B>b>In a debut novel as radiant as it is caustic, a former influencer confronts her past--and takes inventory of the damages that underpin the surface-glamour of social media./b>/b>br>br>At 19, she was an Instagram celebrity.;Now, at 35, she works behind the cosmetic counter at the black and white store, peddling anti-aging products to women seeking physical and spiritual transformation. She too is seeking rebirth. Shes about to undergo the high-risk, elective surgery Aesthetica, a procedure that will reverse all her past plastic surgery procedures, returning her, she hopes, to a truer self.;Provided she survives the knife.br>;br>But on the eve of the surgery, her traumatic past resurfaces when she is asked to participate in the public takedown of her former manager/boyfriend, who has rebranded himself as a paragon of woke masculinity in the post-#MeToo world. With the hours ticking down to her life-threatening surgery, she must confront the ugly truth about her experiences on and off the Instagram grid.br>;br>Propulsive, dark, and moving, Aesthetica is a Veronica for the age of Instagram face, delivering a fresh, nuanced examination of feminism, #metoo, and mother-daughter relationships, all while confronting our collective addiction to followers, filters, and faux realities.
Detective Jack Yu is assigned to the Chinatown precinct as the only officer of Chinese descent. He investigates a series of attacks on children and a missing mistress, shifting between the world of street thugs and gangs and the Chinatown of the rich and powerful. When Detective Jack Yu is transferred to New Yorks Chinatown, he isnt ready to face the changes in his old neighborhood. His childhood friends are now hardened gangsters, his father is dying, and he is constantly reminded of this teenage blood brother, murdered in front of him years before. Then community leader and tong boss Uncle Four is gunned down and his mistress goes missing. But unlike the rest of the culturally clueless police department, Jack knows his districts gritty secrets. He will have to draw on his knowledge in order to catch this killer in a crime-ridden precinct where brotherhoods are just as likely to distribute charity as mete out vigilante justice.
Edwidge Danticat's only short story collection. Gorgeous 20th anniversary edition--complete with a new story!
Arriving one year after the Haitian-American's first novel (Breath, Eyes, Memory) alerted critics to her compelling voice, these 10 stories, some of which have appeared in small literary journals, confirm Danticat's reputation as a remarkably gifted writer.
Examining the lives of ordinary Haitians, particularly those struggling to survive under the brutal Duvalier regime, Danticat illuminates the distance between people's desires and the stifling reality of their lives. A profound mix of Catholicism and voodoo spirituality informs the tales, bestowing a mythic importance on people described in the opening story, "Children of the Sea," as those "in this world whose names don't matter to anyone but themselves." The ceaseless grip of dictatorship often leads men to emotionally abandon their families, like the husband in "A Wall of Fire Rising," who dreams of escaping in a neighbor's hot-air balloon. The women exhibit more resilience, largely because of their insistence on finding meaning and solidarity through storytelling; but Danticat portrays these bonds with an honesty that shows that sisterhood, too, has its power plays. In the book's final piece, "Epilogue: Women Like Us," she writes: "Are there women who both cook and write? Kitchen poets, they call them. They slip phrases into their stew and wrap meaning around their pork before frying it. They make narrative dumplings and stuff their daughter's mouths so they say nothing more." These stories inform and enrich one another, as the female characters reveal a common ancestry and ties to the fictional Ville Rose. In addition to the power of Danticat's themes, the book is enhanced by an element of suspense--we're never certain, for example, if a rickety boat packed with refugees introduced in the first tale will reach the Florida coast. Spare, elegant and moving, these stories cohere into a superb collection.
B>b>A dark and witty story of environmental collapse and runaway capitalism from the Booker-listed author of The Teleportation Accident. /b>/b>br>br>The near future. Tens of thousands of species are going extinct every year. And a whole industry has sprung up around their extinctions, to help us preserve the remnants, or perhaps just assuage our guilt. For instance, the biobanks: secure archives of DNA samples, from which lost organisms might someday be resurrected . . . But then, one day, its all gone. A mysterious cyber-attack hits every biobank simultaneously, wiping out the last traces of the perished species. Now were never getting them back.br> br> Karin Resaint and Mark Halyard are concerned with one species in particular: the venomous lumpsucker, a small, ugly bottom-feeder that happens to be the most intelligent fish on the planet. Resaint is an animal cognition scientist consumed with existential grief over what humans have done to nature. Halyard is an exec from the extinction industry, complicit in the mining operation that destroyed the lumpsuckers last-known habitat. br> br> Across the dystopian landscapes of the 2030s--a nature reserve full of toxic waste; a floating city on the ocean; the hinterlands of a totalitarian state--Resaint and Halyard hunt for a surviving lumpsucker. And the further they go, the deeper theyre drawn into the mystery of the attack on the biobanks. Who was really behind it? And why would anyone do such a thing?br> br> Virtuosic and profound, witty and despairing, Venomous Lumpsucker is Ned Beauman at his very best.
November 1989: Aimée Leduc is in her first year of college at Paris's preeminent medical school. She lives in a 17th-century apartment that overlooks the Seine with her father, who runs the family detective agency. But the week the Berlin Wall crumbles, so does Aimée's life as she knows it.
Paris, April 1999: Aimée Leduc has her work cut out for her-running her detective agency and fighting off sleep deprivation as she tries to be a good single mother to her new bébé. The last thing she has time for now is to take on a personal investigation for a poor manouche (Gypsy) boy. But he insists his dying mother has an important secret she needs to tell Aimée, something to do with Aimée's father's unsolved murder a decade ago.
B>One of Japans great modern masters, Kaoru Takamura, makes her English-language debut with this two-volume publication of her magnum opus. /b> br>br>Tokyo, 1995. Five men meet at the racetrack every Sunday to bet on horses. They have little in common except a deep disaffection with their lives, but together they represent the social struggles and griefs of post-War Japan: a poorly socialized genius stuck working as a welder; a demoted detective with a chip on his shoulder; a Zainichi Korean banker sick of being ostracized for his race; a struggling single dad of a teenage girl with Down syndrome. The fifth man bringing them all together is an elderly drugstore owner grieving his grandson, who has died suspiciously after the revelation of a family connection with the segregated buraku community, historically subjected to severe discrimination. br>br>Intent on revenge against a society that values corporate behemoths more than human life, the five conspirators decide to carry out a heist: kidnap the CEO of Japans largest beer conglomerate and extract blood money from the companys corrupt financiers. br>br>Inspired by the unsolved true-crime kidnapping case perpetrated by the Monster with 21 Faces, Lady Joker has become a cultural touchstone since its 1997 publication, acknowledged as the magnum opus by one of Japans literary masters, twice adapted for film and TV and often taught in high school and college classrooms.
In this dark, quirky fourteenth Dr. Siri Paiboun mystery set in Communist Laos in the early '80s, a death threat sends Dr. Siri down memory lane, from Paris in the '30s to war-torn Vietnam in the '70s, to figure out who's trying to kill him now.
Vientiane, 1980: For a man of his age and in his corner of the world, Dr. Siri, the 76-year-old former national coroner of Laos, is doing remarkably well--especially considering the fact that he is possessed by a thousand-year-old Hmong shaman. That is, until he finds a mysterious note tied to his dog's tail. Upon finding someone to translate the note, Dr. Siri learns it is a death threat addressed not only to him, but to everyone he holds dear. Whoever wrote the note claims the job will be executed in two weeks.
Thus, at the urging of his wife and his motley crew of faithful friends, Dr. Siri must figure out who wants him dead, prompting him to recount three incidents over the years: an early meeting with his lifelong pal Civilai in Paris in the early '30s, a particularly disruptive visit to an art museum in Saigon in 1956, and a prisoner of war negotiation in Hanoi at the height of the Vietnam War in the '70s. There will be grave consequences in the present if Dr. Siri can't decipher the clues from his past.
b>I started writing books about and for my friend George Miles because whenever I would speak about him honestly like I am doing now I felt a complicated agony beneath my words that talking openly cant handle./b>br>b>br>/b>For most of his life, Dennis Cooper believed the person he had loved the most and would always love above all others was George Miles. In his first novel in ten years, Dennis Cooper writes about George Miles, love, loss, addiction, suicide, and how fiction can capture these things, and how it fails to capture them. Candid and powerful, I Wished is a radical work of shifting forms. It includes appearances by Santa Claus, land artist James Turrell, sentient prairie dogs, John Wayne Gacy, Nick Drake, and George, the muse for Coopers acclaimed novels Closer, Frisk, Try, Guide, and Period, collectively known as The George Miles Cycle. In revisiting the inspiration for the Cycle, Dennis has written a masterwork: the most raw, personal, and haunted book of his career.
Reimagines the lives of the Brontë siblings--Charlotte, Emily, Anne, and brother;Branwell--from their precocious childhoods, to the writing of their great novels, to their early deaths.
A form-shattering novel by an author praised as laugh-out-loud hilarious and thought-provokingly philosophical (
How did sisters Emily, Charlotte, and Anne write literary landmarks
B>Set in 1944 Chicago, Edgar Award-winner Naomi Hiraharas eye-opening and poignant new mystery, the story of a young woman searching for the truth about her revered older sister''s death, brings to focus the struggles of one Japanese American family released from mass incarceration at Manzanar during World War II./b> br>br>Chicago, 1944: Twenty-year-old Aki Ito and her parents have just been released from Manzanar, where they have been detained by the US government since the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, together with thousands of other Japanese Americans. The life in California the Itos were forced to leave behind is gone; instead, they are being resettled two thousand miles away in Chicago, where Akis older sister, Rose, was sent months earlier and moved to the new Japanese American neighborhood near Clark and Division streets. But on the eve of the Ito familys reunion, Rose is killed by a subway train. br>br>Aki, who worshipped her sister, is stunned. Officials are ruling Roses death a suicide. Aki cannot believe her perfect, polished, and optimistic sister would end her life. Her instinct tells her there is much more to the story, and she knows she is the only person who could ever learn the truth. br>br> Inspired by historical events, Clark and Division infuses an atmospheric and heartbreakingly real crime with rich period details and delicately wrought personal stories Naomi Hirahara has gleaned from thirty years of research and archival work in Japanese American history.
CWA Gold Dagger winner Mick Herron's debut novel introduces Sarah Tucker, whose search for a missing child unravels a murderous conspiracy.
When a house explodes in a quiet Oxford suburb and a girl disappears in the aftermath, Sarah Tucker--a young married woman, bored and unhappy with domestic life--becomes obsessed with finding her. Accustomed to dull chores in a childless household and hosting her husband's wearisome business clients for dinner, Sarah suddenly finds herself questioning everything she thought she knew as her investigation reveals that people long believed dead are still among the living, while the living are fast joining the dead. What begins in a peaceful neighborhood reaches its climax on a remote, unwelcoming Scottish island as the search puts Sarah in league with a man being hunted down by murderous official forces.
An epic tale of love and political violence set in earthquake-ravaged Darkmotherland, a dystopian reimagining of Nepal, from the Whiting Award-winning author of
In the highly anticipated follow-up to the breakout offbeat hit
With one solved mystery under their wooly belts, the time has come for the sheep of Glennkill to explore Europe. Together with their new shepherdess, Rebecca, they move into their winter quarters in the shadow of a French chateau. But their new home is far from idyllic. A number of the sheep from the previous flock have disappeared, and deer are dying an unnatural death in the forest. The goats from the neighboring pasture have a theory: a werewolf. Could that be real, or just a fantasy?
When a human falls victim, it becomes clear that even fantasies can be fatal. And the last thing the sheep want is to lose
A darkly comic tale of an affluent and delusional young man who terrorizes his way through New York City''s elite in the 1990s, from the acclaimed author of
Robert Doughten Savile is a young man from Darien, Connecticut, an affluent suburb of New York City.
At last in one volume: the collected Slough House spy novellas, including the never-before-published Christmas interlude
Espionage. Blackmail. Revenge. Cunning. Slapstick. State secrets dating back to the fall of the Berlin Wall. All this and more in a tight package of five novellas by Mick Herron, CWA Gold Daggerwinning author of Slow Horses. From the troubled recruitment of a new MI5 informant to a botched information transfer, Herron's novellas capture the drama, humor, and high stakes of everyday life in the world of spycraft, a world rife with both legends and secrets, where thrill-seeking and loneliness are ubiquitous and deadly, and where the lines between friends, enemies, and lovers are perpetually blurred by circumstance and subterfuge.
A long-lost Modigliani portrait, a grieving brother's blood vendetta, a Soviet secret that's been buried for 80 years-Parisian private investigator Aimée Leduc's current case is her most exciting one yet.
In her debut novel, award-winning poet Brynne Rebele-Henry re-imagines the Orpheus myth as a love story between two teenage girls who are sent to conversion therapy after being caught together in an intimate moment. Abandoned by a single mother she never knew, 16-year-old Raya--obsessed with ancient myths--lives with her grandmother in a small conservative Texas town. For years Raya has fought to hide her feelings for her best friend and true love, Sarah. When the two are outed, they are sent to Friendly Saviors: a re-education camp meant to fix them and make them heterosexual. Upon arrival, Raya vows to assume the role of Orpheus, to return to the world of the living with her love--and after she, Sarah, and the other teen residents are subjected to abusive and brutal treatments by the staff, Raya only becomes more determined to escape. In a haunting voice reminiscent of Sylvia Plath and the contemporary lyricism of David Levithan, Brynne Rebele-Henry weaves a powerful inversion of the Orpheus myth informed by the disturbing real-world truths of conversion therapy. Orpheus Girl is a story of dysfunctional families, trauma, first love, heartbreak, and ultimately, the fierce adolescent resilience that has the power to triumph over darkness and ignorance. CW: There are scenes in this book that depict self-harm, homophobia, transphobia, and violence against LGBTQ characters.
