Allie Brosh returns with a new collection of comedic, autobiographical, and illustrated essays. Solutions and Other Problems includes humorous stories from Allie Brosh’s childhood; the adventures of her very bad animals; merciless dissection of her own character flaws; incisive essays on grief, loneliness, and powerlessness; as well as reflections on the absurdity of modern life. This full-color, beautifully illustrated edition features all-new material with more than 1,600 pieces of art.

From the New York Times bestselling author of Dear Committee Members, a collection of wryly funny stories about ordinary women—in all their complexity, fallibility, and humanity. An unsuspecting couple is treated to a luxury vacation by their deceased neighbor. After begrudgingly agreeing to volunteer at a nursing home, a middle school girl gambles over games of bridge with elderly residents. A single mother struggles to understand the unique bond between her autistic son and his dying grandmother. Four friends experience decades of highs and lows as pawns in The Game of Life. A professional gynecology patient runs into a high school flame while at work, undressed, on the job. In this irreverent collection, celebrated novelist Julie Schumacher balances sorrow against laughter. Here, we experience story not only as narrative, but as syllabus and as board game. Each protagonist—ranging from girlhood to senescence—receives her own indelible voice as she navigates social blunders, generational misunderstandings, and the absurdity of the human experience. Exquisitely honest and expertly crafted, Patient, Female renders—with dark humor and wit—the foibles of human behavior and our endearing imperfections.

This is a Memoir about Matthew Sturniolo's struggles with anxiety, the passing of his grandfather and their house fire.

A provocative novel about an immigrant family living the American dream—and the daughter whose death raises questions about just how American they really want to become.Zorah Sharaf is her family’s pride and joy.Zorah Sharaf is bringing shame to her family.What is the truth? It depends on who you ask.After fleeing the horrors of war in Afghanistan, the Sharaf family resettles as refugees in Northern Virginia. After many years of hard work, the father has become a millionaire. Now they live in the most exclusive neighborhood, their growing family attending the most prestigious schools. And Zorah, the eldest daughter, is the apple of her father’s eye.When Zorah dies after her car veers off the road, it initially seems like a tragic accident—a rainy night, an inexperienced young driver. But stories start to emerge of Zorah as a daughter who disgraced her family, who cavorted with boys. There is talk that the Sharafs’ perfect teenage daughter was far from perfect.The media seizes on the story, dragging the family into the court of public opinion. Was Zorah’s death a tragic accident, or did she die by the hands of her own family in an “honor killing?”Told through multiple points of view and set against a backdrop of Islamophobia and xenophobia, the novel is riveting, provocative, and unforgettable. Good People is sure to spark ongoing conversation with its urgent storytelling, daring structure, and nuanced look at some of the most pressing questions of our time.

From acclaimed author Jonathan Miles (“a writer so virtuosic that readers will feel themselves becoming better, more observant people from reading him"—LA Times) comes a blackly comic literary gem in which a broken man confronts a broken world on an uninhabited Pacific island. Reeling from tragedy, a former jazz musician-turned-schoolteacher named Adi answers a job listing advertising a chance to save the world. The to spend five weeks alone on the tiny, isolated Pacific Island of Santa Flora righting an ecological balance that’s gone severely out of whack, with the aim of preserving countless bird and plant species from certain extinction. What follows, however, is anything but balanced. The threats to the once-Edenic island, Adi soon learns, aren’t exactly what his employers said they were—and, complicating things further, he discovers he’s not alone on the island. Fearful for his own life, and for the fate of the island's, Adi spends his sun-drenched days rooting out the true threat to Santa Flora, and, by extension, to the world it occupies—and the desperate steps he must take to eradicate it. A desert-island meditation on the contours of love and grief and solitude as well as jolt to your emotional core, Eradication is an utterly unforgettable reading experience, a narrative tour de force, and the work of a truly singular imagination. With this fourth work of fiction, Jonathan Miles, “a fluid, confident, and profoundly talented writer” (Dave Eggers) has truly come into his own.

Here are fifteen pitch-perfect stories about women trying to make their own way: featuring daughters, divorcees, fox demons, a praying mantis, and . . . green frogs. A young girl reconnects with her Korean grandmother; an artist considers her connection to the Korean folktale of the green frog; a praying mantis living in a beautiful home overlooking the park finds the New York dating scene leaves her hungering for more; a fox demon seeks revenge for her murdered sister, only for her loyalties to be torn; AI brings a grieving mother’s daughter back to life; at a spa in the mountains, a recently divorced woman has a ghostly encounter; and a recipe book instructs the reader on ‘how to eat your own heart’. From Gina Chung, the author of Sea Change, this collection of fifteen offbeat, scintillating stories influenced by Korean fairy tales and contemporary ennui, shines a light on womanhood in all of its human (and other) forms.

A novel about a woman tossed overboard by heartbreak and loss, who has to find her way back to stable shores with the help of a giant Pacific octopus. Ro is stuck. She's just entered her thirties, she's estranged from her mother, and her boyfriend has just left her to join a mission to Mars. Her days are spent dragging herself to her menial job at a mall aquarium, and her nights are spent drinking sharktinis (mountain dew and copious amounts of gin, plus a hint of jalapeno). With her best friend pulling away to focus on her upcoming wedding, Ro's only companion is Dolores, a giant Pacific octopus who also happens to be Ro's last remaining link to her father, a marine biologist who disappeared while on an expedition when Ro was a teenager. When Dolores is sold to a wealthy investor intent on moving her to a private aquarium, Ro finds herself on the precipice of self-destruction. Wading through memories of her youth, Ro has one last chance to come to terms with her childhood trauma, recommit to those around her, and find her place in an ever-changing world. A VINTAGE ORIGINAL

ALA Gay-Lesbian-Bisexual Book Award. In his electrifying novel, adolescent gay love, violence, and the spirituality of old-time religion are combined through the alchemy of Grimsley's vision into a powerfully suspenseful story of escape and redemption.

For readers of Colm Tóibín and Claire Keegan, Saoirse is a powerful novel set between the United States and Ireland about a woman who runs from her traumatic past and the secrets she carries to survive.In Michigan, Sarah’s childhood was defined by fear and silence. As a teenager, she saw a chance to escape and took it. Now, in 1999, she is an artist living on the rugged coast of Donegal, Ireland, where she is known as Saoirse (pronounced Sear-sha)—a name that sounds like the sea and means freedom in the language of her adopted country. And free is precisely how she is finally beginning to feel. Her partner and two beloved daughters are regular subjects of her paintings, and together they have made the safe home she always longed for. But Saoirse's secrets haunt her. No one must learn of the identity she has stolen in order to survive; they cannot know of the dangers that she crossed an ocean to escape.When her artwork wins unexpected acclaim at a Dublin exhibition, the spotlight of fame threatens to unravel the careful lies that hold her world together. Journalists and admirers begin to ask questions about the mysterious artist from Donegal, and she fears the unwanted publicity will expose all that she has done.Saoirse is an evocative, suspenseful exploration of the intimate relationship between art and life and the lies we tell ourselves in the name of reinvention.

The new novel from the winner of the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize, The Hired Man is a taut, powerful novel of a small town and its dark wartime secrets, unwittingly brought into the light by a family of outsiders. Aminatta Forna has established herself as one of our most perceptive and uncompromising chroniclers of war and the way it reverberates, sometimes imperceptibly, in the daily lives of those touched by it. With The Hired Man, she has delivered a tale of a Croatian village after the War of Independence, and a family of newcomers who expose its secrets. Duro is off on a morning’s hunt when he sees something one rarely does in Gost: a strange car. Later that day, he overhears its occupants, a British woman, Laura, and her two children, who have taken up residence in a house Duro knows well. He offers his assistance getting their water working again, and soon he is at the house every day, helping get it ready as their summer cottage, and serving as Laura’s trusted confidant. But the other residents of Gost are not as pleased to have the interlopers, and as Duro and Laura’s daughter Grace uncover and begin to restore a mosaic in the front that has been plastered over, Duro must be increasingly creative to shield the family from the town’s hostility, and his own past with the house’s former occupants. As the inhabitants of Gost go about their days, working, striving to better themselves and their town, and arguing, the town’s volatile truths whisper ever louder. A masterpiece of storytelling haunted by lost love and a restrained menace, this novel recalls Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee and Anil’s Ghost by Michael Ondaatje. The Hired Man confirms Aminatta Forna as one of our most important writers.