List

A traditional American woman, a beautiful wife and mother who sells her pioneer lifestyle of raw milk and farm-fresh eggs to her millions of social media followers, suddenly awakens cold, filthy, and terrified in the brutal reality of 1805—where she must unravel whether this living nightmare is an elaborate hoax, a twisted reality show, or something far more sinister in this sensational debut novel.

My name was Natalie Heller Mills, and I was perfect at being alive.

Natalie lives a traditional lifestyle. Her charming farmhouse is rustic, her husband a handsome cowboy, her six children each more delightful than the last. So what if there are nannies and producers behind the scenes, her kitchen hiding industrial-grade fridges and ovens, her husband the Republican equivalent of a Kennedy? What Natalie’s followers—all 8 million of them—don’t know won’t hurt them. And The Angry Women? The privileged, Ivy League, coastal elite haters who call her an antifeminist iconoclast? They’re sick with jealousy. Because Natalie isn’t simply living the good life, she’s living the ideal—and just so happens to be building an empire from it.

Until one morning she wakes up in a life that isn’t hers. Her home, her husband, her children—they’re all familiar, but something’s off. Her kitchen is warmed by a sputtering fire rather than electricity, her children are dirty and strange, and her soft-handed husband is suddenly a competent farmer. Just yesterday Natalie was curating photos of homemade jam for her Instagram, and now she’s expected to haul firewood and handwash clothes until her fingers bleed. Has she become the unwitting star of a brutal reality show? Could it really be time travel? Is she being tested by God? By Satan? When Natalie suffers a brutal injury in the woods, she realizes two things: This is not her beautiful life, and she must escape by any means possible.

A gripping, electrifying novel that is as darkly funny as it is frightening, Yesteryear is a gimlet-eyed look at tradition, fame, faith, and the grand performance of womanhood.

Warm, insightful, and witty, the first book of advice from New York Times –bestselling author Jenny Lawson—aka the Bloggess

Jenny Lawson is full of contradictions. She’s a celebrated author but battles self-doubt, paralysis, and anxiety. She’s an award-winning humorist but struggles with treatment-resistant depression. The question she’s most often asked by people is “How do you do it? How do you keep going even when it feels impossible? How do you keep creating?” This book is her answer.

In How to Be Okay When Nothing Is Okay, Jenny shares one hundred humorous, heartfelt, and genuine tools and tricks that she relies on to keep her going even when her brain isn’t working properly due to depression, anxiety, and ADHD. She also offers tips to stay passionate and focused on creative endeavors, especially when everything around you is saying to give up.

With chapters like “Wash Your Brain More Than You Wash Your Bra” (sleep, you beautiful human), “Work on Easy Mode” (asking for accommodations is okay!), “Celebrate Good Times, Come On!” (make it a habit to celebrate the good things), and many more, How to Be Okay When Nothing Is Okay is a balm and companion, reminding us all that we are not alone. It’s for anyone who struggles with self-doubt, guilt, motivation, and mental blocks and wants to rekindle their passion for creating. Funny, simple, empathetic, and inspirational, it will encourage you not to just survive but to find and curate joy in the face of difficult times.

A stunning literary achievement and portrait of three women connected through one man in the aftermath of his murder—the explosive and highly anticipated debut novel from beloved and award-winning memoirist, T Kira Madden.

Birdie Chang didn’t know anything about Whidbey Island when she chose it, only that it was about as far away as she could get from her own life. She’s a woman on the run, desperate for an escape from the headlines back home and the look of concern in her girlfriend’s eyes—and from Calvin Boyer, the man who abused her as a child and who’s now resurfaced. On her way, she has an unnerving encounter with a stranger on the ferry who offers her a proposition, a sinister solution, a plan for revenge.

But Birdie isn’t the only girl Calvin harmed back then. There’s also Linzie King, a former reality TV star who recently wrote all about it in her bestselling memoir. Though the two women have never met, their stories intertwine. Once Birdie arrives on Whidbey, she finally cracks the book’s spine, only to find too much she recognizes in its pages. Soon after, on the other side of the country, Calvin’s loving mother, Mary-Beth, receives a shocking phone call from the police: her only son has been murdered.

Calvin’s death sets into motion a series of events that sends each woman on a desperate search for answers. A complex whodunnit told from alternating points of view, Whidbey is searingly perceptive and astonishingly original. Exploring the long reach of violence and our flawed systems of incarceration and rehabilitation, this is a tense and provocative debut that’s sure to incite crucial questions about the pursuit of justice and who has real power over a story: the one who lives it, or the one who tells it?

She's hard to hold onto, but he's good with his hands...Prickly, autistic, and shadowed by a scandalous past, Ruth Kabbah will always be Ravenswood's black sheep. It's a lonely life, but at least it's safe... until Evan Miller comes to town. Calm, confident, and instantly accepted by their small English town, Evan is Ruth's opposite in every way--yet he meets her suspicion with a smile, handles her awkwardness with ease, and watches her with a hunger that threatens to tear down her all her defenses. The gossips want to know how she's bewitched him. Ruth just wants to know when he'll get bored and leave. Because if there's one thing she's learned, it's that girls like her don't get happily ever afters. But when a monster from Ruth's past comes back to haunt her, she's forced to make a choice: should she trust Evan completely? Or is her heart safest alone?

If you are touched by the tongue of a snake, it is somehow good. It gives you wisdom and long life.

In Ojibwe mythology, Mishipeshu, a reptile with the head of a cat, stands sentinel at the gates of the underworld, where the mortal becomes eternal. Louise Erdrich’s remarkable story collection navigates this terrain where life and death are inextricably entwined. Python’s Kiss probes the essence of our humanity in moments both intimate and grand, inviting us to consider the nature of existence; the wonder, bravery, shame, loneliness, yearning, and terror that drive and define us.

Python’s Kiss opens with the acclaimed story “Nero,” originally published in The New Yorker, which explores the tragic transformation of a fierce and innocent spirit and the first stirrings of self-awareness. It is followed by twelve stories that exhibit the range of Louise Erdrich’s remarkable talent. In “Hollow Children,” a school bus driver experiences a terrifying realization during a freak spring blizzard. Collective consciousness and a woman’s longing for revenge transcend death in the near future “Domain.” “December 26” culminates in a terrible debt that must be paid. The final story, “The Stone,” is a reminder of our deep connection to the earth and those who came before us.

Featuring wives and husbands, spirit animals, ghosts, and talismans, betrayals and secrets, an artificial afterlife and a dangerous teenage game, Erdrich’s stories, at once intimate and universal, conjure up narrative worlds which capture our beauty and pain. Python’s Kiss is a gift from one of our greatest chroniclers of human fallibility and nobility, an imaginative and perceptive storyteller whose generosity of vision, wit, and lyricism sing from every page.

A propulsive and deeply moving novel about eternity and mortality that asks what it would mean to live forever.

Vera Van Vulkenburgh hasn’t been home in one hundred and eighty-eight years. But now Vera, forever twenty-six and able to heal from any wound, has returned to the Catskills. Whatever made her family immortal happened here, and if she can uncover it, maybe she can reverse it. After nearly two centuries—an endless sequence of unnoticed, meaningless lives and a soul-shaking incident in the desert—she longs to be released.

Posing as a newly arrived forest ranger, she quickly blends into the upstate community and learns of something curious and disturbing. A mysterious, well-funded company is snapping up local property, no matter how high the asking price. But when her brother, a fellow immortal shows up, accompanied by a woman whose face is incredibly familiar to Vera, the purpose for her return gets clouded and Vera is in a race against time to find out what has caused her condition before someone else does.

Blending the spectacular with the everyday in a tale filled with humor and warmth, The Fountain explores what gives life meaning and how our understandings of our histories shape—and cage—us.

A page-turning, unforgettable fantasy set in a city peopled with ruffians, spies, malcontents and murderers. Experience out-of-this world adventure and dangerous politics as Maggie tries to survive waking up in her favorite fictional world.

When Maggie wakes up cold, filthy and naked in a gutter, it doesn’t take her long to recognize Kair Toren. It’s a city she knows intimately from the pages of a famously unfinished dark fantasy series – one she’s been obsessively reading and re-reading, while waiting years for the final novel.

Her only tools for navigating this gritty world of rival warlords, magic and mayhem? Her encyclopedic knowledge of the plot, the setting and the characters’ ambitions and fates. But while she quickly discovers she cannot be killed (though many will try!), the same cannot be said for the living, breathing characters she’s coming to love – a motley band that includes a former lady’s maid, a deadly assassin, various outrageous magical creatures and a dangerously appealing soldier. Soon, instead of trying to return home, she finds herself enmeshed in the schemes – and attentions – of dueling princes, dukes and villains. This all while trying to save them and the kingdom of Rellas from the ending she’s seen on the a cataclysmic war.

For fans of Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Miranda July comes a whip-smart, irresistible novel about a college senior who has 48 hours to sell her recently deceased mother's surprise stash of rare pills, or suffer the consequences. 

Arvy Keening is just trying to get through the week. Tantalizingly close to leaving her college years at Westheimer University behind, all she has to do is pass her finals, pack up her life, and ship off to San Francisco for a prestigious Big Pharma internship. The problem? Arvy just found 200 hits of Molly in her dead mother's closet. And when two drug dealers come to collect what they are owed, they reveal that the pills are not Molly, but Mona—a rare pharmaceutical that induces intense orgasms. The dealers give Arvy an ultimatum: Sell 200 Monas in 48 hours or die. To aid in her seemingly impossible quest, Arvy recruits Wolf, Westheimer's resident drug dealer who also happens to be infuriatingly charming and distractingly sexy. In a race against the clock, Arvy and Wolf barrel through their college town, leaving a series of erotic shenanigans in their wake; appealing to horny co-eds, lonely barflies, and a mysterious sorority whose sisters have their own ideas for Mona's potential uses. But if Mona has a knack for unleashing visceral reactions in the body, what will it unlock in Arvy, who has been repressing grief over her mother's death for weeks? Unashamedly brash, bold, and blistering, 200 Monas is a truly one-of-a-kind read, a playful and honest examination of sexuality and grief, and a sharp, searing love letter on how to release all that's inside you.

Upward Bound is not a place anyone dreams of spending their days. The dreary adult daycare center for Los Angeles's disabled community is, for many of its clients and staff, a place of last resort. This includes Carlos, a young aide who lost his mother as a boy and now works there alongside his beloved sister Delia; Jorge, the gentle nonverbal giant whom Carlos seeks to befriend (and prevent from escaping); Tom, a beautiful young man with cerebral palsy, who pines for Ann, the summer lifeguard at the center's pool who feels out of her depth; then there's Mike, Upward Bound's director who came to L.A. to pursue an acting career but now channels his passion into staging an impressive holiday show starring the center's sorely underestimated clients. Framing these interlocking narratives - and connecting them in surprising, shattering ways - is the riveting and sometimes ironic testimony of Walter, a recent community college graduate who, after a family tragedy, must return to the company of his disabled peers.

Cat Sebastian's long-awaited foray into contemporary romance! A witty, emotional, and deliciously slow burn enemies-to-lovers romance between two costars on a popular sci-fi television series.

Simon and Charlie, actors on a long-running sci-fi show, can't stand one another. Charlie is impetuous, outgoing, and basically feral, and Simon thinks he should have stayed in reality television where he belongs. They've spent the better part of a decade quarreling over the spotlight and pretty much everything else, and everybody in the industry knows it. Now that Simon's contract is finally done, he can move to New York, start fresh with work he actually likes, and get away from Charlie.

Simon's only problem is that people might assume he's been pushed off the show due to being impossible to work with. And he is kind of difficult to work with. He doesn't get along with people—unlike Charlie, who somehow tricked everyone on the show into adoring him despite some outrageously bad on-set behavior during the show's first season. Simon would rather never have to see Charlie again, but reluctantly agrees to stage a very public friendship during the short time before he moves. When Charlie has to leave town to deal with a family emergency, this means Simon comes along. Their road trip brings Simon to places he would never have willingly chosen to visit—and he finds he's actually not having a terrible time.

The more he gets to know Charlie, the more Simon suspects he's underestimated his former coworker. Simon also realizes that after seven years, Charlie might know him better than anyone ever has. Even stranger, Charlie seems to be starting to actually like him, despite knowing him so well. Still, Simon is about to move three thousand miles away, so whatever's starting between him and Charlie can't really amount to anything... right?

The definitive, all-access biography of one of the world’s most beloved literary voices, showcasing a life as triumphant and inspiring as the stories she crafted.

To know the name Judy Blume is to know and love literature. Her influential novels turned classics—including Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret; Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing; Deenie; and Summer Sisters—touched the lives of tens of millions of adults and children. For more than fifty-five years her work has done something it rewired the world’s expectation of what literature for young people can be—frank, candid, earthy, and unafraid to show the messier sides of humanity.

But Judy Blume was an unlikely literary icon. Judith Marcia Sussman, a Jewish girl born in New Jersey to a dentist and homemaker, was a restless, thirty-year-old, stay-at-home mother of two young children when her lifelong passion for reading turned, suddenly and surprisingly, into a talent for writing. What followed was a burst of creative energy unrivaled in modern ten books (starting with Iggy's House and ending with the incendiary Forever) in just five years that reshaped literature for generations. And the emotional core of her beloved books—death, religion, coming-of-age, sexuality, bullying—are found in the experiences she herself faced as a child, many of which have never before been unpacked.

In Judy Blume, journalist, historian, and longtime Blume aficionado Mark Oppenheimer pens a beautiful, multidimensional portrait of the acclaimed author through extensive interviews with Blume herself and unrivaled access to her papers and correspondence. Oppenheimer goes deep, exploring Blume’s middle-class, 1950s upbringing; complicated childhood; varied relationships and marriages; unabashed sexual experiences; bouts of heartache and loss; and enduring legacy as a champion of free speech and contemporary literature. Oppenheimer peels back the curtain to reveal the woman behind the literary empire in all her complex, multifaceted glory—a true gift for anyone who grew up reading and loving these extraordinary books.

Professor Ember Agni is a rising star in archeology, trying to balance an unfulfilling career in academia and a crumbling marriage, all while pursuing her true passion: unearthing a lost empire that no one else believes existed. Just as she's about to give up on the ambitious expedition she spent a decade trying to fund, a message arrives from overseas. A former student claims to have found something extraordinary--an artifact that hints at the forgotten world lying beneath history's tidy surface.
With vindication finally within reach, Ember risks everything for the sake of discovery and undertakes an odyssey that will either make her name or ruin her. Driven by unwavering faith in her vision of the past, she challenges the limits of her nation, her colleagues, and herself in order to exhume the missing pieces of how humanity began. But as she journeys deep into an untouched wilderness, in dogged pursuit of a dead civilization, she collides with the wreckage of her own life.
On the brink of either discovery or destruction, Ember must choose who she wants to be, and to what kind of world she wants to belong.

One of our best writers, Lauren Groff returns with a fierce new story collection, her first since the award-winning and bestselling Florida.

Ranging from the 1950s to the present day and moving across age, class, and region - from New England to Florida to California - these nine stories reflect and expand upon a single shared theme- the ceaseless battle between the dark and light in all of us.

Among those caught in this match are a young woman suddenly responsible for her disabled sibling; a hot-tempered high school swimmer in need of an adult; a mother blinded by the loss of her family; and a banking scion endowed with a different kind of inheritance. Motivated by love, impeded by human fallibility, they try to do the right thing for as long as they can.

Precise, surprising and provocative, anchored by profound insight into human nature, Brawler reveals the repeated fracture points between love and fear, compassion and violence, reason and instinct, altruism and survival. It is a timeless, stunning achievement from one of the very best short story writers working today.

Two Japanese American men hired to investigate an art theft discover something much more sinister in turn-of-the-century California—from the Mary Higgins Clark Award–winning author of Clark and Division.

Pasadena, 1903: Eighteen-year-old Ryunosuke “Ryui” Wada staggers off the boat from Yokohama, Japan, ready to reinvent himself after the untimely deaths of his parents. Though battling loneliness and culture shock, Ryui does his best to settle into his work as an art dealer’s apprentice while adjusting to his new home. From his enigmatic photographer roommate, Jack, to the beautiful seamstress living downstairs, Ryui finds himself surrounded by colorful characters and unbelievable opportunities and is soon utterly swept up in all “Crown City” has to offer.

But tensions are seething under Pasadena’s bustling prosperity. Ryui is the victim of an anti-Japanese attack, and a painting is stolen from the studio of Toshio Aoki, Pasadena’s most successful Japanese artist, who then hires Ryui and Jack to investigate. It’s not long before their sleuthing leads them into real danger. Ryui is a naive young man in a foreign country—has he bitten off more than he can chew?

In this fish-out-of-water mystery, studded with cameos by real historical figures, Edgar Award–winner Naomi Hirahara brings to life a little-known slice of California history.

Nobel laureate and Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Beloved Toni Morrison investigates Black characters in the American literary canon and the way they shaped the nation’s collective unconscious.

In a dazzling series of lectures from her tenure as a professor at Princeton University, Toni Morrison interrogates America’s most famous works and authors, drawing a direct line from the Black bodies that built the nation to the Black characters that many of the country’s canonical white writers imagined in their work. Morrison sees these fictions as a form of creation and projection, arguing that they helped manufacture American racialidentity—these “Africanist” presences are “the shadow that makes light possible,” as Morrison writes, and the reflections of their authors’ own deepest fears, insecurities, and longings.

With profound erudition and wit, Morrison breaks wide open the American conception of race with energetic, enlivening readings of the nation’s canon, revealing that our liberation from these diminishing notions comes through language. “How,” Morrison wonders, “could one speak of profit, of economy, of labor, or progress, of suffragism, or Christianity, of the frontier, of the formation of new states, the acquisition of new lands . . . of practically anything a new nation concerns itself with—without having as a referent, at the heart of the discourse or defining its edges, the presence of Africans and/or their descendants?”

To read these lectures, collected here for the first time, is to encounter Morrison, not just the writer but also the teacher, in the most penetrating and subversive way yet. With a foreword by her son Ford Morrison and an introduction by her Princeton comparative literature colleague Claudia Brodsky, Language as Liberation is a revelatory collection that promises to redefine the American canon.