Set in the contemporary Paris of American  expatraites, liasons, and violence, a young man finds  himself caught between desire and conventional  morality. James Baldwin's brilliant narrative delves  into the mystery of loving with a sharp, probing  imagination, and he creates a moving, highly  controversial story of death and passion that reveals the  unspoken complexities of the heart.

Kitchen juxtaposes two tales about mothers, transsexuality, bereavement, kitchens, love and tragedy in contemporary Japan. It is a startlingly original first work by Japan's brightest young literary star and is now a cult film. When Kitchen was first published in Japan in 1987 it won two of Japan's most prestigious literary prizes, climbed its way to the top of the bestseller lists, then remained there for over a year and sold millions of copies. Banana Yoshimoto was hailed as a young writer of great talent and great passion whose work has quickly earned a place among the best of modern literature, and has been described as 'the voice of young Japan' by the Independent on Sunday.

Don Quixote has become so entranced by reading chivalric romances that he determines to become a knight-errant himself. In the company of his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, his exploits blossom in all sorts of wonderful ways. While Quixote's fancy often leads him astray—he tilts at windmills, imagining them to be giants—Sancho acquires cunning and a certain sagacity. Sane madman and wise fool, they roam the world together, and together they have haunted readers' imaginations for nearly four hundred years. With its experimental form and literary playfulness, Don Quixote has been generally recognized as the first modern novel. The book has been enormously influential on a host of writers, from Fielding and Sterne to Flaubert, Dickens, Melville, and Faulkner, who reread it once a year, "just as some people read the Bible."

Dante’s Inferno meets Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi in this dark academia fantasy from R. F. Kuang, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Babel and Yellowface, in which two graduate students must put aside their rivalry and journey to Hell to save their professor’s soul—perhaps at the cost of their own. Katabasis, noun, Ancient Greek: The story of a hero’s descent to the underworld Alice Law has only ever had one goal: to become one of the brightest minds in the field of Magick. She has sacrificed everything to make that a reality: her pride, her health, her love life, and most definitely her sanity. All to work with Professor Jacob Grimes at Cambridge, the greatest magician in the world. That is, until he dies in a magical accident that could possibly be her fault. Grimes is now in Hell, and she’s going in after him. Because his recommendation could hold her very future in his now incorporeal hands and even death is not going to stop the pursuit of her dreams…. Nor will the fact that her rival, Peter Murdoch, has come to the very same conclusion. With nothing but the tales of Orpheus and Dante to guide them, enough chalk to draw the Pentagrams necessary for their spells, and the burning desire to make all the academic trauma mean anything, they set off across Hell to save a man they don’t even like. But Hell is not like the storybooks say, Magick isn’t always the answer, and there’s something in Alice and Peter’s past that could forge them into the perfect allies…or lead to their doom.

In Temporary, a young woman's workplace is the size of the world. She fills increasingly bizarre placements in search of steadiness, connection, and something, at last, to call her own. Whether it's shining an endless closet of shoes, swabbing the deck of a pirate ship, assisting an assassin, or filling in for the Chairman of the Board, for the mythical Temporary, "there is nothing more personal than doing your job." This riveting quest, at once hilarious and profound, will resonate with anyone who has ever done their best at work, even when the work is only temporary.

Every year, the most important figure skating competition in the solar system, the Grand Prix Final, takes place on Jupiter’s volcanic moon, Io. Valeria Arqueros, the four-time interplanetary champion with a hidden fetish for domination, abruptly switches from the Uranian team to the Martian team, much to the horror of the skating community. Valeria, full of rage but outwardly pristine in every way she wants to be, is obsessed with perfecting the elusive quintuple jump. It’s hard to focus, however, when she starts being followed around by her fellow Martian teammate, Lu Brooks (they/them), a boyband member in another life who apparently gets off on displays of power, ice skating-related or otherwise. Lu thinks they know something about Valeria that she doesn’t, and their infatuation with her seems to go beyond the idolatry she’s used to from other skaters. But if Valeria becomes sexually entangled with Lu, it’s certainly not anything serious. She’s got more important things to think about, like pushing the limits of human physicality so she can become the greatest skater who’s ever lived. She has no desire to bond with her other teammates, including Bella Fuentes, her youngest competitor and the darling of Mars who seems to be imitating Valeria’s career as well as her unpredictable temper. Surely Valeria will only be a Martian for a single season before returning to Uranus, where everything is familiarly cold and uncomplicated. Surely her old coach slash former guardian Morozova will welcome her back once she sees her skate a quintuple axel. Yes, Valeria doesn’t have time to party with the likes of Lu or anyone else; she’s going to win gold on every planet in the Grand Prix Final circuit and then repeat it for another decade more until her body collapses like a dying star. Sure, maybe figure skating’s about love, Valeria thinks, but it’s even more so about violence.

‘Last year I lost my cat Gattino. He was very young, at seven months barely an adolescent. He is probably dead but I don’t know for certain.’ So begins Mary Gaitskill’s stunning book-length essay, the closest thing she has written to a memoir. Lost Cat begins with the story of how Gaitskill rescued a stray cat in Italy and brought him to live with her in the US, where he went missing. As she explores the unexpected trauma of her loss, Gaitskill describes how she came to foster two siblings, Caesar and Natalia, a pair of inner-city children who spent summers and holidays with Gaitskill and her husband. The joys and ultimate difficulties of this relationship leads to a searing examination of loss, love, safety and fear. Gaitskill applies her razor-sharp writing to her most personal subjects yet.