What kinds of hunger are acceptable? In what ways are domesticity, motherhood, or even femininity itself damning? Also, wouldn’t it be cool to transform into a deer? These short stories are AMAZING.
“An exceptionally beautiful book about loneliness, labor, and survival.“—Carmen Maria Machado
With a warm yet political humor, Ukraine's most famous novelist presents a balanced and illuminating portrait of modern conflict.
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD LONGLIST
The first English-language story collection from "one of Iran's most important living fiction writers" (Guardian), "a playful, whip-smart literary conjuror: a Kundera or Rushdie of post-Khomeini Iran" (Wall Street Journal)
A sublime, sweeping, cross-country (and bi-coastal) American epic about two sisters and their stitched together family. Alternating immense and intimate and ultimutley unforgettable. Easily one of the best books of 2020, which sure needed it.
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Longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize
"Achieves a form of literary alchemy that mesmerizes."--The New York Times
"A pleasure to follow [and] a lovely flexing of Griffith’s strengths in short form." —The New York Times Book Review
“Spectacular—I've been waiting years for this book to exist.” —Maria Dahvana Headley, author of Beowulf: A New Translation
Shortlisted for the Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize
Homage to Jean Genet's antihero and a brilliant reimagining of the ancient form of tragedy, Querelle of Roberval, winner of the Marquis de Sade Prize, is a wildly imaginative story of justice, passion, and murderous revenge.
* 2022 Republic of Consciousness Prize, Longlist.
* ABA "Indie Next List" pick for March 2022.
* 2022 Best Young Australian Novelists awards, Winner.
* Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction, Shortlist.
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WINNER OF THE GOVERNOR GENERAL'S LITERARY AWARD FOR FICTION
SHORTLISTED FOR THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORKER - THE GLOBE AND MAIL - VULTURE - CBC - GLAMOUR - READER'S DIGEST CANADA "True and newly alive." --Los Angeles Times
About one woman’s fine, hard life at the racetrack, Kick the Latch–with its ruthless concision and artful mysteries–is lightning in a bottle
The March 11, 2011, earthquake and subsequent tsunami that ravaged Japan lasted a mere six minutes. But the fallout--the aftershocks, the Fukushima nuclear disaster, the country-wide devastation--from this catastrophic event and the trauma experienced by those who survived it is ongoing, if not permanent.
"Gorgeous."--The New York Times - Best Books of 2022 lists: NYPL, School Library Journal, The Globe and Mail, Indigo - JLG Gold Standard Selection - Moonbeam Children's Book Award Winner - Kids Indie Next Pick
"[The Doloriad] just might be what your rotten little heart deserves." —J. Robert Lennon, The New York Times Book Review
One of Vulture's Best Books of 2022. Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2022 by i-D, Cosmopolitan, Thrillist, Lit Reactor, and Lit Hub.
On Hell transcribes a body broken by American empire, that of ex-con Rafael Luis Estrada Requena, hacking itself away from contemporary society. Johanna Hedva, author of "Sick Woman Theory," takes the ferocious compulsion to escape (from capitalism, from the limits of the body-machine, from Earth) and channels it into an evisceration of oppression and authority.
A young woman crosses over from one world to another in search of her brother. Poetic and sparse and unforgettable. Makins is a protagonist you will take with you wherever you go. Like, say, the underworld.
Nash writes with psychological precision, capturing Lilith's volatile shifts between directionless frustration, self-destructiveness, ambivalence, and vulnerable need. A complex, impressive exploration of obsession and desire. -Publishers Weekly (starred review)
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Writing about music is always so deeply personal but Abdurraqib makes us all feel like we’re right there with him, piling into some junker to drive 6 hours and see the hometown band that somehow made it big. Essays as insightful as they are full of heart.
A genre-expanding collection of stories that Publishers Weekly calls “perplexingly captivating” and “astonishing.”
Barnabus, part mouse-part elephant, knows he isn’t perfect. What he longs for isn’t perfection… it’s freedom. Our friend fearlessly escapes with the help of other “failed projects”, each wonderously conceived and drawn.
Winner of the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize • Winner of the Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Award
Shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award • Shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction • Shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize
A rumination on the color blue that is at once way, way more than that… and exactly that. Scraps of philosophy, literary criticism, anecdotes, confessions and sex. All woven together into something like a narrative. Visceral and profound.
You can find Lispector’s larger than life persona in even her humblest protagonists. Brazil’s “rockstar” author’s stories range from teen infatuation to ‘what has become of me?’ end of life reflection. There’s nothing else out there like Lispector.
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A supremely funny, dark, dreadful, deeply Irish novel unlike anything you’ve ever read. There are spoilers in the introduction, fair warning. As good as Beckett or Joyce if not better, this is my favorite novel of all-time. Go on and properly disarrange your senses.
(This book cannot be returned)
Pitch black socio-philosophical fable that is at times hilarious and disturbing with more heft than any 100 page novella has any right to possess.
Gorgeous cover, too, right?
Guy is silenced (and coerced) by a political apparatus that will do anything to enforce its beliefs. First written in 1940 and not at all applicable to this day and age (all sarcasm).
A great, thrilling read.
Q: Do you know if this is a nice bear?
A: The nicest bear you will ever meet.
Essential reading for an age of rising facism. Ugresic’s acid-laced essays bait their hooks with pop culture references only to frag the reader down into thornier polemics.
The entire Baslas/new crobuzon ‘trilogy’ is well worth your time but start here. Dramy, weird as f**k, dark and bitingly funny. There are cactus people and a moth that shits nightmares.
One of the best and funniest writers today mixes fiction and non-fiction to satirize academia and examine Jewish identity and politics especially as cast to the rural wastes of “Corbindale” a fictional college in western NY.
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The greatest collection of essays, poems, and short fiction gathered and curated each year. The best place to sample writers you always wanted to read in bite-sized portions.
A gripping, horrifying read full of spirituality, song and historical anti-racist weaponry. Full of apocalyptic American imagery (take one look at that cover) and heroic resistance fighters.
Flip to a random story and read a few of these sentences (I personally suggest Fifty Ways to Eat Your Lover, pg. 69) If the prose doesn’t sing for you, well, I’m awfully sorry. And if you dig this try Museum of the Weird.
A propulsive thriller that deftly deconstructs the end of the Vietnam War, a war like all modern wars never truly ended. At its core this is a story about friendship and love. Bleak but beautiful.
Imagine writing a book so perfect you essentially drop the mic and walk away from fiction forever. The book everyone wishes they’d written and SO FREAKING WEIRD. Read a few pages and be entranced.
The greatest novel ever written. (Grossman’s translation is amazing. Check out her book on translation in our reference section!)
Blessedly strange and unsettlingly pretty. Think Katherine Dunn if her geeks were suburban girls growing up alongside exasperated robots and lecherous wizards. On my desert island list of books for sure.
Do you wish Squid Game was a book? King’s best novel finds 100 teens raffled into the highest possible stakes reality competition where only one person can win and everyone else dies. Written forty years ago and fresh as a daisy.
When you are small and building the world, it’s the hypothetical thing in a dark closet that frightens you. When you get a little older and begin to grasp what looks like the world’s limitless potential, mythologies take hold. It’s then that the vampires and witches and ghosts occupy the overactive parts of your brain. Then you get older still–put down the foundations of a career, start a family–and the world’s seemingly irreconcilable complexities darken your mind. And what scares you then? What keeps you up at night? This book. This book right here. Leave the World Behind is terrifying and I can’t stop thinking about it. I almost want to go back to before I read this family’s summer vacation gone spectacularly awry. Or at the very least to a time when all there was to be frightened of were simple bogeymen.