From Monique Truong, winner of the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature and author of The Sweetest Fruits, a brilliant, virtuosic novel about a young woman's search for identity and the true meaning of family

What I know about you, little girl, would break you in two are the prophetic last words that Linda Hammerick's grandmother says to her. Growing up in small-town North Carolina in the 1970s and '80s, Linda already knows that she is profoundly different from everyone else, including the members of her own family. She can taste words. In this and in other ways, her body is a mystery to her. Linda's awkward girlhood is nonetheless enlivened and emboldened by her dancing great-uncle Harper, and Kelly, her letter-writing best friend. Linda makes her way north to college and then to New York City, trying her best to leave her past behind her like a pair of shoes that no longer fit. But when a family tragedy compels her to return home, Linda uncovers the startling secrets of her past. Monique Truong's acclaimed novel questions our assumptions about what it means to be a family and to be a friend, to be foreign and to be familiar, to be connected to and disconnected from our bodies, our histories, ourselves.

On a Sunday, one of them is called at home. And the Firings begin.
Rich with Orwellian doublespeak, filled with sabotage and romance, this astonishing literary debut is at once a comic delight and a narrative tour de force. It's a novel for anyone who has ever worked in an office and wondered: Where does the time go? Where does the life go? And whose banana is in the fridge?

Praise for PERSONAL DAYS
Witty and appealing...Anyone who has ever groaned to hear 'impact' used as a verb will cheer as Park skewers the avatars of corporate speak, hellbent on debasing the language....Park has written what one of his characters calls 'a layoff narrative' for our times. As the economy continues its free fall, Park's book may serve as a handy guide for navigating unemployment and uncertainty. Does anyone who isn't a journalist think there can't be two books on the same subject at the same time? We need as many as we can get right now. --The New York Times Book Review

Never have the minutiae of office life been so lovingly cataloged and collated. --Three First Novels that Just Might Last, --Time

A comic and creepy d but...Park transforms the banal into the eerie, rendering ominous the familiar request Does anyone want anything from the outside world? --The New Yorker

The modern corporate office is to Ed Park's debut novel Personal Days what World War II was to Joseph Heller's Catch-22--a theater of absurdity and injustice so profound as to defy all reason....Park may be in line to fill the shoes left by Kurt Vonnegut and other satirists par excellence.--Samantha Dunn, Los Angeles Times

In Personal Days Ed Park has crafted a sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking, but always adroit novel about office life...Sharp and lovely language. --Newsweek

A warm and winning fiction debut. -- Publishers Weekly

I laughed until they put me in a mental hospital. But Personal Days is so much more than satire. Underneath Park's masterly portrait of wasted workaday lives is a pulsating heart, and an odd, buoyant hope. -- Gary Shteyngart, author of Absurdistan

The funniest book I've read about the way we work now. -William Poundstone, author of Fortune's Formula

Ed Park joins Andy Warhol and Don DeLillo as a master of the deadpan vernacular. --Helen DeWitt, author of The Last Samurai

Nonviolence is a sweeping yet concise history that moves from ancient Hindu times to present-day conflicts raging in the Middle East and elsewhere. Kurlansky also brings into focus just why nonviolence is a dangerous idea, and asks such provocative questions as: Is there such a thing as a just war? Could nonviolence have worked against even the most evil regimes in history?

Kurlansky draws from history twenty-five provocative lessons on the subject that we can use to effect change today. He shows how, time and again, violence is used to suppress nonviolence and its practitioners-Gandhi and Martin Luther King, for example; that the stated deterrence value of standing national armies and huge weapons arsenals is, at best, negligible; and, encouragingly, that much of the hard work necessary to begin a movement to end war is already complete. It simply needs to be embraced and accelerated.

Engaging, scholarly, and brilliantly reasoned, Nonviolence is a work that compels readers to look at history in an entirely new way. This is not just a manifesto for our times but a trailblazing book whose time has come.

Roy and Frankie are matchstick men--con artists. Partners in elegant crimes for years, they know each other like brothers and have perfected the rules of the game. Roy is the careful one, saves every penny. Frankie is the adventurous one, hungry for a big score. He wants Roy to join him in running a tricky game, but Roy is distracted by the discovery that he is the father of a punky teenage daughter from a brief marriage that ended years ago. The kid wants to get to know her father. She also wants to learn the family business. Novelist Eric Garcia takes readers into the fast and funny world of grifters with issues. Matchstick Men is a dazzling literary con game that will keep readers guessing until the last page.

In her Introduction, Doris Lessing shows how relevant The Kreutzer Sonata is to our understanding of Tolstoy the artist, as well as to feminism and literature. This Modern Library Paperback Classic also contains Tolstoy's Sequel to the Kruetzer Sonata.

A dizzying high-wire act.--The Washington Post
Fantastical, hellish, and hilarious.--Los Angeles Times
By turns horrifying, suspenseful, and comic.--The Boston Globe

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, Publishers Weekly

Pepper is the surprised inmate of a mental institution in Queens, New York. In the darkness of his room, on his first night, a terrifying creature with the body of an old man and the head of a bison nearly kills him before being hustled away by the hospital staff. It's no delusion: The other patients confirm that a devil roams the hallways when the sun goes down. Pepper rallies three other inmates in a plot to kill the monster that's stalking them. But can the Devil die?

The Devil in Silver is a thrillingly suspenseful literary work about friendship, love, and the courage to slay our own demons.

In the tradition of Tobias Wolff, James Ellroy, and Mary Karr, a stunning memoir of a mother-son relationship that is also the searing, unflinching account of a murder and its aftermath

Includes an exclusive conversation between Alexandra Fuller and Justin St. Germain

Tombstone, Arizona, September 2001. Debbie St. Germain's death, apparently at the hands of her fifth husband, is a passing curiosity. A real-life old West murder mystery, the local TV announcers intone, while barroom gossips snicker cruelly. But for her twenty-year-old son, Justin St. Germain, the tragedy marks the line that separates his world into before and after.

Distancing himself from the legendary town of his childhood, Justin makes another life a world away in San Francisco and achieves all the surface successes that would have filled his mother with pride. Yet years later he's still sleeping with a loaded rifle under his bed. Ultimately, he is pulled back to the desert landscape of his childhood on a search to make sense of the unfathomable. What made his mother, a onetime army paratrooper, the type of woman who would stand up to any man except the men she was in love with? What led her to move from place to place, man to man, job to job, until finally she found herself in a desperate and deteriorating situation, living on an isolated patch of desert with an unstable ex-cop?

Justin's journey takes him back to the ghost town of Wyatt Earp, to the trailers he and Debbie shared, to the string of stepfathers who were a constant, sometimes threatening presence in his life, to a harsh world on the margins full of men and women all struggling to define what family means. He decides to confront people from his past and delve into the police records in an attempt to make sense of his mother's life and death. All the while he tries to be the type of man she would have wanted him to be.

Praise for Son of a Gun

A] spectacular memoir . . . calls to mind two others of the past decade: J. R. Moehringer's Tender Bar and Nick Flynn's Another Bull____ Night in Suck City. All three are about boys becoming men in a broken world. . . . What] might have been . . . in the hands of a lesser writer, the book's main point . . . is] amplified from a tale of personal loss and grief into a parable for our time and our nation. . . . If the brilliance of Son of a Gun lies in its restraint, its importance lies in the generosity of the author's insights.--Alexandra Fuller, The New York Times Book Review

A] gritty, enthralling new memoir . . . St. Germain has created a work of austere, luminous beauty. . . . In his understated, eloquent way, St. Germain makes you feel the heat, taste the dust, see those shimmering streets. By the end of the book, you know his mother, even though you never met her. And like the author, you will mourn her forever.--NPR

If St. Germain had stopped at examining his mother's psycho-social risk factors and how her murder affected him, this would still be a fine, moving memoir. But it's his further probing--into the culture of guns, violence, and manhood that informed their lives in his hometown, Tombstone, Ariz.--that transforms the book, elevating the stakes from personal pain to larger, important questions of what ails our society.--The Boston Globe

A visceral, compelling portrait of St. Germain's] mother and the violent culture that claimed her.--Entertainment Weekly

You might spot someone you know in the stories here, writes Connie. Maybe you'll even find a glimpse of yourself. Yes, each of us is unique, but life happens in ways that bind us like Gorilla Glue. In Life Happens, Connie shares sharp, passionate observations, winning our hearts with personal thoughts on a wide range of topics, from finding love in middle age to the meaning behind her father's lunch pail, from single motherhood, to who really gets the tips you leave and why as the war in Iraq, race relations, gay marriage, and wwhy women
don't vote. In a more humorous vein, Connie shares her mother's advice on men (Don't marry him until you see how he treats the waitress) and warns men everywhere against using the dreaded f-word (it's not the one you think). Along the way, Connie introduces us to the heroic people who populate our world and shows us how just one person can make a difference.

Charming, provocative, funny, and perceptive, Life Happens gives us, for the first time, Connie Schultz's celebrated commentary in one irresistible volume. Life Happens challenges us to be more open and alive to others and to the world around us.

Late summer, 1938. Hollywood film star Fredric Stahl is on his way to Paris to make a movie. The Nazis know he's coming--a secret bureau within the Reich has been waging political warfare against France, and for their purposes, Fredric Stahl is a perfect agent of influence. What they don't know is that Stahl, horrified by the Nazi war on Jews and intellectuals, has become part of an informal spy service run out of the American embassy. Mission to Paris is filled with heart-stopping tension, beautifully drawn scenes of romance, and extraordinarily alive characters: foreign assassins; a glamorous Russian actress-turned-spy; and the women in Stahl's life. At the center of the novel is the city of Paris--its bistros, hotels grand and anonymous, and the Parisians, living every night as though it were their last. Alan Furst brings to life both a dark time in history and the passion of the human hearts that fought to survive it.

Praise for Mission to Paris

The most talented espionage novelist of our generation.--Vince Flynn

Vividly re-creates the excitement and growing gloom of the City of Light in 1938-39 . . . It doesn't get more action-packed and grippingly atmospheric than this.--The Boston Globe

One of Furst's] best . . . This is the romantic Paris to make a tourist weep. . . . In Furst's densely populated books, hundreds of minor characters--clerks, chauffeurs, soldiers, whores--all whirl around his heroes in perfect focus for a page or two, then dot by dot, face by face, they vanish, leaving a heartbreaking sense of the vast Homeric epic that was World War II and the smallness of almost every life that was caught up in it.--The New York Times Book Review

A book no reader will put down until the final page . . . Critics compare Alan] Furst to Graham Greene and John le Carr as] a master of historical espionage.--Library Journal (starred review)

Alan Furst's writing reminds me of a swim in perfect water on a perfect day, fluid and exquisite. One wants the feeling to go on forever, the book to never end. . . . Furst is one of the finest spy novelists working today.--Publishers Weekly

With its forthright treatment of sex and depression, The Awakening, first published in 1899, was so shocking to turn-of-the-century readers that it was neglected for decades. Rediscovered in the 1960s, this brief, beautiful novel is considered a landmark of early feminism. It is the story of Edna Pontellier, a twenty-eight-year-old wife and mother of two who--with devastating consequences--rejects her conventional married life for a transgressive path of self-discovery.

Edna is vacationing with her husband and children on the Louisiana Gulf Coast when she meets and falls in love with the passionate, impulsive Robert Lebrun. Afterward, Edna can no longer find meaning and satisfaction in her comfortable domestic life and moves out, alone. Her tragic quest for personal, creative, and erotic freedom is at the heart of this now-classic novel which captures women's desires with extraordinary frankness, sympathy, and intensity.

The Modern Library Torchbearers series features women who wrote on their own terms, with boldness, creativity, and a spirit of resistance.

After several days of waiting and with an ominous phone call from a woman who may be connected to a smuggling ring, Regina and Gabo resolve to find Rafa. Help arrives in the form of Miguel, an amorous, recently divorced history teacher; Miguel's gregarious abuelo Milton; a couple of Gabo's gangbanger classmates; and a priest of wayward faith. Though their journey is rife with challenges and danger, it will serve as a remarkable testament to family bonds, cultural pride, and the human experience

Praise for The Guardians

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE

An always skilled storyteller, Castillo] grounds her writing in . . . humor, love, suspense and heartache-that draw the reader in.
-Chicago Sunday Sun-Times

A rollicking read, with jokes and suspense and joy rides and hearts breaking . . . This smart, passionate novel deserves a wide audience.
-Los Angeles Times

What drives the novel is its chorus of characters, all, in their own way, witnesses and guardian angels. In the end, Castillo's unmistakable voice-earthy, impassioned, weaving a 'hybrid vocabulary for a hybrid people'-is the book's greatest revelation.
-Time Out New York

A wonderful novel . . . Castillo's most important accomplishment in The Guardians is to give a unique literary voice to questions about what makes up a 'family.'
-El Paso Times

A moving book that is both intimate and epic in its narrative.
-Oscar Hijuelos, author of The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love

Passionate and shockingly frank, Whatever Happened to Daddy's Little Girl? is the first book to explore the plight of America's fatherless daughters from the unique perspective of the African-American community. This brilliant volume gives all fatherless daughters the knowledge that they are not alone and the courage to overcome the hidden pain they have suffered for so long.

Gertrude and Claudius are the villains of Hamlet: he the killer of Hamlet's father and usurper of the Danish throne; she his lusty consort, who marries Claudius before her late husband's body is cold. But in this imaginative prequel to the play, John Updike makes a case for the royal couple that Shakespeare only hinted at. Gertrude and Claudius are seen afresh against a background of fond intentions and family dysfunction, on a stage darkened by the ominous shadow of a sullen, erratic, disaffected prince. I hoped to keep the texture light, Updike said of this novel, to move from the mists of Scandinavian legend into the daylight atmosphere of the Globe. I sought to narrate the romance that preceded the tragedy.

Li has converted the messy and devastating stuff of life into a remarkable work of art.--The Wall Street Journal

WINNER OF THE PEN/JEAN STEIN AWARD - LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/FAULKNER AWARD - NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST FICTION BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY TIME AND ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Parul Seghal, The New York Times - NPR - The Guardian - The Paris Review

The narrator of Where Reasons End writes, I had but one delusion, which I held on to with all my willpower: We once gave Nikolai a life of flesh and blood; and I'm doing it over again, this time by words.

Yiyun Li meets life's deepest sorrows as she imagines a conversation between a mother and child in a timeless world. Composed in the months after she lost a child to suicide, Where Reasons End trespasses into the space between life and death as mother and child talk, free from old images and narratives. Deeply moving, these conversations portray the love and complexity of a relationship.

Written with originality, precision, and poise, Where Reasons End is suffused with intimacy, inescapable pain, and fierce love.

Matthew King was once considered one of the most fortunate men in Hawaii. His missionary ancestors were financially and culturally progressive-one even married a Hawaiian princess, making Matt a royal descendant and one of the state's largest landowners.

Now his luck has changed. His two daughters are out of control: Ten-year-old Scottie is a smart-ass with a desperate need for attention, and seventeen-year-old Alex, a former model, is a recovering drug addict. Matt's charismatic, thrill-seeking, high-maintenance wife, Joanie, lies in a coma after a boat-racing accident and will soon be taken off life support. The Kings can hardly picture life without her, but as they come to terms with this tragedy, their sadness is mixed with a sense of freedom that shames them-and spurs them into surprising actions.

Before honoring Joanie's living will, Matt must gather her friends and family to say their final goodbyes, a difficult situation made worse by the sudden discovery that there is one person who hasn't been told: the man with whom Joanie had been having an affair, quite possibly the one man she ever truly loved. Forced to examine what he owes not only to the living but to the dead, Matt takes to the road with his daughters to find his wife's lover, a memorable journey that leads to both painful revelations and unforeseen humor and growth.

In this sequel to Rabbit, Run, John Updike resumes the spiritual quest of his anxious Everyman, Harry Rabbit Angstrom. Ten years have passed; the impulsive former athlete has become a paunchy thirty-six-year-old conservative, and Eisenhower's becalmed America has become 1969's lurid turmoil of technology, fantasy, drugs, and violence. Rabbit is abandoned by his family, his home invaded by a runaway and a radical, his past reduced to a ruined inner landscape; still he clings to semblances of decency and responsibility, and yearns to belong and to believe.