In THE FRENZY, Joyce Carol Oates plunges us into the lives of her characters at moments of crisis and confusion, when much of what they understand about themselves and those they love comes undone. A young woman on a supposedly romantic weekend trip to Cape May, New Jersey, turns the tables on her older, married lover. A freak bicycle accident on a bridge haunts one family for decades. A girl jealous of her popular cousin discovers she is the lucky one. A widow waits at her riverside house for her dead husband's return. A young man hiking in the woods comes upon a couple in a heated, possibly violent argument. Should he intervene?

Reeling from a very recent divorce, Frankie has moved into a glamorous London neighborhood. This is a new chapter in her life. She’s decided to put down roots with her beautiful Persian cat, Blue. But little doubts about her perfect new life start to grow, and when Blue returns one night from slipping into places he shouldn’t, Frankie’s concerns solidify. Two words are roughly scratched into his collar: help me. Unsettled and unwilling to ignore the incident, Frankie roots out an old unused “cat cam” collar. What slowly begins as a voyeuristic fascination with her neighbors and the secrets they’re hiding soon turns into a perilous quest for the truth that threatens to bring untold terrors to her doorstep.

Reporter Clarence Thomas Jr. is looking for a great story, former country music teen star Faith Spack has parlayed her fame into a job at the White House, and the two-term incumbent president is campaigning for a constitutionally dubious third term. After an outbreak at a campaign rally, a mysterious new pandemic of “weeping sickness” sweeps the nation. Desperate to retain power, the president enlists the mystical pro wrestler Rasputin to help ensure his reelection and guarantee additional seasons of his presidential reality TV show, “The Real West Wing.” But as Rasputin’s appeal threatens to exceed the president’s, and the wrestler’s supposedly supernatural powers start to seem like the real thing, the campaign finds itself trapped in a spandex-clad destiny no number of executive orders can control.

In this spirited and emotionally resonant collection, award-winning novelist Ruth Ozeki turns her singular gaze to the short story, exploring childhood ambition, youthful desire, midlife reinvention, and the unsparing clarity of old age. A college student falls for her professor and learns to transmute longing into language. A disquieted husband watches with tenderness and unease as the ghost of his wife’s ambition roams the woods outside their home. A long-deceased Beat poet hijacks the mind of a young publishing assistant during a sales meeting, railing against the state of modern literature. A curious grandmother creates a fake online dating profile to spy on her granddaughter’s romantic life --- and sets in motion a deception she can’t control.

In the winter of 1967, the official account of the Kennedy assassination was beginning to unravel. A scattered group of Americans had pointed to major problems with the report prepared by President Johnson’s handpicked Warren Commission. Many of the most serious criticisms of the government’s work came from a source that surprised some: women who, within the community of critics, outnumbered the men two to one. Politicians and reporters dismissed these women, referring to them as “scavengers” and suggesting they were eccentrics with murder-mystery fixations or crushes on the deceased President Kennedy. But Kaitlyn Tiffany resurrects the story of Maggie Field, Shirley Martin and Sylvia Meagher, whose collaboration and friendship reshaped both their own lives and our national memory.

Steven Hammer was once a literary star. Now, his career is floundering, his marriage to a high-powered woman is crumbling, and the only bright spot in his life is Astrid, the Norwegian au pair who cares for their children --- and reveres his neglected novels. But what begins as a secret infatuation soon spirals into a scandal that makes them both infamous. As a headline-grabbing trial captivates the world with a salacious story of sex, power and betrayal, Steven must confront the wreckage he’s created --- and the deeper insecurities that fueled it. Is Astrid an innocent young woman caught up in a case beyond her control, or a calculating femme fatale? And how far will he go, driven by desperation and obsession, for her professed love?

Janey Carter has a lot to be grateful for, including a home by the sea in the Scottish isles. But since her husband left, her confidence has taken a nosedive. And then, out of the blue, her 30-year-old daughter, Essie, announces she’s moving back home. Essie has just lost her job, she can’t afford her rent in Edinburgh, and her boyfriend isn’t ready to commit. No sooner is Essie back under her mother’s roof than an unusual opportunity pops up: the shabby and unloved Seaside Cottages next door come up for sale. Janey has some experience renovating the island’s famous stone fisherman’s cottages, and Essie needs something to do. Mother and daughter slowly bond over the shared challenge, which delivers some much-needed revelations for Essie and offers Janey a surprise second chance at love as well.

Valencia receives troubling news that her brother has gone missing. Her fellow Assassins Anonymous members --- Mark, Astrid and Booker --- offer to watch her baby girl, Lucia, while she's gone. Shortly after Valencia leaves, Mark is summoned to the lair of Zmeya, a Russian mob boss calling in a deadly favor. She wants him to kill Astrid. Mark refuses, but Zmeya reveals that she knows the identity of Mark’s ex-girlfriend…and his son. Either Astrid goes, or they do. Meanwhile, Lucia spikes a dangerously high fever, and when Booker and Astrid take her to urgent care, they realize too late that their fabricated identities are a real liability. Suddenly the splintered group is on the run from both the Russian mob and the police as they try to find refuge in a city full of surveillance cameras --- all without killing anyone.

Val Caruso, Alex Reed and June Kennerson come from completely different worlds. Val is a tough-talking private investigator; Alex is reticent, nervous and on the run from her past; and June is an athlete turned housewife whose true love is her pup. When Val is hired by June’s husband to find out if June is cheating on him, it sets these three women on a collision course. Amid a colorful cast of characters who spend time at the shabby but beloved Hamilton Dog Park, they find they have more in common than they thought. But when their secrets catch up with them, will their newfound friendships be able to withstand the pressure? Or will they find themselves in the doghouse?

Ever since her father broke her heart when she was nine, Julia Heimdahl has tried to be good company for bad men: a jovial drinking companion, an easygoing, witty non-complainer, one of the boys. Now a literary novelist in late middle age and late mid-career, she is at a moment of crisis, although she doesn’t know it yet. GOOD COMPANY takes place over the course of a weekend-long book festival at Baldwin College, which happens to be Julia’s alma mater, where she has come to promote her recently published memoir. She’s been placed on a panel with a fellow memoirist named Ellis Blackwell, a man so outrageously flirtatious and fawningly flattering that Julia is almost too disarmed to recognize how dangerous he is. 

Buzz Busby’s move to Washington, DC, in 1951 helped launch bluegrass in the nation’s capital while the intensity of his mandolin playing drew raves for its unrelenting pace and innovative style. Kip Lornell and Tom Mindte draw on interviews and some 50 hours of Busby speaking about his life to tell the story of a largely forgotten bluegrass virtuoso. Busby and his band, the Bayou Boys, stood front and center on a mid-1950s DC-area TV show that, though short-lived, catalyzed the formation of the city’s bluegrass community. Time with the Louisiana Hayride and classic, if little-heard, bluegrass sides like “Lonesome Wind” seemed to promise a bright future. But a devastating car wreck and a host of legal and personal troubles triggered a long decline into drug and alcohol abuse that undermined Busby’s career.