For fans of

Prep

,

Dead Poets Society

, and

Special Topics in Calamity Physics

comes an elegant and remarkably insightful coming-of-age debut, in which a young woman’s serendipitous discovery of her college’s underground Shakespeare Society leads to an unforgettable series of transformations. When Naomi finds herself among “the Shakes” at Wellesley, she finally lets herself embrace the passionate inner self she’s always kept locked away. But when a sudden scandal unfolds, she will be forced to learn the limits of the relationships that have sustained her. An intimate and enthralling narrative, Elizabeth Percer’s debut novel

An Uncommon Education

marks the emergence of a stunning new literary talent.

Nine “darkly funny, profoundly compassionate” short stories exploring the nature of loneliness and human interaction in contemporary society (

More

).

“The stories in Daniel Orozco’s debut collection convey a sense of workplace alienation that would make Karl Marx cringe. . . . A treat.” —

The New York Times Book Review

A

Kirkus Reviews

Best of 2011 Short Story Collections title

Breakfast’s boiled egg, the overhead hum of fluorescent lights, the midmorning coffee break—daily routines keep the world running. But when people are pushed—by a coworker’s taunt, a face-to-face encounter with a woman in free fall form a bridge—cracks appear, revealing alienation, casual cruelty, madness, and above all a simultaneous hunger for and fear of the unknown. Daniel Orozco’s

Orientation

introduces a writer at the height of his powers, whose work invites us to reassess the landscape of American fiction.

“

Orientation

remains a tour de force. . . . There isn’t a lemon or an extraneous word in Orozco’s nine stories, which boast not just cleverness but complexity, subtlety and range.” —

San Francisco Chronicle

“A gem and a killer. . . . Orozco manages to convey [Henry] James’s psychological acuity with one-tenth of his clauses, mingling it with Steven Milhauser’s sense of lunatic joy.” —

The Boston Phoenix

“The moment you begin this comparable debut, you’ll discover why Daniel Orozco’s fans have been shouting his praises for years. . . . This may be Orozco’s first collection, but he’s nothing short of a master.” —Julie Orringer, author of

The Invisible Bridge

and

How to Breathe Underwater

*** Winner of the 2012 eFestival of Words award for best literary fiction! ***

Village Books is a local institution…which is good, because most of the staff probably belong in one.

The manager’s addiction to WebMD has turned him into a closeted hypochondriac. The cashier’s husband may have just gone AWOL with a small arsenal of fragmentary explosive devices. The fiction lead is buying urine on the black market. Trying to hold it all together is the store’s long-suffering assistant manager, who is spinning his wheels in retail while he waits for something better to come along.

That something better may be Leah Dashwood, an aspiring actress and new assistant manager with an ambitious plan to transform the store and its staff in a way that will turn their carefully disordered world on its head. Will the store survive or will it be bought over by its evil corporate competition?

The stories in The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories, a collection from Ethan Rutherford, map the surprising ways in which the world we think we know can unexpectedly reveal its darker contours.

In stories that are alternately funny, persuasive, and compelling, unforgettable characters are confronted with, and battle against, the limitations of their lives.

Rutherford’s work has been selected by Alice Sebold for inclusion in the volume of The Best American Short Stories that she edited, and also published in Ploughshares, One Story, and American Short Fiction.

Winner of the 2013 Costa First Novel Award (under the title The Shock of the Fall) "A stunning novel. Ambitious and exquisitely realized . . . clearly the work of a major new talent." —S. J. Watson, New York Times bestselling author of Before I Go to SleepWhile on vacation with their parents, Matthew Homes and his older brother snuck out in the middle of the night. Only Matthew came home safely. Ten years later, Matthew tells us, he has found a way to bring his brother back...What begins as the story of a lost boy turns into a story of a brave man yearning to understand what happened that night, in the years since, and to his very person. Unafraid to look at the shadows of our hearts, Nathan Filer's rare and brilliant debut Where the Moon Isn't shows us the strength that is rooted in resilience and love.

Eric Muller has been trying to hack the girlfriend problem for half his life. As a teenage geek, he discovered his gift for programming computers-but his attempts to understand women only confirm that he's better at writing code than connecting with human beings. Brilliant, neurotic, and lonely, Eric spends high school in the solitary glow of a screen. By his early twenties, Eric's talent has made him a Silicon Valley millionaire. He can coax girls into bed with ironic remarks and carefully timed intimacies, but hiding behind wit and empathy gets lonely, and he fears that love will always be out of reach. So when Eric falls for the beautiful, fiercely opinionated Maya Marcom, and she miraculously falls for him too, he's in new territory. But the more he learns about his perfect girlfriend's unresolved past, the further Eric's obsessive mind spirals into confusion and doubt. Can he reconcile his need for order and logic with the mystery and chaos of love? This brilliant debut ushers Eric Muller-flawed, funny, irresistibly endearing-into the pantheon of unlikely heroes. With an unblinking eye for the absurdities and horrors of contemporary life, Gabriel Roth gives us a hilarious and heartbreaking meditation on self consciousness, memory, and love.