NEWS FROM THE WORLD: STORIES AND ESSAYS
Paula Fox
This complete gathering of Paula Fox's short works spans forty-five illustrious years of her career, from 1965 to 2010. There are perfectly turned stories (two of which—"Grace" and "The Broad Estates of Death"—won the O. Henry Prize) in which characters unexpectedly find themselves at a crossroads and struggle to connect with others. There is memoir—a genre where Fox's honesty, grace, and perception set her apart—in which Fox revisits childhood ideas about art and reality, life in New York in the 1960s, and her relationship with her husband's family. And there are essays—pointed, funny, relentlessly persuasive pieces on such topics as censorship and the corruption of language. Enlivened by Fox's signature wit and electrified by her unsparing insights into human nature, News from the World is essential for Fox's loyal readers and perfect to introduce those who are meeting her for the first time.
W. W. Norton, hardcover, 9780393081282
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THE SUMMER WITHOUT MEN: A NOVEL
Suri Hustvedt
Mia Fredrickson, the wry, vituperative, tragic comic, poet narrator of The Summer Without Men, has been forced to reexamine her own life. One day, out of the blue, after thirty years of marriage, Mia's husband, a renowned neuroscientist, asks her for a "pause." This abrupt request sends her reeling and lands her in a psychiatric ward. The June following Mia's release from the hospital, she returns to the prairie town of her childhood, where her mother lives in an old people's home. Alone in a rented house, she rages and fumes and bemoans her sorry fate. Slowly, however, she is drawn into the lives of those around her—her mother and her close friends,"the Five Swans," and her young neighbor with two small children and a loud angry husband—and the adolescent girls in her poetry workshop whose scheming and petty cruelty carry a threat all their own.
From the internationally bestselling author of What I Loved comes a provocative, witty, and revelatory novel about women and girls, love and marriage, and the age-old question of sameness and difference between the sexes.
Picador, paperback, 9780312570606 (April)
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SEPARATE KINGDOMS: STORIES
Valerie Laken
"The stories in Laken's capable follow-up to Dream House are divided among the experimental and the straightforward, the hopeful and the wistful. Laken visually splits the title story on the page: one side sees a removed narrator recount a man's coming-to-terms with the loss of his thumbs, the result of "a coffee-and-ephedrine buzz" and the bypassing of safety regulations at his manufacturing job; the other side tells the story from the perspective of the man's 12-year-old son. Other stories, too, focus on divided perceptions, though with less visual flair. In "Before Long," set in the Russian countryside in 1993, Anton, "twelve and blind," longs to feel useful to his older friend, Oleg, and tries to buy a pornographic magazine for Oleg's collection while on an outing with his overbearing mother. In "Family Planning," Josie and her girlfriend, Meg, travel to Moscow to adopt a child, but when they are given a choice of orphans, the women unexpectedly confront their divergent hopes and expectations. If all this sounds bleak, Laken keeps the misery in check, even as she excavates the split between people, cultures, and generations." —Publishers Weekly
Harper Perennial, paperback, 9780060840945 (March)
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CLEANING NABOKOV'S HOUSE
Leslie Daniels
When Barb Barrett walks out on her loveless marriage she doesn't realize she will lose everything: her home, her financial security, even her beloved children. Approaching forty with her life in shambles and no family or friends to turn to, Barb must now discover what it means to rely on herself in a stark new emotional landscape.
Guided only by her intense inner voice and a unique entrepreneurial vision, Barb begins to collect the scattered pieces of her life. She moves into a house once occupied by Vladimir Nabokov, author of the controversial masterpiece Lolita, and discovers a manuscript that may be his lost work. As her journey gathers momentum, Barb deepens a connection with her new world, discovering resources in her community and in herself that no one had anticipated. Written in elegant prose with touches of sharp humor and wit, Cleaning Nabokov's House offers a new vision of modern love and a fervent reminder that it is never too late to find faith in our truest selves.
Touchstone, hardcover, 9781439195024 (March)
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WITCHES ON THE ROAD TONIGHT
Sheri Holman
As a child growing up in Depression-era rural Virginia, Eddie Alley’s quiet life is rooted in the rumors of his mother’s witchcraft. But when he's visited by a writer and glamorous photographer researching American folklore for the WPA, the spell of his mother’s unorthodox life is violently disrupted, and Eddie is inspired to pursue a future beyond the confines of his dead-end town.
He leaves for New York and becomes a television horror-movie presenter beloved for his kitschy comedy. Though expert at softening terror for his young fans, Eddie cannot escape the guilty secrets of his own childhood. When he opens his family’s door to a homeless teenager working as an intern at the TV station, the boy’s presence not only awakens something in Eddie, but also in his twelve-year-old daughter, Wallis, who has begun to feel a strange kinship to her notorious grandmother. As the ghost stories of one generation infiltrate the next, Wallis and Eddie grapple with the sins of the past to repair their misguided attempts at loyalty and redemption.
In Witches on the Road Tonight, bestselling author Sheri Holman teases out the dark compulsions and desperate longings that blur the line between love and betrayal.
Atlantic Monthly Press, hardcover, 9780802119438 (March)
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BABY AND OTHER STORIES
Paula Bomer
Paula Bomer is a dangerous writer. The short stories in her debut collection are subversive portraits of the modern American family. From a husband who traces his internal crisis to witnessing his wife giving birth, to a mother who forces her young son on a rainy walk through a cemetery as she contemplates the detritus of her marriage, Bomer's characters are hauntingly familiar. Their fear and rage, their failures and desires are our own.
Word Riot Press, paperback,978-0977934379
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THE BIRD SISTERS
Rebecca Rasmussen
Love is timeless. So too is heartbreak. Whenever a bird flies into a window in Spring Green, Wisconsin, sisters Milly and Twiss get a visit. Twiss listens to the birds' heartbeats, assessing what she can fix and what she can't, while Milly listens to the heartaches of the people who've brought them. The two sisters have spent their lives nursing people and birds back to health.
But back in the summer of 1947, Milly was known as a great beauty with emerald eyes and Twiss was a brazen wild child who never wore a dress or did what she was told. That was the summer their golf pro father got into an accident that cost him both his swing and his charm, and their mother, the daughter of a wealthy jeweler, finally admitted their hardscrabble lives wouldn't change. It was the summer their priest, Father Rice, announced that God didn't exist and ran off to Mexico, and a boy named Asa finally caught Milly's eye. And most unforgettably, it was the summer their cousin Bett came down from a town called Deadwater and changed the course of their lives forever.
Crown, hardcover, 9780307717962 (April)
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THE ADULTS
Alison Espach
In her ruefully funny and wickedly perceptive debut novel, Alison Espach deftly dissects matters of the heart and captures the lives of children and adults as they come to terms with life, death, and love. At the center of this affluent suburban universe is Emily Vidal, a smart and snarky teenager, who gets involved in a suspect relationship with one of the adults after witnessing a suicide in her neighborhood. Among the cast of unforgettable characters is Emily's father, whose fiftieth birthday party has the adults descending upon the Vidal's patio; her mother, who has orchestrated the elaborate party even though she and her husband are getting a divorce; and an assortment of eccentric neighbors, high school teachers, and teenagers who teem with anxiety and sexuality and an unbridled desire to be noticed, and ultimately loved.
Simon & Schuster, hardcover, 978143919859
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BENT ROAD
Lori Roy
For twenty years, Celia Scott has watched her husband, Arthur, hide from the secrets surrounding his sister Eve's death. As a young man, Arthur fled his small Kansas hometown, moved to Detroit, married Celia, and never looked back. But when the 1967 riots frighten him even more than his past, he convinces Celia to pack up their family and return to the road he grew up on, Bent Road, and that same small town where Eve mysteriously died. While Arthur and their oldest daughter slip easily into rural life, Celia and the two younger children struggle to fit in. Daniel, the only son, is counting on Kansas to make a man of him since Detroit damn sure didn't. Eve-ee, the youngest and small for her age, hopes that in Kansas she will finally grow. Celia grapples with loneliness and the brutality of life and death on a farm.
And then a local girl disappears, catapulting the family headlong into a dead man's curve… On Bent Road, a battered red truck cruises ominously along the prairie; a lonely little girl dresses in her dead aunt's clothes; a boy hefts his father's rifle in search of a target; a mother realizes she no longer knows how to protect her children. It is a place where people learn: Sometimes killing is the kindest way.
Dutton, hardcover, 9780525951834 (March)
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BIG GIRL SMALL
Rachel DeWoskin
Judy Lohden is your above-average sixteen-year-old—sarcastic and vulnerable, talented and uncertain, full of big dreams for a big future. With a singing voice that can shake an auditorium, she should be the star of Darcy Academy, the local performing arts high school. So why is a girl this promising hiding out in a seedy motel room on the edge of town? The fact that the national media is on her trail after a controversy that might bring down the whole school could have something to do with it. And that scandal has something—but not everything—to do with the fact that Judy is three feet nine inches tall. With a wit and wistfulness that is half Holden Caulfield, half Lee Flora, Prep's ironic heroine, Big Girl Small is a scathingly funny and moving book about dreams and reality, at once light on its feet and unwaveringly serious.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, hardcover, 9780374112578 (March)
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BLIND SIGHT
Meg Howrey
This spellbinding story introduces the unforgettable seventeen-year-old narrator, Luke Prescott, who has been brought up in a bohemian matriarchy by his divorced, New Age mother, a religious grandmother, and two precocious half sisters. Luke is writing his college applications when his father—a famous television star, and a man he never knew—calls and invites him to Los Angeles for the summer. Luke accepts, and the two begin a series of adventures together. We see this grounded, innocent, unspoiled teenager coming to terms with his identity and with hidden truths as he gets to know his father. Meg Howrey brilliantly evokes the show-business world of location shooting, movie premieres, paparazzi, and Hollywood teenagers, all of which we see through Luke’s eyes. The trip has provided a missing link for Luke. When he returns home to be confronted by his mother, who fears that he has been irrevocably spoiled, she tells him a secret that she knows will change everything for him.
With Blind Sight, Meg Howrey gives us a smart, funny, and deeply moving story about truth versus belief, about what we do and don’t tell ourselves—with the result, as Luke says, that we don’t always know what we know.
Pantheon, hardcover, 9780307379160 (March)
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NUDE WALKER: A NOVEL
Bathsheba Monk
"I think the most beautiful things in the world are things in flux," says Kat Warren-Bineki, the heroine of Nude Walker. Everything about Kat’s world is in flux. She hails from Warrenside, Pennsylvania, a once prosperous town named after her mother's family. With the death of the steel industry, Warrenside has fallen on hard times; when its economy falters, Kat and her parents are among the few citizens still eking out a living there.
Nude Walker is a story of forbidden love seen through the prism of post-industrial America. Bathsheba Monk writes with flinty wit and warm spirit, but she's unlike other writers we know. In a voice as true as it is disarming, she depicts the kaleidoscopic tensions between generations and cultures. As Library Journal said about her, "Monk makes us see that we are all exiles in a changing world." In Nude Walker, she offers an unlikely romance about the fantastical myths we weave to define ourselves in unmoored times.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, hardcover, 9780374223441
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THREE STAGES OF AMAZEMENT
Carol Edgarian
Many love stories end in marriage; rare is the love story that begins with one—already promised, already worn. Set in San Francisco during the first year of Obama's presidency, Three Stages of Amazement deftly charts the struggles and triumphs of Lena Rusch and her husband Charlie Pepper, who still believes they can have it all--sex, love, marriage, children, career, brilliance. But life delivers surprises and tests--a stillborn child, an economic crash, a ruthless business rival and the attentions of an old lover. Touched by tragedy and by ordinary hopes unmet, Lena and Charlie must face, for the first time in their lives, real limitation.
Fifteen years after her stunning debut, Rise the Euphrates, Carol Edgarian has created a panoramic and deeply moving story about business and family and the demands of love in our time. She takes readers on a spellbinding journey inside America today, with an unforgettable cast of characters including Cal Rusch, Lena's uncle, a Silicon Valley titan, and Ivy, his socialite wife, who engender complication in the lives of all the people they touch: their grown children, business partners, friends, the servants and workers upon whom the glamorous life depends—and Lena, whose quest for grace is the pulse of this gorgeous novel.
Scribner, hardcover, 978143919838 (March)
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SO MUCH PRETTY
Cara Hoffman
"In this remarkable debut, Hoffman addresses serious injustices in present-day America. In 1992, Claire and Gene Piper, both idealistic New York City physicians, eschew joining Doctors Without Borders and decide instead to move with their gifted two-year-old daughter, Alice, to upstate Haeden, N.Y., to pursue the simple life in the spirit of the '60s back-to-nature movement. After nearly two fruitless decades, Gene's hope of destroying corporate agribusiness in the name of "land and air and autonomy" has left Claire exhausted, in body and soul, and Alice determined to avenge a ghastly crime against all women that she realizes is implicit in Haeden's smalltown–ghost town mentality. Meanwhile, journalist Stacy Flynn indicts Big Pharm for forcing scientists to manipulate people into doing things the scientists believe are wrong, and factory food production for repurposing the countryside into a toxic-waste site. Hoffman's doomed characters burn their way off her angry pages. This searing novel will linger long in the reader's memory." — Publishers Weekly
Simon & Schuster, hardcover, 9781451616750
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WINGSHOOTERS
Nina Revoyr
Michelle Lebeau, the child of a white American father and a Japanese mother, lives with her grandparents in Deerhorn, Wisconsin—a small town that had been entirely white before her arrival. Rejected and bullied, Michelle spends her time reading, avoiding fights, and roaming the countryside with her English springer spaniel, Brett. She idolizes her grandfather, Charlie LeBeau, an expert hunter and former minor league baseball player who is one of the town's most respected men. Charlie strongly disapproves of his son's marriage to Michelle's mother but dotes on his only grandchild, whom he calls Mikey.
This fragile peace is threatened when the expansion of the local clinic leads to the arrival of the Garretts, a young black couple from Chicago. The Garretts' presence deeply upsets most of the residents of Deerhorn—when Mr. Garrett makes a controversial accusation against one of the town leaders, who is also Charlie LeBeau's best friend.
In the tradition of To Kill a Mockingbird, A River Runs Through It, and Snow Falling on Cedars, Revoyr's new novel examines the effects of change on a small, isolated town, the strengths and limits of community, and the sometimes conflicting loyalties of family and justice. Set in the expansive countryside of Central Wisconsin, against the backdrop of Vietnam and the post-civil rights era, Wingshooters explores both connection and loss as well as the complex but enduring bonds of family.
Akashic Books, paperback, 9781936070718 (March)
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