Over the span of a week, Rosemary Jenkins encounters people dealing with various forms of loss, mirroring her own sorrow from the passing of her husband two years before. This story explores the complexity of life and death, and how the two are linked. It emphasizes the solace one can find in companionship when we choose to open our hearts and the intriguing ways our paths can intertwine without ever truly crossing.
The definitive story collection “by one of the most celebrated American short-story writers…. Powerful, important, compassionate, and full of dark humor. This is a book that will be reread with admiration and love many times over” (Vanity Fair). Joy Williams has been celebrated as a master of the short story for four decades, her renown passing as a given from one generation to the next even in the shifting landscape of contemporary writing. At long last the incredible scope of her singular achievement is put on display: thirty-three stories drawn from three much-lauded collections, and another thirteen appearing here for the first time in book form. Forty-six stories in all, far and away the most comprehensive volume in her long career, showcasing her crisp, elegant prose, her dark wit, and her uncanny ability to illuminate our world through characters and situations that feel at once peculiar and foreign and disturbingly familiar. Virtually all American writers have their favorite Joy Williams stories, as do many readers of all ages, and each one of them is available here.
A compelling dual-narrated tale from Jennifer Latham that questions how far we've come with race relations. Some bodies won't stay buried. Some stories need to be told. When seventeen-year-old Rowan Chase finds a skeleton on her family's property, she has no idea that investigating the brutal century-old murder will lead to a summer of painful discoveries about the present and the past. Nearly one hundred years earlier, a misguided violent encounter propels seventeen-year-old Will Tillman into a racial firestorm. In a country rife with violence against blacks and a hometown segregated by Jim Crow, Will must make hard choices on a painful journey towards self discovery and face his inner demons in order to do what's right the night Tulsa burns. Through intricately interwoven alternating perspectives, Jennifer Latham's lightning-paced page-turner brings the Tulsa race riot of 1921 to blazing life and raises important questions about the complex state of US race relations--both yesterday and today.
Life is about balance. That's what Felicia has been telling herself. She has her struggles, like everybody else, but is it fair? That seemingly everyone but her is lucky? That no matter what, she is never benefitting? Felicia is taken on a journey after meeting Ezra; a boy coming into her life, changing it for the better, without him even realizing it. He makes her realize that there is so much more than all the struggles and unfairness that life makes us face. But what happens when Ezra is forced to face his past and has to leave her? Will Felicia let him leave and go back to the life she had been living, or will she try to make him stay? Follow their journey and watch a friendship blossom into something more, while finding out about secrets, that could potentially change everything.
Phoebe experiences some strange and unexplainable incidents on her first day of middle school and her aunt's wedding day. But can she figure out what is causing these mysterious events before the fun turns into chaos and she loses her sanity?
THEN Daisy Everything I have ever wanted was to be someone. Getting out of Edinburgh and making a name for myself. I told you, I would do anything. You should have known. (Please help me forget his lifeless eyes.) NOW Daisy Everything I have ever wanted was to be loved. I did what I had to do. (Please help me forgive myself.)
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout explores the mysteries of marriage and the secrets we keep, as a former couple reckons with where they’ve come from—and what they’ve left behind. BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST • ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Maureen Corrigan, NPR’s Fresh Air “Elizabeth Strout is one of my very favorite writers, so the fact that Oh William! may well be my favorite of her books is a mathematical equation for joy. The depth, complexity, and love contained in these pages is a miraculous achievement.”—Ann Patchett, author of The Dutch House I would like to say a few things about my first husband, William. Lucy Barton is a writer, but her ex-husband, William, remains a hard man to read. William, she confesses, has always been a mystery to me. Another mystery is why the two have remained connected after all these years. They just are. So Lucy is both surprised and not surprised when William asks her to join him on a trip to investigate a recently uncovered family secret—one of those secrets that rearrange everything we think we know about the people closest to us. What happens next is nothing less than another example of what Hilary Mantel has called Elizabeth Strout’s “perfect attunement to the human condition.” There are fears and insecurities, simple joys and acts of tenderness, and revelations about affairs and other spouses, parents and their children. On every page of this exquisite novel we learn more about the quiet forces that hold us together—even after we’ve grown apart. At the heart of this story is the indomitable voice of Lucy Barton, who offers a profound, lasting reflection on the very nature of existence. “This is the way of life,” Lucy says: “the many things we do not know until it is too late.” ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, Time, Vulture, She Reads
