Lauren Groff

Heidi Pitlor

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

New Jersey

A collection of the year's best short stories, selected by celebrated bestselling author Lauren Groff, author of Matrix and The Vaster Wilds, and series editor Heidi Pitlor. Lauren Groff--bestselling author, three-time National Book Award finalist, and "one of our finest living writers" (New York Times)--selects twenty stories out of thousands that represent the best examples of the form published in 2023.

The Best American Short Stories 2024

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Sydney Graves

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

A Jo Bailen Detective Novel

"For readers of Sue Grafton and Sara Gran, a whodunnit about a hardboiled queer private eye whose professional life crosses with her complicated personal history Justine (Jo) Vega is a queer woman private investigator on the cusp of forty who works for an all-female agency based in Tucson, Arizona. As she's staking out a cheating spouse one ordinary morning, she gets a call from her boss: her long-estranged childhood best friend, Rose, is missing, and Rose's mother wants to hire Jo to find her. This whole thing is all kinds of wrong for Jo, but her boss has already accepted the job on her behalf. So Jo heads reluctantly up to her old hometown, Delphi, an hour north of Tucson, where Tyler, her high school boyfriend and the reason her friendship with Rose went south, turns out to be the cop assigned to the missing-persons case. And he's all mixed up in it, too. And, so to find out what happened to Rose, Jo must face the demons from her past The Arizona Triangle is a hardboiled, character-driven whodunit about loyalty, love, and the legacy of trauma"--

The Arizona Triangle

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Emily Jungmin Yoon

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Poems

From one of the sharpest up-and-coming voices in contemporary poetry, a stunning collection that explores our most fundamental instincts, capacity for affection, and the ways in which we resemble the wild Find Me as the Creature I Am is a book full of tenderness and violence, longing and love. Ranging from inherited family tales to meditations on the body to animals’ display of love and grief alike, Emily Jungmin Yoon holds up a mirror to humanity to show that we are animal, too. In poems full of wonder and want, she showcases our tendencies to fight or fly, act with affection and cruelty, and ultimately, overflow with life itself. “And when I say we are beasts, / is that a metaphor?” Yoon asks, exploring how we—like language, like any creature—stem from our surroundings. Braiding together reflections about the natural world, family heritage, and adoration, Yoon shows that what passes between us—body to body, generation to generation—is what defines a life. Deeply felt and beautifully crafted, Find Me as the Creature I Am is a rapturous collection by a rising star in the poetry landscape.

Find Me As the Creature I Am

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Cynthia Zarin

Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

New and Selected Poems

A selection of the dazzling work of one of the finest writers of her generation and winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, a poet of elegant restraint, emotional depth, and moral vision Beginning with several dozen new poems that have appeared in The New Yorker, among other publications, this volume is a tour through Zarin’s five exquisitely made collections, beginning with The Swordfish Tooth, published in 1989. Zarin, a poet in the line of Elizabeth Bishop, allows the reader to experience human truths through a poem's shape and music, bodied forth through intimate images—the turn in the stair, a snow globe, naked birch branches, a vase of flowers—and a propulsive syntax. From the clarity of childhood memory to the maze of marriage and divorce, from her own consciousness—shaping landscapes of New York, Cape Cod, and Rome, to the shifting tides of history and the troubled conscience of a nation, her subject matter encompasses all of a woman's life, with passion—its risks, satisfactions, and shattering immediacy—her first and truest subject.

Next Day

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Kit Heyam

A New History of Gender

Across the world today, people of all ages are doing fascinating, creative, messy things with gender. These people have a rich history - but one that is often left behind by narratives of trans lives that focus on people with stable, binary, uncomplicated gender identities. As a result, these stories tend to be recent, binary, stereotyped, medicalised and white. Before We Were Trans is a new and different story of gender, that seeks not to be comprehensive or definitive, but - by blending culture, feminism and politics - to widen the scope of what we think of as trans history by telling the stories of people across the globe whose experience of gender has been transgressive, or not characterised by stability or binary categories. Transporting us from Renaissance Venice to seventeenth-century Angola, from Edo Japan to North America, the stories this book tells leave questions and resist conclusions. They are fraught with ambiguity, and defy modern Western terminology and categories - not least the category of 'trans' itself. But telling them provides a history that reflects the richness of modern trans reality more closely than any previously written. Before We Were Trans is a history and celebration of gender in all its fluidity, ambiguity and complexity.

Before We Were Trans

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Jo Nesbo

Neil Smith

A Novel

From the internationally best-selling author, a chilling fresh spin on the classic horror novel • When the voices call, don't answer. “In The Night House, the horror begins immediately. And it only keeps calling from there.”—Josh Malerman, New York Times best-selling author of Bird Box and Spin a Black Yarn In the wake of his parents’ tragic deaths in a house fire, fourteen-year-old Richard Elauved has been sent to live with his aunt and uncle in the remote, insular town of Ballantyne. Richard quickly earns a reputation as an outcast, and when a classmate named Tom goes missing, everyone suspects the new, angry boy is responsible for his disappearance. No one believes him when he says the telephone booth out by the edge of the woods sucked Tom into the receiver like something out of a horror movie. No one, that is, except Karen, a beguiling fellow outsider who encourages Richard to pursue clues the police refuse to investigate. He traces the number that Tom prank-called from the phone booth to an abandoned house in the Mirror Forest. There he catches a glimpse of a terrifying face in the window. And then the voices begin to whisper in his ear . . . She’s going to burn. The girl you love is going to burn. There’s nothing you can do about it.

The Night House

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Terry Pratchett

The Lost Stories

"These rediscovered tales were written by Terry Pratchett under a pseudonym for British newspapers during the 1970s and 1980s. The stories have never been attributed to him until now, and might never have been found, were it not for the efforts of a few dedicated fans. As Neil Gaiman writes in his introduction, 'through all of these stories we watch Terry Pratchett becoming Terry Pratchett.' Though none of the short works are set in the Discworld, all are infused with Pratchett's trademark wit, satirical wisdom, and brilliant imagination, hinting at the magical universe he would go on to create"--

A Stroke of the Pen

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Kelly Barnhill

A GOODREADS BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR * A fiery feminist tale set in 1950s America where thousands of women have spontaneously transformed into dragons, exploding notions of a woman's place in the world and expanding minds about accepting others for who they really are.

"Completely fierce, unmistakably feminist, and subversively funny." --Bonnie Garmus, bestselling author of Lessons in Chemistry
 
In the first adult novel by the New York Times bestselling author of The Ogress and The Orphans, Alex Green is a young girl in a world much like ours, except for its most seminal event: the Mass Dragoning of 1955, when hundreds of thousands of ordinary wives and mothers sprouted wings, scales, and talons; left a trail of fiery destruction in their path; and took to the skies. Was it their choice? What will become of those left behind? Why did Alex's beloved aunt Marla transform but her mother did not? Alex doesn't know. It's taboo to speak of.
 
Forced into silence, Alex nevertheless must face the consequences of this astonishing event: a mother more protective than ever; an absentee father; the upsetting insistence that her aunt never even existed; and 
watching her beloved cousin Bea become dangerously obsessed with the forbidden.

In this timely and timeless speculative novel, award-winning author Kelly Barnhill boldly explores rage, memory, and the tyranny of forced limitations. When Women Were Dragons exposes a world that wants to keep women small--their lives and their prospects--and examines what happens when they rise en masse and take up the space they deserve.

When Women Were Dragons

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T. Greenwood

Against the nostalgic grit of 1970s New York City, the precarious lines between girl and woman, art and obscenity, fetish and fame flicker and ignite for a young girl on the brink of stardom and a mother on the verge of collapse in this vividly lyrical drama from the award-winning author T. Greenwood. Perfect for fans of Taylor Jenkins Reid, Emma Cline, and Ella Berman!

In 1970s New York, her innocence is seductive.
Four decades later, it's a crime...

Living peacefully in Vermont, Ryan Flannigan is shocked when a text from her oldest friend alerts her to a devastating news item. A controversial photo of her as a pre-teen has been found in the possession of a wealthy investor recently revealed as a pedophile and a sex trafficker--with an inscription to him from Ryan's mother on the back.

Memories crowd in, providing their own distinctive pictures of her mother Fiona, an aspiring actress, and their move to the West Village in 1976. Amid the city's gritty kaleidoscope of wealth and poverty, high art, and sleazy strip clubs, Ryan is discovered and thrust into the spotlight as a promising young actress with a woman's face and a child's body. Suddenly, the safety and comfort Ryan longs for is replaced by auditions, paparazzi, and the hungry eyes of men of all ages.

Forced to reexamine her childhood, Ryan begins to untangle her young fears and her mother's ambitions, and the role each played in the fraught blackout summer of 1977. Even with her movie career long behind her, Ryan and Fiona are suddenly the object of uncomfortable speculation--and Fiona demands Ryan's support. To put the past to rest, Ryan will need to face the painful truth of their relationship, and the night when everything changed.

"Magnetic...This knotty story leaves readers reflecting on the limits of family obligations." -Publishers Weekly

Such a Pretty Girl

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Trent Dalton

"Unpredictable, fantastic. . . . It takes a charged narrative, like Dickens achieves, and as Dalton does too, to reach the heart and the brain. . . . To tell you more would spoil this complicated and surprising story. You should read it."--Sydney Morning Herald Bighearted, gritty, magical and moving, an irresistible novel from the #1 internationally bestselling author of Boy Swallows Universe and All Our Shimmering Skies. A girl and her mother have been on the run for sixteen years, from the monster they left in their kitchen with a knife in his throat and the police who want to make them pay for his death. Home is now a van with four flat tires in a junkyard by the edge of the Brisbane River. The girl has no name, because names are dangerous when you're on the run. But she has a dream. A vision of a life as an artist. A life outside the grip of the Brisbane underworld. A life of love with the boy who's waiting for her on the bridge above the deadly river. And once her mother can no longer protect her, there's only one person who can help make her dreams come true. That person is Lola. But she has to find her first. Internationally bestselling author Trent Dalton delivers a big, moving, darkly funny, violent, heartbreaking and beautiful novel of love and fate, life and death, and all the things we see when we look in the mirror: all our past, all our present, and all our possible futures. Lola in the Mirror is illustrated with black-and-white line art throughout.

Lola in the Mirror

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Taylor Hahn

A witty, warmhearted novel about coming to terms with grief, taking a chance on unexpected connections, and finding family in time for the holidays For wedding singer Mel Hart, the holidays have always retained a certain magic. Her mother, Connie, always managed to pull off spectacular Santa hijinx that convinced Mel to keep believing in Santa way longer than other kids. Those moments meant everything to Mel because the rest of the year, life was unpredictable because of her mother’s alcohol use. But two weeks before Christmas, Mel gets a call from the hospital: her mother has died. Then a woman shows up on Mel's doorstep, claiming to be Connie's estranged best friend, promising to tell Mel a different narrative—one in which Connie was almost a famous country music star, if only a man hadn't gotten in the way. Instead of spending Christmas alone in her dead mother's house, Mel agrees to stay with Barb for the holidays, finding herself in the middle of Barb's complicated family and uncovering secrets while fighting an attraction to Barb’s in-the-middle-of-a-divorce son. As Christmas approaches, Mel reckons with how little she knew about her mother's past while reexamining her own future. A Home for the Holidays is a moving exploration of complicated grief, mother-daughter relationships, loving someone with addiction, and the redemptive power of opening one's heart to love in all its forms.

A Home for the Holidays

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Morgan Richter

A failed actress turned grifting psychic searches for her missing doppelgänger and is plunged into a web of murder and corruption among Hollywood A-listers. "Weird and wonderfully addictive—reads like Agatha Christie on acid, or maybe Raymond Chandler adapted by the Coen Brothers." —Ernest Cline, #1 New York Times best-selling author of Ready Player One When Jenny St. John was eighteen, she moved to Los Angeles from her rural midwestern hometown and scored the lead role in an independent film called The Divide. Under the intimate direction of young auteur Serge Grumet, Jenny was on her way to becoming the next indie darling. But then the movie tanked, and Jenny never caught a second break. Now, two decades later, after floundering on the fringes of the entertainment industry, she’s barely keeping afloat running a low-level grift as a psychic life coach. But when news surfaces that Serge has been murdered, Jenny’s life is turned upside down. Unbeknownst to Jenny, Serge’s ex-wife, painter Gena Santos, looks alarmingly similar to Jenny. So much so that when Gena goes missing, the cops think Jenny is Gena. Jenny finds herself pulled into Gena’s world and manages to leverage both her resemblance to Gena and her faux psychic abilities to infiltrate the affluent yet unstable inner circle of friends, which include a Korean pop idol–turned–social media star and an Oscar-winning actress–turned–wellness guru. Soon Jenny’s search to find Gena unearths dark secrets about her own past while putting her squarely in the sights of a killer.

The Divide

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Wen-yi Lee

From Gillian Flynn Books, a lyrical young adult horror by debut author Wen-yi Lee that's perfect for fans of She Is a Haunting, Stephen King's IT, and The Haunting of Hill House. "Wen-yi Lee has crafted a dark and compelling supernatural mystery buoyed by earnestly written, queer-centric characters. I am enthralled!" --Gillian Flynn Growing up in Slater, Isadora Chang never felt at ease in the repressive small town, even before she realized she was bisexual--but after the deaths of two childhood friends, Slater went from feeling claustrophobic to suffocating. So, Isa took off before the town could swallow her, too. Even though it meant leaving everything she knew behind, including her last surviving friend, Mason. When Isa's abusive father dies, however, she agrees to come back from art school just long enough to collect the inheritance. But then Mason turns up at the cemetery with a revelation and a plea: their friends were murdered by an evil that haunts the town, and he needs Isa to help stop it--before it takes anyone else. When Isa begins to hear strange songs on the wind, and eerie artwork fills her sketchbook that she can't recall drawing, she's forced to stop running and confront her past. Because something is waiting in the shadows of Slater's valleys, something that feeds on the pain and heartbreak of its children. Whatever it is, it knows Isa's back . . . and it won't let her escape again. Wen-yi Lee's young adult debut is an intimate and gripping exploration of trauma, healing, and the lasting power of friendship, as a runaway teen must finally face the sinister forces that defined her childhood, and in doing so, demand her right to survive.

The Dark We Know

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Ulla Law

THE CAUZZIES HAVE ARRIVED Action Packed Thrill Ride... With Incendiary Humor... The year is 2035. In a world ravaged by climate change, Louden Frear's new biotechnology breakthrough is a ray of hope. Not plant nor animal, his humanoid creations infamously known as Cauzzies are destined to restore the world into a land of tranquility. Or at least that's what his sales pitch says. Soon the new creation challenges its creator plunging Australia into a war zone of epic proportions. In this riveting story, we follow young Merret, a runaway from Crendon Hall Academy, who, with his best mate James, have used their newfound stash of weapons for daring raids against the enemy on the frontlines. When their latest sniping expedition goes terribly awry, Merret expects the inevitable cruel death at the hands of the humanoids but when this threat fails to materialize, he instead discovers they worship him. With this thrilling revelation Merret begins an expedition deep into enemy territory in hopes of ending the war once and for all...

Invasive Species

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Tomás Q. Morín

This fresh voice in American poetry wields lyric pleasure and well-honed insight against a cruel century that would kill us with a thousand cuts. "Morín's writing uses the mundane details of everyday life...as a jumping-off point for creating fascinating and philosophical worlds." —LitHub "Dios aprieta, pero no ahorca" ("God squeezes, but He doesn't strangle")--the epigraph of Machete--sets the stage for a powerful poet who summons a variety of ways to endure life when there's an invisible hand at your throat. Tomás Morín hails from the coastal plains of Texas, and explores a world where identity and place shift like that ever-changing shore. In these poems, culture crashes like waves and leaves behind Billie Holiday and the CIA, disco balls and Dante, the Bible and Jerry Maguire. They are long, lean, and dazzle in their telling: "Whiteface" is a list of instructions for people stopped by the police; "Duct Tape" lauds our domestic life from the point of view of the tape itself. One part Groucho Marx, one part Job, Morín considers our obsession with suffering--"the pain in which we trust"--and finds that the best answer to our predicament is sometimes anger, sometimes laughter, but always via the keen line between them that may be the sharpest weapon we have.

Machete

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Katherine Blake

An aspiring makeup artist takes on predatory Hollywood in this addictive debut novel with bite--a sultry, thrilling blend of The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, Killing Eve, and A Promising Young Woman. It's 1950 and Loretta Reynolds is newly arrived in Hollywood, fresh off a con that brought her from England to the sunny shores of California. She's running away from a complicated past to fulfill her ambition of becoming a makeup artist to the stars. When her new husband, a would-be actor, takes her to a sex-fueled Hollywood party on their wedding night--hoping to trade her to a powerful director for a favor--she discovers the dark side of Tinseltown and sets out on a path of revenge against the cruel men who use their money and power to play with lives and dreams. In her quest for vengeance, Loretta gathers a band of La-La-Land misfits: a fading starlet past her prime, a friendly neighborhood sex worker, and a brooding screenwriter who proves yes, not all men are evil--just most . . . Now, Loretta is about to get her big break--and Hollywood better beware. Loretta has learned a lot about makeup, and more. . . and some of her clients might not make it out alive.

The Unforgettable Loretta Darling

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Monique Roffey

When a female musician is found murdered on a small tropical island, after a string of similar deaths, outraged local women take matters into their own hands. The quiet calm of Ash Wednesday morning. Carnival is over. Everyone on the small island of St. Colibri is sleeping peacefully. Everyone except Sora Tanaka, a young pan player lying under the cannonball tree. Sora, a professional musician, had been visiting St. Colibri to take part in the island’s famous steel pan competition. But Sora isn’t asleep; she’s dead: brutally murdered, and still in her costume. And as the women of this island know all too well, Sora is far from the first woman to be killed, and she probably won’t be the last, either. In fact, the problem of women being killed on the island is so bad, there’s even a dedicated unit within the police department: OMWEN, the Office for Murdered Women, headed by Inspector Cuthbert Loveday. In this powerful new rewriting of the detective novel, Sora’s death is the last straw and the beginning of something much larger, a "revolution" some are calling it. The event draws together four women who have never before seen each other as allies: a friend of the victim, the organizer of a sex workers’ collective, a local activist, and the prime minister’s wife. Tenderly, sometimes hilariously, Passiontide chronicles how these women join forces and find new ways to help one another.

Passiontide

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Elizabeth Bass Parman

"Get ready to laugh! Elizabeth Bass Parman is a true Southern storyteller. I couldn't have loved it more." --Fannie Flagg, New York Times bestselling author Posey Jarvis knows she's the rightful empress of Cooke County . . . She just needs to make everyone else realize it too. Thirty-eight-year-old Posey Jarvis is the self-appointed "empress" of rural Spark in Cooke County, Tennessee. She spends her days following every word about her idol and look-alike Jackie Kennedy, avoiding her stalwart husband Vern, and struggling to control her newly defiant daughter Callie Jane--all while sneaking nips of gin. When Posey unexpectedly inherits a derelict mansion from her quirky old aunt Milbrey, she finagles her way into hosting her high school's twentieth reunion there. She cares nothing about seeing her classmates, but she cares deeply about seeing the love of her life, a man who dumped her nineteen years ago. Possums are nesting in the parlor and the stench of cat urine permeates the sunroom, but she must be ready for the big day, even if she has to do the work herself. Eighteen-year-old Callie Jane finds herself accidentally engaged and is panicking about her fast-approaching wedding. She's also had enough of her domineering mother. Even though she loves her father, the idea of working at his emporium for the rest of her life just makes her . . . so sad. She longs to escape from her mother, her job, her upcoming wedding, and the creepy Peeping Tom terrorizing the town. She dreams of leaving everything she's ever known in her rearview mirror and starting over in California. But when her life has been mapped out for her from birth, how can she break free? Set in a gossipy small town during the turbulent 1960s and full of Southern charm and unforgettable characters, The Empress of Cooke County is a novel about found family, what it means to be loved, and how being true to yourself can have life-altering consequences. Southern women's fiction Stand-alone novel Book length: approximately 82,000 words Includes discussion questions for book clubs

The Empress of Cooke County

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Linda Murphy Marshall

A Linguist's Memoir

Fans of the self-discovering journeys in Cheryl Strayed’s Wild and Andrew McCarthy’s The Longest Way Home will love diving into linguist Linda Murphy Marshall’s adventure-filled international journey as she overcomes her past to find her place in the world—all over the world. Immersion is a memoir that takes the reader on a captivating emotional and physical journey through Linda Murphy Marshall’s life: from the longstanding, crippling impact of family members’ low expectations and abuse, to her discovery as a young adult that she possesses special skills in foreign languages. Linda is taught from an early age that she has little of value to offer the world. But her love of and affinity for languages enables her to create a new life—to separate herself from her toxic environment and to build a successful, decades-long career as a professional multilinguist. It’s a rewarding vocation, but a challenging one: her assignments with the US federal government take her on some hair-raisingly dangerous journeys, some to countries with unstable governments and even active war zones. But these sometimes-harrowing experiences teach her how to open the “windows” around her, unearth her true self, and develop a healthy sense of self-worth—and ultimately, paradoxically, her work and travel so far from home allow her to come home to herself.

Immersion

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Jean-Martin Bauer

Hunger and Hope in the Twenty-First Century

A humanitarian leader with more than two decades of experience working for the United Nations takes aim at the global food crisis—revealing how hunger anywhere affects lives everywhere and what steps we can take to change course. "This book should be required reading for the entire human race." —Jonathan Safran Foer, author of We Are the Weather At the turn of the twenty-first century, more than 150 countries pledged to eradicate hunger by 2030. But with only a few years left, we’re far from reaching that goal. Instead, hunger is on the rise—America itself recently experienced levels of food insecurity not seen since the Great Depression. How could the richest nation in the world have so many people going hungry? In The New Breadline, aid worker and activist Jean-Martin Bauer unravels this paradox. Bauer’s family fled to America during the terrors of the Duvalier dictatorship in Haiti. Now on the brink of mass starvation, Haiti and its grim history inspired Bauer to make food justice his life's work. During his long career with the UN, Bauer learned firsthand that the problem of hunger is always political—and like all political conditions, hunger, he knew, was something we could work to change. Drawing from his fieldwork in the most hunger-prone countries across the globe—from Haiti, where elites hoard imported French cheese, to Madagascar, where foreign corporations are snatching up valuable land from local farmers, to right here in America, where the lines at food banks continue to grow—Bauer weaves profound personal insight with a keen understanding of the structural systems of racism, classism, and sexism that thwart true progress in the battle against hunger. The New Breadline is an inspiring call to action to end what he persuasively argues is one of the greatest threats to our society, boldly envisioning a world where we can always feed ourselves and one another.

The New Breadline

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Kitty Zeldis

"A haunting meditation on the bonds between mothers and daughters. Zeldis offers a fascinating look into historic New York City and New Orleans, and her skill as a storyteller is matched by her compassion for her characters. What a beautiful read."--Fiona Davis, New York Times bestselling author of The Magnolia Palace "By turns heartbreaking and heartwarming, Kitty Zeldis's The Dressmakers of Prospect Heights, set against the backdrop of the not-always-so-roaring Twenties, is an only-in-America story of reinvention, rising above tragedy, and finding family."--Lauren Willig, New York Times bestselling author of Band of Sisters For fans of Fiona Davis, Beatriz Williams, and Joanna Goodman, a mesmerizing historical novel from Kitty Zeldis, the author of Not Our Kind, about three women in 1920s New York City and the secrets they hold. Brooklyn, 1924. As New York City enters the jazz age, the lives of three very different women are about to converge in unexpected ways. Recently arrived from New Orleans, Beatrice is working to establish a chic new dress shop with help from Alice, the orphaned teenage ward she brought north with her. Down the block, newlywed Catherine is restless in her elegant brownstone, longing for a baby she cannot conceive. When Bea befriends Catherine and the two start to become close, Alice feels abandoned and envious, and runs away to Manhattan. Her departure sets into motion a series of events that will force each woman to confront the painful secrets of her past in order to move into the happier future she seeks. Moving from the bustling streets of early twentieth century New York City to late nineteenth-century Russia and the lively quarters of New Orleans in the 1910s, The Dressmakers of Prospect Heights is a story of the families we are born into and the families we choose, and of the unbreakable bonds between women.

The Dressmakers of Prospect Heights

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Esther Lin

Marcelo Hernandez Castillo

Janine Joseph

Poetry and Prose from the Undocumented Diaspora

A lush tapestry of poetry created by undocumented and undocu-adjacent writers, Undocupoetics is an invitation to be a part of an integral component of contemporary American poetry. "As a poet of African descent, I understand what it means to belong to two places at once. But I also understand what it means to be deserted by one as a result of the distance created by involuntary migration and displaced by one because of draconian laws. My sense of identity flows through my verse: through it I am coping, overcoming, surviving, and reaching joy. More than anything, poetry is an act of service for self-actualization and freedom."--an anonymous undocumented contributor From the indomitable writers and activists Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, Janine Joseph, and Esther Lin comes an anthology gathering some of the best work from undocumented or undocu-adjacent writers from across the undocumented diaspora. Here to Stay is a collection of 90 honest, heartfelt, searing, and evocative poems interspersed with short personal narratives, as culturally rich and diverse as the American quilt. Deeply intimate, these works explore what it means to exist in the liminal space between the familiar and the unknown, between past and future. Highlighting the significant talents of undocumented writers, this brilliant anthology challenges misconceptions of what it means to write and exist as an undocumented person in modern America. Beautiful, poignant, and timely, this must-read collection is a rich and important new chapter in the ongoing story of the eclectic immigrant experience and the United States itself.

Here to Stay

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Holly Baxter

With the dark comedy and sharp observations of Monica Heisey and Dolly Alderton, a whip-smart and laugh-out-loud funny debut novel about a disgraced, newly divorced journalist demoted to a "clickbait" job at a Manhattan tabloid. The first thing they tell you when you begin your training is never to become the news. Natasha has screwed up royally. Her mistake isn't just embarrassing, it's a breach of journalistic ethics that makes headlines and costs her a plum job reporting from London. Back in New York at thirty-five and single, divorced from a kind man she loved, she finds herself at the bottom of the media food chain--a junior reporter at a clickbait factory, rewriting sensational tabloid stories to make them just different enough to avoid lawsuits. As if her professional fall from grace weren't bad enough, she's taken the money she'd saved for a down payment for a home on a charming Brooklyn block with her husband, and rashly bought a boxy apartment overlooking the gray ocean in Rockaway Beach, Queens. Though seeing friends and family only serves to remind her of what she's lost, things begin to pick up when her ex-boyfriend Zach moves back to New York and accepts her offer of a spare bedroom. The arrangement is strictly platonic, of course--for him. But Natasha can't help but wonder whether he might be the solution to all her problems. As Natasha's obsession with Zach grows and her involvement in increasingly dystopian "churnalism" deepens, her worlds threaten to collide in the most cataclysmic, extremely public way.

Clickbait

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James Wade

Award-winning author James Wade blends atmospheric prose with soul-stirring themes in Hollow Out the Dark, a gothic adventure set against a Depression-era landscape where a whiskey war threatens to decimate a small Texas town. Veteran of the Great War, Jesse Cole is grateful for the quiet life he now leads. But when his closest friend runs afoul of local criminals, Frog and Squirrel Fenley, Jesse is forced to spin his moral compass and enter a violent and volatile underworld. There he encounters corrupt lawmen, hired assassins, and a dark family secret that will upend all he once knew. Complicating matters are Texas Ranger Amon Atkins--who arrives to investigate the Fenleys just as their empire is threatened by a deadly new competition--and the green-eyed, raven-haired Adaline, a love Jesse thought he'd lost forever. With resources scarce and winter falling hard on the town, a desperate Jesse must choose between the law and the lawless and find a way to survive while still protecting the people he loves. A heart-pounding tale full of plot-twisting revelations, Hollow Out the Dark brings readers into a whiskey-fueled world where everyone has a secret, and love everlasting balances on the edge of a knife.

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