The stories in Fresh Complaint explore equally rich­­—and intriguing—territory. Ranging from the bitingly reproductive antics of “Baster” to the dreamy, moving account of a young traveler’s search for enlightenment in “Air Mail” (selected by Annie Proulx for Best American Short Stories), this collection presents characters in the midst of personal and national emergencies. We meet a failed poet who, envious of other people’s wealth during the real-estate bubble, becomes an embezzler; a clavichordist whose dreams of art founder under the obligations of marriage and fatherhood; and, in “Fresh Complaint,” a high school student whose wish to escape the strictures of her immigrant family lead her to a drastic decision that upends the life of a middle-aged British physicist. Narratively compelling, beautifully written, and packed with a density of ideas despite their fluid grace, these stories chart the development and maturation of a major American writer.Complainers --Air mail --Baster --Early music --Timeshare --Find the bad guy --The oracular vulva --Capricious gardens --Great experiment --Fresh complaint

    Here the father—a former high school teacher—is demeaned by the only job he can get: gravedigger and cemetery caretaker. When local prejudice and the family's own emotional frailty give rise to an unthinkable tragedy, the gravedigger's daughter, Rebecca heads out into America. Embarking upon an extraordinary odyssey of erotic risk and ingenious self-invention, she seeks renewal, redemption, and peace—on the road to a bittersweet and distinctly “American” triumph.

    Bobby Flopkowski has it all. Until a complicated series of events snowball into a disaster that changes the course of his life forever. Now, with a tent on the beach as his only home and an addiction that has cut him off from everyone he once loved, Bobby has a revelation that could put him back on track: he believes he has solved the puzzling crime that led to his downfall. But as the reality he’s always known slips farther away, will he be able to convince someone—anyone—that his suspicions aren’t merely the pleas of a desperate man?

    After the tragic death of his young wife, Reverend Tyler Caskey, a New England minister, struggles to hold together his own life, his family, and his town, while dealing with his personal anger, grief, and loss of faith.

    The book's unnamed narrator, growing up during the 1950s, is beset by aloof parents, a cruel sister, and relentless mocking from his peers, compelling him to seek out works of art and literature as solace-and to uncover new relationships in the struggle to embrace his own sexuality. Lyrical and poignant, with powerful evocations of shame and yearning, this is an American literary treasure.

    As a freak winter storm bears down on an exclusive, affluent suburb in Connecticut, cars skid out of control, men and women swap partners, and their children experiment with sex, drugs, and even suicide. Here two families, the Hoods and the Williamses, come face-to-face with the seething emotions behind the well-clipped lawns of their lives - in a novel widely hailed as a funny, acerbic, and moving hymn to a dazed and confused era of American life.

    Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever? is the formally daring, brilliantly executed story of one man struggling to make sense of his country, seeking answers the only way he knows how. In a barracks on an abandoned military base, miles from the nearest road, Thomas watches as the man he has brought wakes up. Kev, a NASA astronaut, doesn't recognize his captor, though Thomas remembers him. Kev cries for help. He pulls at his chain. But the ocean is close by, and nobody can hear him over the waves and wind. Thomas apologizes. He didn't want to have to resort to this. But they really needed to have a conversation, and Kev didn't answer his messages. And now, if Kev can just stop yelling, Thomas has a few questions.

    Her husband died years ago, as did his wife, and in such a small town they naturally have known of each other for decades; in fact, Addie was quite fond of Louis's wife. His daughter lives hours away in Colorado Springs, her son even farther away in Grand Junction, and Addie and Louis have long been living alone in houses now empty of family, the nights so terribly lonely, especially with no one to talk with. Their brave adventures - their pleasures and their difficulties - are hugely involving and truly resonant, making Our Souls at Night the perfect final installment to this beloved writer's enduring contribution to American literature.

    Russ Hildebrandt, the associate pastor of a liberal suburban church, is on the brink of breaking free of a marriage he finds joyless--unless his wife, Marion, who has her own secret life, beats him to it. Their eldest child, Clem, is coming home from college on fire with moral absolutism, having taken an action that will shatter his father. Clem's sister, Becky, long the social queen of her high-school class, has sharply veered into the counterculture, while their brilliant younger brother Perry, who's been selling drugs to seventh graders, has resolved to be a better person. Each of the Hildebrandts seeks a freedom that each of the others threatens to complicate.Jonathan Franzen's novels are celebrated for their unforgettably vivid characters and for their keen-eyed take on contemporary America. Now, in Crossroads, Franzen ventures back into the past and explores the history of two generations. With characteristic humor and complexity, and with even greater warmth, he conjures a world that resonates powerfully with our own.A tour de force of interwoven perspectives and sustained suspense, its action largely unfolding on a single winter day, Crossroads is the story of a Midwestern family at a pivotal moment of moral crisis. Jonathan Franzen's gift for melding the small picture and the big picture has never been more dazzlingly evident.

    She returns to New York still beautiful but oddly unrecognizable, a virtual stranger in the world she once effortlessly occupied.With the surreal authority of a David Lynch, Jennifer Egan threads Charlotte’s narrative with those of other casualties of our infatuation with the image. There’s a deceptively plain teenaged girl embarking on a dangerous secret life, an alcoholic private eye, and an enigmatic stranger who changes names and accents as he prepares an apocalyptic blow against American society. As these narratives inexorably converge, Look at Me becomes a coolly mesmerizing intellectual thriller of identity and imposture.

    Confidential comes My Dark Places, an investigative autobiography by James Ellroy. In 1958, Ellroy's mother, Jean, was raped, killed, and dumped off a road in El Monte, California, a rundown L.A. suburb. The killer was never found, and the case was closed. It was a sordid, back-page homicide that no one remembered. Except her son.James Ellroy was ten years old when his mother died. His bereavement was complex and ambiguous: "I cried. I cranked tears out all the way to L.A. I hated her. I hated El Monte. Some unknown killer just bought me a brand-new beautiful life." He grew up obsessed with murdered women and crime. He ran from his mother's ghost.Ellroy became a writer of radically provocative and bestselling crime novels. "I wear obsession well," he says. "I've turned it into something." He tried to reclaim his mother through fiction. It didn't work. He quit running and wrote this memoir.My Dark Places is Jean and James Ellroy's story—from 1958 to all points past and up to this moment. It is the story of a brilliant homicide detective named Bill Stoner and of the investigation he and Ellroy undertook. It is also an unflinching autobiography with vivid reportage. This is James Ellroy's journey through his most forbidding memories.

    They meet as children in an ESL class in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. Vaclav is precocious and verbal. Lena, struggling with English, takes comfort in the safety of his adoration, his noisy, loving home, and the care of Rasia, his big-hearted mother. Vaclav imagines their story unfolding like a fairy tale or the perfect illusion from his treasured Magician's Almanac, but among the many truths to be discovered in Haley Tanner's wondrous debut is that happily-ever-after is never a foregone conclusion.One day, Lena does not show up for school. She has disappeared from Vaclav's and his family's lives as if by a cruel magic trick. For the next seven years, Vaclav says goodnight to Lena without fail, wondering if she is doing the same somewhere. On the eve of Lena's seventeenth birthday he finds out.Haley Tanner has the originality and verve of a born storyteller and the boldness to imagine a world in which love can overcome the most difficult circumstances. In Vaclav & Lena she has created two unforgettable young protagonists who evoke the joy, the confusion, and the passion of having a profound, everlasting connection with someone else.

    A comedy depends on stopping the story at exactly the right moment."   Mia Fredrickson, the wry, vituperative, tragicomic poet narrator of The Summer Without Men, has been forced to reexamine her own life. One day, out of the blue, after thirty years of marriage, Mia’s husband, a renowned neuroscientist, asks her for a “pause.” This abrupt request sends her reeling and lands her in a psychiatric ward. The June following Mia’s release from the hospital, she returns to the prairie town of her childhood, where her mother lives in an old people’s home. Alone in a rented house, she rages and fumes and bemoans her sorry fate. Slowly, however, she is drawn into the lives of those around her—her mother and her close friends,“the Five Swans,” and her young neighbor with two small children and a loud angry husband—and the adolescent girls in her poetry workshop whose scheming and petty cruelty carry a threat all their own. From the internationally bestselling author of What I Loved comes a provocative, witty, and revelatory novel about women and girls, love and marriage, and the age-old question of sameness and difference between the sexes.

    Now in her ninety-fourth year, this timely celebration sheds new light on the myriad attributes and personal qualities she brings to the nation. From fortitude in the face of adversity to standing as the nation's ambassador all over the world, no one could doubt the work ethic that powers this remarkable woman, even into her nineties. Equally, her love of family - from her rock of over sixty years' marriage, Prince Philip, to her great grandchildren - shines through. But what are the secrets of her success? How does she still approach her day-to-day with such vitality and aplomb, even when culture and society are changing rapidly all around her?The Queen on fame: When an MP commented that it must be a strain meeting so many strangers all the time, the Queen smiled, 'It is not as difficult as it might seem. You see, I don't have to introduce myself. They all seem to know who I am.'The Queen on fashion: In the late sixties when Mary Quant and the mini skirt came to epitomize all that was fashionable, Princess Anne suggested her mother might also consider shortening her hemline. The Queen was adamant, 'I am not a film star.' The Queen on family: As Great Britain's most famous great grandmother, it is no surprise that the Queen values family life. 'Marriage gains from the web of family relationships between parents and children, grandparents and grandchildren, cousins, aunts and uncles.'In this book Karen Dolby unpicks the key elements that make the Queen so special to - and so loved by - the nation and presents a guide to how you too could put into practice some of Her Majesty's traits to help overcome adversity, find inner strength and present yourself as wonderfully considered and calm, even when all about you seems in chaos.

    Part magic realism, part science fiction, part theater of the absurd, and part over-the-top, unrepentant spoof, this novel packs more into its few short pages than do most epic trilogies. Graziano has fabricated the rare kind of tale that the reader can honestly say ends much too quickly. Perfectly woven, self-enclosed, multifaceted . . . Kosinski’s Being There sprinkled with a strong dose of Frankenstein . . . the kind of simplicity that speaks volumes.”—Michael Mirolla, author of The Formal Logic of Emotion“An amalgam of fairy tale, satire, science fiction, medical thriller, and soap opera. . . . It is difficult to fathom that a novel so brief can be so epic in scope. Inventive and deftly crafted, The Love Song of Monkey is a tale no reader will soon forget.”—Eric Linder, Yellow Umbrella Books, Chatham, MassachusettsIn a surreal exile on the floor of the Atlantic, a young man faces his own death and his wife’s infidelity. The Love Song of Monkey is a meditation on the simple, inexplicable, and lasting power of love, cast in the metaphor of a journey to the depths of the ocean floor. Precise and beautifully crafted, this modern fable is rich with humor and deep thought.Michael S. A. Graziano, professor of neuroscience at Princeton University, is the author of the novella Hiding Places (New England Review), The Seclusion Zone (2007 fi nalist in the William Faulkner–William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition), and The Intelligent Movement Machine (2008, Oxford University Press).