Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre

In the town jail of Martirio, Texas — under the terrifying care of the dynastic Gurie family, and wearing only his New Jack trainers and underpants — fifteen-year-old Vernon Little is in trouble. His friend has just blown away sixteen of his classmates before turning the gun on himself. And Vernon has become the focus of the whole town's need for vengeance, and the media's appetite for sensational content — true or not. When the tricky Mr. Lesdema arrives in town — with a covert mission to promote himself from TV repairman to crack CNN reporter — Vernon thinks he has an ally. In fact, Lesdema is a villain of Machiavellian proportions. Vernon soon realizes that in this modern world innocence is definitely no defense. One distasteful arrangement with old Mr. Deutschman and $300 later, Vernon is headed for the border, for freedom and Mexico, and a much-anticipated date with the nigh-mythical Taylor Figueroa. But Texas isn't finished with Vernon yet.  Vital, riotously funny, and energetic, Vernon God Little puts lust for vengeance, materialism, and trial by media squarely in the dock. Vernon himself emerges as the lovable upholder of love, truth, and homespun wisdom in a world gone mad. <buy now>

Genesis by Jim Crace

Every woman that he dares to sleep with bears his child. So now it is Mouetta's turn. Whispering and smudging his ear with her lipstick, her breath a little sour from the garlic in her lunch, she confirms her first, his sixth pregnancy. His sixth at least. A baby's due by May. It's early days.  Lix wants to say he feels besieged. Another child? To be so fertile is a curse. And yet he only has himself to blame. Again. Lix's blessing and his tragedy is this: He has no true defense against the concentrated moment in the arms of someone that he loves. There comes a point where everything is lost. <buy now>

McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales edited by Michael Chabon

A Vintage Contemporaries Original
Includes:
Jim Shepard's "Tedford and the Megalodon"
Glen David Gold's "The Tears of Squonk, and What Happened Thereafter"
Dan Chaon's "The Bees"
Kelly Link's "Catskin"
Elmore Leonard's "How Carlos Webster Changed His Name to Carl and Became a Famous Oklahoma Lawman"
Carol Emshwiller's "The General"
Neil Gaiman's "Closing Time"
Nick Hornby's "Otherwise Pandemonium"
Stephen King's "The Tale of Gray Dick"
Michael Crichton's "Blood Doesn’t Come Out"
Laurie King's "Weaving the Dark"
Chris Offutt's "Chuck’s Bucket"
Dave Eggers's "Up the Mountain Coming Down Slowly"
Michael Moorcock's "The Case of the Nazi Canary"
Aimee Bender's "The Case of the Salt and Pepper Shakers"
Harlan Ellison's "Goodbye to All That"
Karen Joy Fowler's "Private Grave 9"
Rick Moody's "The Albertine Notes"
Michael Chabon's "The Martian Agent, a Planetary Romance"
Sherman Alexie's "Ghost Dance"

<buy now>

The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

A dazzling novel in the most untraditional fashion, this is the remarkable story of Henry DeTamble, a dashing, adventuresome librarian who travels involuntarily through time, and Clare Abshire, an artist whose life takes a natural sequential course. Henry and Clare's passionate love affair endures across a sea of time and captures the two lovers in an impossibly romantic trap, and it is Audrey Niffenegger's cinematic storytelling that makes the novel's unconventional chronology so vibrantly triumphant.  An enchanting debut and a spellbinding tale of fate and belief in the bonds of love, The Time Traveler's Wife is destined to captivate readers for years to come.  <buy now>
 

Germinal by Emile Zola

Zola's masterpiece of working life, Germinal (1885), exposes the inhuman conditions of miners in northern France in the 1860s. By Zola's death in 1902 it had come to symbolize the call for freedom from oppression so forcefully that the crowd which gathered at his State funeral chanted 'Germinal! Germinal!'. The central figure, Etienne Lantier, is an outsider who enters the community and eventually leads his fellow-miners in a strike protesting against pay-cuts - a strike which becomes a losing battle against starvation, repression, and sabotage. Yet despite the violence and disillusion which rock the mining community to its foundations, Lantier retains his belief in the ultimate germination of a new society, leading to a better world. Germinal is a dramatic novel of working life, sexual desire, and everyday relationships, but it is also a complex novel of ideas, given fresh vigour and power in this new translation. <buy now>

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

Anna Karenina has beauty, social position, wealth, a husband, and an adored son, but her existence seems empty. When she meets the dashing officer Count Vronsky she rejects her marriage and turns to him to fulfill her passionate nature -- with devastating results. One of the world's greatest novels, Anna Karenina is both an immortal drama of personal conflict and social scandal and a vivid, richly textured panorama of nineteenth-century Russia.  While previous versions have softened the robust, and sometimes shocking, quality of Tolstoy's writing, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have produced a magnificent translation that is true to his powerful voice. This award-winning team's authoritative edition also includes an illuminating introduction, a list of principal characters, suggestions for further reading, and full explanatory notes.  Beautiful, vigorous, and eminently readable, this Anna Karenina will be the definitive rendition for generations to come.  <buy now>

The Miracle by John L'Heureux

In a pitch-perfect, deeply satisfying work of fiction selected as a New York Times Notable Book, a Publishers Weekly Best Book, and recipient of the gold Medal for Fiction from the Commonwealth Club of California, master storyteller L'Heureux enters the world of an unorthodox young priest whose faith is put to the test. Father Paul LeBlanc is young, handsome, and charismatic, but he has dangerous ideas on sex, marriage, and birth control — and he just doesn't uphold the decorum expected of a young priest. When, for no reason, a miracle occurs — a dead girl is brought back to life before his eyes — Father LeBlanc finds his faith, his vows, his reason, and his life itself called into question, leaving him with nowhere to turn. Witty, profound, and deeply moving, The Miracle explores the way God meddles in our lives and to what end. It is John L'Heureux's best, most daring novel to date.  <buy now>

Don Quixote, A New Translation by Edith Grossman, by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

Edith Grossman's definitive English translation of the Spanish masterpiece. Widely regarded as the world's first modern novel, and one of the funniest and most tragic books ever written, Don Quixote chronicles the famous picaresque adventures of the noble knight-errant Don Quixote of La Mancha and his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, as they travel through sixteenth-century Spain. Unless you read Spanish, you've never read Don Quixote.  <buy now>

Jamesland by Michelle Huneven

"How do people live in this world? is a question that seems to hover, alongside the Hollywood sign, over the neighborhood of Los Feliz. Certainly Pete Ross wonders as much, his run as a successful chef, husband, and father having imploded so spectacularly as to land him back in the fraught care of his mother. Similarly, Alice Black's life - hinging as it does on a married boyfriend - is yet pending, and Helen Harland's ministry has thus far failed to enchant her new congregants. Meanwhile, at the retirement home down the street, Alice's aunt Kate lives in a world whose more vivid presence is her distinguished ancestor William James." Each of them, then, is trying to divine who or what is both missing and essential. They encounter one another - and several significant others besides - at Helen's midweek service, and amidst the quotidian tumult their particular desires gradually dovetail in a quest not just for romance and friendship but also for deeper meaning in what one of them calls "the variety show of religious experience."  <buy now>

Lullaby by Chuck Palahniuk

Carl Streator is a solitary widower and fortyish newspaper reporter who is assigned to do a series of articles on Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. In the course of this investigation, he discovers an ominous thread: the presence on the scenes of these deaths of the anthology Poems and Rhymes Around the World, opened to the page where there appears an African chant or "culling song." This song turns out to be lethal when spoken or even thought in anyone's direction - and once it lodges in Streator's brain, he finds himself becoming an involuntary serial killer. So he teams up with a real estate broker, one Helen Hoover Boyle, who specializes in selling haunted (or "distressed") houses (wonderfully high turnover), and who lost a child to the culling song years before. Together they set out on a cross-country odyssey. Their goal is to remove all copies of the book from libraries, lest this deadly verbal virus spread and wipe out human life. Accompanying them on their road trip are Helen's assistant, Mona Sabbat, an exquisitely earnest Wiccan, and her sardonic ecoterrorist boyfriend, Oyster, who is running a scam involving fake liability claims and business blackmail. Welcome to the new nuclear family.  <buy now>

Diary by Chuck Palahniuk

Chuck Palahniuk, the bestselling author of Fight Club, Choke, and Lullaby continues his twenty-first-century reinvention of the horror novel in this scary and profound look at our quest for some sort of immortality. Diary takes the form of a coma diary kept by one Misty Tracy Wilmot as her husband lies senseless in a hospital after a suicide attempt. Once she was an art student dreaming of creativity and freedom; now, after marrying Peter at school and being brought back to once quaint, now tourist-overrun Waytansea Island, she's been reduced to the condition of a resort hotel maid. Peter, it turns out, has been hiding rooms in houses he’s remodeled and scrawling vile messages all over the walls—an old habit of builders but dramatically overdone in Peter's case. Angry homeowners are suing left and right, and Misty's dreams of artistic greatness are in ashes. But then, as if possessed by the spirit of Maura Kinkaid, a fabled Waytansea artist of the nineteenth century, Misty begins painting again, compulsively. But can her newly discovered talent be part of a larger, darker plan? Of course it can.  Diary is a dark, hilarious, and poignant act of storytelling from America's favorite, most inventive nihilist. It is Chuck Palahniuk's finest novel yet. <<buy now>>

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