrounding them. Ben Fountain's prize-winning debut speaks to the intimate connection between the foreign, the familiar, and the inescapably human.

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and a finalist for the National Book Award!

From the PEN/Hemingway Award-winning author of the critically acclaimed short story collection, Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, comes Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk ("The Catch-22 of the Iraq War" —Karl Marlantes). A razor-sharp satire set in Texas during America's war in Iraq, it explores the gaping national disconnect between the war at home and the war abroad. Ben Fountain’s remarkable debut novel follows the surviving members of the heroic Bravo Squad through one exhausting stop in their media-intensive "Victory Tour" at Texas Stadium, football mecca of the Dallas Cowboys, their fans, promoters, and cheerleaders.

A superb portrait of family life, The Tender Land is a love story unlike any other. The Finnerans—parents and five children, Irish Catholics in St. Louis—are a seemingly unexceptional family. Theirs is a story seldom told, yet it makes manifest how rich and truly extraordinary the ordinary daily experience we take for granted is. In quietly luminous language, Kathleen Finneran renders the emotional, spiritual, and physical terrain of family life—its closeness and disconnection, its intimacy and estrangement—and pays tribute to the love between parents and children, brothers and sisters.

Ultimately, it is this love that sustains the Finnerans, for at the heart of The Tender Land lies a catastrophic event: the suicide at fifteen of the author's younger brother after a public humiliation in junior high school. A gentle, handsome boy, Sean was a straight-A student and gifted athlete, especially treasured by every member of his family. Masterfully, the book interweaves past and present, showing how inseparable they are, and how the long accumulation of love and memory helps the Finnerans survive their terrible loss. The Tender Land is a testament to the always complicated ways in which we love one another. In the end, the Finnerans are a family much like the reader's own: like every other family, like no other family.

The narrator returns to his small Southern hometown to attempt a reconciliation with his estranged father and to determine what to do about the remains of a lover, whose ashes he had secretly interred in the ancestral cemetery a year earlier.

When this novel's eager protagonist, Jerry Chiffon, dressed in a red ladies' suit and carrying a fake Chanel purse, tries to assassinate a right-wing United States senator in Branch Creek, North Carolina, he succeeds in putting the tiny town on the national map. Have You Heard introduces a host of inimitable characters with endearing foibles, not-so-endearing foibles, and closely held, destructive secrets.

A new collection from a Whiting award and National Poetry Series winner. Thomas Lux has called Roger Fanning "an American original . . . [whose] poems are so pure, so piercing, so simple, so distilled that reading him is like taking a drunk-with-language dive into a moonlit lake on a night you believe you will live forever!"

Fanning writes surprising and evocative poems that are filled with humor and ingenuity; Mary Karr says he "tunes us in to those minuscule instants of revelation that can keep life from being a long zombie convention." This new collection of poems, Fanning's first in more than ten years, in part chronicles a period of time when he suffered a break with reality, and continues his investigations into the drudgeries, the disappointments, and the joy of our daily lives.

Roger Fanning is a junk magician. In Homesick, his second book, he repeatedly drains popular culture of its pop and fizz and transforms it into poems that are substantial, surprising, and evocative. In "Lord of the Jungle, Larva-Nude," Tarzan stands revealed as an adolescent, self-conscious about his lack of body hair. In "Besides Dracula's Castle a Black Pool"—a sly critique of capitalism's excess—Nosferatu becomes "a slender old bachelor with his hair slicked back." For all his humor and ingenuity, Fanning never loses touch with the ache that underlies our daily lives.