Early ReviewersBellevue Literary Press

There is a wonderfully weird but real world out there, and we are a part of it. It is time for physics to take life seriously.

Can we ever truly comprehend the universe before we fully understand consciousness and the wonders, and limits, of the mind? Ulf Danielsson, an acclaimed theoretical physicist who has dedicated his career to probing the deepest mysteries of nature, thinks not. As he dismantles the arguments of esteemed mathematicians and scientists, who would substitute their mathematical models for reality and equate the mind to a computer, he makes a lucid and passionate case that it is nature, full of beauty and meaning, which must compel us. In challenging established worldviews, he also takes a fresh look at major philosophical debates, including the notion of free will.

Witty and fearless, The World Itself is essential reading for anyone curious about the profound questions surrounding life, the universe, and everything.

“The World Itself offers a bold perspective on mathematics, physics, and the nature of reality. There’s much I agree with and less that I don’t, but Ulf Danielsson, a leading theoretical physicist, proves himself an insightful and patient guide through some of the universe’s deepest mysteries.” —Brian Greene, author of The Fabric of the Cosmos and Until the End of Time

“Engrossing. . . . Danielsson’s clarity of thought and expression and his use of illuminating literary and historical references are equal to the quality of his writing. Science ‘popularizing’ doesn’t get much more comprehensible, or provocative, than this.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Danielsson takes readers on an odyssey through the width and depth of his field, and it is truly a fascinating journey. Touching on subjects as diverse as evolutionary biology, philosophy, and even popular culture, Danielsson makes his topics both appreciably substantial and approachable.” —Library Journal (starred review)

Engaging, funny, and unflinching essays about coming of age as a transplant patient and living each day as a gift

Adina Talve-Goodman was born with a congenital heart condition and survived multiple operations over the course of her childhood, including a heart transplant at age nineteen. In these seven essays, she tells the story of her chronic illness and her youthful search for love and meaning, never forgetting that her adult life is tied to the loss of another person—the donor of her transplanted heart.

Whether writing about the experience of taking her old heart home from the hospital (and passing it around the Thanksgiving table), a summer camp for young transplant patients, or a memorable night on the town, Talve-Goodman’s writing is filled with curiosity, humor, and compassion. Published posthumously, Your Hearts, Your Scars is the work of a writer wise beyond her years, a moving reflection on chance and gratitude, and a testament to hope and kindness.

“Adina was a brilliant writer, and these pages are imbued with her exuberance, her sharp humor, and both versions of her spectacular heart.” —Ann Napolitano, author of A Good Hard Look and Dear Edward

“This book is so full of life that it’s hard to believe the amazing young woman who wrote it is no longer walking among us. Adina has left an indelible mark on this world. Her extraordinary gifts, her irrepressible spirit, live on.” —Dani Shapiro, author of Inheritance and Signal Fires

From internationally celebrated Eduardo Halfon comes a new installment in his hero’s nomadic odyssey as he searches for answers surrounding his grandfather’s abduction

In Canción, Eduardo Halfon’s eponymous wanderer is invited to a Lebanese writers’ conference in Japan, where he reflects on his Jewish grandfather’s multifaceted identity. To understand more about the cold, fateful day in January 1967 when his grandfather was abducted by Guatemalan guerillas, Halfon searches his childhood memories. Soon, chance encounters around the world lead to more clues about his grandfather’s captors, including a butcher nicknamed “Canción” (or song). As a brutal and complex history emerges against the backdrop of the Guatemalan Civil War, Halfon finds echoes in the stories of a woman he meets in Japan whose grandfather survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.

Through exquisite prose and intricate storytelling, Halfon exposes the atrocities of war and the effect that silence and extreme violence have on family and identity.

“Extraordinary. . . . Establish[es] an affinity between fiction and autobiography that unsettles generic divisions.” —World Literature Today

“Another minimasterpiece by a master of the form.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

An odyssey of operatic proportions, featuring an obsession-fueled taxi driver

After Lucía loses her job at an IT firm, she has a vision of her future career as a taxi driver, brought on by the intoxicating opera floating through her apartment’s air vent. She obtains her taxi license and meets the neighbor responsible for the music. Calaf is the man’s name, which also happens to be the name of the character in Puccini’s Turandot and the bird Lucía received on her tenth birthday from her long-since-dead mother. When he moves out of her building, Lucía becomes obsessed, driving through Madrid and searching for him on every corner, meeting intriguing people along the way. What follows is a phantasmagoria of coincidence, betrayal, and revenge, featuring Millás’s singular dark humor.

“Wildly carnal. . . . Everything impresses in this darkly iridescent, utterly captivating flight.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Masterly... A disquieting fantasy of the Kafkian variety.” —Library Journal

“Memorable... A strange and often transgressive exploration of art and intimacy.” —Kirkus Reviews

Walt Whitman and Louisa May Alcott meet the horrors of the Civil War as they minister to its casualties

After the Union Army’s defeat at Fredericksburg in 1862, Walt Whitman and Louisa May Alcott converge on Washington to nurse the sick, wounded, and dying. Whitman was a man of many contradictions: egocentric yet compassionate, impatient with religiosity yet moved by the spiritual in all humankind, bigoted yet soon to become known as the great poet of democracy. Alcott was an intense, intellectual, independent woman, an abolitionist and suffragist, who was compelled by financial circumstance to publish saccharine magazine stories yet would go on to write the enduring and beloved Little Women. As Lock captures the musicality of their unique voices and their encounters with luminaries ranging from Lincoln to battlefield photographer Mathew Brady to reformer Dorothea Dix, he deftly renders the war’s impact on their personal and artistic development.

Inspired by Whitman’s poem The Wound-Dresser and Alcott’s Hospital Sketches, the ninth stand-alone book in The American Novels series is a masterful dual portrait of two iconic authors who took different paths toward chronicling a country beset by prejudice and at war with itself.

“Gripping... Distinctive... A haunting novel that offers candid portraits of literary legends.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Lock captures the strong personalities of Whitman and Alcott without glossing over their flaws in this fascinating snapshot of history.” —Library Journal

An incomparable storyteller serves up an enchanting concoction of art, love, and longing

In fifteen masterful stories, Frederic Tuten entertains questions of existential magnitude, pervasive yearning, and the creative impulse. A wealthy older woman reflects on her relationship with her drowned husband, a painter, as she awaits her own watery demise. An exhausted artist, feeling stuck, reads a book of criticism about allegory and symbolism before tossing her paintings out the window. Writing a book about the lives of artists he admires—Cezanne, Monet, Rousseau—a man imagines how each vignette could be a life lesson for his wife, the artist he perhaps admires the most.

Whether set in Tuten’s beloved Lower East Side, Rome’s Borghese Gardens, or a French seaside resort, these stories shift seamlessly between the poignancy of memory into the logic of fairytales or dreams, demonstrating Tuten’s exceptional ability to transmute his passion for art and life to the page.

“Frederic Tuten’s stories are filled with art, dreams, yearning, and a past that he captures beautifully and deftly and then lets go. The Bar at Twilight is a wonderful, evocative collection.” —Meg Wolitzer, author of The Interestings and The Female Persuasion

A young woman discovers what lurks beneath the system that anointed her among the best and brightest of her generation in this accomplished debut novel

Laura, a student from a modest background, escapes her small town to join the ranks of the academic elite on a Weatherfield fellowship to study at Oxford University. She enthusiastically throws herself into her coursework, yet she is never able to escape a feeling of unease and dislocation among her fellow chosen “students of promise and ambition.”

Years later, back in the United States with a PhD and dissertation on Henry James, she loses her job as an adjunct professor and reconnects with the Weatherfield Foundation. Commissioned to write a history for its centennial, she becomes obsessed by the Gilded Age origins of the Weatherfield fortune, rooted in the exploitation and misery of sugar production. As she is lured back into abandoned friendships within the glimmering group, she discovers hidden aspects of herself and others that point the way to a terrifying freedom.

“A smart, razor-sharp exploration of the precarious island of academic life and the cold unforgiving waters that surround it.” —Jenny Offill, author of Dept. of Speculation and Weather

“Phillips’s portrait of a stalled would-be academic is thrillingly intimate and ambitious in its scope, evoking at turns Rachel Cusk, Lynn Steger Strong’s Want, and Christine Smallwood’s The Life of the Mind. Deadpan and dread-filled, shadowed by the specters of war and late capitalism, Benefit probes both the futility and necessity of intellectual work, all in the wry, wise voice of an uncommonly clear-eyed friend.” —Jessica Winter, author of Break in Case of Emergency and The Fourth Child

A virtuosic debut from a gifted violinist searching for a new mode of artistic becoming

How does time shape consciousness and consciousness, time? Do we live in time, or does time live in us? And how does music, with its patterns of rhythm and harmony, inform our experience of time? Uncommon Measure explores these questions from the perspective of a young Korean American who dedicated herself to perfecting her art until performance anxiety forced her to give up the dream of becoming a concert solo violinist. Anchoring her story in illuminating research in neuroscience and quantum physics, Hodges traces her own passage through difficult family dynamics, prejudice, and enormous personal expectations to come to terms with the meaning of a life reimagined—one still shaped by classical music but moving toward the freedom of improvisation.

“Hodges debuts with a literary mosaic of invention, inquiry, and wonder that interrogates classical music, quantum entanglement, the Tiger Mother stereotype, and the fluidity of time. . . . A luminous meditation on the ways in which art, freedom, and identity intertwine. This impresses at every turn.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Masterful. . . . [Hodges’s] writing is deeply intelligent and exquisitely personal, expertly balancing emotional vulnerability with trenchant analysis, and her lyrical prose and clarity of thought render each page a pleasure to read.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

In a fusion of fact and fiction, nineteenth-century women institutionalized as hysterics reveal what history ignored “Where are the hysterics, those magnificent women of former times?” wrote Jacques Lacan. Long history’s ghosts, marginalized and dispossessed due to their gender and class, they are reimagined by Maud Casey as complex, flesh-and-blood people with stories to tell. These linked, evocative prose portraits, accompanied by period photographs and medical documents both authentic and invented, poignantly restore the humanity to the nineteenth-century female psychiatric patients confined in Paris’s Salpêtrière hospital and reduced to specimens for study by the celebrated neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot and his male colleagues. “City of Incurable Women is a brilliant exploration of the type of female bodily and psychic pain once commonly diagnosed as hysteria—and the curiously hysterical response to it commonly exhibited by medical men. It is a novel of powerful originality, riveting historical interest, and haunting lyrical beauty.” —Sigrid Nunez, author of The Friend and What Are You Going Through “Enlightening. . . . [City of Incurable Women] defies convention and revels in searing, gorgeous language.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

The first English-language story collection from “one of Iran’s most important living fiction writers” (Guardian) In Seasons of Purgatory, the fantastical and the visceral merge in tales of tender desire and collective violence, the boredom and brutality of war, and the clash of modern urban life and rural traditions. Mandanipour, banned from publication in his native Iran, vividly renders the individual consciousness in extremis from a variety of perspectives: young and old, man and woman, conscript and prisoner. While delivering a ferocious social critique, these stories are steeped in the poetry and stark beauty of an ancient land and culture. “While the turmoil and danger of everyday life in Iran are the backdrop, Mandanipour focuses on the personal struggles of the characters and their hardscrabble lives. . . . These haunting, urgent works are as nuanced and provocative as the lives they depict.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) “Dostoyevskian in their density and black humor, Mandanipour’s stories capture the Iranian experience of constant upheaval in a brilliant translation that allows the English-speaking world to experience this gem of Iranian literature.” —Booklist

A marriage is transformed when the new nanny arrives Martin, a market analyst, and Lily, a corporate attorney, have a life that many would envy—they share an expensive New York apartment with their twin toddlers, sample the delicacies of Manhattan’s finest restaurants, and take Caribbean vacations. But when the couple’s nanny announces her imminent departure, they panic: how will they ever find a replacement capable of managing their spirited boys? Enter Maeve, a young Irish émigré. Neither of them imagines how indispensable she will become, either to the household or to their marriage. As the family’s domestic bliss takes an unexpected turn, a different type of intimacy evolves, leading to an explosive finale. A captivating, trenchant portrait of class and sexual dynamics, Look at Us reveals just how fragile our social arrangements really are. “Charged with erotic intensity. . . . Toma draws his world with Cheeverian nuance and flair; he’s deeply insightful about the new American culture of ‘watchers’—but to me his greatest skill is his ability to summon pure terror.” —George Dawes Green, founder of The Moth and author of The Caveman’s Valentine, The Juror, and Ravens

Nathaniel Hawthorne pens a new tale to exact revenge on his ancestor, a notorious judge of the Salem witch trials Best known for his novel The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne was burdened by familial shame, which began with his great-great-grandfather John Hathorne, the infamously unrepentant Salem witch trial judge. In this, the eighth stand-alone book in The American Novels series, we witness Hawthorne writing a tale entitled Tooth of the Covenant, in which he sends his fictional surrogate, Isaac Page, back to the year 1692 to save Bridget Bishop, the first person executed for witchcraft, and rescue the other victims from execution. But when Page puts on Hathorne’s spectacles, his worldview is transformed and he loses his resolve. As he battles his conscience, he finds that it is his own life hanging in the balance. An ingenious and profound investigation into the very notion of universal truth and morality, Tooth of the Covenant probes storytelling’s depths to raise history’s dead and assuage the persistent ghost of guilt. “A distinctive and ambitious foray into literary history.” —Kirkus Reviews

Four seasons of immersion in New England’s Great Marsh “Like Wendell Berry and Rachel Carson, Hanlon is a true poet-ecologist, sharing in exquisitely resonant prose her patient observations of nature’s most intimate details. As she and her husband, through summer and snow, swim their local creeks and estuaries, we marvel at the timeless yet fragile terrain of both marshlands and marriage. This is the book to awaken all of us, right now, to how our coastline is changing and what it means for our future.” —Julia Glass, author of Three Junes “Written with a swimmer’s spirit, a naturalist’s eye, and an ecologist’s heart, this book took me to places I have never been. I loved it!” —Lynne Cox, author of Swimming to Antarctica In Swimming to the Top of the Tide, Patricia Hanlon writes, “Like the Velveteen Rabbit, perhaps, places become real when they are loved.” In this debut memoir from a visual artist and citizen scientist, Hanlon details her experience swimming New England’s Great Marsh daily—through all four seasons. At once intimate and scientific, lyrical and inspirational, Hanlon bears witness to the vitality of the watersheds, their essential role in the natural world, and the responsibility of those who love them to contribute to their sustainability.

Comedy and tragedy collide in stories of family life in Soviet Russia and the complexities of the immigrant experience “Mikhail Iossel is an intense and thoughtful force for decency in the world.” —George Saunders “Love Like Water, Love Like Fire is an extraordinary book: funny and profound, moving and provocative. Rarely has life in the former USSR (or anywhere, for that matter) been portrayed with such a rich admixture of soaring observation and finely rendered detail. This is a gorgeously constructed collection by one of our wittiest and most insightful writers.” —Molly Antopol “With an ear for the clumsiness of Russian bureaucratic nomenclature, an eye for Kafkaesque humiliations, and a heart that embraces all the paradoxes of being a Soviet Jew, Iossel casts a spell over the reader. Reading like Sholem Aleichem updated by Bruce Jay Friedman, these stories reflect the exciting evolution of Russian Jewish literature.” —Publishers Weekly

An atmospheric debut novel about one lost young woman’s search for another Elena, struggling with memory loss due to a trauma that has unmoored her sense of self, deserts graduate school and a long-term relationship to accept a bizarre proposition from an estranged family friend in Paris: she will search for a young woman, Ella, who went missing six years earlier in Thailand, by rewriting her journals. As she delves deeper into Ella’s story, Elena begins to lose sight of her own identity and drift dangerously toward self-annihilation. Her Here is an existential detective story with a shocking denouement that plumbs the creative and destructive powers of narrative itself. “Dennis is in possession of hypnotic narrative gifts and a ferocious intellect.” —Rebecca Makkai, author of The Great Believers “In Her Here, Dennis has written a metaphysical investigation that is also a wonderfully personal account of a daughter coming to terms with the loss of her mother, and a mother coming to terms with the loss of her daughter. As Elena conjures Ella’s last days, the richly imagined narrative moves back and forth between Paris and Thailand, carrying both characters and readers to a vivid and suspenseful conclusion.” —Margot Livesey, author of The Flight of Gemma Hardy and The Boy in the Field

Global capitalism fails young Barcelona couples in this dynamic English-language debut What happens when the hopes of a generation are dashed by austerity policies and underemployment? Come On Up is a group portrait of contemporary Barcelona, beaten by the economic crisis and divided by a secessionist movement. Always witty, often absurdist, these stories offer a mesmerizing glimpse into the daily lives of couples, families, and neighbors living the new normal of the 21st century. “Nopca’s stories, written with clarity and flair, are smart and modern, filled with sharply observed detail. They capture the unease of the times and the flux of contemporary life in Barcelona with wit, wisdom, moments of pure hilarity, and a mixture of sympathy and dark laughter.” —Colm Tóibín, author of Brooklyn and House of Names “The day will come when there’ll be no need to keep repeating how Nopca’s talent and his corrosive humor have exploded and electrified the literature of Spain: it will be common knowledge.” —Enrique Vila-Matas, author of Bartleby & Co. and Mac’s Problem

A shattering biographical novel of J.D. Salinger in combat “[A] literary tour de force. . . . Charyn vividly portrays [J.D. Salinger’s] journey from slick short story writer to suffering artist. The winning result humanizes a legend.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) J.D. Salinger, mysterious author of The Catcher in the Rye, is remembered today as a reclusive misanthrope. Jerome Charyn’s Salinger is a young American WWII draftee assigned to the Counter Intelligence Corps, a band of secret soldiers who trained with the British. A rifleman and an interrogator, he witnessed all the horrors of war. After the war, maladjusted to civilian life, he lived like a “spook,” with invisible stripes on his shoulder, the ghosts of the murdered inside his head, and stories to tell. Grounded in biographical fact and reimagined as only Charyn could, Sergeant Salinger is an astonishing portrait of a devastated young man on his way to becoming the mythical figure behind a novel that has marked generations.

The aesthetic adventures of a mad mycologist Aseroë, the mushroom, as object of fascination. First observed in Tasmania and South Africa, it appeared suddenly in France around 1920. It is characterized by its stench and, at maturity, its grotesque beauty. Aseroë, the word, as incantation. Can a word create a world? It does, here. François Dominique is a conjurer, who through verbal sorcery unleashes the full force of language, while evoking the essential rupture between the word and the object. An impossible endeavor, perhaps, but one at the very heart of literature. The narrator of Aseroë wanders medieval streets and dense forests, portrait galleries, and rare bookshops. As he explores the frontiers of language, the boundaries of science, art, and alchemy melt away, and the mundane is overtaken by the bizarre. Inhabited by creatures born in darkness, both terrible and alluring, Aseroë is ultimately a meditation on memory and forgetting, creation, and oblivion. “A singular novel.” —Lydia Davis, author of Can’t and Won’t and Essays One “Full of wonder. . . . Aseroë is a lyrical contemplation of how words affect reality.” —Foreword Reviews

A masterpiece of eco-fiction from an acclaimed German author making his English-language debut An aging botanist withdraws to the seclusion of his family’s vacation home in the German countryside. In his final days, he realizes that his life’s work of scientific classification has led him astray from the hidden secrets of the natural world. As his body slows and his mind expands, he recalls his family’s escape from budding fascism in Germany, his father’s need to prune and control, and his tender moments with first loves. But as his disintegration into moss begins, his fascination with botany culminates in a profound understanding of life’s meaning and his own mortality. Visionary and poetic, Moss explores our fundamental human desires for both transcendence and connection and serves as a testament to our tenuous and intimate relationship with nature. “A masterful examination of internal conflict, gratifying for readers inspired by ecofiction and literary theory. . . . Inner explorations transform into a Weltanschauung of epiphany and new understanding of love, death, and the natural world.” —Booklist

A young woman joins Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Barnum’s circus to rescue her infant from the KKK In the seventh stand-alone book of The American Novels series, Ellen Finch, former stenographer to Henry James, recalls her time as an assistant to Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, heroes of America’s woman suffrage movement, and her friendship with the diminutive Margaret, one of P. T. Barnum’s circus “eccentrics.” When her infant son is kidnapped by the Klan, Ellen, Margaret, and the two formidable suffragists travel aboard Barnum’s train from New York to Memphis to rescue the baby from certain death at the fiery cross. A savage yet farcical tale, American Follies explores the roots of the women’s rights movement, its relationship to the fight for racial justice, and its reverberations in the politics of today. “A thrilling, unnerving portrait of 19th-century America. . . . One part novel of ideas, one part madcap adventure.” —Kirkus Reviews “Dark, carnivalesque. . . . American Follies features lavish period details and unsettling alternative world building, warping expectations and standing out for its rapier wit.” —Foreword Reviews

An intimate and revelatory voyage through pain and perception, pop culture and personal experience In this extended lyric essay, a poet mines her lifelong experience with migraine to deliver a marvelously idiosyncratic cultural history of pain—how we experience, express, treat, and mistreat it. Her sources range from the trial of Joan of Arc to the essays of Virginia Woolf and Elaine Scarry to Hugh Laurie’s portrayal of Gregory House on House M.D. As she engages with science, philosophy, visual art, rock lyrics, and field notes from her own medical adventures (both mainstream and alternative), she finds a way to express the often-indescribable experience of living with pain. Eschewing simple epiphanies, Olstein instead gives us a new language to contemplate and empathize with a fundamental aspect of the human condition. “A fascinating, totally seductive read!” —Eula Biss, author of On Immunity “A book built of brain and nerve and blood and heart, about what it means to live with pain. Irreverent and astute.” —Elizabeth McCracken, author of Bowlaway “A thrilling investigation into pain, language, and Olstein’s own exile from what Woolf called ‘the army of the upright.’” —Leni Zumas, author of Red Clocks

A gorgeous fable of Earth’s last two human inhabitants, and a girl’s journey home In an Edenic future, a girl and her father live close to the land in the shadow of a lone mountain. They possess a few remnants of civilization: some books, a pane of glass, a set of flint and steel, a comb. The father teaches the girl how to fish and hunt, the secrets of the seasons and the stars. He is preparing her for an adulthood in harmony with nature, for they are the last of humankind. But when the girl finds herself alone in an unknown landscape, it is a bear that will lead her back home through a vast wilderness that offers the greatest lessons of all, if she can only learn to listen. A cautionary tale of human fragility, of love and loss, The Bear is a stunning tribute to the beauty of nature’s dominion. ”Transcendent.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) “Engagingly different.” —Library Journal (starred review) “A moving post-apocalyptic fable for grown-ups. . . . Ursula K. Le Guin would approve.” —Kirkus Review (starred review)

A spy navigates the labyrinthine horrors of Nazi Germany, on a mission to save the woman he loves “Spectacular. . . . This extraordinary tour de force showcases [Jerome Charyn] at the top of his game.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) “[An] edgy, hallucinatory, full-throttle fable. Cabaret, Moby-Dick, Shakespeare, Rosa Luxembourg, ‘Jewish jazz,’ traveling executioners dubbed Hansel and Gretel, a hump-backed baron—they’re all in the mix. A darkly entertaining, eye-opening novel.” —Kirkus Review (starred review)

From one of Spain’s most original authors comes a wild, absurdist story about a lonely man’s misguided attempts to connect “Part surreal comedy, part dark parable, Millás’s wild work brings readers face to face with the mundane facets of middle-class suburban life. . . . A page-turner of the strangest order, Millás’s debut stuns and entrances. It’s impossible to put down.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) Laid off from his job, Damián Lobo obsessively imagines himself as a celebrity being interviewed on TV. After committing an act of petty theft at an antiques market, he finds himself trapped inside a wardrobe and delivered to the seemingly idyllic home of a husband, wife, and their internet-addicted teenage daughter. There, he sneaks from the shadows to serve as an invisible butler, becoming deeply and disastrously involved with his unknowing host family. Every thread of the plot is ingeniously tied together, creating a potent admixture of parable, love story, and thriller. Millás masterfully reveals the everyday as innately surreal as he renders the unbelievable tangible and the trivial fantastical, and full of dark humor.

A bankrupt merchant encounters Herman Melville and is pursued through the depths of Gilded Age Manhattan by a brutal antagonist In the sixth stand-alone book in The American Novels series, Shelby Ross, a merchant ruined by the depression of 1873–79, is hired as a New York City Custom House appraiser under inspector Herman Melville, the embittered, forgotten author of Moby-Dick. On the docks, Ross befriends a genial young man and makes an enemy of a despicable one, who attempts to destroy them by insinuating that Ross and the young man share an unnatural affection. Ross narrates his story to his childhood friend Washington Roebling, chief engineer of the soon-to-be-completed Brooklyn Bridge. As he is harried toward a fate reminiscent of Ahab’s, he encounters Ulysses S. Grant, dying in a brownstone on the Upper East Side; Samuel Clemens, who will publish Grant’s Memoirs; and Thomas Edison, at the dawn of the electrification of the city. Feast Day of the Cannibals charts the harrowing journey of a tormented heart during America’s transformative age. “This spectacular work will delight and awe readers with Lock’s magisterial wordsmithing.” —Library Journal (starred review) “Transfixing. . . . This historically authentic novel raises potent questions about sexuality during an unsettling era in American history past and is another impressive entry in Lock’s dissection of America’s past.” —Publishers Weekly “While Moby-Dick is often referenced by the characters, it’s Billy Budd, a later work of Melville’s, that's alluded to thematically, as Lock addresses questions of desire and repression, both personal and societal. . . . [Feast Day of the Cannibals] memorably provides a window into old New York and its narrator’s conflicted mind.” —Kirkus Reviews

A nineteenth-century American woman journalist becomes deeply invested in the tragic case of a young Welsh girl deemed a miracle “The real miracle lies in the capacity of Sarah’s singular, dark fate to illuminate the socioeconomic, religious, scientific, philosophic, and political cultures and conflicts of [the] time. . . . A transcendent historical novel.” —Foreword Reviews (starred review) Twelve-year-old Sarah Jacob was the most famous of the Victorian fasting girls, who claimed to miraculously survive without food, serving as flashpoints between struggling religious, scientific, and political factions. In this novel based on Sarah’s life and premature death from what may be the first documented case of anorexia, an American journalist, recovering from her husband’s death in the Civil War, leaves her home and children behind to travel to Wales, where she investigates Sarah’s bizarre case by becoming the young girl’s friend and confidante. Unable to prevent the girl’s tragic decline while doctors, nurses, and a local priest keep watch, she documents the curious family dynamic, the trial that convicted Sarah’s parents, and an era’s hysterical need to both believe and destroy Sarah’s seemingly miraculous power. Intense, dark, and utterly compelling, The Welsh Fasting Girl delves into the complexities of a true story to understand how a culture’s anxieties led to the murder of a child.

North American debut of the lauded British novel based on the darkest chapter in the life of genius Alan Turing Goldsmiths Prize Shortlist BBC National Short Story Award Shortlist (for the novel’s opening chapter) Republic of Consciousness Prize Longlist New Scientist “Best Book of the Year” selection Guardian “Best Book of the Year” selection Times Literary Supplement “Book of the Year” selection Australian Book Review “Book of the Year” selection In Murmur, a hallucinatory masterwork, Will Eaves invites us into the brilliant mind of Alec Pryor, a character inspired by Alan Turing. Turing, father of artificial intelligence and pioneer of radical new techniques to break the Nazi Enigma cipher during World War II, was later persecuted by the British state for “gross indecency with another male” and forced to undergo chemical castration. Set during the devastating period before Turing’s suicide, Murmur evokes an extraordinary life, the beauty and sorrows of love, and the nature of consciousness.

A perspective-altering deep dive into the nature of consciousness honoring both science and spirituality “Kripal makes many sympathetic points about the present spiritual state of America. . . . [He] continues to believe that spirituality and science should not contradict each other.” —New York Times Book Review A “flip,” writes Jeffrey J. Kripal, is “a reversal of perspective,” “a new real,” often born of an extreme, life-changing experience. The Flip is Kripal’s ambitious, visionary program for unifying the sciences and the humanities to expand our minds, open our hearts, and negotiate a peaceful resolution to the culture wars. Combining accounts of rationalists’ spiritual awakenings and consciousness explorations by philosophers, neuroscientists, and mystics within a framework of the history of science and religion, Kripal compellingly signals a path to mending our fractured world.

Special edition of Paul Harding’s Pulitzer Prize–winning debut novel—featuring a new foreword by Marilynne Robinson and book club extras inside In this deluxe tenth anniversary edition, Marilynne Robinson introduces the beautiful novel Tinkers, which begins with an old man who lies dying. As time collapses into memory, he travels deep into his past, where he is reunited with his father and relives the wonder and pain of his impoverished New England youth. At once heartbreaking and life affirming, Tinkers is an elegiac meditation on love, loss, and the fierce beauty of nature.

The lives of sixteen people who once gathered in a City of Destiny bar in 1968 unfold over sixty years. “ Think Sherwood Anderson inhabiting Raymond Carver’s Northwest and you’ll have a clear picture of Wiley’s accomplishment.” —Bob Shacochis, author of Easy in the Islands and The Woman Who Lost Her Soul On St. Patrick’s Day in 1968, sixteen people sit in Pat’s Tavern, drink green beer, flirt, rib each other, and eventually go home in (mostly) different directions. In the stories that follow, which span 1958 to the present, Richard Wiley pops back into the lives of this colorful cast of characters—sometimes into their pasts, sometimes into their futures—and explores the ways in which their individual narratives indelibly weave together. At the heart of it all lies Tacoma, Washington, a town full of eccentricities and citizens as unique as they are universal. The Tacoma of Tacoma Stories might be harboring paranoid former CIA operatives and wax replicas of dead husbands, but it is also a place with all the joys and pains one could find in any town, anytime and anywhere.

A lyrical autobiography in essays from a celebrated author, honoring outlier artists and other heroes and villains who inspired him “With his customary linguistic verve and pulsing imagination, Jerome Charyn serves up here some of the tastiest essay writing available. He knows and loves New York past and present, and he draws on a lifetime of raucous experience and dedicated reading for a rich, heady, satisfying brew.” —Philip Lopate, editor of The Art of the Personal Essay and author of A Mother’s Tale “Deeply personal. . . . Readers will delight in encountering Charyn’s New York City. . . . From his ruminations on seeing classic studio-era films during his South Bronx childhood in the 1940s and ’50s to an account of a day spent with Mayor Ed Koch in the mid-’80s, Charyn’s prose enchants.” —Publishers Weekly “Lively essays. . . . A very personal view of the past artfully brought to vivid life.” —Kirkus Reviews In the New York Review of Books, Joyce Carol Oates expressed her admiration for an equally prolific contemporary: “Among Charyn’s writerly gifts is a dazzling energy. . . . [He is] an exuberant chronicler of the mythos of American life”; the Los Angeles Times described him as “absolutely unique among American writers.” In these ten essays, Charyn shares personal stories about places steeped in history and myth, including his beloved New York, and larger-than-life personalities from the Bible and from the worlds of film, literature, politics, sports, and the author’s own family. Together, writes Charyn, these essays create “my own lyrical autobiography.”

A nineteenth-century army chaplain confesses his loss of faith in God and country to his first love, poet Emily Dickinson. When U.S. Army chaplain Robert Winter first meets Emily Dickinson, he is fascinated by the brilliance of the strange girl immersed in her botany lessons. She will become his confidante, obsession, and muse over the years as he writes to her of his friendship with the aspiring politician Abraham Lincoln, his encounter with the young newspaperman Samuel Clemens, and his crisis of conscience concerning the radical abolitionist John Brown. Bearing the standard of God and country through the Mexican War and the Mormon Rebellion, Robert seeks to lessen his loneliness while his faith is eroded by the violence he observes and ultimately commits. Emily, however, remains as elusive as her verse on his rare visits to Amherst and denies him solace, a rejection that will culminate in a startling epiphany at the very heart of his despair. Powerfully evocative of Emily Dickinson’s life, times, and artistry, this fifth, stand-alone volume in The American Novels series captures a nation riven by conflicts that continue to this day. “Perceptive and contemplative. . . . Bring[s] the 1840–60s to life with shimmering prose.” —Library Journal (starred review) “The lively passages of Emily’s letters are so evocative of her poetry that it becomes easy to see why Robert finds her so captivating. The book also expands and deepens themes of moral hypocrisy around racism and slavery. . . . Lyrically written but unafraid of the ugliness of the time, Lock’s thought-provoking series continues to impress.” —Publishers Weekly

A Doctors Without Borders Prize–winning graphic novel supported by Amnesty International and Le Korsa, a nonprofit organization devoted to improving human lives in Senegal Today’s refugee and migrant crisis threatens to divide countries and alliances. In this charged political climate, it is easy to forget the individuals struggling to cross borders and survive. Alpha is the antidote. In this beautifully told graphic novel, Alpha’s wife and son left Côte d’Ivoire months ago to join his sister-in-law in Paris, but Alpha has heard nothing from them since. With a visa, Alpha’s journey to reunite with his family would take a matter of hours. Without one, he is adrift for over a year, encountering human traffickers in the desert, refugee camps in northern Africa, overcrowded boats carrying migrants between the Canary Islands and Europe’s southern coast, and an unforgettable cast of fellow travelers lost and found along the way. Throughout, Alpha stays the course, carrying his loved ones’ photograph close to his heart as he makes his perilous trek across continents. Featuring emotive, full-color artwork created in felt-tip pen and wash, the story of this infinitely relatable character gives a human face to a global crisis.

“Eduardo Halfon is a brilliant storyteller.” —Daniel Alarcón “The hero of Halfon’s novel delights in today’s risible globalism, but recognizes that what we adopt from elsewhere makes us who we are.” —New York Times Book Review “Editors’ Choice” selection “Tight and lean . . . falling somewhere between the novels of Roberto Bolaño, WG Sebald, and Junot Díaz.” —Telegraph In Mourning, a mysterious family tragedy inspires Eduardo Halfon’s eponymous narrator on a journey across the globe and through the tangled memories of childhood to discover what, or who, really killed his uncle Salomón. As he goes deeper, he realizes that the truth lies buried in his own past, in the brutal Guatemala of the 1970s and his subsequent exile to the American South. Subtle and stirring, Mourning is a reflection on the formative and destructive power of family mythology, silence, and loss.

An essential collection from the writer and physician Nobel Laureate Eric Kandel calls “America’s most interesting and important essayist.” “Weissmann introduces us to a new way of thinking about the connections between art and medicine.” —New York Times Book Review “Oliver Sacks, Richard Selzer, Lewis Thomas . . . Weissmann is in this noble tradition.” —Los Angeles Times “Essays that brim with knowledge and bubble with attitude.” —Kirkus Reviews In this diverting collection of essays, Gerald Weissmann looks back at the past few decades of a career spent working at the intersection of the arts and sciences. The Fevers of Reason features some of his best and most representative works, alongside eleven new essays that have never before been published in book form. Masterfully drawing from an array of subject areas and time periods, he tackles everything from Ebola to Eisenhower, Zika to Zola, Darwin to Dawkins, and once again shows that he is one of the most important voices in humanistic science writing today.

“A remarkable book.” —Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature and Oil and Honey “In this extraordinary narrative, Glassley, a geologist, describes his intimate relationship with Greenland’s ancient rocks in such a fashion that the reader who knows nothing about geology is hooked; that reader feels like he’s not only been transported to the rockribbed coast of West Greenland, but is also bent down and studying its rocks right along with Glassley.” —Lawrence Millman, author of Last Places and At the End of the World “Profound and moving. . . . A superb tool for a better understanding of the natural world and why real science matters.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “Poetic, enthusiastic. . . . Combining the strengths of travel writing and lyrical memoir, Glassley translates his own ‘incandescent experience of place’ into a conservation message: ‘We must share and celebrate the wild so that it might be saved.’” —Foreword Reviews (starred review) Greenland, one of the last truly wild places, contains a treasure trove of information on Earth’s early history embedded in its pristine landscape. Over numerous seasons, William E. Glassley and two fellow geologists traveled there to collect samples and observe rock formations for evidence to prove a contested theory that plate tectonics, the movement of Earth’s crust over its molten core, is a much more ancient process than some believed. As their research drove the scientists ever farther into regions barely explored by humans for millennia—if ever—Glassley encountered wondrous creatures and natural phenomena that gave him unexpected insight into the origins of myth, the virtues and boundaries of science, and the importance of seeking the wilderness within. An invitation to experience a breathtaking place and the fascinating science behind its creation, A Wilder Time is nature writing at its best.

In 1940s Texas, an isolated young girl navigates the mysteries and threats of the adult world “A time capsule of American awakening.” —Kirkus Reviews “Paints a vivid picture of childhood in postwar America, replete with all of the joys and sorrows that are part of growing up.” —Booklist For Dick and Jane, Dallas after World War II is a place of promise and prosperity: the first home air conditioners are making summertime bearable and Dick’s position at his father’s business, the Cadillac dealership, is assured. Jane has help with the house and the children, and garden parties and holiday celebrations are spirited social affairs. For the oldest of their three daughters, however, life is full of frustrating mysteries. The stories the adults tell her don’t make sense. Too curious for comfort, she finds her questions only seem to annoy them. Why won’t they tell the truth about Santa? What is that Holy Spirit business, and what is the difference between an angel and a ghost? Why is her mother often so tense and sad? And why does her father keep flying into violent rages? Hap and Hazard and the End of the World is an intimate, finely crafted novel about the innocence and vulnerability of childhood and the dangers posed by adults who cannot cope with life’s complexities. It is also about the ingenuity born of loneliness and neglect, and the surprising, strange beauty of the world.

The war comes home in a searingly compassionate story about the wounds inflicted on soldiers, refugees, and their families “[Helen Benedict] has emerged as one of our most thoughtful and provocative writers of war literature.” —David Abrams, author of Fobbit and Brave Deeds, at the Quivering Pen “Fierce and vivid and full of hope, this story of trauma and resilience, of love and family, of mutual aid and solidarity in the aftermath of a brutal war is nothing short of magic. . . . To read these pages is to be transported to a world beyond hype and propaganda to see the human cost of war up close. This is not a novel that allows you to walk away unchanged.” —Cara Hoffman, author of Be Safe I Love You and Running After a hurricane devastates a small town in upstate New York, the lives of three women and their young children are irrevocably changed. Rin, an Iraq War veteran, tries to protect her blind daughter and the three wolves under her care. Naema, a widowed doctor who fled Iraq with her wounded son, faces life-threatening injuries and confusion about her feelings for Louis, a veteran and widower harboring his own secrets and guilt. Beth, who is raising a troubled son, waits out her marine husband’s deployment in Afghanistan, equally afraid of him coming home and of him never returning at all. As they struggle to maintain their humanity and find hope, their war-torn lives collide in a way that will affect their entire community.

From the 2017 Winner of the Swiss Grand Prize in Literature When a young woman returns to her childhood home after her estranged father’s death, she begins to piece together the final years of his life. What changed him from a prominent left-wing journalist to a bitter racist who defended the murder of a defenseless African immigrant? In this intimate novel, Pascale Kramer exposes a country gripped by intolerance and violence to unearth the source of a family’s fall from grace. Set in Paris and its suburbs, and inspired by the real-life scandal of a French author and intellectual, Autopsy of a Father blends sharp observations about familial dynamics with resonant political and philosophical questions, taking a scalpel to the racism and anti-immigrant sentiment spreading just beneath the skin of modern society.

Henry David Thoreau’s principles are tested when a young man escapes from slavery into Walden Woods “A Fugitive in Walden Woods manages that special magic of making Thoreau’s time in Walden Woods seem fresh and surprising and necessary right now. . . . This is a patient and perceptive novel, a pleasure to read even as it grapples with issues that affect the United States to this day.” —Victor LaValle “Bold and enlightening. . . . An important novel that creates a vivid social context for the masterpieces of such writers as Thoreau, Emerson, and Hawthorne and also offers valuable insights about our current conscious and unconscious racism.” —Sena Jeter Naslund “Offer[s] profound insights that sharpen our understanding of American history.” —Booklist (starred review) Samuel Long escapes slavery in Virginia, traveling the Underground Railroad to Walden Woods where he encounters Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Lloyd Garrison, and other transcendentalists and abolitionists. Against this historical backdrop, Norman Lock’s powerful narrative examines issues that continue to divide the United States: racism, privilege, and what it means to be free in America.

An illuminating journey into a complex mind, a searing exploration of masculinity, and a celebration of art’s provocative power “This is an ingenious and fascinating reading of Freud’s response to Signorelli’s frescoes at Orvieto. It is also a meditation on Jewish identity, and on masculinity, memory, and the power of the image. It is filled with intelligence, wit, and clear-eyed analysis not only of the paintings themselves, but how we respond to them in all their startling sexuality and invigorating beauty.” —Colm Toibin “Freud’s Trip to Orvieto is at once profound and wonderfully diverse, and as gripping as any detective story. Nicholas Fox Weber mixes psychoanalysis, art history, and the personal with an intricacy and spiritedness that Freud himself would have admired.” —John Banville After a visit to the cathedral at Orvieto in Italy, Sigmund Freud deemed Luca Signorelli’s frescoes the greatest artwork he’d ever encountered; yet, a year later, he couldn’t recall the artist’s name. When the name came back to him, the images he had so admired vanished from his mind’s eye. This is known as the “Signorelli parapraxis” in the annals of Freudian psychoanalysis and is a famous example from Freud’s own life of his principle of repressed memory. What was at the bottom of this? There have been many theories on the subject, but art historian Nicholas Fox Weber is the first to study the actual Signorelli frescoes for clues. What Weber finds in these extraordinary Renaissance paintings provides unexpected insight into this famously confounding incident in Freud’s biography. As he sounds the depths of Freud’s feelings surrounding his masculinity and Jewish identity, Weber is drawn back into his own past. Freud’s Trip to Orvieto is an intellectual mystery with a very personal, intimate dimension. Through rich illustrations, Weber evokes art’s singular capacity to provoke, destabilize, and enchant us, as it did Freud, and awaken our deepest memories, fears, and desires.

Marvelous landscapes of human experience and emotion rendered through the magnification of our tears “A moving depiction of the micro and macro aspects of our emotional lives, and a beautiful means of integrating the often separate realms of science and art.” —Refinery29 Does a tear shed while chopping onions look different from a tear of happiness? In this powerful collection of images, award-winning photographer Rose-Lynn Fisher trains her optical microscope and camera on her own tears and those of men, women, and children, released in moments of grief, pain, gratitude, and joy, and captured upon glass slides. The Topography of Tears reveals the beauty of recurring patterns in nature and presents evocative, crystalline imagery for contemplation. Underscored by poetic captions, these 67 duotone photographs translate the mysterious act of crying into an atlas mapping the structure and magnificence of our interior lives.

A startling novel of a celebrated author whose life was warped by war, shrouded in mystery, and broken by scandal “Jerome Charyn is one of the most important writers in American literature.” —Michael Chabon “Charyn skillfully breathes life into historical icons.” —New Yorker “The rise and fall of novelist Jerzy Kosinski (1933-1991) emerges in an offbeat way . . . through Charyn’s resourceful imagination and always-colorful, punchy, provocative prose.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) Jerzy Kosinski was a great enigma of post-World War II literature. When he exploded onto the American literary scene in 1965 with his best-selling novel The Painted Bird, he was revered as a Holocaust survivor and refugee from the world hidden behind the Soviet Iron Curtain. He won major literary awards, befriended actor Peter Sellers (who appeared in the screen adaptation of his novel Being There), and was a guest on talk shows and at the Oscars. But soon the facade began to crack, and behind the public persona emerged a ruthless social climber, sexual libertine, and pathological liar who may have plagiarized his greatest works. Jerome Charyn lends his unmistakable style to this most American story of personal disintegration, told through the voices of multiple narrators—a homicidal actor, a dominatrix, and Joseph Stalin’s daughter—who each provide insights into the shifting facets of Kosinski’s personality. The story unfolds like a Russian nesting doll, eventually revealing the lost child beneath layers of trauma, while touching on the nature of authenticity, the atrocities of WWII, the allure of sadomasochism, and the fickleness of celebrity.

Mind-bending tales of passion, obsession, and brutality from an award-winning master of short fiction The twelve stories of Sleeping Mask introduce readers to remarkable characters. They include a child soldier sent to raid a girls’ boarding school, a Virginia Woolf scholar surviving cancer, a desperate writer living under fascism in a futuristic Latin America, the spirits of recently deceased college students on a tour of the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, and a middle-aged man transported back to his childhood, where he is led out to sea by his mother’s ghost. LaSalle’s tantalizing “fictions” are evocative of many of the great innovators of postmodern literature, from Borges to Nabokov, while charting a path entirely their own. Through all of their stylistic pyrotechnics these stories never forsake rich characterization and plotting to probe the deepest parts of the contemporary human condition, such as the nature of erotic desire, the legacy of art and artistry, the power of grief and fear, and the horror of war and violence.

An authoritative, impassioned celebration of Black English, how it works, and why it matters It has now been almost fifty years since linguistic experts began studying Black English as a legitimate speech variety, arguing to the public that it is different from Standard English, not a degradation of it. Yet false assumptions and controversies still swirl around what it means to speak and sound “black.” In his first book devoted solely to the form, structure, and development of Black English, John McWhorter clearly explains its fundamentals and rich history, while carefully examining the cultural, educational, and political issues that have undermined recognition of this transformative, empowering dialect. Talking Back, Talking Black takes us on a fascinating tour of a nuanced and complex language that has moved beyond America’s borders to become a dynamic force for today’s youth culture around the world.

A psychiatrist falls for a charismatic patient and must unravel the mystery of his identity “Haunted—in a good way—by the ghost of Robert Louis Stevenson. . . . . A romantic comedy with just enough of a philosophical edge.” —Kirkus Reviews “A witty, roller-coaster ride of uncertain identity set against the gritty certainties of New York City. In compelling, unadorned prose, Richard Wiley gives us a bewitching and ultimately moving tale.” —Caryl Phillips, author of A Distant Shore and The Lost Child Dr. Ruby Okada meets a charming man with a Scottish accent in the elevator of her psychiatric hospital. Unaware that he is an escaping patient, she falls under his spell, and her life and his are changed forever by the time they get to the street. Who is the mysterious man? Is he Archie B. Billingsly, suffering from dissociative identity disorder and subject to brilliant flights of fancy and bizarre, violent fits? Or is he the reincarnation of Robert Louis Stevenson, back to haunt New York as Long John Silver and Mr. Edward Hyde? Her career compromised, Ruby soon learns that her future and that of her unborn child depend on finding the key to his identity. With compelling psychological descriptions and terrifying, ineffable transformations, Bob Stevenson is an ingenious tale featuring a quirky cast of characters drawn together by mutual fascination, need, and finally, love.

“This is the book I’ve been waiting for—only it’s richer, deeper, and more intriguing than I could have imagined. A Road Unforeseen is a major contribution to our understanding of feminism and Islam, of women and the world, and gives me fresh hope for change.” —Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed In war-torn northern Syria, a democratic society—based on secularism, ethnic inclusiveness, and gender equality—has won significant victories against the Islamic State with women on the front lines as fierce warriors and leaders. A Road Unforeseen recounts the dramatic, under-reported history of the Rojava Kurds, whose all-women militia was instrumental in the perilous mountaintop rescue of tens of thousands of civilians besieged in Iraq. Up to that point, the Islamic State had seemed invincible. Yet these women helped vanquish them, bringing the first half of the refugees to safety within twenty-four hours. Who are the revolutionary women of Rojava, what are their chances for survival under attack from all sides, and what lessons can we learn from their heroic story?

A young surgical assistant faces his doppelgänger in a chilling tale featuring Edgar Allan Poe and a “lost” Poe story. “This chilling and layered story of obsession succeeds both as a moody period piece and as an effective and memorable homage to the works of Edgar Allan Poe.” —Kirkus Reviews “As lyrical and alluring as Poe’s own original work, The Port-Wine Stain captures the magic, mystery, and madness of the great American author while weaving an eerie and original tale in homage to him.” —Foreword Reviews This gothic psychological thriller recounts the story of a young Philadelphian, Edward Fenzil, who, in the winter of 1844, falls under the sway of two luminaries of the nineteenth-century grotesque imagination: Thomas Dent Mütter, a surgeon and collector of medical “curiosities,” and Edgar Allan Poe. As Fenzil struggles against the powerful wills that would usurp his identity, including that of his own malevolent doppelgänger, he loses his mind and his story to another.

Seven palpably tense and exquisitely atmospheric stories of people confronting their innermost fears “Brian Booker’s stories contain a phantasmagorical hilarity, along with a headlong momentum that only accelerates as the stories’ events grow more dire. You can open this book to any page and will find there amazing events related in a deeply unsettling style. I don’t know of any writing quite like his. Are You Here for What I’m Here For? is a brilliant debut.” —Charles Baxter, author of The Soul Thief and There’s Something I Want You to Do “Like Kafka and W.G. Sebald, Booker’s theme is dislocation, as much from the physical world as from the world of others and of thought. The writing brims with intelligent detail, but always in the service of its characters—people striving for ‘new, uncharted places,’ reachable nowhere else but in these singular stories.” —Salvatore Scibona, author of The End The suspense creeps in and takes hold in this polished and lyrical debut about troubled characters grappling with rare illnesses, menacing chance encounters, sexual awakening, impending natural disasters, and New Age cults. Here, the everyday meets the uncanny as two high school friends go out for one unforgettable night. A boy, haunted by dreams of a catastrophic flood, becomes swept up in an encephalitis epidemic. A hypochondriac awaits her diagnosis at a Caribbean health resort. A disease researcher meets his nemesis on a train. A father searches for his missing son in a remote mountain lodge where nothing is quite as it seems. An elderly pharmacist protects his adopted nephew, who found a mermaid in a bottle, from a coastal village gripped by hysteria. A teenager is sent to a “therapeutic” boarding school with disturbing methods and is reunited with a staff member years later.

From an assassination attempt by early anarchists in the late-19th century to Occupy Wall Street, a novel of radical lives and loves “The Attempt is historical fiction at its best. Through its narrator’s archival approach to his material, the book explores the intimate lives of a pair of fervent idealists, as well as a robber baron and his family. The result is a vivid, poignant narrative about political upheaval, both in the past and the present.” —Siri Hustvedt, author of The Blazing World When a Czech historian becomes convinced he’s the illegitimate great-grandson of an infamous anarchist who attempted an assassination while living in the United States, he travels to New York to investigate. Arriving in Manhattan during the height of the Occupy Wall Street movement, his research takes him further back into the past—from the Pittsburgh home of a nineteenth-century US industrialist to 1920s Europe, where a celebrated anarchist couple is on the run from the law. Based on the lives of Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman, The Attempt is a novel about the legacy of radical politics and relationships—one that traverses centuries and continents to deliver a moving, powerful story of personal and political transformation.

A gripping journey into the depths of a fractured mind This second novel from award-winning author and neurologist Liam Durcan is a tale about two estranged brothers who are suddenly reunited in the aftermath of a car accident that has left one brother, the successful architect Martin, with a brain injury called neglect syndrome. Despite his family’s renewed support, Martin’s only solace is found in the parallels he draws between himself and gifted Soviet-era architect Konstantin Melnikov, who survived Stalin’s disfavor by retreating into obscurity. As he retraces Melnikov’s life and his own fateful decisions, he becomes increasingly unsettled, until the discovery of the harrowing truth about the night of his accident hurtles him toward a deadly confrontation.

A passionate and deeply researched reassessment of Emily Dickinson’s life and singular legacy in American arts and letters “[A] lively reassessment.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) “Remarkable insight . . . [a] unique meditation/investigation. . . . Jerome Charyn the unpredictable, elusive, and enigmatic is a natural match for Emily Dickinson, the quintessence of these.” —Joyce Carol Oates We think we know Emily Dickinson: the Belle of Amherst, virginal, reclusive, and possibly mad. But in A Loaded Gun, Jerome Charyn Charyn (author ofThe Secret Life of Emily Dickinson: A Novel) introduces us to a different Emily Dickinson: the fierce, brilliant, and sexually charged poet who wrote: My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun— … Though I than He— may longer live He longer must—than I— For I have but the power to kill, Without—the power to die— Through interviews with contemporary scholars, close readings of Dickinson’s correspondence and handwritten manuscripts, and a suggestive, newly discovered photograph that is purported to show Dickinson with her lover, Charyn’s literary sleuthing reveals the great poet in ways that have only been hinted at previously: as a woman who was deeply philosophical, intensely engaged with the world, attracted to members of both sexes, and able to write poetry that disturbs and delights us today.

Stories of lives lost and found at the crossroads of the ordinary, the bizarre, the tragic, and the comic “Marvelous.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “Robert Lopez is the master of deadpan dread, of the elliptical koan, of the sudden turn of language that reveals life to be so wonderfully absurd. Always with Lopez, the voice is all his—enchanting, surprising, at times devastating.” —Jess Walter, author of Beautiful Ruins “Robert Lopez’s strange, incantatory, visionary stories reveal the mysteries behind the ordinary world. You lift your head from this book and it’s as if a third eye has been opened.” —Dan Chaon, author of Await Your Reply and Stay Awake “Nothing is funnier than unhappiness,” claims Samuel Beckett. To this, we add: nothing is funnier than unhappiness with a heavy dose of amorality, as we learn from Robert Lopez’s unforgettable Good People. In these twenty stories, a motley cast of obsessive, self-deluded outsiders narrate their darker moments, which include kidnapping, voyeurism, and psychic masochism. As their struggles give way to the black humor of life’s unreason, the bleak merges with the oddly poetic, in a style as lean and resolute as Carver or Hemingway. Treading the fine line between confession and self-justification, the absurd violence of threatened masculinity, and the perverse joy of neurosis, Lopez’s stories reveal the compulsive suffering at the precarious core of our universal humanity.

A neuroscientist illuminates how we make and are made by the world both real and virtual Our surroundings can powerfully affect our thoughts, emotions, and physical responses, whether we’re awed by the Grand Canyon or Hagia Sophia, panicked in a crowded room, soothed by a walk in the park, or tempted in casinos and shopping malls. In Places of the Heart, neuroscientist Colin Ellard explores how our homes, workplaces, cities, and nature—places we escape to and can’t escape from—have influenced us throughout history, and how our brains and bodies respond to different types of real and virtual space. As he describes the insight he and other scientists have gained from new technologies, he assesses the influence these technologies will have on our evolving environment and asks what kind of world we are, and should be, creating. Praise for Colin Ellard “One of the world’s foremost thinkers on the neuroscience of urban design.” —Charles Montgomery, author of Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design “One of the finest science writers I’ve ever read.” —Los Angeles Times 
 “Delightfully lucid. . . . Ellard has a knack for distilling obscure scientific theories into practical wisdom.” —New York Times Book Review

 “[Ellard] mak[es] even the most mundane entomological experiment or exegesis of psychological geekspeak feel fresh and fascinating.” —NPR

A scrappy Brooklyn orphan turned vengeful assassin narrates a visionary tale of the American West. “[American Meteor] feels like a campfire story, an old-fashioned yarn full of rich historical detail about hard-earned lessons and learning to do right.” —Publishers Weekly (“Pick of the Week” starred review) In this panoramic tale of Manifest Destiny, Stephen Moran comes of age with the young country that he crosses on the Union Pacific, just as the railroad unites the continent. Propelled westward from his Brooklyn neighborhood and the killing fields of the Civil War to the Battle of Little Big Horn, he befriends Walt Whitman, receives a medal from General Grant, becomes a bugler on President Lincoln’s funeral train, goes to work for railroad mogul Thomas Durant, apprentices with frontier photographer William Henry Jackson, and stalks General George Custer. When he comes face-to-face with Crazy Horse, his life will be spared but his dreams haunted for the rest of his days. By turns elegiac and comic, American Meteor is a novel of adventure, ideas, and mourning: a unique vision of America’s fabulous and murderous history.

Seeking Franklin’s lost expedition and threatened by crushing Arctic ice, the Impetus lieutenant discovers a stowaway, pregnant with his child. “Extraordinary. . . . Reading [The Surfacing], I recalled the dramatic natural landscape of Jack London and the wild untamed seas of William Golding.” —John Boyne, author of The Boy in the Striped Pajamas and A History of Loneliness “The great topic of Cormac James’ The Surfacing] is the reach of human possibility. The prose is calm, vivid, hypnotic, and acutely piercing. . . . This is a book about fatherhood and all its attendant terrors. . . . It’s a remarkable achievement, a stylish novel, full of music and quiet control.” —Colum McCann, author of Let the Great World Spin and Transatlantic “I read The Surfacing in Gjoa Haven, where Franklin Expedition spirits seem to cry out on the winter winds, and Cormac James’ writing spoke through the midday twilight with the chill of a voice from the distant past. Like the High Arctic world that he masterfully conjures, his storytelling is beautifully stark and captivating.” —PAUL WATSON, Arctic correspondent for the Toronto Star, and author of Where War Lives Far from civilization, on the hunt for Sir John Franklin’s recently lost Northwest Passage expedition, Lieutenant Morgan and his crew find themselves trapped in ever-hardening Arctic ice that threatens to break apart their ship. When Morgan realizes that a stowaway will give birth to his child in the frozen wilderness, he finds new clarity and courage to lead his men across a bleak expanse as shifting, stubborn, and treacherous as human nature itself. A harrowing tale of psychological fortitude against impossible odds, The Surfacing is also a beautifully told story of one man’s transformative journey toward fatherhood.

Reflections on a literary life pulled in two directions: from war zone journalism to the writing and teaching of fiction “Pritchard polishes the strange and makes it shine.” —Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams at the San Francisco Chronicle “Heartfelt . . . bear[s] powerful witness to suffering, compassion, and transcendence.” —Kirkus Reviews “Gorgeous and moving. . . . Each of these essays confirms that to write is to think and feel, to take part in the profound and sacred act of witness. Read together—and the book is so arresting that many readers will finish it in a single sitting—the essays amount to a clear and irrefutable mandate for empathy.” —Bret Anthony Johnston, director of Creative Writing at Harvard University, author of Remember Me Like This, and editor of Naming the World: And Other Exercises for the Creative Writer (from the Foreword) In A Solemn Pleasure, Melissa Pritchard presents an undeniable case for both the power of language and the nurturing constancy of the writing life. This is nonfiction vividly engaged with the world, encompassing the author’s journeys into the deeply interior imaginative life required to write fiction, her search for the lost legacy of American literature as embodied by Walt Whitman, her reports from Afghanistan while embedded with a young female GI, her tales of travel with Ethiopian tribes, and the heartrending story of her informally adopted son William, a former Sudanese child slave. Through these fifteen magnificent essays, Pritchard shares her passion for writing and storytelling that educates, honors, and inspires.

Poignant tales of fathers, sons, and the search for connection from a wise new voice in American fiction “Riveting. . . . Coffey brilliantly examines the efforts of a mother to cope with her son’s death in ‘Moon Over Quabbin’; he uses the J.F.K. assassination as a backdrop to a tale about a sinful priest in ‘Inn of the Nations’; and, in ‘Sons,’ he explores a difficult father-son relationship in the context of a possible Obama assassination attempt. . . . Vibrant and unsparing.” —Publishers Weekly (starred and boxed review) 

 “Well-crafted stories, thick with literary references. . . . Carefully chiseled. . . Sober and smart writing that evokes the more mannered American stylists of the 1960s and ’70s.” —Kirkus Reviews “Whether [Coffey is] writing about a sinning priest or a man who’s made a career out of branding or about himself, we can smell Coffey’s protagonists and feel their breath on our cheek. Like Chekhov, he must be a notebook writer; how else to explain the strange quirks and the perfect but unaccountable details that animate these intimate portraits?” —Edmund White, author of Inside a Pearl and A Boy’s Own Story Among these eight stories, a fan of writer (and fellow adoptee) Harold Brodkey gains an audience with him at his life’s end, two pals take a Joycean sojourn, a man whose business is naming things meets a woman who may not be what she seems, and a father discovers his son is a suspect in an assassination attempt on the president. In each tale, Michael Coffey’s exquisite attention to character underlies the brutally honest perspectives of his disenchanted fathers, damaged sons, and orphans left feeling perpetually disconnected.

A modern medical mystery about an illness that afflicted healthy children, changed health policy, and vanished before a cause was found “A fascinating history. . . . Largent’s empathy is with the myriad children and parents harmed by the disease, while he challenges the triumphalist view that labeling solved the crisis.” —Erik M. Conway, coauthor of Merchants of Doubt “Largent’s engagingly written and honest account explores how medical mysteries are shaped by prevailing narratives about venal drug companies, heroic investigators, and Johnny-come-lately politicians.” —Helen Epstein, author of The Invisible Cure Reye’s syndrome, identified in 1963, was a debilitating, rare condition that typically afflicted healthy children just emerging from the flu or other minor illnesses and, in 50 percent of all cases, led to death. Survivors were often left with permanent liver or brain damage. Desperate, terrorized parents and doctors pursued dramatic, often ineffectual treatments. For over fifteen years, many inconclusive theories were posited as to its causes. The Centers for Disease Control dispatched its Epidemic Intelligence Service to investigate, culminating in a study that suggested a link to aspirin. Congress held hearings at which parents, researchers, and pharmaceutical executives testified. The result was a warning to parents and doctors to avoid pediatric use of aspirin, leading to the widespread substitution of alternative fever and pain reducers. But before a true cause was definitively established, Reye’s syndrome simply vanished. Mark A. Largent, an expert medical historian whose previous books also examined the intersections between medicine, business, public health, and politics, is a survivor of Reye’s syndrome himself. His background has made him especially attuned to the difficulty families face in making decisions given conflicting information from their doctors, industry authorities, political leaders, and government officials.

The journey continues for the hero of the acclaimed The Polish Boxer In Eduardo Halfon’s first novel The Polish Boxer, the nomadic narrator brought readers along on the search for his origins, demonstrating how stories change and evolve. In Monastery, the hero returns to travel from Tel Aviv, where his sister’s Jewish Orthodox wedding is being held, to the highland coffee plantations of Guatemala, and then from the jazz haunts of Harlem to the French Breton coast, where he dreams of Chekhov in an attempt to retrace his grandfather’s path. Along the way, he’s confronted by authority, isolation, history’s atrocities, and the burdens of his heritage. As he moves through the chaos of the world, and the intolerance he finds both within and without, he comes to realize that “a wall is never bigger than the spirit of those it confines.” Praise for The Polish Boxer “Elegant” —Marie Claire “Deeply accessible, deeply moving.” —Los Angeles Times “Tight and lean . . . falling somewhere between the novels of Roberto Bolaño, WG Sebald, and Junot Díaz.” —Telegraph “Funny and revelatory. . . . The hero of Halfon’s novel delights in today’s risible globalism, but recognizes that what we adopt from elsewhere makes us who we are.” —New York Times Book Review, Editor’s Choice citation

The untold story of the influential creative genius behind major 20th-century movements in therapy and theater J.L. Moreno (1889-1974), the father of psychodrama, was an early critic of Sigmund Freud, wrote landmark works of Viennese expressionism, founded an experimental theater where he discovered Peter Lorre, influenced Martin Buber, and became one of the most important psychiatrists and social scientists of his time. 

 A mystic, theater impresario and inventor in his youth, Moreno immigrated to America in 1926, where he trained famous actors, introduced group therapy, and was a forerunner of humanistic psychology. As a social reformer he reorganized schools, prisons, and refugee camps. Moreno’s methods have been adopted by improvisational theater groups, military organizations, educators, business leaders, and trial lawyers. His studies of social networks laid the groundwork for social media like Twitter and Facebook. 

 Featuring interviews with Clay Shirky, Gloria Steinem, and Werner Erhard, among others, original documentary research, and the author’s own perspective growing up as the son of an innovative genius, Impromptu Man is both the study of a great and largely unsung figure of the last century and an epic history, taking readers from the creative chaos of early twentieth-century Vienna to the wired world of Silicon Valley.

Aesop’s Fables for the Age of Extinction Sophie is an amateur naturalist with a rare genetic gift: the ability to see a marvelous kingdom of invisible, sentient creatures that share a vital relationship with humankind. To record her observations, Sophie creates a personal bestiary and, as she relates the strange abilities of these endangered beings, her tales become extraordinary meditations on the entwined destinies of all living creatures. Early praise for Invisible Beasts “Lines blur between the human and animal worlds in this richly detailed debut. . . . In Sophie’s struggles to find her footing in a world only she and a few others can see, Muir expertly pinpoints the frailty of the human condition. This is an amazing feat of imagination.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) “Invisible Beasts is a strange and beautiful meditation on love and seeing, a hybrid of fantasy and field guide, novel and essay, treatise and fable. With one hand it offers a sad commentary on environmental degradation, while with the other it presents a bright, whimsical, and funny exploration of what it means to be human. It’s wonderfully written, crazily imagined, and absolutely original.” —ANTHONY DOERR, author of All the Light We Cannot See and The Shell Collector “Invisible Beasts is a delightful and stunning feat of environmental imagination, endlessly enjoyable and fascinating. With the deep inventiveness of Ursula Le Guin and the quirky vitality of Annie Dillard, Sharona Muir seduces us into a cautionary world full of creatures, at once fanciful and utterly convincing, who hold unexpected lessons for ourselves.” —ROBERT FINCH, author of A Cape Cod Notebook and co-editor of The Norton Book of Nature Writing

A wondrous tale of cosmic exploration and the colorful characters who ushered astronomy into the modern age The unsung pioneers of modern astronomy were self-funded amateurs. In the span of just decades at the turn of the twentieth-century, they transformed an art of visual observation and geometric reasoning into a hard science grounded in measurement. The new technologies they perfected—photography, celestial spectroscopy, and large-aperture telescopes—have changed the way we understand our universe. Early praise for Starlight Detectives “Beautifully written, Starlight Detectives reminds us how the wonders of the modern universe would never have been possible without the ingenious advances made by pioneering scientists in the nineteenth century. They were the ones who first learned how to read the messages hidden within a star’s radiations. With his poetic eye on the nighttime sky, Alan Hirshfeld engagingly shows how science arrived, step by step, at its revolutionary discovery that we live in but one galaxy amid multitudes flying outward in an expanding universe. A must-read for astronomy and history of science aficionados alike.” —MARCIA BARTUSIAK, author of The Day We Found the Universe and Archives of the Universe

Launched into existence by Mark Twain in 1835, Huck Finn and Jim have now been transported by Norman Lock through three vital, violent, and transformative centuries of American history. As time unfurls on the river’s banks, they witness decisive battles of the Civil War, the betrayal of Reconstruction’s promises to the freed slaves, the crushing of the Native American nations, and the electrification of a continent. Huck, who finally comes of age when he’s washed up on shore during Hurricane Katrina, narrates a classic tale for our own time as an older and wiser man in 2077. Early praise for The Boy in His Winter “Lock plays profound tricks, with language—his is crystalline and underline-worthy—and with time, the perfect metaphor for which is the mighty Mississippi itself.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) “In this surreal and otherworldly river journey through time, Norman Lock transports Huck Finn down the Mississippi and deep into America’s history—and future. Elegant and imaginative, The Boy in His Winter is a tale that’s as hypnotic as it is profound.” —GILBERT KING, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America “I read Norman Lock’s The Boy in His Winter with delight and amazement. Styled in the vernacular of a rapidly changing America, it stays true to the themes of Mark Twain’s original: class relations, race and slavery, childhood innocence, moral hypocrisy—and, of course, the stark beauty and unforgiving nature of America’s greatest river. I finished this absolutely elegant narrative feeling that Huck Finn has never been more alive.” —DAVID OSHINSKY, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Polio: An American Story and Worse Than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice

Palmerino is the British enclave in rural Italy where Violet Paget, known to the world by her pen name and male persona, Vernon Lee, held court with fascinating artists and intellectuals—Oscar Wilde, John Singer Sargent, Henry James, Robert Browning, Bernard Berenson—who challenged and inspired each other during an age of repression. In imagining the real life of this brilliant writer known for her chilling supernatural stories, Pritchard creates a multilayered tale in which Violet inhabits the heart and mind of her lonely, modern-day biographer. Early praise for Palmerino “Enthralling . . . An intriguing introduction to Violet Paget, and an unusual look into the mysteries of writing.” —Booklist “A supernaturally infused, innovative story . . . Pritchard’s fertile imagination and presentation give new meaning to the expression ‘a meeting of the minds.’” —Kirkus Reviews “Dazzling in its descriptions, lush and lyrical in language, Palmerino is a jewel of a novel. It is a tale to be savored like a rich Italian pastry. Melissa Pritchard’s characters—eccentric, quirky, and brilliant—will live on in the heart and mind long after the last crumb is licked from the plate.” —NAOMI BENARON, author of Running the Rift “This lovely, sexy novel provides a sumptuous glance into the secret lives of artists. At its center is Violet, a fierce woman who never met a rule she didn’t break. Melissa Pritchard’s voice is completely her own and her characters are as unique, wild and magical as she is.” —TAYARI JONES, author of Silver Sparrow

Based on the real-life story of Bauhaus artist Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, Aaron’s Leap is framed by the lens of a twenty first-century Israeli film crew delving into the extraordinary life of a woman who taught art to children in the Nazi transport camp of Terezín and died in Auschwitz. Aided by the granddaughter of one of the artist’s pupils, the filmmakers begin to uncover buried secrets from a time when personal and artistic decisions became matters of life-and-death. Spanning a century of Central European history, the novel evokes the founding impulses, theories, and personalities of the European Modernist movement (with characters modeled after Oskar Kokoschka, Alma Mahler and Franz Werfel) and shows what it takes to grapple with a troubled history, “leap” into the unknown, and dare to be oneself. Early praise for Aaron’s Leap “Platzová’s prose is as sharp and effective as the angles of an expressionist monument. . . . [A] powerfully elegiac novel.” —Publishers Weekly “Told in clear and beautiful prose, Aaron’s Leap is a deeply moving portrait of love, sacrifice, and the transformative power of art in a time of brutal uncertainty.” —SIMON VAN BOOY, author of The Illusion of Separateness “Aaron’s Leap takes you on an epic journey, which is also a very intimate and personal story—entertaining, touching and brutally honest. Her characters are full of compassion and tenderness, but are never sentimental. It’s a great book.” —AGNIESZKA HOLLAND, Academy Award-nominated writer and director of Europa Europa and HBO guest director of Treme and The Wire

A Selection of the Scientific American, History, and BOMC2 Book Clubs Whether discussing the ideal human form in classical antiquity, the impressive depth of the arching soles on the figures in Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, an array of foot maladies and how they have affected luminaries from Lord Byron to Benjamin Franklin, or the racy history of foot fetishism, Rinzler has created a wonderfully engaging cultural biography of our lowest extremities. This is social history and popular science writing at its most entertaining—page after page of fascinating facts, based around the playful notion that appreciating this often overlooked part of our body is essential to understanding what it is to be human.

“Dr. Reicher’s memoir tells a gripping, tragic, unforgettable tale that, like Wladyslaw Szpilman’s The Pianist, recounts the horrors of being a Jew in Poland during World War II. This important historical document distinguishes itself from other Holocaust narratives in many ways, but perhaps in none more so than this: its perseverant hero not only saved his wife and daughter but helped bring one of the most notorious Nazis of all to justice.” —AUSTIN RATNER, Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature-winning author of The Jump Artist and In the Land of the Living Country of Ash is the starkly compelling, original chronicle of a Jewish doctor who miraculously survived near-certain death, first inside the Lodz and Warsaw ghettoes, where he was forced to treat the Gestapo, then on the Aryan side of Warsaw, where he hid under numerous disguises. He clandestinely recorded the terrible events he witnessed, but his manuscript disappeared during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. After the war, reunited with his wife and young daughter, he rewrote his story. Peopled with historical figures like the controversial Chaim Rumkowski, who fancied himself a king of the Jews, to infamous Nazi commanders and dozens of Jews and non-Jews who played cat and mouse with death throughout the war, Reicher’s memoir is about a community faced with extinction and the chance decisions and strokes of luck that kept a few stunned souls alive.

Mr. Hyde finally reveals his secrets to an ambitious journalist, unleashing unforeseen horrors. An ancient Egyptian mummy is revived in 1935 New York to consult on his Hollywood biopic. A Brooklynite suddenly dematerializes and passes through the internet, in search of true love… Love Among the Particles is virtuosic storytelling, at once a poignant critique of our romance with technology and a love letter to language. In a whirlwind tour of space, time, and history, Norman Lock creates worlds that veer wildly from the natural to the supernatural via the pre-modern, mechanical, and digital ages. Whether reintroducing characters from the pages of Robert Louis Stevenson, Mark Twain, Franz Kafka, and Gaston Leroux, or performing dizzying displays of literary pyrotechnics, these stories are nothing less than a compendium of the marvelous. Praise for Norman Lock “Our finest modern fabulist.” —Bookslut “One could spend forever worming through [Lock’s] magicked words, their worlds.” —The Believer “No other writer in recent memory, lives up to [Whitman’s] declaration that behind every book there is a hand reaching out to us, a hand to be held onto, a hand that has the power to touch us, to make us feel.” —Detroit Metro Times “All hail Lock, whose narrative soul sings fairy tales, whose language is glass.” —KATE BERNHEIMER, editor of My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me and Fairy Tale Review “[Lock] has an impressive ability to create a unique and original world.” —BRIAN EVENSON, author of Immobility and Windeye

During the hot Irish summer of 1969, tensions rise in Belfast where Katherine, a former actress, and George, a firefighter, struggle to keep buried secrets from destroying their marriage. As Catholic Republicans and Protestant Loyalists clash during the “Troubles” and Northern Ireland moves to the brink of civil war, the lines between private anguish and public outrage disintegrate. An exploration of memory, childhood, illicit love, and loss, Ghost Moth is an exceptional tale about a family—and a country—seeking freedom from ghosts of the past. Early praise for Ghost Moth “Readers will revel in the skillful writing . . . complex plot . . . strong characterization . . . lyrical descriptions . . . Genre fans (Irish-history buffs, family-story readers, historical-fiction enthusiasts) will enjoy this novel, while its stylistic richness and narrative intricacy will also please readers of literary fiction. Highly recommended.” —Booklist (starred review) “Ghost Moth is an impressive debut by a writer who is not afraid to address the so-called ordinary lives of real human beings. We shall be hearing a great deal more from Michèle Forbes.” —JOHN BANVILLE, Booker Prize-winning author of The Sea and Ancient Light “Clever, unpredictable, beautifully written and crafted—Ghost Moth stayed with me for a long time after I’d finished reading the final, sad, wonderful page.” —RODDY DOYLE, Booker Prize-winning author of Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha and The Commitments “This slow burning tale is both guileless and deeply—sometimes erotically— charged. The writing soaks up the world, and thrills to the beauty of it. Children, bees, milk, the sea, all are wonderfully rendered and alive on the page. Katherine Bedford—so ordinary and so passionate—is a heroine to treasure.” —ANNE ENRIGHT, Booker Prize-winning author of The Gathering and The Forgotten Waltz

The first English-language publication of award-winning Swiss author Pascale Kramer’s emotionally explosive novel Simone and Claude live in a house with a lush garden, surrounded by a high gate that barely protects them from the growing violence and unrest of the surrounding, low-income neighborhood. Simone mourns the loss of youth and possibility as Claude, a gym teacher who has been diagnosed with cancer, edges toward death. This is an unflinching portrait of a couple ravaged by illness and locked into mutual isolation—that is, until the arrival of a young boy brings hope and upsets their delicate danse macabre to devastating effect. “Intense and bravely uncompromising. An adult study of pain, thwarted affection, and guarded privacies in a world at the edge of violent public breakdown. An impressive achievement.” —David Malouf, author of Ransom: A Novel and The Happy Life: The Search for Contentment in the Modern World

The English-language debut of a major Latin American writer The Polish Boxer is a semi-autobiographical tale about roots and origins: the subtly subversive longing for lost identity, the emotionally treacherous territory of cultural exile, and the lingering legacy of history’s atrocities. As the narrator—a Guatemalan literature professor and writer named Eduardo Halfon—travels from small Mayan villages to a Scottish bar in Antigua, and from a Mark Twain conference in North Carolina through the memories of his Polish grandfather’s nightmare at Auschwitz and to a Gypsy neighborhood in Serbia, he encounters people whose stories are as rich and diverse as the languages they speak. PRAISE “Eduardo Halfon’s prose is as delicate, precise, and ineffable as precocious art—a lighthouse that illuminates everything.” —Francisco Goldman, author of Say Her Name “These are the stories of life . . . the question of survival (of both people and cultures) and the way the fictional makes the real bearable and intelligible.” —Publishers Weekly, (boxed review)

An incisive first account of the formation, history, and bloody dissolution of the rebel Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka In the final days of the 30-year Sri Lankan civil war, tens of thousands of civilians were killed, according to UN estimates, as government forces hemmed in the last remaining Tamil Tiger rebels on a tiny sand-spit, dubbed “The Cage.” Gordon Weiss, the United Nations spokesperson in Sri Lanka at the time, here pulls back the curtain of government misinformation to tell the full story for the first time. A harrowing portrait of an island paradise torn apart by war, The Cage is also a moving story about the root causes and catastrophic consequences of a revolutionary uprising caught in the crossfire of international power jockeying PRAISE “The Cage is a tightly-written and clear-eyed narrative about one of the most disturbing human dramas of recent years. . . . a riveting, cautionary tale about the consequences of unchecked political power in a country at war. A must-read.” —Jon Lee Anderson, New Yorker staff writer and author of The Fall of Baghdad “This shattering, heartbreaking tale of savagery and suffering not only lifts the veil that conceals one of the most awful tragedies of the current era, but also helps us understand what should be done, not just in this sad and beautiful land, but long before other such horrors spiral out of control.” —Noam Chomsky, Institute Professor & Professor of Linguistics, MIT, and author of Hopes and Prospects

The gripping tale of a young man’s obsession with an Arctic explorer’s doomed quest to find the Northwest Passage. John Franklin has moved his fifteen-year-old son to the remote northern Canadian town of Houndstitch to make a new life together after his wife, Thomas’ mother, left them. Mourning her disappearance, John, a high school English teacher, writes poetry and escapes into an affair, while Thomas withdraws into a fantasy recreation of the infamous Victorian-era arctic expedition led by British explorer Sir John Franklin. With teenage bravado, Thomas gives himself scurvy so that he can sympathize with the characters in the film of his mind—and is almost lost himself. Although told over the course of only a few days, this gripping tale slips through time, powerfully evoking a modern family in distress and the legendary Franklin crew’s descent into despair and madness on the Arctic tundra. PRAISE “Gregory Spatz’s prose is as clean and sparkling as a new fall of snow.” —Janet Fitch, author of White Oleander and Paint it Black “At its heart Inukshuk is about family. But Spatz has transfigured this beautifully told, wise story with history and myth, poetry and magic into something rarer, stranger and altogether amazing. A book that points unerringly true north.” —Karen Joy Fowler, author of The Jane Austen Book Club and Wit’s End

Dr. Strangelove meets Men Who Stare at Goats in the true story of how neuroscience and related technologies are shaping national defense. The first book of its kind, Mind Wars covers the bizarre history of cutting edge technology and neuroscience developed for military applications, while addressing the ethical dilemmas sparking debate in the halls of science and government. Jonathan D. Moreno, a respected advisor to presidents, Congress, and the Pentagon, discusses the innovative Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and its involvement in “psyops” mind control experiments, microchip brain implants and advanced prosthetics, supersoldiers and robot armies, and drugs that erase both fear and the need to sleep, while offering hope for PTSD sufferers. Although Mind Wars may read like science fiction or the latest conspiracy thriller, its subjects are very real and changing the course of modern warfare. PRAISE “One of the most important thinkers describes the literally mind-boggling possibilities that modern brain science could present for national security.” —Lawrence J. Korb, former US Assistant Secretary of Defense

What if there were a city that consisted only of restaurants? What if Paul Gauguin had gone to Greenland instead of Tahiti? What if there were a field called Umbrology, the study of shadows, where physicists and shadow puppeteers worked side by side? Tim Horvath explores all of this and more as he blends the everyday and wondrous to contend with age-old themes of loss, identity, imagination, and the search for human connection. Full of speculative daring though firmly anchored in the tradition of realism, these stories easily stand in the company of contemporary masters such as Steven Millhauser and Jim Shepard. Whether making offhand references to Mystery Science Theater, providing a new perspective on Heidegger’s philosophy and forays into Nazism, or following the imaginary travels of a library book, Horvath’s writing is as entertaining as it is thought provoking. PRAISE “Tim Horvath is a fluid, inventive writer who deftly interweaves the palpably real and the pyrotechnically fantastic. At once playful, deeply moving, and sharply funny, Understories satisfies the mind, the heart, and the gut.” —Kate Christensen, author of The Astral and The Great Man “Horvath seems to be channeling, all at once, Borges and Calvino and Kevin Brockmeier. And it all works.” —Rebecca Makkai, author of The Borrower

“The stories in this strange and original collection bend genres—horror, mystery, Western—into wondrous new shapes.” —O, The Oprah Magazine In each of these eight lyrical and baroque tales, Melissa Pritchard transports readers into spine-tingling milieus that range from the astounding realm of Robert LeRoy Ripley’s “odditoriums” to the courtyard where Edgar Allan Poe once played as a child. Whether she is setting the famed figures of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, including Annie Oakley and Sitting Bull, against the real, genocidal history of the American West, or contrasting the luxurious hotel where British writer Somerset Maugham stayed with the modern-day brothels of India, her stories illuminate the many ways history and architecture exert powerful forces upon human consciousness. Melissa Pritchard is a Flannery O’Connor, Janet Heidinger Kafka, and Carl Sandburg award-winning author whose two previous short fiction collections were New York Times Notable Book and Editor’s Choice selections. She has also been an embedded journalist in Afghanistan and is member of the Afghan Women’s Writing Project, which helps to promote literacy and education for Afghan women and girls. Visit her website at www.melissapritchard.com

“The Body Politic is a penetrating and uncommonly fair-minded analysis of how science is construed, nourished, and antagonized across the rainbow of American thought and belief. Highly recommended for all those who would base their political opinions on facts, rather than on other people’s opinions.” —TIMOTHY FERRIS, journalist, PBS filmmaker, and author of The Science of Liberty: Democracy, Reason, and the Laws of Nature “Since the beginning of our quest to win the Indianapolis 500 our family has believed in the power of technology. The only limits to that technology have been human ones. The Body Politic reminds us that in biology as well as engineering, America will always need that pioneer spirit.” —AL UNSER, Sr., AL UNSER, Jr., BOBBY UNSER, Sr., Indianapolis 500 Champions “Moreno shows how biological discoveries aggravate cultural tensions, challenge our political system and values, and stimulate debate about the place of science and scientists in America. . . . Sophisticated, useful, and well-written.” —Library Journal We have entered what is called the “biological century” and a new biopolitics has emerged to address the implications for America’s collective value system, our well-being, and ultimately, our future. The Body Politic is the first book to recognize and assess this new force in our political landscape—one that fuels today’s culture wars and has motivated politicians of all stripes to reexamine their platforms. As Moreno explains the most contentious issues, he also offers an engaging history of the intersection between science and democracy in American life, a reasoned (and often surprising) analysis of how different political ideologies view scientific controversies, and a vision for how the new biopolitics can help shape the quality of our lives.

A stirring debut novel of brotherhood, survival, and coming-of-age during World War One “The Sojourn is a work of uncommon strength by a writer of rare and powerful elegance about a war, now lost to living memory, that echoes in headlines of international strife to this day.”—Mary Doria Russell, author of A Thread of Grace “With For Whom the Bell Tolls, Hemingway gave us a war novel in a uniquely bold, American cadence. In The Sojourn, Andrew Krivak gives us a war novel in the rhythms and harmonies of Bartók and Janáček. His use of language conveys the energy, wit, and grace of Mozart. With the centennial of World War One now only three years ahead, we do well to peer back into some of its shadowy corners, in this case central and eastern Europe, the Tyrolean Alps, and Sardinia.”—Carol Chittenden, Eight Cousins Bookstore (Falmouth, MA) Inspired by the author’s own family history, The Sojourn is the story of Jozef Vinich, who was uprooted from a 19th-century mining town in Colorado by a shocking family tragedy to return with his father to an impoverished shepherd’s life in rural Austria-Hungary. When war comes, Jozef joins his cousin and brother-in-arms as a sharpshooter on the southern front, where he must survive a perilous trek across the frozen Italian Alps and capture by a victorious enemy. As poetic as Cold Mountain and The English Patient, this novel evokes a time when Czechs, Slovaks, Austrians, and Germans fought on the same side while divided by language, ethnicity, and social class in the most brutal war to date. It is also a poignant tale of fathers and sons, addressing the great immigration to America and the desire to live the American dream amid the unfolding tragedy in Europe.