Former best friends Scott and Errol meet unexpectedly at Oso Lake, a remote Canadian fly-fishing paradise where, five years before, fresh out of college, they had the time of their lives. Their situations, though, have changed, their high hopes quashed by workaday realities and, in Errol's case, marriage to Claire, who has come with him trying to stave off divorce.
N. is a novella in the Spatial Species series, edited by Youmna Chlala and Ken Chen, which investigates the ways we activate space through language. Expertly employing historical surrealism to critique orientalism, megalomaniac masculinity, and colonialism, Van der Vliet Oloomi rages against the abandonment of the natural world in favor of digital realms with satirical humor and restless energy.
Even through the roar and effervescence of the 1920s, everyone in New York has heard of Benjamin and Helen Rask. He is a legendary Wall Street tycoon; she is the brilliant daughter of eccentric aristocrats. Together, they have risen to the very top of a world of seemingly endless wealth. But at what cost have they acquired their immense fortune?
Dana Potowski is a restaurant critic, food writer, and a longtime member of a progressive Unitarian Universalist congregation in Southern California. Under pressure to find her next book idea, she agrees and resolves to secretly pen a memoir, with recipes, about the experience. That memoir, Search, follows the travails of the church committee and their candidates for a new minister--and becomes its own media sensation.
Joan is a thirtysomething ICU doctor at a busy NYC hospital. The daughter of Chinese parents who came to the US to secure the American dream for their children, she is intensely devoted to her work, happily solitary, successful. She does sometimes wonder where her true roots lie: at the hospital, where her white coat makes her feel needed, or with her family, who try to shape her life by their own cultural and social expectations.
The truths revealed and the lives upended in the 13 stories that make up Yannick Murphy’s By the Time You Read This are at once singularly foreign and uncannily familiar. A wife pens a series of suicide notes that verge on the comic, hovering between the tyrannical and the absurd. A young girl left with caretakers in New York draws on her potent imagination with consequences in real life that are both liberating and disastrous. In a college application essay a young woman finally begins to make sense of the troubling vicissitudes of her existence. Murphy’s keen rendering of these disparate, complex lives illuminate in ways both quiet and startling our capacity for deliverance and devastation through daring acts of self-invention.
The third and final book in Percy’s innovative and acclaimed Comet Cycle, The Sky Vault follows the aftermath of an airplane that goes missing over Fairbanks, Alaska, in the wake of the comet, and a teenager’s search for answers about his father's final moments aboard the flight.
A collection of short stories told in the intimate voices of unique and endearing characters of all ages, exploring desire and heartache, loss and discovery, moments of jolting violence and the inexorable tug toward love at all costs. Five Tuesdays in Winter showcases Lily King’s spare and stunning prose and gift for creating lasting and treasured characters.
To his neighbors on 125th street, Ray Carney is an upstanding furniture salesman making a decent life for himself and his family. Few people know he descends from a line of uptown hoods and crooks, and that his façade of normalcy has more than a few cracks in it. Cracks that are getting bigger all the time. Harlem Shuffle is a family saga masquerading as a crime novel, a hilarious morality play, a social novel about race and power, and ultimately a love letter to Harlem.
By turns comic and harrowing, a tour-de-force of interwoven perspectives and sustained suspense, Crossroads is the first volume of a trilogy, A Key to All Mythologies, that will span three generations and trace the inner life of our culture through the present day. Set in a historical moment of moral crisis, and reaching back to the early twentieth century, Crossroads serves as a foundation for a sweeping investigation of human mythologies, as the Hildebrandt family navigates the political, intellectual, and social crosscurrents of the past fifty years.
