The Wall Street Journal’s popular columnist Jason Gay delivers a hilarious and heartfelt guide to modern living. Little Victories is a life guide for people who hate life guides. Whether the subject is rules for raising the perfect child without infuriating all of your friends, rules for how to be cool (related: Why do you want to be cool?) or rules of thumb to tell the difference between real depression and just eating five cupcakes in a row, Gay’s essays—whimsical, practical, and occasionally poignant—will make you laugh, and then think, “You know, he’s kind of right.”
Archives
Bats of the Republic
In 1843, Zadock Thomas must leave his home to deliver a secret letter to a general on the front lines of the war over Texas. When a cloud of bats leads him off the trail, he happens on something quite extraordinary. This highly inventive novel-within-a novel features hand drawn maps, illustrations, subversive pamphlets, and curious diagrams—an intrigue wrapped inside an innovative design.
The People in the Trees
Readers of exciting, challenging and visionary literary fiction—including admirers of Norman Rush’s Mating, Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder, Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible, and Peter Matthiessen’s At Play in the Fields of the Lord—will be drawn to this astonishingly gripping and accomplished first novel. A decade in the writing, this is an anthropological adventure story that combines the visceral allure of a thriller with a profound and tragic vision of what happens when cultures collide. It is a book that instantly catapults Hanya Yanagihara into the company of young novelists who really, really matter.
In 1950, a young doctor called Norton Perina signs on with the anthropologist Paul Tallent for an expedition to the remote Micronesian island of Ivu’ivu in search of a rumored lost tribe. They succeed, finding not only that tribe but also a group of forest dwellers they dub “The Dreamers,” who turn out to be fantastically long-lived but progressively more senile. Perina suspects the source of their longevity is a hard-to-find turtle; unable to resist the possibility of eternal life, he kills one and smuggles some meat back to the States. He scientifically proves his thesis, earning worldwide fame and the Nobel Prize, but he soon discovers that its miraculous property comes at a terrible price. As things quickly spiral out of his control, his own demons take hold, with devastating personal consequences.