Literary Life

The epic novel Beauty Is a Wound combines history, satire, family tragedy, legend, humor, and romance in a sweeping polyphony. The beautiful Indo prostitute Dewi Ayu and her four daughters are beset by incest, murder, bestiality, rape, insanity, monstrosity, and the often vengeful undead. Kurniawan's gleefully grotesque hyperbole functions as a scathing critique of his young nation's troubled past: the rapacious offhand greed of colonialism....

When it first gets announced, the Leteo Institute's memory-alteration procedure seems too good to be true to Aaron Soto; miracle cure-alls don't tend to pop up in the Bronx projects. Aaron can't forget how he's grown up poor, how his friends all seem to shrug him off, and how his father committed suicide in their one-bedroom apartment. Then Thomas shows up. The love Aaron discovers may cost him what's left of his life. But since Aaron can't suddenly stop being gay, Leteo may be the only way out.

Once upon a time four aspiring authors met at their very first writers' conference. Ten years later they're still friends, survivors of the ultra-competitive New York publishing world. Mallory St. James is a workaholic whose best sellers support a lavish lifestyle. Tanya Mason is a single mother juggling two jobs, two kids, and too many deadlines. Faye Truett is the wife of a famous televangelist and the author of inspirational romances: No one would ever guess her explosive secret.

Kim Lord is an avant garde figure, feminist icon, and agent provocateur in the LA art scene. Her groundbreaking new exhibition, Still Lives, is comprised of self-portraits depicting herself as famous murdered women - the Black Dahlia, Chandra Levy, Nicole Brown Simpson, among many others - and the works are as compelling as they are disturbing, implicating a culture that is too accustomed to violence against women.

Allison Weiss is a typical working mother, trying to balance a business, aging parents, a demanding daughter, and a marriage. But when the website she develops takes off, she finds herself challenged to the point of being completely overwhelmed. Her husband’s becoming distant, her daughter’s acting spoiled, her father is dealing with early Alzheimer’s, and her mother’s barely dealing at all.

The sheriff's deputy at the front door brings hard news to Ree Dolly. Her father has skipped bail on charges that he ran a crystal meth lab, and the Dollys will lose their house if he doesn't show up for his next court date. Ree's father has disappeared before. The Dolly clan has worked the shadowy side of the law for generations, and arrests (and attempts to avoid them) are part of life in Rathlin Valley.

The final book in the landmark Cazalet Chronicles, recently broadcast on BBC Radio 4. It is the 1950s and as the Cazalets' beloved matriarch, the Duchy, passes away, she takes with her the last remnants of a world - of great houses and servants, of class and tradition - in which the Cazalets have thrived. Louise, now divorced, becomes entangled in a painful affair; while Polly and Clary must balance marriage and motherhood with their own ideas and ambitions.

Squeezed into a coat closet with his classmates and teacher, first grader Zach Taylor can hear gunshots ringing through the halls of his school. A gunman has entered the building, taking nineteen lives and irrevocably changing the very fabric of this close-knit community. While Zach's mother pursues a quest for justice against the shooter's parents, holding them responsible for their son's actions, Zach retreats into his super-secret hideout and loses himself in a world of books and art.

As a rebellious teenager, Honey managed to escape her father’s circle of influence and reinvent herself in a world of art and beauty, working for a high-end auction house in Los Angeles. Now in her twilight years, she decides to return home and unexpectedly falls in love. But in her family, nothing has changed. When her grandnephew Michael bursts into her life in what appears to be a drug-fueled frenzy, and her Lexus gets jacked, it’s hard to keep minding her own business. As old cruelties begin to resurface, Honey is no longer sure what she really wants—to forgive or to avenge.

Summer, 1947. Kate Herrick, a war widow, returns to her childhood home for a final visit before the house is sold. But Rose Cottage is not the idyllic paradise she remembers from her youth and someone has been there before her. As Kate uncovers an old secret that haunts the home she thought she knew, she is forced to confront a dark truth from her own past.... Beyond the weedy garden with its riot of rose bushes, nothing had changed. And someone was crossing the bridge to approach the garden gate. Someone I knew well....

Looee is forever set apart, a chimp raised by a well-meaning and compassionate human couple in Vermont who cannot conceive a baby of their own. He's not human, but with his peculiar upbringing, he is no longer like other chimps. One tragic night Looee's two natures collide, and this unique family is forever changed. At the Girdish Institute in Florida, a group of chimpanzees has been studied for decades. The work at Girdish has proved that chimps have memories and solve problems, that they can learn language and need friends, and that they build complex cultures.

For every woman who has ever fantasized about driving past her exit on the highway instead of going home to make dinner, for every woman who has ever dreamed of boarding a train to a place where no one needs constant attention - meet Maribeth Klein, a harried working mother who's so busy taking care of her husband and twins, she doesn't even realize she's had a heart attack. Afterward, surprised to discover that her recuperation seems to be an imposition on those who rely on her, Maribeth does the unthinkable: She packs a bag and leaves.

Noah wants to go home. A seemingly easy request from most four-year-olds. But as Noah's single mother, Janie, knows, nothing with Noah is ever easy. One day the preschool office calls and says Janie needs to come in to talk about Noah, and no, not later, now - and life as she knows it stops. For Jerome Anderson, life as he knows it has stopped. A deadly diagnosis has made him realize he is approaching the end of his life.

The trip of a lifetime! Rosie Lewis has her life together. A swanky job as a Michelin-starred sous chef, a loving husband and future children scheduled for exactly January 2021. That’s until she comes home one day to find her husband’s prepacked bag and a confession that he's had an affair. Heartbroken and devastated, Rosie drowns her sorrows in a glass (or three) of wine, only to discover the following morning that she has spontaneously invested in a bright pink campervan to facilitate her grand plans to travel the country.

At a suburban barbecue, a man slaps a child who is not his own. This event has a shocking ricochet effect on a group of people, mostly friends, who are directly or indirectly influenced by the incident. In this remarkable novel, Christos Tsiolkas turns his unflinching and all-seeing eye onto that which connects us all: the modern family and domestic life in the 21st century.

In the spring of 1981, the young Skinner siblings - fierce Renee, dreamy Caroline, golden boy Joe, and watchful Fiona - lose their father to a heart attack and their mother to a paralyzing depression, events that thrust them into a period they will later call “the Pause.” Caught between the predictable life they once led and an uncertain future that stretches before them, the siblings navigate the dangers and resentments of the Pause to emerge fiercely loyal and deeply connected.

Six Californians join to discuss Jane Austen's novels. Over the six months they meet, marriages are tested, affairs begin, unsuitable arrangements become suitable, and love happens. With her finely sighted eye for the frailties of human behavior and her finely tuned ear for the absurdities of social intercourse, Fowler has never been wittier nor her characters more appealing. The result is a delicious dissection of modern relationships.

Author and artist Nava Atlas presents a treasury of intimate glimpses into the unfolding creative writing process across fifteen brilliant careers in women’s literature and relates their stories to women writers of today. Through their journals, letters, and diaries, we get to know the struggles and triumphs of Louisa May Alcott, Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Gwendolyn Brooks, Octavia E. Butler, Willa Cather, Madeleine LEngle, Edna Ferber, Zora Neale Hurston, L.M. Montgomery, Anais Nin, George Sand, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Edith Wharton, and Virginia Woolf.

At the age of 12, Sophie Caco is sent from her impoverished village of Croix-des-Rosets to New York, to be reunited with a mother she barely remembers. There she discovers secrets that no child should ever know and a legacy of shame that can be healed only when she returns to Haiti - to the women who first reared her. What ensues is a passionate journey through a landscape charged with the supernatural and scarred by political violence in a novel that bears witness to the traditions, suffering, and wisdom of an entire people.

Meet the Pomeroys: a church-going family living in a too-red house in a Texas college town. Roger, the patriarch, has impulsively gone back to school, only to find his future ambitions at odds with the temptations of the present. His wife, Georgia, tries to keep things afloat at home, but she's been feeding the bill drawer with unopened envelopes for months and never manages to confront its swelling contents. In an attempt to climb out of the holes they've dug, Roger and Georgia make a series of choices that have catastrophic consequences for their three children