On the eve of America's entry into World War II, Maria is an associate producer at Mercury Pictures, trying to keep her personal and professional life from falling apart. Maria rises through a maze of conflicting politics, divided loyalties, and jockeying ambitions. But when the arrival of a stranger from her father's past threatens Maria's carefully constructed facade, she must finally confront her father's fate—and her own. 

Paul is a recently demoted adjunct instructor of freshman comp, a divorced but doting Brooklyn father, and a self-described "curmudgeonly crank" cataloging his resentment of the priorities of modern life in a book called The Luddite Manifesto. Outraged by the authoritarian creeps ruining the country, he is determined to be better the future for his young daughter, one aggrieved lecture at a time.

Mick Hardin is home on leave, recovering from an IED attack when a body is found in the center of town. It's Barney Kissick, the local heroin dealer, and the city police see it as an occupational hazard. But when Barney's mother, Shifty, asks Mick to take a look, it seems there's more to the killing than it seems. 

From the acclaimed and bestselling author of The Idiot, the continuation of beloved protagonist Selin's quest for self-knowledge, as she travels abroad and tests the limits of her newfound adulthood Selin is the luckiest person in her family: the only one who was born in America and got to go to Harvard. Now it's sophomore, 1996, and Selin knows she has to make it count.

Former best friends Scott and Errol meet unexpectedly at Oso Lake, a remote Canadian fly-fishing paradise where, five years before, fresh out of college, they had the time of their lives. Their situations, though, have changed, their high hopes quashed by workaday realities and, in Errol's case, marriage to Claire, who has come with him trying to stave off divorce.

N. is a novella in the Spatial Species series, edited by Youmna Chlala and Ken Chen, which investigates the ways we activate space through language. Expertly employing historical surrealism to critique orientalism, megalomaniac masculinity, and colonialism, Van der Vliet Oloomi rages against the abandonment of the natural world in favor of digital realms with satirical humor and restless energy. 

Even through the roar and effervescence of the 1920s, everyone in New York has heard of Benjamin and Helen Rask. He is a legendary Wall Street tycoon; she is the brilliant daughter of eccentric aristocrats. Together, they have risen to the very top of a world of seemingly endless wealth. But at what cost have they acquired their immense fortune?

Dana Potowski is a restaurant critic, food writer, and a longtime member of a progressive Unitarian Universalist congregation in Southern California. Under pressure to find her next book idea, she agrees and resolves to secretly pen a memoir, with recipes, about the experience. That memoir, Search, follows the travails of the church committee and their candidates for a new minister--and becomes its own media sensation.

Joan is a thirtysomething ICU doctor at a busy NYC hospital. The daughter of Chinese parents who came to the US to secure the American dream for their children, she is intensely devoted to her work, happily solitary, successful. She does sometimes wonder where her true roots lie: at the hospital, where her white coat makes her feel needed, or with her family, who try to shape her life by their own cultural and social expectations.

The truths revealed and the lives upended in the 13 stories that make up Yannick Murphy’s By the Time You Read This are at once singularly foreign and uncannily familiar. A wife pens a series of suicide notes that verge on the comic, hovering between the tyrannical and the absurd. A young girl left with caretakers in New York draws on her potent imagination with consequences in real life that are both liberating and disastrous. In a college application essay a young woman finally begins to make sense of the troubling vicissitudes of her existence. Murphy’s keen rendering of these disparate, complex lives illuminate in ways both quiet and startling our capacity for deliverance and devastation through daring acts of self-invention.