"In this atmospheric thriller set at a luxury memoir-writing workshop on the shores of Lake Atitlán, Guatemala, a grieving mother goes undercover to investigate her daughter's mysterious death. Rose, the mother of 20-something aspiring writer Jules, has waited three months for answers about her daughter's death. Why was she swimming alone when she feared the water? Why did she stop texting days before she was last seen? When the official investigation...

In this collection of impeccably written essays, Schwartz tells us early on that she never thought of her life as a "continuous line," but rather a series of intertwined, interrupted experiences. Hers is a life that has been bumped, tumbled, and smoothed by an endless stream of travel, fascinating people, and writing them, pondering them, translating them. Her essays range from musings about the art of translation, the tribulations of major surgery...

"Viggo Bergman, hopeless romantic, is thoroughly weary of waiting for his happily ever after. But between opening a romance bookstore, running a romance book club, coaching kids' soccer, and adopting a household of pets-just maybe, he's overcommitted himself? Viggo's chaotic life has made finding his forever love seem downright improbable. Enter Tallulah Clarke, chilly cynic with a massive case of writer's block. Tallulah needs help with her thriller's...

"In the summer of 1976, an earthquake swallows up the city of Tangshan, China. Among the hundreds of thousands of people scrambling for survival is a mother who makes an agonizing decision that irrevocably changes her life and the lives of her children. In that devastating split second, her seven-year-old daughter, Xiaodeng, is separated from her brother and the mother she loves and trusts. All Xiaodeng remembers of the fateful morning is betrayal....

"In her 50s, Cassie has already weathered more than most. She was orphaned at the age of two and has never fully understood why her DC-based parents were on a bridge in West Virginia that just so happened to collapse as they drove across it. Her search for answers prompted a failed career in journalism, and now she's an aspiring novelist teaching at a local community college waiting for her literary dreams to finally come true. She stood by her once-doting...

"Confusion frames the human predicament. In Katie Peterson’s Fog and Smoke, confusion is, literally, our climate. Writing to and from the California landscape, Peterson sees fog and smoke as literal―one a habitual, natural weather event, the other an increasingly common aftereffect of the West’s drought-caused fires. But they are also metaphysical. Fog and smoke reflect the true conditions (and frustrations) of our ability to perceive and to...

"How do you tell a story? Before Toni Morrison was a Pulitzer Prize winner and Nobel Prize–winning author, she was Chloe Ardelia Wofford, a little girl in Ohio who was both the only Black child in her first-grade classroom and the only student who was able to read. This is the true story of how that young girl learned from her upbringing, surrounded herself with stories, and made a tremendous impact on the world. Toni Morrison’s pen was her sword,...

"Leslie Jamison has become one of our most beloved contemporary voices, a scribe of the real, the true, the complex. She has been compared to Joan Didion and Susan Sontag, acclaimed for her powerful thinking, deep feeling, and electric prose. But while Jamison has never shied away from challenging material—scouring her own psyche and digging into our most unanswerable questions across four books—Splinters enters a new realm. In her first memoir,...

"An uplifting collection of speeches by African American women, curated by civil and human rights activist, scholar, and author Janet Dewart Bell. These magnificent speakers explore ethics, morality, courage, authenticity, and leadership, and Bell's substantive introductions provide rich new context for each woman's speech, highlighting Black women speaking truth to power in service of freedom and justice"--

"Scholar Susan Godwin is hooked when she comes across the captivating story of Mary of Modena--a seventeenth-century Italian princess who was only fourteen when coerced into marriage with the future king of England, James II, yet went on to cultivate a court full of women writers in an age when female authorship was rare. How did Mary achieve such a feat? Rain Dodging is Susan's creative nonfiction account of the years-long search upon which this...