Literature

National Book Award Finalist
Winner of the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award
Winner of the American Academy of Arts & Letters Rosenthal Family Foundation Award
Winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Award
Winner of the Bard Fiction Prize
One of the New York Times Book Review's Ten Best Books of the Year
One of Granta's Best Young American Novelists
A Washington Post Notable Fiction Book of the Year
PEN Center USA Literary Award Finalist for Fiction
Simpson Family Literary Prize Finalist
Shortlisted for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature
Longlisted for the FT/Oppenheimer Emerging Voices Award

Named a Best Book of the Year by: Buzzfeed, Esquire, New York magazine, The Huffington Post, The Guardian, The AV Club, The Fader, Redbook, Electric Literature, Book Riot, Bustle, Good magazine, PureWow, and PopSugar

"Brilliant." --Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal

When brothers Tushar and Nakul Khurana, two Delhi schoolboys, pick up their family's television set at a repair shop with their friend Mansoor Ahmed one day in 1996, disaster strikes without warning. A bomb--one of the many "small" bombs that go off seemingly unheralded across the world--detonates in the Delhi marketplace, instantly claiming the lives of the Khurana boys, to the devastation of their parents. Mansoor survives, bearing the physical and psychological effects of the bomb. After a brief stint at university in America, Mansoor returns to Delhi, where his life becomes entangled with the mysterious and charismatic Ayub, a fearless young activist whose own allegiances and beliefs are more malleable than Mansoor could imagine. Woven among the story of the Khuranas and the Ahmeds is the gripping tale of Shockie, a Kashmiri bomb maker who has forsaken his own life for the independence of his homeland.

Karan Mahajan writes brilliantly about the effects of terrorism on victims and perpetrators, proving himself to be one of the most provocative and dynamic novelists of his generation.

The word atavism, coined by a botanist and popularized by a criminologist, refers to the resurfacing of a primitive evolutionary trait or urge in a modern being. This inventive collection from Lydia Millet offers overlapping tales of urges ranging from rage to jealousy to yearning--a fluent triumph of storytelling, rich in ideas and emotions both petty and grand.

The titular atavists include an underachieving, bewildered young bartender; a middle-aged mother convinced her gentle son-in-law is fixated on geriatric porn; a bodybuilder with an incel's fantasy life; an arrogant academic accused of plagiarism; and an empty-nester dad determined to host refugees in a tiny house in his backyard.

As they pick away at the splitting seams in American culture, Millet's characters shimmer with the sense of powerlessness we share in an era of mass overwhelm. A beautician in a waxing salon faces a sudden resurgence of grief in the midst of a bikini Brazilian; a couple sets up a camera to find out who's been slipping homophobic letters into their mailbox; a jilted urban planner stalks a man she met on a dating app.

In its rich warp and weft of humiliations and human error, Atavists returns to the trenchant, playful social commentary that made A Children's Bible a runaway hit. In these stories sharp observations of middle-class mores and sanctimony give way to moments of raw exposure and longing: Atavists performs an uncanny fictional magic, full of revelation but also hilarious, unpretentious, and warm.

An Instant New York Times Bestseller
A Vulture Best Fantasy Novel of 2022
A Goodreads Best Fantasy Choice Award Nominee

The much-acclaimed viral sensation from Olivie Blake, The Atlas Six--now newly revised and edited with additional content--is the first in an explosive dark academia fantasy trilogy that reads like The Secret History meets The Umbrella Academy

Each decade, only the six most uniquely talented magicians are selected to earn a place in the Alexandrian Society, the foremost secret society in the world. The chosen will secure a life of power and prestige beyond their wildest dreams.

But at what cost?

Each of the six newest recruits has their reasons for accepting the Society's elusive invitation. Even if it means growing closer than they could have imagined to their most dangerous enemies-- or risking unforgivable betrayal from their most trusted allies-- they will fight tooth and nail for the right to join the ranks of the Alexandrians.

Even if it means they won't all survive the year.

Also by Olivie Blake
The Atlas Paradox
The Atlas Complex
Alone With You in the Ether
One for My Enemy
Masters of Death
Januaries: Stories of Love, Magic & Betrayal
Gifted & Talented

As Alexene Farol Follmuth
Twelfth Knight

In Augustus, his third great novel, John Williams took on an entirely new challenge, a historical narrative set in classical Rome, exploring the life of the founder of the Roman Empire. To tell the story, Williams turned to the epistolary novel, a genre that was new to him, transforming and transcending it just as he did the western in Butcher's Crossing and the campus novel in Stoner. Augustus is the final triumph of a writer who has come to be recognized around the world as an American master.

?ric Chevillard here seeks to clear up a persistent and pernicious literary misunderstanding: the belief that a novel's narrator must necessarily be a mouthpiece for his or her writer's own opinions. Thus, we are introduced to a narrator haunted by a deep loathing for cauliflower gratin (and by a no less passionate fondness for trout almondine), but his monologue has been helpfully and hilariously annotated in order to clarify all the many ways in which this gentleman and ?ric Chevillard are nothing alike. Language and logic are pushed to their farthest extremes in one of Chevillard's funniest novels yet.

Set in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast at the end of the nineteenth century, The Awakening centers on Edna Pontellier, an apparently happy twenty-eight-year-old wife and mother of two. But when a summer romance reignites Edna's appetite for life, she discovers that her conventional family, friends, and surroundings do not make her happy. Boldly--and to the astonishment of her husband and the consternation of New Orleans society--Edna begins to discover the joys of solitude, creative expression, and erotic freedom. A scandal and a shock to readers when it was first published in 1899, The Awakening remains a daring portrayal of a woman rejecting domesticity in favor of her own happiness and self-expression.

This edition includes some of Chopin's most studied short stories, including "Desiree's Baby," "A Pair of Silk Stockings," and "The Story of an Hour."

Instant #1 New York Times Bestseller from the author of The Poppy War

"Absolutely phenomenal. One of the most brilliant, razor-sharp books I've had the pleasure of reading that isn't just an alternative fantastical history, but an interrogative one; one that grabs colonial history and the Industrial Revolution, turns it over, and shakes it out." -- Shannon Chakraborty, bestselling author of The City of Brass

From award-winning author R. F. Kuang comes Babel, a thematic response to The Secret History and a tonal retort to Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell in this unforgettable work of dark academia that grapples with student revolutions, colonial resistance, and the use of language and translation as the dominating tool of the British empire.

Traduttore, traditore: An act of translation is always an act of betrayal.

1828. Robin Swift, orphaned by cholera in Canton, is brought to London by the mysterious Professor Lovell. There, he trains for years in Latin, Ancient Greek, and Chinese, all in preparation for the day he'll enroll in Oxford University's prestigious Royal Institute of Translation--also known as Babel.

Babel is the world's center for translation and, more importantly, magic. The unique magic system of silver working--the art of manifesting the meaning lost in translation using enchanted silver bars--has made the British unparalleled in power, as its knowledge serves the Empire's quest for colonization.

For Robin, Oxford is a utopia dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge. But knowledge obeys power, and as a Chinese boy raised in Britain, Robin realizes serving Babel means betraying his motherland. As his studies progress, Robin finds himself caught between Babel and the shadowy Hermes Society, a secret society dedicated to stopping imperial expansion. When Britain pursues an unjust war with China over silver and opium, Robin must decide...

In Alexandria in the years before the Second World War, an exiled Irish school teacher seeks to unravel his sexual obsession with two women: the tubercular cafe dancer, Melissa, and Justine, the alluring Jewish wife of a wealthy Coptic Christian. What emerges in his sessions with the psychiatrist Balthazar, however, is something far more complex - and unfathomably more sinister - than neurosis. Lawrence Durrell's kaleidoscopic narrative ushers us into a world in which no perception is reliable - and love itself is always an act of treachery.

From National Book Award in Fiction finalist Andrew Krivak comes a gorgeous fable of Earth's last two human inhabitants, and a girl's journey home

In an Edenic future, a girl and her father live close to the land in the shadow of a lone mountain. They possess a few remnants of civilization: some books, a pane of glass, a set of flint and steel, a comb. The father teaches the girl how to fish and hunt, the secrets of the seasons and the stars. He is preparing her for an adulthood in harmony with nature, for they are the last of humankind. But when the girl finds herself alone in an unknown landscape, it is a bear that will lead her back home through a vast wilderness that offers the greatest lessons of all, if she can only learn to listen.

A cautionary tale of human fragility, of love and loss, The Bear is a stunning tribute to the beauty of nature's dominion.