It's early 2000 on New York City's Upper East Side, and the alienation of Moshfegh's unnamed young protagonist from others is nearly complete when she initiates her yearlong siesta, during which time she experiences limited personal interactions. Her parents have died; her relationships with her bulimic best friend Reva, an ex-boyfriend, and her drug-pushing psychiatrist are unwholesome. As her pill-popping intensifies, so does her isolation and determination...

"The story of a woman on the run from catastrophe, searching for love, home, healing, a swimming pool, and perhaps someone who can stop the bleeding from her head"-- Allison Brody is thirty-two and newly arrived on the East Coast after just managing to flee her movie producer boyfriend. She has some money, saved up from years of writing and waitressing, and so she spends it, buying a small house on the beach. But then a Category 3 hurricane makes...

Our life is brief . . . Sasha Samokhina has been accepted to the Institute of Special Technologies. Or, more precisely, she's been chosen. Situated in a tiny village, she finds the students are bizarre, and the curriculum even more so. The books are impossible to read, the lessons obscure to the point of maddening, and the work refuses memorization. Using terror and coercion to keep the students in line, the school does not punish them for their...

Say Holden Caulfield was an alcoholic advertising executive and Lolita was a photographer's assistant and somehow they met in Bright Lights Big City. He's blinded by love; she by ambition. Purporting to be an autobiography, this book is honest, hilarious and heartrending, but above all a very real account of what we do to each other and what we allow to have done to us. -- He's an alcoholic freelance art director. And he likes to hurt girls. Mentally,...

June is physically and emotionally abused by her stepmother, and the only person June feels safe telling is her friend Blister. He helps her believe she can escape her nightmare situation. But when a shocking tragedy occurs June finds herself trapped, potentially forever.

A lonely teenager exiled to a remote Vermont boarding school in the wake of a family tragedy must either surrender his sanity to the wild wolves inside his mind or learn that surviving means more than not dying.

Eleven-year-old Lacey rediscovers life and the soothing power of nature and art after she, her little sister, and mom escape from their controlling and abusive father.

Seven months. That's how long I was kept captive. Locked in a room with a bed, refrigerator, and adjoining bathroom, I was instructed to eat, bathe, and behave. I received meals, laundered clothes, and toiletries through a cat door, never knowing if it was day or night. The last time I saw the face of my abductor was when he dragged me fighting from the trunk of his car. My only solace was Mason-one of the other kidnapped teens-and our pact to one...

"When Mitya was two years old, he swallowed his grandmother's sewing needle. For his family, it marks the beginning of the end. As he grows, his life mirrors the uncertain future of his country, which is attempting to rebuild itself after the collapse of the Soviet Union, torn between its past and the promise of modern freedom. Mitya finds himself facing a different sort of ambiguity: is he a boy, as everyone keeps telling him, or is he not quite...

Nate and his mother are escaping from his emotionally abusive step-father, Gary, but the run-down and abandoned cottage in the woods that his mother takes them to does not seem like much of a refuge; but when his mother goes off to buy provisions and does not come back Nate is left alone (except for his imaginary friend Sam) and afraid--until a mysterious girl trying to solve the clues of a long-ago treasure hunt turns up.