New Literary Fiction

Lucas and Margo are fed up. Margo is a brilliant programmer tired of being talked over as the company’s sole black employee, and while Lucas is one of many Asians at the firm, he’s nearly invisible as a low-paid customer service rep. Together, they decide to steal their tech startup’s user database in an attempt at revenge. The heist takes a sudden turn when Margo dies in a car accident, and Lucas is left reeling, wondering what to do with their secret—and wondering whether her death really was an accident.

The National Book Award finalist for Refund returns with a new collection of stories that boldly examines the changes in American culture over the last two years through the increasing presence of violence, bigotry, sexual harassment, and the emotional costs of living under constant threat. In the title story, the competition between two middle school cellists is affected by a shooting at their school, and it is only years later that they realize how the intrusion of violence affected the course of their lives.

Down on his luck and still pining for his ex-wife, South Carolina taxidermist Romie Futch spends his evenings drunkenly surfing the Internet before passing out on his couch. In a last-ditch attempt to pay his mortgage, he replies to an ad and becomes a research subject in an experiment conducted by the Center for Cybernetic Neuroscience in Atlanta, Georgia.

Ninety-year-old Margaret Riley is content hiding from the world, finding comfort in the mystery novels that keep her company - that is until she spots a woman who's moved into the long-empty house across the pond. Jennifer Young is also looking to hide. On the run from her old life, she and her four-year-old son, Milo, have moved to a quiet town where no one from her past can find her. In Jennifer, Margaret sees both a potential companion in her loneliness and a mystery to be solved.

In the New England university town of Elm Harbor, a murder begins to crack the veneer that has hidden the racial complications of the town's past, the secrets of a prominent family, and the most hidden bastions of African-American political influence. At the center is Lemaster Carlyle, the university president, and his wife, Julia Carlyle, a deputy dean at the divinity school - African Americans living in "the heart of whiteness".

This story collection by one of the preeminent writers of this generation traces the arc of an entire career and - in this manifold exploration of delusion, fame, and experience - displays anew McInerney's rare ability to unveil and recreate the manic flux of our society.

When Sy Levin, a high school teacher beset by alcohol and bad decisions, leaves the city for the Pacific Northwest to start over, it's no surprise that he conjures a vision of the extraordinary new life awaiting him there: "He imagined the pioneers in covered wagons entering this valley for the first time. Although he had lived little in nature Levin had always loved it, and the sense of having done the right thing in leaving New York was renewed in him."

Journalist Paige Keller, while recovering at a remote resort from an overseas assignment, is drawn into a community dominated by a fundamentalist church, a family of real estate developers, and a group of environmentalists, all in conflict over control of the valley's future. She goes undercover to discover what lies beneath the church's rituals and sacred ceremonies, but the more she learns, the deeper the valley's mysteries and seductions become.

Calamity is confronting two big transitions: the death of her beloved father and the beginning of menopause, a physical shift that has rekindled her gift for finding lost things. Suddenly, she is getting hot flashes that seem to forge objects out of thin air, most notably a four-year old boy. As Calamity takes the child into her care, she discovers that all is not as it seems. Then, Calamity must reawaken to the mysteries surrounding her own childhood and the early disappearance of her mother.

The three linked novellas that comprise Josh Weil's masterful debut bring us into America's remote and often unforgiving backcountry, and delicately open up the private worlds of three very different men as they confront love, loss, and their own personal demons.

This new edition provides extensive commentary on the literary figures, such as Baudelaire, Swinburne, J.K. Huysmans, Mallarmé, Arthur Symons and Théophile Gautier, who formed Wilde's literary circle and, in some senses, underpinned his overconfidence in the shield of Art to protect him from the sword of social morality. Returning to this contemporary account of such an infamous trial allows the modern listener a broader historical perspective. Grolleau’s words are, in fact, part of the history surrounding the immediate literary and social aftermath of Wilde’s death.

Peggy Gilbert left the hustle and bustle of London for the beautiful blue skies and rugged cliffs of Pencarrow Bay three years ago with her husband, Ted. While Ted has immediately taken to life in their new corner of the world and Peggy feels as though he's leaving her behind, so she’s determined to find her own passion. Peggy will do everything from a sunrise swim to a salsa class and a fishing trip. Can Peggy find what she’s been looking for? Or has it always been closer to home than she thought?

Elizabeth Blau upended her life in the city to move to the Middle of Nowhere and start over. She reconnects with her estranged brother and begins her new life. First, Elizabeth lands a great job, then a date, and her luck seems to change for the better. But when the man’s body is found mangled in a ravine, the murder rocks the small town as fault descends upon the Blau Family.

Bordertown: a city on the Border between the human world and the elfin realm. A place where neither magic nor technology can be counted on, where elf and human kids run away to find themselves…. Here are 13 interconnected stories and eight poems - all new work by some of today's best urban fantasy, fantasy, and slipstream writers.

Jurnee is a recent college graduate struggling desperately to find a job as a teacher. Discouraged, she happens upon a chance opportunity to teach in a village in southern India. Overcoming anxiety, self-doubt, and cultural differences, she finds a home in her new surroundings. See India from her eyes as she narrowly escapes an arranged marriage, learns where cashews come from, encounters a king cobra snake, and finds love in the most unexpected of places.

Sissily is driving cross-country with a much older man called Ezzy. On their way to California to begin a life together, he insists on stopping at his family ranch outside Liberty, Kansas, to visit his mother, Mrs. Svoboda. This family reunion is a painful reminder for Sissily of the rumors about the scandal that led to her running away from home, but while Mrs. Svoboda is a domineering figure, Sissily sees a woman who harbors secrets of her own.

Jane has just received some terrible news. A phone full of missed calls and sympathetic text messages seems to indicate that her husband, Jim, a chaplain at the hospital where she works as a surgeon, is dead. Only, not quite—rather, his head has been removed from his body and cryogenically frozen. Jim awakes to find himself in an altogether unique situation, to say the least: his body gone but his consciousness alive, his only companion a mysterious disembodied voice.

A common man of modest means, world-weary George McLast decides to forget all his problems and take the trip he and his beloved wife had only dreamed about before she passed away three years earlier. Despite all the unnerving feelings he's been getting in his chest, his son's disapproval, and his precarious financial situation, he sets out across America following the same route John Steinbeck took in 1959 with his pet poodle Charley.

When a fourteen-year-old runs away, her parents turn to social media to find her—launching a public campaign that will expose their darkest secrets and change their family forever, in this suspenseful and gripping debut for fans of Reconstructing Amelia and Gone Girl. Don’t try to find me...

In part one, Stanley, an out of work tech writer, gets a short-term contract job across the country. Of the three areas he feels give meaning to life—family, work, and religion—he is going to leave the only one of the three which has meaning to him, family, to go be "just a tech writer" at "just another company".