An ill-timed visit forces twentysomething New Yorker Julian to shelter in place in Venice Beach with his glamorous and eccentric ninety-three-year-old grandmother, Mamie Künstler, and her inscrutable housekeeper. To pass the time, Mamie regales Julian with stories of her adolescent adventures among the émigré elite, from tennis lessons with Arnold Schoenberg to a romance with Greta Garbo.
During his unexpected extended stay in his grandmother’s crumbling domain, Julian undergoes his own personal quest as he reckons with the trajectory of the life he thought he wanted and what role he will choose to play in it all.
Archives
The Covenant of Water
From the New York Times-bestselling author of Cutting for Stone comes a stunning and magisterial new epic of love, faith, and medicine, set in Kerala, South India, and following three generations of a family seeking the answers to a strange secret. With astonishing scenes of medical ingenuity, fantastic moments of humor, a surprising and deeply moving story, and characters imbued with the essence of life, this is a hymn to human understanding and a humbling testament to the hardships undergone by past generations for the sake of those alive today.
The Burning
Anna Todd’s Brightest Stars trilogy tells the contemporary love story of Karina, a young woman who “grew up military” and is living and working for the first time on her own, and Kael, a 21-year-old soldier now home after two life-altering deployments in Afghanistan. The Burning picks up from the sudden and shocking disruption of Karina and Kael’s developing romance at the end of The Falling: the attraction to one another is undeniable, yet the trust they’ve placed in each other has been broken by a concealed truth. To resolve what may be difficult, or impossible, to repair, Kael’s closed-off past — a past that unknowingly links him to Karina’s family — must be opened and reconciled. And Karina must decide whether loving someone she doesn’t want to live without is worth the pain and risk of it all.
The Three of Us
Long-standing tensions between a husband, his wife, and her best friend finally come to a breaking point in this sharp domestic comedy of manners, told brilliantly over the course of one day.
What if the two most important people in your life hated each other with a passion?
The wife has it all. A big house in a nice neighborhood, a ride-or-die snarky friend with whom to laugh about facile men, and an affectionate husband who loves her above all else. The only thing missing from this portrait is a baby. But motherhood is a serious undertaking, especially for the wife who has valued her selfhood more than anything.
On a seemingly normal day, the best friend comes over to spend a lazy afternoon with the wife. But when the husband comes home and a series of confessions are made that threaten to throw everything off balance, the wife’s two confidantes are suddenly forced to jockey for their positions. Told in three taut, mesmerizing parts—the wife, the husband, the best friend—the day quickly unfolds to show how the trio’s dented visions of each other finally unravel, throwing everyone’s integrity into question—and their long-drawn-out territorial dance, carefully constructed over pivotal years, into utter chaos.
At once subversively comical, wildly astute, and painfully compulsive, The Three of Us explores cultural truths, what it means to defy them, and the fine line between compromise and betrayal, ultimately asking: who are we if not for the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, and the people we’re meant to love?
Medusa’s Sisters
A vivid and moving reimagining of the myth of Medusa and the sisters who loved her.
The end of the story is only the beginning…
Even before they were transformed into Gorgons, Medusa and her sisters, Stheno and Euryale, were unique among immortals. Curious about mortals and their lives, Medusa and her sisters entered the human world in search of a place to belong, yet quickly found themselves at the perilous center of a dangerous Olympian rivalry and learned—too late—that a god’s love is a violent one.
Forgotten by history and diminished by poets, the other two Gorgons have never been more than horrifying hags, damned and doomed. But they were sisters first, and their journey from sea-born origins to the outskirts of the Parthenon is a journey that rests, hidden, underneath their scales.
Monsters, but not monstrous, Stheno and Euryale will step into the light for the first time to tell the story of how all three sisters lived and were changed by each other, as they struggle against the inherent conflict between sisterhood and individuality, myth and truth, vengeance and peace.
Clytemnestra
You are born to a king, but marry a tyrant. You stand helplessly as he sacrifices your child to placate the gods. You watch him wage war on a foreign shore and you comfort yourself with violent thoughts of your own. You play the part, fooling enemies who deny you justice. And slowly, you plot. But when your husband returns in triumph, what then? Acceptance or vengeance—death follows both. So you bide your time and force the gods’ hands in a wretched game of vengeance.
Circe meets Cersei Lannister in this powerful retelling about the most notorious heroine and favorite villain of the Ancient World who reigned as an unforgettable and ruthless queen, faced the men who wronged her, and forged a treacherous path to ensure everyone would know her name.
House of Cotton
A stunning, contemporary Black southern gothic novel about what it means to be a poor woman in the God fearing south in the age of OnlyFans, by a breakout new Affrilachian writer, perfect for readers of The Other Black Girl and Luster.
Magnolia Brown is nineteen years old, broke, and effectively an orphan. She feels stuck and haunted: by her overdrawn bank account, her predatory landlord, and the ghost of her late grandmother Mama Brown. One night, while working at her dead-end gas station job, a mysterious, slick stranger named Cotton walks in and offers to turn Magnolia’s luck around with a lucrative “modeling” job at his family’s funeral home. She accepts. But despite things looking up, Magnolia’s problems fatten along with her wallet. When Cotton’s requests become increasingly weird, Magnolia discovers there’s a lot more at stake than just her rent.
Sharp as a belted knife, this sly social commentary cuts straight to the bone. House of Cotton will keep you mesmerized until the very last page.
Talking at Night
Secret walks and late-night phone calls. An undeniable chemistry. A tragedy that haunts them both. A powerful yet tender love story between two people who can’t help but be pulled back to one another, time and again.
Homebodies
Urgent, propulsive, and strikingly insightful, Homebodies is a thrilling debut novel about a young Black writer whose world is turned upside down when she loses her coveted job in media and her searing manifesto about racism in the industry goes viral.
Mickey Hayward dreams of writing stories that matter. She has a flashy media job that makes her feel successful and a devoted girlfriend who takes care of her when she comes home exhausted and demoralized. It’s not all A-list parties and steamy romance, but Mickey’s on her way, and it’s far from the messy life she left behind in Maryland. Despite being overlooked and mistreated at work, it seems like she might finally get the chance to prove herself—until she finds out she’s being replaced.
Distraught and enraged, Mickey fires back with a detailed letter outlining the racism and sexism she’s endured as a Black woman in media, certain it will change the world for the better. But when her letter is met with overwhelming silence, Mickey is sent into a tailspin of self-doubt. Forced to reckon with just how fragile her life is—including the uncertainty of her relationship—she flees to the last place she ever dreamed she would run to, her hometown, desperate for a break from her troubles.
Back home, Mickey is seduced by the simplicity of her old life—and the flirtation of a former flame—but her life in New York refuses to be forgotten. When a media scandal catapults Mickey’s forgotten letter into the public zeitgeist, suddenly everyone wants to hear what Mickey has to say. It’s what she’s always wanted—isn’t it?
Intimate, witty, and deeply sexy, Homebodies is a testament to those trying to be heard and loved in a world that refuses to make space, and introduces a standout new writer.
Natural Beauty
In this sly, surprising, and razor-sharp debut novel, a virtuoso pianist gives up her future as a musician to work at a high-end wellness store in New York City where the pursuit of beauty comes at a staggering cost.