This tale of a repressive priest and his small Mexican village during the eighteen months preceding the Revolution of 1910 is a great novel, one that exposes the struggle between human desire and paralyzing fear—fear of humanity, fear of nature, fear of the wrath of God. Agustín Yáñez probes the actions of people caught in life’s currents, enthralling his readers with mounting dramatic tension as he shows that no power can forge saints from the human masses, that any attempt to do so, in fact, often has exactly the opposite result.

Yáñez brings to his work a deep understanding of people—his people—and he illuminates a great truth—that no one, anywhere, seems very strange when we understand the environment that has produced him or her.

An American literary take on the Nordic noir genre

Unfolding during the moody Pacific Northwest winter of 1951, we follow Bernadette Baston, scholar of child development and language acquisition, as she travels to a penitentiary on the remote island Elita in the Puget Sound to consult on a curious case: two guards have discovered an animal-like adolescent girl living alone in the cold woods beyond the prison’s walls. There are few answers, but many people who know more than they are saying. According to official reports, the girl, dubbed Atalanta, does not speak. Is her silence protecting someone? The prison warden, court-appointed guardian, and police detective embroil Bernadette in resolving a secret that the tight-knit island community has long held, and her investment in the girl’s case soon becomes more personal than professional. As a mother, wife, and woman bound by mid-twentieth-century expectations, Bernadette strategizes to retain the fragile control she has over her own freedom, identity, and future, which becomes inextricably tied to solving Atalanta’s case.

In the summer of 1942, Eve Halverson assumes her dead sister’s identity and leaves behind her small-town life in Washington for the promise of something new in San Pedro, California. Determined to support the war effort, she takes a job at a boot factory, stepping into an unfamiliar world of sweat, steel, and camaraderie. Among the women on the factory floor, she finds resilience, laughter, and unexpected friendships that begin to reshape her understanding of the world—and herself.

But it’s the quiet, captivating dockworker and blues singer Hard Times (H.T.) who truly upends her life. As Eve grows closer to H.T., she finds herself drawn into his world, one filled with music, longing, and the ever-present shadows of prejudice. Their connection forces Eve to confront realities she’d never imagined, challenging the boundaries of her own perceptions and the risks of crossing societal lines. When Eve becomes a witness to a violent crime at a blues club, her life takes a dangerous turn. As she navigates the escalating threats, she leans on the strength of her newfound friends and the fragile, complex bond she shares with H.T.

Set against the vibrant yet turbulent backdrop of World War II–era California, Emerald City Blues is a heartfelt coming-of-age story. It explores the complexities of love, the power of friendship, and the courage it takes to forge your own path in an uncertain world. Eve’s journey is one of discovery—not just of the world beyond her hometown, but of the resilience and strength she never knew she possessed.

It seems like a sign of liberation—of adulthood’s indefinite postponement—when partisans bomb the university and every student’s personal records, from transcripts to debts, are consumed in erasing fire. If nothing else, it lends Margaux the freedom to continue her preferred art form of list-making unfettered by the authority of academia--until she encounters the breakdowns and disappearances and deaths of the people she admires and cherishes most. A monochromatic painter. A BDSM documentary photographer. A transgendered Aphrodite. A mathematician with an invisible cat. Yet as the concrete details of her world dissolve into the abstraction of loss, they also become more rarefied, more essential. Something small enough to be contained. Small enough to be protected.

Set in a semi-fictional, post-industrial American warzone, this novel explores multiple facets related to the recent nonfictional decades of constant civil unrest, with a particular focus on the complicated nature of holding a personal creative life amidst a time of constant violence and change. Despite its heavy themes, the narrative is threaded throughout with veins of absurdist humor that invite and welcome us into the familial warmth of the narrator’s memories of friendship. 

Finalist, PEN USA Literary Award for Fiction

Srinivas Aravamudan here reveals how Oriental tales, pseudo-ethnographies, sexual fantasies, and political satires took Europe by storm during the eighteenth century. Naming this body of fiction Enlightenment Orientalism, he poses a range of urgent questions that uncovers the interdependence of Oriental tales and domestic fiction, thereby challenging standard scholarly narratives about the rise of the novel.

Epic and Lovely is the swan song of Nina Simone Blaine, the daughter of a long-dead 1950s Vegas crooner and a Texas beauty queen forty years his junior. In the wake of her unexpected divorce, Nina returns to her hometown of Los Angeles to spend her final days with The Friends of the Good Thumb, a support group for patients with A12 Fibrillin Deficiency Syndrome, a genetic disorder that affects children of much-older fathers, causes several physical deformities, and results in death around the age of forty.

Written as a deathbed letter to the UCLA physician who has tracked Nina and the other Good Thumbs throughout their lives, Nina recounts her final days with the group and with Cole, the charismatic, sadistic fellow A12er with whom she has fallen madly in love, who charms and harms her in equal measures. An unlikely alliance with a tech billionaire, the return of her estranged mother, and the birth of the baby she never thought she’d have force Nina to reckon with the triumphs and mistakes of her life and to fight to leave her child in good hands.

“I let these years slip through my fingers like a stream of dry, glinting sand.” Eva is a coming-of-age story told in fluid, stream-of-consciousness prose that takes readers through the eponymous main character’s orthodox Jewish girlhood to marriage to, finally, independence and sexual freedom. Originally published in 1927 by Dutch writer Carry van Bruggen (1881–1932), the experimental novel expresses Eva’s dawning sense of self and expanding subjectivity. Burdened all of her life by feelings of shame, Eva overcomes this legacy of her upbringing at the end of the novel and declares that it is “bodily desire that makes love acceptable.”

For the first time, Jane Fenoulhet has made this important, modernist novel accessible to English-language readers, her deft translation capturing the rich expressiveness of van Bruggen’s original Dutch. In insightful accompanying commentary, Fenoulhet describes how, just as the novel depicts the becoming of both Eva and her creator, so too can the translation be seen as the translator’s own becoming. Fenoulhet also describes the challenges of translating van Bruggen’s dynamic, intense narrative, which necessitated deep personal engagement with the novel.
 

Set against the backdrop of a small-town Wisconsin NICU, a sweeping story of parenthood, family, and redemption

After a decade of miscarriages, Brooke Jensen is finally pregnant—with quadruplets. When she goes into labor after twenty-three weeks, Brooke and her husband rush to the hospital in the small town of Hanover, Wisconsin. For the 203 days that follow, they’re plunged into the terrifying and mysterious netherworld of the neonatal intensive care unit.
 
As the babies grow and struggle, fall turns to stark upper-Midwest winter. Brooke bonds with Dash, a senior nurse whose son, Landon, had been a patient in the NICU years earlier and is now straining his parents’ abilities to care for him. Both families bend and edge closer to breaking, and the questions mount: What does love look like? What does it mean to save a life?
 
A fiercely honest portrait of American parenthood, the American healthcare system, and Rust Belt communities, Everything We Could Do lays bare the ways that families are formed and remade in times of crisis.