Acclaimed novelist Mat Johnson is the winner of the prestigious Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. After being sacked, American literature professor Chris Jaynes discovers a slave manuscript that seemingly confirms the existence of an “island of pure and utter blackness” as described in Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. Soon Jaynes and a rag-tag crew embark on an epic adventure to discover the truth.

Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World electrified a global readership. A Booker Prize and National Book Award finalist, and one of the New York Times’ Ten Best Books of the Year, it explored the life and thought of a clutch of mathematicians and physicists who took science to strange and sometimes dangerous new realms. In The MANIAC, Labatut has created a tour de force on an even grander scale.

Miss Lonelyhearts is an unnamed male newspaper columnist writing an advice column, which is viewed by the newspaper as a joke. As "Miss Lonelyhearts" reads letters from desperate New Yorkers, he feels terribly burdened and falls into a cycle of deep depression, accompanied by heavy drinking and occasional barfights. The novel is essentially a black comedy and is characterized by an extremely dark but clever sense of humor and irony.

When Jack and Elizabeth meet as college students in the gritty '90s Chicago art scene, the two quickly join forces and hold on tight, each eager to claim a place in the thriving underground scene with an appreciative kindred spirit. Fast-forward twenty years to suburban married life, and alongside the challenges of parenting, they encounter the often-baffling pursuits of health and happiness from polyamorous would-be suitors to home-renovation hysteria.

Lorrie Moore’s first novel since A Gate at the Stairs—a daring, meditative exploration of love and death, passion and grief, and what it means to be haunted by the past, both by history and the human heart. A teacher visiting his dying brother in the Bronx. A mysterious journal from the nineteenth century stolen from a boarding house. A therapy clown and an assassin, both presumed dead, but perhaps not dead at all...

From the acclaimed fiction writer comes Still No Word from You, a unique chain of essays and intimate stories that meld the lived life and the reading life. For Orner, there is no separation. Covering such well-known writers as Lorraine Hansberry, Primo Levi, and Marilynne Robinson, as well as other greats like Maeve Brennan and James Alan McPherson, Orner's highly personal take on literature alternates with his own true stories of loss and love, hope and despair. This is a book for anyone for whom reading is as essential as breathing.

COVID-19 has arrived in London, and the entire world quickly succumbs to the surreal, chaotic mundanity of screens, isolation, and the disasters small and large that have plagued recent history. As our unnamed narrator—a classics academic immersed in her studies of ancient prophecies—navigates the tightening grip of lockdown, a marriage in crisis, and a 10-year-old son who seems increasingly unreachable, she becomes obsessed with predicting the future.

An Unferth story lures you in with a voice that seems amiable and lighthearted, but it swerves in sudden and surprising ways that reveal, in terrifying clarity, the rage, despair, and profound mournfulness that have taken up residence at the heart of the American dream. These stories often take place in an exaggerated or heightened reality, a quality that is reminiscent of the work of Donald Barthelme, Lorrie Moore, and George Saunders, but in Unferth's unforgettable collection she carves out territory that is entirely her own.

What I wanted more than anything was to be standing beside Schmidt, in concert with Schmidt, at the foot of Saint Sebastian’s Abyss along with Schmidt, hands cupped to the sides of our faces, debating art, transcendence, and the glory of the apocalypse.” Former best friends who built their careers writing about a single work of art meet after a decades-long falling-out. One of them, called to the other’s deathbed for unknown reasons by a “relatively short” nine-page email, spends his flight to Berlin reflecting on Dutch Renaissance painter Count Hugo Beckenbauer.

John Hodgman - New York Times best-selling author, semifamous personality, deranged millionaire, increasingly elderly husband, father, and human of Earth - has written a memoir about his cursed travels through two wildernesses: from the woods of his home in Massachusetts, birthplace of rage, to his exile on the coast of Maine, so-called Vacationland, home to the most painful beaches on Earth.

Pietro and Teresa’s love affair is tempestuous and passionate. After yet another terrible argument, she gets an idea: They should tell each other something they’ve never told another person; something they’re too ashamed to tell anyone. They will hear the other’s confessions without judgment and with love in their hearts. In this way, Teresa thinks, they will remain united forever, more intimately connected than ever.

From the creator of the beloved and universally acclaimed television series BoJack Horseman, a fabulously off-beat collection of short stories about love - the best and worst thing in the universe. Equally at home with the surreal and the painfully relatable (and both at once), Bob-Waksberg delivers a killer combination of humor, romance, whimsy, cultural commentary, and crushing emotional vulnerability.

All is well until the Whitmans - an apparently traditional family with new money and a secretly troubled teenaged daughter - raze the house and trees next door to build themselves a showplace. With little in common except a property line, these two very different families quickly find themselves at odds: First, over an historic oak tree in Valerie's yard, and soon after, the blossoming romance between their two teenagers.

A gorgeous, darkly humorous memoir for listeners of Cheryl Strayed about a woman overcoming dramatic loss and finding reinvention, based on this award-winning writer's New Yorker article "Thanksgiving in Mongolia".

Tom Papa is a little worried about you. You seem stressed, overworked, and, frankly, a little mixed up. Everyone is fighting an overwhelming feeling that things are getting worse, that we should be doing more, that we're not good enough. Well, life isn't perfect. There have always been problems, and there always will be. You can fight for the things you believe in, you can work really, really hard, but you shouldn't lose track of the fact that while you're doing all that, life is flying by at lightning-fast speed.