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Both an exorcism of contemporary academia and a comedic portrait of an artist seeking the means to survive.

At once angry and jubilant, Ray Levy’s School is a curse on a dying system and an incantation for transforming pain into a vessel for capacious, creative selfhood.

A dissertation manuscript possessed by the spirit of Marquis de Sade; a lecture on psychoanalysis delivered as stand-up comedy by a dysphoric graduate student; a review of a found-footage horror movie that’s also a YouTube video of a conference presentation on French theory; an interview with an avant-garde filmmaker that’s really an invocation for conjuring your demon brother; oversharing and withholding, chanting and channeling, School is a slapstick roast of Derrida’s corpse and a mystical vision of a life in which you have not lost.

A fresh and vivid translation of Flaubert’s influential bildungsroman

Gustave Flaubert conceived Sentimental Education, his final complete novel, as the history of his own generation, one that failed to fulfill the promise of the Revolution of 1848. Published a few months before the start of the 1870 Franco–Prussian War, it offers both a sweeping panorama of French society over three decades and an intimate bildungsroman of a young man from a small town who arrives in Paris when protests against the monarchy are increasing.

The novel’s protagonist, Frédéric Moreau, alternates between aimlessness and ambition as he searches for a meaningful life through love affairs and republican politics. Flaubert’s narrative includes scenes of high drama, as scattered protests across Paris swell into revolution, and quiet moments of self-aware romanticism, crafting a story that possesses the sweep and scope of a historical novel combined with deep emotion and scandalous intimacy. Suffused with tragedy and the poignancy of lost chances and wasted lives, Sentimental Education is sharpened by satirical observations of what Flaubert condemned as the Second Empire’s endemic hypocrisy and willful blindness.

This vibrant, new translation by Raymond N. MacKenzie includes an extensive critical introduction and annotations to help the modern reader appreciate Flaubert’s achievement. Sentimental Education intertwines the personal, the intimate, and the subjective with the political, social, and cultural, embedding Frédéric’s story in the larger arc of what Flaubert saw as France’s decline into mediocrity and imbecility in its politics and manners.

An innovative work of experimental prose examining the entanglements of media, authority, and embodied experience.

Sex for the Millennium: Extreme Tales by Harold Jaffe is a provocative collection of experimental narratives that push the boundaries of form, language, and subject matter. Blending fiction, satire, and cultural commentary, the book presents a series of fragmented “extreme” episodes that explore the intersections of desire, power, and media in contemporary society.

Jaffe uses the concept of sex as a central metaphor rather than a literal focus, exploring how desire can be shaped, controlled, and commodified within larger social and political systems. Rather than following a traditional plot, Jaffe constructs a shifting landscape populated by characters caught in systems of control shaped by institutions, technology, and consumer culture. The stories examine how identity and intimacy are mediated by external forces.

Jaffe's work reflects postmodern literary traditions, using disjointed narratives and abrupt tonal shifts to unsettle the reader. His writing challenges social norms and exposes the underlying mechanisms of authority and manipulation at work in everyday life. With dark humor and intentional provocation, Sex for the Millennium: Extreme Tales offers a critique of modern culture, inviting readers to confront questions about autonomy, authenticity, and the influence of media in shaping human experience.

A kaleidoscopic sequence of autofictional narratives about identity, grief, and narrative itself.

Shame is a daring exploration of the potential and limits of memory and self. Here we meet Grant Maierhofer at various points within his life then, now, and in the future as he investigates the sense of shame that haunts the course of his days. The real and unreal, fact and fiction, blur together in a Kaufmanesque sequence of overlapping narratives about who we really are, how we cope with regret, and the repetitions of our behavior.

Through lists, fragments, recollections, and rants, the story of a son’s vexing grief for his father emerges. A sober addict trying to figure out how to navigate pleasure, diversion, and escape. A father trying to figure out marriage, children, maturity, and responsibility. A confused observer in a world constantly torn apart by media, politics, and aggression. A meditation on the nature of art, and art’s place in contemporary life.
 

A masterpiece of twentieth-century Hungarian fiction, Kosztolányi's Skylark is a classic portrait of provincial life in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. Set in the autumn of 1899, it focuses on one extraordinary week in the otherwise uneventful lives of an elderly Hungarian couple. Their ugly spinster daughter, nicknamed Skylark, has left them for an unprecedented holiday with relatives in the country. At first, the couple, whose entire existence revolves around their daughter, are devastated by her absence. Slowly, however, they rediscover the delights and diversions of small-town life, finally reaching the shocking conclusion that their daughter is a burden to them.

In this beautifully written tale Kosztolányi turns family sentiment on its head with an irony that is as telling now as it was nearly seventy years ago. 

A New York TimesBook Review Editors’ Choice

A Shelf Awareness Best Book of the Year

Hudson Booksellers Book of the Year

One of the New York Post’s Best Books of the Summer

One of The Millions’s Most Anticipated Books of the Year

IndieNext Pick

A Time Magazine “What to Read Now” Selection

A wry novel set at the edge of the earth about the courage it takes to band together, even as everything around you falls apart

Unmoored by a recent family tragedy, Cooper Gosling is adrift at thirty and on the verge of ruining her career. So when the opportunity arises to join the National Science Foundation’s Artists & Writers Program in Antarctica, she jumps at the chance—and finds herself in the company of others who are just abnormal enough for Polar life, a group of eccentrics motivated by desires as ambiguous as her own. When they are joined by a fringe scientist who claims climate change is a hoax, the Polies’ already-imbalanced community is rattled, bringing them to the center of a global controversy and threatening the ancient ice chip they call home.

In Southern Neogothic, Lee Rozelle moves beyond familiar debates that have long dominated studies of the American South, proposing a new framework for understanding how contemporary writers, filmmakers, and artists have transformed the genre’s signature tropes to engage pressing cultural, political, and environmental concerns. Rather than revisiting narratives centered on white grievance, Confederate memory, or Lost Cause mythology, Rozelle examines works that expand Southern Gothic’s reach, connecting regional traditions to global audiences and contemporary struggles over identity, power, and belonging. By demonstrating how contemporary artists have reinvented one of America’s most enduring literary modes, Rozelle offers a fresh and timely account of the genre’s continuing cultural relevance.

The nineteenth-century Southern novel that transformed romance, virtue, and redemption into literary legend.

St. Elmo was the most famed and beloved novel by Augusta Jane Evans, a June 2015 inductee into the Alabama Writers Hall of Fame. First published in 1866, Evans’s rich tale of the relationship between the dashing and worldly St. Elmo and Edna Earl, an exemplar of virtuous Southern womanhood, sold over a million copies in four months and became one of the nineteenth century’s most influential novels.

This edition includes an introduction by Evans scholar Diane Roberts about the enduring relevance and legacy of St. Elmo as a work of literature as well as a reflection of gender roles and the seismic societal changes taking place in the United States in the aftermath of the Civil War.
 

In 1960 S. K. Sharma, a brilliant young astrophysicist at the beginning of his academic career, has finally succeeded in bringing his wife, Sushila, from India to America. Intensely drawn to one another as star university students, the couple pursue an unlikely affair and marriage that crosses caste lines. Their sweeping, decades-long story of love, forgiveness, and coming of age takes place in a country that is both fascinated by and shuns them. The United States, with its exaltation of individualism, offers immense opportunities, but its looser sexual mores threaten to undermine the family’s happiness and devotion to one another.

As their three daughters become young women, they must navigate the tumultuous decades of the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, and the women’s liberation movement. In their journeys of self-discovery, they upend their parents’ hold on them to craft radically new identities for themselves. As they discover their parents’ faults they grow increasingly puzzled by their devotion to one another, eventually learning how love and forgiveness have the power to overcome the most uncomfortable truths.