Adult

In her memoir, Carey Perloff offers a unique perspective of being a woman in a male-dominated profession, as the Artistic Director of San Francisco's legendary American Conservatory Theater. Whether reminiscing about her turbulent first years as a young woman taking over an insolvent theater in crisis and transforming it into a thriving, world-class performance space, or ruminating on the potential for its future, Perloff takes on critical questions about arts education, cultural literacy, gender disparity, leadership, and power. 

A cautious, reserved professor of Spanish Literature, Maria has no idea that her quiet life is about to be turned upside down. When she's asked to review the work of a young, ambitious first-time novelist, she meets Daniel.  Theirs is the story of an intense and impossible love, set in today's Havana, a city where there can be no plans, where chance is the order of the day and a fierce sense of loyalty and pride coexists with the desire to live beyond the island's isolation.

What does it really mean to be a man? MAN ALIVE engages an extraordinary personal story to tell a universal one—how we all struggle to create ourselves, and how this struggle often requires risks. Far from a transgender transition tell-all, MAN ALIVE grapples with the larger questions of legacy and forgiveness, love and violence, agency and invisibility.

An older woman recognizes the body of an unidentified woman as Lisemette, a child she once cared for in the state mental institution many years ago. Lisemette, like the other children in the institution, was abandoned by her family and branded a "forgotten girl." But Louise Rick, the new commander of the Missing Persons Department, soon discovers something more disturbing: Lisemette had a twin, and both girls were issued death certificates more than 30 years ago.

In Greg Baxter’s second novel, his follow-up to 2013’s THE APARTMENT, an unnamed narrator waits in Munich’s fog-bound airport with his father and a US consul to transport the corpse of the expatriate narrator’s sister to America. She died alone of starvation in Berlin three weeks earlier. The book consists of flashbacks that paint a portrait of one family’s struggles and of a young man trying to come to terms with decisions he has made.

Through Frank Bascombe, we’ve witnessed the aspirations, sorrows, longings, achievements and failings of an American life in the twilight of the 20th century. Now, in LET ME BE FRANK WITH YOU, author Richard Ford reinvents Bascombe in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. In four narratives, Bascombe (and Ford) attempts to reconcile, interpret and console a world undone by calamity.

Thomas Mann's last great novel is a modern reworking of the Faust legend, in which Germany sells its soul to the Devil. Mann's protagonist, the composer Adrian Leverkühn, is the flower of German culture, a brilliant, isolated, overreaching figure, his radical new music a breakneck game played by art at the very edge of impossibility. In return for twenty-four years of unparalleled musical accomplishment, he bargains away his soul--and the ability to love his fellow man.