Week of January 16, 2023
A hilarious and painfully relatable debut novel about one womanβs messy search for joy and meaning in the wake of an unexpected breakup, from comedian, essayist, and award-winning screenwriter Monica Heisey
Maggie is fine. Sheβs doing really good, actually. Sure, sheβs broke, her graduate thesis on something obscure is going nowhere, and her marriage only lasted 608 days, but at the ripe old age of twenty-nine, Maggie is determined to embrace her new life as a Surprisingly Young DivorcΓ©eβ’.
Now she has time to take up nine hobbies, eat hamburgers at 4 am, and βget back out thereβ sex-wise. With the support of her tough-loving academic advisor, Merris; her newly divorced friend, Amy; and her group chat (naturally), Maggie barrels through her first year of single life, intermittently dating, occasionally waking up on the floor and asking herself tough questions along the way.
Laugh-out-loud funny and filled with sharp observations,Β Really Good, ActuallyΒ is a tender and bittersweet comedy that lays bare the uncertainties of modern love, friendship, and our search for that thing we like to call βhappinessβ. This is a remarkable debut from an unforgettable new voice in fiction.
From the author of PEN/Faulkner finalistΒ Disappear DoppelgΓ€nger DisappearΒ andΒ Craft in the Real WorldΒ comes a “aΒ smart, very meta take”Β (Kirkus Reviews) on the ways Asian Americans navigate the thorny worlds of sports and entertainment when everything is stacked against them.
An Asian American basketball star walks into a gym. No one recognizes him, but everyone stares anyway. It is the start of a joke but what is the punchline? When Won Lee, the first Asian American in the NBA, stuns the world in a seven-game winning streak, the global media audience dubs it βThe Wonderββmuch to Wonβs chagrin. Meanwhile, Won struggles to get attention from his coach, his peers, his fans, and most importantly, his hero, Powerball!, who also happens to be Wonβs teammate and the captain. Covering it all is sportswriter Robert Sung, who writes about Won’s stardom while grappling with his own missed hoops opportunities as well as his place as an Asian American in media. And to witness it all is Carrie Kang, a big studio producer, who juggles a newfound relationship with Won while attempting to bring K-drama to an industry not known to embrace anything new or different.
The Sense of WonderΒ follows Won and Carrie as they chronicle the human and professional tensions exacerbated by injustices and fight to be seen and heard on some of the worldβs largest stages. An incredibly funny and heart-rending dive into race and our βcollective imagination that lays bare our limitations before blasting joyfully past themβ (Catherine Chung). This is the work of a gifted storyteller at the top of his game.
From the acclaimed author of BOYFRIEND MATERIAL comes a deeply emotional romance about heartbreak, hope, and learning to love against all the odds.
Once the golden boy of the English literary scene, now a clinically depressed writer of pulp crime fiction, Ash Winters has given up on hope, happiness, andβmost of allβhimself. He lives his life between the cycles of his illness, haunted by the ghosts of other people’s expectations.
Then a chance encounter throws him into the path of Essex-born Darian Taylor. Flashy and loud, radiant and full of life, Darian couldn’t be more different…and yet he makes Ash laugh, reminding him of what it’s like to step beyond the boundaries of his anxiety. But Ash has been living in his own shadow for so long that he can no longer see a way out. Can a man who doesn’t trust himself ever trust in happiness? And how can someone who doesn’t believe in happiness ever fight for his own?
This is the year of Cecily Chang.
San Francisco attorney Cecily Chang is ready to tackle the New Year head on, so she creates a list of resolutions guaranteed to reboot her lifeβright after her dutiful visit home to Sunset Park, Brooklyn, for the Lunar New Year. Cecily prepares to face her critical, meddling mother, nosy relatives, and the chaos and drama family togetherness brings. At least the food will be delicious. This holiday, Cecily vows to remain calmβas long as she doesnβt see him.
Jeffrey Lee deeply regrets how he ended things with Cecily ten years ago, but he felt it was best for her at the time. When he runs into her again during the New Year, he sees it as a sign. Now a successful screenwriter, Jeffrey is determined to win back Cecilyβs heart.
But Cecily doesnβt believe in signs or second chances and embraces her new resolutions. This time, Jeffrey wonβt give upβand heβs convinced he can write them a new Hollywood happy ending.
A novel of sensational literary and psychological suspense from the best-selling author ofΒ Less Than ZeroΒ andΒ American PsychoΒ that tracks a group of privileged high school friends in a vibrantly fictionalized 1980s Los Angeles as a serial killer strikes across the city
Bret Easton Ellisβs masterful new novel is a story about the end of innocence, and the perilous passage from adolescence into adulthood, set in a vibrantly fictionalized Los Angeles in 1981 as a serial killer begins targeting teenagers throughout the city.
Seventeen-year-oldΒ Bret is a senior at the exclusive Buckley prep school when a new student arrives with a mysterious past. Robert Mallory is bright, handsome, charismatic, and shielding a secret from Bret and his friends even as he becomes a part of their tightly knit circle. Bretβs obsession with Mallory is equaled only by his increasingly unsettling preoccupation with the Trawler, a serial killer on the loose who seems to be drawing ever closer to Bret and his friends, taunting themβand Bret in particularβwith grotesque threats and horrific, sharply local acts of violence. The coincidences are uncanny, but they are also filtered through the imagination of a teenager whose gifts for constructing narrative from the filaments of his own life are about to make him one of the most explosive literary sensations of his generation. Can he trust his friendsβor his own mindβto make sense of the danger they appear to be in? Thwarted by the world and by his own innate desires, buffeted by unhealthy fixations, he spirals into paranoia and isolation as the relationship between the Trawler and Robert Mallory hurtles inexorably toward a collision.
Set against the intensely vivid and nostalgic backdrop of pre-Less Than ZeroΒ L.A.,Β The ShardsΒ is a mesmerizing fusing of fact and fiction, the real and the imagined, that brilliantly explores the emotional fabric of Bretβs life at seventeenβsex and jealousy, obsession and murderous rage. Gripping, sly, suspenseful, deeply haunting, and often darkly funny,Β The ShardsΒ is Ellis at his inimitable best.
Naomi Shaw used to believe in magic. Twenty-two years ago, she and her two best friends, Cassidy and Olivia, spent the summer roaming the woods, imagining a world of ceremony and wonder. They called it the Goddess Game. The summer ended suddenly when Naomi was attacked. Miraculously, she survived her seventeen stab wounds and lived to identify the man who had hurt her. The girlsβ testimony put away a serial killer, wanted for murdering six women. They were heroes.
And they were liars.
For decades, the friends have kept a secret worth killing for. But now Olivia wants to tell, and Naomi sets out to find out whatΒ reallyΒ happened in the woodsβno matter how dangerous the truth turns out to be.
New York TimesΒ bestselling author Grady Hendrix takes on the haunted house in a thrilling new novel that explores the way your pastβand your familyβcan haunt you like nothing else.
When Louise finds out her parents have died, she dreads going home. She doesnβt want to leave her daughter with her ex and fly to Charleston. She doesnβt want to deal with her family home, stuffed to the rafters with the remnants of her fatherβs academic career and her motherβs lifelong obsession with puppets and dolls. She doesnβt want to learn how to live without the two people who knew and loved her best in the world.
Most of all, she doesnβt want to deal with her brother, Mark, who never left their hometown, gets fired from one job after another, and resents her success. Unfortunately, sheβll need his help to get the house ready for sale because itβll take more than some new paint on the walls and clearing out a lifetime of memories to get this place on the market.
But some houses donβt want to be sold, and their home has other plans for both of themβ¦
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