Tricia is a shy newlywed, married to a rising attorney on loan to navy intelligence. Charlene is a practiced corporate spouse and mother of three. In Saigon in 1963, the two women form a wary alliance as they balance the era’s mandate to be “helpmeets” to their ambitious husbands with their own inchoate impulse to “do good” for the people of Vietnam. Sixty years later, Charlene’s daughter, spurred by an encounter with an aging Vietnam vet, reaches out to Tricia. Together, they look back at their time in Saigon, taking wry account of that pivotal year and of Charlene’s altruistic machinations. They discover how their own lives as women on the periphery have been shaped and burdened by the same sort of unintended consequences that followed America’s tragic interference in Southeast Asia.

Anthologized here for the first time, A HITCH IN TIME is a choice selection of Christopher Hitchens’ finest reviews, diary entries and essays --- along with a smattering of ferocious letters. Familiar bêtes noires --- Kennedy, Nixon, Kissinger and Clinton --- rub shoulders with lesser-known preoccupations: P.G. Wodehouse, Princess Margaret and, magisterially, Isaiah Berlin. Here is a banquet of entertaining stories ranging from his thoughts on Salman Rushdie to being spanked by Margaret Thatcher in The House of Lords and the night he took his son to the Oscars. The broad scope and high caliber of Hitchens’ essays allows his work to transcend the occasion for which it was written and continues to be essential reading.

The late Anthony Veasna So’s debut story collection, AFTERPARTIES, was a landmark publication. And he was equally known for his comic, soulful essays, published in n+1, The New Yorker and The Millions. SONGS ON ENDLESS REPEAT gathers those essays together, along with previously unpublished fiction. Written with razor-sharp wit and an unflinching eye, the essays examine his youth in California, the lives of his refugee parents, his intimate friendships, loss, pop culture and more. And in linked fiction following three Cambodian American cousins who stand to inherit their late aunt’s illegitimate loan-sharking business, So explores community, grief and longing with inimitable humor and depth.

Elegy plus comedy is the only way to express how we live in the world today, says a character in Sigrid Nunez’s ninth novel. THE VULNERABLES offers a meditation on our contemporary era, as a solitary female narrator asks what it means to be alive at this complex moment in history and considers how our present reality affects the way a person looks back on her past. Humor, to be sure, is a priceless refuge. Equally vital is connection with others, who here include an adrift member of Gen Z and a spirited parrot named Eureka. This book reveals what happens when strangers are willing to open their hearts to each other and how far even small acts of caring can go to ease another’s distress.

April 5, 2019: In a cozy brownstone in Brooklyn, the veneer of domestic bliss is beginning to crack. Dan and his wife, Isabel, are slowly drifting apart --- and both, it seems, are a little bit in love with Isabel’s younger brother, Robbie. Ten-year-old Nathan is taking his first uncertain steps toward independence, while his sister, five-year-old Violet, does her best not to notice the growing rift between her parents. April 5, 2020: As the world goes into lockdown, the cozy brownstone is starting to feel more like a prison. Violet is terrified of leaving the windows open. Isabel and Dan communicate mostly in veiled sleights and frustrated sighs. And Robbie is stranded in Iceland. April 5, 2021: Emerging from the worst of the crisis, the family reckons with a new, very different reality.

Boyd Halverson --- star journalist turned notorious online disinformation troll turned JCPenney manager --- robs a bank and takes the teller, Angie Bing, as a hostage and for a ride. Haunted by his past and weary of his present, Boyd has one goal before the authorities catch up with him: settle a score with the man who destroyed his life. By Monday, Boyd and Angie reach Mexico; by winter, they are in a lakefront mansion in Minnesota. On their trail are hitmen, jealous lovers, ex-cons, an heiress, a billionaire shipping tycoon, a three-tour veteran of Iraq, and the ghosts of Boyd’s past. Everyone, it seems, except the police.

A boy searches for his father, a prison guard on Sakhalin Island. In Barcelona, a woman is tasked with spying on a prizefighter who may or may not be her estranged son. A samurai escorts an orphan to his countrymen in the Edo Period. A formerly incarcerated man starts a new life in a small town in upstate New York and attempts to build a family. THE HIVE AND THE HONEY is a bold and indelible collection that portrays the vastness and complexity of diasporic communities, with each story bringing to light the knotty inheritances of their characters. How does a North Korean defector connect with the child she once left behind? What are the traumas that haunt a Korean settlement in Far East Russia?

When Michael Lewis first met him, Sam Bankman-Fried was the world’s youngest billionaire and crypto’s Gatsby. CEOs, celebrities and leaders of small countries all vied for his time and cash after he catapulted, practically overnight, onto the Forbes billionaire list. Who was this rumpled guy in cargo shorts and limp white socks, whose eyes twitched across Zoom meetings as he played video games on the side? In GOING INFINITE, Michael Lewis sets out to answer this question, taking readers into the mind of Bankman-Fried, whose rise and fall offers an education in high-frequency trading, cryptocurrencies, philanthropy, bankruptcy and the justice system.

The author of the New York Times bestseller THE BOOK OF DELIGHTS is back with a new record of small wonders --- and it is exactly the book we need right now. In this second intimate collection of short, lyrical, genre-defying essays, again written daily over a year, one of America’s most original and observant voices celebrates the ordinary, helping us see our extraordinary world anew. For Ross Gay, practicing delight is an act of defiance in an often unjust world, as necessary as breathing. Even as he acknowledges racism, consumerism, ecological devastation and our individual sorrows, he shows us that the un-delights make the delights even more so. As always, Gay revels in the natural world and the trillion mysterious ways this glorious earth delights us.

It is 1873. Mrs. Eliza Touchet is the Scottish housekeeper --- and cousin by marriage --- of a once-famous novelist, William Ainsworth, with whom she has lived for 30 years. Mrs. Touchet suspects her cousin of having no talent; his successful friend, Mr. Charles Dickens, of being a bully and a moralist; and England of being a land of facades, in which nothing is quite what it seems. The “Tichborne Trial” --- wherein a lower-class butcher from Australia claimed he was in fact the rightful heir of a sizable estate and title --- captivates Mrs. Touchet and all of England. Is Sir Roger Tichborne really who he says he is? Or is he a fraud?