Adult

Sam Lipsyte’s second collection of short stories features the characters you would expect to see in a Lipsyte book: wise-cracking slackers from New York and New Jersey, most of them male, with drug and commitment problems. But you also get well-rounded female characters, touching moments between dying parents and their adult progeny, and surprisingly poetic writing. THE FUN PARTS fulfills the promise of VENUS DRIVE, Lipsyte’s vivid first collection.

William H. Gass’s new novel moves from World War II Europe to a small town in postwar Ohio. In a series of variations, Gass gives us a mosaic of a life --- futile, comic, anarchic --- arranged in an array of vocabularies, altered rhythms, forms and tones, and broken pieces with music as both theme and structure, set in the key of middle C.

From an early age, Margaret Fuller provoked and dazzled New England’s intellectual elite. Her famous Conversations changed women’s sense of how they could think and live; her editorship of the Transcendentalist literary journal The Dial shaped American Romanticism. Megan Marshall tells the story of how Fuller, who was tired of Boston, accepted Horace Greeley’s offer to be the New-York Tribune’s front-page columnist.

In an ancient time, in a faraway land, a young woman named Aoife is allowed a rare apprenticeship to become her kingdom’s mapmaker, tasked with charting the entire domain. Traveling beyond its borders, she finds a secretive people who live in peace, among great wealth. They claim to protect a mythic treasure, one connected to the creation of the world. When Aoife reports their existence to her kingdom, the community is targeted as a threat.

When a trip to the post office brings a letter addressed to her old detective agency asking her to locate a missing Irish serving maid, Molly Murphy --- now Molly Sullivan --- figures it couldn’t hurt to at least ask around. On the same day, Molly learns that five babies have been kidnapped in the past month. What she uncovers will lead her on a terrifying journey through all levels of society, putting her life --- and that of her baby --- in danger.

Kate has just graduated from Yale and is eager to pursue her dreams as a fledgling painter. When she receives a job offer to work as the assistant to Lydia Schell, a famous American photographer in Paris, she immediately accepts. As Kate rediscovers Paris and her roots there, while trying to fit into Lydia’s glamorous and complicated family, she begins to question the kindness of the people to whom she is so drawn as well as her own motives for wanting them to love her. 

A brilliant and dangerous group of scientists are determined to save the world from the perils of overpopulation by releasing into the world a brutal virus. Having just arrived at the research station at the earth's southernmost tip, returning hero Hallie Leland has seven days to stop them from putting their plan into action.

For nearly two years, American Elder McLeod has spent his days in Brazil studying the Bible and the Book of Mormon. His new partner is Elder Passos, a Brazilian who found salvation and solace in the church after his mother’s early death. When a beautiful woman and her husband offer the missionaries a chance to be heard and put all of their practice to good use, they must confront their own long-held beliefs and doubts, and the simmering tensions at the heart of their friendship.

Sam Dolan is a young man coming to terms with his life in the process and aftermath of making his first film. He has a difficult relationship with his father, B-movie actor Booth Dolan --- a boisterous, opinionated, lying lothario whose screen legacy falls somewhere between cult hero and pathetic. Unraveling the tumultuous, decades-spanning story of the Dolan family’s friends, lovers, and adversaries, Double Feature is about letting go of everything --- regret, resentment, dignity, moving pictures, the dead --- and taking it again from the top.

Professor David Ullman doesn’t believe in demons, though his extensive knowledge of the literature of the demonic --- especially Milton’s PARADISE LOST --- has won him wide acclaim. When he is lured to Venice on a mysterious journey, he loses his 12-year-old daughter to an ancient evil that will force him to come face to face with all he knows about the underworld and the faith required to defeat it.