Fiction

Novelist Guy Ableman is in thrall to his vivacious wife Vanessa, a strikingly beautiful redhead, contrary, highly strung, and blazingly angry. The trouble is, he is no less in thrall to her alluring mother, Poppy. More like sisters than mother and daughter, they come as a pair, a blistering presence that destroys Guy's peace of mind, suggesting the wildest stories but making it impossible for him to concentrate long enough to write any of them. In flight from personal disappointment and universal despair, Guy wonders if it's time to take his love for Poppy to another level. Fiction might be dead, but desire isn't. And out of that desire he imagines squeezing one more great book. By turns angry, elegiac, and rude, Zoo Time is a novel about love-love of women, love of literature, love of laughter. It shows our funniest writer at his brilliant best.

Zoology is the story of Henry Elinsky, a college flunk-out who takes a job at the Central Park Zoo and discovers that becoming an adult takes a lot more than just a weekly paycheck.

Finalist for the 2021 National Book Award (Fiction)
"A virtuosic portrait." -New York Times Book Review
"A tender, glowing novel." -Anthony Doerr, Guardian, "Best Books of the Year"
"Pages that are polished like jewels." -Scott Simon, NPR, "Books We Love"
"Lit from within." -Mark Athitakis, Los Angeles Times, "Best Fiction Books of the Year"
"A touching, tightly woven story from an always impressive author." -Kirkus (starred review), "Best Fiction of the Year"
"Radiates the heat of a beating heart." -Vox
"A poignant, unforgettable novel." -Hernan Diaz

From prize-winning, acclaimed author Laird Hunt, a poignant novel about a woman searching for her place in the world and finding it in the daily rhythms of life in rural Indiana.

"It was Indiana, it was the dirt she had bloomed up out of, it was who she was, what she felt, how she thought, what she knew."

As a girl, Zorrie Underwood's modest and hardscrabble home county was the only constant in her young life. After losing both her parents, Zorrie moved in with her aunt, whose own death orphaned Zorrie all over again, casting her off into the perilous realities and sublime landscapes of rural, Depression-era Indiana. Drifting west, Zorrie survived on odd jobs, sleeping in barns and under the stars, before finding a position at a radium processing plant. At the end of each day, the girls at her factory glowed from the radioactive material.

But when Indiana calls Zorrie home, she finally finds the love and community that have eluded her in and around the small town of Hillisburg. And yet, even as she tries to build a new life, Zorrie discovers that her trials have only begun.

Spanning an entire lifetime, a life convulsed and transformed by the events of the 20th century, Laird Hunt's extraordinary novel offers a profound and intimate portrait of the dreams that propel one tenacious woman onward and the losses that she cannot outrun. Set against a harsh, gorgeous, quintessentially American landscape, this is a deeply empathetic and poetic novel that belongs on a shelf with the classics of Willa Cather, Marilynne Robinson, and Elizabeth Strout.

A child of two worlds--the son of an aristocratic Spanish military man turned landowner and a Shoshone warrior woman--young Diego de la Vega cannot silently bear the brutal injustices visited upon the helpless in late-eighteenth-century California. And so a great hero is born--skilled in athleticism and dazzling swordplay, his persona formed between the Old World and the New--the legend known as Zorro.

A swashbuckling adventure story that reveals for the first time how Diego de la Vega became the masked man we all know so well

Born in southern California late in the eighteenth century, he is a child of two worlds. Diego de la Vega's father is an aristocratic Spanish military man turned landowner; his mother, a Shoshone warrior. Diego learns from his maternal grandmother, White Owl, the ways of her tribe while receiving from his father lessons in the art of fencing and in cattle branding. It is here, during Diego's childhood, filled with mischief and adventure, that he witnesses the brutal injustices dealt Native Americans by European settlers and first feels the inner conflict of his heritage.

At the age of sixteen, Diego is sent to Barcelona for a European education. In a country chafing under the corruption of Napoleonic rule, Diego follows the example of his celebrated fencing master and joins La Justicia, a secret underground resistance movement devoted to helping the powerless and the poor. With this tumultuous period as a backdrop, Diego falls in love, saves the persecuted, and confronts for the first time a great rival who emerges from the world of privilege.

Between California and Barcelona, the New World and the Old, the persona of Zorro is formed, a great hero is born, and the legend begins. After many adventures -- duels at dawn, fierce battles with pirates at sea, and impossible rescues -- Diego de la Vega, a.k.a. Zorro, returns to America to reclaim the hacienda on which he was raised and to seek justice for all who cannot fight for it themselves.

Zugzwang--A chess term used to describe a position in which a player is reduced to utter helplessless: he is obliged to move, but every move serves to make his position even worse.

The breakout book from a celebrated literary writer: a thriller set in St. Petersburg in 1914 amid an international chess tournament and a series of mysterious murders.

Ronan Bennett's new masterpiece of literary suspense unfolds in a city on the verge of revolution. On a blustery April day, a respected St. Petersburg newspaper editor is murdered in front of a shocked crowd. Five days later, Dr. Otto Spethmann, the celebrated psychoanalyst, receives a visit from the police. There has been another murder in the city--and somehow he is implicated. The doctor is mystified and deeply worried, as much for his young, spirited daughter as for himself.

Meanwhile, he finds himself preoccupied by two new patients: Anna Petrovna, a society beauty plagued with nightmares with whom he is inappropriately falling in love, and the troubled genius Rozental, a brilliant but fragile chess master on the verge of a complete breakdown. As Dr. Spethmann is drawn deeper into the murderous intrigue, he finds that he, his patients, and his daughter may all be pawns in a game larger in scope than anything he could have imagined.
Punctuated with board-by-board illustrations of a chess match that plays out through the book, Zugzwang is a masterfully written novel packed with cliffhangers, romance, unforgettable characters, and a plot that keeps readers guessing to the very end.

Sir Henry Maximilian "Max" Beerbohm was, like his friend Oscar Wilde, such an acclaimed wit (and essayist, caricaturist, and parodist) that George Bernard Shaw dubbed him "the incomparable Max." But Beerbohm's comic masterpiece Zuleika Dobson--one of the Modern Library's top 100 English-language novels of the twentieth century--is the only novel he ever wrote.

Strangely out of print in the United States for years, this crackling farce is nonetheless as piercing and fresh as when it first appeared in 1911: a hilarious dismantling of academia and privilege, and a swashbuckling lampooning of class systems and notions of masculine virtue.

The all-male campus of Oxford--Beerbohm's alma mater--is a place where aesthetics holds sway above all else, and where witty intellectuals reign. Things haven't changed for its privileged student body for years . . . until the beguiling music-hall prestidigitator Zuleika Dobson shows up.

The book's marvelous prose dances along the line between reality and the absurd as students and dons alike fall at Zuleika's feet, and she cuts a wide swath across the campus--until she encounters one young aristocrat for whom she is astonished to find she has feelings.

As Zuleika, and her creator, zero in on their targets, the book takes some surprising and dark twists on its way to a truly startling ending--an ending so striking that readers will understand why Virginia Woolf said that "Mr. Beerbohm in his way is perfect."