Recommendations for Adults
Browse our regularly updated lists of staff picks, bestsellers, genre selections, and more. (Want personalized recommendations? Use our Book Picks form for suggested reads from our librarians.)
Books Like Dune
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The Left Hand of Darkness
50TH ANNIVERSARY EDITIONâWITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY DAVID MITCHELL AND A NEW AFTERWORD BY CHARLIE JANE ANDERS
Ursula K. Le Guinâs groundbreaking work of science fictionâwinner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards.A lone human ambassador is sent to the icebound planet of Winter, a world without sexual prejudice, where the inhabitantsâ gender is fluid. His goal is to facilitate Winterâs inclusion in a growing intergalactic civilization. But to do so he must bridge the gulf between his own views and those of the strange, intriguing culture he encounters...
Embracing the aspects of psychology, society, and human emotion on an alien world, The Left Hand of Darkness stands as a landmark achievement in the annals of intellectual science fiction. -
Red Mars
In his most ambitious project to date, award-winning author Kim Stanley Robinson utilizes years of research and cutting-edge science in the first of three novels that will chronicle the colonization of Mars.
For eons, sandstorms have swept the barren desolate landscape of the red planet. For centuries, Mars has beckoned to mankind to come and conquer its hostile climate. Now, in the year 2026, a group of one hundred colonists is about to fulfill that destiny.
John Boone, Maya Toitavna, Frank Chalmers, and Arkady Bogdanov lead a mission whose ultimate goal is the terraforming of Mars. For some, Mars will become a passion driving them to daring acts of courage and madness; for others it offers and opportunity to strip the planet of its riches. And for the genetic "alchemists," Mars presents a chance to create a biomedical miracle, a breakthrough that could change all we know about life...and death.
The colonists place giant satellite mirrors in Martian orbit to reflect light to the planets surface. Black dust sprinkled on the polar caps will capture warmth and melt the ice. And massive tunnels, kilometers in depth, will be drilled into the Martian mantle to create stupendous vents of hot gases. Against this backdrop of epic upheaval, rivalries, loves, and friendships will form and fall to pieces--for there are those who will fight to the death to prevent Mars from ever being changed.
Brilliantly imagined, breathtaking in scope and ingenuity, "Red Mars" is an epic scientific saga, chronicling the next step in human evolution and creating a world in its entirety. "Red Mars" shows us a future, with both glory and tarnish, that awes with complexity and inspires with vision. -
The Stars Are Legion
Somewhere on the outer rim of the universe, a mass of decaying world-ships known as the Legion is traveling in the seams between the stars. For generations, a war for control of the Legion has been waged, with no clear resolution. As worlds continue to die, a desperate plan is put into motion.
Zan wakes with no memory, prisoner of a people who say they are her family. She is told she is their salvation -ĂÂ the only person capable of boarding the Mokshi, a world-ship with the power to leave the Legion. But Zan's new family is not the only one desperate to gain control of the prized ship. Zan must choose sides in a genocidal campaign that will take her from the edges of the Legion's gravity well to the very belly of the world. Zan will soon learn that she carries the seeds of the Legion's destruction -ĂÂ and its possible salvation.
File Under: Science Fiction [ Armies in the Darkness | Over the Edge | Total Recall | She Is Legion ] -
Red Rising
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER ⢠Pierce Brownâs relentlessly entertaining debut channels the excitement of The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins and Enderâs Game by Orson Scott Card.
âRed Rising ascends above a crowded dysÂtopian field.ââUSA Today
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEARâEntertainment Weekly, BuzzFeed, Shelf Awareness
âI live for the dream that my children will be born free,â she says. âThat they will be what they like. That they will own the land their father gave them.â
âI live for you,â I say sadly.
Eo kisses my cheek. âThen you must live for more.â
Darrow is a Red, a member of the lowest caste in the color-coded society of the future. Like his fellow Reds, he works all day, believing that he and his people are making the surface of Mars livable for future generations. Yet he toils willingly, trusting that his blood and sweat will one day result in a better world for his children.
But Darrow and his kind have been betrayed. Soon he discovers that humanity reached the surface generations ago. Vast cities and lush wilds spread across the planet. Darrowâand Reds like himâare nothing more than slaves to a decadent ruling class.
Inspired by a longing for justice, and driven by the memory of lost love, Darrow sacrifices everything to infiltrate the legendary Institute, a proving ground for the dominant Gold caste, where the next generation of humanityâs overlords struggle for power. He will be forced to compete for his life and the very future of civilization against the best and most brutal of Societyâs ruling class. There, he will stop at nothing to bring down his enemies . . . even if it means he has to become one of them to do so.
Praise for Red Rising
â[A] spectacular adventure . . . one heart-pounding ride . . . Pierce Brownâs dizzyingly good debut novel evokes The Hunger Games, Lord of the Flies, and Enderâs Game. . . . [Red Rising] has everything it needs to become meteoric.ââEntertainment Weekly
âEnder, Katniss, and now Darrow.ââScott Sigler
âRed Rising is a sophisticated vision. . . . Brown will find a devoted audience.ââRichmond Times-Dispatch
Donât miss any of Pierce Brownâs Red Rising Saga:
RED RISING ⢠GOLDEN SON ⢠MORNING STAR ⢠IRON GOLD ⢠DARK AGE ⢠LIGHT BRINGER -
The Forever War
Private William Mandella is a hero in spite of himself -- a reluctant conscript drafted into an elite military unit, and propelled through space and time to fight in a distant thousand-year conflict. He never wanted to go to war, but the leaders on Earth have drawn a line in the interstellar sand -- despite the fact that their fierce alien enemy is unknowable, unconquerable, and very far away. So Mandella will perform his duties without rancor and even rise up through the military's ranks . . . if he survives. But the true test of his mettle will come when he returns to Earth. Because of the time dilation caused by space travel the loyal soldier is aging months, while his home planet is aging centuries -- and the difference will prove the saying: you never can go home. . .
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Hyperion
A stunning tour de force filled with transcendent awe and wonder, Hyperion is a masterwork of science fiction that resonates with excitement and invention, the first volume in a remarkable epic by the multiple-award-winning author of The Hollow Man.
On the world called Hyperion, beyond the reach of galactic law, waits a creature called the Shrike. There are those who worship it. There are those who fear it. And there are those who have vowed to destroy it. In the Valley of the Time Tombs, where huge, brooding structures move backward through time, the Shrike waits for them all.
On the eve of Armageddon, with the entire galaxy at war, seven pilgrims set forth on a final voyage to Hyperion seeking the answers to the unsolved riddles of their lives. Each carries a desperate hopeâand a terrible secret. And one may hold the fate of humanity in his hands.
Praise for Dan Simmons and Hyperion
âDan Simmons has brilliantly conceptualized a future 700 years distant. In sheer scope and complexity it matches, and perhaps even surpasses, those of Isaac Asimov and James Blish.ââThe Washington Post Book World
âAn unfailingly inventive narrative . . . generously conceived and stylistically sure-handed.ââThe New York Times Book Review
âSimmonsâs own genius transforms space opera into a new kind of poetry.ââThe Denver Post
âAn essential part of any science fiction collection.ââBooklist -
A Game of Thrones
NOW THE ACCLAIMED HBO SERIES GAME OF THRONESâTHE MASTERPIECE THAT BECAME A CULTURAL PHENOMENON
Winter is coming. Such is the stern motto of House Stark, the northernmost of the fiefdoms that owe allegiance to King Robert Baratheon in far-off Kingâs Landing. There Eddard Stark of Winterfell rules in Robertâs name. There his family dwells in peace and comfort: his proud wife, Catelyn; his sons Robb, Brandon, and Rickon; his daughters Sansa and Arya; and his bastard son, Jon Snow. Far to the north, behind the towering Wall, lie savage Wildings and worseâunnatural things relegated to myth during the centuries-long summer, but proving all too real and all too deadly in the turning of the season.
Yet a more immediate threat lurks to the south, where Jon Arryn, the Hand of the King, has died under mysterious circumstances. Now Robert is riding north to Winterfell, bringing his queen, the lovely but cold Cersei, his son, the cruel, vainglorious Prince Joffrey, and the queenâs brothers Jaime and Tyrion of the powerful and wealthy House Lannisterâthe first a swordsman without equal, the second a dwarf whose stunted stature belies a brilliant mind. All are heading for Winterfell and a fateful encounter that will change the course of kingdoms.
Meanwhile, across the Narrow Sea, Prince Viserys, heir of the fallen House Targaryen, which once ruled all of Westeros, schemes to reclaim the throne with an army of barbarian Dothrakiâwhose loyalty he will purchase in the only coin left to him: his beautiful yet innocent sister, Daenerys. -
A Desolation Called Peace
WINNER OF THE 2022 HUGO AWARD FOR BEST NOVEL
Now a USA Today bestseller!
Publishers Weekly's Best Books of 2021
Amazon's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of 2021
Bookpage's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of 2021
Goodreads Choice Awards Nominee for Best Science Fiction Book of 2021
"[An] all around brilliant space opera, I absolutely love it."âAnn Leckie, on A Memory Called Empire
A Desolation Called Peace is the spectacular space opera sequel to Arkady Martine's genre-reinventing, Hugo Award-winning debut, A Memory Called Empire.
An alien armada lurks on the edges of Teixcalaanli space. No one can communicate with it, no one can destroy it, and Fleet Captain Nine Hibiscus is running out of options.
In a desperate attempt at diplomacy with the mysterious invaders, the fleet captain has sent for a diplomatic envoy. Now Mahit Dzmare and Three Seagrassâstill reeling from the recent upheaval in the Empireâface the impossible task of trying to communicate with a hostile entity.
Their failure will guarantee millions of deaths in an endless war. Their success might prevent Teixcalaanâs destructionâand allow the empire to continue its rapacious expansion.
Or it might create something far stranger . . .
Also by Arkady Martine:
A Memory Called Empire
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied. -
Leviathan Wakes
From a New York Times bestselling and Hugo award-winning author comes a modern masterwork of science fiction, introducing a captain, his crew, and a detective as they unravel a horrifying solar system wide conspiracy that begins with a single missing girl. Now a Prime Original series.
Humanity has colonized the solar systemâMars, the Moon, the Asteroid Belt and beyondâbut the stars are still out of our reach.
Jim Holden is XO of an ice miner making runs from the rings of Saturn to the mining stations of the Belt. When he and his crew stumble upon a derelict ship, the Scopuli, they find themselves in possession of a secret they never wanted. A secret that someone is willing to kill forâand kill on a scale unfathomable to Jim and his crew. War is brewing in the system unless he can find out who left the ship and why.
Detective Miller is looking for a girl. One girl in a system of billions, but her parents have money and money talks. When the trail leads him to the Scopuli and rebel sympathizer Holden, he realizes that this girl may be the key to everything.
Holden and Miller must thread the needle between the Earth government, the Outer Planet revolutionaries, and secretive corporationsâand the odds are against them. But out in the Belt, the rules are different, and one small ship can change the fate of the universe.
"Interplanetary adventure the way it ought to be written." âGeorge R. R. Martin
The Expanse
Leviathan Wakes
Caliban's War
Abaddon's Gate
Cibola Burn
Nemesis Games
Babylon's Ashes
Persepolis Rising
Tiamat's Wrath
âLeviathan Falls
Memory's Legion
The Expanse Short Fiction
Drive
The Butcher of Anderson Station
Gods of Risk
The Churn
The Vital Abyss
Strange Dogs
Auberon
The Sins of Our Fathers -
The Water Knife
NATIONAL BESTSELLER ⢠A "fresh, genre-bending thrillerâ (Los Angeles Times) set in the near future when water is scarce and a spy, a hardened journalist and a young Texas migrant find themselves pawns in a corrupt game.
"Think Chinatown meets Mad Max." NPR, All Things Considered
In the near future, the Colorado River has dwindled to a trickle. Detective, assassin, and spy, Angel Velasquez âcutsâ water for the Southern Nevada Water Authority, ensuring that its lush arcology developments can bloom in Las Vegas. When rumors of a game-changing water source surface in Phoenix, Angel is sent south, hunting for answers that seem to evaporate as the heat index soars and the landscape becomes more and more oppressive. There, he encounters Lucy Monroe, a hardened journalist with her own agenda, and Maria Villarosa, a young Texas migrant, who dreams of escaping north. As bodies begin to pile up, the three find themselves pawns in a game far bigger and more corrupt than they could have imagined, and when water is more valuable than gold, alliances shift like sand, and the only truth in the desert is that someone will have to bleed if anyone hopes to drink.
Irish-American Heritage Month
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The Untouchable
WINNER OF THE LANNAN LITERARY AWARD FOR FICTION ⢠From the Booker Prize-winning author of The Sea comes the fascinating story of a former British spy who's been unmasked as a Russian agentâand "one of spy fiction's greatest characters" (People). ⢠"Contemporary fiction gets no better than this." âThe New York Times Book Review
One of the most dazzling and adventurous writers now working in English takes on the enigma of the Cambridge spies in a novel of exquisite menace, biting social comedy, and vertiginous moral complexity. The narrator is the elderly Victor Maskell, formerly of British intelligence, for many years art expert to the Queen. Now he has been unmasked as a Russian agent and subjected to a disgrace that is almost a kind of death. But at whose instigation?
As Maskell retraces his tortuous path from his recruitment at Cambridge to the airless upper regions of the establishment, we discover a figure of manifold doubleness: Irishman and Englishman; husband, father, and lover of men; betrayer and dupe. Beautifully written, filled with convincing fictional portraits of Maskell's co-conspirators, and vibrant with the mysteries of loyalty and identity, The Untouchable places John Banville in the select company of both Conrad and le Carre.
"Victor Maskell is one of the great characters in recent fiction.... The Untouchable is the best work of art in any medium on [its] subject." âWashington Post Book World
"As remarkable a literary voice as any to come out of Ireland; Joyce and Beckett notwithstanding." âSan Francisco Chronicle -
The Master
Like Michael Cunningham in "The Hours, " Colm Toibin captures the extraordinary mind and heart of a great writer. Brilliant and profoundly moving, "The Master" tells the story of Henry James, a man born into one of America's first intellectual families two decades before the Civil War. James left his country to live in Paris, Rome, Venice, and London among privileged artists and writers.
In stunningly resonant prose, Toibin captures the loneliness and longing, the hope and despair of a man who never married, never resolved his sexual identity, and whose forays into intimacy inevitably failed him and those he tried to love. The emotional intensity of Toibin's portrait of James is riveting. Time and again, James, a master of psychological subtlety in his fiction, proves blind to his own heart and incapable of reconciling his dreams of passion with his own fragility.
Toibin is "a great and humanizing writer" who describes complex relationships in "supple, beautifully modulated prose" ("The Washington Post Book World"). In "The Master, " he has written his most ambitious and heartbreaking novel, an extraordinarily inventive encounter with a character at the cusp of the modern age, elusive to his own friends and even family, yet astonishingly vivid in these pages.
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Light a Penny Candle
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The Commitments
In the first volume of the Barrytown Trilogy, Roddy Doyle, winner of the Booker Prize for Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, introduces The Commitments, a group of fame-starved, working-class Irish youths with a paradoxical passion for the music of Sam Cooke and Otis Redding and a missionâto bring Soul to Dublin. Doyle writes about the band with a fan's enthusiasm and about Dublin with a native's cheerful knowingness. His book captures all the shadings of the rock experience: ambition, greed, and egotismâans the redeeming, exhilarating joy of making music. The Commitments is one of the most engaging and believable novels about rock'n'roll ever written, a book whose brashness and originality have won it mainstream acclaim and underground cachet.
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The Sea, the Sea
These two major novelsâby one of the most influential British writers of the twentieth centuryâare ferociously dark comedies that combine playfulness with profundity.
A Severed Head (1961) is one of Iris Murdochâs most entertaining works, tracing the turbulent emotional journey of Martin Lynch-Gibbon, a smug, prosperous London wine merchant and unfaithful husband, whose life is turned inside out when his wife leaves him for her psychoanalyst. The story takes bedroom farce to a new level of sophistication, with scenes that are both wickedly funny and emblematic of the way momentous moral issues play out in everyday life.
The Booker Prizeâwinning The Sea, the Sea (1978) is set on the edge of Englandâs North Sea, where egotistical Charles Arrowby, a big name in Londonâs glittering theatrical world, has retreated into seclusion to write his memoirs. Arrowbyâs plans begin to unravel when he encounters his long-lost first love and finds himself increasingly besieged by his own fantasies, delusions, and obsessions.
Both novels are tragicomic masterpieces that brilliantly dramatize how much our lives are governed by the lies we tell ourselves and by the all-consuming need for love, meaning, and redemption.
Introduction by Sarah Churchwell -
The Third Policeman
A masterpiece of black humour from the renown comic and acclaimed author of 'At Swim-Two-Birds' - Flann O'Brien.
A thriller, a hilarious comic satire about an archetypal village police force, a surrealistic vision of eternity, the story of a tender, brief, unrequited love affair between a man and his bicycle, and a chilling fable of unending guilt, 'The Third Policeman' is comparable only to 'Alice in Wonderland' as an allegory of the absurd.
Distinguished by endless comic invention and its delicate balancing of logic and fantasy, 'The Third Policeman' is unique in the English language. -
The Last September
The Last September is Elizabeth Bowen's portrait of a young woman's coming of age in a brutalized time and place, where the ordinariness of life floats like music over the impending doom of history.
In 1920, at their country home in County Cork, Sir Richard Naylor and his wife, Lady Myra, and their friends maintain a skeptical attitude toward the events going on around them, but behind the facade of tennis parties and army camp dances, all know that the end is approachingâthe end of British rule in the south of Ireland and the demise of a way of life that had survived for centuries. Their niece, Lois Farquar, attempts to live her own life and gain her own freedoms from the very class that her elders are vainly defending. The Last September depicts the tensions between love and the longing for freedom, between tradition and the terrifying prospect of independence, both political and spiritual.
"Brilliant.... A successful combination of social comedy and private tragedy."âThe Times Literary Supplement (London) -
Dubliners
"Since its publication in 1914, Dubliners has been arguably the most famous collection of short stories written in English. Through what James Joyce described as their "style of scrupulous meanness," the stories collectively present a direct, sometimes searing view of the city of Dublin in the twentieth century. This Norton Critical Edition is based on Hans Walter Gabler's scholarly edition and includes Gabler's edited text, his textual notes, and a newly revised version of his introduction, which details and discusses the complicated publication history of Dubliners. Explanatory annotations are provided by the volume editor, Margot Norris." ""Contexts" is a rich collection of materials intended to bring Dubliners to life for twenty-first-century readers. The Irish capital of a century ago is captured through photographs, maps, songs, newspaper items, and advertising. Early versions of two of the stories and Joyce's satirical poem about his publication woes provide additional background." ""Criticism" includes eight interpretive essays that illuminate some of the stories most frequently taught and discussed -"Araby," "Eveline," "After the Race," "The Boarding House," "Counterparts," "A Painful Case," and "The Dead." The contributors are David G. Wright, Heyward Ehrlich, Margot Norris, James Fairhall, Fritz Senn, Morris Beja, Roberta Jackson, and Vincent J. Cheng. A Selected Bibliography is also included."--BOOK JACKET.
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The Beautiful and Damned
The publication of The Beautiful and Damned confirmed F. Scott Fitzgerald's place in the pantheon of great American writers. The story chronicles the courtship, fraught marriage, and social demise of Anthony Patch, the presumptive heir to a tycoon's fortune, and Gloria Gilbert, a ravishing society girl. Brilliant and scathing, it is a dazzling tale of lost youth and dissipation that spares no one--least of all the protagonists who resemble, in substance if not circumstance, Fitzgerald himself and his charismatic, capricious, wife, Zelda. This vivid portrait of a corrupt, rootless, and boozy age anticipates Fitzgerald's masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, and signals his fascination with the themes that would continue to animate his work.
This edition includes a biographical timeline of the author's life and the full text of Zelda Fitzgerald's spoof review of The Beautiful and the Damned, which appeared in the New York Tribune.
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Wise Blood
The American short story master Flannery O'Connor's haunting first novel of faith, false prophets, and redemptive wisdom.
Wise Blood, Flannery O'Connor's astonishing and haunting first novel, is a classic of twentieth-century literature. It is the story of Hazel Motes, a twenty-two-year-old caught in an unending struggle against his inborn, desperate fate. He falls under the spell of a "blind" street preacher named Asa Hawks and his degenerate fifteen-year-old daughter, Sabbath Lily. In an ironic, malicious gesture of his own non-faith, and to prove himself a greater cynic than Hawks, Motes founds the Church Without Christ, but is still thwarted in his efforts to lose God. He meets Enoch Emery, a young man with "wise blood," who leads him to a mummified holy child and whose crazy maneuvers are a manifestation of Motes's existential struggles.
This tale of redemption, retribution, false prophets, blindness, blindings, and wisdom gives us one of the most riveting characters in American fiction.
Experimental Fiction
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JPod
A lethal joyride into todayâs new breed of technogeeks, Couplandâs JPod updates Microserfs for the age of Google.
Ethan Jarlewski and five co-workers whose names start with J are bureaucratically marooned in jPod, a no-escape architectural limbo on the fringes of a massive Vancouver game design company.
The six workers daily confront the forces that define our era: global piracy, boneheaded marketing staff, people smuggling, the rise of China, marijuana grow-ops, Jeff Probst and the ashes of the 1990s financial tech dream. jPodâs universe is amoral and shameless. The characters are products of their era even as theyâre creating it.
Everybody in Ethanâs life inhabits a moral grey zone. Nobody is exempt, not even his seemingly straitlaced parents or Coupland himself, as readers will see.
Full of word games, visual jokes and sideways jabs, this book throws a sharp, pointed lawn dart into the heart of contemporary life. JPod is Douglas Coupland at the top of his game. -
Man Or Mango?
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
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Sunflower
A screenplay that predicts the future. A terrorist cult destined to destroy something they can't remember. A projectionist trying to find her way through a story she's suddenly aware she's living. A loser who always seems to be in the wrong place at the right time. And the disparate particles and people populating a slowly-collapsing, not-so-far-from-now world where movie theaters no longer exist, one percent of the population is dead, and everything we do is surveilled and advertised. This is Sunflower -- the final film by Simeon Wolpe.
Readers of Sunflower, Tex Gresham's brilliant new novel, will probably find themselves thinking of Gravity's Rainbow, House of Leaves, and Infinite Jest. But in truth, Sunflower is something else, a beast with its own distinct brand of madness. Bluntly satirical of Trump-era politics, Sunflower takes you on an acid trip disguised as a conspiracy theory, working with equal skill in realist, absurdist, and metafictional modes to make sure you're lost in a funhouse you won't want to leave. In Gresham's fictional universe, the world might end while you're watching a movie about the end of the world, and maybe you wrote the script or maybe your double wrote the script, and even if the theater is filled with people who won't hesitate to blow your brains out if you laugh at all the wrong moments, it won't make any difference, since the book is filled with all the right moments.
--Stephen-Paul Martin, author of The Ace of Lightning
If a bodybuilder were to astral project herself into both Werner Herzog's cameraman/cinematography and Middlemarch, it would produce a morbidly rakish sunflower of the same heliotropic anti- equivalent as Tex Gresham's Sunflower. And, if an intern were to work in Gresham's library of chapters and deleted scenes, it would confuse The Library of Congress for Netflix.
-Vi Khi Nao, author of Fish In Exile and The Vegas Dilemma
Tex Gresham has blurred the line between satirical deconstruction of postmodern novels and sentimental love letters to cinema. Simultaneously hilarious and heartbreaking, Sunflower is an intricate mystery that will leave readers seeking to mend their broken relationships and their humanity through a shared fondness for the silver screen. Sunflower is this summer's biggest literary blockbuster hit! You'll laugh. You'll cry. You'll dissolve.
--Dan Eastman, author of Watertown
Sunflower is virtuosic, gargantuan, totally unafraid. Experimental and wild, beautiful and heartbreaking, serious and hilarious--I think Tex is here to stay.
--Lindsay Lerman, author of I'm From Nowhere and What Are You
If Paul Thomas Anderson wrote a novel based on a film by David Foster Wallace with a screenplay by Thomas Pynchon about dark Hollywood, mind-bending conspiracy, the slapstick horror of America and sheer insanity of existence, these would be some in a long line of flavors the sum total of which might come partway to encapsulating Sunflower. Hilarious, repulsive, enthralling, shocking, breathtaking, masterful-Tex Gresham's magnum opus is a novel you will use all your adjectives attempting to describe; a dense, multi-character tale in which each place and person, every moment and word, are connected through myriad layers across space and time. The effect is staggering. This book will swallow you whole then spit you back out, dazed, bewildered, transformed-hungering for more.
--Philip Elliot, author of Nobody Move and Porno Valley
I've tried to make Sunflower into a feature--not a Netflix series--and people called me a moron. So the least I can do is say, "Read this book and imagine it as a really good movie that I would make." Because it's so good that I wanted to make it into a movie--not a Netflix series.
--Alan Smithee, legendary Hollywood direct
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Lincoln in the Bardo
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - WINNER OF THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE
The "devastatingly moving" (People) first novel from the author of Tenth of December a moving and original father-son story featuring none other than Abraham Lincoln, as well as an unforgettable cast of supporting characters, living and dead, historical and invented
Named One of Paste's Best Novels of the Decade - Named One of the Ten Best Books of the Year by The Washington Post, USA Today, and Maureen Corrigan, NPR - One of Time's Ten Best Novels of the Year - A New York Times Notable Book - One of O: The Oprah Magazine's Best Books of the Year
February 1862. The Civil War is less than one year old. The fighting has begun in earnest, and the nation has begun to realize it is in for a long, bloody struggle. Meanwhile, President Lincoln's beloved eleven-year-old son, Willie, lies upstairs in the White House, gravely ill. In a matter of days, despite predictions of a recovery, Willie dies and is laid to rest in a Georgetown cemetery. "My poor boy, he was too good for this earth," the president says at the time. "God has called him home." Newspapers report that a grief-stricken Lincoln returns, alone, to the crypt several times to hold his boy's body.From that seed of historical truth, George Saunders spins an unforgettable story of familial love and loss that breaks free of its realistic, historical framework into a supernatural realm both hilarious and terrifying. Willie Lincoln finds himself in a strange purgatory where ghosts mingle, gripe, commiserate, quarrel, and enact bizarre acts of penance. Within this transitional state--called, in the Tibetan tradition, the bardo--a monumental struggle erupts over young Willie's soul.
Lincoln in the Bardo is an astonishing feat of imagination and a bold step forward from one of the most important and influential writers of his generation. Formally daring, generous in spirit, deeply concerned with matters of the heart, it is a testament to fiction's ability to speak honestly and powerfully to the things that really matter to us. Saunders has invented a thrilling new form that deploys a kaleidoscopic, theatrical panorama of voices to ask a timeless, profound question: How do we live and love when we know that everything we love must end?"A luminous feat of generosity and humanism."--Colson Whitehead, The New York Times Book Review
"A masterpiece."--Zadie Smith
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Felix Culpa
Whose stories deserve to be told? And whose words should do the telling? In Felix Culpa, Jeremy Gavron conjures up a work of extraordinary literary alchemy: a novel made out of lines taken from a hundred great works of literature. It follows a writer on the trail of a boy recently released from prison, who has been discovered dead in the cold north, frozen and alone. But in searching for the boy's story, will he lose his own? Magical and moving, Felix Culpa is a living demonstration of how storytelling works, by sound and by rhythm, by elision and by omission, as well as by reference and by allusion. It asks what happens when we lose the narrative of our own life, and fall into someone else's.
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The Fountain in the Forest
When a brutally murdered man is found hanging in a theatre, Detective Sergeant Rex King becomes obsessed with the case. Who is this anonymous corpse, and why has he been ritually mutilated? But as Rex explores the crime scene further, the mystery deepens, and he finds himself confronting his own secret history instead. Who, more importantly, is Rex King? Shifting between Holborn Police Station, an abandoned village in rural 1980s France, and Stonehenge's Battle of the Beanfield, The Fountain in the Forest transforms the traditional crime narrative into something dizzyingly unique. At once an avant-garde linguistic experiment, thrilling police procedural, philosophical meditation on liberty, and counter-culture bildungsroman, this is an iconoclastic novel of unparalleled ambition.
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Scatterlings
A BEST NEW BOOK from *Vanity Fair *The Root *Vulture *People *The Washington Post *Christian Science Monitor *Los Angeles Times *Essence
A New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice Pick! A New Yorker Best Book of the Year!
A lyrical, moving novel in the spirit of Transcendent Kingdom and A Burningâand the most awarded debut title in South Africaâthat tells the story of a multiracial family when the Immorality Act is passed, revealing the story of one familyâs scattered souls in the wake of history.
In 1927, South Africa passes the Immorality Act, prohibiting sexual intercourse between âEuropeansâ (white people) and ânativesâ (Black people). Those who break the draconian new law face imprisonmentâfor men of up to five years; for women, four years.
Abram and his wife Alisa have their share of marital problems, but they also have a comfortable life in South Africa with their two young girls. But then the Act is passed. Alisa is black, and their two children are now evidence of their involvement in a union that has been criminalized by the state.
At first, Alisa and Abram question how theyâll be affected by the Act, but then officials start asking questions at the girlsâ school, and their estate is catalogued for potential disbursement. Abram is at a loss as to how to protect his young family from the grinding machinery of the law, whose worst discriminations have until now been kept at bay by the familyâs economic privilege. And with this, his hesitation, the coupleâs bond is tattered.
Alisa, who is Jamaican and the descendant of slaves, was adopted by a wealthy white British couple, who raised her as their child. But as she grew older and realized that the prejudices of British society made no allowance for her, she journeyed to South Africa where she met Abram. In the aftermath of the Immorality Act, she comes to a heartbreaking conclusion based on her past and collective history â and she commits her own devastating act, one that will reverberate through their entire familyâs lives.
Intertwining her storytelling with ritual, myth, and the heart-wrenching question of who stays and who leaves, Scatterlings marks the debut of a gifted storyteller who has become a sensation in her native South Africaâand promises to take the Western literary world by storm as well.
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Inherent Vice
"The funniest book Pynchon has written." â Rolling Stone
"Entertainment of a high order." - Time
Part noir, part psychedelic romp, all Thomas Pynchonâprivate eye Doc Sportello surfaces, occasionally, out of a marijuana haze to watch the end of an era.
In this lively yarn, Thomas Pynchon, working in an unaccustomed genre that is at once exciting and accessible, provides a classic illustration of the principle that if you can remember the sixties, you weren't there.
It's been a while since Doc Sportello has seen his ex- girlfriend. Suddenly she shows up with a story about a plot to kidnap a billionaire land developer whom she just happens to be in love with. It's the tail end of the psychedelic sixties in L.A., and Doc knows that "love" is another of those words going around at the moment, like "trip" or "groovy," except that this one usually leads to trouble. Undeniably one of the most influential writers at work today, Pynchon has penned another unforgettable book. -
Any Man
âAn explosive, shapeshifting piece of literary real estate, Amber Tamblynâs arresting debut offers a scathing portrait of American celebrity culture and the way in which it transmutes human tragedy into a vicious circus; victims are forgotten as likes and shares swirl, and ânewsâ becomes a squalid orgy, a lurid feast. Tamblyn takes every risk in this astonishing and innovative work, and succeeds, gloriously.â
â Janet Fitch, bestselling author of The Revolution of Marina M. and Paint It BlackVanity Fair's Summer Ultimate Fiction List
Entertainment Weekly Summer Preview List
In this electric and provocative debut novel, Tamblyn blends genres of poetry, prose, and elements of suspense to give shape to the shocking narratives of victims of sexual violence, mapping the destructive ways in which our society perpetuates rape culture.
A violent serial rapist is on the loose, who goes by the name Maude. She hunts for men at bars, online, at homeâ the place doesnât matter, neither does the man. Her victims then must live the aftermath of their assault in the form of doubt from the police, feelings of shame alienation from their friends and family and the haunting of a horrible woman who becomes the phantom on which society projects its greatest fears, fascinations and even misogyny. All the while the police are without leads and the media hound the victims, publicly dissecting the details of their attack.
What is extraordinary is how as years pass these men learn to heal, by banding together and finding a space to raise their voices. Told in alternating viewpoints signature to each voice and experience of the victim, these pages crackle with emotion, ranging from horror to breathtaking empathy.
As bold as it is timely, Any Man paints a searing portrait of survival and is a tribute to those who have lived through the nightmare of sexual assault.
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Interior Chinatown
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER ⢠NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER ⢠âA shattering and darkly comic send-up of racial stereotyping in Hollywoodâ (Vanity Fair) and a deeply personal novel about race, pop culture, immigration, assimilation, and escaping the roles we are forced to play.Willis Wu doesnât perceive himself as the protagonist in his own life: heâs merely Generic Asian Man. Sometimes he gets to be Background Oriental Making a Weird Face or even Disgraced Son, but always he is relegated to a prop. Yet every day, he leaves his tiny room in a Chinatown SRO and enters the Golden Palace restaurant, where Black and White, a procedural cop show, is in perpetual production. Heâs a bit player here, too, but he dreams of being Kung Fu Guyâthe most respected role that anyone who looks like him can attain. Or is it?
After stumbling into the spotlight, Willis finds himself launched into a wider world than heâs ever known, discovering not only the secret history of Chinatown, but the buried legacy of his own family. Infinitely inventive and deeply personal, exploring the themes of pop culture, assimilation, and immigrationâInterior Chinatown is Charles Yuâs most moving, daring, and masterful novel yet.