- Table View
- List View
One's Company: A Novel
by Ashley HutsonOne of the New Yorker's Best Books of 2022 So Far and BuzzFeed's Must-Read Summer Books For readers of Ottessa Moshfegh and Mona Awad, this fearless debut chronicles one woman’s escape into a world of obsessive imagination.Bonnie Lincoln just wants to be left alone. To come home from work, shut out the ghosts of some devastating losses, and unwind in front of the nostalgic, golden glow of her favorite TV show, Three’s Company.When Bonnie wins the lottery, a more grandiose vision—to completely shuck off her own troublesome identity—takes shape. She plans a drastic move to an isolated mountain retreat where she can re-create the iconic apartment set of Three’s Company and slip into the lives of its main characters: no-nonsense Janet Wood, pleasantly airheaded Chrissy Snow, and confident Jack Tripper. While her best friend, Krystal, tries to drag her back to her old life, Bonnie is determined to transcend pain, trauma, and the baggage of her past by immersing herself in the ultimate binge-watch.
Thank You, Jeeves (Jeeves and Wooster)
by P. G. Wodehouse"P. G. Wodehouse wrote the best English comic novels of the century." —Sebastian Faulks Bertram Wooster’s interminable banjolele playing has driven Jeeves, his otherwise steadfast gentleman's gentleman, to give notice. The foppish aristocrat cannot survive for long without his Shakespeare-quoting and problem-solving valet, however, and after a narrowly escaped forced marriage, a cottage fire, and a great butter theft, the celebrated literary odd couple are happy to return to the way things were.
The Blind Light: A Novel
by Stuart EversNamed a Best Historical Fiction of 2020 Pick by the New York Times A multigenerational story about two families bound together by the tides of history and the bittersweet complexity of love.England, 1959: two young soldiers—Drummond and Carter—form an intense and unlikely friendship at "Doom Town," a training center that recreates the aftermath of atomic warfare. The experience will haunt them the rest of their lives. Years later, Carter, now a high-ranking government official, offers working-class Drummond a way to protect himself and his wife, Gwen, should a nuclear strike occur. Their pact, kept secret, will have devastating consequences for the families they so wish to shield.The Blind Light is a grand, ambitious novel that spans decades, from the 1950s to the present. Told from the perspectives of Drum and Gwen, and later their children, Nate and Anneka, the story brilliantly captures the tenderness and envy of long relationships. As the families attempt to reform themselves, the pressures of the past are visited devastatingly on the present, affecting spouses, siblings, and friends.Stuart Evers writes with literary flair and intellect without ever abandoning the pleasures and emotional intensity of great storytelling. He explores the psychological legacy of nuclear war and social inequality yet finds a delicate beauty in the adventure of making a life in the ruins of the one you lived before.
Crime: A Novel
by Irvine Welsh“[An] inimitable combination of dark realism, satire and psychological insight . . . complicated, unsettling and at times beautiful."--Publishers Weekly, starred review In the wake of a nasty child-murder case, Detective Ray Lennox of the Edinburgh PD has suffered a full-scale breakdown. He’s placed on leave for mental retuning and takes off for a few days of sun in Miami. From there, Crime becomes an unmistakably Welshian blend of the macabre and the psychologically astute, as Lennox faces a dwindling supply of antidepressants, a bridal-magazine-toting fiancée, and cokehappy locals who lead him back into old habits and leave him to care for a child. Is he really in the right shape to be playing knight-errant to a terrified ten-year-old girl? Will his best instincts and worst judgments get them both killed, or find him the redemption he seeks?
The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs: A Novel
by Irvine Welsh"A family saga, a revenge fantasy, a Twilight Zone-esque parable, and, most importantly, a very fun read." —Entertainment Weekly This story of two men locked in a war of wills that threatens their very existence is vintage Irvine Welsh. Troubled restaurant inspector Danny Skinner is on a quest to find the mysterious father his mother will not identify. Unraveling this hidden information is the key to understanding the crippling compulsions that threaten to wreck his young life. His ensuing journey takes him from the festival city of Edinburgh to the foodie city of San Francisco. But the hard-drinking, womanizing Skinner has a strange nemesis in the form of mild-mannered fellow inspector Brian Kibby. It is Skinner's unfathomable, obsessive hatred of Kibby that takes over everything, threatening to destroy not only Skinner and his mission but also those he loves most dearly. When Kibby contracts a horrific, undiagnosable illness, Skinner understands that his destiny is inextricably bound to that of his hated rival, and he is faced with a terrible dilemma. Irvine Welsh's work is a transgressive parable about the great obsessions of our time: food, sex, and celebrity.
The West End Horror: A Posthumous Memoir of John H. Watson, M.D. (The Journals of John H. Watson, M.D. #0)
by Nicholas MeyerNew York Times Bestseller "As authentically, irresistibly gripping as anything Conan Doyle ever wrote…Don't miss it." —CosmopolitanMarch 1895. London. A month of strange happenings in the West End. First there is the bizarre murder of theater critic Jonathan McCarthy. Then the lawsuit against the Marquess of Queensberry for libel; the public is scandalized. Next, the ingenue at the Savoy is discovered with her throat slashed. And a police surgeon disappears, taking two corpses with him.Some of the theater district's most fashionable and creative luminaries have been involved: a penniless stage critic and writer named Bernard Shaw; Ellen Terry, the gifted and beautiful actress; a suspicious box office clerk named Bram Stoker; an aging matinee idol, Henry Irving; an unscrupulous publisher calling himself Frank Harris; and a controversial wit by the name of Oscar Wilde.Scotland Yard is mystified by what appear to be unrelated cases, but to Sherlock Holmes the matter is elementary: a maniac is on the loose. His name is Jack.
Lost Lake: Stories
by Mark Slouka“Relentlessly observant, miraculously expressive, these [stories] see through the mirrored surface into a hidden yet strangely intimate world.” —New York Times Book ReviewSet in a tiny Czech community on the shores of Lost Lake, these stories chronicle three generations of men and women under the spell of a landscape with a powerful history. Mark Slouka explores both the quiet glory of the natural world and the mysterious motions of the human spirit.A New York Times Notable Book A California Book Award Silver Medalist for Fiction
A State of Freedom: A Novel
by Neel MukherjeeA New York Times Notable Book of 2018 A devastating novel of multiple narratives, “a mark of Neel Mukherjee’s range and force and ambition” (New York Times Book Review).A State of Freedom wrests open the central, defining events of our century: displacement and migration. Five characters, in very different circumstances—from a domestic cook in Mumbai to a vagrant and his dancing bear—find out the meanings of dislocation and the desire to get more out of life.
The Metamorphosis: A New Translation
by Franz Kafka“This fine version, with David Cronenberg’s inspired introduction and the new translator’s beguiling afterword, is, I suspect, the most disturbing though the most comforting of all so far; others will follow, but don’t hesitate: this is the transforming text for you.”—Richard Howard Franz Kafka’s 1915 novella of unexplained horror and nightmarish transformation became a worldwide classic and remains a century later one of the most widely read works of fiction in the world. It is the story of traveling salesman Gregor Samsa, who wakes one morning to find himself transformed into a monstrous insect. This hugely influential work inspired George Orwell, Albert Camus, Jorge Louis Borges, and Ray Bradbury, while continuing to unsettle millions of readers. In her new translation of Kafka’s masterpiece, Susan Bernofsky strives to capture both the humor and the humanity in this macabre tale, underscoring the ways in which Gregor Samsa’s grotesque metamorphosis is just the physical manifestation of his longstanding spiritual impoverishment.
Grace Notes: A Novel
by Bernard MacLavertyShortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Prize The luminous novel by one of the finest living Irish writers, which Brian Moore has praised as "in every sense a triumph…moving throughout and ending triumphantly and joyously in its own special music."Grace Notes is a compact and altogether masterful portrait of a woman composer and the complex interplay between her life and her art. With superb artistry and startling intimacy, it brings us into the life of Catherine McKenna—estranged daughter, vexed lover, new mother, and musician making her mark in a male-dominated world. It is a book that the Virginia Woolf of A Room of One's Own would instantly understand.
Childish Loves: A Novel
by Benjamin MarkovitsThe last piece of a literary puzzle falls into place in the final novel of Benjamin Markovits’s Byron trilogy.When his former colleague Peter Sullivan dies, Ben Markovits inherits unpublished manuscripts about the life of Lord Byron—including the novels Imposture and A Quiet Adjustment. Ben’s own literary career is in the doldrums, and he tries to revive it by publishing and writing about his dead friend, whose reimagining of Byron’s lost memoirs—titled Childish Loves—may provide a key to Sullivan’s own life and tarnished reputation.Acting as a literary sleuth, Ben sorts through boxes of Sullivan’s writing; reads between the lines of his scandalous, Byron-inspired stories; meets with the Society for the Publication of the Dead; and tracks down people from Peter’s past in an effort to untangle rumor from reality. In the process, he crafts a masterful story-within-a-story that turns on uncomfortable questions about childhood and sexual awakening, innocence and attraction, while exploring the lives of three very different writers and their brushes with success and failure in both literature and life.
Come West and See: Stories
by Maxim LoskutoffAn NPR Best Book of 2018 "Devastating.…Grows increasingly bizarre and haunting until it’s left an indelible mark." —Janet Maslin, New York TimesIn an isolated region of Idaho, Montana, and eastern Oregon, an armed occupation of a wildlife refuge escalates into civil war. Against this backdrop, Maxim Loskutoff shatters the myths of the West: a lonesome trapper falls in love with a bear; a newly married woman hatches a plot to murder a tree; and an unemployed millworker joins a militia after returning home. Written with “blade-sharp prose” (Electric Literature), the twelve stories in this debut collection expose the simmering rage and resentments of small-town America “with extraordinary eloquence and compassion” (National Book Review).
Harmless Like You: A Novel
by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan“Rowan Hisayo Buchanan’s debut is a beautifully textured novel, befitting the story of an artist.” —Washington PostWritten in startlingly beautiful prose, Harmless Like You is set across New York, Connecticut, and Berlin. At its heart is Yuki Oyama, a Japanese girl fighting to make it as an artist, and her struggle with her decision to leave her two-year-old son, Jay. As an adult, Jay sets out to find his mother and confront her abandonment.
Wolves of Eden: A Novel
by Kevin McCarthy“Kevin McCarthy is in the company of masters like Patrick O’Brian and Hilary Mantel.… [A] shiningly humane novel.” —Stephen Harrigan, author of The Gates of the Alamo and A Friend of Mr. Lincoln1866, Dakota Territory. Red Cloud’s coalition of tribes is battling the U.S. Army to reclaim hunting grounds in the Powder River Valley. Against this background, Wolves of Eden sets four men on a deadly collision course in a narrative that explores the cruelty of warfare, the power of love and the resilience of the human spirit. Lieutenant Martin Molloy and his loyal orderly are sent west to investigate a triple murder at a frontier fort, and Irish immigrant brothers Thomas and Michael O’Driscoll, who survived the brutal frontlines of the Civil War, find themselves as both hunters and the hunted in another bloody campaign. Blending intimate historical detail and emotional acuity, Wolves of Eden is “a riveting and propulsive mystery” (Publishers Weekly).
Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex
by Mary RoachA New York Times Bestseller "Rich in dexterous innuendo, laugh-out-loud humor and illuminating fact. It’s compulsively readable." —Los Angeles Times Book ReviewIn Bonk, the best-selling author of Stiff turns her outrageous curiosity and insight on the most alluring scientific subject of all: sex. Can a person think herself to orgasm? Why doesn't Viagra help women—or, for that matter, pandas? Can a dead man get an erection? Is vaginal orgasm a myth? Mary Roach shows us how and why sexual arousal and orgasm—two of the most complex, delightful, and amazing scientific phenomena on earth—can be so hard to achieve and what science is doing to make the bedroom a more satisfying place.
Matters of Life & Death: Stories
by Bernard MacLaverty"MacLaverty's tales are poised and beautifully balanced, outward yet intimate, graced by both subtlety and substance."—The Independent A new book from Bernard MacLaverty is a cause for celebration, but Matters of Life and Death is more than that. It is the finest collection yet from a contemporary master of the form. Beginning with the sudden terror of a family caught up in shocking sectarian violence, and ending with the whiteout of an Iowa blizzard and the fear of losing your way very far from home, this collection is about bonds made and broken, secret and known. In the extraordinary story "Up the Coast," a landscape painter discovers a place that makes her, finally, feel whole, only to have that communion shattered by an arbitrary act of aggression that will resonate throughout her life. Written with effortless skill and empathy, these stories are hauntingly real. MacLaverty's perfect attention to every detail, every nuance of idiom and character, remakes the world for us here on the page.
The Director: A Novel
by David IgnatiusA New York Times Bestseller. “If you think cybercrime and potential worldwide banking meltdown is a fiction, read this sensational thriller.”—Bob Woodward, PoliticoGraham Weber has been the director of the CIA for less than a week when a Swiss kid in a dirty T-shirt walks into the American consulate in Hamburg and says the agency has been hacked, and he has a list of agents' names to prove it. This is the moment a CIA director most dreads. Like the new world of cyber-espionage from which it's drawn, The Director is a maze of double dealing, about a world where everything is written in zeroes and ones—and nothing can be trusted.
Ship Fever: Stories
by Andrea Barrett1996 National Book Award Winner for Fiction. The elegant short fictions gathered hereabout the love of science and the science of love are often set against the backdrop of the nineteenth century. Interweaving historical and fictional characters, they encompass both past and present as they negotiate the complex territory of ambition, failure, achievement, and shattered dreams. In "Ship Fever," the title novella, a young Canadian doctor finds himself at the center of one of history's most tragic epidemics. In "The English Pupil," Linnaeus, in old age, watches as the world he organized within his head slowly drifts beyond his reach. And in "The Littoral Zone," two marine biologists wonder whether their life-altering affair finally was worth it. In the tradition of Alice Munro and William Trevor, these exquisitely rendered fictions encompass whole lives in a brief space. As they move between interior and exterior journeys, "science is transformed from hard and known fact into malleable, strange and thrilling fictional material" (Boston Globe).
Joy in the Morning (Jeeves and Wooster)
by P. G. Wodehouse“To dive into a Wodehouse novel is to swim in some of the most elegantly turned phrases in the English language.”—Ben Schott Follow the adventures of Bertie Wooster and his gentleman’s gentleman, Jeeves, in this stunning new edition of one of the greatest comic novels in the English language. Steeple Bumphleigh is a very picturesque place. But for Bertie Wooster, it is a place to be avoided, containing not only the appalling Aunt Agatha but also her husband, the terrifying Lord Worplesdon. So when a certain amount of familial arm-twisting is applied, Bertie heads for the sticks in fear and trepidation despite the support of the irreplaceable Jeeves.
The Boy Who Loved Anne Frank: A Novel of Remembering and Forgetting
by Ellen Feldman"An appealing and inventive novel…original and cathartic." —Dana Kennedy, New York TimesOn February 16, 1944, Anne Frank recorded in her diary that Peter, whom she at first disliked and eventually came to love, had confided to her that if he got out alive, he would reinvent himself entirely. This novel is the story of what might have happened if the boy in hiding had survived to become a man.Peter arrives in America, the land of self-creation, and passes as a Christian. Successful in business and rich in love in the boom years of the 1950s, he thrives in the present, plans for the future, and has no past. But there is a cost to his charade. When The Diary of a Young Girl is published to worldwide acclaim, it triggers paralyzing memories of his experiences in the secret annex in Amsterdam. The diary is his story too, and once the floodgate of memory opens, his life spirals out of control.Based on extensive research of Peter van Pels and the strange and disturbing life Anne Frank's diary took on after her death, this is a novel about the memory of death, the death of memory, and the inescapability of the past. Reading group guide included.
The Bear Comes Home: A Novel
by Rafi ZaborWinner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction "A hilarious, richly imagined bear's eye view of love, music, alienation, manhood and humanity…that recalls Pynchon at his most controlled." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)The hero of this sensational debut novel is an alto-sax virtuoso trying to evolve a personal style out of Coltrane and Rollins. He also happens to be a walking, talking, Blake- and Shakespeare-quoting bear whose musical, spiritual, and romantic adventures add up to perhaps the best novel, ursine or human, ever written about jazz.
Fateful Mornings: A Henry Farrell Novel (The Henry Farrell Series #2)
by Tom Bouman“A terrific writer. Definitely one to keep an eye on.”—Dennis LehaneIn Wild Thyme, Pennsylvania, summer has brought Officer Henry Farrell nothing but trouble. Heroin has arrived with a surge in crime. When local carpenter Kevin O’Keeffe admits that he shot a man and that his girlfriend, Penny, is missing, the search leads the small-town cop to an industrial vice district across state lines that has already ensnared more than one of his neighbors. With the patience of a hunter, Farrell ventures into a world of shadow beyond the fields and forests of home.Fateful Mornings is the second book in the Henry Farrell series. Tom Bouman's Officer Farrell returns in The Bramble and the Rose.
Gone So Long: A Novel
by Andre Dubus III"Taut with tension.… [E]nding with a hint of hope."—Rob Merrill, Associated PressCathartic, affirming, and steeped in the empathy and precise observations of character for which Dubus is celebrated, Gone So Long explores how the wounds of the past afflict the people we become.Gone So Long is a riveting family drama about an ex-con who did time for murder, the estranged daughter he hasn’t seen in forty years, and the grandmother angry enough to kill him. A profound exploration of the struggle between the selves we wish to be, and the ones—shaped by chance and circumstance, as well as character—that we can’t escape, it confirms Andre Dubus’s reputation as a novelist whose “compassion is unsentimental and unblinking, total and unwavering” (Paul Harding).
Uncle Dynamite
by P. G. Wodehouse“P.G. Wodehouse is still the funniest writer ever to have put words on paper.”—Hugh Laurie Uncle Fred’s nephew Pongo has just smashed the prized statue of his lady love’s father. His troubles multiply as the replacement bust is revealed to be a smuggling vessel filled with jewels. This bust busting gut buster has Uncle Fred and Wodehouse himself at the very height of their work.
Inheritance: A Novel
by Lan Samantha ChangSpanning seven decades and set in China and America against a backdrop of political chaos and social upheaval, this arresting debut novel tells a timeless story of familial devotion undermined by deceit and passion and rebuilt by memory.In 1931, abandoned after their mother's suicide, the young Junan and her sister, Yinan, make a pact never to leave each other. The two girls are inseparable—until Junan enters into an arranged marriage and finds herself falling in love with her soldier husband. When the Japanese invade China, Junan and her husband are separated. Unable to follow him to the wartime capital, Junan makes the fateful decision to send her sister after him. Inheritance traces the echo of betrayal through generations and explores the elusive nature of trust.