From the Bram Stoker Award–winning author of Queen of Teeth and A Game in Yellow, a “blissfully twisted and genuinely heartfelt” (Rachel Harrison, New York Times bestselling author of Play Nice) literary horror novel following a young woman on the heels of a traumatic break-up as she anxiously awaits an impending alien abduction.When Rabbit was ten years old, she was abducted by aliens. Then, it happened again when she was twenty. Now thirty, she’s ready for their next visit. What she isn’t prepared for is her boyfriend callously ending their long-term relationship and ejecting her from their shared home. As her birthday approaches, the aliens still haven’t arrived. Rabbit descends into a spiral of growing paranoia and bizarre bodily transformations, until soon it seems that even her reflection has a mind of its own. With her only refuge being the chaos of strangers who might not have her best interests at heart, Rabbit worries that her ex’s abandonment not only severed her from his life, but also from her own. Struggling to orient herself within a world growing more topsy-turvy by the day, Rabbit must regain control before her aliens at last return.

A hypnotic and haunting work of fiction about losing yourself and finding your family, Long Wave is the finest novel yet from Booker Prize-shortlisted Daisy Johnson'Elemental, fundamental, irresistable... Her greatest achievement yet' Kiran Millwood HargraveClose to the shore is the uninhabited, wild, with only a storm-beaten lighthouse for shelter. Ori was found there as a small child with a handful of stones, no memories and no mother. When she has a baby of her own, the job of motherhood feels immense and sleepless nights begin to shatter her grip on reality. Her head fills with the sound of stones knocking against each other and the mystery of her past begins to unravel, opening up a path to the mother she lost, and the mother she could become.Years earlier, on a sweltering summer day, ten-year-old Ruth sees a woman and her baby walk into the river and disappear. But she is the only witness, and the water yields no trace. Ruth’s mother, Edith, locks her daughter away – first to restrain these wild imaginings, and later, when she falls pregnant, to hide the shame. Ruth longs to escape and dreams of the nearby island, where she and her baby can finally be free.Told with mythic power and lyrical precision, Long Wave is an extraordinary novel of longing and loss, rebirth and survival.

The Renaissance Faire — a 50 year-long party, communal ritual, political challenge and cultural wellspring—receives its first sustained historical attention with Well Met. Beginning with the chaotic communal moment of its founding and early development in the 1960s through its incorporation as a major “family friendly” leisure site in the 2000s, Well Met tells the story of the thinkers, artists, clowns, mimes, and others performers who make the Faire. Well Met approaches the Faire from the perspective of labor, education, aesthetics, business, the opposition it faced, and the key figures involved. Drawing upon vibrant interview material and deep archival research, Rachel Lee Rubin reveals the way the faires established themselves as a pioneering and highly visible counter cultural referendum on how we live now—our family and sexual arrangements, our relationship to consumer goods, and our corporate entertainments. In order to understand the meaning of the faire to its devoted participants,both workers and visitors, Rubin has compiled a dazzling array of testimony, from extensive conversations with Faire founder Phyllis Patterson to interviews regarding the contemporary scene with performers, crafters, booth workers and “playtrons.” Well Met pays equal attention what came out of the faire—the transforming gifts bestowed by the faire’s innovations and experiments upon the broader American culture: the underground press of the 1960s and 1970s, experimentation with “ethnic” musical instruments and styles in popular music, the craft revival, and various forms of immersive theater are all connected back to their roots in the faire. Original, intrepid, and richly illustrated, Well Met puts the Renaissance Faire back at the historical center of the American counterculture.

“When truth teller and careful writer bell hooks offers a book, I like to be standing at the bookshop when it opens.” –Maya Angelou Intimate, revealing, provocative, Communion challenges every woman to courageously claim the search for love as the heroic journey we must all choose to be truly free. In her trademark commanding and lucid language, hooks explores the ways ideas about women and love were changed by the feminist movement, by women's full participation in the workforce, and by the culture of self-help, and reveals how women of all ages can bring love into every aspect of their lives, for all the years of their lives. Communion is the heart-to-heart talk every woman -- mother, daughter, friend, and lover -- needs to have.

“When truth teller and careful writer bell hooks offers a book, I like to be standing at the bookshop when it opens.” –Maya Angelou Intimate, revealing, provocative, Communion challenges every woman to courageously claim the search for love as the heroic journey we must all choose to be truly free. In her trademark commanding and lucid language, hooks explores the ways ideas about women and love were changed by the feminist movement, by women's full participation in the workforce, and by the culture of self-help, and reveals how women of all ages can bring love into every aspect of their lives, for all the years of their lives. Communion is the heart-to-heart talk every woman -- mother, daughter, friend, and lover -- needs to have.

A bold, expansive argument for a new way to understand immoral art in our time of cultural and political upheaval In this unconventional journey through the history of art, philosopher and artist Daisy Dixon explores works of art that society has condemned as depraved, obscene, or dangerous, from prehistoric sculpture to extreme metal music, videogames to classical paintings. Interrogating our sense of morality, past and present, Depraved asks listeners to engage with essential questions about art, censorship, social progress, and the eternal debate over right and wrong. Can an artwork speak? How can it shape or distort our world? Who gets to decide whether a work of art is depraved, and what are the qualities that make it so? And of course, what should we do about it? As art is subjected to renewed criticism in the cultural and political spheres, it is imperative that we examine it with care. Only by understanding the long history of depraved art can we begin to bring our own age into focus. Art can be dangerous—but censorship can be equally catastrophic. Where does this leave us? With wit, fascinating anecdotes, and shrewd analysis, Dixon crafts a path forward that demands a new understanding of the nature of art itself.

Shortlisted for the 2018 Man Booker International Prize From Booker Prize-winner and literary phenomenon Han Kang, a lyrical and disquieting exploration of personal grief, written through the prism of the color white While on a writer's residency, a nameless narrator wanders the twin white worlds of the blank page and snowy Warsaw. THE WHITE BOOK becomes a meditation on the color white, as well as a fictional journey inspired by an older sister who died in her mother's arms, a few hours old. The narrator grapples with the tragedy that has haunted her family, an event she colors in stark white--breast milk, swaddling bands, the baby's rice cake-colored skin--and, from here, visits all that glows in her memory: from a white dog to sugar cubes. As the writer reckons with the enormity of her sister's death, Han Kang's trademark frank and chilling prose is softened by retrospection, introspection, and a deep sense of resilience and love. THE WHITE BOOK--ultimately a letter from Kang to her sister--offers powerful philosophy and personal psychology on the tenacity and fragility of the human spirit, and our attempts to graft new life from the ashes of destruction.

“I was two percent into Bad Words when I realized I was reading something special, the rare kind of book that not only treads new, fresh territory but does so in a way that feels startlingly inevitable. The kind of book I can’t believe doesn’t already exist, because it is just so right, so the thing I’ve been waiting for. It’s also a book that could only ever have been written by Rioghnach Robinson, whose clear, clever voice and incisive social commentary elevate the book’s punchy premise and irresistible will-they-won’t-they romance to a once-in-a-lifetime read about truth, art, vulnerability and all the sticky places they intersect. Bad Words left me buzzing.” — Emily Henry, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Great Big Beautiful Life Bad Words follows Parker Navarro, whose debut was snapped up in a million-dollar deal and pegged to be the book of the year—until notorious City Magazine critic Selina Chan tore it apart, turning it into the decade’s biggest flop. Now, four years later, Parker’s second novel is about to drop, and he’s desperate for redemption. But when Selina’s brutal new review goes viral, history repeats itself, and a fiery, very public blowout between them at a publishing party turns them into instant enemies of the literary world. As their feud plays out through snarky interviews and tense convention run-ins, their jabs about writing, criticism, and who gets to lead an artist’s life start to give way to the realization they might be more like-minded than they thought. While the feud carries on in public, a different conversation is taking place in private, especially after they're thrust together for one snowy New York evening and begin an epistolary communication that starts to feel a lot like flirting.

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.

Life on Fortune is hard. The atmosphere is poisonous, the planet hardly fit for life. For years the colonists have struggled, forbidden from returning to the Mothership until they develop the technology of spaceflight for themselves. Cora suffers from a rare condition, brought about by her contact with the alien animal she pilots, quarrying vital water for the colony. Signy is the only person who can save her - but to do so, she must break the rules that govern their lives, and risk her livelihood and the other colonists who rely on her for survival. But, as Cora and Signy meet, grow, and fall in love, they begin to yearn for more than mere survival . . .

Author of Piñata, Leopoldo Goût's latest horror novel Rooted is a "a blood reckoning" (Marlon James) where one woman's return to Mexico City digs away the layers of her forgotten past and the Aztec gods she awakened.Aurora, a successful art lawyer, has returned to Mexico to celebrate a recent campaign for the repatriation of stolen artifacts. In particular a mysterious statue of an Aztec god.There’s nothing wrong with Aurora.But Mexico City isn’t as she remembered, and as she cares for her ailing mother, home isn’t as she remembered either. Nothing is as she remembered. Elements of her past hint at darkness and power, and reality begins to crack and warp the streets.There’s nothing wrong with Aurora.But some sicknesses can’t be healed. As Aurora’s sanity unravels, she must pry apart her family’s secrets and accept the simplest of The Flayed One cannot stay buried.Other Books by Leopoldo GoûtPiñataAt the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Full of glimpses into gleaming worlds and fairy tales with teeth, Seasons of Glass and Stories is a collection of acclaimed and awarded work from Amal El-Mohtar. With confidence and style, El-Mohtar guides us through exquisitely told and sharply observed tales about life as it is, was, and could be. Like miscellany from other worlds, these stories are told in letters, diary entries, reference materials, folktales, and lyrical prose. Full of Nebula, Locus, World Fantasy, and Hugo Award-winning and nominated stories, Seasons of Glass and Stories includes "Seasons of Glass and Iron," "The Green Book," "Madeleine," "The Lonely Sea in the Sky," "And Their Lips Rang with the Sun," "The Truth About Owls," "A Hollow Play," "Anabasis," "To Follow the Waves," "John Hollowback and the Witch," "Florilegia, or, Some Lies About Flowers," "Pockets," and more.

An extraordinary debut novel, Freshwater explores the surreal experience of having a fractured self. It centers around a young Nigerian woman, Ada, who develops separate selves within her as a result of being born “with one foot on the other side.” Unsettling, heartwrenching, dark, and powerful, Freshwater is a sharp evocation of a rare way of experiencing the world, one that illuminates how we all construct our identities. Ada begins her life in the south of Nigeria as a troubled baby and a source of deep concern to her family. Her parents, Saul and Saachi, successfully prayed her into existence, but as she grows into a volatile and splintered child, it becomes clear that something went terribly awry. When Ada comes of age and moves to America for college, the group of selves within her grows in power and agency. As Ada fades into the background of her own mind and these alters—now protective, now hedonistic—move into control, Ada’s life spirals in a dark and dangerous direction. Narrated by the selves within Ada, and based in the author’s realities, Freshwater explores the metaphysics of identity and mental health, plunging the reader into the mystery of being and self. Freshwater dazzles with ferocious energy and serpentine grace, heralding the arrival of a fierce new literary voice.

A surreal portrait of the Nakba as never-ending, lived and relived by one displaced Palestinian family. In Stockholm, Zein al-Abedin shivers, far from the warmth of simmering revolt years ago in Shatila. In Paris, his son Nidal toils in solitude, ignoring his father’s phone calls and dousing his desire for Bassam back in Lebanon. Salwa, refusing to leave Beirut for Sweden, digs backward in time through Facebook and discovers an unlikely channel to the one place in the world she can’t go: Ayn Ara, the Abu Sukkar family’s ancestral home in Palestine. Invoking the long wake of the 1948 Nakba and its displacement of 750,000 Palestinians from their homes, Sara Abou Ghazal webs the worldwide, timewide scatter of the Abu Sukkar family. At every turn, Ayn Ara disrupts their otherwise “normal” days in new terrains through memory, pain, and strange magic — culminating with a journey into both the past and a parallel present of Zionist settler violence. Be it through a ghostly return to the brutal event of the Nakba, or grandmother Nijmeh’s psychic drift from land to no-land and back, Dreams of Ayn Ara portrays time as a false phenomenon for people ripped from their rightful place—and points to fissures in the fragile reality that denies Palestine to Palestinians.

Grace O'Malley was born to be at sea. Raised alongside her brother by their father, chief of the name of clan O'Malley, Grace learns early that her dreams of the open water are not compatible with the life she's expected to lead as the daughter of a noble family. And when her father marries her to the wrong man, a neighbouring chief named Donhal, Grace's world shifts for the worse. Undaunted, Grace raises a family without abandoning her passion, aiding her hot-tempered husband in his campaigns against rival tribes. Eventually ousted from her husband's land in the wake of his death, Grace returns to her childhood home and begins her career as a pirate in earnest, claiming new territories and finding deeper love, only to see her livelihood threatened by English incursions into Ireland, and her family endangered in an attempt to check her power. Tenderly observed and fiercely written, Ariel Lawhon's gripping latest novel channels the natural beauty of sixteenth-century Ireland alongside the brutality of the period as seen through the eyes of an unforgettable heroine and defender of her people, who truly earned the title 'the Pirate Queen of Ireland.' A thrilling historical adventure inspired by the life of Grace O'Malley, an infamous Irish sea captain and folk heroine who risked everything to protect her people against the powerful Elizabethan regime

How do we give old words new voices? What must a translator lose - and might she gain - when she moves between languages, bringing ancient stories to modern life? Reflecting on the inspiration, interpretation and (mis)appropriation of words from Antiquity to today, Emily Wilson invites us to explore the translator's art and mind - and gives a wholly fresh insight into the joys and quandaries of her own work. From Athenian comedy and Rome's love of Greek culture to Han Kang's novels, Cardi B's lyrics and the discoveries she made whilst translating Homer, this is a playful and fascinating voyage into the promise, possibility and constant renewal of our founding classical culture.

The pressure cooker of minor league baseball leads to major chemistry in this exhilarating, sexy, and triumphant rivals to lovers debut romance. Hope is familiar territory for Gene Ionescu. He has always loved baseball, a sport made for underdogs and optimists like him. He also loves his team, the minor league Beaverton Beavers, and, for the most part, he loves the career he’s built. As the first openly trans player in professional baseball, Gene has nearly everything he’s ever let himself dream of—that is, until Luis Estrada, Gene’s former teammate and current rival, gets traded to the Beavers, destroying the careful equilibrium of Gene’s life. Gene and Luis can’t manage a civil conversation off the field or a competent play on it, but in the close confines of dugout benches and roadie buses, they begrudgingly rediscover a comfortable rhythm. As the two grow closer, the tension between them turns electric, and their chemistry spills past the confines of the stadium. For every tight double play they execute, there’s also a glance at summer-tan shoulders or a secret shared, each one a breathless moment of possibility that ignites in Gene the visceral, terrifying kind of desire he’s never allowed himself. Soon, Gene has to reconcile the quiet, minor-league-sized life he used to find fulfilling with the major-league dreams Luis makes feel possible. A joyful, heartfelt debut rom-com revealing what’s possible when we allow ourselves to want something enough to swing for the fences.

From the author of A Ghost in the Throat , an unforgettable book - both history and ghost story - that will leave you gasping by its final page. In the city of Cork, a derelict Victorian mental hospital is being converted into modern apartments. One passer by has always flinched as she passes the place. Had her birth occurred in another decade, she too might have lived within those walls. Now, she notices a FOR SALE. It is the first of many signs. Following them, she finds herself drawn into an irresistible river of forgotten voices, those of the women who knew this place insistent, vivid and true. They murmur from archives and old records; they whisper from stairwells and walls. Among them - and in one figure in particular -- she may find meaning, solace, rage; her own salvation, perhaps, or her own vanishing? A work of sublime intensity and tenderness, Said the Dead breaks the boundaries between worlds -- past and present, imagined and real -- to make something lasting and an experience full of danger, full of love and full of truth.

Co-winner of the 2022 Novel Prize, this incredible life-after-death novel asks us to consider how much of our memory, of our bodies, of the world as we know it ― how much of what we love can we lose before we are lost? And then what happens?  This third perspective on myself is disconcerting.  The heroine of the spare and haunting It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over  is voraciously alive in the afterlife. Adrift yet keenly aware, she notes every bizarre detail of her new reality. And even if she has forgotten her name and much of what connects her to her humanity, she remembers with an implacable and nearly unbearable longing the place where she knew herself and was known―where she loved and was loved. Traveling across the landscapes of time and of space, heading always west, and carrying a dead but laconically opinionated crow in her chest, our undead narrator encounters and loses parts of her body and her self in one terrifying, hilarious, and heartbreaking situation after another.  A bracing writer of great nerve and verve, Anne de Marcken bends reality (and the reader’s mind) with throwaway assurance. It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over plumbs mortality and how it changes everything, except possibly love. Delivering a near-Beckettian whopping to the reader’s imagination, this is one of the sharpest and funniest novels of recent years, a tale for our dispossessed times.

This hilarious, unpredictable, sexy novel is a fascinating journey into the storefronts, underground clubs, and back alleys of New York's Lower East Side lesbian subculture. And Sarah Schulman, writing in sharp, immediate, insightful prose, has created a wonderfully modern, totally original heroine.