Literary Fiction

Life doesn’t end. Reality isn’t fixed. Time doesn’t work the way you think. Even the universe, despite its size, is surprisingly aware of and attuned to each of us. Then come those moments when all boundaries dissolve, worlds merge, and we are given glimpses into how connected everything is. Call Me Jonah is the story of an ordinary man who experiences such extraordinary moments starting in childhood and that continue throughout his lifetime. Afraid of ridicule, he keeps hidden what he learns from each mystical encounter for decades.

Once A Homecoming Queen is a darkly humorous novel about addiction and redemption, featuring a 75-year-old, Francine-Reynolds-Richelli-Freeman, whose extreme alcohol consumption leads to a bevy of problems including her latest—a fall that breaks her neck, leaving her daughter and those who care about her to help Francine make peace with her past and re-imagine her future.

The Novices of Lerna introduces the enigmatic fictions of Ángel Bonomini to English listeners for the first time. Shot through with wry humor and tender absurdity, these meditations on identity, surveillance, and isolation remain eerily prescient. The collection's central novella follows Ramon Beltra, an unambitious scholar who receives a mysterious invitation to a lucrative six-month fellowship at the University of Lerna in Switzerland.

As a student in college, David Kepesh styles himself “a rake among scholars, a scholar among rakes.” Little does he realize how prophetic this motto will be—or how damning. For as Philip Roth follows Kepesh from the domesticity of childhood into the vast wilderness of erotic possibility, from a ménage à trois in London to the throes of loneliness in New York, he creates a novel that “ranks among the major achievements in the literature of our time”—Village Voice.

At 40, Lena Baker is at a steady and stable moment in life—between wine nights with her two best friends and her wedding just weeks away, she’s happy in love and in friendship—until a confession on her wedding day shifts her world.

Unable to afford rent, Mia—a community college student—lives out of her car, cleaning houses of the well-to-do in the LA area to meet her shoestring budget. Then Covid hits, and everything changes. For people living in houses and apartments, with stay-at-home jobs, the pandemic was inconvenient. For Mia—a student and housekeeper whose budget is so tight she lives in her car—the pandemic destroys the very source of her paltry income.

One of Jon Fosse’s most acclaimed novels, Boathouse is told from the perspective of an unnamed narrator leading a largely hermit-like existence until he unexpectedly encounters a long-lost childhood friend and his wife. Told partially in a stream-of-consciousness style and with an atmosphere reminiscent of a gripping crime novel, Boathouse slowly unravels the story of a love triangle leading to jealousy, betrayal, and eventually death.

A searing, unflinching collection of stories set in Nigeria that explores themes of community expectations, familial strife, and the struggle for survival.

When Myriam and Allison fall in love at a show in a run-down punk house, their relationship begins to unfold through a series of hypotheticals. What if they became mothers by finding a baby in an alley? What if the only cure for Myriam’s depression was Allison’s flesh? What if they were B-list celebrities, famous for writing a book about building healthy lesbian relationships? How much darker—or sexier—would their dynamic be if one were a power-hungry CEO, and the other her lowly employee?

After Bexhet Konar escapes fascist Hungary and crosses the ocean to find Jozef, the man who saved his life in 1919, he falls in love with Jozef's daughter, Hannah, enlists in World War II, and is drawn into a personal war of revenge. Many years later, their youngest son, Samuel, is taken prisoner in Vietnam and returns home with a heroin addiction and deep physical and psychological wounds. As Samuel travels his own path toward healing, his son will graduate from Annapolis as a Marine on his way to Iraq.

In the gripping world of this suspenseful thriller, the lives of identical twins diverge dramatically from the moment of their birth. Born into the same world, they are immediately separated, destined for divergent paths with devastating consequences. The tale unfolds with the birth of Lily and Grace, twins torn apart by fate. Lily is raised in a world of privilege, while Grace faces adversity in the realm of adoption. Their lives run parallel yet distant, each unaware of the other.

At Shadows Casino, this isn’t just a phrase, it’s a grim reality. Far from prying eyes is a world of decadent pleasure, and unimaginable pain, where only the desperate or the rich dare to tread. Cee is the leader of the sinister establishment, but that hasn’t always been her story. Long before she'd ever heard of a parlay or letting it ride, Cee was just a little girl with a daddy who liked to gamble. And when her daddy brought her into Shadows, he made a bet that changed both of their lives forever.

Peter Heller is unique in his ability to capture the beauty and nuance of the natural world and its pull on women and men. In The Orchard, he pairs evocative storytelling with jewel-like poems—Hayley’s translations of her most beloved Tang poet, Li Xue—that echo Hayley and Frith’s life in the wilderness and tell their own tale of mother and daughter.

Returning home from combat operations, Army Specialist Wesley Erickson strives to settle back into civilian life. Hanging up his rifle and picking up a deck of cards, Wes now provides for his wife, Maggie, and their unborn child as a poker dealer in a local casino.

From interdisciplinary writer and performer Jacob Wren comes Polyamorous Love Song, a novel of intertwined narratives concerning the relationship between artists and the world. Shot through with unexpected moments of sex and violence, listeners will become acquainted with a world that is at once the same and opposite from the one in which they live.