The author of the award-winning Spill Simmer Falter Wither returns with a stunning new novel about a young artist’s search for meaning and healing in rural Ireland.
Struggling to cope with urban life—and life in general—Frankie, a twenty-something artist, retreats to her family’s rural house on “turbine hill,” vacant since her grandmother’s death three years earlier. It is in this space, surrounded by countryside and wild creatures, that she can finally grapple with the chain of events that led her here—her shaky mental health, her difficult time in art school—and maybe, just maybe, regain her footing in art and life.
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A warm, funny, and acutely perceptive debut novel about four adult siblings and the fate of the shared inheritance that has shaped their choices and their lives.
Every family has its problems. But even among the most troubled, the Plumb family stands out as spectacularly dysfunctional. Years of simmering tensions finally reach a breaking point on an unseasonably cold afternoon in New York City as Melody, Beatrice, and Jack Plumb gather to confront their charismatic and reckless older brother, Leo, freshly released from rehab. Months earlier, an inebriated Leo got behind the wheel of a car with a nineteen-year-old waitress as his passenger.
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Just as authors create books, books create authors — and these essays by thirty-one writers for young people offer a fascinating glimpse at the books that inspired them the most.
What if you could look inside your favorite authors’ heads and see the book that led them to become who they are today? What was the book that made them fall in love, or made them understand something for the first time? What was the book that made them feel challenged in ways they never knew they could be, emotionally, intellectually, or politically? What book made them readers,
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A New York Times Editor’s Choice
In Animals Strike Curious Poses, Elena Passarello channels her own potent sense of natural wonder into sixteen wondrous essays about legendary animals of history, constructing a bestiary that informs, astonishes, and delights. Passarello’s menagerie spans nearly 40 millennia, from Yuka, the 39,000-year-old wooly mammoth recently pulled from Siberian permafrost to Cecil, the beloved lion killed for sport in Zimbabwe in 2015. The collection celebrates the vibrancy of the human imagination as it approaches the animal other: Albrecht Durer’s sixteenth century woodcut Rhinocerus; Mozart’s collaborative compositions with a starling;
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A New York Times Book Review Favorite Read of 2016
“Despair is always described as dull,” writes Daphne Merkin, “when the truth is that despair has a light all its own, a lunar glow, the color of mottled silver.” This Close to Happy—Merkin’s rare, vividly personal account of what it feels like to suffer from clinical depression—captures this strange light.
Daphne Merkin has been hospitalized three times: first, in grade school, for childhood depression; years later, after her daughter was born, for severe postpartum depression; and later still, after her mother died,
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I work in an office. I take cards out of a file. Once I have taken them out, I put them back in again. That is it.
Twenty-three-year-old Frits—office worker, daydreamer, teller of inappropriate jokes—finds life absurd and inexplicable. He lives with his parents, who drive him mad. He has terrible, disturbing dreams of death and destruction. Sometimes he talks to a toy rabbit.
This is the story of ten evenings in Frits’s life at the end of December, as he drinks, smokes, sees friends, aimlessly wanders the gloomy city streets and tries to make sense of the minutes,
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