Rachel Kushner

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

New Jersey

A Novel

"Creation Lake is a novel about a freelance agent, a 34-year-old American woman of ruthless tactics and bold opinions and clean beauty, who is sent to do dirty work in France. "Sadie Smith" is how the narrator introduces herself to her lover, to the rural commune of French subversives on whom she is keeping tabs, and to the reader. We never learn her real name. Sadie has met her lover, Lucien, a young and well-born Parisian, by "cold bump"- making him believe the encounter was accidental. And like everyone she chooses to interact with, Lucien is useful to her, used by her. Sadie operates on strategy and dissimulation, based on what her "contacts," shadowy figures in business and government, instruct. First, these contacts want her to incite provocation. Then they want more. In this region of centuries-old farms and ancient caves, Sadie becomes entranced by a mysterious figure named Bruno Lacombe, a mentor to the young activists, who lives in a vast network of underground caves on his daughter's land and communicates only by email. Bruno believes that the path to emancipation from what ails modern life is not revolt, but a return to the ancient past before civilization. Just as Sadie is certain she's the seductress and puppet master of those whom she surveils, Bruno Lacombe is seducing her with his ingenious counter-histories, his artful laments, his own tragic story. Written in short, vaulting sections, Rachel Kushner's rendition of "noir" is taut, propulsive, and dazzling. Creation Lake is Kushner's finest achievement yet as a novelist, a work of high art, high comedy, keen insights, and unforgettable pleasure. From Rachel Kushner on the title: My character Bruno refers to "a deep cistern of voices, the lake of our creation" - meaning all of human history, the whole struggle in which chains of civilizations try to figure out how to live. He believes he can hear these voices underground. To me, "Creation Lake" suggests intrigue. Creation of what? In Sadie's case, a persona, a feint, a manipulation. But also in her case, the creation possibly of her own soul"--

Creation Lake

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Nikki May

From the acclaimed author of Wahala, a "vibrant" (Charmaine Wilkerson) decolonial retelling of Mansfield Park, exploring identity, culture, race, and love. Quiet Funke is happy in Nigeria. She loves her art teacher mother, her professor father, and even her annoying little brother (most of the time). But when tragedy strikes, she's sent to England, a place she knows only from her mother's stories. To her dismay, she finds the much-lauded estate dilapidated, the food tasteless, the weather grey. Worse still, her mother's family are cold and distant. With one exception: her cousin Liv. Free-spirited Liv has always wanted to break free of her joyless family. She becomes fiercely protective of her little cousin, and her warmth and kindness give Funke a place to heal. The two girls grow into adulthood the closest of friends. But the choices their mothers made haunt Funke and Liv and when a second tragedy occurs their friendship is torn apart. Against the long shadow of their shared family history, each woman will struggle to chart a path forward, separated by country, misunderstanding, and ambition. Moving between Somerset and Lagos over the course of two decades, This Motherless Land is a sweeping examination of identity, culture, race, and love that asks how we find belonging and whether a family's generational wrongs can be righted.

This Motherless Land

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Holly Black

Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

A Novel of Elfhame

Return to the opulent world of Elfhame, filled with intrigue, betrayal, and dangerous desires, with this first book of a captivating new duology from the #1 New York Times bestselling author Holly Black. 



A runaway queen. A reluctant prince. And a quest that may destroy them both.

 

Eight years have passed since the Battle of the Serpent. But in the icy north, Lady Nore of the Court of Teeth has reclaimed the Ice Needle Citadel. There, she is using an ancient relic to create monsters of stick and snow who will do her bidding and exact her revenge.

 

Suren, child queen of the Court of Teeth, and the one person with power over her mother, fled to the human world. There, she lives feral in the woods. Lonely, and still haunted by the merciless torments she endured in the Court of Teeth, she bides her time by releasing mortals from foolish bargains. She believes herself forgotten until the storm hag, Bogdana chases her through the night streets. Suren is saved by none other than Prince Oak, heir to Elfhame, to whom she was once promised in marriage and who she has resented for years. 

 

Now seventeen, Oak is charming, beautiful, and manipulative. He's on a mission that will lead him into the north, and he wants Suren's help. But if she agrees, it will mean guarding her heart against the boy she once knew and a prince she cannot trust, as well as confronting all the horrors she thought she left behind.

 

The Stolen Heir

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Elizabeth Hay

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Snow Road Station

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Katherine Applegate

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

Soon to be a major motion picture! Winner of the Newbery Medal and a #1 New York Times bestseller This unforgettable novel from renowned author Katherine Applegate celebrates the transformative power of unexpected friendship. Inspired by the true story of a captive gorilla known as Ivan, this illustrated book is told from the point of view of Ivan himself. Having spent twenty-seven years behind the glass walls of his enclosure in a shopping mall, Ivan has grown accustomed to humans watching him. He hardly ever thinks about his life in the jungle. Instead, Ivan occupies himself with television, his friends Stella and Bob, and painting. But when he meets Ruby, a baby elephant taken from the wild, he is forced to see their home, and his art, through new eyes. In the tradition of timeless stories like Charlotte's Web and Stuart Little, Katherine Applegate blends humor and poignancy to create an unforgettable story of friendship, art, and hope. The One and Only Ivan features first-person narrative; author's use of literary devices (personification, imagery); and story elements (plot, character development, perspective). Plus don't miss Katherine Applegate's Endling series!

The One and Only Ivan

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Sara Pennypacker

National Book Award Longlist * New York Times Bestseller * An Amazon Best Book of the Year Finally in paperback! This handsome edition features French flaps. From bestselling and award-winning author Sara Pennypacker comes a beautifully wrought, utterly compelling novel about the powerful relationship between a boy and his fox. Pax is destined to become a classic, beloved for generations to come. Pax and Peter have been inseparable ever since Peter rescued him as a kit. But one day, the unimaginable happens: Peter's dad enlists in the military and makes him return the fox to the wild. At his grandfather's house, three hundred miles away from home, Peter knows he isn't where he should be—with Pax. He strikes out on his own despite the encroaching war, spurred by love, loyalty, and grief, to be reunited with his fox. Meanwhile Pax, steadfastly waiting for his boy, embarks on adventures and discoveries of his own. . . .

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Sarah Moss

Blurbed by Emma Donoghue, Maggie O’Farrell, Maria Dahvana Headley, Elizabeth Day, and Jessie Burton.

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

A taut, gripping tale of a young woman and an Iron Age reenactment trip that unearths frightening behavior The light blinds you; there’s a lot you miss by gathering at the fireside. In the north of England, far from the intrusions of cities but not far from civilization, Silvie and her family are living as if they are ancient Britons, surviving by the tools and knowledge of the Iron Age. For two weeks, the length of her father’s vacation, they join an anthropology course set to reenact life in simpler times. They are surrounded by forests of birch and rowan; they make stew from foraged roots and hunted rabbit. The students are fulfilling their coursework; Silvie’s father is fulfilling his lifelong obsession. He has raised her on stories of early man, taken her to witness rare artifacts, recounted time and again their rituals and beliefs—particularly their sacrifices to the bog. Mixing with the students, Silvie begins to see, hear, and imagine another kind of life, one that might include going to university, traveling beyond England, choosing her own clothes and food, speaking her mind. The ancient Britons built ghost walls to ward off enemy invaders, rude barricades of stakes topped with ancestral skulls. When the group builds one of their own, they find a spiritual connection to the past. What comes next but human sacrifice? A story at once mythic and strikingly timely, Sarah Moss’s Ghost Wall urges us to wonder how far we have come from the “primitive minds” of our ancestors.

Ghost Wall

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Thomas Desaulniers-Brousseau

As World War II thrashed to its end, Jerome Brauvais hides in the woods of Quebec. A young deserter from the Canadian Forces, he has been sent by his mother to live with his moody grandfather in a remote house. There, he helps renovate the old place and catches wind of its history of crime and mysterious deaths.

Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

Depressed and unmoored by his father's violent death, and drafted into the Canadian military to serve in World War II, Jerome has fled, taking refuge in a cabin his grandfather owns in a remote part of the countryside. But Jerome's troubles are only beginning. A strange dread fills the woods, and rumors of murders and ghosts cast his refuge in a sinister light. As Jerome struggles to come to terms with his father's death, he obsessively seeks to uncover the mystery of what, exactly, happened in his grandfather's house. In Idle Days, Simon Leclerc's expressionistic artwork brings to life a layered and deeply literary story from writer Thomas Desaulniers-Brousseau. This haunting graphic novel explores with tenderness and insight the wounds opened with the loss of a loved one.

Idle Days

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Quiara Alegría Hudes

Pulitzer Prize winner, blurbed by Lin-Manuel Miranda.

A Memoir

GOOD MORNING AMERICA BUZZ PICK * The Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and co-writer of In the Heights tells her lyrical story of coming of age against the backdrop of an ailing Philadelphia barrio, with her sprawling Puerto Rican family as a collective muse.

LONGLISTED FOR THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL * ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: NPR, New York Public Library, BookPage, and BookRiot * "Quiara Alegría Hudes is in her own league. Her sentences will take your breath away. How lucky we are to have her telling our stories."--Lin-Manuel Miranda, award-winning creator of Hamilton and In the Heights
 
Quiara Alegría Hudes was the sharp-eyed girl on the stairs while her family danced their defiance in a tight North Philly kitchen. She was awed by her mother and aunts and cousins, but haunted by the unspoken, untold stories of the barrio--even as she tried to find her own voice in the sea of language around her, written and spoken, English and Spanish, bodies and books, Western art and sacred altars. Her family became her private pantheon, a gathering circle of powerful orisha-like women with tragic real-world wounds, and she vowed to tell their stories--but first she'd have to get off the stairs and join the dance. She'd have to find her language.

Weaving together Hudes's love of music with the songs of her family, the lessons of North Philly with those of Yale, this is a multimythic dive into home, memory, and belonging--narrated by an obsessed girl who fought to become an artist so she could capture the world she loved in all its wild and delicate beauty.

My Broken Language

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Alfred Doblin

Michael Hofmann

The inspiration for Rainer Werner Fassbinder's epic film and that The Guardian named one of the "Top 100 Books of All Time," Berlin Alexanderplatz is considered one of the most important works of the Weimar Republic and twentieth century literature.

Berlin Alexanderplatz, the great novel of Berlin and the doomed Weimar Republic, is one of the great books of the twentieth century, gruesome, farcical, and appalling, word drunk, pitchdark. In Michael Hofmann's extraordinary new translation, Alfred Döblin's masterpiece lives in English for the first time.

As Döblin writes in the opening pages: 

The subject of this book is the life of the former cement worker and haulier Franz Biberkopf in Berlin. As our
story begins, he has just been released from prison, where he did time for some stupid stuff; now he is back
in Berlin, determined to go straight. 

To begin with, he succeeds. But then, though doing all right for himself financially, he gets involved in a
set-to with an unpredictable external agency that looks an awful lot like fate. 

Three times the force attacks him and disrupts his scheme. The first time it comes at him with dishonesty and deception. Our man is able to get to his feet, he is still good to stand. 

Then it strikes him a low blow. He has trouble getting up from that, he is almost counted out. And finally it hits him with monstrous and extreme violence.

Berlin Alexanderplatz

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Temi Oh

When an Earth-like planet is discovered, a team of six teens, along with three veteran astronauts, embark on a twenty-year trip to set up a planet for human colonization—but find that space is more deadly than they ever could have imagined. Have you ever hoped you could leave everything behind? Have you ever dreamt of a better world? Can a dream sustain a lifetime? A century ago, an astronomer discovered an Earth-like planet orbiting a nearby star. She predicted that one day humans would travel there to build a utopia. Today, ten astronauts are leaving everything behind to find it. Four are veterans of the twentieth century’s space-race. And six are teenagers who’ve trained for this mission most of their lives. It will take the team twenty-three years to reach Terra-Two. Twenty-three years locked in close quarters. Twenty-three years with no one to rely on but each other. Twenty-three years with no rescue possible, should something go wrong. And something always goes wrong.

Do You Dream of Terra-Two?

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Eugene Lim

One of Vol. 1 Brooklyn's Favorite Fiction Books of 2017, a Literary Hub Staff Favorite Book of 2017, and one of BOMB Magazine's "Looking Back on 2017: Literature" Selections.

"Wondrous . . . [A] sense of the erratic and tangential quality of everyday life--even if it's displaced into a bizarre, parallel world--drifts off the page, into the world you see, after reading Dear Cyborgs." --Hua Hsu, The New Yorker

In a small Midwestern town, two Asian American boys bond over their outcast status and a mutual love of comic books. Meanwhile, in an alternative or perhaps future universe, a team of superheroes ponder modern society during their time off. Between black-ops missions and rescuing hostages, they swap stories of artistic malaise and muse on the seemingly inescapable grip of market economics.

Gleefully toying with the conventions of the novel, Dear Cyborgs weaves together the story of a friendship's dissolution with a provocative and timely meditation on protest. Through a series of linked monologues, a lively cast of characters explores narratives of resistance--protest art, eco-terrorists, Occupy squatters, pyromaniacal militants--and the extent to which any of these can truly withstand and influence the cold demands of contemporary capitalism. All the while, a mysterious cybernetic book of clairvoyance beckons, and trusted allies start to disappear.

Entwining comic-book villains with cultural critiques, Eugene Lim's Dear Cyborgs is a fleet-footed literary exploration of power, friendship, and creativity. Ambitious and knowing, it combines detective pulps, subversive philosophy, and Hollywood chase scenes, unfolding like the composites and revelations of a dream.

Dear Cyborgs

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“An electric call to heal our broken world.” - Naomi Klein

Writing into Existence

A Publishers Weekly Top 10 Memoir of the Season The work of a lifetime from the Tony Award-winning, bestselling author of The Vagina Monologues-political, personal, profound, and more than forty years in the making. The newest book from V (formerly Eve Ensler), Reckoning invites you to travel the journey of a writer's and activist's life and process over forty years, representing both the core of ideas that have become global movements and the methods through which V survived abuse and self-hatred. Seamlessly moving from the internal to the external, the personal to the political, Reckoning is a moving and inspiring work of prose, poetry, dreams, letters, and essays drawn from V's lifetime journals that takes readers from Berlin to Oklahoma to Congo, from climate disaster, homelessness, and activism to family. Unflinching, intimate, introspective, courageous, Reckoning explores ways to create an unstoppable force for change, to love and survive love, to hold people and states accountable, to reckon with demons and honor the dead, to reclaim the body, and to see oneself as connected to a greater purpose. It reimagines what seems fixed and intractable, providing a path to understand one's unique experience as deeply rooted in the world, to break through one's own boundaries, and to write oneself into freedom.

Reckoning

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Brandon Taylor

INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER 

WINNER OF THE STORY PRIZE

SHORTLISTED FOR THE DYLAN THOMAS PRIZE

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY USA TODAY, NPR, VULTURE, MARIE CLAIRE, THE TIMES OF LONDON, GOOD HOUSEKEEPING, AND PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

A group portrait of young adults enmeshed in desire and violence, a hotly charged, deeply satisfying new work of fiction from the author of Booker Prize finalist Real Life

In the series of linked stories at the heart of Filthy Animals, set among young creatives in the American Midwest, a young man treads delicate emotional waters as he navigates a series of sexually fraught encounters with two dancers in an open relationship, forcing him to weigh his vulnerabilities against his loneliness. In other stories, a young woman battles with the cancers draining her body and her family; menacing undercurrents among a group of teenagers explode in violence on a winter night; a little girl tears through a house like a tornado, driving her babysitter to the brink; and couples feel out the jagged edges of connection, comfort, and cruelty.

One of the breakout literary stars of 2020, Brandon Taylor has been hailed by Roxane Gay as "a writer who wields his craft in absolutely unforgettable ways." With Filthy Animals he renews and expands on the promise made in Real Life, training his precise and unsentimental gaze on the tensions among friends and family, lovers and others. Psychologically taut and quietly devastating, Filthy Animals is a tender portrait of the fierce longing for intimacy, the lingering presence of pain, and the desire for love in a world that seems, more often than not, to withhold it.

Filthy Animals

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Edward St. Aubyn

All the Patrick Melrose novels in one collection.

Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother's Milk

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

An Atlantic Magazine Best Book of the Year
APublishers Weekly Best Book of the Year

"The Melrose Novels are a masterwork for the twenty-first century, written by one of the great prose stylists in England." --Alice Sebold, author ofThe Lovely Bones

Soon to be a Showtime TV series starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Blythe Danner

For more than twenty years, acclaimed author Edward St. Aubyn has chronicled the life of Patrick Melrose, painting an extraordinary portrait of the beleaguered and self-loathing world of privilege. This single volume collects the first four novels--Never Mind,Bad News,Some Hope, andMother's Milk, a Man Booker finalist--to coincide with the publication ofAt Last, the final installment of this unique novel cycle.

By turns harrowing and hilarious, these beautifully written novels dissect the English upper class as we follow Patrick Melrose's story from child abuse to heroin addiction and recovery.Never Mind, the first novel, unfolds over a day and an evening at the family's chateaux in the south of France, where the sadistic and terrifying figure of David Melrose dominates the lives of his five-year-old son, Patrick, and his rich and unhappy American mother, Eleanor. From abuse to addiction, the second novel,Bad News opens as the twenty-two-year-old Patrick sets off to collect his father's ashes from New York, where he will spend a drug-crazed twenty-four hours. And back in England, the third novel,Some Hope, offers a sober and clean Patrick the possibility of recovery. The fourth novel, the Booker-shortlistedMother's Milk, returns to the family chateau, where Patrick, now married and a father himself, struggles with child rearing, adultery, his mother's desire for assisted suicide, and the loss of the family home to a New Age foundation.

Edward St. Aubyn offers a window into a world of utter decadence, amorality, greed, snobbery, and cruelty--welcome to the declining British aristocracy.

The Patrick Melrose Novels

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Robin MacArthur

Stories

“This heartbreakingly honest and authentic fiction will make you weep over, laugh at, and finally cheer for, mothers and daughters, sons and fathers, lovers and losers, and the human race in general. Half Wild is American fiction, and American literature, at its very best.”—Howard Frank Mosher, author of The Great Northern Express and Northern Borders Spanning nearly forty years, the stories in Robin MacArthur’s formidable debut give voice to the dreams, hungers, and fears of a diverse cast of Vermonters—adolescent girls, aging hippies, hardscrabble farmers, disconnected women, and solitary men. Straddling the border between civilization and the wild, they all struggle to make sense of their loneliness and longings in the stark and often isolating enclaves they call home—golden fields and white-veiled woods, dilapidated farmhouses and makeshift trailers, icy rivers and still lakes rouse the imagination, tether the heart, and inhabit the soul. In “Creek Dippers,” a teenage girl vows to escape the fate that has trapped her eccentric mother. In “God’s Country,” an elderly woman is unexpectedly reminded of a forbidden youthful passion and the chance she did not take. Returning to her childhood house when her mother falls ill, a daughter grapples with her own sense of belonging in “The Women Where I’m From.” With striking prose powerful in its clarity and purity, MacArthur effortlessly renders characters—men and women, young and old—cleaved to the fierce and beautiful land that has defined them.

Half Wild

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Cory Doctorow

It’s thirty years from now. We’re making progress, mitigating climate change, slowly but surely. But what about all the angry old people who can’t let go? For young Americans a generation from now, climate change isn't controversial. It's just an overwhelming fact of life. And so are the great efforts to contain and mitigate it. Entire cities are being moved inland from the rising seas. Vast clean-energy projects are springing up everywhere. Disaster relief, the mitigation of floods and superstorms, has become a skill for which tens of millions of people are trained every year. The effort is global. It employs everyone who wants to work. Even when national politics oscillates back to right-wing leaders, the momentum is too great; these vast programs cannot be stopped in their tracks. But there are still those Americans, mostly elderly, who cling to their red baseball caps, their grievances, their huge vehicles, their anger. To their "alternative" news sources that reassure them that their resentment is right and pure and that "climate change" is just a giant scam. And they're your grandfather, your uncle, your great-aunt. And they're not going anywhere. And they’re armed to the teeth. The Lost Cause asks: What do we do about people who cling to the belief that their own children are the enemy? When, in fact, they're often the elders that we love?

Browse by categories

Rachel Kushner

Creation Lake

Nikki May

This Motherless Land

Holly Black

The Stolen Heir

Elizabeth Hay

Snow Road Station

Katherine Applegate

The One and Only Ivan

Sara Pennypacker

Pax

Sarah Moss

Ghost Wall

Thomas Desaulniers-Brousseau

Idle Days

Quiara Alegría Hudes

My Broken Language

Alfred Doblin; Michael Hofmann

Berlin Alexanderplatz

Temi Oh

Do You Dream of Terra-Two?

Eugene Lim

Dear Cyborgs

V.

Reckoning

Brandon Taylor

Filthy Animals

Edward St. Aubyn

The Patrick Melrose Novels

Eugene Lim

Dear Cyborgs

Robin MacArthur

Half Wild

Cory Doctorow

The Lost Cause

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