Treat Us Like Dogs And We Will Become Wolves

“An intellectual page-turner” set in a secretive countercultural community by the author of The Beans of Egypt, Maine (O, The Oprah Magazine). It’s the height of summer 1999, when local Maine newspaper the Record Sun receives numerous tipoffs from anonymous callers warning of violence, weapons stockpiling, and rampant child abuse at the nearby homeschool on Heart’s Content Road. Hungry to break into serious journalism, Ivy Morelli sets out to meet the mysterious leader of the homeschool, Gordon St. Onge—referred to by many as “The Prophet.” Soon, Ivy ingratiates herself into the sprawling Settlement, a self-sufficient counterculture community that many locals suspect to be a wild cult. Despite her initial skepticism—not to mention the Settlement’s ever-growing group of pregnant teenage girls—Ivy finds herself irresistibly drawn to Gordon. Then, a newcomer—a gifted, disturbed young girl with wild orange hair—joins the community, and falls into a complicated relationship with the charismatic Prophet. When the Record Sun finally runs its piece on the leader of the Settlement, lives will be changed both within and beyond the community, in this novel by a writer described by the New York Times Book Review as “a James Joyce of the backcountry, a Proust of rural society.”

Welcome to the world of Calvin, an unusually perceptive and astute canine with great insight and a hint of rogue, whose keen observation skills work overtime on society and culture, philosophy, and theology.

A pioneering canine behaviorist draws on cutting-edge research to show that a single, simple trait--the capacity to love--is what makes dogs such perfect companions for humans, and to explain how we can better reciprocate their affection.

The PEN New England Award–winning author returns to Egypt, Maine, where revolution is brewing in a rural compound as the twenty-first century approaches. It’s September 1999, and Gordon St. Onge, known as “The Prophet”, presides over his controversial Settlement in rural Maine. It is rumored to be a cult, where his many wives and children live off the land and off the grid. The newest member, fifteen year old Brianna Vandermast, is fired up and ready for change. Forming her own militia, Bree spreads her vision by writing “The Recipe”, an incendiary revolutionary document that winds up in the hands of wealthy elites—including one who is about to have a fateful encounter with Gordon. A chance drinking session during an airport layover brings Gordon together with multinational CEO Bruce Hummer. Bruce hands Gordon a mysterious brass key which has the potential to spark the unrest that is stirring in Egypt, Maine. As word of “The Recipe” spreads, myriad factions from across the country arrive at The Settlement wanting to make Gordon their poster boy. Gordon soon finds himself at the center of an uprising, the consequences of which no one can predict.

A novel of a down-and-out New England family that “seizes the reader on its opening page with . . . a knock-about country humor unmistakably its own” (Newsweek). There are families like the Beans all over America. They live on the wrong side of town in mobile homes strung with Christmas lights all year round. The women are often pregnant, the men drunk and just out of jail, and the children too numerous to count. In this novel that “pulses with kinetic energy,” we meet the God-fearing Earlene Pomerleau, and experience her obsession with the whole swarming Bean tribe (Newsweek). There is cousin Rubie, a boozer and a brawler; tall Aunt Roberta, the earth mother surrounded by countless clinging babies; and Beal, sensitive, often gentle, but doomed by the violence within him. In The Beans of Egypt, Maine, Carolyn Chute—whose jobs included waitress, chicken factory worker, and hospital floor scrubber before gaining renown as a prize-winning novelist—creates “a fictional world so vivid and compelling that one feels at a loss when it ends. The Beans belong with the Snopes clan of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, with Erskine Caldwell’s white Southerners, and with the rural blacks of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple” (San Jose Mercury News).

The author of the critically acclaimed, award-winning debut novel, Lamb returns with “a story of haunted histories and broken promises” (O, The Oprah Magazine, Must-Read Book of the Summer). Set on the Colorado high plains, the town of Lions is nearly deserted. Built to be a glorious city, it was never fit for farming, mining, trading, or any of the industries its pioneers imagined. The Walkers have been settled on its barren terrain for generations—a simple family in a town still enthralled by promises of bigger, better, and brighter. But when a stranger appears, his unsettling presence sets off a chain reaction that will change the fates of everyone he encounters. When the patriarch John Walker dies, his son Gordon must choose between leaving for college with his girlfriend, Leigh, or staying with his family to look after their failing welding shop—and carry on a mysterious family legacy. While Leigh is desperate to make a better life in the world beyond Lions, Gordon is strangely hesitant to leave it behind. And as more families abandon the town, it seems that listening to reason must come at the cost of betraying his own heart. “Nadzam weaves a strange and mesmerizing story” that explores ambition and an American obsession with self-improvement, the responsibilities we have to ourselves and each other, as well as the everyday illusions that pass for a life worth living (Publishers Weekly).

Interconnected stories of women of all ages. “If the fiction of Stephen King and Alice Munro had a literary love child, it might look like this” (The Washington Post). Moving along the Maine coast and beyond, the stories in Goodnight, Beautiful Women bring us into the sultry, mysterious inner lives of New England women and girls as they navigate the dangers and struggles of their outer worlds. With novelistic breadth and a quicksilver emotional intelligence, Noyes explores the ruptures and vicissitudes of growing up and growing old, and shines a light on our most uncomfortable impulses while masterfully charting the depths of our murky desires. A woman watches her husband throw—one by one—their earthly possessions into the local quarry, before vanishing himself; two girls from very different social classes find themselves deep in the throes of a punishing affair; a motherless teenager is sexually awakened in the aftermath of a local trauma; and a woman’s guilt from a childhood lie about her intellectually disabled cousin reverberates into her married years. Dark and brilliant, rhythmic and lucid, Goodnight, Beautiful Women marks the arrival of a fearless and unique new young voice in American fiction. “Anna Noyes’s stunning debut collection concerns girls and women struggling to break away, dealing with burdens like mental illness and neglect that threaten to transform and define them.” —The Wall Street Journal, “The Season’s Most Exciting Fiction Reads”

"Like Bastard Out of Carolina, ffitch's electrifying debut novel is a paean to independence and a protest against the materialism of our age." —O: The Oprah Magazine "Delightfully raucous." —Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal Helen arrives in Appalachian Ohio full of love and her boyfriend’s ideas for living off the land. Too soon, with winter coming, he calls it quits. Helped by Rudy—her government-questioning, wisdom-spouting, seasonal-affective-disordered boss—and a neighbor couple, Helen makes it to spring. Those neighbors, Karen and Lily, are awaiting the arrival of their first child, a boy, which means their time at the Women’s Land Trust must end. So Helen invites the new family to throw in with her—they’ll split the work and the food, build a house, and make a life that sustains them, if barely, for years. Then young Perley decides he wants to go to school. And Rudy sets up a fruit-tree nursery on the pipeline easement edging their land. The outside world is brought clamoring into their makeshift family. Set in a region known for its independent spirit, Stay and Fight shakes up what it means to be a family, to live well, to make peace with nature and make deals with the system. It is a protest novel that challenges our notions of effective action. It is a family novel that refuses to limit the term. And it is a marvel of storytelling that both breaks with tradition and celebrates it. Best of all, it is full of flawed, cantankerous, flesh-and-blood characters who remind us that conflict isn't the end of love, but the real beginning. Absorbingly spun, perfectly voiced, and disruptively political, Madeline ffitch's Stay and Fight forces us to reimagine an Appalachia—and an America—we think we know. And it takes us, laughing and fighting, into a new understanding of what it means to love and to be free.