From the bestselling author Christobel Kent, a high-strung, bone-chilling, heart-stopping plunge into the desolate byways of England’s Essex, in search of a missing barmaid named Beth

Some say Beth’s disappearance was to be expected. She’s a rural barmaid from Cornwall, a fly-by-night party girl who can’t be trusted. There wasn’t really anything to keep her...

In The Wine Lover’s Daughter, Anne Fadiman examines—with all her characteristic wit and feeling—her relationship with her father, Clifton Fadiman, a renowned literary critic, editor, and radio host whose greatest love was wine.

An appreciation of wine—along with a plummy upper-crust accent, expensive suits, and an encyclopedic knowledge of Western...

An intimate new biography of Joni Mitchell, one of the greatest musicians of the twentieth century

Joni Mitchell is a cultural touchstone for generations of Americans. In her heyday she released ten experimental, challenging, and revealing albums; her lyrics captivated people with the beauty of their language and the rawness of their emotions, both deeply...

A captivating blend of reportage and memoir exploring the history of the Chicago Cubs

When Rich Cohen was eight years old, his father took him to see a Cubs game. On the way out of the park, his father asked him to make a promise. "Promise me you will never be a Cubs fan. The Cubs do not win,” he explained, “and because of that, a Cubs fan will have a...

Girlfriend. Prostitute. Addict. Terrorist? Who is K?

The daring new novel from Katherine Faw, the brilliant author of Young God is a scintillating story of money, sex, and power told in Faw’s viciously sharp prose. A high-end, girlfriend-experience prostitute has just returned to her native New York City after more than a decade abroad—in Dubai, with a man...

A magnetic, provocative debut novel chronicling a young woman’s downward spiral following the end of an affair

Elsa Fisher is headed for rock bottom. At least, that’s her plan. She has just been fired from MoMA on the heels of an affair with her married boss, and she retreats to Los Angeles to blow her severance package on whatever it takes to numb the pain...

A trio of reported essays exploring identity and the Internet

The slippery online ecosystem is the perfect breeding ground for identities: true, false, and in between. The Internet shorthand IRL—“in real life”—now seems naïve. We no longer question the reality of online experiences but the reality of selfhood in the digital age.

In The Secret Life: Three True...

A captivating biography of Ezra Pound told via the stories of his visitors at St. Elizabeths Hospital

In 1945, the great American poet Ezra Pound was deemed insane. He was due to stand trial for treason for his fascist broadcasts in Italy during the war. Instead, he escaped a possible death sentence and was held at St. Elizabeths Hospital for the insane for...

The gripping story of how Joseph Lister’s antiseptic method changed medicine forever

In The Butchering Art the historian Lindsey Fitzharris reveals the shocking world of nineteenth-century surgery and shows how it was transformed by advances made in germ theory and antiseptics between 1860 and 1875. She conjures up early operating theaters—no place for the...

The definitive account of what happened, why, and above all how it felt, when catastrophe hit Japan—by the Japan correspondent of The Times (London) and author of People Who Eat Darkness

On March 11, 2011, a powerful earthquake sent a 120-foot-high tsunami smashing into the coast of northeast Japan. By the time the sea retreated, more than eighteen thousand...

A portrait of the Irish-American experience in the 1940s and 1950s, by the National Book Award-winning author

On a dim winter afternoon, a young Irish immigrant opens the gas taps in his Brooklyn tenement. He is determined to prove—to the subway bosses who have recently fired him, to his badgering, pregnant wife—“that the hours of his life belong to himself...

An engagingly contemporary approach to Buddhism—through the lens of an iconic film and its memorable characters

Humorous yet spiritually rigorous in the tradition of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and The Tao of Pooh, drawing from pop culture and from personal experience, The Dharma of “The Princess Bride” teaches us how to understand and navigate...

From five-time Grand Slam winner Maria Sharapova, the candid, captivating story of her rise to tennis stardom

In the middle of the night, a father and his daughter step off a Greyhound bus in Florida and head straight to the Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy. They ring the bell, though no one is expecting them and they don’t speak English. The two have arrived...

In his much-anticipated new novel, Robin Sloan does for the world of food what he did for the world of books in Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore

Lois Clary is a software engineer at General Dexterity, a San Francisco robotics company with world-changing ambitions. She codes all day and collapses at night, her human contact limited to the two brothers who run...

The stunning true story of an untouchable family who become teachers, and one, a poet and revolutionary

Like one in six people in India, Sujatha Gidla was born an untouchable. While most untouchables are illiterate, her family was educated by Canadian missionaries in the 1930s, making it possible for Gidla to attend elite schools and move to America at the...

The Strange Bird—from New York Times bestselling novelist Jeff VanderMeer—is a digital original that expands and weaves deeply into the world of his “thorough marvel”* of a novel, Borne.

The Strange Bird is a new kind of creature, built in a laboratory—she is part bird, part human, part many other things. But now the lab in which she was created is under...

An incisive biography of the prolific photo-essayist W. Eugene Smith

In an interview with Philippe Halsman, W. Eugene Smith remarked: “I didn’t write the rules—why should I follow them?” Famously unabashed, Smith is photography’s most celebrated humanist. During his reign as a photo-essayist at Life magazine in the 1940s and 1950s, he established himself as...

The acclaimed novelist Samantha Hunt’s first collection of stories blends the literary and the fantastic and brings us characters on the verge—girls turning into women, women turning into deer, people doubling or becoming ghosts, and more

Strange things happen all around us all the time, but is it best to acknowledge or to turn away from moments when the...

Suzy Hansen left her country and moved to Istanbul and discovered America

In the wake of the September 11 attacks and the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Suzy Hansen, who grew up in an insular conservative town in New Jersey, was enjoying early success as a journalist for a high-profile New York newspaper. Increasingly, though, the disconnect between the chaos of...

The collected works of one of contemporary poetry’s most original voices

Gathered together, the poems of Frank Bidart perform one of the most remarkable transmutations of the body into language in contemporary literature. His pages represent the human voice in all its extreme registers, whether it’s that of the child-murderer Herbert White, the obsessive...

One of Nylon and Chicago Reader's "Books We Can't Wait To Read In 2017"

One of Buzzfeed and Vulture's Best Books to Read This Summer

A father searches for his addict son while grappling with his own choices as a parent (and as a user of sorts)

In Lindsay Hunter’s achingly funny, fiercely honest second novel, Eat Only When You’re Hungry we meet Greg—an...

The lunacy of the final months of World War II, as experienced by a young German soldier

Distant, silent, often drunk, Walter Urban is a difficult man to have as a father. But his son—the narrator of this slim, harrowing novel—is curious about Walter’s experiences during World War II, and so makes him a present of a blank notebook in which to write down his...

One of Nylon's "50 Books We Can't Wait To Read In 2017"

One of Chicago Reader's "Books We Can't Wait To Read In 2017"

A chilling literary horror novel about a young couple haunted by their newly purchased home

Jac Jemc’s The Grip of It tells the eerie story of a young couple haunted by their new home. Julie and James settle into a house in a small town outside...

A riveting, cinematic new novel from Ryan Gattis, whose work Paula Hawkins has called “shocking, visceral, and humane.”

Ricky “Ghost” Mendoza, Jr. is trying to be good. As a teenager he was a gangbanger, addict, and killer until got out—and met Rose. Now in recovery and working as a safecracker for the DEA in Los Angeles, Ghost is determined to live “clean”...