Fiction

A masterful blend of historical and modern fiction by a best-selling, award-winning author, THE BEST POLISH RESTAURANT IN BUFFALO chronicles a century of life in America for one humble Polish farm girl and three generations of her descendants in Buffalo, New York.

This book collects some of the best stories from the first ten issues of McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, the literary journal that has become one of the country's most important and influential publications. McSweeney's began as a small collection of work rejected by other magazines, but it soon began to publish pieces primarily written for the journal, and to attract some of the finest writers in the country. Contributors to Best of McSweeney's, Volume One include Jonathan Lethem, Glen David Gold, A. M. Homes, David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers, Amanda Davis, George Saunders, Paul Collins, and William Vollmann, as well as many talented newcomers. Stories included here have been selected for The O. Henry Prize Stories and The Best American Short Stories, and one was performed in a regional musical theater.

Sheri-D Wilson, whose unparalleled writing style is rich with erotic jazz, infused with a sharp feminist sensibility, and laced with a dangerous wit, is back with Between Lovers, her fifth collection of poetry and her strongest to date.

Seamlessly matching word with sound, these poems fly off the page with lyrical beauty and a rhythmical electric charge that transports you into Sheri-D's surreal world: an empowering, sensual place where one can discover what it means to be a woman in the 21st century.

In this collection, Sheri-D's language is brilliantly alive with the wit, charm and playfulness she is known for. She reaches into the soul's dark abyss and finds that what makes us different is what makes us the same.

Just what does it mean to be human? Sheri-D Wilson traverses the extremes of the human condition, as she examines the many entendres of what it means to be -Between Lovers.

Praise for Between Lovers:

"Sheri-D's poems give the tone-deaf world tone; they take the clumsy world and make it dance."--Andrei Codrescu

"Passionate, gutsy, wise, these personal addresses and observations move out in a range of populist Voice. A lively and affecting collection."--Anne Waldman

Sheri-D Wilson is a poet, playwright, performer and teacher who has been called one of North America's most compelling "action" poets. She divides her time between Calgary and Vancouver, and recently represented Canada at the World Poetry Circus at Taos, New Mexico.

Continuing the epic foot journey across Europe begun in A Time of Gifts, Patrick Leigh Fermor writes about walking from Hungary to the Balkans.

The journey that Patrick Leigh Fermor set out on in 1933--to cross Europe on foot with an emergency allowance of one pound a day--proved so rich in experiences that when much later he sat down to describe them, they overflowed into more than one volume. Undertaken as the storms of war gathered, and providing a background for the events that were beginning to unfold in Central Europe, Leigh Fermor's still-unfinished account of his journey has established itself as a modern classic. Between the Woods and the Water, the second volume of a projected three, has garnered as many prizes as its celebrated predecessor, A Time of Gifts.

The opening of the book finds Leigh Fermor crossing the Danube--at the very moment where his first volume left off. A detour to the luminous splendors of Prague is followed by a trip downriver to Budapest, passage on horseback across the Great Hungarian Plain, and a crossing of the Romanian border into Transylvania. Remote castles, mountain villages, monasteries and towering ranges that are the haunt of bears, wolves, eagles, gypsies, and a variety of sects are all savored in the approach to the Iron Gates, the division between the Carpathian mountains and the Balkans, where, for now, the story ends.

The first anthology of Sung dynasty tzu poems in English, Beyond Spring includes one hundred and fifty translations from the golden age of tzu in the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries. Tzu poetry is one of the two most important lyric forms in the Chinese literary tradition. First composed and performed by prostitutes in the singing houses, tzu became the favorite of emperors and high-ranking ministers who transformed it from a genre of bawdy songs to one of the lyric that could "stay the moving clouds." A mixture of confession and elegy, these songs remain fresh despite their thousand-year history. The genre-written in meter to the original tunes from the brothels-flourished well into the twentieth century. Beyond Spring includes best-known tzu poems by fifteen of the most celebrated poets of the period, including a king who lost his country, an emperor who lost his empire, and a woman who lost everything. Keeping true to the original music, Landau's translations capture the phrasing and rhythms crucial to tzu. Remarkably sure in her sense of what each poem is about, Landau imparts this confidence to her readers. A helpful introduction to symbols and allusions retells famous traditional stories; it equips the reader to recognize references and themes in the poems. Brief biographies of the poets, a glossary, and a historical chart of Chinese poetic genres place the poems in historical perspective. Paintings and calligraphy by the poets and their contemporaries accompany these superb translations.

"Really, what other book would anyone ever need?" --Naomi Shihab Nye, author of Honeybee

"Elegant and exquisite." --Deepak Chopra, author of Muhammad, Jesus, and Buddha

The Big Red Book is a poetic masterpiece from Jalaluddin Rumi, the medieval Sufi mystic whom Time magazine calls "the most popular poet in America." Readers continue to be awed and inspired by Rumi's masterfully lyrical, deeply expressive poems, collected in volumes such as The Illustrated Rumi, The Soul of Rumi, and the bestselling The Essential Rumi. With The Big Red Book, acclaimed poet and Rumi interpreter Coleman Barks offers a never-before-published translation of a crucial anthology of poems widely considered to be one of Persian literature's greatest treasures.

A number 1 bestseller in France and translated into over twenty-five languages, Billie is one of the most beloved French novels to be published in recent years. A brilliant evocation of contemporary Paris and a moving tale of friendship, Anna Gavalda's new novel tells the story of two young people, Billie and Franck, who, as the story opens, are trapped in a gorge in the Cévennes Mountains. Billie begins to tell stories from their lives in order to calm herself and Franck as darkness encroaches. In alternating episodes, the novel moves between recollections of the two characters' childhoods and their dire predicament.

Franck's life has been impacted by a childhood spent with a perennially unemployed father who toyed with Christian extremism and a mother aestheticized by antidepressants. A bright kid, Franck's future was menaced at every turn by the bigotry surrounding him. As for Billie, her abiding wish as an adult is to avoid ever having to come into contact with her family again. To escape from her abusive and alcohol-addled family, she was willing to do anything and everything. The wounds have not entirely healed.

At the heart of Gavalda's moving story lies a generosity of spirit that will take readers' breath away, and an unshakable belief in the power of art to lift the most fragile among us to new vistas from which they can see futures full of hope, love, and dignity. Billie is a beautifully crafted novel for readers of all ages and from all walks of life that conveys a positive message about overcoming life's trials and tribulations.

Herman Melville's final masterpiece, found unpublished on his desk at his death.

Billy Budd, Sailor would emerge, after its publication in 1924, as one of Melville's best-loved books--and one of his most open, with its discussion of homosexualty.

In it, Melville returns to the sea to tell the story of Billy, a cheerful, hard working, and handsome young sailor, conscripted to work against his will on another ship, where he soon finds himself persecuted by Claggart, the paranoid master-at-arms. As things escalate beyond the naive Billy's control, tragedy looms on the horizon like Melville's great white whale, and the story become Melville's final, sublime plunge into the classic tussle between civilization and chaos, between oppression and freedom, as well as the book in which he discusses homosexuality most openly.

One of the major works of American literature.

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and a finalist for the National Book Award

"Brilliantly done . . . grand, intimate, and joyous." --New York Times Book Review

From the PEN/Hemingway Award-winning author of the critically acclaimed short story collection, Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, comes Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk ("The Catch-22 of the Iraq War" --Karl Marlantes).

Three minutes and forty-three seconds of intensive warfare with Iraqi insurgents--caught on tape by an embedded Fox News crew--has transformed the eight surviving men of Bravo Squad into America's most sought-after heroes. Now they're on a media-intensive nationwide tour to reinvigorate public support for the war. On this rainy Thanksgiving Day, the Bravos are in Texas Stadium, slated to be part of the halftime show.

Among the Bravos is nineteen-year-old Specialist Billy Lynn. Surrounded by patriots sporting flag pins on their lapels and support our troops bumper stickers, he is thrust into the company of the team's owner and his coterie of wealthy colleagues; a born-again cheerleader; a veteran Hollywood producer; and supersized players eager for a vicarious taste of war. Over the course of this day, Billy will drink and brawl, yearn for home and mourn those missing, face a heart-wrenching decision and discover pure love and a bitter wisdom far beyond his years.

Poignant, riotously funny, and exquisitely heartbreaking, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk is a searing and powerful novel that has cemented Ben Fountain's reputation as one of the finest writers of his generation.

Bitters is an extended quarrel with God, driven by the desire to recover what is banished to the marginal and apocryphal. In her third collection Seiferle claims whatever originates in the earth as an emissary of the divine, whether it is a starving boy in a supermarket or the maggots thriving in the skin of a cat.

Seraphim

Even houseflies must have their angels.
Principalities, at knee or elbow, the voice
of God caught within an ear, at such a pitch,
it makes the skull hum. And if I swat them,
can they blame me? Like all good messengers,
they're just testing whether we are still alive.
By such means, the priest taught me, "God creates.
All the living and the dead, just a nursery
for his hatching." So when I found a trinity
of maggots in the abdominal wall
of a living kitten, though I had to pinch
them out, I could not blame them--Shadrach,
Meshach, Abednego, pale witnesses
of a homesick God, caught in the furnace
of the flesh, hoping to sprout wings.

Against the background and harsh light of the desert Southwest or withing the darkness of European history and religion, Seiferle has created a new kind of beauty: tragic, wise, open to every possibility. And just as the liquor of the title are colorful, earthy draughts of distilled spirits with an ancient medicinal history, so too are they a fitting metaphor for these darkly humorous and curative poems.

Rebecca Seiferle's The Music We Dance To was nominated for the Pulitzer prize and poems from the volume are included in The Best American Poetry 2000. Her first book, The Ripped-Out Seam won the Bogin Memorial, the Writers' Exchange, and the Writers' Union Poetry Prize. Her translation of Cesar Vallejo's Trilce won the 1992 PenWest Translation Award. She lives in Farmington, NM.

Finalist for the 2017 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Nonfiction

A lyrical memoir-in-essays by an award-winning Chicana writer: "the real power of Black Dove comes when it speaks to what mothers face raising black and brown children all across this nation." (Los Angeles Review of Books)

Growing up as the intellectually spirited daughter of a Mexican Indian immigrant family during the 1970s, Castillo defied convention as a writer and a feminist. A generation later, her mother's crooning mariachi lyrics resonate once again. Castillo--now an established Chicana novelist, playwright, and scholar--witnesses her own son's spiraling adulthood and eventual incarceration. Standing in the stifling courtroom, Castillo describes a scene that could be any mother's worst nightmare. But in a country of glaring and stacked statistics, it is a nightmare especially reserved for mothers like her: the inner-city mothers, the single mothers, the mothers of brown sons.

Black Dove: Mamá, Mi'jo, and Me looks at what it means to be a single, brown, feminist parent in a world of mass incarceration, racial profiling, and police brutality. Through startling humor and love, Castillo weaves intergenerational stories traveling from Mexico City to Chicago. And in doing so, she narrates some of America's most heated political debates and urgent social injustices through the oft-neglected lens of motherhood and family.

One of TIME's 100 Best Fantasy Books of All Time

Winner of the L.A. Times Ray Bradbury Prize

Finalist for the 2019 National Book Award

The New York Times Bestseller

Named a Best Book of 2019 by The Wall Street Journal, TIME, NPR, GQ, Vogue, and The Washington Post

"A fantasy world as well-realized as anything Tolkien made." --Neil Gaiman

"Gripping, action-packed....The literary equivalent of a Marvel Comics universe." --Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

The epic novel from the Man Booker Prize-winning author of A Brief History of Seven Killings

In the stunning first novel in Marlon James's Dark Star trilogy, myth, fantasy, and history come together to explore what happens when a mercenary is hired to find a missing child.

Tracker is known far and wide for his skills as a hunter: "He has a nose," people say. Engaged to track down a mysterious boy who disappeared three years earlier, Tracker breaks his own rule of always working alone when he finds himself part of a group that comes together to search for the boy. The band is a hodgepodge, full of unusual characters with secrets of their own, including a shape-shifting man-animal known as Leopard.

As Tracker follows the boy's scent--from one ancient city to another; into dense forests and across deep rivers--he and the band are set upon by creatures intent on destroying them. As he struggles to survive, Tracker starts to wonder: Who, really, is this boy? Why has he been missing for so long? Why do so many people want to keep Tracker from finding him? And perhaps the most important questions of all: Who is telling the truth, and who is lying?

Drawing from African history and mythology and his own rich imagination, Marlon James has written a novel unlike anything that's come before it: a saga of breathtaking adventure that's also an ambitious, involving read. Defying categorization and full of unforgettable characters, Black Leopard, Red Wolf is both surprising and profound as it explores the fundamentals of truth, the limits of power, and our need to understand them both.

A profound book of essays from a celebrated master of the form.

"Darkness is not empty," writes Teju Cole in Black Paper, a book that meditates on what it means to sustain our humanity--and witness the humanity of others--in a time of darkness. One of the most celebrated essayists of his generation, Cole here plays variations on the essay form, modeling ways to attend to experience--not just to take in but to think critically about what we sense and what we don't.

Wide-ranging but thematically unified, the essays address ethical questions about what it means to be human and what it means to bear witness, recognizing how our individual present is informed by a collective past. Cole's writings in Black Paper approach the fractured moment of our history through a constellation of interrelated concerns: confrontation with unsettling art, elegies both public and private, the defense of writing in a time of political upheaval, the role of the color black in the visual arts, the use of shadow in photography, and the links between literature and activism. Throughout, Cole gives us intriguing new ways of thinking about blackness and its numerous connotations. As he describes the carbon-copy process in his epilogue: "Writing on the top white sheet would transfer the carbon from the black paper onto the bottom white sheet. Black transported the meaning."

"Brilliantly written...a joy to read...Bleeding Edge is totally gonzo, totally wonderful. It really is good to have Thomas Pynchon around, doing what he does best." - Michael Dirda, The Washington Post

"Exemplary...dazzling and ludicrous." - Jonathan Lethem, The New York Times Book Review

It is 2001 in New York City, in the lull between the collapse of the dot-com boom and the terrible events of September 11th.

Maxine Tarnow runs a fine little fraud investigation business on the Upper West Side. All is ticking over nice and normal, until she starts looking into the finances of a computer-security firm and its billionaire geek CEO. She soon finds herself mixed up with a drug runner in an art deco motorboat, a professional nose obsessed with Hitler's aftershave, a neoliberal enforcer with footwear issues, and an array of bloggers, hackers, code monkeys, and entrepreneurs, some of whom begin to show up mysteriously dead. Foul play, of course.

Will perpetrators be revealed, forget about brought to justice? Will Maxine have to take the handgun out of her purse? Will Jerry Seinfeld make an unscheduled guest appearance? Will accounts secular and karmic be brought into balance?

Hey. Who wants to know?