Susan Minot

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Pennsylvania

A Novel

A mesmerizing new novel from the author of Evening: the story of a woman swept into a love affair at mid-life Ivy Cooper is 52 years old when Ansel Fleming first walks into her life. Twenty years her junior, a musician newly released from prison on a minor drug charge, Ansel’s beguiling good looks and quiet intensity instantly seduce her. Despite the gulf between their ages and experience the physical chemistry between them is overpowering, and over the heady weeks and months that follow Ivy finds her life bifurcated by his presence: On the surface she is a responsible mother, managing the demands of friends, an ex-husband, home; but emotionally, psychologically, sexually, she is consumed by desire and increasingly alive only in the stolen moments-out-of-time, with Ansel in her bed. In spellbinding prose, Susan Minot has crafted a luminous novel about erotic obsession, and the hunger for intimacy, communication, oblivion. Don't Be a Stranger is a gripping, sensual, and provocative work from one of the most remarkable voices in contemporary fiction.

Don't Be a Stranger

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Sarah Manguso

A searing novel about being a wife, a mother, and an artist, and how marriage makes liars of us all—from the author of Very Cold People and 300 Arguments “Painful and brilliant—I loved it.”—Elif Batuman, author of The Idiot and Either/Or A nuclear family can destroy a woman artist. I’d always known that. But I’d never suspected how easily I’d fall into one anyway. When Jane, an aspiring writer, meets filmmaker John Bridges, they both want the same things: to be in love, to live a successful, creative life, and to be happy. When they marry, Jane believes she has found everything she was looking for, including—a few years later—all the attendant joys and labors of motherhood. But it’s not long until Jane finds herself subsumed by John’s ambitions, whims, and ego; in short, she becomes a wife. As Jane’s career flourishes, their marriage starts to falter. Throughout the upheavals of family life, Jane tries to hold it all together. That is, until John leaves her. Liars is a tour de force of wit and rage, telling the blistering story of a marriage as it burns to the ground, and of a woman rising inexorably from its ashes.

Liars

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Mikita Brottman

Sex, God, and Murder in Tallahassee, Florida

"From the critically-acclaimed author and psychoanalyst Mikita Brottman comes the murky retelling of the murder of Mike Williams committed under the haze of faith and devotion. Perfect for true-crime and literary fiction fans alike"--

Guilty Creatures

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Suji Kim

Most fairytales end with a wedding and a happily-ever-after—but this is no fairytale. The updated and official translation of Under the Oak Tree, the #1 webnovel on MANTA. The gorgeous first edition hardcover of Under the Oak Tree: Volume 1 (The Novel) will feature designed sprayed page edges, full-color patterned endpapers, silver foil stamping on the cover, and a ribbon bookmark! Lady Maximilian is the daughter of the powerful Duke Croyso, but she is rarely allowed outside her family’s sprawling castle for fear that her stutter will tarnish their noble name. When she is forced to marry Sir Riftan, a lowborn knight caught in one of her father’s schemes, Maxi doesn’t dare hope for happiness, let alone love. Her stumbling communication and his gruff manner sour their relationship before it can begin, and Riftan leaves without a word the morning after their vows are exchanged. Now, three years after their disastrous wedding night, Riftan has returned as a war hero. To Maxi’s surprise, despite rumors that he was offered marriage to Princess Agnes, a beautiful and renowned sorceress, Riftan still wants Maxi for his wife. And when he comes to claim her, his longing becomes a desire that bewilders Maxi, even as she is overcome by the scorching heat that Riftan’s presence ignites within her. As she learns to navigate the intricacies of her new life, Maxi will find herself and her courage, and discover that she is anything but powerless. This volume collects chapters 1-76 of the original webnovel by Suji Kim.

Under the Oak Tree: Volume 1 (the Novel)

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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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Yuval Noah Harari

Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Sapiens comes the groundbreaking story of how information networks have made, and unmade, our world. “Masterful and provocative.”—Mustafa Suleyman For the last 100,000 years, we Sapiens have accumulated enormous power. But despite all our discoveries, inventions, and conquests, we now find ourselves in an existential crisis. The world is on the verge of ecological collapse. Misinformation abounds. And we are rushing headlong into the age of AI—a new information network that threatens to annihilate us. For all that we have accomplished, why are we so self-destructive? Nexus looks through the long lens of human history to consider how the flow of information has shaped us, and our world. Taking us from the Stone Age, through the canonization of the Bible, early modern witch-hunts, Stalinism, Nazism, and the resurgence of populism today, Yuval Noah Harari asks us to consider the complex relationship between information and truth, bureaucracy and mythology, wisdom and power. He explores how different societies and political systems throughout history have wielded information to achieve their goals, for good and ill. And he addresses the urgent choices we face as non-human intelligence threatens our very existence. Information is not the raw material of truth; neither is it a mere weapon. Nexus explores the hopeful middle ground between these extremes, and in doing so, rediscovers our shared humanity.

Nexus

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Louisa May Alcott

Susan Cheever

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

Introduction by Susan Cheever Commentary by G. K. Chesterton, Katherine Fullerton Gerould, and Madeleine B. Stern Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read It is no surprise that Little Women, the adored classic of four devoted sisters, was loosely based on Louisa May Alcott’s own life. In fact, Alcott drew from her own personality to create a heroine unlike any seen before: Jo, willful, headstrong, and undoubtedly the backbone of the March family. Follow the sisters from innocent adolescence to sage adulthood, with all the joy and sorrow of life in between, and fall in love with them and this endearing story. Praised by Madeleine Stern as “a book on the American home, and hence universal in its appeal,” Little Women has been an avidly read tale for generations. This Modern Library edition includes notes that offer more description and insight than those of previous editions. Includes a Modern Library Reading Group Guide

Little Women

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Olivia Gatwood

This darkly brilliant debut novel explores how women build themselves—beneath the gaze of love, friendship, and the algorithm—showcasing Olivia Gatwood as a thrilling feminist voice for our hyper-digital age. Only when Lena stepped into that house did she realize what she’d been missing. A life. An entire life. There’s no way Sebastian would have planned for that epiphany. Because as soon as she had it, she felt the urge to run. On the Santa Cruz waterfront, every house is as flawless as the people inside—except for Mitty and her elderly roommate, Bethel. For ten years, Mitty has found refuge in their secluded existence after a traumatic adolescence. Now, they’re the oddball pair in the dilapidated bungalow, the last vestiges of a town taken over by the tech elite. But their lives are about to be irrevocably disrupted when a new couple, Lena and Sebastian, move in next door. Because on the quiet outskirts of Silicon Valley, nothing is off-limits, and what was once considered dystopia is now reality... Sebastian is a renowned tech founder and Lena is his spellbinding girlfriend, seemingly floating through their luxurious life. But just like Mitty, Lena has her own secrets; she feels uneasy about her oddly spotty memory, and is growing increasingly wary of the way Sebastian closely controls their life together. As the two women begin to form a close friendship, they are finally forced to face their pasts—or lack thereof—which have overpowered their lives for far too long, and the urgent truths that could change everything. A kind of Stepford Wives meets Grey Gardens for the age of artificial intelligence, Whoever You Are, Honey is gripping, seductive, and prescient as it dissects relationships between women, unpacks perfection and desirability, and explodes the intersection of passion, technology, and power.

Whoever You Are, Honey

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Makoto Shinkai

Naruki Nagakawa

Ginny Tapley Takemori

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Stories

A collection of four interrelated, stream-of-consciousness short stories follows women and their cat companions as they explore the frailty of life, the pain of isolation, and the limits of communication.

She and Her Cat

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Liane Moriarty

If you knew your future, would you try to fight fate? Aside from a delay, there will be no problems. The flight will be smooth, it will land safely. Everyone who gets on the plane will get off. But almost all of them will be forever changed. Because on this ordinary, short, domestic flight, something extraordinary happens. People learn how and when they are going to die. For some, their death is far in the future—age 103!—and they laugh. But for six passengers, their predicted deaths are not far away at all. How do they know this? There were ostensibly more interesting people on the flight (the bride and groom, the jittery, possibly famous woman, the giant Hemsworth-esque guy who looks like an off-duty superhero, the frazzled, gorgeous flight attendant) but none would become as famous as “The Death Lady.” Not a single passenger or crew member will later recall noticing her board the plane. She wasn’t exceptionally old or young, rude or polite. She wasn’t drunk or nervous or pregnant. Her appearance and demeanor were unremarkable. But what she did on that flight was truly remarkable. A few months later, one passenger dies exactly as she predicted. Then two more passengers die, again, as she said they would. Soon no one is thinking this is simply an entertaining story at a cocktail party. If you were told you only had a certain amount of time left to live, would you do things differently? Would you try to dodge your destiny? Liane Moriarty’s Here One Moment is a brilliantly constructed tale that looks at free will and destiny, grief and love, and the endless struggle to maintain certainty and control in an uncertain world. A modern-day Jane Austen who humorously skewers social mores while spinning a web of mystery, Moriarty asks profound questions in her newest I-can’t-wait-to-find-out-what-happens novel.

Here One Moment

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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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Jessica Anthony

From "one of our most thrilling and singular innovators on the page" (Laura Van Den Berg), a tightly wound, consuming tale for readers of Claire Keegan and Ian McEwan, about a 1950s American housewife who decides to get into the pool in her family's apartment complex one morning and won't come out. It is an unseasonably warm Sunday in November 1957. Katheen, a college tennis champion turned Delaware housewife, decides not to join her flagrantly handsome life insurance salesman husband, Virgil, or their two young boys, at church. Instead, she takes a dip in the kidney-shaped swimming pool of their apartment complex. And then she won't come out. A consuming, single-sitting read set over the course of eight hours, THE MOST breaches the shimmering surface of a seemingly idyllic mid-century marriage, immersing us in the unspoken truth beneath. As Sputnik 2 orbits the earth carrying Laika, the doomed Soviet dog, Kathleen and Virgil hurtle towards each other until they arrive at a reckoning that will either shatter their marriage, or transform it, at last, into something real.

The Most

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Khashayar J. Khabushani

A poetic, open-hearted debut about an Iranian American boy searching for his place in the world--"exquisite, heartbreaking, incredibly beautiful" (Caleb Azumah Nelson, author of Open Water)

K just wants to be an American boy--shooting hoops with his two older brothers and riding his Huffy with his buddies around the San Fernando Valley. But K knows there's something different about himself, a longing that draws him closer to his best friend while making him feel increasingly alienated from everyone around him. At home, K must navigate another confusing identity: that of the faithful son of Iranian immigrants struggling to survive in the United States. To make his mother proud, he tries to do well in school and help around the apartment, uncertain of whether he can live up to her ideal of a son. On Friday nights, K dutifully attends prayers at the local mosque with his unknowable father, whose affection and violence distort K's understanding of what it means to be a man and how to love.

A stunning, tender novel about being lost in one's family, one's country, and one's skin, I Will Greet the Sun Again stares down the brutality of being a queer kid in America and an immigrant in an unwelcoming land. Khashayar J. Khabushani transforms personal and national pain into an unforgettable work of art: an urgent and beautifully rendered exploration of youth, love, family--and becoming yourself.

I Will Greet the Sun Again

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Jen Silverman

A woman is pulled into a love affair with a radical activist, unknowingly echoing her family's dangerous past and risking the foundations of her future in this electrifying novel. The course of your life can change with one split-second decision. Minnow has always tried to lead the life her single father modeled—private, quiet, hardworking, apolitical. So she is rocked when an instinctive decision to help a student makes her the extremely public face of a scandal in the small town where she teaches. As tensions rise, vandalism and death threats follow, and an overwhelmed Minnow flees to a teaching position in Paris. There, Minnow falls into an exhilarating and all-consuming relationship with Charles, a young Frenchman whose activism has placed him at odds with his powerful family. As Minnow is pulled into the daring protest Charles and his friends are planning, she unknowingly draws close to repeating a secret tragedy from her family's past. For her father wasn’t always the restrained, conservative man he appears today. There are things he has taken great pains to bury from his family and from the world. In 1968, Keen is avoiding the Vietnam draft by pursuing a PhD at Harvard. He lives his life in the basement chemistry lab, studiously avoiding the news. But when he unexpectedly falls in love with Olya, a fiery community organizer, he is consumed by her world and loses sight of his own. Learning that his deferment has ended and he’s been drafted, Keen agrees to participate in the latest action that Olya is organizing—one with more dangerous and far-reaching consequences than he could have imagined. Minnow’s and Keen's intertwining stories take us through the turmoil of the late sixties student movements and into the chaos of the modern world. Exploding with suspense, heart, and intelligence, There's Going to Be Trouble is a story about revolution, legacy, passionate love, and how we live with the consequences of our darkest secrets.

There's Going to Be Trouble

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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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Chigozie Obioma

A sweeping, heart-racing, mystical novel about a university student in Lagos trying to save his brother, and himself, amid the chaos of Nigeria’s civil war—a story of love, friendship, and personal triumph by the two-time Booker Prize finalist and “the heir to Chinua Achebe” (New York Times) “A wondrous novel.”—Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, author of Chain-Gang All Stars, finalist for the National Book Award “Chigozie Obioma is that rare thing: an original. His world is a mix of the real and the folkloric, and his writing sounds like no one else’s.”—The Wall Street Journal The first images of the vision are grainy—like something seen through wet glass. But slowly it clears, and there appears the figure of a man. Set in Nigeria in the late 1960s, The Road to the Country is the epic story of a shy, bookish student haunted by long-held guilt who must go to war to free himself. When his younger brother disappears as the country explodes in civil war, Kunle must set out on an impossible rescue mission. Kunle’s search for his brother becomes a journey of atonement that will see him conscripted into the breakaway Biafran army and forced to fight a war he hardly understands, all while navigating the prophecies of a local Seer, he who marks Kunle as an abami eda—one who will die and return to life. The story of a young man seeking redemption in a country on fire, Chigozie Obioma’s novel is an odyssey of brotherhood, love, and unimaginable courage set during one of the most devastating conflicts in the history of Africa. Intertwining myth and realism into a thrilling, inspired, and emotionally powerful novel, The Road to the Country is the masterpiece of Chigozie Obioma, a writer Salman Rushdie calls “a major voice” in literature.

The Road to the Country

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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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Patrick Nathan

A dazzling novel about making art, desire, and the inextricable link between the personal and the political set against the decadence of post-war Los Angeles, for readers of Garth Greenwell and Eve Babitz George is a Hungarian immigrant working as a studio hack writing monster movies in 1950s Los Angeles. He must navigate the McCarthy era studio system filled with possible Communists and spies; the life of closeted men along Sunset Boulevard; the inability of the era to disassemble love from persecution and guilt. But when a famous actress named Madeleine offers George a “writing residency” at her estate in Malibu to work on the political writing he cares most deeply about, his world changes dramatically. Soon it’s drinks by the pool every night, pleasure in every direction, and Madeleine carrying him like an ornament into a class of postwar L.A. society ordinarily hidden from men like him. What this lifestyle hides behind, aside from the monsters on the screen, are the monsters dwelling closer to home: this endless bacchanalia covers a gnawing hole shelled wide by the horror of the war they’d thought they left behind. Beneath his newfound relationships lie the pernicious forces of the American political project. And what George can never escape: his past as György, the queer Jew who fled Budapest before the war, landing in New York all alone a decade prior. In New York as in California, the people he loves aren’t what they seem—and neither is his adopted country, one pretending to have transcended bigotry, authoritarianism, and violence. It is a novel as well as a historical document, upending our perceptions of just how personal the political can be. Spanning from sun-drenched Los Angeles, to hidden corners of working-class New York, to a virtuosic climax in the Las Vegas desert, The Future Was Color is an immaculately written exploration of making art and reinventing the self, post-war American decadence, and the psychosis that lingers in a world that’s seen the bomb.

The Future Was Color

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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"--

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