Fra Keeler

The debut novel from PEN/Faulkner award-winning author of Call Me Zebra and Savage Tongues is a comic psychological thriller, an absurdist journey into the heart of darkness. A man purchases a house, the house of Fra Keeler, moves in, and begins investigating the circumstances of the latter's death. Yet the investigation quickly turns inward, and the reality it seeks to unravel seems only to grow stranger, as the narrator pursues not leads but lines of thought, most often to hideous conclusions.

"Dear Incomprehension tackles a broad swath of contemporary literature currently labeled "speculative fiction." A blurring of genres that includes science fiction, modern fairy tales, and avant-garde experimental fiction, these works are extremely popular but also derive from highly sophisticated philosophical and aesthetic sensibilities, ones that call into question and uproot the very foundations of stories and storytelling. Because such fictions subvert most conventional narrative devices-plot, recognizable characters, verisimilitude, logic, legibility-they deliberately confound almost any kind of conventional reading and criticism. So, what do you do with a text that cannot be conventionally read or understood? To do such a literature justice, the traditional frameworks of literary criticism fail, and Dear Incomprehension is more of an extended philosophical essay than it is a traditional work of criticism, as oblique and unconventional in its voice, tone, and methods as the texts it illuminates"--

Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction "Hearken ye fellow misfits, migrants, outcasts, squint-eyed bibliophiles, library-haunters and book stall-stalkers: Here is a novel for you."--Wall Street Journal "A tragicomic picaresque whose fervid logic and cerebral whimsy recall the work of Bola o and Borges." --New York Times Book Review Finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction * Longlisted for the PEN/Open Book Award * An Amazon Best Book of the Year * A Publishers Weekly Bestseller Named a Best Book by: Entertainment Weekly, Harper's Bazaar, Boston Globe, Fodor's, Fast Company, Refinery29, Nylon, Los Angeles Review of Books, Book Riot, The Millions, Electric Literature, Bitch, Hello Giggles, Literary Hub, Shondaland, Bustle, Brit & Co., Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Read It Forward, Entropy Magazine, Chicago Review of Books, iBooks and Publishers Weekly From an award-winning young author, a novel following a feisty heroine's quest to reclaim her past through the power of literature--even as she navigates the murkier mysteries of love. Zebra is the last in a line of anarchists, atheists, and autodidacts. When war came, her family didn't fight; they took refuge in books. Now alone and in exile, Zebra leaves New York for Barcelona, retracing the journey she and her father made from Iran to the United States years ago. Books are Zebra's only companions--until she meets Ludo. Their connection is magnetic; their time together fraught. Zebra overwhelms him with her complex literary theories, her concern with death, and her obsession with history. He thinks she's unhinged; she thinks he's pedantic. Neither are wrong; neither can let the other go. They push and pull their way across the Mediterranean, wondering with each turn if their love, or lust, can free Zebra from her past. An adventure tale, a love story, and a paean to the power of language and literature starring a heroine as quirky as Don Quixote, as introspective as Virginia Woolf, as whip-smart as Miranda July, and as spirited as Frances Ha, Call Me Zebra will establish Van der Vliet Oloomi as an author "on the verge of developing a whole new literature movement" (Bustle).

A new novel by PEN/Faulkner Award winner Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi--"if you don't know this name yet, you should" (Entertainment Weekly)--about a young woman caught in an affair with a much older man, a personal and political exploration of desire, power, and human connection. It's summer when Arezu, an Iranian American teenager, goes to Spain to meet her estranged father at an apartment he owns there. He never shows up, instead sending her a weekly allowance, care of his step-nephew, Omar, a forty-year-old Lebanese man. As the weeks progress, Arezu is drawn into a mercurial, charged, and ultimately catastrophic affair with Omar, a relationship that shatters her just at the cusp of adulthood. Two decades later, Arezu inherits the apartment. She returns with her best friend, Ellie, an Israeli-American scholar devoted to the Palestinian cause, to excavate the place and finally put to words a trauma she's long held in silence. Together, she and Ellie catalog the questions of agency, sexuality, displacement, and erasure that surface as Arezu confronts the ghosts of that summer, crafting between them a story that spans continents and centuries. Equal parts Marguerite Duras and Shirley Jackson, Rachel Cusk and Samanta Schweblin, Savage Tongues is a compulsive, unsettling, and bravely observed exploration of violence and eroticism, haunting and healing, and the profound intimacy born of the deepest pain.

During the early 1700s, Brookfield was first colonized in an area occupied by the Pootatuck Indians. Hat, shear, and comb factories arose along the Still River, enticing settlers, who built farms, churches, and inns. In 1752, land was taken from New Milford, Newtown, and Danbury to form the Parish of Newbury. By 1788, the town was incorporated as Brookfield in honor of the area's first ordained pastor, Rev. Thomas Brooks. The town quickly outgrew its horse-and-buggy paths and one-room schoolhouses. In 1927, Candlewood Lake was born out of area farmland, flooded to form the largest man-made lake in Connecticut. Brookfield depicts the settlement of the area and highlights notable natives, including Lucia Ruggles Holman, the first American woman to circumnavigate the globe, and Sarah Jane Campbell, P.T. Barnum's famous fat lady.

The first in Nathalie Léger’s acclaimed genre-defying triptych of books about the struggles and obsessions of women artists. Exposition is the first in a triptych of books by the award-winning writer and archivist Nathalie Léger that includes Suite for Barbara Loden and The White Dress. In each, Léger sets the story of a female artist against the background of her own life and research—an archivist's journey into the self, into the lives that history hides from us. Here, Léger's subject is the Countess of Castiglione (1837–1899), who at the dawn of photography dedicated herself to becoming the most photographed woman in the world, modeling for hundreds of photos, including “Scherzo di Follia,” among the most famous in history. Set long before our own “selfie” age, Exposition is a remarkably modern investigation into the curses of beauty, fame, vanity, and age, as well as the obsessive drive to control and commodify one's image.

“This is a book of wonders, full of intricate beauty, and Giada Scodellaro is an extraordinary talent.” —Katie Kitamura Giada Scodellaro’s debut is a fiercely original collection of stories ranging in length, style, and tone—a collage of social commentary, surrealism, recipes, folklore, art— that centers Black women in moments of imminent change. In language that is lyrical, minimal, and often absurd, the diverse stories in Some of Them Will Carry Me deconstruct intimacy while building a surprising, unnerving new reality of language, culture, consumption, and loss.

Winner of the 2018 Acorn Prize, New Zealand’s highest fiction award, Pip Adam’s The New Animals is a work of artistic ambition and political urgency. Set in the Auckland fashion scene in 2016, The New Animals moves over the course of one night through the hopes, misapprehensions, resentments, and regrets of a small group of fashion-industry workers, divided by generation and class. The young and rich act like nothing can touch them; the tired Gen-Xers feel forever adrift. On this particularly stressful night, hairdressers, patternmakers, stylists, and a makeup artist are tasked with preparing for a last-minute photoshoot without clothes or clear directions. Caught up in the small dramas of their lives, while around them the world is fast becoming uninhabitable, the group toils against the impossible pressure until one of them decides to break away. Like a twisted contemporary heir to Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, The New Animals is a brilliant and unforgettable dive beneath the surface of life, uncovering the common ground of humanity, as well as the common plight.