"WONDERFULLY STRANGE." --Mark HaddonA beguiling, irresistibly immersive debut novel about sixteen sisters in a walled garden, and what happens to their carefully constructed world when one girl starts asking questions about life outside.Fourteen-year-old Calamity Leek and her sisters spend their days tending white roses and memorizing the lessons in Aunty’s Appendix, a multi-volume compendium of show tunes, beauty regimens, and twisted creation myths. Calamity knows the Appendix front to back, and she is Aunty’s favorite, destined for particular greatness. But when her restless sister Truly Polperro gets too curious about life beyond their Wall of Safekeeping, she cracks Calamity’s world wide open. Calamity needs a new book. And she will have to write it herself. With formidable imagination and brilliant strangeness, Paula Lichtarowicz's The First Book of Calamity Leek draws on fairytales and doublespeak to tell a story both classic and keenly modern. Calamity, fearless and wrenching, leads us to question the stories we ourselves live by.

*LONGLISTED FOR THE 2018 PEN/ROBERT W. BINGHAM PRIZE FOR DEBUT FICTION*

*SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2018 WILLIAM SAROYAN INTERNATIONAL PRIZE FOR WRITING*

Named a Best Book of 2017 by The San Francisco Chronicle

Named one of Electric Literature’s 15 Best Short Story Collections of 2017

A stunningly original debut collection about lives across history marked by violence and longing.

A brother and sister turn outlaw in a wild and brutal landscape. The daughter of a diplomat disappears and resurfaces across the world as a deadly woman of many names. A young Philadelphia boy struggles with the contradictions of privilege, violence, and the sway of an incarcerated father. A monk in sixteenth century England suffers the dissolution of his monastery and the loss of all that he held sacred.

The characters in The Man Who Shot Out My Eye Is Dead, Benz's wildly imaginative debut, are as varied as any in recent literature, but they share a thirst for adventure which sends them rushing full-tilt toward the moral crossroads, becoming victims and perpetrators along the way. Riveting, visceral, and heartbreaking, Benz’s stories of identity, abandonment, and fierce love come together in a daring, arresting vision.

Lucy Hickey-Rios has loved animals her entire life, and that is why she works so hard as the Executive Director of Mercy Animal Shelter. Mercy is an open, non-profit humane society that serves an upstate New York county. They care for unwanted pets and strays, and investigate complaints of animal abuse. Lucy hates any form of animal abuse or neglect, but most of all she despises people who fight animals. When she and her staff discover evidence of organized dog fighting right under their noses, they become obsessed with catching those responsible and rescuing the pit bulls being so horribly used. They must battle the dog fighters, the prejudice against pit bulls and even the feds in their efforts to rescue these dogs and purge their city of the horror that is dog fighting. Through it all, Lucy must also deal with a situation at home that threatens her decades old marriage.

Now a Major Motion Picture A dazzling debut—and a publishing phenomenon—Natasha: And Other Stories is the tender, savagely funny collection from a young immigrant who has taken the critics by storm. Few readers had heard of David Bezmozgis before May 2003, when Harper's, Zoetrope, and The New Yorker all printed stories from his forthcoming collection. In the space of a few weeks, America thus met the Bermans—Bella and Roman and their son, Mark—Russian Jews who have fled the Riga of Brezhnev for Toronto, the city of their dreams. Told through Mark's eyes, the stories in Natasha possess a serious wit and uniquely Jewish perspective that recall the first published stories of Bernard Malamud and Philip Roth, not to mention the work of Jhumpa Lahiri, Nathan Englander, and Adam Haslett. Winner of the Commonwealth Writers' First Book Prize for Canada and the Caribbean, the Toronto Book Award, Reform Judaism Prize for Jewish Fiction, Koffler Centre of the Arts' Helen and Stan Vine Canadian Jewish Book Award for Fiction, the City of Toronto Book Award, the Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize for Fiction, and the Moment Magazine Fiction Award Shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, and the Governor General’s Award for Literature, the Danuta Gleed Literary Award for Best First Collection of Short Fiction in the English Language Named a New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year, a Los Angeles Times' 1 of the 25 Best Books of the Year, a New York Public Library's 25 Best Books to Remember, and a Chicago Tribune and San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year

One of England's finest and most loved writers explores the uncomfortable and tragicomic gap between people's public appearance and their private desires in two tender and surprising stories. In The Greening of Mrs. Donaldson, a recently bereaved widow finds interesting ways to supplement her income by performing as a patient for medical students, and renting out her spare room. Quiet, middle-class, and middle-aged, Mrs. Donaldson will soon discover that she rather enjoys role-play at the hospital, and the irregular and startling entertainment provided by her tenants. In The Shielding of Mrs. Forbes, a disappointed middle-aged mother dotes on her only son, Graham, who believes he must shield her from the truth. As Graham's double life becomes increasingly complicated, we realize how little he understands, not only of his own desires but also those of his mother. A master storyteller dissects a very English form of secrecy with two stories of the unexpected in otherwise apparently ordinary lives.