Kate Goldbeck

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

Pennsylvania

A Novel

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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Sam Sax

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

In between the space of time when Ezra lights themself on fire and when Ezra dies the world of this book flashes before their eyes. Everyone Ezra's ever loved, every place they've felt queer and at home, or queer and out of place, reveals itself in an instant. Unfolding in fragments of memory, Ezra dissolves into the family, religion, desire, losses, pains and joys that made them into the person that's decided on this final act of protest. Told in lyric fragments that span both lifetimes, and geography, Yr Dead is a queer, Jewish, diasporic coming of age story that questions how our historical memory shapes our political and emotional present. Visceral, propulsive, and at turns fluorescently beautiful and fluorescently tragic, Yr Dead is a blistering debut novel from one of our most dynamic and imaginative writers.

Yr Dead

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Jessica Anthony

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

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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Ann Napolitano

The tender and perceptive debut novel from the New York Times bestselling author of Hello Beautiful, about three generations of a large Catholic family jarred into crisis by an unexpected pregnancy “This stunning . . . exquisite, skillfully written gem addresses serious issues–e.g., guilt vs. loyalty, the past vs. the present—[but] remains hopeful and includes ample doses of humor and wit.”—Library Journal (starred review) No one in my mother’s family ever talks about anything that can be categorized as unpleasant or as having to do with emotions. . . . This spellbinding novel by bestselling author Ann Napolitano is a poignant reminder of how connected we are to those we love, even when we cannot find the words to say it. The unforgettable story of three generations of an Irish American family, Within Arm’s Reach is another rich and deeply satisfying novel from the author who captured the many dimensions of grief in Dear Edward and the unbreakable bonds of sisterhood in Hello Beautiful.

Within Arm's Reach

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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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Chimene Suleyman

Love, Betrayal, and the Sisterhood That Heals Us

A devastating personal testimony and a searing indictment of persistent misogyny. In January 2017, Chimene Suleyman was on her way to an abortion clinic in Queens, New York with her boyfriend, the father of her nascent child. It was the last day they would spend together. In an extraordinary sequence of events, Chimene was to discover the truth of her boyfriend's life: that the man she'd loved had gaslit, lied to, stolen from, and painfully betrayed her and many others. In this spellbinding memoir, Suleyman exposes one man's control over many women and the trauma he left behind and celebrates the sisterhood that formed in his wake despite--and in spite of--him. With radiant prose and incisive observation, Suleyman questions society's complicity in allowing those who would do women harm to flourish and contemplates why others remain silent witnesses by accepting and normalizing shameless behavior towards women. She demonstrates how women themselves are acculturated to perform prescribed roles of giver and nurturer, to be self-sacrificing and subordinate, and to bolster the egos of others by remaining silent and ignoring their own protective instincts. A soul-baring story, brilliant cultural critique, and celebration of the healing power of sisterhood, The Chain is a book for any woman who has questioned her relationship and buried her doubts, for any woman who can't quite identify the source of her unease and for any woman who has been sheltered by the fierce protection of her female friends.

The Chain

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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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Maurice Carlos Ruffin

A gripping historical novel about a spirited girl who joins a sisterhood working to undermine the Confederates—from the award-winning author of We Cast a Shadow Ady, a curious, sharp-witted girl, and her fierce mother, Sanite, are an inseparable duo. Enslaved to a businessman in the French Quarter of New Orleans, the pair spend their days dreaming of a loving future and reminiscing on their family's rebellious and storied history. When mother and daughter are separated, Ady is left hopeless and direction-less, until she stumbles into the Mockingbird Inn and meets Lenore, a free Black woman with whom she becomes fast friends. Lenore invites Ady to join a clandestine society of spies called the Daughters. With the courage instilled in her by Sanite—and help from these strong women—Ady learns how to choose herself. So begins her journey toward liberation and imagin­ing a new future. The American Daughters is a novel of hope and triumph that reminds us what is possible when a community bands together to fight for their freedom.

The American Daughters

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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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Ali Smith

The fourth novel in the Seasonal Quartet by Man Booker Prize Finalist Ali Smith is "a prose poem in praise of memory, forgiveness, getting the joke, and seizing the moment" (The New York Times) In the present, Sacha knows the world's in trouble. Her brother Robert just is trouble. Their mother and father are having trouble. Meanwhile, the world's in meltdown--and the real meltdown hasn't even started yet. In the past, a lovely summer. A different brother and sister know they're living on borrowed time. This is a story about people on the brink of change. They're family, but they think they're strangers. So: Where does family begin? And what do people who think they've got nothing in common have in common? Summer.

Summer

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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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Asha Lemmie

Following her New York Times bestselling debut Fifty Words for Rain, Asha Lemmie's next sweeping and evocative novel introduces a determined young woman’s search for the larger-than-life literary figure she believes to be her father. When tragedy forces Delphine Auber, an aspiring writer on the cusp of adulthood, from her home in postwar Paris, she seizes the opportunity to embark on the journey she's long dreamed of: finding the father she has never known. But her quest—spanning from Paris to New York’s Harlem, to Havana and Key West—is complicated by the fact that she believes him to be famed luminary Ernest Hemingway, a man just as elusive as he is iconic. She desperately yearns for his approval, as both a daughter and a writer, convinced that he holds the key to who she's truly meant to be. But what will happen if she is wrong, or if her real story falls outside of the legend of her parentage that she’s revered all her life? The Wildest Sun is a dazzling, unexpected, and transportive story about coming into adulthood—from escaping our pasts, to the stories we tell ourselves, to the ambition that drives us—as we seek to find out who we are.

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