New Literary Fiction

Set in the forest in northern New Zealand, Mila is a young woman descended from healers. A family death causes her terrible guilt and sets her on a path away from home and to the distant city. Her friend Tommy, the quirky boy next door who makes models from bones, helps to bring her home, where she belongs.

Roller-coastering from the mournful to the comical, Watson's work is both embedded in a literary heritage tied to place and at home in a universal literature of the absurd. His stories waltz with lovely and strange melancholy, infused with wit and astonishing beauty. There Is Happiness embodies the twisted hilarity and undeniable grace of an underrecognized literary genius.

A dazzling debut about family, home, and grief, The Floating World takes listeners into the heart of Hurricane Katrina with the story of the Boisdores, whose roots stretch back nearly to the foundation of New Orleans. Though the storm is fast approaching the Louisiana coast, Cora, the family's fragile elder daughter, refuses to leave the city, forcing her parents, Joe Boisdore, an artist descended from a freed slave, and his white "uptown" wife, Dr. Tess Eshleman, to evacuate without her, setting off a chain of events that leaves their marriage in shambles and Cora catatonic.

Decades ago in Brooklyn, three girls demonstrated against the Vietnam War, and each followed a distinct path into adulthood. Helen became a violent revolutionary. Val wrote a controversial book, Bright Morning of Pain, which was essentially a novelization of Helen’s all-too-short but vibrant life. And Olive became an editor and writer, now comfortably settled with her husband, Griff, in modern-day New Haven. In Conscience, Alice Mattison paints the nuanced relationships between the palpable personalities of Olive, Griff, and Jean with her signature wit and precision.

When the story opens, the eponymous hero of Rudolfo Anaya's novel is in an ambulance en route to a hospital for crippled children in the New Mexican desert. A poor boy from Albuquerque, 16-year-old Tortuga takes his name from the odd, turtle-shaped mountain that is rumored to possess miraculous curative powers. Tortuga is paralyzed, and not even his mother's fervent prayers can heal him. But under the mountain's watchful gaze, with the support of fellow patients, he begins the Herculean task of breaking out of his shell and becoming whole again.

For crooked politicians and white-collar criminals looking to avoid either prison or a deadlier form of payback, there’s Exit Strategy. With just one call, they can fake your death, give you a new name and face, and launder whatever ill-gotten funds you need to establish a new life on the other side of the world. When Jordan Parrish, the brilliant founder of a medical technology start-up, made the call, he thought he had no other way out. But after his exit, he began to wonder about the circumstances that led him to make that decision: Was someone working against him?

A new and long-awaited novel exploring what happens when untested people are put to a hard test and in its aftermath find themselves in a newly uncertain world.

When June arrives on the coast of New England, baby in arms, an untrustworthy man by her side, Mabel - who rents them a cabin - senses trouble. A few days later, the girl and her child are abandoned. June is soon placed with Mabel's friend, Iris, in town, and her life becomes entwined with a number of locals who have known one another for decades.

Tim Welch is a popular history teacher at the Montague Academy, an exclusive private school in Brooklyn Heights. As he says, "I was an odd-looking, gawky kid but I like to think my rocky start forced me to develop empathy, kindness, and a tendency to be enthusiastic. All of this, I'm now convinced, helped in my quest to be worthy of Kate Oliver." Now, Kate is not inherently ordinary.

There is more to a princess than stunning looks, soprano pipes, and an inherent tenderness toward all creation. There is more to freeing a king’s daughter from a curse than riding up singing, lips puckered. Fairy stories leave out too much, true love is a complicated business, and for this there is not always an evil stepmother to blame. Princess stories are simply better when they are expanded, embellished, and arbitrarily annotated.

Monkeys is the remarkable story of a decade in the life of the Vincents, a colorful Irish Catholic family from the Boston suburbs. On the surface, they seem happy with their vivacious mother Rosie at the helm. But underneath, the Vincents struggle to maintain the appearance of wealth and stability while dealing with the effects of their father’s alcoholism. When a sudden accident strikes, their love for one another is tested like never before.

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Since 1944, when she published her first story, Elizabeth Spencer has been acclaimed as a writer of short fiction in the great tradition of Welty, Chopin, and Mansfield. The Southern Woman: New and Selected Fiction, her first collection in almost fifteen years, again makes available the author's most masterful stories and novellas, including "The Light in the Piazza" and publishes more than ten new stories for the first time.

Jewell Parker Rhodes follows up her acclaimed Voodoo Dreams with a present-day mystery surrounding the gifts of an ancestor of the Voodoo Queen. Doctor Marie Levant can't explain why she's drawn to New Orleans, or why it's comforting and unsettling at the same time. And she can't shake her haunting dreams. But when she delivers a dead woman's baby, Marie knows malevolent forces are at work, and it's up to her to stop them.

Somewhere in the United Kingdom, an eight year old boy is removed from his home in the middle of the night. He is a victim of an extraordinary experiment. In an attempt to reform society, the government has divided the population into four groups, each group representing a different personality type.

Nate Myers graduated from UCLA medical school at the top of his class, ready to follow in the footsteps of his father, a superstar cardiothoracic surgeon. Six years later, Nate's career is being ruined by a malpractice suit. Questioning himself for the first time, he retreats to a Montana cattle ranch to visit his uncle and gain perspective. There he meets a beautiful young woman named Avelina who teaches him more than he ever knew about matters of the heart.

1946: At the apogee of the American Century, the confidence inspired by victory in World War II has spawned a culture of suffocating conformity in thrall to the cult of masculine privilege. In the hardscrabble industrial city of Trenton, New Jersey, a woman made strong by wartime factory work kills her army veteran husband in a domestic brawl, disposes of his body, and assumes his identity. As Abe Kunstler, he secures a job in a wire rope factory, buys a car, and successfully woos Inez, an alcoholic dime dancer. He makes a home with her, but for Abe, this is not enough: to complete his transformation, he needs a son.

Set in an early New England colony, the novel shows the terrible impact a single, passionate act has on the lives of three members of the community: the fiery, tortured Reverend Dimmesdale; the obsessed, vengeful Chillingworth; and the defiant Hester Prynne, who, unwilling to name her partner in adultery, is condemned to wear a scarlet "A" on the breast of her gown for the remainder of her life.

Down on his luck and still pining for his ex-wife, South Carolina taxidermist Romie Futch spends his evenings drunkenly surfing the Internet before passing out on his couch. In a last-ditch attempt to pay his mortgage, he replies to an ad and becomes a research subject in an experiment conducted by the Center for Cybernetic Neuroscience in Atlanta, Georgia.

A questo autore dall'inconfondibile vena pessimista e cruda, dall'originale scrittura raffinata e apparentemente naturale, tratta dal linguaggio parlato, ma piena di intrusioni e slanci d'autore, appartiene una serie di romanzi dimenticati, a metà tra il romanzo criminale e il western. A questo filone, quasi sfociante nel dramma antirazzista, che allora furoreggiava in certo cinema e in certo teatro americano alla Tennessee Williams, appartiene "Rossa".