A charming story about romance, friendship, and a love of books, in which two women—a lonely remote worker and a widowed single mom—and a handsome local bookstore clerk find themselves in an unusual love triangle when an anonymous note left in a book finds the wrong recipient. April, a smart and lonely tech worker, worries work from home has gotten out of hand: She’s left an anonymous note in a book for Westley, the clerk at her Seattle neighborhood bookstore who has a gentle smile and looks great in flannel. But thanks to fate, Laura—a busy single mom who had given up on love—buys the book, finds the note, and thinks Westley has left it for her. A handsome man who loves books seems like just the plot twist she has been looking for. Meanwhile, Westley—not the most perceptive—is too distracted by the movie filming at the store and the ambition it’s unlocked in him to notice either of the two women. But as April and Laura’s anonymous correspondence continues back and forth, their mundane routines are challenged, sparking a glimmer of hope. Is a happy ending in the cards for them? A hilarious and intricate web of mistaken identities and serendipitous encounters, Storybook Ending is a playful tribute to romance, friendship, and bookstores, and to the objects—from a forgotten slip of paper to someone’s heart—left between the pages of books we loved.

An alternative cover for this ISBN can be found here One day fourteen-year-old Sophie Amundsen comes home from school to find in her mailbox two notes, with one question on each: "Who are you?" and "Where does the world come from?" From that irresistible beginning, Sophie becomes obsessed with questions that take her far beyond what she knows of her Norwegian village. Through those letters, she enrolls in a kind of correspondence course, covering Socrates to Sartre, with a mysterious philosopher, while receiving letters addressed to another girl. Who is Hilde? And why does her mail keep turning up? To unravel this riddle, Sophie must use the philosophy she is learning—but the truth turns out to be far more complicated than she could have imagined.

The Irish language has thirty-two words for field. Among them – a field of corn-grassTuar – a field for cattle at nightRéidhleán – a field for games or dancingCathairín – a field with a fairy-dwelling in itThe richness of a language closely tied to the natural landscape offered our ancestors a more magical way of seeing the world. Before we cast old words aside, let us consider the sublime beauty and profound oddness of the ancient tongue that has been spoken on this island for almost 3,000 years.In Thirty-Two Words for Field, Manchán Magan meditates on these words – and the nuances of a way of life that is disappearing with them.

A portrait of the poet as an office worker, plumbing the depths of the spiritual gulf between art and work.It’s the summer of 2017 and D__, a poet working by day as a copywriter at a retail start-up, can’t dispel a creeping sense of dissolution on the horizon. Whether it be the company’s new twenty-four-year-old CEO, who has more charisma than work experience, the growing distance between D__ and his longtime girlfriend, or a mounting sense of unreality in the wake of the first delirious year of the Trump administration, there’s a sense that things are speeding towards collapse—and that they’ve perhaps been unraveling for some time. Borne along on these ambivalent straits, D__ begins to keep a notebook, filling it with dreams, scenes from his own life, emails, and broadly-defined moments, both real and fictional, that he calls parables—attempts to learn from the underlying schedule of the universe, some music of the spheres that, if heard correctly, might help him finally understand his life, his art, and labor. Unfurling over the course of two years, season by season, The Copywriter circles a series of perennial questions, capturing in the process the unique absurdism of the gone-but-not-forgotten era of office culture between the Great Recession and the COVID-19 How should an artist balance a job and life when art doesn’t fit into either category? How does one find meaning in work that is stubbornly, uncannily, comically meaningless? Does one need to find meaning in one’s labor at all? What concessions do we make for the sake of a paycheck? What does all of this do to our art, and our souls? Utterly original and lyrically beautiful, burrowing deep into contemporary disaffection without falling under its spell, The Copywriter is a comic story in the vein of Kafka’s Jewish mysticism, following the absurd paths that office work can take us on, and the subtle ways in which seemingly mindless labor can determine our fate.

A portrait of the poet as an office worker, plumbing the depths of the spiritual gulf between art and work.It’s the summer of 2017 and D__, a poet working by day as a copywriter at a retail start-up, can’t dispel a creeping sense of dissolution on the horizon. Whether it be the company’s new twenty-four-year-old CEO, who has more charisma than work experience, the growing distance between D__ and his longtime girlfriend, or a mounting sense of unreality in the wake of the first delirious year of the Trump administration, there’s a sense that things are speeding towards collapse—and that they’ve perhaps been unraveling for some time. Borne along on these ambivalent straits, D__ begins to keep a notebook, filling it with dreams, scenes from his own life, emails, and broadly-defined moments, both real and fictional, that he calls parables—attempts to learn from the underlying schedule of the universe, some music of the spheres that, if heard correctly, might help him finally understand his life, his art, and labor. Unfurling over the course of two years, season by season, The Copywriter circles a series of perennial questions, capturing in the process the unique absurdism of the gone-but-not-forgotten era of office culture between the Great Recession and the COVID-19 How should an artist balance a job and life when art doesn’t fit into either category? How does one find meaning in work that is stubbornly, uncannily, comically meaningless? Does one need to find meaning in one’s labor at all? What concessions do we make for the sake of a paycheck? What does all of this do to our art, and our souls? Utterly original and lyrically beautiful, burrowing deep into contemporary disaffection without falling under its spell, The Copywriter is a comic story in the vein of Kafka’s Jewish mysticism, following the absurd paths that office work can take us on, and the subtle ways in which seemingly mindless labor can determine our fate.

Music is magic in this novel set in a fantastical version of New Orleans where a battle for the city's soul brews between two young mages, a vengeful wraith, and one powerful song. Nola is a city full of wonders. A place of sky trolleys and dead cabs, where haints dance the night away and Wise Women help keep the order. To those from Away, Nola might seem strange. To Perilous Graves, it’s simply home. In a world of everyday miracles, Perry might not have a talent for magic, but he does know Nola’s rhythm as intimately as his own heartbeat. So when the city’s Great Magician starts appearing in odd places and essential songs are forgotten, Perry realizes trouble is afoot. Nine songs of power have escaped from the piano that maintains the city’s beat, and without them, Nola will fail. Unwilling to watch his home be destroyed, Perry will sacrifice everything to save it. But a storm is brewing, and the Haint of All Haints is awake. Nola’s time might be coming to an end.

Rei, Kiki and Ai are three sisters whose lives have taken them on very different paths. They have lost both parents, one way or another, and found their own ways of carrying on. Eldest daughter Rei is spiky and sensible, distracting herself with an all-consuming job at a financial corporation in London. Big-hearted Kiki is a single mother in Tokyo, juggling the demands of her young son and the cantankerous elderly residents of the retirement home she works in. Ai, the free-spirited youngest, is a Japanese pop idol who has found fame and fortune but lost herself along the way. When Ai is embroiled in a scandal and thrust into the spotlight, Rei must pick up the pieces of her family once more. Over the course of a summer in their childhood home on the Japanese coast, the sisters reunite with their sharp-tongued grandmother, entertain Kiki's irrepressible son and silently worry about Ai, carefully avoiding the subject of their mother's death fifteen years before. But silence between sisters can only last for so long . . . Transporting, funny and moving, Kakigori Summer is an uplifting exploration of love and loss, sisterhood and family, the stories we tell ourselves about the past and how they determine our future.

Delving into new worlds populated by robots, witches, talking pandas, and giant stags, this collection offers funny, haunting, and heartbreaking poems. Highlighting the poet’s dazzling lyrical instincts balanced by her stinging wit, it moves between high art, pop culture, science fiction, and detective fiction to produce a series of unforgettable surprises. The characters herein speak from the page, from the lonely android seeking love in the wrong places to Sherlock Holmes’s hunting for a Yeti in Tibet. By searching out the heart of every real or fantastical situation, this compilation explores what it means to be human.

A woman haunted by a dark inheritance returns to the woods where her mother vanished, in this queer Gothic novel—a butch Black Swan. Sam, finally sober and stable with a cat and a long-term boyfriend in Brooklyn, returns alone to Hemlock, her family’s deteriorating cabin deep in the Wisconsin Northwoods, where her mother disappeared years before and never returned. But a quick, practical trip takes a turn for the worse when the rot and creak of the forest starts to creep in around the edges of Sam’s mind. It starts, as it always does, with a beer. As Sam dips back into the murky waters of dependency, the inexplicable begins to arrive at her door in the forms of a neighbor who leaves no trace, a talking doe who sounds just like Sam’s missing mother, and a series of mysterious gifts that might be a welcome or a warning. And as Sam’s stay extends—as the town’s grip on her tightens and her body takes on a strange new shape—the borders of reality begin to blur, and she senses she is battling something sinister—whether nested in the woods or within herself. Hemlock is a carnal coming-of-addiction, a dark sparkler about rapture, desire, transformation, and transcendence in many forms. What lives at the heart of fear—animal, monster, or man? How do we contain a threat that may come from within? And how can we reject our own inheritance, the psychic storm that’s been coming for generations, and rebuild a new home for ourselves? In the tradition of Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, Hemlock is a novel of singular style, with all the edginess of a survival story and a simmering menace that glints from the very periphery of the page.

“Lily King is one of our great literary treasures.”—Madeline Miller From the New York Times bestselling author of Writers & Lovers comes a magnificent and intimate new novel of desire, friendship, loss, and the lasting impact of first love You knew I’d write a book about you someday. Our narrator understands good love stories—their secrets and subtext, their highs and their free falls. But her greatest love story, the one she lived, never followed the simple rules. In the fall of her senior year of college, she meets two star students from her 17th-Century Lit Sam and Yash. Best friends living off-campus in the elegant house of a professor on sabbatical, the boys invite her into their intoxicating world of academic fervor, rapid-fire banter and raucous card games. They nickname her Jordan, and she quickly discovers the pleasures of friendship, love and her own intellectual ambition. Youthful passion is unpredictable though, and she soon finds herself at the center of a charged and intricate triangle. As graduation comes and goes, choices made will alter these three lives forever. Decades later, Jordan is living the life she dreamed of, and the vulnerable days of her youth seem comfortably behind her. But when a surprise visit and unexpected news brings the past crashing into the present, Jordan returns to a world she left behind and is forced to confront the decisions and deceptions of her younger self. Written with the superb wit and emotional sensitivity fans and critics of Lily King have come to adore, Heart the Lover is a deeply moving story that celebrates love, friendship, and the transformative nature of forgiveness. Wise, unforgettable, and with a delightful connective thread to Writers & Lovers, this is King at her very best, affirming her as a masterful chronicler of the human experience and one of the finest novelists at work today.