Adult

The white elephant looms large over the town of Willard Park. A newly constructed behemoth of a home, it towers over the quaint houses, including Allison and Ted Miller's tiny hundred-year-old home. When owner Nick Cox cuts down the Millers’ precious red maple --- in an effort to make his unsightly property more appealing to buyers --- their once serene town becomes a battleground. Meanwhile, Allison finds herself compulsively drawn to the man who threatens to upend her quietly organized life. A lawyer with a pot habit and a serious mid-life crisis skirts his responsibilities. And in a quest for popularity, a teenage girl gets caught up in a not-so-harmless prank. Newcomers and longtime residents alike clash in conflicting pursuits of the American Dream, with trees mysteriously uprooted, fingers pointed and lines drawn.

For Damon Young, existing while Black is an extreme sport. The act of possessing black skin while searching for space to breathe in America is enough to induce a ceaseless state of angst where questions such as “How should I react here, as a professional black person?” and “Will this white person’s potato salad kill me?” are forever relevant. WHAT DOESN’T KILL YOU MAKES YOU BLACKER chronicles Young’s efforts to survive while battling and making sense of the various neuroses his country has given him.

The story of the 1969 New York Mets’ season has long since entered sports lore as one of the most remarkable of all time. But beyond the “miracle” is a compelling narrative of an unlikely collection of players and the hallowed manager who inspired them to greatness. Future Hall of Fame ace Tom Seaver snagged the biggest headlines, but the enduring richness of the story lies in the core of a team comprised of untested youngsters, lightly regarded veterans, and four Southern-born African-American stalwarts who came of age in the shadow of Jackie Robinson. Renowned sports journalist Wayne Coffey brings to life a moment when a championship could descend on a city like magic, and when a baseball legend was authored one inning at a time.

These 15 exquisitely honed stories reveal Amy Hempel at her most compassionate and spirited, as she introduces characters, lonely and adrift, searching for connection. In “A Full-Service Shelter,” a volunteer at a dog shelter tirelessly, devotedly cares for dogs on a list to be euthanized. In “Greed,” a spurned wife examines her husband’s affair with a glamorous, older married woman. And in “Cloudland,” the longest story in the collection, a woman reckons with the choice she made as a teenager to give up her newborn infant. Quietly dazzling, these stories are replete with moments of revelation and transcendence and with Hempel’s singular, startling, inimitable sentences.

Late one spring night in California, Driss Guerraoui --- father, husband, business owner, Moroccan immigrant --- is hit and killed by a speeding car. The aftermath of his death brings together a diverse cast of characters: Guerraoui's daughter, Nora, a jazz composer returning to the small town in the Mojave she thought she'd left for good; her mother, Maryam, who still pines for her life in the old country; Efraín, an undocumented witness whose fear of deportation prevents him from coming forward; Jeremy, an old friend of Nora’s and an Iraqi War veteran; Coleman, a detective who is slowly discovering her son’s secrets; Anderson, a neighbor trying to reconnect with his family; and the murdered man himself. As these characters tell their stories, connections among them emerge.

1904. On the banks of the Zambezi River, a few miles from the majestic Victoria Falls, there is a colonial settlement called The Old Drift. In a smoky room at the hotel across the river, an Old Drifter named Percy M. Clark, foggy with fever, makes a mistake that entangles the fates of an Italian hotelier and an African busboy. This sets off a cycle of unwitting retribution between three Zambian families (black, white, brown) as they collide and converge over the course of the century, into the present and beyond. As the generations pass, their lives --- their triumphs, errors, losses and hopes --- emerge through a panorama of history, fairy tale, romance and science fiction.

Early on the morning of May 6, 1840, the elderly Lord William Russell was found in his London house with his throat so deeply cut that his head was nearly severed. The crime soon had everyone, including Queen Victoria, feverishly speculating about motives and methods. But when the prime suspect claimed to have been inspired by a sensational crime novel, it sent shock waves through literary London and drew both Dickens and Thackeray into the fray. Could a novel really lead someone to kill?

Galactus, France’s answer to SpaceX, has just launched a communications satellite into orbit, but the payload actually harbors a frightening weapon: a nuclear-triggered electromagnetic pulse. When the satellite is in position, Galactus’s second-in-command, Dr. Nevaeh Patel, will have the power to lay waste to the world with an EMP. A former astronaut, Patel believes she is following the directions of the Numen, aliens who saved her life when she space-walked outside the International Space Station. Special Agents Nicholas Drummond and Michaela Caine must stop the EMP that would wreak havoc on communication and electronic systems on Earth, resulting in chaos and anarchy.

Larry is the secular son in a family of Orthodox Brooklyn Jews. When his father dies, it’s his responsibility to recite the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, every day for 11 months. To the horror and dismay of his sister, Larry refuses --- imperiling the fate of his father’s soul. To appease her, Larry hatches an ingenious if cynical plan, hiring a stranger through a website called kaddish.com to recite the prayer and shepherd his father’s soul safely to rest.

Using the 2018 baseball season as the backdrop, INSIDE THE EMPIRE gives readers the real, unvarnished “straight-from-the-gut” truth from Brian Cashman, Aaron Boone, Giancarlo Stanton, C.C. Sabathia --- even Hal Steinbrenner and Randy Levine --- and many more. This is baseball’s version of HBO’s award-winning NFL series “Hard Knocks.” Bob Klapisch and Paul Solotaroff take you deep into the Yankees clubhouse, their dugout and the front office, and pull back the curtain so that every fan can see what really goes on.