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A fictional return to the unsettling world of Franz Kafka's iconic unfinished novel, The Castle Seth Rogoff's masterful and mesmerizing novel, The Castle, draws inspiration from the enigmatic and incomplete final sentence of Franz Kafka's influential work of the same title. Follow renowned translator Sy Kirschbaum as he finds his way into the deserted landscape of Kafka's world where the village of Z. lies eerily silent. The inhabitants vanished like phantoms leaving only remnants of their lives. From these fragments, Kirschbaum pieces together a vision of a world in crisis triggered by the arrival of a stranger named K. To unravel this mystery, not just for the sake of the vanished village of Z. but for the world beyond, Kirschbaum is compelled to venture where K. could not—the deepest core of the castle. The Castle is built upon lost documents, forgotten stories, and imagined histories. Unbound by the constraints of an authoritarian and doomed reality, Kirschbaum embarks on an extraordinary journey, seeking meaning through the fertile ground of imagination and embracing the inherent paradox of existence.

Published in 1900, eleven years prior to her masterpiece Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton's novella The Touchstone explores the emotional complexities of love and betrayal. Penniless and unable to marry the woman he loves, the financially struggling lawyer Stephen Glennard discovers a way out of his predicaments by selling love letters written to him by deceased author Margaret Aubyn. Glennard's psychological anguish as he grapples with his guilt and the repercussions of his actions presents a poignant narrative of human conscience and morality.

FINALIST FOR THE PULITZER PRIZEFINALIST FOR THE PEN/FAULKNER AWARDWINNER OF THE WHITING AWARDWINNER OF THE SAROYAN INTERNATIONAL PRIZE FOR WRITINGWINNTER OF THE VCU CABELL FIRST NOVELIST AWARDWINNER OF THE NEW AMERICAN VOICES AWARDA PUBLISHERS WEEKLY TOP 10 BOOK OF THE YEARThe first novel by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Trust, an exquisite and blisteringly intelligent story of a young Swedish boy, separated from his brother, who becomes a legend and an outlawA young Swedish immigrant finds himself penniless and alone in California. The boy travels east in search of his brother, moving on foot against the great current of emigrants pushing west. Driven back again and again, he meets criminals, naturalists, religious fanatics, swindlers, American Indians, and lawmen, and his exploits turn him into a legend. Diaz defies the conventions of historical fiction and genre, offering a probing look at the stereotypes that populate our past and a portrait of radical foreignness.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the celebrated author of Disappearing Earth comes a tale of family, obsession, and a mysterious creature in the woods—“a mesmerizing story about hope, sisterhood, and survival with a truly shocking twist at the end” (People, Book of the Week).NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS'CHOICE • A GOOD MORNING AMERICA BUZZ PICK!AN NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR“Thrilling and propulsive, glorious and terrifying. Julia Phillips is a brilliant writer.”—Ann Patchett“Beautiful and haunting... this is brilliant.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)They were sisters and they would last past the end of time.Sam and Elena dream of another life. On the island off the coast of Washington where they were born and raised, they and their mother struggle to survive. Sam works on the ferry that delivers wealthy mainlanders to their vacation homes while Elena bartends at the local golf club, but even together they can't earn enough to get by, stirring their frustration about the limits that shape their existence.Then one night on the boat, Sam spots a bear swimming the dark waters of the channel. Where is it going? What does it want? When the bear turns up by their home, Sam, terrified, is more convinced than ever that it's time to leave the island. But Elena responds differently to the massive beast. Enchanted by its presence, she throws into doubt the desire to escape and puts their long-held dream in danger.A story about the bonds of sisterhood and the mysteries of the animals that live among us—and within us—Bear is a propulsive, mythical, richly imagined novel from one of the most acclaimed young writers in America.

An'engrossing, affecting, and singular'(Publishers Weekly) debut novel about love, family, queerness, and losing your mind in the modern world.While god is sending her signs through Instagram and Spotify demanding she break up with her girlfriend, Norma meets with a new therapist for one reason: she really needs to write again. With only one chapter missing in her manuscript, Norma is desperate to know if she needs to leave her girlfriend in order to write The Last Story. The new therapist diagnoses Norma with Depersonalization/Derealization Disorder, but Norma isn't having it. It's just Oblivion. Haunted by SSRI side effects and life becoming less hazily fictional by the day, Norma has never felt crazier. Does anyone else see the world's poorly crafted plotline? Like, who even wrote this story? Norma begins sharing her manuscript with her therapist, hoping to connect the dissociative dots once and for all—or at least enough so that Google ads stop giving her panic attacks. But soon Norma is questioning everything she's ever believed about life, writing, and love. And then there's Norma's girlfriend, the one with a crack of light in her eyes. Could she be Oblivion's antagonist, the manuscript's savior? Or is she just a human? Told alternately through Norma's barely fictional fiction and her crackling stream of consciousness, Please Stop Trying To Leave Me is an honest, comedic, horrifying, and heart-wrenching story about existing in today's world, challenging all we've been taught about the distance between fiction and reality, sanity and insanity, mental illness and healing.

A New York TimesBook Review Editors'ChoiceA Shelf Awareness Best Book of the YearHudson Booksellers Book of the YearOne of the New York Post's Best Books of the SummerOne of The Millions's Most Anticipated Books of the YearIndieNext PickA Time Magazine “What to Read Now” SelectionA wry novel set at the edge of the earth about the courage it takes to band together, even as everything around you falls apart Unmoored by a recent family tragedy, Cooper Gosling is adrift at thirty and on the verge of ruining her career. So when the opportunity arises to join the National Science Foundation's Artists & Writers Program in Antarctica, she jumps at the chance—and finds herself in the company of others who are just abnormal enough for Polar life, a group of eccentrics motivated by desires as ambiguous as her own. When they are joined by a fringe scientist who claims climate change is a hoax, the Polies'already-imbalanced community is rattled, bringing them to the center of a global controversy and threatening the ancient ice chip they call home.

Winner of the 2021 National Book Award for Translated Literature Tonight is the opening night. There are birds perched everywhere, on the power lines, the guy ropes, the strings of light that festoon the tent... when I think of all those little bodies suspended between earth and sky, it makes me smile to remind myself that for some of them, their first flight begins with a fall. Nathalie arrives at the circus in Vladivostok, Russia, fresh out of fashion school in Geneva. She is there to design the costumes for a trio of artists who are due to perform one of the most dangerous acts of all: the Russian Bar. As winter approaches, the season at Vladivostok is winding down, leaving the windy port city empty as the performers rush off to catch trains, boats and buses home; all except the Russian bar trio and their manager. They are scheduled to perform at a festival in Ulan Ude, just before Christmas. What ensues is an intimate and beguiling account of four people learning to work with and trust one another. This is a book about the delicate balance that must be achieved when flirting with death in such spectacular fashion, set against the backdrop of a cloudy ocean and immersing the reader into Dusapin's trademark dreamlike prose. Translated from the French by Aneesa Abbas Higgins

Once a fêted literary figure, the former lover of B-list movie star Lucida, but now derelict, incontinent, asexual, ageing poet Harold Lime turns his back on material modernity, withdrawing to a basement in the university town of Cambridge, England. But human connections will prove difficult to sever completely, and he is drawn out of himself by a fox hunt saboteur (“the sab woman”), with whom he forms a poignant, uneasy relationship and who acts as his mutual confessor. In the isolation of his basement, Harold Lime obsessively listens to Mahler, whose nine symphonies, unfinished tenth, and Earth Songs, each corresponding to a separate chapter of this innovative poetic novel, will reawaken the sensitivities he has tried to erase, taking him back to his Australian childhood and youth, fostering a growing awareness of intertwined body and soul, of commitment and connectedness, of the ecology of rootedness and unrootedness in an unjust world.

It was an exciting time for young women of the 1920s as they embraced liberation from the pre–World War I traditions of their mothers. In the mild Mediterranean climate of the Italian Riviera, a rebellious young Sydney Warren cautiously tested her newfound freedom, developing an intimate relationship with the charming middle-aged widow Mrs. Kerr that caused rumors and speculation to stir among the wealthy British guests of a luxurious seaside hotel. A sapphic affair simmers beneath the surface of Elizabeth Bowen's captivating first novel, published in 1927. With its masterful storytelling, combined with Bowen's keen observations and elegant prose, The Hotel beautifully illuminates the contrast between the tranquil Italian setting and the underlying tensions among the privileged characters. The novel is a thoughtful exploration of social norms, personal identity, and the subtle dynamics of group interaction, resulting in a rich story that often relies on what is left unsaid as much as what is written on the page.

An exciting and “inventive” (HuffPost) debut novel about a top-rated man on the Rental Stranger app—a place where users can hire a pretend fiancé, a wingman, or companion of any kind—who finds out who he is by being anyone but himself.Would you hire someone to be the best man at your wedding? Your stand-in brother? The father to your child? In an age where online ratings are all-powerful, Five-Star Stranger follows the adventures of a top-rated man on the Rental Stranger app as he navigates New York City under the guise of characters he plays, always maintaining a professional distance from his clients. But, when an eccentric patron threatens to upend his long-term role as father to a young girl, Stranger begins to reckon with his attachment to his pretend daughter, her mother, and his own fraught past. Now, he must confront the boundaries he has drawn and explore the legacy of abandonment that shaped his life. “A sharp page-turner about our culture's commodification of everything” (Debutiful), Five-Star Stranger is a strikingly vivid novel about isolation in a hyperconnected world, and “what it means to love and be loved” (Rachel Khong, author of Real Americans).