NATIONAL BESTSELLER - PEN/Faulkner Award Winner - A gripping, tragic, and densely atmospheric masterpiece of courtroom suspense--one that leaves us shaken and changed.

Haunting .... A whodunit complete with courtroom maneuvering and surprising turns of evidence and at the same time a mystery, something altogether richer and deeper. --Los Angeles Times

San Piedro Island, north of Puget Sound, is a place so isolated that no one who lives there can afford to make enemies. But in 1954 a local fisherman is found suspiciously drowned, and a Japanese American named Kabuo Miyamoto is charged with his murder.

In the course of the ensuing trial, it becomes clear that what is at stake is more than a man's guilt. For on San Pedro, memory grows as thickly as cedar trees and the fields of ripe strawberries--memories of a charmed love affair between a white boy and the Japanese girl who grew up to become Kabuo's wife; memories of land desired, paid for, and lost. Above all, San Piedro is haunted by the memory of what happened to its Japanese residents during World War II, when an entire community was sent into exile while its neighbors watched.

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE - NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - The epic, beloved novel of two boy geniuses dreaming up superheroes in New York's Golden Age of comics

It's absolutely gosh-wow, super-colossal--smart, funny, and a continual pleasure to read.--The Washington Post Book World

One of The New York Times's 100 Best Books of the 21st Century - One of Entertainment Weekly's 10 Best Books of the Decade - Finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize

A towering, swash-buckling thrill of a book (Newsweek), hailed as Chabon's magnum opus (The New York Review of Books), The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is a triumph of originality, imagination, and storytelling, an exuberant, irresistible novel that begins in New York City in 1939.

A young escape artist and budding magician named Joe Kavalier arrives on the doorstep of his cousin, Sammy Clay. While the long shadow of Hitler falls across Europe, America is happily in thrall to the Golden Age of comic books, and in a distant corner of Brooklyn, Sammy is looking for a way to cash in on the craze. He finds the ideal partner in the aloof, artistically gifted Joe, and together they embark on an adventure that takes them deep into the heart of Manhattan, and the heart of old-fashioned American ambition. From the shared fears, dreams, and desires of two teenage boys, they spin comic book tales of the heroic, fascist-fighting Escapist and the beautiful, mysterious Luna Moth, otherworldly mistress of the night. Climbing from the streets of Brooklyn to the top of the Empire State Building, Joe and Sammy carve out lives, and careers, as vivid as cyan and magenta ink.

Spanning continents and eras, this superb book by one of America's finest writers remains one of the defining novels of our modern American age.

Winner of the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award and the New York Society Library Book Award

Stonewall Book Award Honor - American Library Association (ALA)

Sometimes the border is a mirror, sometimes it's an escape, and sometimes it's just the bridge you cross to go home.

All borders entangle those who live on either side, resulting in many a tale. Take, for instance, these seven evocative stories coming out of the Kentucky Club on Avenida Juárez two blocks south of the Rio Grande. It's a touchstone for all who walk by or go in for a drink or to score. The border on which it sits is really no border at all. Like all special watering holes, it is a liminal space, undefined and unclaimed. It welcomes Spanish and English, Mexicans and gringos, poor and rich, gay and straight, drug addicts and drunks, laughter and sadness, and even despair. It's a place of rich history and good drinks and cold beer and a long, polished mahogany bar. Some days it smells like piss. I'm going home to the other side, folks say. That's a strange statement, but you hear it all the time at the Kentucky Club.

WINNER OF THE PEN/FAULKNER AWARD - A profound novel about art, terror, masses, and the individual, from the National Book Award-winning author of White Noise, one of the most ironic, intelligent, grimly funny voices to comment on life in present-day America (The New York Times)

This novel's a beauty. A vision as bold and a voice as eloquent and morally focused as any in American writing.--Thomas Pynchon

Bill Gray, a famous, reclusive novelist, emerges from his isolation when he becomes the key figure in an event staged to force the release of a poet hostage in Beirut. As Bill enters the world of political violence, a nightscape of Semtex explosives and hostages locked in basement rooms, his dangerous passage leaves two people stranded: his brilliant, fixated assistant, Scott, and the strange young woman who is Scott's lover--and Bill's.

An extraordinary novel about words and images, novelists and terrorists, the mass mind and the arch-individualist, Mao II is the work of an ingenious writer at the height of his powers.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER - NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE WINNER - With music pulsing on every page, this startling, exhilarating novel of self-destruction and redemption features characters about whom you come to care deeply as you watch them doing things they shouldn't, acting gloriously, infuriatingly human (The Chicago Tribune).

One of the New York Times's 100 Best Books of the 21st Century - One of The Atlantic's Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years

Bennie is an aging former punk rocker and record executive. Sasha is the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Here Jennifer Egan brilliantly reveals their pasts, along with the inner lives of a host of other characters whose paths intersect with theirs.

Pitch perfect.... Darkly, rippingly funny.... Egan possesses a satirist's eye and a romance novelist's heart. --The New York Times Book Review

Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award

The Chaneysville Incident rivals Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon as the best novel about the black experience in America since Ellison's Invisible Man. -- Christian Science Monitor

The legends say something happened in Chaneysville. The Chaneysville Incident is the powerful story of one man's obsession with discovering what that something was a quest that takes the brilliant and bitter young Black historian John Washington back through the secrets and buried evil of his heritage.

Returning home to care for and then bury his father's closest friend and his own guardian, Old Jack Crawley, John comes upon the scant records of his family's proud and tragic history, which he drives himself to reconstruct and accept. This is the story of John's relationship with his family, the town, and the woman he loves; and also between the past and the present, between oppression and guilt, hate and violence, love and acceptance.

WINNER OF THE PEN/FAULKNER AWARD - From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of American Pastoral--a fiendishly imaginative book that features Israeli intelligence agents, Palestinian exiles, an accused war criminal, and an enticing charter member of an organization called Anti-Semites Anonymous

One of Roth's grand inventions.... [He is] a comic genius. --The New York Review of Books

In this book (which may or may not be fiction), Philip Roth meets a man who may or may not be Philip Roth. Because someone with that name has been touring Israel, promoting a bizarre reverse exodus of the Jews. Roth is intent on stopping him, even if that means impersonating his own impersonator.

With excruciating suspense, unfettered philosophical speculation, and a wild cast of characters, Operation Shylock barrels across the frontier between fact and fiction, seriousness and high comedy, history and nightmare.

The question How German Is It underlies the conduct and actions of the characters in Walter Abish's novel, an icy panorama of contemporary Germany, in which the tradition of order and obedience, the patrimony of the saber and the castle on the Rhine, give way to the present, indiscriminate fascination with all things American. On his return from Paris to his home city of Würtenburg, Ulrich Hargenau, whose father was executed for his involvement in the 1944 plot against Hitler, is compelled to ask himself, How German am l?--as he compares his own recent attempt to save his life, and his wife Paula's, by testifying against fellow members of a terrorist group, with his father's selfless heroism. Through Ulrich--privileged, upper class--we confront the incongruities of the new democratic Germany, in particular the flourishing community of Brumholdstein, named after the country's greatest thinker, Brumhold, and built on the former site of a concentration camp. Paula's participation in the destruction of a police station; the State's cynical response to crush the terrorists; two attempts on Ulrich's life; the discovery in Brumholdstein of a mass grave of death camp inmates--all these, with subtle irony, are presented as pieces of a puzzle spelling out the turmoil of a society's endeavor to avoid the implications of its menacing heritage.

The Ordinary Seaman, the second novel from acclaimed writer Francisco Goldman is a lyrical and spellbinding story of hope, despair, and the promise of love. The ordinary seaman is Esteban, a 19-year-old veteran of the war in Nicaragua, who has come to America with 14 other men to form the crew of the Urus. Docked on a desolate Brooklyn pier, the Urus is a wreck, and the men, without the means to return home, become its prisoners. Esteban, haunted by the loss of his first love in the war, gradually works up the courage to escape the ship and start a new life in the city. His story and those of his shipmates come to life, illuminating the conflicts and triumphs of the human heart.

WINNER OF THE PEN/FAULKNER AWARD - In this stunning novel, one man traces the tangled histories of three very different families--from the New York Times bestselling author of The Tortilla Curtain

Boyle has emerged as one of the most inventive and verbally exuberant writers of his generation.--The New York Times

Haunted by the burden of his family's traitorous past, woozy with pot, cheap wine, and sex, and disturbed by a frighteningly real encounter with some family ghosts, Walter Van Brunt is about to have a collision with history.

It will lead Walter to search for his lost father. And it will send the story into the past of the Hudson River Valley, from the 1960s back to the anticommunist riots of the 1940s to the late seventeenth century, where the long-hidden secrets of three families--the aristocratic Van Warts, the Native American Mohonks, and Walter's own ancestors, the Van Brunts--will be revealed.

The acclaimed short story and novella collection by a virtuoso of the dismal comedy of Soviet life--and the basis for the HBO film PU-239 (The New York Times). A PEN/Faulkner Award Finalist.

Ken Kalfus traverses a century of Russian history in tales that range from hair-raising to comic to fabulous. The astonishing title story follows a doomed nuclear power plant worker as he attempts to hawk plutonium in Moscow's black market. In Budyonnovsk, a young man hopes that the takeover of his town by Chechen rebels will somehow save his marriage. Salt is an economic fairy tale, featuring kings, princesses, and swiftly melting currencies.

Set in the 1920s, Birobidzhan is the bittersweet story of a Jewish couple journeying to the Soviet Far East, where they intend to establish the modern world's first Jewish state. The novella, Peredelkino, which closes the book, traces the fortunes of a 1960s literary apparatchik whose romantic intrigues inadvertently become political.

Together, these works of fiction capture the famously enigmatic Russian psyche. They display Kalfus' ability to imagine a variety of believable yet wholly singular characters whose lives percolate against a backdrop of momentous events.

Finalist for 2013 PEN/Faulkner Award

There is always a surprise in the voice and in the heart of Laird Hunt's stories, with its echoes of habit caught in a timeless dialect, so we see the world he gives us as if new. 'You hear something like that and it walks out the door with you.'--Michael Ondaatje

Laird Hunt's Kind One, about two slave girls who take their white mistress into captivity, is a profound meditation on the sexual and racial subconscious of America. . . . [A] gorgeous and terrifying novel.--Danzy Senna

As a teenage girl, Ginny marries Linus Lancaster, her mother's second cousin, and moves to his Kentucky pig farm ninety miles from nowhere. In the shadows of the lush Kentucky landscape, Ginny discovers the empty promises of Linus' paradise--a place where the charms of her husband fall away to reveal a troubled man and cruel slave owner. Ginny befriends the young slaves Cleome and Zinnia who work at the farm--until Linus' attentions turn to them, and she finds herself torn between her husband and only companions. The events that follow Linus' death change all three women for life. Haunting, chilling, and suspenseful, Kind One is a powerful tale of redemption and human endurance in antebellum America.

Laird Hunt is the author of several works of fiction and a finalist for the 2010 PEN Center USA Award in Fiction. Currently on the faculty of the University of Denver's creative writing program, he and his wife, the poet Eleni Sikelianos, live in Boulder, Colorado, with their daughter, Eva Grace.

In the epigraph to this volume, Penelope Fitzgerald tells us: If a story begins with finding, it must end with searching, and so we discover each story here to follow the arc of a search, just as each also contains a rescue. What is immediately apparent is that it will be impossible to guess the form this rescue will take or even who it is who'll require it.

Instead, the astonishingly talented Valerie Trueblood has imbued each story with its own depth and mystery, so rescue comes as a surprise to the reader, who is in intimate sympathy for the soul in extremity. And these are diverse characters whose fates, in lesser hands, might be thought of as hopeless: the fired cop turned security guard, the stolid, 19-year-old nurses' aide who will not be going to art school, the cynical radio producer who is dying of breast cancer and on a plane on her way to Lourdes.

In these thirteen stories linked by a common transcendent human genius, the writing is confident and clear and original, and often drop-dead stunning, as if the stories are being told by the most casually eloquent among us.