As this urgent, genre-defying book opens, a woman who has recently been elevated to prominence for her social media posts travels around the world to meet her adoring fans. She is overwhelmed by navigating the new language and etiquette of what she terms "the portal," where she grapples with an unshakable conviction that a vast chorus of voices is now dictating her thoughts. When existential threats--from climate change and economic precariousness...

In this taut and thrilling debut, an unraveling woman, unhappily childless and recently separated, becomes fixated on her neighbor--the beautiful, famous actress. The unnamed narrator can't help noticing with wry irony that, though she and the actress live just a few doors apart, they are separated by a chasm of professional success and personal fulfillment. When an interaction with the actress at the annual block party takes a disastrous turn, what...

Gulliver has an itch to travel around the world, but whenever he steps on a ship, bad luck seems to find him. He is shipwrecked, abandoned, marooned, and mutinied against, and each time lands in a strange and curious place. First he discovers the kingdom of the six-inch-tall Lilliputians, then the country of the giant Brobdingnagians, then the island of the academic Laputans, which floats in the sky, and finally the noble realm of the horselike Houyhnhnms....

Blanche White is a plump, feisty, middle-aged African-American housekeeper working for the genteel rich in North Carolina. But when an employer stiffs her, and her checks bounce, she goes on the lam, hiding out as a maid for a wealthy family at their summer home. That plan goes awry when there's a murder and Blanche becomes the prime suspect. So she's forced to use her savvy, her sharp wit, and her old-girl network of domestic workers to discover...

"From one of our most pre eminent writers, a tale that captures the shifting meanings of the past , and how our experience colors those meanings. Lloyd Wilkinson Petrie, one of the seven surviving trustees of the now defunct (for 34 years) Temple Academy for Boys, is preparing a memoir of his days at the school, intertwined with a description of present events. As he navigates, with faltering recall , between the subtle anti-semitism that pervaded...

Cohen has researched the published works and private utterances of our greatest authors to discover the elements that made their prose memorable. Evoking the marvelous, the famous, and the irreverent, he reveals the challenges that even the greatest writers faced--and how they surmounted them.

Rescued from torpor and poverty by the need to help a good friend deal with the murder of her beloved granddaughter, our downsized-social-worker protagonist and her cat, Bunnywit, are jolted into a harsh, street-wise world of sex, lies, and betrayal, to which they respond with irony, wit, intelligence (except for the cat), and tenacity. With judicious use of the Oxford comma, pop culture trivia, common mystery tropes, and a keen eye for deceit, our...

An award-winning debut novel about a quirky immigrant's journey through a multicultural, post-nationalist landscape Set in Frankfurt, All Russians Love Birch Trees follows a young immigrant named Masha. Fluent in five languages and able to get by in several others, Masha lives with her boyfriend, Elias. Her best friends are Muslims struggling to obtain residence permits, and her parents rarely leave the house except to compare gas prices. Masha...