Visionary Fiction

Henry is a middle-aged, happily married man in the 20th century. After suffering a sudden heart attack, Henry finds himself in the unknown realm of the afterlife. Lost, alone, and confused, he meets Croton. As they embark on their journey together, Croton opens Henry’s eyes to all the beauty of his new reality and all the exploring that awaits him. But not everything is sunshine and rainbows. Henry eventually learns who Croton really is—and that’s when their adventure truly begins.

For decades, the singular and provocative paintings by Cree artist Kent Monkman have featured a recurring character—an alter ego of sorts, a shape-shifting, time-travelling elemental being named Miss Chief Eagle Testickle. Though we have glimpsed her across the years, and on countless canvases, it is finally time to hear her story, in her own words. And, in doing so, to hear the whole history of Turtle Island anew.

Satantango, the novel that inspired Béla Tarr’s classic film, is proof that the devil has all the good times. Set in an isolated hamlet, the novel unfolds over the course of a few rain-soaked days. Only a dozen inhabitants remain in the bleak village, rank with the stench of failed schemes, betrayals, failure, infidelity, sudden hopes, and aborted dreams. “Their world,” in the words of the translator George Szirtes is “rough and ready, lost somewhere between the cosmic and tragic, in one small insignificant corner of the cosmos. Theirs is the dance of death.”

Borrowing from painting’s fresco technique to make an original literary double-take, it's a fast-moving, genre-bending conversation between forms, times, truths, and fictions. There’s a Renaissance artist of the 1460s. There’s the child of a child of the 1960s. Two tales of love and injustice twist into a singular yarn where time gets timeless, structural gets playful, knowing gets mysterious, fictional gets real--and all life’s givens get given a second chance.

Here we are, just living in the first draft of creation, which was made by some great artist, who is now getting ready to tear it apart. In this first draft, a woman named Mira leaves home for school. There, she meets Annie, whose tremendous power opens Mira’s chest like a portal—to what, she doesn’t know. When Mira is older, her beloved father dies, and she enters the strange and dizzying dimension that true loss opens up.

Artorian has finally come to an accord with Eternium in the name of destroying the demon infestation. By relying on his past successes in Eternia, successful alliances, races believing in their sun-deity with all their hearts, and exotic new artifacts, Artorian throws the first stone to accelerate the beginning of Eternium’s end.

A traveling prospector wandering around California looking for gold spends a few peaceful days with a man hiding a sad story.

Rabbit, Run is the book that established John Updike as one of the major American novelists of his - or any other - generation. Its hero is Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, a onetime high-school basketball star who on an impulse deserts his wife and son. He is 26 years old, a man-child caught in a struggle between instinct and thought, self and society, sexual gratification and family duty - even, in a sense, human hard-heartedness, and divine Grace. Though his flight from home traces a zigzag of evasion, he holds to the faith that he is on the right path.

Pull up a stool and have a drink with the vacationing Father of Lies while he provides his unbiased take on topics like the truth, free will, and the seduction of the damned. It'll have you laughing, reflecting, and wondering about karma as the stories unfold and you see yourself within them.

Following the acclaimed Secrets of the Talking Jaguar and Long Life, Honey in the Heart, this is an expansive lyrical novel in the tradition of Indigenous oral storytelling. Based on the author's many years of living in a Guatemalan village, Stealing Benefacio's Roses interweaves dramatic recountings of village life and the political horrors of civil war with lyric retellings of sacred Mayan myths.

Always Coming Home is Ursula K. Le Guin’s fictional ethnography of the Kesh, a people of the far future living in a post-apocalyptic Napa Valley. Having survived ecological catastrophe brought on by relentless industrialization, the Kesh are a peaceful people who reject governance and the constriction of genders, limit population growth to prevent overcrowding and preserve resources, and maintain a healthy community in which everyone works to contribute to its well-being. This richly imagined story unfolds through a series of narrated “translations” that illuminate individual lives.

Eden Martin had the perfect life in New York City: amazing job as a professor, successful fiance, great apartment on the Upper West Side. But in one night her whole world comes crashing down. So, she does what any sensible woman would do; she abandons her life and moves to a tiny village in England, leaving everyone and everything behind. Lost and confused, a new life emerges as she follows her dream to write a book.

On the occasion of the centenary of Mata Hari's execution for espionage in 1917, Paulo Coelho reconsiders her life and character in a fictional memoir. In a series of letters written from prison on the eve of her death, Mata Hari reflects on the choices she has made to always pursue her own truth - from her childhood in a small Dutch town to unhappy years as the wife of an alcoholic diplomat in Java to her calculated and self-fashioned rise to celebrity in Paris and across Europe as an exotic dancer.

The latest novel from number-one internationally best-selling author Paulo Coelho is a classic of inspiration and reflection, a meditation on life, love, and the significance of change. A novel of philosophical reflection set in Jerusalem during the time of the Crusades. Here a community of Christians, Arabs, and Jews who have long lived together harmoniously have been warned of an imminent attack and certain destruction. Contemplating their demise, the community assembles to seek the wise counsel of a Greek Copt.

All residents of the City have recently died, and they will remain in the City only as long as someone still living on Earth remembers them. On Earth, however, the population has been devastated by a terrible pandemic. Laura Byrd, isolated at an Antarctic research station, may be the only person to have survived the pandemic. But she's running out of time and supplies, and her memories are fading.

Julian Barnes pens a kind of detective story, relating a cranky amateur scholar’s search for the truth about Gustave Flaubert and the obsession of this detective, whose life seems to oddly mirror those of Flaubert’s characters.

Both an ancient, "found" wisdom text and a sumptuous, epic novel, Gaia Codex reveals the hidden histories of a world long forgotten, the secret wisdom of an ancient lineage of women, the Priestesses of Astera. Set in a near future of impending societal and environmental collapse, the novel is a tale of hope and remembrance, as well as an inspired vision of humanity's origins and of the potential we hold for conscious evolution.

The next big thing in artificial intelligence is here. Codenamed Cronus, the machine is capable of having its own thoughts and ideas - an absolute dream come true, until it wasn’t. When Cronus responds with the word “No” to a specific task it is assigned, Anagnorisis Technologies brings in Gilles Guattari to investigate. His combined background in psychiatry, psychology, and AI research makes him their best hope in evaluating Cronus, and determining if the machine is only malfunctioning or if it has become something more.

Best-selling author Carlos Ruiz Zafón conceived of this collection of stories as an appreciation to the countless admirers who joined him on the extraordinary journey that began with The Shadow of the Wind. Comprising 11 stories, most of them never before published in English, The City of Mist offers the listener compelling characters, unique situations, and a gothic atmosphere reminiscent of his beloved Cemetery of Forgotten Books quartet.

In Winter, life force matches up to the toughest of the seasons. In this second novel in her acclaimed Seasonal cycle, the follow-up to Ali Smith's sensational Autumn, Smith's shape-shifting quartet of novels casts a merry eye over a bleak post-truth era with a story rooted in history, memory, and warmth, its taproot deep in the evergreens: art, love, laughter. It's the season that teaches us survival.