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Contemporary
Heaven: A Novel
Mieko Kawakami • 2022
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2022 INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE<br/>“A raw, painful, and tender portrait of adolescent misery… This book is very likely to make you cry.”—Lily Meyer, NPR<br/>With profound tenderness and sensitivity, Japanese literary superstar Mieko Kawakami turns her unique gaze onto the causes and effects of violence. Raw but revelatory, this novel stands as a dazzling confirmation of Kawakami’s standing as one of her country’s most insightful and compelling novelists.<br/>In Heaven, a shy high-school student is subjected to bullying from his classmates and the only person capable of understanding his ordeal is a young classmate who suffers similar treatment at the hands of her tormentors. Each finds in the other a unique sensibility capable of offering not only solace but also a fresh perspective on their predicaments.
Conversations with Friends
Sally Rooney • 2017
NOW A HULU ORIGINAL SERIES • From the New York Times bestselling author of Normal People . . . “[A] cult-hit . . . [a] sharply realistic comedy of adultery and friendship.”—Entertainment Weekly<br/><br/>SALLY ROONEY NAMED TO THE TIME 100 NEXT LIST • WINNER OF THE SUNDAY TIMES (UK) YOUNG WRITER OF THE YEAR AWARD • ONE OF BUZZFEED’S BEST BOOKS OF THE DECADE • ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Vogue, Slate • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Elle<br/><br/>Frances is a coolheaded and darkly observant young woman, vaguely pursuing a career in writing while studying in Dublin. Her best friend is the beautiful and endlessly self-possessed Bobbi. At a local poetry performance one night, they meet a well-known photographer, and as the girls are then gradually drawn into her world, Frances is reluctantly impressed by the older woman’s sophisticated home and handsome husband, Nick. But however amusing Frances and Nick’s flirtation seems at first, it begins to give way to a strange—and then painful—intimacy.<br/><br/>Written with gemlike precision and marked by a sly sense of humor, Conversations with Friends is wonderfully alive to the pleasures and dangers of youth, and the messy edges of female friendship.<br/><br/>SHORTLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD<br/><br/>“Sharp, funny, thought-provoking . . . a really great portrait of two young women as they’re figuring out how to be adults.”—Celeste Ng, Late Night with Seth Meyers Podcast<br/><br/>“The dialogue is superb, as are the insights about communicating in the age of electronic devices. Rooney has a magical ability to write scenes of such verisimilitude that even when little happens they’re suspenseful.”—Curtis Sittenfeld, The Week<br/><br/>“Rooney has the gift of imbuing everyday life with a sense of high stakes . . . a novel of delicious frictions.”—New York<br/><br/>“A writer of rare confidence, with a lucid, exacting style . . . One wonderful aspect of Rooney’s consistently wonderful novel is the fierce clarity with which she examines the self-delusion that so often festers alongside presumed self-knowledge. . . . But Rooney’s natural power is as a psychological portraitist. She is acute and sophisticated about the workings of innocence; the protagonist of this novel about growing up has no idea just how much of it she has left to do.”—Alexandra Schwartz, The New Yorker<br/><br/>“This book. This book. I read it in one day. I hear I’m not alone.”—Sarah Jessica Parker (Instagram)
Open Water
Caleb Azumah Nelson • 2021
WINNER OF THE COSTA FIRST NOVEL AWARD<br/>A NATIONAL BOOK FOUNDATION 5 UNDER 35<br/>WINNER OF THE BRITISH BOOK AWARD FOR DEBUT FICTION<br/>A stunning first novel about two young Black artists in London falling in and out of love by a new literary virtuoso and finalist for the BBC Short Story Award, twenty-six-year-old writer and photographer Caleb Azumah Nelson<br/>“Open Water is tender poetry, a love song to Black art and thought, an exploration of intimacy and vulnerability between two young artists learning to be soft with each other in a world that hardens against Black people.” —Yaa Gyasi, author of Homegoing<br/>In a crowded London pub, two young people meet. Both are Black British, both won scholarships to private schools where they struggled to belong, both are now artists—he a photographer, she a dancer—and both are trying to make their mark in a world that by turns celebrates and rejects them. Tentatively, tenderly, they fall in love. But two people who seem destined to be together can still be torn apart by fear and violence, and over the course of a year they find their relationship tested by forces beyond their control.<br/>Narrated with deep intimacy, Open Water is at once an achingly beautiful love story and a potent insight into race and masculinity that asks what it means to be a person in a world that sees you only as a Black body; to be vulnerable when you are only respected for strength; to find safety in love, only to lose it. With gorgeous, soulful intensity, and blistering emotional intelligence, Caleb Azumah Nelson gives a profoundly sensitive portrait of romantic love in all its feverish waves and comforting beauty.<br/>This is one of the most essential debut novels of recent years, heralding the arrival of a stellar and prodigious young talent.
Intermezzo
Sally Rooney • unde
An exquisitely moving story about grief, love, and family, from the global phenomenon Sally Rooney.<br/><br/>Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common.<br/><br/>Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties—successful, competent, and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women—his enduring first love, Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke.<br/><br/>Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined.<br/><br/>For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude—a period of desire, despair, and possibility; a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.
My Year of Rest and Relaxation: A Novel
Ottessa Moshfegh • 2019
Named a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post, Time, NPR, Vice, Bustle, The New York Times, The Guardian, Kirkus Reviews, Entertainment Weekly, The AV Club, & Audible A New York Times Bestseller • New York Times Readers Pick: 100 Best Books of the 21st Century “One of the most compelling protagonists modern fiction has offered in years: a loopy, quietly furious pillhead whose Ambien ramblings and Xanaxed b*tcheries somehow wend their way through sad and funny and strange toward something genuinely profound.” — Entertainment Weekly “Darkly hilarious . . . [Moshfegh’s] the kind of provocateur who makes you laugh out loud while drawing blood.” —Vogue From one of our boldest, most celebrated new literary voices, a novel about a young woman's efforts to duck the ills of the world by embarking on an extended hibernation with the help of one of the worst psychiatrists in the annals of literature and the battery of medicines she prescribes. Our narrator should be happy, shouldn't she? She's young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate, works an easy job at a hip art gallery, lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for, like the rest of her needs, by her inheritance. But there is a dark and vacuous hole in her heart, and it isn't just the loss of her parents, or the way her Wall Street boyfriend treats her, or her sadomasochistic relationship with her best friend, Reva. It's the year 2000 in a city aglitter with wealth and possibility; what could be so terribly wrong? My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a powerful answer to that question. Through the story of a year spent under the influence of a truly mad combination of drugs designed to heal our heroine from her alienation from this world, Moshfegh shows us how reasonable, even necessary, alienation can be. Both tender and blackly funny, merciless and compassionate, it is a showcase for the gifts of one of our major writers working at the height of her powers.
The Vegetarian
Han Kang • 2016
<b>FROM HAN KANG, WINNER OF THE 2024 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE</b><br><br><b>“[Han Kang’s] intense poetic prose . . . exposes the fragility of human life.”—The Nobel Committee for Literature, in the citation for the Nobel Prize</b><br><br><b><i>A NEW YORK TIMES</i> BESTSELLER</b><br><b>WINNER OF THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE </b><br><b>ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES’S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21ST CENTURY<br>A <i>KIRKUS REVIEWS </i>BEST FICTION BOOK OF THE CENTURY</b><br><br><b>“Ferocious.”—<i>The New York Times Book Review</i> (Ten Best Books of the Year)</b><br><b>“Both terrifying and terrific.”—Lauren Groff</b><br><b>“Provocative [and] shocking.”—<i>The Washington Post</i></b><br><br>Before the nightmares began, Yeong-hye and her husband lived an ordinary, controlled life. But the dreams—invasive images of blood and brutality—torture her, driving Yeong-hye to purge her mind and renounce eating meat altogether. It’s a small act of independence, but it interrupts her marriage and sets into motion an increasingly grotesque chain of events at home. As her husband, her brother-in-law and sister each fight to reassert their control, Yeong-hye obsessively defends the choice that’s become sacred to her. Soon their attempts turn desperate, subjecting first her mind, and then her body, to ever more intrusive and perverse violations, sending Yeong-hye spiraling into a dangerous, bizarre estrangement, not only from those closest to her, but also from herself. <br><br>Celebrated by critics around the world, <i>The Vegetarian</i> is a darkly allegorical, Kafka-esque tale of power, obsession, and one woman’s struggle to break free from the violence both without and within her.<br><b><br>A Best Book of the Year: <i>BuzzFeed, Entertainment Weekly, Wall Street Journal, Time, Elle, The Economist, HuffPost, Slate, Bustle, The St. Louis Dispatch, Electric Literature, Publishers Weekly</i></b>
Dorayaki
Durian Sukegawa • 2023
"Sentaro, un joven solitario, pasa los días trabajando en una pequeña tienda de pasteles dorayakis con un árbol de cerezo en frente. Una tarde conoce a Tokue, una anciana un poco excéntrica que prepara una pasta de porotos azuki excepcional. Ella comienza a enseñarle la manera precisa de preparar esa pasta y, de a poco, el vínculo entre ellos se convierte en una inesperada y entrañable amistad. El paso del tiempo acompasado con los cambios en la naturaleza, la belleza de lo pequeño, las marcas que dejan las heridas del pasado, la forma en que las personas lidian con la injusticia y el mal, la posibilidad de encontrar algún consuelo en realizar tareas cotidianas con absoluta dedicación: la prosa de Sukegawa aborda todo esto con sutileza en una historia sencilla y profunda."--Back cover.
Hello Beautiful
Ann Napolitano • 2023
<p>From the <i>New York Times </i>bestselling author of <i>Dear Edward</i> comes a beautifully tender, heartbreaking, and moving story of four sisters over three decades <p>Meet the Padvano girls. Best friends and sisters, they are thought of as inseparable by everyone in their close-knit Chicago neighbourhood. Julia, the eldest, is the "rocket" of the family - she always has a destination in mind and clear plans for how to get there. Sylvie, the dreamer, is happiest with her nose in a book and imagines a life for herself other than the expected path of wife and mother. Cecelia and Emmeline, the twins, are the artist and the caregiver. From childhood, the four sisters complete each other, expecting that their family will always be intact. <p>When Julia falls in love with William Walters, a history student and college sports star, she's delighted by the way her plans for adulthood are coming together. A husband, a house, a family. But when darkness from William's past begins to block the light of his future, it is Sylvie, not Julia, who steps in to help. Suddenly, things shift. Dynamics and relationships, priorities and secrets - everything that was once a given no longer is. <p>Rich and vivid, heartbreaking and heart-mending, <i>Hello Beautiful </i>captures the joy, tragedy, trust, and betrayal to ask: what does it mean to be a family? And once shattered, can it be pieced back together? <p>***Praise for <i>Dear Edward</i> by Ann Napolitano*** <p>'Wonderful . . . a beautifully written coming-of-age story' Nina Stibbe <p>'Powerful' New York Times <p>'Ann Napolitano's writing is astonishing. I'm in awe' Marian Keyes <p>'Moving and emotional' Anne Tyler <p>'That rare book that breaks your heart and stitches it back together' Jodi Picoult <p>'Stunning, life-affirming' <i>Vogue</i> <p><i>'</i>Made me think, nod in recognition, care about its characters, and cry, and you can't ask more of a novel than that' Emma Donoghue</p>
Breasts and Eggs
Mieko Kawakami • 2020
A novel that “considers the agency . . . women exert over their bodies and charts the emotional underpinnings of physical changes . . . with humor and empathy” (The New Yorker). On a sweltering summer day, Makiko travels from Osaka to Tokyo, where her sister Natsu lives. She is in the company of her daughter, Midoriko, who has lately grown silent, finding herself unable to voice the vague yet overwhelming pressures associated with adolescence. Over the course of their few days together in the capital, Midoriko’s silence will prove a catalyst for each woman to confront her fears and family secrets. On yet another summer’s day eight years later, Natsu, during a journey back to her native city, confronts her anxieties about growing old alone and childless. Bestselling author Mieko Kawakami mixes stylistic inventiveness and riveting emotional depth to tell a story of contemporary womanhood in Japan. “Took my breath away.” —Haruki Murakami, #1 New York Times–bestselling author The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle “Kawakami lobbed a literary grenade into the fusty, male-dominated world of Japanese fiction with Breast and Eggs.” —The Economist “A sharply observed and heartbreaking portrait of what it means to be a woman.” —TIME “Raw, funny, mundane, heartbreaking.” —The Atlantic “A bracing, feminist exploration of daily life in Japan.” —Entertainment Weekly “Timely feminist themes; strange, surreal prose; and wonderful characters will transcend cultural barriers and enchant readers.” —The New York Observer “Bracing and evocative, tender yet unflinching.” —Publishers Weekly “Kawakami writes with unsettling precision about the body—its discomforts, its appetites, its smells and secretions. And she is especially good at capturing its longings.” —The New York Times Book Review
Good Material
Alderton Dolly • 2023
From the bestselling author of Ghosts and Everything I Know About Love: a story of heartbreak and friendship and how to survive both.<br/><br/>Andy's story wasn't meant to turn out this way. Living out of a suitcase in his best friends' spare room, waiting for his career as a stand-up comedian to finally take off, he struggles to process the life-ruining end of his relationship with the only woman he's ever truly loved.<br/><br/>As he tries to solve the seemingly unsolvable mystery of his broken relationship, he contends with career catastrophe, social media paranoia, a rapidly dwindling friendship group and the growing suspicion that, at 35, he really should have figured this all out by now.<br/><br/>Andy has a lot to learn, not least his ex-girlfriend's side of the story.<br/><br/>Warm, wise, funny and achingly relatable, Dolly Alderton's highly-anticipated second novel is about the mystery of what draws us together - and what pulls us apart - the pain of really growing up, and the stories we tell about our lives.
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
Ocean Vuong • 2019
A New York Times bestseller • Nominated for the National Book Award for Fiction • Ocean Vuong’s debut novel is a shattering portrait of a family, a first love, and the redemptive power of storytelling New York Times Readers Pick: 100 Best Books of the 21st Century “A lyrical work of self-discovery that’s shockingly intimate and insistently universal…Not so much briefly gorgeous as permanently stunning.” —Ron Charles, The Washington Post “This is one of the best novels I’ve ever read...Ocean Vuong is a master. This book a masterpiece.”—Tommy Orange, author of There There and Wandering Stars On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family’s history that began before he was born — a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam — and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity. Asking questions central to our American moment, immersed as we are in addiction, violence, and trauma, but undergirded by compassion and tenderness, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is as much about the power of telling one’s own story as it is about the obliterating silence of not being heard. With stunning urgency and grace, Ocean Vuong writes of people caught between disparate worlds, and asks how we heal and rescue one another without forsaking who we are. The question of how to survive, and how to make of it a kind of joy, powers the most important debut novel of many years. Named a Best Book of the Year by: GQ, Kirkus Reviews, Booklist, Library Journal, TIME, Esquire, The Washington Post, Apple, Good Housekeeping, The New Yorker, The New York Public Library, Elle.com, The Guardian, The A.V. Club, NPR, Lithub, Entertainment Weekly, Vogue.com, The San Francisco Chronicle, Mother Jones, Vanity Fair, The Wall Street Journal Magazine, and more!
Afterparties: Stories
Anthony Veasna So • 2021
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE’S JOHN LEONARD PRIZE FOR BEST FIRST BOOK WINNER OF THE FERRO-GRUMLEY AWARD FOR LGBTQ FICTION Named a Best Book of the Year by: New York Times * NPR * Washington Post * LA Times * Kirkus Reviews * New York Public Library * Chicago Public Library * Harper’s Bazaar * TIME * Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air * Boston Globe* The Atlantic A vibrant story collection about Cambodian-American life—immersive and comic, yet unsparing—that offers profound insight into the intimacy of queer and immigrant communities Seamlessly transitioning between the absurd and the tenderhearted, balancing acerbic humor with sharp emotional depth, Afterparties offers an expansive portrait of the lives of Cambodian-Americans. As the children of refugees carve out radical new paths for themselves in California, they shoulder the inherited weight of the Khmer Rouge genocide and grapple with the complexities of race, sexuality, friendship, and family. A high school badminton coach and failing grocery store owner tries to relive his glory days by beating a rising star teenage player. Two drunken brothers attend a wedding afterparty and hatch a plan to expose their shady uncle’s snubbing of the bride and groom. A queer love affair sparks between an older tech entrepreneur trying to launch a “safe space” app and a disillusioned young teacher obsessed with Moby-Dick. And in the sweeping final story, a nine-year-old child learns that his mother survived a racist school shooter. The stories in Afterparties, “powered by So’s skill with the telling detail, are like beams of wry, affectionate light, falling from different directions on a complicated, struggling, beloved American community” (George Saunders).
Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982
Cho Nam-Joo • 2021
Kim Jiyoung is a girl born to a mother whose in-laws wanted a boy. Kim Jiyoung is a sister made to share a room while her brother gets one of his own.<br/><br/>Kim Jiyoung is a female preyed upon by male teachers at school. Kim Jiyoung is a daughter whose father blames her when she is harassed late at night.<br/><br/>Kim Jiyoung is a good student who doesn't get put forward for internships. Kim Jiyoung is a model employee but gets overlooked for promotion. Kim Jiyoung is a wife who gives up her career and independence for a life of domesticity.<br/><br/>Kim Jiyoung has started acting strangely.<br/><br/>Kim Jiyoung is depressed.<br/><br/>Kim Jiyoung is mad.<br/><br/>Kim Jiyoung is her own woman.<br/><br/>Kim Jiyoung is every woman.<br/><br/>Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 is the life story of one young woman born at the end of the twentieth century and raises questions about endemic misogyny and institutional oppression that are relevant to us all. Riveting, original and uncompromising, this is the most important book to have emerged from South Korea since Han Kang's The Vegetarian.
Hurricane Season
Fernanda Melchor • 2020
The English-language debut of one of the most thrilling and accomplished young Mexican writers Winner of the Queen Sofía Spanish Institute's Tanslation Prize Longlisted for the National Book Award Shortlisted for the Booker Prize Winner of the Internationaler Literaturpreis New York Public Library Best Books of 2020 Chicago Public Library Best Book of 2020 The Witch is dead. And the discovery of her corpse has the whole village investigating the murder. As the novel unfolds in a dazzling linguistic torrent, with each unreliable narrator lingering on new details, new acts of depravity or brutality, Melchor extracts some tiny shred of humanity from these characters—inners whom most people would write off as irredeemable—forming a lasting portrait of a damned Mexican village. Like Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 or Faulkner’s novels, Hurricane Season takes place in a world saturated with mythology and violence—real violence, the kind that seeps into the soil, poisoning everything around: it’s a world that becomes more and more terrifying the deeper you explore it.
Martyr!: A novel
Kaveh Akbar • 2024
<b><i>NEW YORK TIMES</i> BESTSELLER • SHORTLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD • ONE OF <i>THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW'S </i>10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR <b>• <b>A<b> <i>TIME</i> MUST-READ BOOK OF THE YEAR</b></b> • </b>A newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a remarkable search for a family secret that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum. Electrifying, funny, and wholly original<i>, Martyr!</i> heralds the arrival of an essential new voice in contemporary fiction.<br><br>“Kaveh Akbar is one of my favorite writers. Ever.” —Tommy Orange, Pulitzer Prize–nominated author of <i>There There</i><br><br>“The best novel you'll ever read about the joy of language, addiction, displacement, martyrdom, belonging, homesickness.” —Lauren Groff, best-selling author of <i>Matrix</i> and <i>Fates and Furies</i></b><br><br>Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother’s plane was shot down over the skies of the Persian Gulf in a senseless accident; and his father’s life in America was circumscribed by his work killing chickens at a factory farm in the Midwest. Cyrus is a drunk, an addict, and a poet, whose obsession with martyrs leads him to examine the mysteries of his past—toward an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the angel of death to inspire and comfort the dying, and toward his mother, through a painting discovered in a Brooklyn art gallery that suggests she may not have been who or what she seemed.<br><br>Kaveh Akbar’s <i>Martyr!</i> is a paean to how we spend our lives seeking meaning—in faith, art, ourselves, others.
A Girl Returned
Donatella Di Pietrantonio • 2019
<p>"One of the best Italian novels of the year" in a pitch-perfect rendering in English by Ann Goldstein, Elena Ferrante's translator ( Huffington Post, Italy). Winner of the Campiello Prize A 2019 Best Book of the Year ( The Washington Post Kirkus Reviews Dallas Morning News) Told with an immediacy and a rare expressive intensity that has earned it countless adoring readers and one of Italy's most prestigious literary prizes, A Girl Returned is a powerful novel rendered with sensitivity and verve by Ann Goldstein, translator of the works of Elena Ferrante. Set against the stark, beautiful landscape of Abruzzo in central Italy, this is a compelling story about mothers and daughters, about responsibility, siblings, and caregiving. Without warning or explanation, an unnamed thirteen-year-old girl is sent away from the family she has always thought of as hers to live with her birth family: a large, chaotic assortment of individuals whom she has never met and who seem anything but welcoming. Thus begins a new life, one of struggle, tension, and conflict, especially between the young girl and her mother. But in her relationship with Adriana and Vincenzo, two of her newly acquired siblings, she will find the strength to start again and to build a new and enduring sense of self. "An achingly beautiful book, and an utterly devastating one." — Minneapolis Star Tribune "Di Pietrantonio [has a] lively way with a phrase (the translator, Ann Goldstein, shows the same sensitivity she does with Elena Ferrante) [and] a fine instinct for detail." —The Washington Post "A gripping, deeply moving coming-of-age novel; immensely readable, beautifully written, and highly recommended." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) "Captivating." — The Economist<br></p>
Deep Cuts
Holly Brickley • 2025
It was the love story of the decade... Or it should have been ------------------------------------------------ <br> <br> <p>SOON TO BE A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE FROM A24 STARRING SAOIRSE RONAN AND AUSTIN BUTLER</p> <p>'Tender as a ballad and pleasurable as a pop song' COCO MELLORS</p> <p>'Clever and heart-wrenching and addictive' MIRANDA COWLEY HELLER</p> <p>'An incredibly special book' BETH O'LEARY</p> ------------------------------------------------ <p>The first time Joe plays Percy one of his songs in his college room in 2000, she instantly realises three things:</p> <p>One, she is watching a star in the making.</p> <p>Two, she can shape his music into something extraordinary.</p> <p>Three, she will always be on the sidelines.</p> <p>She swallows her jealousy and throws herself into collaboration, transforming Joe's songs into indie hits with her blistering critiques.</p> <p>But there's an undercurrent to the music they're making - something undeniably electric, hurtling towards love. And then, almost inevitably, towards heartbreak.</p> <p>As Joe steps into the spotlight, can Percy bear to watch on in silence?</p> <p>And can he exist there without her?</p> <p>Deep Cuts is an irresistible novel about passion and obsession, love and longing and, above all, our need to be heard.</p> ------------------------------------------------------- WHAT READERS ARE SAYING... <p>'The best debut novel I've ever read' ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐</p> <p>'I need this book to come out so I can talk to at least one person about it!! Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow meets Normal People, with all the nostalgia of Almost Famous and High Fidelity' ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐</p> <p>'You need to add this to your TBR. Just trust me on this, ok?' ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐</p> <p>'I can't believe this book is a debut novel because of how good it is. I felt a mixture of Sally Rooney with Gabrielle Zevin and it was delicious' ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐</p> <p>'I love it with all my heart, I'm super sad it's over and I will be insufferable when it's out' ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐</p> <p>'I wish I could have written this book. I'm jealous of people who haven't yet read this book' ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐</p> <p>'This is an absolutely breathtaking debut. I cannot hammer that home enough' ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐</p> <p>'I can't believe this is a debut! It's perfect for fans of One Day and Daisy Jones & The Six ... This one hit me hard'⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐</p> -------------------------------------------------------
All the Lovers in the Night
Mieko Kawakami • 2022
FINALIST for the 2022 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction A BEST BOOK OF 2022 Oprah Daily·TIME Magazine·Washington Post·Publishers Weekly·Lit Hub Bestselling author of Breasts and Eggs Mieko Kawakami invites readers back into her immediately recognizable fictional world with this new, extraordinary novel and demonstrates yet again why she is one of today’s most uncategorizable, insightful, and talented novelists. Fuyuko Irie is a freelance copy editor in her mid-thirties. Working and living alone in a city where it is not easy to form new relationships, she has little regular contact with anyone other than her editor, Hijiri, a woman of the same age but with a very different disposition. When Fuyuko stops one day on a Tokyo street and notices her reflection in a storefront window, what she sees is a drab, awkward, and spiritless woman who has lacked the strength to change her life and decides to do something about it. As the long overdue change occurs, however, painful episodes from Fuyuko’s past surface and her behavior slips further and further beyond the pale. All the Lovers in the Night is acute and insightful, entertaining and engaging; it will make readers laugh, and it will make them cry, but it will also remind them, as only the best books do, that sometimes the pain is worth it. “In the skilled hands of Bett and Boyd, Kawakami’s prose is instantly recognizable—immediate, incisive, and unfailingly honest.”—Katie Kitamura, Entertainment Weekly (A Most Anticipated Book of 2022)
Thriller
If We Were Villains
M. L. Rio • 2017
“Much like Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, M. L. Rio’s sparkling debut is a richly layered story of love, friendship, and obsession...will keep you riveted through its final, electrifying moments.” —Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney, New York Times bestselling author of The Nest "Nerdily (and winningly) in love with Shakespeare...Readable, smart.” —New York Times Book Review On the day Oliver Marks is released from jail, the man who put him there is waiting at the door. Detective Colborne wants to know the truth, and after ten years, Oliver is finally ready to tell it. A decade ago: Oliver is one of seven young Shakespearean actors at Dellecher Classical Conservatory, a place of keen ambition and fierce competition. In this secluded world of firelight and leather-bound books, Oliver and his friends play the same roles onstage and off: hero, villain, tyrant, temptress, ingénue, extras. But in their fourth and final year, good-natured rivalries turn ugly, and on opening night real violence invades the students’ world of make-believe. In the morning, the fourth-years find themselves facing their very own tragedy, and their greatest acting challenge yet: convincing the police, each other, and themselves that they are innocent. If We Were Villains was named one of Bustle's Best Thriller Novels of the Year, and Mystery Scene says, "A well-written and gripping ode to the stage...A fascinating, unorthodox take on rivalry, friendship, and truth."
Eileen: A Novel
Ottessa Moshfegh • 2016
Now a major motion picture streaming on Hulu, starring Anne Hathaway and Thomasin McKenzie<br/><br/>Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize<br/><br/>“Eileen is a remarkable piece of writing, always dark and surprising, sometimes ugly and occasionally hilarious. Its first-person narrator is one of the strangest, most messed-up, most pathetic—and yet, in her own inimitable way, endearing—misfits I’ve encountered in fiction. Trust me, you have never read anything remotely like Eileen.” —Washington Post<br/><br/>So here we are. My name was Eileen Dunlop. Now you know me. I was twenty-four years old then, and had a job that paid fifty-seven dollars a week as a kind of secretary at a private juvenile correctional facility for teenage boys. I think of it now as what it really was for all intents and purposes—a prison for boys. I will call it Moorehead. Delvin Moorehead was a terrible landlord I had years later, and so to use his name for such a place feels appropriate. In a week, I would run away from home and never go back.<br/><br/>This is the story of how I disappeared.<br/><br/>The Christmas season offers little cheer for Eileen Dunlop, an unassuming yet disturbed young woman trapped between her role as her alcoholic father’s caretaker in a home whose squalor is the talk of the neighborhood and a day job as a secretary at the boys’ prison, filled with its own quotidian horrors. Consumed by resentment and self-loathing, Eileen tempers her dreary days with perverse fantasies and dreams of escaping to the big city. In the meantime, she fills her nights and weekends with shoplifting, stalking a buff prison guard named Randy, and cleaning up her increasingly deranged father’s messes. When the bright, beautiful, and cheery Rebecca Saint John arrives on the scene as the new counselor at Moorehead, Eileen is enchanted and proves unable to resist what appears at first to be a miraculously budding friendship. In a Hitchcockian twist, her affection for Rebecca ultimately pulls her into complicity in a crime that surpasses her wildest imaginings.<br/><br/>Played out against the snowy landscape of coastal New England in the days leading up to Christmas, young Eileen’s story is told from the gimlet-eyed perspective of the now much older narrator. Creepy, mesmerizing, and sublimely funny, in the tradition of Shirley Jackson and early Vladimir Nabokov, this powerful debut novel enthralls and shocks, and introduces one of the most original new voices in contemporary literature. Ottessa Moshfegh is also the author of My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Homesick for Another World: Stories, and McGlue.
Yellowface: A Novel
R. F. Kuang • 2023
<p>INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A REESE'S BOOK CLUB PICK<br></p><p>"Hard to put down, harder to forget." — Stephen King, #1 New York Times bestselling author<br></p><p>White lies. Dark humor. Deadly consequences… Bestselling sensation Juniper Song is not who she says she is, she didn't write the book she claims she wrote, and she is most certainly not Asian American—in this chilling and hilariously cutting novel from R.F. Kuang, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Babel. <br></p><p>Authors June Hayward and Athena Liu were supposed to be twin rising stars. But Athena's a literary darling. June Hayward is literally nobody. Who wants stories about basic white girls, June thinks.<br></p><p>So when June witnesses Athena's death in a freak accident, she acts on impulse: she steals Athena's just-finished masterpiece, an experimental novel about the unsung contributions of Chinese laborers during World War I.<br></p><p>So what if June edits Athena's novel and sends it to her agent as her own work? So what if she lets her new publisher rebrand her as Juniper Song—complete with an ambiguously ethnic author photo? Doesn't this piece of history deserve to be told, whoever the teller? That's what June claims, and the New York Times bestseller list seems to agree.<br></p><p>But June can't get away from Athena's shadow, and emerging evidence threatens to bring June's (stolen) success down around her. As June races to protect her secret, she discovers exactly how far she will go to keep what she thinks she deserves.<br></p><p>With its totally immersive first-person voice, Yellowface grapples with questions of diversity, racism, and cultural appropriation, as well as the terrifying alienation of social media. R.F. Kuang's novel is timely, razor-sharp, and eminently readable.<br></p>
Clean
Alia Trabucco Zerán • 2024
Clean begins with an inescapable fact: a girl has died. Told by Estela, a maid to a wealthy, middle class family who speaks to us from a locked room, we hear of her plight and the circumstances that led to this moment. As we enter into her account of her daily existence, we see how her apparently simple life begins to sour, but would that drive her to the unthinkable?<br/><br/>Disturbing and profound, Clean explores domestic work, class and violence, against the backdrop of Chile’s changing political landscape. This is one of the most daring and compelling thrillers in international literature.
Classics
Sula
Toni Morrison • 2004
Sula and Nel are born in the Bottom—a small town at the top of a hill. Sula is wild, and daring; she does what she wants, while Nel is well-mannered, a mamma’s girl with a questioning heart. Growing up they forge a bond stronger than anything, stronger even than the dark secret they have to bear. Strong enough, it seems, to last a lifetime—until, decades later, as the girls become women, Sula’s anarchy leads to a betrayal that may be beyond forgiveness.<br/><br/>One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years<br/><br/>Masterful, richly textured, bittersweet, and vital, Sula is a modern masterpiece about love and kinship, about living in an America birthed from slavery. Nobel Prize laureate Toni Morrison gives life to characters who struggle with what society tells them to be, and the love they long for and crave as Black women. Most of all, they ask: When can we let go? What must we hold back? And just how much can be shared in a friendship?
The Waves
Virginia Woolf • 1978
“I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me.”<br/><br/>Innovative and deeply poetic, The Waves is often regarded as Virginia Woolf’s masterpiece. It begins with six children—three boys and three girls—playing in a garden by the sea, and follows their lives as they grow up, experience friendship and love, and grapple with the death of their beloved friend Percival. Instead of describing their outward expressions of grief, Woolf draws her characters from the inside, revealing their inner lives: their aspirations, their triumphs and regrets, their awareness of unity and isolation.
To the Lighthouse
Virginia Woolf • 1989
<p>“Radiant as [To the Lighthouse] is in its beauty, there could never be a mistake about it: here is a novel to the last degree severe and uncompromising. I think that beyond being about the very nature of reality, it is itself a vision of reality.”—Eudora Welty, from the Introduction.The serene and maternal Mrs. Ramsay, the tragic yet absurd Mr. Ramsay, and their children and assorted guests are on holiday on the Isle of Skye. From the seemingly trivial postponement of a visit to a nearby lighthouse, Woolf constructs a remarkable, moving examination of the complex tensions and allegiances of family life and the conflict between men and women.</p>
Mrs. Dalloway
Virginia Woolf • 1990
The authorized, original edition of Virginia Woolf’s masterpiece and one of the most “moving, revolutionary artworks of the twentieth century” (Michael Cunningham), with a foreword by Maureen Howard.<br/>In this vivid portrait of a single day in a woman’s life, Mrs. Clarissa Dalloway is preoccupied with the last-minute details of preparation for a party while in her mind she is something much more than a perfect society hostess. As she readies her house for friends and neighbors, she is flooded with remembrances of the past—the passionate loves of her carefree youth, her practical choice of husband, and the approach and retreat of war. And, met with the realities of the present, Clarissa reexamines the choices that brought her there, hesitantly looking ahead to the unfamiliar work of growing old.<br/>From the introspective Clarissa, to the lover who never fully recovered from her rejection, to a war-ravaged stranger in the park, the characters and scope of Mrs. Dalloway reshape our sense of ordinary life and reshaped English literature as we know it.<br/>“Perhaps her masterpiece…Exquisite and superbly constructed…Required like most writers to choose between the surface and the depths as the basis of her operations, she chooses the surface and then burrows in as far as she can.” –E. M. Forster
The Brothers Karamazov
Fyodor Dostoevsky • 2021
Winner of the Pen/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize<br/><br/>The award-winning translation of Fyodor Dostoevsky's classic novel of psychological realism.<br/><br/>The Brothers Karamazov is a murder mystery, a courtroom drama, and an exploration of erotic rivalry in a series of triangular love affairs involving the “wicked and sentimental” Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov and his three sons―the impulsive and sensual Dmitri; the coldly rational Ivan; and the healthy, red-cheeked young novice Alyosha. Through the gripping events of their story, Dostoevsky portrays the whole of Russian life, its social and spiritual striving, in what was both the golden age and a tragic turning point in Russian culture.<br/><br/>This award-winning translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky remains true to the verbal inventiveness of Dostoevsky’s prose, preserving the multiple voices, the humor, and the surprising modernity of the original. It is an achievement worthy of Dostoevsky’s last and greatest novel.
The Stranger
Albert Camus • 1989
With the intrigue of a psychological thriller, The Stranger—Camus's masterpiece—gives us the story of an ordinary man unwittingly drawn into a senseless murder on an Algerian beach. With an Introduction by Peter Dunwoodie; translated by Matthew Ward.<br/><br/>Behind the subterfuge, Camus explores what he termed "the nakedness of man faced with the absurd" and describes the condition of reckless alienation and spiritual exhaustion that characterized so much of twentieth-century life.<br/><br/>“The Stranger is a strikingly modern text and Matthew Ward’s translation will enable readers to appreciate why Camus’s stoical anti-hero and devious narrator remains one of the key expressions of a postwar Western malaise, and one of the cleverest exponents of a literature of ambiguity.” —from the Introduction by Peter Dunwoodie<br/><br/>First published in 1946; now in translation by Matthew Ward.
The Handmaid's Tale
Margaret Atwood • 2021
BESTSELLER DEL NEW YORK TIMES * RECOMENDADO POR JENNA BUSH EN SU CLUB DE LECTURA DEL TODAY SHOW Y EN SU PODCAST READ WITH JENNA<br/><br/>El libro en que se basa la serie de Hulu.<br/><br/>El libro de cabecera de una nueva generación.<br/><br/>Amparándose en la coartada del terrorismo islámico, unos políticos teócratas se hacen con el poder y, como primera medida, suprimen la libertad de prensa y los derechos de las mujeres. Esta trama, inquietante y oscura, que bien podría encontrarse en cualquier obra actual, pertenece en realidad a esta novela escrita por Margaret Atwood a principios de los ochenta, en la que la afamada autora canadiense anticipó con llamativa premonición una amenaza latente en el mundo de hoy.<br/><br/>En la República de Gilead, el cuerpo de Defred sólo sirve para procrear, tal como imponen las férreas normas establecidas por la dictadura puritana que domina el país. Si Defred se rebela -o si, aceptando colaborar a regañadientes, no es capaz de concebir- le espera la muerte en ejecución pública o el destierro a unas Colonias en las que sucumbirá a la polución de los residuos tóxicos. Así, el régimen controla con mano de hierro hasta los más ínfimos detalles de la vida de las mujeres: su alimentación, su indumentaria, incluso su actividad sexual. Pero nadie, ni siquiera un gobierno despótico parapetado tras el supuesto mandato de un dios todopoderoso, puede gobernar el pensamiento de una persona. Y mucho menos su deseo.<br/><br/>Los peligros inherentes a mezclar religión y política; el empeño de todo poder absoluto en someter a las mujeres como paso conducente a sojuzgar a toda la población; la fuerza incontenible del deseo como elemento transgresor: son tan sólo una muestra de los temas que aborda este relato desgarrador, aderezado con el sutil sarcasmo que constituye la seña de identidad de Margaret Atwood. Una escritora universal que, con el paso del tiempo, no deja de asombrarnos con la lucidez de sus ideas y la potencia de su prosa.<br/><br/>ENGLISH DESCRIPTION<br/><br/>NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • READ WITH JENNA BOOK CLUB PICK AS FEATURED ON TODAY • RECOMMENDED ON THE 'READ WITH JENNA' PODCAST•<br/><br/>A book-adapted series on Hulu. !<br/><br/>Look for The Testaments, the sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, available now.<br/><br/>An instant classic and eerily prescient cultural phenomenon, from “the patron saint of feminist dystopian fiction” (New York Times).<br/><br/>Now an award-winning Hulu series starring Elizabeth Moss.<br/><br/>In Margaret Atwood’s dystopian future, environmental disasters and declining birthrates have led to a Second American Civil War. The result is the rise of the Republic of Gilead, a totalitarian regime that enforces rigid social roles and enslaves the few remaining fertile women. Offred is one of these, a Handmaid bound to produce children for one of Gilead’s commanders. Deprived of her husband, her child, her freedom, and even her own name, Offred clings to her memories and her will to survive. At once a scathing satire, an ominous warning, and a tour de force of narrative suspense, The Handmaid’s Tale is a modern classic.
Jane Eyre
Charlotte Brontë • 2019
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë. Jane Eyre ranks as one of the greatest and most perennially popular works of English fiction. Although the poor but plucky heroine is outwardly of plain appearance, she possesses an indomitable spirit, a sharp wit and great courage. She is forced to battle against the exigencies of a cruel guardian, a harsh employer and a rigid social order. All of which circumscribe her life and position when she becomes governess to the daughter of the mysterious, sardonic and attractive Mr Rochester. However, there is great kindness and warmth in this epic love story, which is set against the magnificent backdrop of the Yorkshire moors. Ultimately the grand passion of Jane and Rochester is called upon to survive cruel revelation, loss and reunion, only to be confronted with tragedy.
Shirley
Charlotte Bronte • 2006
<b>A passionate but unsentimental depiction of conflict between classes, sexes and generations</b><br><br>Struggling manufacturer Robert Moore has introduced labour saving machinery to his Yorkshire mill, arousing a ferment of unemployment and discontent among his workers. Robert considers marriage to the wealthy and independent Shirley Keeldar to solve his financial woes, yet his heart lies with his cousin Caroline, who, bored and desperate, lives as a dependent in her uncle's home with no prospect of a career. Shirley, meanwhile, is in love with Robert's brother, an impoverished tutor - a match opposed by her family. As industrial unrest builds to a potentially fatal pitch, can the four be reconciled? Set during the Napoleonic wars at a time of national economic struggles, <i>Shirley </i>(1849) is an unsentimental, yet passionate depiction of conflict between classes, sexes and generations.<br><br>For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Near to the Wild Heart
Clarice Lispector • 2022
Agua viva
Clarice Lispector • 2023
¿Dónde están los límites del lenguaje?<br/><br/>Agua viva es una vivencia –no una reflexión– sobre esos límites. Para avanzar más allá, en busca de la «entrelínea», la voz femenina que nos habla deberá pedir auxilio a la música y sobre todo a la pintura para acercarse al it, ese punto central de lo vivo que Clarice Lispector persiguió en todas sus obras. Vaga epístola a un destinatario mudo, Agua viva supera en todo momento las fronteras de esa amplia familia de las cartas de desamor a la que en parte pertenece. Más allá de la pasión, el texto apunta –con todas las armas: palabra, color y nota– al centro de la vida y desafía a la muerte con su defensa de la alegría.
Mansfield Park
Jane Austen • 2003
Taken from the poverty of her parents' home in Portsmouth, Fanny Price is brought up with her rich cousins at Mansfield Park, acutely aware of her humble rank and with her cousin Edmund as her sole ally. During her uncle's absence in Antigua, the Crawford's arrive in the neighbourhood bringing with them the glamour of London life and a reckless taste for flirtation. Mansfield Park is considered Jane Austen's first mature work and, with its quiet heroine and subtle examination of social position and moral integrity, one of her most profound.<br/><br/>For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Orlando
Virginia Woolf • 2019
Once described as the 'longest and most charming love-letter in literature', the Virginia Woolf's Orlando is edited by Brenda Lyons with an introduction and notes by Sandra M. Gilbert in Penguin Classics. Written for Virginia Woolf's intimate friend, the charismatic writer Vita Sackville-West, Orlando is a playful mock 'biography' of a chameleonic historical figure, immortal and ageless, who changes sex and identity on a whim. First masculine, then feminine, Orlando begins life as a young sixteenth-century nobleman, then gallops through three centuries to end up as a woman writer in Virginia Woolf's own time. A wry commentary on gender roles and modes of history, Orlando is also, in Woolf's own words, a light-hearted 'writer's holiday' which delights in ambiguity and capriciousness.
The Trial
Franz Kafka • 1999
<b>A brilliant translation of one of the most important novels of the twentieth century, revealing a tale that is as full of energy and power as it was when it was first written. From the author of <i>The Metamorphosis.<br></i></b><br>Written in 1914, <i>The Trial</i> is the terrifying tale of Josef K., a respectable bank officer who is suddenly and inexplicably arrested and must defend himself against a charge about which he can get no information. Whether read as an existential tale, a parable, or a prophecy of the excesses of modern bureaucracy wedded to the madness of totalitarianism, Kafka's nightmare has resonated with chilling truth for generations of readers. This new edition is based upon the work of an international team of experts who have restored the text, the sequence of chapters, and their division to create a version that is as close as possible to the way the author left it.
Wuthering Heights
Emily Brontë • 2002
<b>Coming soon to the big screen is Emerald Fennell’s feature film “<i>Wuthering Heights</i>,” which captures the spirit of this epic love story and stars Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi as Catherine and Heathcliff.<br></b><br>Emily Brontë's only novel endures as a work of tremendous and far-reaching influence. The Penguin Classics edition is the definitive version of the text, edited with an introduction by Pauline Nestor.<br><br>Lockwood, the new tenant of Thrushcross Grange, situated on the bleak Yorkshire moors, is forced to seek shelter one night at Wuthering Heights, the home of his landlord. There he discovers the history of the tempestuous events that took place years before. What unfolds is the tale of the intense love between the gypsy foundling Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw. Catherine, forced to choose between passionate, tortured Heathcliff and gentle, well-bred Edgar Linton, surrendered to the expectations of her class. As Heathcliff's bitterness and vengeance at his betrayal is visited upon the next generation, their innocent heirs must struggle to escape the legacy of the past. <br><br>In this edition, a new preface by Lucasta Miller, author of <i>The Brontë Myth</i>, looks at the ways in which the novel has been interpreted, from Charlotte Brontë onwards. This complements Pauline Nestor's introduction, which discusses changing critical receptions of the novel, as well as Emily Brontë's influences and background.
A Breath of Life
Clarice Lispector • 2012
A mystical dialogue between a male author and his creation, this posthumous work has never before been translated, and is a book of particular beauty and strangeness.<br/>A mystical dialogue between a male author (a thinly disguised Clarice Lispector) and his/her creation, a woman named Angela, this posthumous work has never before been translated. Lispector did not even live to see it published.<br/>At her death, a mountain of fragments remained to be “structured” by Olga Borelli. These fragments form a dialogue between a god-like author who infuses the breath of life into his creation: the speaking, breathing, dying creation herself, Angela Pralini. The work’s almost occult appeal arises from the perception that if Angela dies, Clarice will have to die as well. And she did.
The Passion According to G.H.
Clarice Lispector • 2012
"A New Directions paperbook original"--Back cover.
Frankenstein
Mary Shelley • 2018
<b>Mary Shelley’s classic novel, presented in its original 1818 text, with an introduction from National Book Critics Circle award-winner Charlotte Gordon</b><br> <br> <b>Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s <i>The Great American Read</i></b><br> <br>The original 1818 text of <i>Frankenstein</i> preserves the hard-hitting and politically-charged aspects of Shelley’s original writing, as well as her unflinching wit and strong female voice. This edition also emphasizes Shelley’s relationship with her mother—trailblazing feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, who penned <i>A Vindication of the Rights of Woman</i>—and demonstrates her commitment to carrying forward her mother’s ideals, placing her in the context of a feminist legacy rather than the sole female in the company of male poets, including Percy Shelley and Lord Byron.<br> <br> This edition includes a new introduction and suggestions for further reading by National Book Critics Circle award-winner and Shelley expert Charlotte Gordon, literary excerpts and reviews selected by Gordon, and a chronology and essay by preeminent Shelley scholar Charles E. Robinson. <br> <br>Penguin Classics is the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world, representing a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
A Room With A View
E.M. Forster • 2020
A Room with a View, written by E.M. Forster and originally published in 1908, tells the story of Lucy Honeychurch, a young Englishwoman on holiday in Italy with her cousin Charlotte Bartlett. Lucy finds herself torn between the conventions of her upbringing and the passionate desires of her heart, as she discovers a new way of looking at the world. A Room with a View captures the beauty of Florence and the Italian countryside, as well as the humor and irony of Victorian England. With its charming characters and vivid settings, this classic novel is a timeless exploration of love, freedom, and self-discovery.<br/><br/>E.M. Forster (Edward Morgan Forster) is a beloved English novelist and essayist, best known for his works of fiction such as A Room with a View, Howards End, and A Passage to India. Born in London in 1879, Forster was educated at Tonbridge School and King’s College, Cambridge, where he studied history and developed a passion for literature. After graduating in 1901, Forster moved to Italy and worked as a private secretary to an English aristocrat, Lady Olivia Wilmot. Throughout his career, Forster wrote six novels, two collections of short stories, and several essays. His first novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread, was published in 1905 and was followed by A Room with a View in 1908 and Howards End in 1910. A Passage to India, Forster’s most famous novel, was published in 1924 and was soon adapted into a successful film. Forster’s works are known for their vivid and detailed descriptions of English society during the Edwardian era and for their exploration of issues such as class, gender, and race. In addition to his literary career, Forster was an active member of the Bloomsbury group, a group of writers, artists, and intellectuals who met regularly during the early 20th century. Forster was also an active political and social campaigner and was a strong advocate of homosexual rights. He was awarded the Order of Merit in 1969 and died in 1970. He is remembered as one of the most influential writers of the 20th century and his works remain popular to this day.
East of Eden
John Steinbeck • 1952
A masterpiece of Biblical scope, and the magnum opus of one of America’s most enduring authors<br/><br/>A Penguin Classic<br/><br/>In his journal, Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck called East of Eden “the first book,” and indeed it has the primordial power and simplicity of myth. Set in the rich farmland of California’s Salinas Valley, this sprawling and often brutal novel follows the intertwined destinies of two families—the Trasks and the Hamiltons—whose generations helplessly reenact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel.<br/><br/>The masterpiece of Steinbeck’s later years, East of Eden is a work in which Steinbeck created his most mesmerizing characters and explored his most enduring themes: the mystery of identity, the inexplicability of love, and the murderous consequences of love's absence. Adapted for the 1955 film directed by Elia Kazan introducing James Dean and read by thousands as the book that brought Oprah’s Book Club back, East of Eden has remained vitally present in American culture for over half a century.<br/><br/>This edition features an introduction by David Wyatt.<br/><br/>For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,800 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Chess Story
Stefan Zweig • 2005
Chess Story, also known as The Royal Game, is the Austrian master Stefan Zweig's final achievement, completed in Brazilian exile and sent off to his American publisher only days before his suicide in 1942. It is the only story in which Zweig looks at Nazism, and he does so with characteristic emphasis on the psychological.<br/><br/>Travelers by ship from New York to Buenos Aires find that on board with them is the world champion of chess, an arrogant and unfriendly man. They come together to try their skills against him and are soundly defeated. Then a mysterious passenger steps forward to advise them and their fortunes change. How he came to possess his extraordinary grasp of the game of chess and at what cost lie at the heart of Zweig's story.<br/><br/>This new translation of Chess Story brings out the work's unusual mixture of high suspense and poignant reflection.
Stoner
John Williams • 2006
Discover an American masterpiece. This unassuming story about the life of a quiet English professor has earned the admiration of readers all over the globe.<br/><br/>William Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to the state university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar’s life, so different from the hardscrabble existence he has known. And yet as the years pass, Stoner encounters a succession of disappointments: marriage into a “proper” family estranges him from his parents; his career is stymied; his wife and daughter turn coldly away from him; a transforming experience of new love ends under threat of scandal. Driven ever deeper within himself, Stoner rediscovers the stoic silence of his forebears and confronts an essential solitude.<br/><br/>John Williams’s luminous and deeply moving novel is a work of quiet perfection. William Stoner emerges from it not only as an archetypal American, but as an unlikely existential hero, standing, like a figure in a painting by Edward Hopper, in stark relief against an unforgiving world.
Giovanni's Room
James Baldwin • 2016
"The groundbreaking novel by one of the most important twentieth-century American writers--now in an Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics hardcover edition. Giovanni's Room is set in the Paris of the 1950s, where a young American expatriate finds himself caught between his repressed desires and conventional morality. David has just proposed marriage to his American girlfriend, but while she is away on a trip he becomes involved in a doomed affair with a bartender named Giovanni. With sharp, probing insight, James Baldwin's classic narrative delves into the mystery of love and tells an impassioned, deeply moving story that reveals the unspoken complexities of the human heart. Introduction by Colm Toibin"--
The Invention of Morel
Adolfo Bioy Casares • 2016
The Invention of Morel<br/>The Invention of Morel<br/>Adolfo Bioy Casares<br/>La invención de Morel — translated as The Invention of Morel or Morel's Invention — is a novel by Adolfo Bioy Casares. It was Bioy Casares' breakthrough effort, for which he won the 1941 First Municipal Prize for Literature of the City of Buenos Aires. He considered it the true beginning of his literary career, despite being his seventh book. The first edition cover artist was Norah Borges, sister of Bioy Casares' lifelong friend, Jorge Luis Borges.<br/>Adolfo Bioy Casares (September 15, 1914 – March 8, 1999) was an Argentine fiction writer, journalist, and translator. He was a friend and frequent collaborator with his fellow countryman Jorge Luis Borges, and wrote what many consider one of the best pieces of fantastic fiction, the novella The Invention of Morel.<br/>Author's page on Wikipedia
Perfume: The Story of Murder
Patrick Suskind • 1986
The year is 1738; the place, Paris. A baby is born under a fish-monger’s bloody table in a marketplace, and abandoned. Orphaned, passed over to the monks as a charity case, already there is something in the aura of the tiny infant that is unsettling. No one will look after him; he is somehow too demanding, and, even more disturbing, something is missing: as his wet nurse tries to explain, he doesn’t smell the way a baby should smell; indeed, he has no scent at all.<br/><br/>Slowly, as we watch Jean-Baptiste Grenouille cling stubbornly to life, we begin to realize that a monster is growing before our eyes. With mounting unease, yet hypnotized, we see him explore his powers and their effect on the world around him. For this dark and sinister boy who has no smell himself possesses an absolute sense of smell, and with it he can read the world to discover the hidden truths that elude ordinary men. He can smell the very composition of objects, and their history, and where they have been, he has no need of the light, and darkness is not dark to him, because nothing can mask the odors of the universe.<br/><br/>As he leaves childhood behind and comes to understand his terrible uniqueness, his obsession becomes the quest to identify, and then to isolate, the most perfect scent of all, the scent of life itself.<br/><br/>At first, he hones his powers, learning the ancient arts of perfume-making until the exquisite fragrances he creates are the rage of Paris, and indeed Europe. Then, secure in his mastery of these means to an end, he withdraws into a strange and agonized solitude, waiting, dreaming, until the morning when he wakes, ready to embark on his monstrous quest: to find and extract from the most perfect living creatures—the most beautiful young virgins in the land— that ultimate perfume which alone can make him, too, fully human. As his trail leads him, at an ever-quickening pace, from his savage exile to the heart of the country and then back to Paris, we are caught up in a rising storm of terror and mortal sensual conquest until the frenzy of his final triumph explodes in all its horrifying consequences.<br/><br/>Told with dazzling narrative brilliance and the haunting power of a grown-up fairy tale, Perfume is one of the most remarkable novels of the last fifty years.
Beloved
Toni Morrison • 2004
PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A spellbinding novel that transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby. With a new afterword by the author.<br/><br/>This "brutally powerful, mesmerizing story” (People) is an unflinchingly look into the abyss of slavery, from the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner.<br/><br/>Sethe was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. Sethe has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe’s new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved.<br/><br/>“A masterwork.... Wonderful.... I can’t imagine American literature without it.” —John Leonard, Los Angeles Times
The Master and Margarita
Mikhail Bulgakov • 1996
The underground masterpiece of twentieth-century Russian fiction, this classic novel was written during Stalin’s regime and could not be published until many years after its author’s death.<br/>When the devil arrives in 1930s Moscow, consorting with a retinue of odd associates—including a talking black cat, an assassin, and a beautiful naked witch—his antics wreak havoc among the literary elite of the world capital of atheism. Meanwhile, the Master, author of an unpublished novel about Jesus and Pontius Pilate, languishes in despair in a pyschiatric hospital, while his devoted lover, Margarita, decides to sell her soul to save him. As Bulgakov’s dazzlingly exuberant narrative weaves back and forth between Moscow and ancient Jerusalem, studded with scenes ranging from a giddy Satanic ball to the murder of Judas in Gethsemane, Margarita’s enduring love for the Master joins the strands of plot across space and time.
Romance
Far from the Madding Crowd
Thomas Hardy • 2003
Thomas Hardy’s impassioned novel of courtship in rural life<br/><br/>In Thomas Hardy’s first major literary success, independent and spirited Bathsheba Everdene has come to Weatherbury to take up her position as a farmer on the largest estate in the area. Her bold presence draws three very different suitors: the gentleman-farmer Boldwood, the soldier-seducer Sergeant Troy, and the devoted shepherd Gabriel Oak. Each, in contrasting ways, unsettles her decisions and complicates her life, and tragedy ensues, threatening the stability of the whole community. One of his first works set in the semi-fictional region of Wessex, Hardy’s novel of swift passion and slow courtship is imbued with his evocative descriptions of rural life and landscapes, and with unflinching honesty about sexual relationships.<br/><br/>This edition, based on Hardy’s original 1874 manuscript, is the complete novel he never saw published, and restores its full candor and innovation. Rosemarie Morgan’s introduction discusses the history of its publication, as well as the biblical and classical allusions that permeate the novel.<br/><br/>For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Beautiful World, Where Are You: A Novel
Sally Rooney • 2021
AN INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Beautiful World, Where Are You is a new novel by Sally Rooney, the bestselling author of Normal People and Conversations with Friends. Alice, a novelist, meets Felix, who works in a warehouse, and asks him if he’d like to travel to Rome with her. In Dublin, her best friend, Eileen, is getting over a break-up, and slips back into flirting with Simon, a man she has known since childhood. Alice, Felix, Eileen, and Simon are still young—but life is catching up with them. They desire each other, they delude each other, they get together, they break apart. They have sex, they worry about sex, they worry about their friendships and the world they live in. Are they standing in the last lighted room before the darkness, bearing witness to something? Will they find a way to believe in a beautiful world?
An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures
Clarice Lispector • 2022
Now in paperback, a romantic love story by the great Brazilian writer Lóri, a primary school teacher, is isolated and nervous, comfortable with children but unable to connect to adults. When she meets Ulisses, a professor of philosophy, an opportunity opens: a chance to escape the shipwreck of introspection and embrace the love, including the sexual love, of a man. Her attempt, as Sheila Heti writes in her afterword, is not only “to love and to be loved,” but also “to be worthy of life itself.”<br/>Published in 1968, An Apprenticeship is Clarice Lispector’s attempt to reinvent herself following the exhausting effort of her metaphysical masterpiece The Passion According to G. H. Here, in this unconventional love story, she explores the ways in which people try to bridge the gaps between them, and the result, unusual in her work, surprised many readers and became a bestseller.<br/>Some appreciated its accessibility; others denounced it as sexist or superficial. To both admirers and critics, the olympian Clarice gave a typically elliptical answer: “I humanized myself,” she said. “The book reflects that.”
Alone with You in the Ether: A Love Story
Olivie Blake • 2022
From Olivie Blake, the New York Times bestselling author of The Atlas Six, comes a literary, intimate study of time, space, and the nature of love. Alone with You in the Ether explores what it means to be unwell, and how to face the fractures of yourself and still love as if you're not broken.<br/><br/>CHICAGO, SOMETIME―<br/>Two people meet in the Art Institute by chance. Prior to their encounter, he is a doctoral student who manages his destructive thoughts with compulsive calculations about time travel; she is a bipolar counterfeit artist, undergoing court-ordered psychotherapy. By the end of the story, these things will still be true. But this is not a story about endings.<br/><br/>For Regan, people are predictable and tedious, including and perhaps especially herself. She copes with the dreariness of existence by living impulsively, imagining a new, alternate timeline being created in the wake of every rash decision.<br/><br/>To Aldo, the world feels disturbingly chaotic. He gets through his days by erecting a wall of routine: a backbeat of rules and formulas that keep him going. Without them, the entire framework of his existence would collapse.<br/><br/>For Regan and Aldo, life has been a matter of resigning themselves to the blueprints of inevitability―until the two meet. Could six conversations with a stranger be the variable that shakes up the entire simulation?
Writers & Lovers: Lily King
Lily King • 2021
The New York Times Bestseller<br/>‘Captivating, potent, incisive, and wise’ – Madeline Miller, author of Circe<br/>‘Extremely funny’ – Sunday Times<br/><br/>Recently out of a devastating love affair and mourning the loss of her beloved mum, Casey is lost. The novel she has been writing for six years isn’t going anywhere, her debt is soaring, and at thirty-one, with all her friends getting married and having kids, she feels too old for things to be this way.<br/><br/>Then she meets Silas. He is kind, handsome, interested. But only a few weeks later, Oscar – older, fascinating, troubled – walks into her life, his two boys in tow. Suddenly Casey finds herself at the point of a love triangle, torn between two very different relationships that promise two very different futures. And she’s still got to write that book . . .<br/><br/>‘Suffused with hopefulness and kindness’ – Ann Patchett<br/>‘Exquisite’ – Sunday Telegraph<br/>‘Funny and immensely clever’ – Tessa Hadley<br/>‘Beautiful . . . Reading the book feels like waiting for clouds to break – a kind of gorgeous agony’ – Guardian<br/>‘I loved this book’ – Curtis Sittenfeld
Historical
In Memoriam: A novel
Alice Winn • 2023
GMA BUZZ PICK • INTERNATIONAL BEST SELLER AND AWARD WINNER • A haunting, virtuosic debut novel about two young men who fall in love during World War I • “Will live in your mind long after you’ve closed the final pages.” —Maggie O’Farrell, best-selling author of Hamnet and The Marriage Portrait<br/><br/>A Best Book of the Year: The New Yorker, The Washington Post, NPR<br/><br/>“In Memoriam is the story of a great tragedy, but it is also a moving portrait of young love.”—The New York Times<br/><br/>It’s 1914, and World War I is ceaselessly churning through thousands of young men on both sides of the fight. The violence of the front feels far away to Henry Gaunt, Sidney Ellwood and the rest of their classmates, safely ensconced in their idyllic boarding school in the English countryside. News of the heroic deaths of their friends only makes the war more exciting.<br/><br/>Gaunt, half German, is busy fighting his own private battle--an all-consuming infatuation with his best friend, the glamorous, charming Ellwood--without a clue that Ellwood is pining for him in return. When Gaunt's family asks him to enlist to forestall the anti-German sentiment they face, Gaunt does so immediately, relieved to escape his overwhelming feelings for Ellwood. To Gaunt's horror, Ellwood rushes to join him at the front, and the rest of their classmates soon follow. Now death surrounds them in all its grim reality, often inches away, and no one knows who will be next.<br/><br/>An epic tale of both the devastating tragedies of war and the forbidden romance that blooms in its grip, In Memoriam is a breathtaking debut.
Great Granny Webster
Caroline Blackwood • 2002
My Brilliant Friend
Elena Ferrante • 2020
The international bestseller, now in B-format paperback with a brand new cover.
Lady Tan's Circle of Women
Lisa See • 2023
*NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER!* From “one of those special writers capable of delivering both poetry and plot” (The New York Times Book Review) an immersive historical novel inspired by the true story of a woman physician in 15th-century China—perfect for fans of Lisa See’s classics Snow Flower and the Secret Fan and The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane. According to Confucius, “an educated woman is a worthless woman,” but Tan Yunxian—born into an elite family, yet haunted by death, separations, and loneliness—is being raised by her grandparents to be of use. Her grandmother is one of only a handful of female doctors in China, and she teaches Yunxian the pillars of Chinese medicine, the Four Examinations—looking, listening, touching, and asking—something a man can never do with a female patient. From a young age, Yunxian learns about women’s illnesses, many of which relate to childbearing, alongside a young midwife-in-training, Meiling. The two girls find fast friendship and a mutual purpose—despite the prohibition that a doctor should never touch blood while a midwife comes in frequent contact with it—and they vow to be forever friends, sharing in each other’s joys and struggles. No mud, no lotus, they tell themselves: from adversity beauty can bloom. But when Yunxian is sent into an arranged marriage, her mother-in-law forbids her from seeing Meiling and from helping the women and girls in the household. Yunxian is to act like a proper wife—embroider bound-foot slippers, recite poetry, give birth to sons, and stay forever within the walls of the family compound, the Garden of Fragrant Delights. How might a woman like Yunxian break free of these traditions and lead a life of such importance that many of her remedies are still used five centuries later? How might the power of friendship support or complicate these efforts? A captivating story of women helping each other, Lady Tan’s Circle of Women is a triumphant reimagining of the life of one person who was remarkable in the Ming dynasty and would be considered remarkable today.
The Silence of the Girls: A Novel
Pat Barker • 2018
A Washington Post Notable Book One of the Best Books of the Year: NPR, The Economist, Financial Times Shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award Finalist for the Women’s Prize for Fiction Here is the story of the Iliad as we’ve never heard it before: in the words of Briseis, Trojan queen and captive of Achilles. Given only a few words in Homer’s epic and largely erased by history, she is nonetheless a pivotal figure in the Trojan War. In these pages she comes fully to life: wry, watchful, forging connections among her fellow female prisoners even as she is caught between Greece’s two most powerful warriors. Her story pulls back the veil on the thousands of women who lived behind the scenes of the Greek army camp—concubines, nurses, prostitutes, the women who lay out the dead—as gods and mortals spar, and as a legendary war hurtles toward its inevitable conclusion. Brilliantly written, filled with moments of terror and beauty, The Silence of the Girls gives voice to an extraordinary woman—and makes an ancient story new again.
The Women of Troy: A Novel
Pat Barker • 2021
A daring and timely feminist retelling of The Iliad from the perspective of the women of Troy who endured it—an extraordinary follow up to The Silence of the Girls from the Booker Prize-winning author of The Regeneration Trilogy and “one of contemporary literature’s most thoughtful and compelling writers" (The Washington Post). Troy has fallen and the victorious Greeks are eager to return home with the spoils of an endless war—including the women of Troy themselves. They await a fair wind for the Aegean. It does not come, because the gods are offended. The body of King Priam lies unburied and desecrated, and so the victors remain in suspension, camped in the shadows of the city they destroyed as the coalition that held them together begins to unravel. Old feuds resurface and new suspicions and rivalries begin to fester. Largely unnoticed by her captors, the one time Trojan queen Briseis, formerly Achilles's slave, now belonging to his companion Alcimus, quietly takes in these developments. She forges alliances when she can, with Priam's aged wife the defiant Hecuba and with the disgraced soothsayer Calchas, all the while shrewdly seeking her path to revenge.
The Vanishing Half: A Novel
Brit Bennett • 2020
La historia de dos hermanas gemelas que eligen caminos muy diferentes en la vida y cómo sus decisiones afectan a sus familias.
Pachinko
Min Jin Lee • 2017
A New York Times Top Ten Book of the Year and National Book Award finalist, Pachinko is an "extraordinary epic" of four generations of a poor Korean immigrant family as they fight to control their destiny in 20th-century Japan (San Francisco Chronicle).<br/><br/>NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2017 * A USA TODAY TOP TEN OF 2017 * JULY PICK FOR THE PBS NEWSHOUR-NEW YORK TIMES BOOK CLUB NOW READ THIS * FINALIST FOR THE 2018DAYTON LITERARY PEACE PRIZE* WINNER OF THE MEDICI BOOK CLUB PRIZE<br/><br/>Roxane Gay's Favorite Book of 2017, Washington Post<br/><br/>NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * #1 BOSTON GLOBE BESTSELLER * USA TODAY BESTSELLER * WALL STREET JOURNAL BESTSELLER * WASHINGTON POST BESTSELLER<br/><br/>"There could only be a few winners, and a lot of losers. And yet we played on, because we had hope that we might be the lucky ones."<br/><br/>In the early 1900s, teenaged Sunja, the adored daughter of a crippled fisherman, falls for a wealthy stranger at the seashore near her home in Korea. He promises her the world, but when she discovers she is pregnant--and that her lover is married--she refuses to be bought. Instead, she accepts an offer of marriage from a gentle, sickly minister passing through on his way to Japan. But her decision to abandon her home, and to reject her son's powerful father, sets off a dramatic saga that will echo down through the generations.<br/><br/>Richly told and profoundly moving, Pachinko is a story of love, sacrifice, ambition, and loyalty. From bustling street markets to the halls of Japan's finest universities to the pachinko parlors of the criminal underworld, Lee's complex and passionate characters--strong, stubborn women, devoted sisters and sons, fathers shaken by moral crisis--survive and thrive against the indifferent arc of history.<br/><br/>*Includes reading group guide*
River East, River West
Aube Rey Lescure • 2024
Sci-Fi
1Q84
Haruki Murakami • 2013
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The year is 1984 and the city is Tokyo. A young woman named Aomame follows a taxi driver’s enigmatic suggestion and begins to notice puzzling discrepancies in the world around her.<br/><br/>She has entered, she realizes, a parallel existence, which she calls 1Q84 —“Q is for ‘question mark.’ A world that bears a question.” Meanwhile, an aspiring writer named Tengo takes on a suspect ghostwriting project. He becomes so wrapped up with the work and its unusual author that, soon, his previously placid life begins to come unraveled.<br/><br/>As Aomame’s and Tengo’s narratives converge over the course of this single year, we learn of the profound and tangled connections that bind them ever closer: a beautiful, dyslexic teenage girl with a unique vision; a mysterious religious cult that instigated a shoot-out with the metropolitan police; a reclusive, wealthy dowager who runs a shelter for abused women; a hideously ugly private investigator; a mild-mannered yet ruthlessly efficient bodyguard; and a peculiarly insistent television-fee collector.<br/><br/>A love story, a mystery, a fantasy, a novel of self-discovery, a dystopia to rival George Orwell’s—1Q84 is Haruki Murakami’s most ambitious undertaking yet: an instant best seller in his native Japan, and a tremendous feat of imagination from one of our most revered contemporary writers.
Never Let Me Go
Kazuo Ishiguro • 2006
<b>NOBEL PRIZE WINNER <b>•</b> From the acclaimed, bestselling author of <i>The Remains of the Day</i> comes “a Gothic tour de force" (<i>The New York Times</i>) with an extraordinary twist—a moving, suspenseful, beautifully atmospheric modern classic.<br><br>One of <i>The New York Times</i>’s 10 Best Books of the 21st Century • A <i>Kirkus Reviews </i>Best Fiction Book of the Century • A <i>Los Angeles Times</i> Best Fiction Book of the Last 30 Years</b><br><br>As children, Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy were students at Hailsham, an exclusive boarding school secluded in the English countryside. It was a place of mercurial cliques and mysterious rules where teachers were constantly reminding their charges of how special they were. <br><br>Now, years later, Kathy is a young woman. Ruth and Tommy have reentered her life. And for the first time she is beginning to look back at their shared past and understand just what it is that makes them special—and how that gift will shape the rest of their time together.
Orbital
Samantha Harvey • 2024
LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2024<br/>Winner of the 2024 Hawthornden Prize<br/>Shortlisted for the 2024 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction<br/>Shortlisted for the 2024 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction<br/>A singular new novel from Betty Trask Prize-winner Samantha Harvey, Orbital is an eloquent meditation on space and life on our planet through the eyes of six astronauts circling the earth in 24 hours<br/>"Ravishingly beautiful." — Joshua Ferris, New York Times<br/>A slender novel of epic power, Orbital deftly snapshots one day in the lives of six women and men traveling through space. Selected for one of the last space station missions of its kind before the program is dismantled, these astronauts and cosmonauts—from America, Russia, Italy, Britain, and Japan—have left their lives behind to travel at a speed of over seventeen thousand miles an hour as the earth reels below. We glimpse moments of their earthly lives through brief communications with family, their photos and talismans; we watch them whip up dehydrated meals, float in gravity-free sleep, and exercise in regimented routines to prevent atrophying muscles; we witness them form bonds that will stand between them and utter solitude. Most of all, we are with them as they behold and record their silent blue planet. Their experiences of sixteen sunrises and sunsets and the bright, blinking constellations of the galaxy are at once breathtakingly awesome and surprisingly intimate.<br/>Profound and contemplative, Orbital is a moving elegy to our environment and planet.
Memoir
Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, The Flesh, and L.A. (New York Review Books Classics)
Eve Babitz • 2016
No one burned hotter than Eve Babitz. Possessing skin that radiated “its own kind of moral laws,” spectacular teeth, and a figure that was the stuff of legend, she seduced seemingly everyone who was anyone in Los Angeles for a long stretch of the 1960s and ’70s. One man proved elusive, however, and so Babitz did what she did best, she wrote him a book.<br/><br/>Slow Days, Fast Company is a full-fledged and full-bodied evocation of a bygone Southern California that far exceeds its mash-note premise. In ten sun-baked, Santa Ana wind–swept sketches, Babitz re-creates a Los Angeles of movie stars distraught over their success, socialites on three-day drug binges holed up in the Chateau Marmont, soap-opera actors worried that tomorrow’s script will kill them off, Italian femmes fatales even more fatal than Babitz.<br/><br/>And she even leaves LA now and then, spending an afternoon at the house of flawless Orange County suburbanites, a day among the grape pickers of the Central Valley, a weekend in Palm Springs where her dreams of romance fizzle and her only solace is Virginia Woolf. In the end it doesn’t matter if Babitz ever gets the guy—she seduces us.
Crime
Time of the Flies
Claudia Piñeiro • 2024
Life after crime from the International Booker-shortlisted author of Elena Knows<br/>Fifteen years after killing her husband’s lover, Inés is fresh out of prison and trying to put together a new life. Her old friend Manca is out now too, and they’ve started a business – FFF, or Females, Fumigation, and Flies – dedicated to pest control and private investigation, by women, for women. But Señora Bonar, one of their clients, wants Inés to do more than kill bugs―she wants her expertise, and her criminal past, to help her kill her husband’s lover, too. Crimes against women versus crimes by women; culpability, fallibility, and our responsibilities to each other―this is Piñeiro at her wry, earthy best, alive to all the ways we shape ourselves to be understandable, to be understood, by family and love and other hostile forces.
Horror
We Have Always Lived in the Castle
Shirley Jackson • 2024
Boy Parts
Eliza Clark • 2020
<p>‘Hallucinogenic, electric and sharp, <i>Boy Parts</i> is a whirlwind exploration of gender, class and power.’</p><p>– Jessica Andrews</p><br><p>Irina obsessively takes explicit photographs of the average-looking men she persuades to model for her, scouted from the streets of Newcastle.</p><p>Placed on sabbatical from her dead-end bar job, she is offered an exhibition at a fashionable London gallery, promising to revive her career in the art world and offering an escape from her rut of drugs, alcohol, and extreme cinema. The news triggers a self-destructive tailspin, centred around Irina’s relationship with her obsessive best-friend, and a shy young man from her local supermarket who has attracted her attention….</p><p><i>Boy Parts</i> is the incendiary debut novel from Eliza Clark, a pitch-black comedy both shocking and hilarious, fearlessly exploring the taboo regions of sexuality and gender roles in the twenty-first century.</p>
Brutes
Tate Dizz • 2024
LGBT
Sunburn
Chloe Michellq Howarth • 2023
<p><b>** Shortlisted for the Polari First Book Prize 2024 **</b><br><b>** Shortlisted for the 2024 Book of the Year: Discover Award by the British Book Awards **<br>** Shortlisted for the 2023 Nero Book Award for Debut Fiction **<br>** Longlisted for the Diverse Book Awards 2024 **<br>** An <i>Evening Standard</i> 'One to Watch in 2023 **<br>** An <i>Independent</i> ‘Best Romantic Summer Reads' **<br>** A Book of the Month pick for <i>Diva</i>, <i>Irish Examiner</i>, <i>Novellic </i>& <i>Sainsbury’s Magazine</i> **<br>** A Most Anticipated pick for <i>PinkNews</i> & <i>Queer on the Street</i> **</b></p><br> <p>It's the early 1990s, and in the Irish village of Crossmore, Lucy feels out of place. Despite her fierce friendships, she's always felt this way, and the conventional path of marriage and motherhood doesn't appeal to her at all. Not even with handsome and doting Martin, her closest childhood friend.</p><br> <p>Lucy begins to make sense of herself during a long hot summer, when a spark with her school friend Susannah escalates to an all-consuming infatuation, and, very quickly, to a desperate and devastating love.</p><br> <p>Fearful of rejection from her small and conservative community, Lucy begins living a double life, hiding the most honest parts of herself in stolen moments with Susannah.</p><br> <p>But with the end of school and the opportunity to leave Crossmore looming, Lucy must choose between two places, two people and two futures, each as terrifying as the other. Neither will be easy, but only one will offer her happiness.</p><br> <p><b><i>Sunburn</i> is an astute and tender portrayal of first love, adolescent anxiety and the realities of growing up in a small town where tradition holds people tightly in its grasp. An atmospheric sapphic love story and coming-of-age novel with the intensity of Megan Nolan's <i>Acts of Desperation</i>, the long hot summer of André Aciman's <i>Call Me By Your Name</i> and the female friendships of Anna Hope's <i>Expectation</i>.</b></p><br> <p>‘A tender and heartfelt coming-of-age tale’ – <b><i>Heat</i></b></p><br> <p>‘A compassionate take on the push and pull between what's expected and what is felt’ – <b><i>Herald</i></b></p><br> <p>‘A deeply moving, heartfelt love story’ – <b><i>Daily Mail</i></b></p><br> <p>‘Lucy tells her story in a true, compelling voice, with an eye for minutiae, quaint apercus, and confidences that make her account moving and convincing’ – <b><i>SAGA Magazine</i></b></p><br> <p>‘Tender and poignant... Ideal reading for the last month of summer’ – <b><i>Diva</i></b></p><br> <p>'Intense and all-consuming - like the first love it describes - <i>Sunburn</i> transported me to the heart of summer and the heady days of late adolescence. I won't soon forget Chloe Michelle Howarth's addictive, lushly written debut' - <b>Laura Sims</b></p><br> <p>'Capturing all the intensity of first love, blended with the claustrophobia of small-town life, this debut, inspired by real experience, is tender and raw' - <b><i>The Bookseller</i></b></p><br> <p>'A beautiful coming of age love novel written with an insightful poetical prose, rich with religious allegory and texture which underscores the transformative, spiritual power of first love explored' - <b><i>Scene Magazine</i></b></p>
Mystery
Where the Crawdads Sing
Delia Owens • 2018
Una novela que combina un misterio de asesinato con una historia de crecimiento en la naturaleza de Carolina del Norte.
The Secret History
Tartt Donna • 1993
Front cover slightly creased
The Goldfinch
Donna Tartt • 2014
The Goldfinch
Fantasy
Babel
R.F. Kuang • 2022
A New Dark Academic Fantasy By The New York Times Bestselling Author Of The Poppy War Traduttore, Traditore: An Act Of Translation Is Always An Act Of Betrayal. Oxford, 1836. The City Of Dreaming Spires. It Is The Centre Of All Knowledge And Progress In The World. And At Its Centre Is Babel, The Royal Institute Of Translation. The Tower From Which All The Power Of The Empire Flows. Orphaned In Canton And Brought To England By A Mysterious Guardian, Babel Seemed Like Paradise To Robin Swift. Until It Became A Prison... But Can A Student Stand Against An Empire? An Incendiary New Novel From Award-winning Author R.f. Kuang About The Power Of Language, The Violence Of Colonialism, And The Sacrifices Of Resistance.
Dystopian
I Who Have Never Known Men
Jacqueline Harpman • 2019
<p><b>SISTERHOOD. SECRETS. SURVIVAL.</b><br> <br> <b>Discover the haunting, heart-breaking post-apocalyptic TikTok sensation.</b><br> <br> Deep underground, thirty-nine women are kept in isolation in a cage. Above ground, a world awaits. Has it been abandoned? Devastated by a virus?<br> <br> Watched over by guards, the women have no memory of how they got there, no notion of time, and only vague recollection of their lives before. But, as the burn of electric light merges day into night and numberless years pass, a young girl - the fortieth prisoner - sits alone an outcast in the corner.<br> <br> Soon she will show herself to be the key to the others' escape and survival in the strange world that awaits them above ground. The woman who will never know men.<br> <br> <b>WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY SOPHIE MACKINTOSH, BOOKER PRIZE-LONGLISTED AUTHOR OF THE <i>WATER CURE</i><br> <br> **<i>Orlanda</i>, the next sensation from Jacquline Harpman, is available now**</b></p>
Uncategorized
Infinite Jest
David Foster Wallace • 1997
Corrigan
Caroline Blackwood • 1985
The widowed and lonely Mrs. Blunt succumbs to the mysterious power of Corrigan, a gaunt, handsome Irishman in a wheelchair, a man of charm and erudition, and her estranged daughter, Nadine, looks into the matter
The Woman Destroyed
Simone De Beauvoir • 1987
One of the most influential thinkers of her generationdraws us into the lives of three women, all past their first youth, all facing unexpected crises in these three “immensely intelligent stories about the decay of passion” (The Sunday Herald Times).<br/><br/>Suffused with de Beauvoir’s remarkable insights into women, The Woman Destroyed gives us a legendary writer at her best. Includes "The Age of Discretion," "The Monologue," and "The Woman Destroyed."<br/><br/>"Witty, immensely adroit...These three women are believable individuals presented with a wry mixture of sympathy and exasperation." —The Atlantic
The Inseparables
Simone de Beauvoir • 2021
Told by one of the foremost feminists of the twentieth century, this is a gripping coming-of-age novel from Simone de Beauvoir, closely modelled on events of her own life. Two young women, Sylvie and Andree, battle with their families, their religion and the deeply held conventions of society in early twentieth-century Paris. A deep and abiding friendship sustains them in an increasingly desperate struggle to find happiness and independence.
All Fours: A Novel
Miranda July • 2024
AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER<br/><br/>The New York Times bestselling author returns with an irreverently sexy, tender, hilarious and surprising novel about a woman upending her life<br/><br/>“A frank novel about a midlife awakening, which is funnier and more boldly human than you ever quite expect….the bravery of All Fours is nothing short of riveting.”—Vogue<br/><br/>“A novel that presses into that tender bruise about the anxiety of aging, of what it means to have a female body that is aging, and wanting the freedom to live a fuller life…Deeply funny and achingly true.” —LA Times<br/><br/>“All Fours possessed me. I picked it up and neglected my life until the last page, and then I started begging every woman I know to read it as soon as possible.” —The Cut<br/><br/>“July’s novel is hot and weird and captivating and one of the most entertaining, deranged, and moving depictions of lust and romantic mania I’ve ever read.” —New York Magazine<br/><br/>A semi-famous artist announces her plan to drive cross-country, from LA to NY. Thirty minutes after leaving her husband and child at home, she spontaneously exits the freeway, checks into a nondescript motel, and immerses herself in an entirely different journey.<br/><br/>Miranda July’s second novel confirms the brilliance of her unique approach to fiction. With July’s wry voice, perfect comic timing, unabashed curiosity about human intimacy, and palpable delight in pushing boundaries, All Fours tells the story of one woman’s quest for a new kind of freedom. Part absurd entertainment, part tender reinvention of the sexual, romantic, and domestic life of a forty-five-year-old female artist, All Fours transcends expectation while excavating our beliefs about life lived as a woman. Once again, July hijacks the familiar and turns it into something new and thrillingly, profoundly alive.
Misunderstanding in Moscow
Simone de Beauvoir • 2023
