Nils contains a dark secret in its basement, and Jonathan, the mostly clueless clerk who works there, just wants to fix things once and for all. But, beginning with an early encounter in an animal shelter that leaves three dead, things don’t always work out the way they ought to. Or do they? Filled with memorable characters, including two dogs (one too smart for his own good) and a retired sea captain, this unsettling darkly comic novel is an exploration of memory, desire, and the nature of storytelling. More disturbingly, Girl Factory raises questions about the ubiquitous objectification of women, the possibility for change, and the nature of freedom.

    The one her mother calls difficult and her father calls remarkable. On Sarah's eleventh birthday, Hetty 'Handful' Grimké is taken from the slave quarters she shares with her mother, wrapped in lavender ribbons, and presented to Sarah as a gift. Sarah knows what she does next will unleash a world of trouble. She also knows that she cannot accept. And so, indeed, the trouble begins ... A powerful, sweeping novel, inspired by real events, and set in the American Deep South in the nineteenth century, THE INVENTION OF WINGS evokes a world of shocking contrasts, of beauty and ugliness, of righteous people living daily with cruelty they fail to recognise; and celebrates the power of friendship and sisterhood against all the odds.

    Here are urban upheavals reimagined as frontier myth; travelogues through countries that might have been created by Kafka; cryptic dialogues that bore down to the bedrock of our longings, dreams, and angsts. Like all of Donald's work, the sixty stories collected in this volume are triumphs of language and perception, at once unsettling and irresistible.

    All her life she kept herself pure for her faith and her future husband. Although having never had experienced love, and occasionally doubting whether she will, Safia feels herself growing impatient being single. She then sends her family to search for 'the one.' Trusting her family, she decides to say yes to the first person her family finds for her. She believes she will get married and face all her problems with her husband by her side. Is it really as simple as that?Yusuf feels a void in his heart. He tries to deny it, but he knows his mother's not proud of him. He knows she wishes he could be a little more modern like his brother. He wanted his family to find him a wife while he could focus on his deen (faith), but his idea of a wife clashes with his mother's. Seeing that his family were struggling to find him someone he likes, he decides to take matters into his own hands. But is he rushing into decisions without thinking?

    that blurs the boundaries between life and performance, dance, art, and viral video. The novel is also framed in the world of performance art and is itself its own kind of performance... and feels rightly reflective of a moment when dance is pushing the boundaries of what constitutes a performance space."-Slate Book Review"Deftly blending highbrow intellectual concerns with the informality of Facebook-era communiques, Browning's newest is as entertaining as it is thought-provoking."-Publishers Weekly (Starred)"Exquisite storytelling at its finest. I’m Trying to Reach You cultivates our relationship addiction with YouTube and our desire for interconnectivity while illuminating what it means to strive, cope and love with all of our heart, brain, body and soul. It is all here. Browning writes with humor, wit, grace and passion to the human purpose, mortality and the joys of existence. Start reading.”-Karen FinleyFirst Michael Jackson, then Pina Bausch. Next is Merce Cunningham.Gray Adams, a former dancer with the Royal Swiss Ballet at work on his dissertation at NYU, has a theory spurred by countless hours of YouTube-based procrastination: someone is killing these famous dancers! (And he may bear an uncanny resemblance to Jimmy Stewart, circa Vertigo.)I'm Trying to Reach You is a moving and candid contemporary look at how we process grief, as well as how we love and communicate with one another.In the author's consideration of gender, race, and class, she also attempts to relate what it truly means to be an American in this modern age.Barbara Browning is the author of The Correspondence Artist. She teaches in the Performance Studies department at Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. She's also a poet and dancer who lives in Greenwich Village with her son.

    In 1835, The Brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm revise the tale to bury a truth about Jacob even he can’t come to face. In 1986, a folklore scholar and her brother come to find the record is wrong about the figurative witch in the woods, while in 2211, twin space probes aiming to find earth's sister planet disseminate the narrative in binary code. Breadcrumbing back in time from 2365 to 1378, siblings reimagine, reinvent, and recycle the narrative of Hansel and Gretel to articulate personal, regional, and ultimately cosmic experiences of tragedy.Through a relay of speculative pieces that oscillate between eco-fiction and psychological horror, The Archive of Alternate Endings explores sibling love in the face of trauma over the course of a millennium, in the vein of Richard McGuire's Here and Lars von Trier's Melancholia.

    Every two years the international art world descends on Venice for the opening of the Biennale. Among them is Jeff Atman–a jaded and dissolute journalist–whose dedication to the cause of Bellini-fuelled partygoing is only intermittently disturbed by the obligation to file a story. When he meets the spellbinding Laura, he is rejuvenated and ecstatic. Their romance blossoms quickly, but is it destined to disappear just as rapidly? Every day thousands of pilgrims head to the banks of the Ganges at Varanasi, the holiest Hindu city in India. Among their number is a narrator who may or may not be the Atman previously seen in Venice. Intending to visit only for a few days he ends up staying for months, and suddenly finds–or should that be loses?–a hitherto unexamined idea of himself, the self. In a romance he can only observe, he sees a reflection of the kind of pleasures that, willingly or not, he has renounced. In the process, two ancient and watery cities become versions of each other. Could two stories, in two different cities, actually be one and the same story? Nothing Geoff Dyer has written before is as wonderfully unbridled, as dead-on in evocation of place, longing and the possibility of neurotic enlightenment, and as irrepressibly entertaining as Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi.

    BEST BEHAVIOR, the new novel by Noah Cicero, is his boldest work yet. As the subject matter becomes increasingly autobiographical, the landscape more bleak, its impact is blunt, brutal, but somehow still hilarious. This is the literature of pain: of living in a world where nothing is right a temple to capitalism with no room for any kind of human spirit and, despite everything, trying to find some way to deal with it; then eventually failing. BEST BEHAVIOR might be the truest story ever told. BEST BEHAVIOR is slice-of-life, and that's as it should be. Where the classics have beginnings, middles, and ends that are relevant to the mainstream consciousness of the times, BEST BEHAVIOR is a couple of days in the life, making it a more honest and useful cultural artifact Rebecca Haze."

    They are bonded by their loyalty to each other-and by their urgent desire to reconcile their own versions of the past. In what she means to be a rebellious act, Lily steals a car with her boyfriend and heads southwest to confront her mother. Mabel stays behind, hoping to commune somehow with her father's ghost...in a textured, eccentric, and redemptive tale as spare and compelling as the Nebraska landscape.

    A perfect servant suddenly reveals himself to be the insidious Dr. Fu Manchu. Science-fantasy wars, racism, corporate capitalism, drug addiction, and various medical and psychiatric horrors all play their parts in this mosaiclike, experimental novel. Here is William S. Burroughs at his coruscating and hilarious best.

    He's batting below .200 at the plate, and even worse in bed with his wife; and he secretly fears he's inherited his mother's insanity. Ordered to take a midseason rest, Suder instead takes his record of Charlie Parker's "Ornithology," his record player, and his new saxophone and flees, negotiating his way through madcap adventures and flashbacks to childhood ("If you folks believed more strongly in God, maybe you wouldn't be colored"). Pursued by a raging dope dealer, saddled with a mishandled elephant and an abused little white girl, he manages in the end to fly free, both transcending and inspired by the pull of so much life.

    VERA & LINUS is a series of short sketches. The book's theme is the love between the two protagonists, Vera and Linus. They are mischief makers and tricksters of the most daring sort, and they are constantly up to no good, but the language holds them with a clear restraint, a restraint born perhaps out of the peculiar nature of their love, a love both for each other and the things of the world. Their mastery, and shifting natures allow them to compel the workaday world as they see it, but not to rule over each other, and so their game begins, as Vera struggles to outwit Linus, and Linus to outwit Vera.

    A filmmaker and now a dry alcoholic, he's lived life to the full - sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. Here, struggling to survive cancer, Noah evaluates his chequered past life, and as a picture builds of a brave and foolish man, gradually it becomes clear that he's a modern-day hero.

    Scott Fitzgerald is known for his novels, but in his lifetime, his fame stemmed from his prolific achievement as one of America's most gifted story writers. "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," a witty and fantastical satire about aging, is one of his most memorable stories. In 1860 Benjamin Button is born an old man and mysteriously begins aging backward. At the beginning of his life he is withered and worn, but as he continues to grow younger he embraces life -- he goes to war, runs a business, falls in love, has children, goes to college and prep school, and, as his mind begins to devolve, he attends kindergarten and eventually returns to the care of his nurse. This strange and haunting story embodies the sharp social insight that has made Fitzgerald one of the great voices in the history of American literature.

    'I'm such a big fan.' No one had briefed Hugo about him.This book is different. You've really never read a book like this before.It's the story of an April night that never happened. A night that changes everything for nerdy Michael, a Fleet Street worker ant, when he agrees to take his boss's invitation to an A-list party at a London club.Inside, reclusive movie star Hugo Marks is announcing his re-entrance to society. And the last thing Hugo needs is Mellody, his junkie supermodel wife, deciding now's the time to swan-dive off the wagon. Or drop-dead-gorgeous pop pup Calvin, hoping he can screw himself into their league.Yet not one of them sees the real crisis coming. The moment that will tangle their four lives into an intricate disaster. It happens at the afterparty. But then, perhaps you knew that already...