After we had been married a year, I realized two things. One: There was no mystery left — she had become totally predictable. Two: I had passed up the opportunity to use my marriage to business...
An overwhelmed new mom asks to hear her grandmother’s story of her family’s desperate escape from the Nazis, discovering unexpected parallels to her own life in America in this sharp, heartfelt novel.
“A fresh perspective—one that’s...
What a terrible thing at a time like this: to own a house, and the trees around it. Janet sat rigid in her seat. The plane lifted from the city and her house fell away, consumed by the other houses. Janet worried about her own particular garden and...
The author of the critically admired, award-winning A Replacement Life turns to a different kind of story — an evocative, nuanced portrait of marriage and family, a woman reckoning with what she’s given up to make both work, and the universal...
Back in 1961, at the height of the Cold War and with the USSR firmly leading the Space Race, President John F. Kennedy vowed to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. It was an audacious promise, one that echoes through US history as one of...
Ian Blackwater was surprised when film rights to his novel Volkswagens and Velociraptors were sold. And more surprised to find himself on location in California, particularly as the novel was set in London. However Ian knows better than to...
Thurlow Dan is the founder of the Helix, a cult that promises to cure loneliness in the twenty-first century. With its communes and speed-dating, mixers and confession sessions, the Helix has become a national phenomenon — and attracted the...
Containing work reprinted in Best Non-Required Reading 2008, Best New American Voices 2010, and The Pushcart Prizes 2010, the stories in Laura van den Berg's rich and inventive debut illuminate the intersection of the mythic and the mundane.
A...
Pursued by a mermaid, two boys talk their way into pirating and end up in the Arctic where a secret unhinges them both. Disabled piecemeal, harassed by a parrot, marooned on a tree-challenged island, posing as Pilgrims, scrimshawing and singing...