Literary Life

To all appearances, John Wilder has all the trappings of success, circa 1960: a promising career in advertising, a loving family, a beautiful apartment, even a country home. John's evenings are spent with associates at quiet Manhattan lounges and his weekends with friends at glittering cocktail parties. But something deep within this seemingly perfect life has long since gone wrong.

Written with the celebrated precision, intensity, and complexity that have marked her previous works, Clever Girl is a powerful exploration of family relationships and class in modern life, witnessed through the experiences of an English woman named Stella. Unfolding in a series of snapshots, Tessa Hadley's moving novel follows Stella from the shallows of childhood, growing up with a single mother in a Bristol bedsit in the 1960s, into the murky waters of middle age.

Brooke is a divorced single mom, financially strapped, living with her mother, and holding tight to the one thing that matters most: her two-year-old daughter, Etta. Then, in a matter of seconds, Brooke’s life is shattered when she’s carjacked. Helpless and terrified, all Brooke can do is watch as Etta, still strapped in her seat, disappears into the Los Angeles night. Miles away, Etta is found by Molly, a homeless teen who is all too used to darkness. Thrown away by her parents, and with a future as stable as the wooden crate she calls home, Molly survives day to day by her wits.

A riveting, brilliantly written debut novel, The Death of Bees is a coming-of-age story in which two young sisters attempt to hold the world at bay after the mysterious death of their parents. Marnie and Nelly, left on their own in Glasgow's Hazlehurst housing estate, attempt to avoid suspicion until Marnie can become a legal guardian for her younger sister.

Elizabeth and Betsy are old school friends. Born in 1948 and unready for the sixties, they had high hopes of the lives they would lead, even though their circumstances were so different. When they meet again in their thirties, Elizabeth, married to the safe, older Digby, is relieving the boredom of a cosy but childless marriage with an affair. Betsy seems to have found real romance in Paris. Are their lives taking off, or are they just making more of the wrong choices without even realising it?

In this collection, Vivian Gornick turns her attention to a large theme in literature: the struggle for the semblance of inner freedom. In the essays collected here, she explores the work of V. S. Naipaul, James Baldwin, George Gissing, Randall Jarrell, H. G. Wells, Loren Eiseley, Allen Ginsberg, Hayden Carruth, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth.

Andy Carter was happy. He had a solid job. He ran 5Ks for charity. He was living a nice, safe Midwestern existence. And then his wife left him for a handsome paramedic down the street. We're All Damaged begins after Andy has lost his job, ruined his best friend's wedding, and moved to New York City, where he lives in a tiny apartment with an angry cat named Jeter that isn't technically his. But before long he needs to go back to Omaha to say good-bye to his dying grandfather.

Joan Didion's electrifying first novel is a haunting portrait of a marriage whose wrong turns and betrayals are at once absolutely idiosyncratic and a razor-sharp commentary on the history of California. Everett McClellan and his wife, Lily, are the great-grandchildren of pioneers, and what happens to them is a tragic epilogue to the pioneer experience, a story of murder and betrayal that only Didion could tell with such nuance, sympathy, and suspense.

How is it that Flaubert, the great 19th-century novelist and last of the great French romantics, still seems so very modern? In this stunning biography, Geoffrey Wall investigates why Flaubert and his work, Madame Bovary, exert such a firm hold on the popular literary imagination.

Kate dreamed of a happy marriage, a house full of children and a fulfilling teaching career. But after twenty-five years of married life and about to hit the big 5-0, it’s clear that her dreams haven’t quite come true. Then her husband leaves her for his golf partner, forcing Kate to take stock of what has become of her life. Luckily, new friendship comes her way in the form of three feisty older women who take Kate under their wings, plus a new flame (could it be more . . .?) sparks with local divorced dad, Milo. As her big birthday approaches, Kate’s zest for life begins to return.

From a New York Times bestselling author Lauren Grodstein, a story inspired by a little-known piece of history in the lives of Jewish occupants of the Warsaw Ghetto in World War II. Called a "masterpiece", and as seen on The Today Show with Jenna pick (Madeline Miller). On a November day in 1940...

The award-winning, “quick-witted and razor-sharp” (Taylor Jenkins Reid, New York Times bestselling author of Daisy Jones & The Six) author of Limelight and Small Admissions returns with a funny and heartwarming summer novel about love, family drama, secrets, and second chances. “Poeppel...

“A powerful exploration of motherhood and feminism… this novel will have readers examining their own ‘what-ifs.’” — Jill Santopolo, New York Times bestselling author of Everything After “[An] inventive novel about love, loss, identity, and compromise.”—Woman's Day “Delves...

A heart-warming and hilarious family memoir of growing up as one of eleven siblings raised by a single dad in Northern Ireland at the end of the Troubles. Séamas O’Reilly’s mother died when he was five, leaving him, his ten (!) brothers and sisters, and their beloved father in their...

Pat Conroy is without doubt America's favorite storyteller, a writer who portrays the anguished truth of the human heart and the painful secrets of families in richly lyrical prose and unforgettable narratives. Now, in Beach Music, he tells of the dark memories that haunt generations, in a story...

“Why did Lorrie Ann look graceful in beat-up Keds and shorts a bit too small for her? Why was it charming when she snorted from laughing too hard? Yes, we were jealous of her, and yet we did not hate her. She was never so much as teased by us, we roaming and bratty girls of Corona del Mar...

Zhenia is adrift in Los Angeles, pregnant with a baby her husband doesn't want, while her Russian grandmother and favorite person in the world is dying on the opposite coast. She's deeply disconnected from herself and her desires when she gets a strange call from Paul, a psychic medium who usually specializes in channeling dead pets, with a message from the other side. Zhenia's great-grandmother Irina, a Russian Revolutionary, has approached him from a cloud of ancestral grief, desperate to tell her story and receive absolution from Zhenia.

In LA Times First Fiction Award winner Maggie Shipstead's "Angel Lust", Simon Orff, a thrice-married movie producer, departs for his deceased father’s house, daughters selfishly in tow. “If he had to referee their squabbles and navigate their quicksilver emotions while sifting through his father’s possessions, he hoped the house would not seem so empty, or he hoped at least the emptiness would be neutral.” "If only," writes Halimah Marcus, co-editor of Electric Literature, in her introduction.

Teenage girls have a lot to say, and poet Betsy Franco shares some of it in this unique work. In both poetry and prose, the young voices here share their thoughts on topics all teens are familiar with—from self-confidence to body image, from sexuality to loneliness, and everything in between.

In this "thought-provoking" thriller from the author of the Reese Witherspoon book club pick and national bestseller Conviction, a woman in crisis finds herself on the hunt for her own mother's murderer (People). Dr. Margo Dunlop is at a crossroads. Her adoptive mom just passed away, and Margo...