These 15 stories, written from the 1960s to the early 21st century --- and selected, revised and placed in order by the author himself shortly before he died in 2015 --- are a testament to the genius of E. L. Doctorow. In “A House on the Plains,” a mother has a plan for financial independence, which may include murder. “Jolene: A Life” follows a teenager who escapes her home for Hollywood on a perilous quest for success. “Heist,” the account of an Episcopal priest coping with a crisis of faith, was expanded into the bestseller CITY OF GOD. “The Water Works,” about the underbelly of 1870s New York, grew into a brilliant novel. “Liner Notes: The Songs of Billy Bathgate” is a corollary to the renowned novel and includes Doctorow’s revisions.

Here is the dazzling saga of two women: the brilliant, bookish Elena and the fiery uncontainable Lila. In the fourth and final Neapolitan novel, both are adults; life’s great discoveries have been made, its vagaries and losses have been suffered. Through it all, the women’s friendship, examined in its every detail over the course of four books, remains the gravitational center of their lives.

The year 2015 marks several literary milestones: the centennial of Saul Bellow’s birth, the 10th anniversary of his death, and the publication of Zachary Leader’s much anticipated biography. Bellow, a Nobel Laureate, Pulitzer Prize winner and the only novelist to receive three National Book Awards, has long been regarded as one of America’s most cherished authors. Here, Benjamin Taylor, editor of the acclaimed SAUL BELLOW: LETTERS, presents lesser-known aspects of the iconic writer.

Mohsin Hamid’s stories are at once timeless and of-the-moment, and his themes are universal: love, language, ambition, power, corruption, religion, family and identity. In DISCONTENT AND ITS CIVILIZATIONS, he explores this terrain from a different angle in essays that deftly counterpoise the personal and the political, and are shot through with the same passion, imagination and breathtaking shifts of perspective that gives his fiction its unmistakable electric charge.

Once upon a time there was a king, and the king commissioned his favorite wizard to create a magic mirror. This mirror didn't show you your reflection. It showed you your soul --- it showed you who you really were. The wizard couldn't look at it without turning away. The king couldn't look at it. The courtiers couldn't look at it. A chestful of treasure was offered to anyone who could look at it for 60 seconds without turning away. And no one could.

Celebrated brain surgeon Thomas Eapen has been sitting on his porch, talking to dead relatives. At least that is the story his wife, Kamala, tells their daughter, Amina. Reluctantly Amina returns home and finds a situation that is far more complicated than her mother let on, with roots in a trip the family took to India 20 years earlier. Amina soon realizes that the only way she can help her father is by coming to terms with her family’s painful past.

The Lizzie Bennet Diaries is a year-long video diary project that chronicled Lizzie Bennet’s life as a 24-year-old grad student. When rich, handsome Bing Lee comes to town, along with his stuck-up friend William Darcy, things really start to get interesting for the Bennet sisters --- and for Lizzie’s viewers. Suddenly Lizzie --- who always considered herself a fairly normal young woman --- was a public figure. But not everything happened on-screen. Luckily for us, Lizzie kept a secret diary.

Why is it that Leonard Cohen receives the sort of reverence we reserve for a precious few living artists? Why are his songs, three or four decades after their original release, suddenly gracing the charts, blockbuster movie sound tracks, and television singing competitions? These are two of the questions at the heart of A BROKEN HALLELUJAH, a meditation on the singer, his music, and the ideas and beliefs at its core.

THREE BROTHERS follows the fortunes of Harry, Daniel and Sam Hanway, a trio of brothers born on a postwar council estate in Camden Town. Marked from the start by curious coincidence, each boy is forced to make his own way in the world --- a world of dodgy deals and big business, of criminal gangs and crooked landlords, of newspaper magnates, backbiters and petty thieves.

As a teen, Patience Bloom fell in love with Harlequin novels and imagined her life would turn out just like the heroines’ on the page. Years later, she moved to New York and found her dream job: editing romances for Harlequin. Bloom became an expert when it came to fictional love stories, but her dating life remained uninspired. Then one day, a real-life chance at romance made her wonder if what she’d been writing and editing all those years might be true.