Juan Villoro

Alfred MacAdam

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Pennsylvania

A City Called Mexico

At once intimate and wide-ranging, and as enthralling, surprising, and vivid as the place itself, this is a uniquely eye-opening tour of one of the great metropolises of the world, and its largest Spanish-speaking city. Horizontal Vertigo: The title refers to the fear of ever-impending earthquakes that led Mexicans to build their capital city outward rather than upward. With the perspicacity of a keenly observant flaneur, Juan Villoro wanders through Mexico City seemingly without a plan, describing people, places, and things while brilliantly drawing connections among them. In so doing he reveals, in all its multitudinous glory, the vicissitudes and triumphs of the city ’s cultural, political, and social history: from indigenous antiquity to the Aztec period, from the Spanish conquest to Mexico City today—one of the world’s leading cultural and financial centers. In this deeply iconoclastic book, Villoro organizes his text around a recurring series of topics: “Living in the City,” “City Characters,” “Shocks,” “Crossings,” and “Ceremonies.” What he achieves, miraculously, is a stunning, intriguingly coherent meditation on Mexico City’s genius loci, its spirit of place.

Horizontal Vertigo

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Heather McCalden

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

An Investigation

Is anyone ever truly lost in the internet age? A moving, original memoir of a young woman reckoning with her parents’ absence, the virus that took them, and what it means to search for meaning in a hyperconnected world. “Brilliantly innovative . . . syncing a narrative of profoundly personal emotion with the invention and evolution of today’s cyberspace.”—William Gibson, author of Neuromancer and The Peripheral In the early 1990s, Heather McCalden lost both her parents to AIDS. She was seven when her father died, ten when she lost her mother. Raised by her grandmother, Nivia, she grew up in Los Angeles, also known as ground zero for the virus and its destruction. Years later, she begins researching online the history of HIV as a way to deal with her loss, which leads her to the unexpected realization that the AIDS crisis and the internet developed on parallel timelines. By accumulating whatever fragments she could about both phenomena—images, anecdotes, and scientific entries—alongside her own personal history, McCalden forms a synaptic journey of what happened to her family, one that leads to an equally unexpected discovery about who her parents might have been. Entwining this personal search with a wider cultural narrative of what the virus and virality mean in our times—interrogating what it means to “go viral” in an era of explosive biochemical and virtual contagion—The Observable Universe is at once a history of our viral culture and a prismatic account of grief in the internet age.

The Observable Universe

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Alana Saab

A Novel

An "engrossing, affecting, and singular" (Publishers Weekly) debut novel about love, family, queerness, and losing your mind in the modern world. While god is sending her signs through Instagram and Spotify demanding she break up with her girlfriend, Norma meets with a new therapist for one reason: she really needs to write again. With only one chapter missing in her manuscript, Norma is desperate to know if she needs to leave her girlfriend in order to write The Last Story. The new therapist diagnoses Norma with Depersonalization/Derealization Disorder, but Norma isn’t having it. It’s just Oblivion. Haunted by SSRI side effects and life becoming less hazily fictional by the day, Norma has never felt crazier. Does anyone else see the world’s poorly crafted plotline? Like, who even wrote this story? Norma begins sharing her manuscript with her therapist, hoping to connect the dissociative dots once and for all—or at least enough so that Google ads stop giving her panic attacks. But soon Norma is questioning everything she’s ever believed about life, writing, and love. And then there’s Norma’s girlfriend, the one with a crack of light in her eyes. Could she be Oblivion’s antagonist, the manuscript’s savior? Or is she just a human? Told alternately through Norma's barely fictional fiction and her crackling stream of consciousness, Please Stop Trying To Leave Me is an honest, comedic, horrifying, and heart-wrenching story about existing in today’s world, challenging all we’ve been taught about the distance between fiction and reality, sanity and insanity, mental illness and healing.

Please Stop Trying to Leave Me

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Julia Phillips

A mesmerizing novel of two sisters whose lives are upended by an unexpected visitor—a tale of family, obsession, and a mysterious creature in the woods, by the celebrated, bestselling author of Disappearing Earth An Oprah Daily, CNN, Publishers Weekly, and Lit Hub Most Anticipated Book of the Year “Thrilling and propulsive, glorious and terrifying. Julia Phillips is a brilliant writer.”—Ann Patchett They were sisters and they would last past the end of time. Sam and Elena dream of another life. On the island off the coast of Washington where they were born and raised, they and their mother struggle to survive. Sam works on the ferry that delivers wealthy mainlanders to their vacation homes while Elena bartends at the local golf club, but even together they can’t earn enough to get by, stirring their frustration about the limits that shape their existence. Then one night on the boat, Sam spots a bear swimming the dark waters of the channel. Where is it going? What does it want? When the bear turns up by their home, Sam, terrified, is more convinced than ever that it’s time to leave the island. But Elena responds differently to the massive beast. Enchanted by its presence, she throws into doubt the desire to escape and puts their long-held dream in danger. A story about the bonds of sisterhood and the mysteries of the animals that live among us—and within us—Bear is a propulsive, mythical, richly imagined novel from one of the most acclaimed young writers in America.

Bear

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Colleen Hoover

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of It Ends with Us and It Starts with Us!

Moving, passionate, and unforgettable, Colleen Hoover's novel follows two young adults from completely different backgrounds embarking on a tentative romance, unaware of what the future holds.

After a childhood filled with poverty and neglect, Beyah Grim finally has her hard-earned ticket out of Kentucky with a full ride to Penn State. But two months before she's finally free to change her life for the better, an unexpected death leaves her homeless and forced to spend the remainder of her summer in Texas with a father she barely knows.

Devastated and anxious for the summer to go by quickly, Beyah has no time or patience for Samson, the wealthy, brooding guy next door. Yet, the connection between them is too intense to ignore. But with their upcoming futures sending them to opposite ends of the country, the two decide to maintain only a casual summer fling. Too bad neither has any idea that a rip current is about to drag both their hearts out to sea.

Heart Bones

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Édouard Louis

Lorin Stein

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

Highly acclaimed for The End of Eddy, E ́douard Louis in Who Killed My Father rips into France's long neglect of the working class and its overt contempt for the poor, accusing the complacent French--at the minimum--of negligent homicide. "Racism," he quotes Ruth Gilmore, "is the exposure of certain groups to premature death." And Louis goes to visit the ugly gray town of his childhood to see his dying father--barely fifty years old, he can hardly walk or breathe: "You belong to the category of humans whom politics consigns to an early death." It's as simple as that. But hand in hand with searing, specific denunciations are tender passages of a love story between a father and son badly damaged by shame, poverty and homophobia, but still so alive. Tenderness reconciles them just as the state kills off his father. Louis goes after the French system with bare knuckles but then turns to his long-alienated father with open arms: this passionate combination makes Who Killed My Father a heartbreaking book.

Who Killed My Father

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Kate Goldbeck

Can they stop hating each other long enough to fall in love? A commitment-phobe and a hopeless romantic clash over and over again—until heartbreak and unexpected chemistry bring them together in this clever enemies-to-friends-to-lovers debut romance. “Fresh, witty, and utterly romantic.”—Ali Hazelwood, New York Times bestselling author of The Love Hypothesis When Ari and Josh first meet, the wrong kind of sparks fly. They hate each other. Instantly. A free-spirited, struggling comedian who likes to keep things casual, Ari sublets, takes gigs, and she never sleeps over after hooking up. Born-and-bred Manhattanite Josh has ambitious plans: Take the culinary world by storm, find The One, and make her breakfast in his spotless kitchen. They have absolutely nothing in common . . . except that they happen to be sleeping with the same woman. Ari and Josh never expect their paths to cross again. But years later, as they’re both reeling from ego-bruising breakups, a chance encounter leads to a surprising connection: friendship. Turns out, spending time with your former nemesis is fun when you’re too sad to hate each other—and too sad for hate sex. As friends-without-benefits, they find comfort in late-night Netflix binges, swiping through each other’s online dating profiles, and bickering across boroughs. It’s better than romance. Until one night, the unspoken boundaries of their platonic relationship begin to blur. . . . With sharp observations and sizzling chemistry, You, Again explores the dynamics of co-ed friendship in this sparkling romantic comedy of modern love in all its forms.

You, Again

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Peter Doggett

Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young

"The first-ever biography focused on the formative and highly influential early years of rock's first supergroup, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young--in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of Woodstock and the founding of the band itself. The original supergroup of folk rock David Crosby, Stephen Stills, and Graham Nash released their first album, Crosby Stills & Nash, in May 1969. By the time they got to Woodstock only a few months later, they had added Neil Young and went on to channel in their music all the radical anger, romantic idealism, and generational angst of their time. They had each already made their marks in huge bands (the Hollies, Buffalo Springfield, the Byrds), but together their harmonies were transcendent. Music journalist Peter Doggett first met the band twenty-five years ago and has had a lifelong love of their music. His interviews with the musicians and many of their closest friends and fellow rock stars, as well as access to CSNY's archive, provide new insights into their incredible catalog, from their delicate acoustic confessionals like 'Suite: Judy Blue Eyes' and 'Guinnevere' to raucous counterculture anthems 'Ohio' and 'Woodstock' to classics discovered by every new generation like 'Teach Your Children' and 'Our House.' Doggett also uncovers plenty of new stories and perspectives on the four tenacious and volatile songwriters' infamously reckless, hedonistic, and often combative lifestyles that led to their continuous breakups and behaviors extreme even by rock star standards. CSNY chronicles these iconic musicians and the movement they came to represent, concentrating on their prime as a collective unit and a cultural force: the years between 1969, when the Woodstock music festival telegraphed their arrival to the world, and 1974, when their archenemy Richard Nixon was driven from office and the band (to quote Graham Nash himself) 'lost it on the highway.' CSNY is a quintessential and definitive account of one of the biggest bands of the Woodstock generation."--Dust jacket.

Csny

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Camille Bordas

“A novel about an MFA program for stand-up comics better be damned funny, and The Material is definitely that. It’s also profound, deeply engrossing, dark, and generous, a great novel about humans making art right now.”—Sam Lipsyte, author of No One Left to Come Looking for You “Brilliance is on display here.”—Percival Everett, author of James and The Trees Can comedy be taught? Someone, at some point, seemed to think so. The Chicago Stand-Up MFA program has enrolled young comedians for nearly a decade. Its teachers and students all know how bits work—in theory, at least. They know that there’s a line between sharp and cruel, that sad becomes funny at the right angle, that the worst is the best, the truth is the worst, and any moment of your life that isn’t a punch line will either get you to a punch line or force you to be one. They’re all afraid to be one. Artie may be too handsome for standup, Olivia too reluctant to examine her own life, and Phil too afraid to cause harm. Kruger may be too vanilla to command his students’ respect, Ashbee too detached. And then we have Dorothy—the only woman on the program’s faculty—who though preparing to launch a comeback tour can’t tell if she’s too abiding, too ambitious, or too ambivalent. Whether a visiting professor—the high-profile, controversy-steeped comedian Manny Reinhardt—will do more to help or harm their cause remains to be seen. But he’s on his way. He’ll be arriving sooner than anyone thinks. Riffing keenly across a diverse array of precision-cut perspectives, The Material examines life through the eyes of a reluctantly assembled ensemble, a band of outsiders bound together by the need to laugh and the longing to make others laugh even harder.

The Material

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C. Michelle Lindley

"Art historian, Elizabeth Clarke, is sent to a remote island in Southern Greece to acquire a rare female nude sculpture for a Los Angeles collection. Disoriented by time zones, migraines, and suspicious details surrounding the figure's discovery, she's dependent on her flirtatious but guileless translator. The last thing she expects is to be so pulled to his wife, Theo, a subversive artist who has amassed a small following for her provocative self-portraits, which seek to deconstruct the objectification of the female form. As Elizabeth immerses herself in the island's cobblestoned mazes and sumptuous cuisine, and falls deeper into an infatuation with Theo-and Theo's art-she starts to question her role in the acquisition of cultural artifacts. And when, after a hazy night out, both Elizabeth and the nude are violated in divergent but damaging ways, Elizabeth begins to see a parrallel between the sculpture and herself. What does it mean for a woman to navigate morally complicated negotiations of property in a male-directed world? What other kinds of ownership-or self-ownership-might be possible?"--

The Nude

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Gabriella Burnham

A young woman reunites with her teenage sister in their childhood home on Nantucket Island after their mother disappears in this alluring coming-of-age novel from the acclaimed author of It Is Wood, It Is Stone. “A novel to remember.”—Sarah Thankam Mathews, author of All This Could Be Different Elise is out dancing the night before her college graduation when her younger sister, Sophie, calls to tell her that their mom is nowhere to be found. Elise leaves on the next flight back to her childhood home, Nantucket Island, for the first time in nearly four years. The sisters soon learn that their mother was stopped by police on her way home from work and deported to São Paulo, Brazil. Intent on bringing her mother back, Elise stays and secures the same job she had in high school: monitoring endangered birds. Meanwhile, her best friend from college, Sheba—a gregarious socialite and heir to a famed children’s toy company—reveals that she has inherited her grandfather’s summer mansion on Nantucket. Elise’s worlds collide as she confronts the emotional and material conditions that have fractured her family, as well as the life in Brazil that her mother has had to leave behind. Told with penetrating insight, humor, and unexpected tenderness, Wait is a story about a family swimming against the social currents that erode bonds: housing precarity, immigration systems, and inherited wealth. But it is also a story about love, wit, and sisterhood, and how two sisters cling to each other in the midst of cataclysmic change, all the while dreaming about a better future.

Wait

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Andrew Ewell

A wryly funny and moving novel that captures the complexities of marriage, art, friendship, and the fictions we create in order to become the people we wish to be. A creative writing professor at a third-tier college in upstate New York is on his way home from a summer fellowship in France, where he’s spent the last three months loafing around Bordeaux, tasting the many varieties of French wine at his disposal, and doing just about anything but actually working on his long overdue novel. A stopover in Brooklyn to see his and his wife’s closest friends—John, a jaded poet-turned-lawyer with a dubious moral compass, and Sophie, a once-promising fiction writer with a complicated past and a mysterious allure—causes further trouble when he and Sophie wind up sleeping together while John is out serenading Brooklyn coeds with poems instead of preparing legal briefs. But instead of succumbing to his failures as a teacher, writer, and husband, an odd freedom begins to bubble up. Could a love affair be the answer he’s been searching for? Could it offer the escape he needs from the department chair, Chet Bland, who’s been breathing down his neck? Relief from the gossip of colleagues and generational tension with students? Respite from embarrassment over his wife, Debra Crawford, and her meteoric rise as a novelist? His escapades might even make the perfect raw material for an absolutely devastating novel, which would earn him tenure, wealth, and celebrity—everything he needs to be set for life. If only he could be the one to write it. A brilliant case of art imitating life, Andrew Ewell’s gem of a debut is a hilarious and poignant tour de force that asks who owns whose story, skewers the fictions created from our lives and others’, and brings a whole new meaning to the phrase “publish or perish.”

Set for Life

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Louisa Luna

"The Silent Patient meets Gone Girl in this sharp psychological thriller about a psychiatrist with a shocking past and her dangerous new patient"--

Tell Me Who You Are

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Daniel Hornsby

Succession meets Bad Blood in this sharp-toothed satire of Silicon Valley and the 1 percent, in which the black-sheep son of an industrial tycoon starts working for a tech pioneer who's running a biomedical startup selling nothing less than immortality, only to uncover the horrifying truth at the heart of her sublime promises. "Exceptional, horrifically hilarious, and deeply original.” —Kevin Wilson, New York Times bestselling author of Nothing to See Here Chuck Gross would like nothing more than to prune himself from his family tree. He’s already clipped his name, turning Charles Grossheart, Jr.—son of a billionaire labor exploiter, weapons manufacturer, and climate change denier—into ordinary good-guy Chuck, the “self-made” proprietor of an up-and-coming punk label. But when Daddy threatens to cut him off, Chuck is forced to get a “real job”—and conveniently, an old college friend has just swept back into his life with the perfect opportunity. Famed Harvard dropout and biotech darling Olivia Watts says she is on the verge of totally reinventing the field of medicine, but when Chuck signs on, he soon discovers that things at the vast Kenosis campus are not quite how they appear. Secret labs, vanished employees, and mutated test subjects seem to be as impossible as they are sinister. Is Olivia simply a scammer, or does her technology threaten to usher humanity toward a far bloodier fate? Moreover, does Chuck—who has never accomplished anything without the aid of Daddy’s money—stand a chance of stopping her? Daniel Hornsby hilariously skewers the insatiable hungers of the ultrarich in a novel that no one will be able to resist sinking their teeth into.

Sucker

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Karen Jennings

A woman in post-apartheid South Africa confronts her family’s troubling past in this taut and daring novel about national trauma and collective guilt—from the Booker Prize–longlisted author of An Island. “Extraordinary . . . unputdownable.”—Roddy Doyle Cape Town, 2028. The land cracks from a years-long drought, the nearby mountains threaten to burn, and the queue for the water trucks grows ever longer. In her crumbling corner of a public housing complex, Deidre van Deventer receives a call from the South African police. Her family home, recently reclaimed by the government, has become the scene of a criminal investigation. The remains of several bodies have just been unearthed from her land, after decades underground. Detectives pepper Deidre with questions: Was your brother a member of a pro-apartheid group in the 1990s? Is it true that he was building bombs as part of a terrorist plot? Deidre doesn’t know the answers to the detectives’ questions. All she knows is that she was denied—repeatedly—the life she felt she deserved. Overshadowed by her brother, then left behind by her daughter after she emigrated, Deidre must watch over her aging mother and make do with government help and the fading generosity of her neighbors while the landscape around her grows more and more combustible. As alarming evidence from the investigation continues to surface, and detectives pressure her to share what she knows of her family’s disturbing past, Deidre must finally face her own shattered memories so that something better might emerge for her and her country. In exquisitely spare prose, Karen Jennings weaves a singularly powerful novel about post-apartheid South Africa. It is an unforgettable, propulsive story of fractured families, collective guilt, the ways we become trapped in prisons of our own making, and how we can begin to break free.

Crooked Seeds

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David Martinez

A Memoir

Bones Worth Breaking is a portrait of the unbreakable bond between brothers and a reckoning with the global forces that shaped them. Nobody around David Martinez saw how quickly he was breaking apart except for his younger brother, Mike. They stood out in Idaho: Black and Brazilian American in a Mormon community that, in the years before David’s birth, considered Black people ineligible for salvation. The Martinez brothers were raised to be “good boys,” definitely not to get high, skateboard all night, or get arrested, all of which they did with zeal. Then their paths diverged. David went on a two-year mission trip to Brazil like his father before him, and Mike stayed in the States, finding himself in and out of prison. When David returned, in the middle of the still-unnamed opioid epidemic, things had irrevocably changed, and in 2021, Mike unexpectedly died in prison. Martinez writes with a serrated edge, as viscerally felt as an exposed nerve, and transforms from a stoic boy constantly seeking escape to a vulnerable man eager to contextualize the legacies and losses that have shaped his life. With a wild, ragged velocity—flipping and soaring like a pro skater—Martinez defies a linear telling of his life and tackles topics from abuse and racism to writing and capturing the meaning of the specific nostalgia of saudade. Bones Worth Breaking is a portrait of the unbreakable bond between brothers who were robbed of the chance to grow old together, and a reckoning with the brutal global forces that let so many poor young men of color fall perilously through the cracks.

Bones Worth Breaking

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Andrea Marcolongo

Will Schutt

Learning to Run Like a Greek

The inspiring story of how one of Europe's most original and compelling classicist learned to run--and live--like a Greek Much has changed since the day in 490 BCE when the indefatigable Athenian herald Philippides made his legendary run and delivered to the people of Athens news of their city's victory over the Persians. One thing, however, hasn't changed: it is still twenty-five punishing miles over rough terrain from Marathon to the Acropolis. Each year, all over the world, thousands of professional athletes and millions of amateur enthusiasts replicate Philippides's enterprise, many running with such gusto that one could be forgiven for thinking the fate of Athens once more hung in the balance. Why do we run? To what end, all the effort and pain? Wherefore this love of muscle, speed, sweat, of testing one's limits? The Greeks were the first to ask these questions and to wonder why we choose to measure ourselves in this way against others; they were the first to formulate the adage, mens sana in corpore sano; they were first to interrupt war, work, politics, the daily routine to enjoy public celebrations of athletic prowess. The Greeks invented sport! Sport as something separate from labor or war; activity as an end unto itself and a form of entertainment for others. They were also the first to understand how regular physical activity, victory, and loss connected to our emotional and mental well-being. As the pandemic entered its second year, despondent, isolated, and apprehensive about the future, the internationally renowned classics scholar and best-selling author Andrea Marcolongo discovered running. After years spent with her head and heart in the books, trying to think like a Greek, she set out to learn how to run like a Greek. In doing so, she not only deepened her understanding of the ancient civilization she has spent decades studying, but also discovered a great deal about herself. In this spirited, generous, and erudite book, Andrea Marcolongo shares not only her erudition but her own journey to understanding that a healthy body is indeed, and in more ways than one might guess, a healthy mind.

The Art of Running

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Armando Lucas Correa

In the vein of Paula Hawkins and Ruth Ware, a bold and suspenseful psychological thriller about a young woman with a rare neurological condition who is convinced her neighbor is going to be murdered. Leah has been living with akinetopsia, or motion blindness, since she was a child. For the last twenty years, she hasn’t been able to see movement. As she walks around her upper Manhattan neighborhood with her white stick tapping in front, most people assume she’s blind. But the truth is Leah sees a good deal, and with her acute senses of smell and hearing, very little escapes her notice. She has a quiet, orderly life, with little human contact beyond her longtime housekeeper, her doctor, and her elderly neighbor. That all changes when Alice moves into the apartment next door and Leah can immediately smell the anxiety wafting off her. Worse, Leah can’t help but hear Alice and a late-night visitor engage in a violent fight. Worried, she befriends her neighbor and discovers that Alice is in the middle of a messy divorce from an abusive husband. Then one night, Leah wakes up to someone in her apartment. She blacks out and in the morning is left wondering if she dreamt the episode. And yet the scent of the intruder follows her everywhere. And when she hears Alice through the wall pleading for her help, Leah makes a decision that will test her courage, her strength, and ultimately her sanity.

The Silence in Her Eyes

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James W. Jennings

An inventive and stylish debut written by a Black educator, Wings of Red is a clear-eyed, funny, imperfect, and observant work of autofiction that grapples with the absurdity of the New York City educational system as a substitute teacher—that, in the end, reads as an ode to the city itself June Papers is a twenty-eight-year-old MFA grad with a felony record, “the classic young, Black and gifted American misfit.” He’s also a substitute teacher. He’s also homeless. With dreams of becoming a writer, June endures a host of trials and dilemmas as he reluctantly realizes mentoring and teaching might actually be a path forward for him. Wings of Red is driven by June’s unique narrative style, a propulsive voice that intimately and vulnerably guides readers through the condemned external reality of a Black educator’s personal and professional world falling apart, and coming together again. Populated by a host of true-to-life characters who are attempting to realize their dreams despite precarious professional and financial realities, Wings of Red elucidates the fallacy of the American dream while serving as a reminder of how powerful and necessary autofiction can be. Directed at students and educators but written for any audience, Wings of Red is an inspiring and poetic tour de force and an unexpectedly necessary ode to New York City that features a texture, velocity, and immediacy that speaks to the author's authentic and lived perspective.

Wings of Red

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Jennifer Egan

Manhattan Beach opens in Brooklyn during the Great Depression. Anna Kerrigan, nearly twelve years old, accompanies her father to the house of Dexter Styles, a man who, she gleans, is crucial to the survival of her father and her family. Years later, her father has disappeared and the country is at war. Anna works at the Brooklyn Naval Yard, where women are allowed to hold jobs that had always belonged to men. She becomes the first female diver, the most dangerous and exclusive of occupations, repairing the ships that will help America win the war. She is the sole provider for her mother, a farm girl who had a brief and glamorous career with the Ziegfeld Follies, and her lovely, severely disabled sister. At a nightclub, she chances to meet Dexter Styles again, and she begins to understand the complexity of her father's life, the reasons he might have vanished"--

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Juan Villoro; Alfred MacAdam