Adult

From the acclaimed author of STORIES OF YOUR LIFE AND OTHERS --- the basis for the Academy Award-nominated film Arrival --- comes a groundbreaking new collection of short fiction. These are tales that tackle some of humanity’s oldest questions along with new quandaries only Ted Chiang could imagine. In “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate,” a portal through time forces a fabric seller in ancient Baghdad to grapple with past mistakes and second chances. In “Exhalation,” an alien scientist makes a shocking discovery with ramifications that are literally universal. In “Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom,” the ability to glimpse into alternate universes necessitates a radically new examination of the concepts of choice and free will.

The New York Yankees have won 27 world championships and 40 American League pennants, both world records. They have 26 members in the Hall of Fame. Yet some 25 years ago, from 1989 to 1992, the Yankees were a pitiful team at the bottom of the standings, sitting on a 14-year World Series drought and a 35 percent drop in attendance. To make the statistics worse, their mercurial, bombastic owner was banned from baseball. But out of these ashes emerged a modern Yankees dynasty, a juggernaut built on the sly, a brilliant mix of personalities, talent and ambition. In CHUMPS TO CHAMPS, award-winning sportswriter Bill Pennington reveals a grand tale of revival.

FBI Agent Kate O'Hare has been assigned to find a Silicon Valley billionaire, known as the Big Kahuna, who has mysteriously disappeared. But no one seems particularly keen on helping. His 26-year-old adult actress wife-turned Instagram model wife and his shady Czech business partner are more interested in gaining control of his company. The only lead Kate and her partner, Nicholas Fox, have is the Kahuna's drop-out son, who's living the dream in Hawaii. To get close to him, Kate and Nick go undercover as a married couple in the big wave, bohemian, surfer community of Paia, Maui. If they don't catch a break soon, waves aren't the only thing Kate is going to be shredding (or bedding).

Dr. Seuss is a classic American icon. Whimsical and wonderful, his work has defined our childhoods and the childhoods of our own children. Theodor Geisel, however, had a second, more radical side. It is there that the allure and fascination of his Dr. Seuss alter ego begins. He had a successful career as an advertising man and then as a political cartoonist, his personal convictions appearing, not always subtly, throughout his books. Remember the environmentalist of THE LORAX? Geisel was a complicated man on an important mission. He introduced generations to the wonders of reading while teaching young people about empathy and how to treat others well.

The Stewart sisters, pragmatic Lorena and chimerical Elise, are bound together not only by their isolation on the prairie of early 1900s Oklahoma, but also by their deep emotional reliance on each other. They’re all they’ve got...until Gus McQueen arrives in Lone Wolf. An inexperienced first-time teacher, Gus is challenged by the sisters’ wit and ingenuity. Then one impulsive decision and a cataclysmic blizzard trap Elise and her horse on the prairie --- and the balance of everything is forever changed.

Oliver Wendell Holmes escaped death twice as a young Union officer in the Civil War. He lived ever after with unwavering moral courage, unremitting scorn for dogma and an insatiable intellectual curiosity. During his nearly three decades on the Supreme Court, he wrote a series of opinions that would prove prophetic in securing freedom of speech, protecting the rights of criminal defendants, and ending the Court’s reactionary resistance to social and economic reforms. As a pioneering legal scholar, Holmes revolutionized the understanding of common law. As an enthusiastic friend, he wrote thousands of letters brimming with an abiding joy in fighting the good fight. Drawing on many previously unpublished letters and records, Stephen Budiansky offers the fullest portrait yet of this pivotal American figure.

Louis has been forlorn since his wife of 37 years left him, his father passed, and he impulsively retired from his job in anticipation of an inheritance check that may not come. On a routine trip to Walgreens to pick up his diabetes medication, he stops at a sign advertising free dogs. Harry Davidson, a man who claims to have more than a dozen canines, offers only one: an overweight mixed breed named Layla. Without any rational explanation, Louis feels compelled to take the dog home, and the two become inseparable. He is dumbfounded to find himself in love --- bursting into song with improvised jingles, exploring new locales, and reevaluating what he once considered the fixed horizons of his life.

The passing of Chinese immigrant Wong Chut King would have been unremarkable if a city health officer hadn’t noticed a swollen black lymph node on his groin --- a sign of bubonic plague. Empowered by racist pseudoscience, officials rushed to quarantine Chinatown while doctors examined Wong’s tissue for telltale bacteria. If the devastating disease was not contained, San Francisco would become the American epicenter of an outbreak that had already claimed 10 million lives worldwide. As a cover-up was mounted to obscure the threat, ending the career of one of the most brilliant scientists in the nation in the process, it fell to federal health officer Rupert Blue to save a city that refused to be rescued.

Lily Bushwold thought she’d found the antidote to endless foster care and group homes --- a teaching job in Cochabamba, Bolivia --- but unfortunately that gig falls through. Tired of hustling and already world-weary, crazy love finds her in the form she least expected: Omar, a savvy, handsome local man who’d abandoned his life as a hunter to try his hand at city life. When Omar learns that a jaguar has killed his four-year-old nephew in Ayachero, he gives Lily a choice: Stay alone in the unforgiving city, or travel to the last in a string of ever-more-isolated river towns in the jungles of Bolivia. She follows Omar to this ruthless new world of lawless poachers, bullheaded missionaries, and desperate indigenous tribes driven to the brink of extinction.