Gathering pieces written between 2003 and 2020, LANGUAGES OF TRUTH chronicles Salman Rushdie’s intellectual engagement with a period of momentous cultural shifts. Immersing the reader in a wide variety of subjects, he delves into the nature of storytelling as a human need, and what emerges is, in myriad ways, a love letter to literature itself. Rushdie explores what the work of authors from Shakespeare and Cervantes to Samuel Beckett, Eudora Welty and Toni Morrison mean to him, whether on the page or in person. He delves deep into the nature of “truth,” revels in the vibrant malleability of language and the creative lines that can join art and life, and looks anew at migration, multiculturalism and censorship.

Set along the East Coast from Maine to Key West, Ann Beattie’s new collection explores unconventional friendships, frustrated loves, mortality and aging. One theme of THE ACCOMPLISHED GUEST is people paying visits or receiving visitors, traveling to see old friends, the joys and tolls of hosting company (and of being hosted). The occasion might be a wedding, a birthday, a reunion, an annual Christmas party, or another opportunity to gather and attempt to bond with biological relatives or chosen families. In some stories, as in life, what begins as a benign social event becomes a situation played for high stakes.

Each of these 11 stories, many of which were first published in The New Yorker, burrows deep into the often awkward and hilarious misunderstandings that pass between strangers and lovers alike, and that turn ordinary lives upside down. Joshua Ferris shows to what lengths we mortals go to coax human meaning from our very modest time on earth, an effort that skews ever-more desperately in the direction of redemption. The stories in THE DINNER PARTY are about lives changed forever when the reckless gives way to possibility and the ordinary cedes ground to mystery.

The characters in these four expansive stories are a departure from the blue-collar denizens that populate so many of Richard Russo’s novels, and all are bound together by parallel moments of reckoning with their pasts. In “Horseman,” a young professor confronts an undergraduate plagiarist --- as well as her own regrets. In “Intervention,” a realtor facing a serious medical prognosis finds himself in his late father’s shadow. “Voice” gives us a semiretired academic who is conned by his estranged brother into joining a group tour of the Venice Biennale. And “Milton and Marcus” takes us into a lapsed novelist’s attempt to rekindle his screenwriting career --- a career that depends wholly on two Hollywood icons (one living, one dead).

Here are two sisters: One trades self-respect for a wealthy husband, while the other finds in the pages of a book a kindred spirit who changes her life. The janitor at the local school has his faith tested in an encounter with an isolated man he has come to help; a grown daughter longs for mother love even as she comes to accept her mother’s happiness in a foreign country; and the adult Lucy Barton (the heroine of MY NAME IS LUCY BARTON, Elizabeth Strout's celebrated New York Times bestseller) returns to visit her siblings after 17 years of absence.

HOURGLASS is an inquiry into how marriage is transformed by time --- abraded, strengthened, shaped in miraculous and sometimes terrifying ways by accident and experience. With courage and relentless honesty, Dani Shapiro opens the door to her house, her marriage and her heart, and invites us to witness her own marital reckoning --- a reckoning in which she confronts both the life she dreamed of and the life she made, and struggles to reconcile the girl she was with the woman she has become.

Joan Didion has always kept notebooks --- of overheard dialogue, interviews, drafts of essays, copies of articles. SOUTH AND WEST gives us two extended excerpts from notebooks she kept in the 1970s. “Notes on the South” traces a road trip that she and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, took through Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. Her acute observations about the small towns they pass through, her interviews with local figures, and their preoccupation with race, class and heritage suggest a South largely unchanged today. “California Notes” began as an assignment from Rolling Stone on the Patty Hearst trial. Though Didion never wrote the piece, the time she spent watching the trial in San Francisco triggered thoughts about the West and her own upbringing in Sacramento.

In a little dive in a small Israeli city, Dov Greenstein, a comedian a bit past his prime, is doing a night of standup. In the audience is a district court justice, Avishai Lazar, whom Dov knew as a boy, along with a few others who remember Dov as the awkward, scrawny kid who walked on his hands to confound the neighborhood bullies. Gradually, teetering between hilarity and hysteria, Dov's patter becomes a kind of memoir, taking us back into the terrors of his childhood. Finally, recalling his week at a military camp for youth --- where Lazar witnessed what became the central event of Dov's childhood --- Dov describes the indescribable while Lazar wrestles with his own part in the comedian's story of loss and survival.

In THE WORLD TO COME, Jim Shepard traverses both borders and centuries. Seamlessly inhabiting a multitude of disparate men and women, he gives voice to visionaries, pioneers and secret misfits --- from 19th-century explorers departing on one of the Arctic’s most nightmarish expeditions to 20th-century American military wives maintaining hope at home. Shepard’s characters confront everything from the emotional pitfalls of everyday life to colossal catastrophes, battling natural forces, the hazards of new technology, and their own implacable shortcomings.

George Washington’s Farewell Address was a prophetic letter from a “parting friend” to his fellow citizens about the forces he feared could destroy our democracy: hyper-partisanship, excessive debt and foreign wars. Once celebrated as civic scripture, more widely reprinted than the Declaration of Independence, the Farewell Address is now almost forgotten. However, its message remains starkly relevant. In WASHINGTON’S FAREWELL, John Avlon offers a stunning portrait of our first president and his battle to save America from self-destruction.