The Book of X


Sarah Rose Etter - 2019
    From childhood with her parents on the family meat farm, to a desk job in the city, to finally experiencing love, she grapples with her body, men, and society, all the while imagining a softer world than the one she is in.

The Probable Future


Alice Hoffman - 2003
    Women of the Sparrow family have unusual gifts. Elinor can detect falsehood. Her daughter, Jenny, can see people's dreams when they sleep. Granddaughter Stella has a mental window on the future -- a future that she might not want to see. In The Probable Future this vivid and intriguing cast of characters confronts a haunting past -- and a very current murder -- against the evocative backdrop of small-town New England. By turns chilling and enchanting, The Probable Future chronicles the Sparrows’s legacy as young Stella struggles to cope with her disturbing clairvoyance. Her potential to ruin or redeem becomes unbearable when one of her premonitions puts her father in jail, wrongly accused of homicide. Yet this ordeal also leads Stella to the grandmother she was forbidden to meet and to a historic family home full of talismans from her ancestors. Poignant, arresting, unsettling, The Probable Future showcases the lavish literary gifts that have made Alice Hoffman one of America’s most treasured writers.

The Afternet


Peter Empringham - 2011
    When the system begins to misfire under the workload, the ill-equipped representatives of God and the Devil tasked with managing the process are given an ultimatum. Fix The Afternet or go back to your previous afterlives. They begin an odyssey through the hordes of souls awaiting judgement and the oblivious living in search of a solution. Rich in comic detail and populated with characters real and imagined from throughout time, their quest is never going to be straightforward…

More Than You Know


Beth Gutcheon - 2000
    This spare, piercing, and unforgettable novel bridges two centuries and two intense love stories as Hannah and Conary's fate is interwoven with the tale of a marriage that took place in Dundee a hundred years earlier.

Bellefleur


Joyce Carol Oates - 1980
    They own vast lands and profitable businesses, they employ their neighbors, and they influence the government. A prolific and eccentric group, they include several millionaires, a mass murderer, a spiritual seeker who climbs into the mountains looking for God, a wealthy noctambulist who dies of a chicken scratch.Bellefleur traces the lives of several generations of this unusual family. At its center is Gideon Bellefleur and his imperious, somewhat psychic, very beautiful wife, Leah, their three children (one with frightening psychic abilities), and the servants and relatives, living and dead, who inhabit the mansion and its environs. Their story offers a profound look at the world's changeableness, time and eternity, space and soul, pride and physicality versus love. Bellefleur is an allegory of caritas versus cupiditas, love and selflessness versus pride and selfishness. It is a novel of change, baffling complexity, mystery.Written with a voluptuousness and startling immediacy that transcends Joyce Carol Oates's early works, Bellefleur is widely regarded as a masterwork—a feat of literary genius.

Lick Your Neighbor


Chris Genoa - 2010
    And that's all before he leaves for work. Mutant ninjas, a talking whale, kung-fu masters, maniacal Pilgrims and an alcoholic clown populate Chris Genoa's surreal, darkly comical and unnerving reimagining of the first Thanksgiving. Put down your feathered headdresses, puritan collars and buckled shoes and prepare to get schooled in the alternate history lesson they never mentioned in grade school.

The Thrilling Adventure Hour: A Spirited Romance


Ben Acker - 2018
    Headliners on the society pages. And, oh yes, they see ghosts. Trading quips and tossing back cocktails, the Doyles take what they want and hoodwink their clientele for the rest. Ghosts, vampires, werewolves, mummies, even diabolical gingerbread men are nothing but obstacles in the way of the liquor cabinet for our fast-talking, hard-drinking sleuths. Written by the creators of the wildly popular Hollywood stage show and podcast, Ben Acker and Ben Blacker (Deadpool, Star Wars Adventures), and illustrated by Phil Hester (Batman Beyond), The Thrilling Adventure Hour: A Spirited Romance is a rip-roaring adventure that harkens back to the heyday of old-time radio entertainment. Collects The Thrilling Adventure Hour Presents: Beyond Belief #0 - #4

The Seas


Samantha Hunt - 2004
    An occasional chambermaid, granddaughter to a typesetter, and daughter to a dead man, awkward and brave, wayward and willful, she is in love (unrequited) with an Iraq War veteran thirteen years her senior. She is convinced that she is a mermaid. What she does to ease the pain of growing up lands her in prison. What she does to get out is the stuff of legend. In the words of writer Michelle Tea, The Seas is "creepy and poetic, subversive and strangely funny, [and] a phenomenal piece of literature."

The End of the Story


Lydia Davis - 1994
    With compassion, wit, and what appears to be candor she seeks to determine what she actually knows about herself and her past, but we begin to suspect, along with her, that given the elusiveness of memory and understanding, any tale retrieved from the past must be fiction.

Undermajordomo Minor


Patrick deWitt - 2015
    He is a compulsive liar, a sickly weakling in a town famous for begetting brutish giants. Then Lucy accepts employment assisting the majordomo of the remote, foreboding Castle Von Aux. While tending to his new post as undermajordomo, he soon discovers the place harbours many dark secrets, not least of which is the whereabouts of the castle's master, Baron Von Aux. Thus begins a tale of polite theft, bitter heartbreak, domestic mystery, and cold-blooded murder.Undermajordomo Minor is an ink-black comedy of manners, an adventure, and a mystery, and a searing portrayal of rural Alpine bad behaviour, but above all it is a love story. And Lucy must be careful, for love is a violent thing.

Tree of Codes


Jonathan Safran Foer - 2010
    With a different die-cut on every page, Tree of Codes explores previously unchartered literary territory. Initially deemed impossible to make, the book is a first — as much a sculptural object as it is a work of masterful storytelling. Tree of Codes is the story of an enormous last day of life — as one character's life is chased to extinction, Foer multi-layers the story with immense, anxious, at times disorientating imagery, crossing both a sense of time and place, making the story of one person’s last day everyone’s story. Inspired to exhume a new story from an existing text, Jonathan Safran Foer has taken his "favorite" book, The Street of Crocodiles by Polish-Jewish writer Bruno Schulz, and used it as a canvas, cutting into and out of the pages, to arrive at an original new story told in Jonathan Safran Foer's own acclaimed voice.

There Will Come Soft Rains


Ray Bradbury - 1950
    First published in Collier's, May 6, 1950.The story concerns a household in Allendale, California, in the aftermath of a nuclear war.

Eaters of the Dead


Michael Crichton - 1976
    The refined Arab courtier Ibn Fadlan is accompanying a party of Viking warriors back to their home. He is appalled by their customs—the gratuitous sexuality of their women, their disregard for cleanliness, and their cold-blooded sacrifices. As they enter the frozen, forbidden landscape of the North—where the day’s length does not equal the night’s, where after sunset the sky burns in streaks of color—Fadlan soon discovers that he has been unwillingly enlisted to combat the terrors in the night that come to slaughter the Vikings, the monsters of the mist that devour human flesh. But just how he will do it, Fadlan has no idea.

The Land of Laughs


Jonathan Carroll - 1980
    A novel about how terrifying that would be.Schoolteacher Thomas Abbey, unsure son of a film star, doesn't know who he is or what he wants--in life, in love, or in his relationship with the strange and intense Saxony Gardner. What he knows is that in his whole life nothing has touched him so deeply as the novels of Marshall France, a reclusive author of fabulous children's tales who died at forty-four.Now Thomas and Saxony have come to France's hometown, the dreamy Midwestern town of Galen, Missouri, to write France's biography. Warned in advance that France's family may oppose them, they're surprised to find France's daughter warmly welcoming instead. But slowly they begin to see that something fantastic and horrible is happening. The magic of Marshall France has extended far beyond the printed page...leaving them with a terrifying task to undertake.

2030: The Real Story of What Happens to America


Albert Brooks - 2011
    Is this what’s in store?June 12, 2030 started out like any other day in memory—and by then, memories were long.  Since cancer had been cured fifteen years before, America’s population was aging rapidly.  That sounds like good news, but consider this: millions of baby boomers, with a big natural predator picked off, were sucking dry benefits and resources that were never meant to hold them into their eighties and beyond.  Young people around the country simmered with resentment toward “the olds” and anger at the treadmill they could never get off of just to maintain their parents’ entitlement programs.But on that June 12th, everything changed: a massive earthquake devastated Los Angeles, and the government, always teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, was unable to respond. The fallout from the earthquake sets in motion a sweeping novel of ideas that pits national hope for the future against assurances from the past and is peopled by a memorable cast of refugees and billionaires, presidents and revolutionaries, all struggling to find their way.  In 2030, the author’s all-too-believable imagining of where today’s challenges could lead us tomorrow makes gripping and thought-provoking reading.