We Used to Live Here

Marcus Kliewer

Get Out meets Parasite in this eerily haunting debut and Reddit hit—soon to be a Netflix original movie starring Blake Lively—about two homeowners whose lives are turned upside down when the house’s previous residents unexpectedly visit. As a young, queer couple who flip houses, Charlie and Eve can’t believe the killer deal they’ve just gotten on an old house in a picturesque neighborhood. As they’re working in the house one day, there’s a knock on the door. A man stands there with his family, claiming to have lived there years before and asking if it would be alright if he showed his kids around. People pleaser to a fault, Eve lets them in. As soon as the strangers enter their home, uncanny and inexplicable things start happening, including the family’s youngest child going missing and a ghostly presence materializing in the basement. Even more weird, the family can’t seem to take the hint that their visit should be over. And when Charlie suddenly vanishes, Eve slowly loses her grip on reality. Something is terribly wrong with the house and with the visiting family—or is Eve just imagining things?

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Swordheart

T. Kingfisher

Halla is a housekeeper who has suddenly inherited her great-uncle’s estate… and, unfortunately, his relatives. Sarkis is an immortal swordsman trapped in a prison of enchanted steel. When Halla draws the sword that imprisons him, Sarkis finds himself attempting to defend his new wielder against everything from bandits and roving inquisitors to her own in-laws… and the sword itself may prove to be the greatest threat of all…

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O Pioneers!

Willa Cather

O Pioneers! (1913) was Willa Cather's first great novel, and to many it remains her unchallenged masterpiece. No other work of fiction so faithfully conveys both the sharp physical realities and the mythic sweep of the transformation of the American frontier—and the transformation of the people who settled it. Cather's heroine is Alexandra Bergson, who arrives on the wind-blasted prairie of Hanover, Nebraska, as a girl and grows up to make it a prosperous farm. But this archetypal success story is darkened by loss, and Alexandra's devotion to the land may come at the cost of love itself. At once a sophisticated pastoral and a prototype for later feminist novels, O Pioneers! is a work in which triumph is inextricably enmeshed with tragedy, a story of people who do not claim a land so much as they submit to it and, in the process, become greater than they were.

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My Antonia

Willa Cather

Against Nebraska's panoramic landscape, My Antonia (1918) re-creates the life of an immigrant girl who becomes, in the memories of narrator Jim Burden, the ideal of strong and resourceful womanhood, and a figure of salvation.

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Take Us to a Better Place

Madeline Ashby

A profound and unforgettable original story collection about well-being and the future of health and the planet. With a foreword by bestselling author Roxane Gay and an introduction from Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Pam Belluck. Offered to readers free by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Take Us to a Better Place is a collection of powerful, perceptive, and seamlessly crafted fiction that tells multiple truths about the realities of our health and the world in which we live. Roxane Gay writes: “These stories are at once hopeful and cautionary tales. They are, above all, a call to action, offering all of us the opportunity to rise to the occasion of contributing, in ways we can, to a world where a healthier life is possible for all.” Conjuring a future that is at once vivid and hopeful, as well as heartbreaking and perilous, these deeply human stories will linger long after you finish. The stories may also spark new ideas about what a healthy future might hold—and how we might get there. The book features the literary talents of Hannah Lillith Assadi (finalist, PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize), Calvin Baker, Frank Bill, Mike McClelland, and Achy Obejas (finalist, PEN/Faulkner); the bold visual storytelling of David Robertson and Selena Goulding; and the searing science fiction/future fiction writing of New York Times best-selling author Yoon Ha Lee (winner, Locus Award), Karen Lord (finalist, Locus Award), futurist Madeline Ashby, and New York Times best-selling author Martha Wells (winner of the Nebula, Hugo and Locus Awards). The stories explore issues such as health care, climate change, immigration, gentrification, and post-traumatic stress disorder with keen observations, fully-drawn characters, and haunting narratives. Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is the nation's largest philanthropy dedicated solely to health. The Foundation is working alongside others toward its vision of a Culture of Health, where everyone has a fair and just opportunity for health and well-being. It is in this spirit that the Foundation invited ten authors to write a story about what a Culture of Health means to them. This book is the result.

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The Table where We Meet: Lessons Learned from Dinner with 1000 Strangers

Jess Janz

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Against Convenience: Embracing Friction in an Age of Endless Ease

Gabe Bullard

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The Iliad

Homer

After nine years fighting the Trojan War, the Greeks sense imminent defeat. The gods have cursed them with a plague; the Trojans have set their ships on fire; and their best warrior, the impenetrable Achilles, has turned his back on them. But when the Trojans go too far and kill Patroclus, his beloved brother-in-arms, Achilles returns to the battlefield with a vengeance so terrible that it shocks even the gods. Written by Homer more than twenty-five hundred years ago, The Iliad is among the oldest extant works of Western literature—the seminal epic narrative of infantry combat, the scars of battle, and the inevitability of fate. Dating to the ninth century B.C., Homer’s timeless poem still vividly conveys the horror and heroism of men and gods wrestling with towering emotions and battling amidst devastation and destruction, as it moves inexorably to the wrenching, tragic conclusion of the Trojan War.

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Fahrenheit 451

Ray Bradbury

Sixty years after its original publication, Ray Bradbury’s internationally acclaimed novel Fahrenheit 451 stands as a classic of world literature set in a bleak, dystopian future. Today its message has grown more relevant than ever before. Guy Montag is a fireman. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden. Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television “family.” But when he meets an eccentric young neighbor, Clarisse, who introduces him to a past where people didn’t live in fear and to a present where one sees the world through the ideas in books instead of the mindless chatter of television, Montag begins to question everything he has ever known.

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How to Be Eaten

Maria Adelmann

This darkly funny and provocative novel reimagines classic fairy tale characters as modern women in a support group for trauma. In present-day New York City, five women meet in a basement support group to process their traumas. Bernice grapples with the fallout of dating a psychopathic, blue-bearded billionaire. Ruby, once devoured by a wolf, now wears him as a coat. Gretel questions her memory of being held captive in a house made of candy. Ashlee, the winner of a Bachelor-esque dating show, wonders if she really got her promised fairy tale ending. And Raina's love story will shock them all. Though the women start out wary of one another, judging each other’s stories, gradually they begin to realize that they may have more in common than they supposed . . . What really brought them here? What secrets will they reveal? And is it too late for them to rescue each other? Dark, edgy, and wickedly funny, this debut for readers of Carmen Maria Machado, Kristen Arnett, and Kelly Link takes our coziest, most beloved childhood stories, exposes them as anti-feminist nightmares, and transforms them into a new kind of myth for grown-up women.

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