Spooky, dark academia, transitional, etc.

Veronica Roth

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

California

From #1 New York Times bestselling author Veronica Roth, When Among Crows is a contemporary fantasy set in Chicago, where creatures from Slavic lore are real and among us, and is a story about the families we build—and the ones we destroy.

When among Crows

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Sylvie Perry

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Virginia

For fans of Riley Sager, The Hawthorne School is a twisty psychological suspense about the lengths one mother will go for her child, inspired by present-day obsession with cults and true crime. Claudia Morgan is overwhelmed. She's a single parent trying the best that she can, but her four-year-old son, Henry, is a handful--for her and for his preschool. When Claudia hears about a school with an atypical teaching style near her Chicagoland home, she has to visit. The Hawthorne School is beautiful and has everything she dreams of for Henry: time to play outside, music, and art. The head of the school, Zelma, will even let Claudia volunteer to cover the cost of tuition. The school is good for Henry: his "behavioral problems" disappear, and he comes home subdued instead of rageful. But there's something a bit off about the school, its cold halls, and its enigmatic headmistress. When Henry brings home stories of ceremonies in the woods and odd rules, Claudia's instincts tell her that something isn't quite right, and she begins to realize she's caught in a web of manipulations and power. The author's work as a psychotherapist, with a focus on narcissistic manipulation and addictive power dynamics, guides this exploration of a young mother wanting to do the best for her child.

The Hawthorne School

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Mariana Enriquez

Megan McDowell

Texas

Stories

SHORTLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE • “The lauded Argentine author of What We Lost in the Fire returns with enthralling stories conjured from literary sorcery” (O: The Oprah Magazine), in the tradition of Shirley Jackson and Jorge Luis Borges. KIRKUS PRIZE FINALIST • “Mariana Enriquez’s stories are smoky, carnal, and dazzling.”—Lauren Groff, author of Matrix and Fates and Furies Mariana Enriquez has been critically lauded for her unconventional and sociopolitical stories of the macabre. Populated by unruly teenagers, crooked witches, homeless ghosts, and hungry women, they walk the uneasy line between urban realism and horror. The stories in her new collection are as terrifying as they are socially conscious, and press into being the unspoken—fetish, illness, the female body, the darkness of human history—with bracing urgency. A woman is sexually obsessed with the human heart; a lost, rotting baby crawls out of a backyard and into a bedroom; a pair of teenage girls can’t let go of their idol; an entire neighborhood is cursed to death when it fails to respond correctly to a moral dilemma. Written against the backdrop of contemporary Argentina, and with a resounding tenderness toward those in pain, in fear, and in limbo, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed is Mariana Enriquez at her most sophisticated, and most chilling.

The Dangers of Smoking in Bed

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Fall Recs

Kurt Vonnegut

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Colorado

A Novel

“Vonnegut is George Orwell, Dr. Caligari and Flash Gordon compounded into one writer . . . a zany but moral mad scientist.”—Time Mother Night is a daring challenge to our moral sense. American Howard W. Campbell, Jr., a spy during World War II, is now on trial in Israel as a Nazi war criminal. But is he really guilty? In this brilliant book rife with true gallows humor, Vonnegut turns black and white into a chilling shade of gray with a verdict that will haunt us all. “A great artist.”—Cincinnati Enquirer “A shaking up in the kaleidoscope of laughter . . . Reading Vonnegut is addictive!”—Commonweal

Mother Night

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Ohio

“Relentlessly fun to read.”—Dave Eggers • A collection of fourteen previously unpublished short stories from one of the most original writers in all of American fiction In this series of perfectly rendered vignettes, written just as he was starting to find his comic voice, Kurt Vonnegut paints a warm, wise, and funny portrait of life in post–World War II America—a world where squabbling couples, high school geniuses, misfit office workers, and small-town lotharios struggle to adapt to changing technology, moral ambiguity, and unprecedented affluence. Here are tales both cautionary and hopeful, each brimming with Vonnegut’s trademark humor and profound humanism. A family learns the downside of confiding their deepest secrets into a magical invention. A man finds himself in a Kafkaesque world of trouble after he runs afoul of the shady underworld boss who calls the shots in an upstate New York town. A quack psychiatrist turned “murder counselor” concocts a novel new outlet for his paranoid patients. While these stories reflect the anxieties of the postwar era that Vonnegut was so adept at capturing—and provide insight into the development of his early style—collectively, they have a timeless quality that makes them just as relevant today as when they were written. It’s impossible to imagine any of these pieces flowing from the pen of another writer; each in its own way is unmistakably, quintessentially Vonnegut. Featuring a foreword by author and longtime Vonnegut confidant Sidney Offit and illustrated with Vonnegut’s characteristically insouciant line drawings, Look at the Birdie is an unexpected gift for readers who thought his unique voice had been stilled forever—and serves as a terrific introduction to his short fiction for anyone who has yet to experience his genius. Includes these never-before-published stories: “Confido” “FUBAR” “Shout About It from the Housetops” “Ed Luby’s Key Club” “A Song for Selma” “Hall of Mirrors” “The Nice Little People” “Hello, Red” “Little Drops of Water” “The Petrified Ants” “The Honor of a Newsboy” “Look at the Birdie” “King and Queen of the Universe” “The Good Explainer” “[Look at the Birdie] brings us the late writer’s young voice as he skewers—sometimes gently, always lethally—post World War II America.”—The Boston Globe

Look at the Birdie

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A collection of Vonnegut's shorter works.

Wisconsin

Tender stories of love, incisive essays on human greed and misery, and imaginative tales of futuristic happenings reveal Vonnegut's versatility and vision

Welcome to the Monkey House

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Kurt Vonnegut Dial Press Paperbacks

Katarzyna Boni

Mark Ordon

Massachusetts

Workshops on Dying

Oral history of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, and the Fukushima accident in a style resembling Svetlana Alexievich

Ganbare!

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Kristin Kobes Du Mez

How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation

"A scholar of American Christianity answers perhaps the most bewildering question of our time: Why are evangelicals "the Donald's" most fervent supporters? Donald Trump is a libertine who lacks even basic knowledge of the Christian faith. Yet in 2016 he won 81 percent of the white evangelical vote, and continues to rely on white evangelicals as his base of support. While we assume the religious right has pragmatic reasons for backing Trump, in truth he represents the fulfillment of evangelicals' most deeply held values. As historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez demonstrates, American evangelicals have worked for decades to replace the Jesus of the Gospels with an idol of rugged masculinity and Christian nationalism-or, in the words of one modern chaplain, with "a spiritual badass." Trump is hardly the first flashy celebrity to capture evangelicals' hearts and minds, having followed the path blazed by, among others, John Wayne, Oliver North, and Mel Gibson. A revelatory account of a uniquely influential subculture, Jesus and John Wayne incisively reveals why evangelicals have rallied behind patriarchal power and the least- Christian president in American history"--

Jesus and John Wayne

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Eula Biss

Connecticut

An Inoculation

"On Immunity is a book I've recommended too many times to count--a searching, empathetic, ultimately unassailable argument, not just for vaccination but for thoroughly acknowledging our interdependence, and for all that becomes necessary and possible once we do. Written before COVID, it nonetheless speaks directly to the concerns of the pandemic era--to the fact that we are dangerous as well as vulnerable, to the way collective well-being and individual self-interest are configured at odds to one another when they are fundamentally intertwined."--Jia Tolentino

In this bold, fascinating book, Eula Biss addresses our fear of the government, the medical establishment, and what may be in our children's air, food, mattresses, medicines, and vaccines. Reflecting on her own experience as a new mother, she suggests that we cannot immunize our children, or ourselves, against the world. As she explores the metaphors surrounding immunity, Biss extends her conversations with other mothers to meditations on the myth of Achilles, Voltaire'sCandide, Bram Stoker'sDracula, Rachel Carson'sSilent Spring, Susan Sontag'sAIDS and Its Metaphors, and beyond.On Immunity is an inoculation against our fear and a moving account of how we are all interconnected-our bodies and our fates.

On Immunity

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NF Wishlist

Mariner Books/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt paperbacks

Philip K. Dick

Lovely, like-new, unread copy with some very light, barely discernible pageblock discoloration, as pictured.

Vermont

"I have never seen [its] theme handled with greater technical dexterity or given more psychological meaning."--Fantasy and Science Fiction

When a routine tour of a particle accelerator goes awry, Jack Hamilton and the rest of his tour group find themselves in a world ruled by Old Testament morality, where the smallest infraction can bring about a plague of locusts. Escape from that world is not the end, though, as they plunge into a Communist dystopia and a world where everything is an enemy.

Philip K. Dick was aggressively individualistic and no worldview is safe from his acerbic and hilarious take downs. Eye in the Sky blends the thrills and the jokes to craft a startling morality lesson hidden inside a comedy.

Eye in the Sky

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Roger Zelazny

In this collaboration with Roger Zelazny, an armless and legless painter must undertake a pilgrimage through a nuclear war-ravaged America in a search for the God of Wrath, whose picture he has been commissioned to paint.

Deus Irae

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God is not dead, he has merely been exiled to an extraterrestrial planet. And it is on this planet that God meets Herb Asher and convinces him to help retake Earth from the demonic Belial. Featuring virtual reality, parallel worlds, and interstellar travel, The Divine Invasion blends philosophy and adventure in a way few authors can achieve. As the middle novel of Dick’s VALIS trilogy, The Divine Invasion plays a pivotal role in answering the questions raised by the first novel, expanding that world while exploring just how much anyone can really know—even God himself. Over a career that spanned three decades, Philip K. Dick (1928–1982) wrote 121 short stories and 45 novels, establishing himself as one of the most visionary authors of the twentieth century. His work is included in the Library of America and has been translated into more than twenty-five languages. Eleven works have been adapted to film, including Blade Runner (based on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), Total Recall, Minority Report, and A Scanner Darkly.

The Divine Invasion

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PKD Shelf

Ursula. K Le Guin

Book is brand new. No sign of damage or wear. Paperback 

Summary: 

With a new introduction by Kelly Link, the Locus Award–winning science fiction novel by legendary author Ursula K. Le Guin, set in a world where one man’s dreams rewrite the future.

During a time racked by war and environmental catastrophe, George Orr discovers his dreams alter reality. George is compelled to receive treatment from Dr. William Haber, an ambitious sleep psychiatrist who quickly grasps the immense power George holds. After becoming adept at manipulating George’s dreams to reshape the world, Haber seeks the same power for himself. George—with some surprising help—must resist Haber’s attempts, which threaten to destroy reality itself.

A classic of the science fiction genre, The Lathe of Heaven is prescient in its exploration of the moral risks when overwhelming power is coupled with techno-utopianism.

Michigan

Vibrantly repackaged in a stunning new format, this classic science fiction novel offers "a rare and powerful synthesis of poetry and science, reason and emotion" ("The New York Times"). In the year 2002, George Orr discovers his dreams can--and do--change the world.

The Lathe of Heaven

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Yu Chen

Regina Kanyu Wang

Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

Washington

A Collection of Chinese Science Fiction and Fantasy in Translation from a Visionary Team of Female and Nonbinary Creators

From an award-winning team of authors, editors, and translators comes a groundbreaking short story collection that explores the expanse of Chinese science fiction and fantasy.In The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories, you can dine at a restaurant at the end of the universe, cultivate to immortality in the high mountains, watch roses perform Shakespeare, or arrive at the island of the gods on the backs of giant fish to ensure that the world can bloom.Written, edited, and translated by a female and nonbinary team, these stories have never before been published in English and represent both the richly complicated past and the vivid future of Chinese science fiction and fantasy.Time travel to a winter's day on the West Lake, explore the very boundaries of death itself, and meet old gods and new heroes in this stunning new collection.

The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories

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Anton Hur

Arizona

Negotiating the terrain of Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun and Emily St. John Mandel's Sea of Tranquility, a brilliant, haunting speculative novel from a #1 New York Times bestselling translator that sets out to answer the question: What does it mean to be human in a world where technology is quickly catching up to biology? In a near-future world, a new technological therapy is quickly eradicating cancer. The body's cells are entirely replaced with nanites--robot or android cells which not only cure those afflicted but leaves them virtually immortal. Literary researcher Yonghun teaches an AI how to understand poetry and creates a living, thinking machine he names Panit, meaning Beloved, in honor of his husband. When Yonghun--himself a recipient of nanotherapy--mysteriously vanishes into thin air and then just as suddenly reappears, the event raises disturbing questions. What happened to Yonghun, and though he's returned, is he really himself anymore? When Dr. Beeko, the scientist who holds the patent to the nanotherapy technology, learns of Panit, he transfers its consciousness from the machine into an android body, giving it freedom and life. As Yonghun, Panit, and other nano humans thrive--and begin to replicate--their development will lead them to a crossroads and a choice with existential consequences. Exploring the nature of intelligence and the unexpected consequences of progress, the meaning of personhood and life, and what we really have to fear from technology and the future, Toward Eternity is a gorgeous, thought-provoking novel that challenges the notion of what makes us human--and how love survives even the end of that humanity.

Toward Eternity

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Scifi + Speculative Fiction

Anne Berest

Tina Kover

Illinois

A MAY 2023 INDIE NEXT PICK
A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2023

WINNER OF THE AMERICAN CHOIX GONCOURT PRIZE
WINNER OF THE PRIX RENAUDOT DES LYCÉENS
WINNER OF THE ELLE READERS PRIZE
FINALIST FOR THE GONCOURT PRIZE

Anne Berest's The Postcard is among the most acclaimed and beloved French novels of recent years. Luminous and gripping to the very last page, it is an enthralling investigation into family secrets, a poignant tale of mothers and daughters, and a vivid portrait of twentieth-century Parisian intellectual and artistic life.

January, 2003. Together with the usual holiday cards, an anonymous postcard is delivered to the Berest family home. On the front, a photo of the Opéra Garnier in Paris. On the back, the names of Anne Berest's maternal great-grandparents, Ephraïm and Emma, and their children, Noémie and Jacques--all killed at Auschwitz.

Fifteen years after the postcard is delivered, Anne, the heroine of this novel, is moved to discover who sent it and why. Aided by her chain-smoking mother, family members, friends, associates, a private detective, a graphologist, and many others, she embarks on a journey to discover the fate of the Rabinovitch family: their flight from Russia following the revolution, their journey to Latvia, Palestine, and Paris. What emerges is a moving saga of a family devastated by the Holocaust and partly restored through the power of storytelling that shatters long-held certainties about Anne's family, her country, and herself.

The Postcard

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Kristin Hannah

Mesmerizing from the first page to the last, Winter Garden is one woman’s sweeping, heartbreaking story of love, loss, and redemption. At once an epic love story set in World War II Russia and an intimate portrait of contemporary mothers and daughters poised at the crossroads of their lives, it explores the heartbreak of war, the cost of survival and the ultimate triumph of the human spirit. It is a novel that will haunt the reader long after the last page is turned. 1941. Leningrad, a once magical city besieged by war, cut off from aid, buried in snow. A city full of women desperate to save their children and themselves... 2000. Loss and old age have taken a terrible toll on Anya Whitson. At last, she will reach out to her estranged daughters. In a halting, uncertain voice, she begins to weave a fable about a beautiful Russian girl who lived in Leningrad a lifetime ago... Nina and Meredith sit spellbound at their mother’s bedside, listening to a story that spans more than sixty years and moves from the terrors of war-torn Leningrad under siege to modern-day Alaska. In a quest to uncover the truth behind the story, Nina and Meredith discover a secret so shocking, so impossible to believe, it shakes the foundation of their family and changes who they believe they are. “Another powerful story of family love, and strong women...a fascinating story that weaves fairy tales into reality, fairy tales that don’t always have the expected endings.”—The Herald-News “...a gripping read. Hannah’s audience will find plenty to discuss in this enthralling entry.”—Booklist

Winter Garden

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Toshikazu Kawaguchi

If you could go back, who would you want to meet? In a small back alley of Tokyo, there is a café that has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. Local legend says that this shop offers something else besides coffee--the chance to travel back in time. Over the course of one summer, four customers visit the café in the hopes of making that journey. But time travel isn't so simple, and there are rules that must be followed. Most important, the trip can last only as long as it takes for the coffee to get cold. Heartwarming, wistful, mysterious and delightfully quirky, Toshikazu Kawaguchi's internationally bestselling novel explores the age-old question: What would you change if you could travel back in time?

Before the Coffee Gets Cold

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Winter Recs

Mostly books translated into English by women and books authored by women that are translated.

More can be found at womenintranslation.org!

Monika Kim

Kentucky

Crying in H-Mart meets My Sister, the Serial Killer in this feminist psychological horror about the making of a female serial killer from a Korean-American perspective. Ji-won’s life tumbles into disarray in the wake of her Appa’s extramarital affair and subsequent departure. Her mother, distraught. Her younger sister, hurt and confused. Her college freshman grades, failing. Her dreams, horrifying… yet enticing. In them, Ji-won walks through bloody rooms full of eyes. Succulent blue eyes. Salivatingly blue eyes. Eyes the same shape and shade as George’s, who is Umma’s obnoxious new boyfriend. George has already overstayed his welcome in her family’s claustrophobic apartment. He brags about his puffed-up consulting job, ogles Asian waitresses while dining out, and acts condescending toward Ji-won and her sister as if he deserves all of Umma’s fawning adoration. No, George doesn’t deserve anything from her family. Ji-won will make sure of that. For no matter how many victims accumulate around her campus or how many people she must deceive and manipulate, Ji-won’s hunger and her rage deserve to be sated. A brilliantly inventive, subversive novel about a young woman unraveling, Monika Kim’s The Eyes Are the Best Part is a story of a family falling apart and trying to find their way back to each other, marking a bold new voice in horror that will leave readers mesmerized and craving more.

The Eyes Are the Best Part

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Linn Ullmann

Nevada

One of the New York Times Book Review's 100 Notable Books of 2014!

Ullmann's characters are complex and paradoxical: neither fully guilty nor fully innocent
 
Siri Brodal, a chef and restaurant owner, is married to Jon Dreyer, a famous novelist plagued by writer's block. Siri and Jon have two daughters, and together they spend their summers on the coast of Norway, in a mansion belonging to Jenny Brodal, Siri's stylish and unforgiving mother.
 
Siri and Jon's marriage is loving but difficult, and troubled by painful secrets. They have a strained relationship with their elder daughter, Alma, who struggles to find her place in the family constellation. When Milla is hired as a nanny to allow Siri to work her long hours at the restaurant and Jon to supposedly meet the deadline on his book, life in the idyllic summer community takes a dire turn. One rainy July night, Milla disappears without a trace. After her remains are discovered and a suspect is identified, everyone who had any connection with her feels implicated in her tragedy and haunted by what they could have done to prevent it.
 
The Cold Song is a story about telling stories and about how life is continually invented and reinvented.

Shelves by Anne Clements

Anne Clements

Fall Recs

Kurt Vonnegut Dial Press Paperbacks

NF Wishlist

PKD Shelf

Scifi + Speculative Fiction

Winter Recs

Women in Translation

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Shelves by Anne Clements

Anne Clements

Fall Recs

Kurt Vonnegut Dial Press Paperbacks

NF Wishlist

PKD Shelf

Scifi + Speculative Fiction

Winter Recs

Women in Translation