The second novel in The Comet Cycle, a grippingly original sci-fi series in which a passing comet has caused irreversible change to the growth of fungi, spawning a dangerous, invasive species in the Pacific Northwest that threatens to control the lives of humans and animals alike.
Mick Hardin, a combat veteran now working as an Army CID agent, is home on leave. His wife is about to give birth, but they aren't getting along, and his sister, newly risen to sheriff, has just landed her first murder case. The Killing Hills is a novel of betrayal—sexual, personal, within and between the clans that populate the hollers—and the way it so often shades into violence. Chris Offutt delivers a dark, witty, and absolutely compelling story of murder and honor, with an investigator-hero unlike any in fiction.
The stories in Said Sayrafiezadeh’s new collection are set in a contemporary America full of people contending with internal struggles—a son’s fractured relationship with his father, death of a mother, loss of a job, drug addiction—even as they are battered by larger, invisible economic and political forces. Searing, intimate, slyly funny, and marked by a deep imaginative sympathy, American Estrangement is a testament to our addled times.
An explosive, breakout speculative thriller in which a powerful new metal arrives on Earth in the wake of a meteor shower, triggering a massive new "gold rush" in the Midwest and turning life as we know it on its head. The first of a cycle of novels set in a shared universe.
Coming of age as a free-born Black girl in Reconstruction-era Brooklyn, Libertie Sampson was all too aware that her mother, a practicing physician, had a vision for their future together: Libertie would go to medical school and practice alongside her. But Libertie feels stifled by her mother’s choices and is hungry for something else. As she tries to parse what freedom means for a Black woman, Libertie struggles with where she might find it.
Arezu, an Iranian American teenager, goes to Spain to meet her estranged father. He never shows up, instead sending her an allowance, care of an older Lebanese man. As the week progresses, Arezu is drawn into a mercurial, charged, and catastrophic affair, shattering her on the cusp of adulthood. A compulsive, unsettling, and bravely observed exploration of violence and eroticism, and the profound intimacy born of the deepest pain.
In these nine pieces, Beard investigates love and betrayal, grief and survival in the precise, searingly personal language for which she is beloved. These genre-defying works capture both the quietly luminous moments of daily existence and those of life-and-death decision, showing a pioneering author at the pinnacle of her talent.
These gripping stories find inspiration in news headlines about recent events. Ordinary people negotiate their tentative paths through wildfire, mass shootings, bureaucratic incompetence, and heedless government policies with vicious impacts on the innocent and helpless. As a whole, the collection forms a troubling yet irresistible mirror of our time.
In her funny, idiosyncratic, and propulsive novel, written as a series of Instagram essays, Snapchat freakouts, rejected Yelp reviews, Facebook screeds, and SmugMug streams-of-consciousness merging volcanic confession with eagle-eyed art criticism, Yxta Maya Murray shows us the painful but joyous development of a mid-career artist whose world implodes just as she has a breakthrough.
A woman describes a series of encounters in the ordinary course of her life: running into an ex at a public forum, an Airbnb owner unsure how to interact with guests, a friend of her youth now hospitalized with cancer. The woman finds each person needs the same thing: an audience for their experiences.
