Literary Realism

For listeners of Roberto Bolaño’s Savage Detectives and Muriel Spark’s Loitering with Intent, this “sublime” and “delightfully unhinged” metaphysical mystery disguised as a picaresque romp follows one poet’s spectacular fall from grace to ask a vital question: Is everyone a...

One of the Best Books of the Year: Elle, Harper’s Bazaar, Vulture This uncompromising look at the immigrant experience, and the depravity of one man, is an electrifying page-turner rooted in a magical reality “Impossible to stop reading” —Vulture When Lucien flees Haiti with...

Sometimes, la sangre atrae, "the blood calls you back," and when Maya gets the call to go back to her agave roots to claim the body of her long-missing father, her world changes forever. Set against the backdrop of her childhood in Mexico, Agave Blues is the story of ailing attorney Maya, in a broken relationship and butting heads with her teenage daughter, Lily.

Marion Letharby, novantanovenne inglese ormai sorda da anni, riceve in dono dalla sua migliore amica un imponente cornetto acustico tempestato di argento e madreperla e la sua vita, sorprendentemente cambia. Quando il bisnipote sceglie per lei un non troppo costoso ospizio per vecchi, la Confraternita del Pozzo di Luce, Marion, invece di abbattersi per la perdita della sua amata solitudine, comincia a guardarsi intorno. Nel vasto parco della Confraternita trova padiglioni a forma di casine di gnomi, di fungo velenoso, di orologio a cucù, di vagone ferroviario, di stivale e di mummia.

Four troubled twentysomethings board a ship in search of a mysterious squid only to discover their captain has gone missing. As they take turns steering the vessel, these newfound companions begin to reveal their natures and unearth the events that have inextricably bound them together.

Une ode merveilleuse à la lecture et à l'imagination faisant écho au "Petit Prince"... Rintarô Natsuki, lycéen flegmatique, est sur le point de fermer la librairie héritée de son grand-père quand il reçoit une visite inattendue. Au milieu des livres, il découvre un gros chat brun tigré, un chat qui parle ! Et ce félin exprime une requête plutôt inhabituelle : il demande - ou plutôt exige - l'aide de l'adolescent pour aller sauver des livres.

Reality and dream collide in Amy Bonnaffons's "dazzling," wildly inventive "miracle of a love story" about an affair between the living and the dead (NPR) For weeks, Rachel has been noticing the same golden-haired young man sitting at her Brooklyn bus stop, staring off with a melancholy air...

Acclaimed author of 2 A.M. at the Cat's Pajamas Marie-Helene Bertino's Parakeet is a darkly funny and warm-hearted novel about a young woman whose dead grandmother (in the form of a parakeet) warns her not to marry and sends her out to find an estranged loved one. The week of her wedding, The...

From Conan Doyle and Rudyard Kipling to Satyajit Ray and R. K. Narayan, this text is a collection of spine-chilling tales of the supernatural from India...

"Read this now, because everyone you know will be talking about it by early 2019." —Washington Post From the award-winning author of Ways to Disappear, a taut, timely story about what a powerful politician thinks he can get away with and the group of misfits who finally bring him down. On an...

An astonishing fiction debut from a UC Irvine MFA graduate and recent contributor to The New Yorker. Bewitching and playful, with its feet only slightly tethered to the world we know, The Sea Beast Takes a Lover explores hope, love, and loss across a series of surreal landscapes and wild...

From debut author Ronlyn Domingue comes a stunning, imaginative novel that beautifully captures the nature of love and how it transcends all barriers -- even death. In 1920s New Orleans, smart and fearless Raziela Nolan is in the throes of a magnificent love affair when she suddenly dies in a...

The lost literary origin story of #1 bestseller Lev Grossman - including a new foreword about how and why he wrote his first novel: "It is the intense, concentrated, boiled-down essence of the unhappiest years of my life." Twenty-something Hollis Kessler languishes in a hopelessly...

In this disarming debut, Brian Strause has written a vastly entertaining novel about an American family transfixed by a series of mysterious events. From a comfortable suburb of Columbus, Ohio, emerges a story of rebellion, faith and hope, bridging the cultural gap between those who believe in...

"[Jean Ann] Douglass’ narration, intimate and bemused and every so often curling up with wryness at the end of a sentence, is a perfect match for Shun-lien Bynum’s delicate delights." -- Slate A Buzz Book of Fall at Publishers Lunch * A WIRED Ultimate Summer Reading pick National Book Award...

The short fiction of Colum McCann documents a dizzying cast of characters in exile, loss, love, and displacement. There is the worn boxing champion who steals clothes from a New Orleans laundromat, the rumored survivor of Hiroshima who emigrates to the tranquil coast of Western Ireland, the...

Living the unexamined life may not be the most successful way to proceed through this world. It certainly hasn't worked for 30-year-old Arthur Loveday, who has failed to impress both his employers and the woman he's fallen in love with. An industrial psychologist attempting to assess him for future employment says he can never succeed at anything until he works out who he really is. From that point on, Arthur finds himself persistently chivvied by fate into a spiritual quest to find his true self.

From the author of the Scotiabank Giller Prize-nominated novel The Incident Report comes a hypnotic novel following Heinrich Schlögel from Germany to Canada, where he sets out on a solo hike into the interior of Baffin Island. His journey quickly becomes surreal, full of strange encounters, inexplicable visions, and the shifting of time. After returning back to civilization, Heinrich discovers inexplicably that many years have passed.

“Is me - Bob. Bob Marley.” Reincarnated as homeless Fall-down man, Bob Marley sleeps in a clock tower built on the site of a lynching in Half Way Tree, Kingston. The ghosts of Marcus Garvey and King Edward VII are there too, drinking whiskey and playing solitaire. No one sees that Fall-down is Bob Marley, no one but his long-ago love, the deaf woman, Leenah, and, in the way of this otherworldly book, when Bob steps into the street each day, five years have passed.

What’s in a name? For Judas Thomas, named after the infamous betrayer, a great many things. For centuries, Judas Iscariot has been the most despised figure in Western civilization. Betrayer or scapegoat? For a young boy born in 1970, his greatest obstacle in life is not his conception by a violent rape or his difficult and strict upbringing in a Catholic orphanage nor his mixed race. For this young orphan, his greatest challenge is his name: Judas, named for the infamous betrayer-disciple.