Picador Best New Voices Sampler Fall 2014

Picador Presents the Fall's Best New Voices This fall, immerse yourself in these free, select excerpts from this spellbinding list of fiction and nonfiction titles, brought to you by Picador. Discover the books at the front lines of modern fiction and nonfiction by some of our country's finest authors, and be the first to unearth the next generation with our smart, imaginative debuts. In this sampler, enjoy excerpts from Edward St. Aubyn, Keith Donohue, Euny Hong, Richard House, Fred Venturini, and many more!

Picador Presents the Picador Book Club This fall, immerse yourself in these free, select excerpts from this year's best reading group books, brought to you by Picador. Discover the books at the front lines of modern fiction by some of our country's finest authors. These reading group books are sure to lead to some legendary chats (and arguments!) at your book club. In this sampler, enjoy excerpts from Alice McDermott, Toby Barlow, Amy Grace Loyd, Mary Kay Zurevleff, Ronald Frame, and many more!

The Good House, by Ann Leary, is funny, poignant, and terrifying. A classic New England tale that lays bare the secrets of one little town, this spirited novel will stay with you long after the story has ended. Now a major motion picture starring Sigourney Weaver and Kevin Kline! Hildy Good is a townie. A lifelong resident of a small community on the rocky coast of Boston's North Shore, she knows pretty much everything about everyone. And she's good at lots of things, too. A successful real-estate broker, mother, and grandmother, her days are full. But her nights have become lonely ever since her daughters, convinced their mother was drinking too much, sent her off to rehab. Now she's in recovery—more or less. Alone and feeling unjustly persecuted, Hildy finds a friend in Rebecca McAllister, one of the town's wealthy newcomers. Rebecca is grateful for the friendship and Hildy feels like a person of the world again, as she and Rebecca escape their worries with some harmless gossip and a bottle of wine by the fire—just one of their secrets. But Rebecca is herself the subject of town gossip. When Frank Getchell, an old friend who shares a complicated history with Hildy, tries to warn her away from Rebecca, Hildy attempts to protect her friend from a potential scandal. Soon, however, Hildy is busy trying to protect her own reputation. When a cluster of secrets becomes dangerously entwined, the reckless behavior of one person threatens to expose the other, and this darkly comic novel takes a chilling turn.

From his first published story in the Paris Review in 1968, James Salter's stories have been universally acclaimed. Including his two published collections, Dusk and Other Stories (1988) and Last Night (2005), and the previously uncollected 'Charisma', this volume contains over twenty short stories by one of the finest writers of our time. Concerning men and women in their most intimate moments, struggling with loss, desire, or the burden of memory, each indelible narrative in the Collected Stories is marked by James Salter's great literary grace, his ability to show the subtleties of a character or situation with precision, and his equally assured ability to command reversals of fortune or shocking revelations.

The #1 New York Times bestselling (mostly true) memoir from the hilarious author of Furiously Happy. “Gaspingly funny and wonderfully inappropriate.”—O, The Oprah Magazine When Jenny Lawson was little, all she ever wanted was to fit in. That dream was cut short by her fantastically unbalanced father and a morbidly eccentric childhood. It did, however, open up an opportunity for Lawson to find the humor in the strange shame-spiral that is her life, and we are all the better for it. In the irreverent Let’s Pretend This Never Happened, Lawson’s long-suffering husband and sweet daughter help her uncover the surprising discovery that the most terribly human moments—the ones we want to pretend never happened—are the very same moments that make us the people we are today. For every intellectual misfit who thought they were the only ones to think the things that Lawson dares to say out loud, this is a poignant and hysterical look at the dark, disturbing, yet wonderful moments of our lives. Readers Guide Inside

This work investigates inequality and social exclusion in contemporary Chinese society, specifically in the context of urbanization, migration and crime. Economic reforms started in the late 1970s (post-Mao) fuelled a trend of urbanization and mass migration within China, largely from rural areas to more economically developed urban regions. With this migration, came new challenges in a rapidly changing society. Researchers have extensively studied the rural-to-urban human movement, social changes, inequality and its impact on individuals and society as a whole. This volume provides a new perspective on this issue. It forges a link between internal migration, inequality, social exclusion and crime in the context of China, through qualitative research into the impact of this phenomenon on individuals’ lives. Using a series of case studies drawn from interviews with inmates – men and women – in a large Chinese prison, it focuses on migrant offenders’ subjective experiences, and analyses issues from the rarely-heard perspectives of migrant lawbreakers themselves. The research demonstrates how factors – including: the hukou system, rural-urban, class and gender inequalities, prejudices against rural migrants, and other structural problems – often lead to migrant offending. The author argues that to mitigate the effects of criminalisation, the root causes of these problems should be examined, emphasizing radical reforms to the hukou policy, cultural change in urban society to welcome newcomers, positive programs to integrate migrant workers into urban societies and improve their opportunities, rather than inflicting harsher penalties or reducing migration. While the research is based in China, it has clear implications for other regions of the world, which are experiencing similar tensions related to national and international migration. This work will be of interest to researchers in criminology and criminal justice, particularly with an interest in Asia, as well as those in related fields such as sociology, law and social justice.

Despite the remarkable growth of Christianity in Africa, Asia, and Latin America in the twentieth century, there is a dearth of primary material produced by these Christians. This volume explores the problem of writing the history of indigenous Christian communities in the Global South. Many such indigenous Christian groups pass along knowledge orally, and colonial forces have often not deemed their ideas and activities worth preserving. In some instances, documentation from these communities has been destroyed by people or nature. Highlighting the creative solutions that historians have found to this problem, the essays in this volume detail the strategies employed in discerning the perspectives, ideas, activities, motives, and agency of indigenous Christians. The contributors approach the problem on a case-by-case basis, acknowledging the impact of diverse geographical, cultural, political, and ecclesiastical factors. This volume will inspire historians of World Christianity to critically interrogate—and imaginatively use—existing Western and indigenous documentary material in writing the history of Christianity in Asia, Africa, the Americas, and Oceania. In addition to the editor, the contributors to this volume include J. J. Carney, Adrian Hermann, Paul Kollman, Kenneth Mills, Esther Mombo, Mrinalini Sebastian, Christopher Vecsey, Haruko Nawata Ward, and Yanna Yannakakis.

A product of twenty-five years of archival and primary research, Sounding Our Way Home: Japanese American Musicking and the Politics of Identity narrates the efforts of three generations of Japanese Americans to reach “home” through musicking. Using ethnomusicology as a lens, Susan Miyo Asai examines the musical choices of a population that, historically, is considered outside the racial and ethnic boundaries of American citizenship. Emphasizing the notion of national identity and belonging, the volume provokes a discussion about the challenges of nation-building in a democratic society. Asai addresses the politics of music, interrogating the ways musicking functions as a performance of social, cultural, and political identification for Japanese Americans in the United States. Musicking is an inherently political act at the intersection of music, identity, and politics, particularly if it involves expressing one’s ethnicity and/or race. Asai further investigates how Japanese American ethnic identification and cultural practices relate to national belonging. Musicking cultivates a narrative of a shared history and aesthetic between performers and listeners. The discourse situates not only Japanese Americans, but all Asians into the Black/white binary of race relations in the United States. Sounding Our Way Home contributes to the ongoing struggle for acceptance and equal representation for people of color in the US. A history of Japanese American musicking across three generations, the book unveils the social and political discrimination that nonwhite immigrants and their offspring continue to face when it comes to finding acceptance in US society and culture.