Adult

Glenn Frankel’s SHOOTING MIDNIGHT COWBOY tells the story of a modern classic that, by all accounts, should never have become one in the first place. The film’s boundary-pushing subject matter --- homosexuality, prostitution, sexual assault --- earned it an X rating when it first appeared in cinemas in 1969. For Midnight Cowboy, director John Schlesinger enlisted Jerome Hellman, a producer coming off his own recent flop and smarting from a failed marriage, and Waldo Salt, a formerly blacklisted screenwriter with a tortured past. The decision to shoot on location in New York, at a time when the city was approaching its gritty nadir, backfired when a sanitation strike filled Manhattan with garbage fires and fears of dysentery.

On the day she returns to active duty with the Serial Crimes Unit, Detective Inspector Anjelica Henley is called to a crime scene. Dismembered body parts from two victims have been found by the river. The modus operandi bears a striking resemblance to Peter Olivier, the notorious Jigsaw Killer, who has spent the past two years behind bars. When he learns that someone is co-opting his grisly signature --- the arrangement of victims’ limbs in puzzle-piece shapes --- he decides to take matters into his own hands. As the body count rises, DI Henley is faced with an unspeakable new threat. Can she apprehend the copycat killer before Olivier finds a way to get to him first? Or will she herself become the next victim?

Following her mother’s death, 14-year-old Ava is on a train heading to New Orleans, to stay with the grandmother she barely remembers. Lane is a well-known artist in the New Orleans art scene. She spends most of her days in a pot-smoke haze, sipping iced coffee, and painting, which has been her singular focus for years. Ava’s arrival unsettles Lane. The girl bears an uncanny resemblance to her daughter, from whom she was estranged before her death. Now her presence is dredging up painful and disturbing memories, which forces Lane to retreat even further into her own mind. As Ava and Lane attempt to form a bond, the oppressive heat and history of New Orleans bears down on them, forcing a reckoning neither of them are ready for.

When “The Fourth State of Matter,” her now famous piece about a workplace massacre at the University of Iowa, was published in The New Yorker, Jo Ann Beard immediately became one of the most influential writers in America, forging a path for a new generation of young authors willing to combine the dexterity of fiction with the rigors of memory and reportage, and in the process extending the range of possibility for the essay form. Now, with FESTIVAL DAYS, Beard brings us the culmination of her groundbreaking work. In these nine pieces, she captures both the small, luminous moments of daily existence and those instances when life and death hang in the balance.

In SARAHLAND, Sam Cohen explores the ways in which traditional stories have failed us, providing for its cast of Sarahs new origin stories, new ways to love the planet and those inhabiting it, and new possibilities for life itself. In one story, a Jewish college Sarah passively consents to a form-life in pursuit of an MRS degree and is swept into a culture of normalized sexual violence. Another reveals a version of Sarah finding pleasure --- and a new set of problems --- by playing dead for a wealthy necrophiliac. A Buffy-loving Sarah uses fan fiction to work through romantic obsession. As the collection progresses, Cohen explodes this search for self, insisting that we have more to resist and repair than our own personal narratives.

The Townhouse Bar, midtown, July 1992: The piano player seems to know every song ever written, and a man standing nearby is drinking a Scotch and water. The man strikes the piano player as forgettable. He looks bland and inconspicuous. Not at all what you think a serial killer looks like. But that’s what he is, and tonight he has his sights set on a gray-haired man. He will not be his first victim. Nor will he be his last. The Last Call Killer preyed upon gay men in New York in the ’80s and ’90s. Yet because of the sexuality of his victims, the sky-high murder rates and the AIDS epidemic, his murders have been almost entirely forgotten. LAST CALL tells the story of the Last Call Killer and the decades-long chase to find him.

On March 12, 2034, US Navy Commodore Sarah Hunt is on the bridge of her flagship, the guided missile destroyer USS John Paul Jones, conducting a routine freedom of navigation patrol in the South China Sea when her ship detects an unflagged trawler in clear distress, smoke billowing from its bridge. On that same day, US Marine aviator Major Chris "Wedge" Mitchell is flying an F35E Lightning over the Strait of Hormuz, testing a new stealth technology as he flirts with Iranian airspace. By the end of that day, Wedge will be an Iranian prisoner, and Sarah Hunt's destroyer will lie at the bottom of the sea, sunk by the Chinese Navy. In a single day, America's faith in its military's strategic pre-eminence is in tatters. A new, terrifying era is at hand.

Escape to worlds full of adventure and magic in the first-ever Terry Brooks short-story collection, featuring both new and fan-favorite stories from all three of his major literary worlds: Shannara, Magic Kingdom, and The Word and the Void. Here are heroes fighting new battles and struggling to conquer the ghosts of the past. Here are quests both small and far-reaching; heroism both intimate and vast. Here we learn of Garet Jax’s childhood, see how Allanon first located Shea Ohmsford, and follow an old wing-rider at the end of his life. Here we see Knights of the Word fighting demons within and without, and witness Ben Holiday and his daughter each trying to overcome the unique challenges that Landover offers.

The son of a struggling single mother, Jamie Conklin just wants an ordinary childhood. But Jamie is no ordinary child. Born with an unnatural ability that his mom urges him to keep secret, Jamie can see what no one else can see and learn what no one else can learn. But the cost of using this ability is higher than Jamie can imagine --- as he discovers when an NYPD detective draws him into the pursuit of a killer who has threatened to strike from beyond the grave.

In 1932, Roy Chapman Andrews, president of the men-only Explorers Club, boldly stated to hundreds of female students at Barnard College that "women are not adapted to exploration," and that women and exploration do not mix. He obviously didn't know a thing about either. THE GIRL EXPLORERS is the inspirational and untold story of the founding of the Society of Women Geographers --- an organization of adventurous female world explorers --- and how key members served as early advocates for human rights and paved the way for today's women scientists by scaling mountains, exploring the high seas, flying across the Atlantic, and recording the world through film, sculpture and literature.