The Only Good Thing Anyone Has Ever Done

When Chrysalis Moffat and her brother, Eddie, inherit a mansion on the coast of California, Eddie hatches a plan to fleece credulous Californians of their cash by starting the fraudulent Tibetan School of Miracles. But something else is happening. Through Chrysalis's reunion with her brother, she begins to discover her adoptive father's secret past, causing her own identity to unravel. As Chrysalis lays down the facts of her life, she gambles her identity against the contradictions, half-truths, and fables of her past, leading her ultimately to question what it is we can truly know and whether it is fate or chance that dictates our lives.

In this generous collection of book reviews and literary essays, legendary Village Voice rock critic Robert Christgau showcases the passion that made him a critic—his love for the written word. Many selections address music, from blackface minstrelsy to punk and hip-hop, artists from Lead Belly to Patti Smith, and fellow critics from Ellen Willis and Lester Bangs to Nelson George and Jessica Hopper. But Book Reports also teases out the popular in the Bible and 1984 as well as pornography and science fiction, and analyzes at length the cultural theory of Raymond Williams, the detective novels of Walter Mosley, the history of bohemia, and the 2008 financial crisis. It establishes Christgau as not just the Dean of American Rock Critics, but one of America's most insightful cultural critics as well.

A compilation of candid, often moving narratives, essays, and memoirs by adoptive parents, birth parents, and adoptees answers questions about what it means to be a parent and a family, the search for origins, love, and belonging, in pieces by A. M. Homes, Bernard Cornwell, Tama Janowitz, Martin Rowson, Jonathan Rendall, Paula Fox, and many others. Original. 25,000 first printing.

Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best nonfiction books of all time A book about romantic love, Eros the Bittersweet is Anne Carson's exploration of the concept of "eros" in both classical philosophy and literature. Beginning with, "It was Sappho who first called eros 'bittersweet.' No one who has been in love disputes her," Carson examines her subject from numerous points of view, creating a lyrical meditation in the tradition of William Carlos Williams's Spring and All and William H. Gass's On Being Blue. Epigrammatic, witty, ironic, and endlessly entertaining, Eros is an utterly original book.

A post-apocalyptic literary epic in the tradition of The Handmaid's Tale, Divergent and Cloud Atlas, and a breakout book in North America for a writer of rare and unconventional talent. From Guardian First Book Award finalist Sandra Newman comes an ambitious and extraordinary novel of a future in which bands of children and teens survive on the detritus--physical and cultural--of a collapsed America. When her brother is struck down by Posies--a contagion that has killed everyone by their late teens for generations--fifteen-year-old Ice Cream Star pursues the rumour of a cure and sets out on a quest to save him, her tribe and what's left of their future. Along the way she faces broken hearts and family tragedy, mortal danger and all-out war--and much growing up for the girl who may have led herself and everyone she loves to their doom.

This issue of Granta is about time and about ghosts - the ghosts of our past selves, the shadows of past injuries, the ghosts of history, the ghosts in the machine. André Aciman remembers Rome Ahmet Altan on his life sentence Bernard Cooper on Ambien and sleep-eating Maggie O'Farrell on damaging her 'sacred' joint Vasily Grossman's Stalingrad, a companion to his epic Life and Fate Amos Oz in conversation with Shira Hadad Inigo Thomas on the fall of Singapore PLUS NEW FICTION from Anne Carson, Steven Dunn, Sheila Heti, Eugene Lim, Sandra Newman, Maria Reva and Jess Row POETRY from Cortney Lamar Charleston and Jana Prikryl PHOTOGRAPHY from Monika Bulaj, with an introduction by Janine di Giovanni

A literary scholar who is an adult adoptee delves into one of the enduring themes of literature--the child raised by other parents

‘He slipped his hand between my legs. I froze. I was throbbing. What would happen if he touched it?’ Imagine if you asked your wolf shifter best friend to pretend to be your fiancé and one night while sharing a bed, your naked body reacted to his touch. ______ I’m not a wolf shifter but all of my friends are. The only thing magical about me is the chemistry I had with the hot football player from our university who asked to marry me. We dated for two weeks before he popped the question... and then broke my heart a week later. After that d-bag ripped my heart out, it was my wolf shifter best friend, Titus, who came to the rescue. I needed someone to pretend to be my fiancé at a family event and asked him. You ever share a bed with a wolf shifter? When he’s sleeping half naked next to you, it’s impossible not to think about him using your virginal body to break your headboard. But he’s my best friend and means everything to me. I couldn’t ruin things with him. Besides, he’s in the middle of a fight for the life of his pack. The last thing he needs to worry about is the suspicious circumstances behind my ex-fiancé’s actions and how they relate to a supernatural legacy I didn’t know my family has. It’s enough to make me think there was more to my grandmother’s death than anyone is telling me. Maybe if I help Titus defeat the fae that’s suppressing his pack, he could help me figure out why people have died over my family’s land. And if his chiseled wolf shifter body finds itself wrapped around mine in the meantime, maybe I’ll get everything I ever wanted. The question is, how do I do it without again breaking my heart?