When four classmates from a small Massachusetts college move to New York to make their way, they're broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition. There is kind, handsome Willem, an aspiring actor; JB, a quick-witted, sometimes cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry to the art world; Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm; and withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their center of gravity. Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success, and pride. Yet their greatest challenge, each comes to realize, is Jude himself, by midlife a terrifyingly talented litigator yet an increasingly broken man, his mind and body scarred by an unspeakable childhood, and haunted by what he fears is a degree of trauma that he’ll not only be unable to overcome—but that will define his life forever.

A newly discovered, powerful and devastating firsthand account of the Hiroshima bombing and its aftermath, from one of the survivors profiled in John Hersey's landmark 1946 account, Hiroshima.On the morning of August 6, 1945, Kiyoshi Tanimoto was on the outskirts of Hiroshima, helping a neighbor, when a flash in the sky signaled the birth of a dangerous and horrifying new world. In an instant, tens of thousands of Hiroshima residents had been vaporized or crushed to death. As the 36-year-old Methodist minister raced back to the city center in search of his wife and infant daughter, he encountered scenes of unimaginable structures leveled; fires everywhere; uncountable injured suffering from burns, broken bones, and the effects of radiation. In the days, weeks, and months that followed this unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe, Tanimoto invested body and soul in helping his living congregants obtain food, shelter, and medical care, as well as identifying and burying with as much dignity as possible those who had perished. He dedicated himself to rebuilding, at great personal cost, not only his church and congregation, but his city and his nation, and he went on to gain renown as one of the survivors featured in John Hersey's New Yorker piece and book, Hiroshima, which changed the American public's understanding of the event.But Tanimoto also wrote his own story. What Divides Us is Tanimoto's never-before-published firsthand account of the bombing of Hiroshima, written in the immediate aftermath, in his own words. This singular memoir is both an invaluable addition to the historical record, and an urgent eyewitness testimony of one of the most calamitous events to befall humanity. Tanimoto spent the rest of his life working to ensure that the memories of the hibakusha—the survivors—never be forgotten. At a time when the threat of nuclear war still looms, Tanimoto's message of peace, and his vision of a better path forward for humankind, is of vital importance.

From the “most talented writer of his generation” (The New York Times), a lightning flash of a novel that is at once a gripping emotional drama and a brilliant examination of the devices, digital and literary, we use to store―or to erase―our memories. The narrator of Ben Lerner’s new novel has traveled to Providence, Rhode Island, where he is to conduct what will be the final published interview with Thomas, his ninety-year-old mentor and the father of his college friend, Max. Thomas is a giant in the arts who seems to hail “from the future and the past simultaneously” and who “reenchants the air” when he speaks. But the narrator drops his smartphone in the hotel sink. He arrives at Thomas’s house with no recording device, a fact he is mysteriously unable to confess. What unfolds from this dreamlike circumstance is both the unforgettable story of the triangle formed by Thomas, Max, and the narrator, and a brilliant meditation on those technologies that enrich or impoverish our connection to one another, that store or obliterate memory. Haunted by Kafka (there are echoes of “The Judgement” and “A Hunger Artist”), but utterly contemporary, Lerner combines trenchant insight with lyric mystery. Ultimately, Transcription demonstrates what only a work of fiction can record.

An autobiographical novel about growing up gay in a working-class town in Picardy. “Every morning in the bathroom I would repeat the same phrase to myself over and over again . . . Today I’m really gonna be a tough guy. ” Growing up in a poor village in northern France, all Eddy Bellegueule wanted was to be a man in the eyes of his family and neighbors. But from childhood, he was different―“girlish,” intellectually precocious, and attracted to other men. Already translated into twenty languages, The End of Eddy captures the violence and desperation of life in a French factory town. It is also a sensitive, universal portrait of boyhood and sexual awakening. Like Karl Ove Knausgaard or Edmund White, Édouard Louis writes from his own undisguised experience, but he writes with an openness and a compassionate intelligence that are all his own. The result―a critical and popular triumph―has made him the most celebrated French writer of his generation.

"I’ll be grand, girl, I’ve great faith." – Mammy, just before she died Funny, charismatic and generous; angry, vicious and hurt; in pub lounges all over Cork City, Noelle McCarthy’s mother, Carol, rages against her life and everything she’s lost. As soon as she can, Noelle runs away. All the way to New Zealand, to make a new, different kind of life. But then Mammy gets sick, and it’s time to face everything that’s waiting back home. From Catholic Ireland in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s to sparkling Auckland in the first years of the new millennium, Grand is a story of the invisible ties that bind us, of bitter legacies handed down through the generations, and of the leap of faith it takes to change them.

Crossing to Safety has, since its publication in 1987, established itself as one of the greatest and most cherished American novels of the twentieth century. Tracing the lives, loves, and aspirations of two couples who move between Vermont and Wisconsin, it is a work of quiet majesty, deep compassion, and powerful insight into the alchemy of friendship and marriage.

When her cousin and wife fail to return from a walk, this story takes a sinister turn to a quest of survival A woman takes a holiday in the Austrian mountains, spending a few days with her cousin and his wife in their hunting lodge. When the couple fails to return from a walk, the woman sets off to look for them. But her journey reaches a sinister and inexplicable dead end. She discovers only a transparent wall behind which there seems to be no life. Trapped alone behind the mysterious wall she begins the arduous work of survival. This is at once a simple account of potatoes and beans, of hoping for a calf, of counting matches, of forgetting the taste of sugar and the use of one's name, and simultaneously a disturbing dissection of the place of human beings in the natural world. **PERFECT FOR FANS OF THE YELLOW WALLPAPER, STATION ELEVEN AND THE MARTIAN VINTAGE EARTH is a collection of novels to transform our relationship with the natural world. Each one is a work of creative activism, a blast of fresh air, a seed from which change can grow. The books in this series reconnect us to the planet we inhabit - and must protect. Discover great writing on the most urgent story of our times.