Anthony Marra’s collection introduces a cast of remarkable characters whose lives intersect in ways both life-affirming and heartbreaking. A 1930s Soviet censor painstakingly corrects offending photographs, bewitched by the image of a disgraced prima ballerina. A chorus of women recount their stories and those of their grandmothers, former gulag prisoners. Two pairs of brothers share a fierce, protective love. Young men across the former USSR face violence at home and in the military. And great sacrifices are made in the name of an oil landscape that is unremarkable except for the almost incomprehensibly peaceful past it depicts.

A glancing encounter with a German peace activist leads young Pip Tyler to an internship in South America with The Sunlight Project, an organization that traffics in all the secrets of the world --- including, Pip hopes, the secret of her origins. TSP is the brainchild of Andreas Wolf, a charismatic provocateur who rose to fame in the chaos following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Now on the lam in Bolivia, Andreas is drawn to Pip for reasons she doesn't understand, and the intensity of her response to him upends her conventional ideas of right and wrong.

In six masterly stories, Adam Johnson delves deep into love and loss, natural disasters, the influence of technology, and how the political shapes the personal. He returns to his signature subject, North Korea, in the title story, which depicts two defectors from Pyongyang who are trying to adapt to their new lives in Seoul, while one cannot forget the woman he left behind. FORTUNE SMILES gives voice to the perspectives we don’t often hear, while offering a new way of looking at the world.

Many of these stories are set in Maine, but THE STATE WE'RE IN is about more than geographical location. Some characters have arrived in Maine by accident, others are trying to escape. Ann Beattie's collection is woven around Jocelyn, a wry, disaffected teenager living with her aunt and uncle while attending summer school. As in life, the narratives of other characters interrupt Jocelyn’s --- sometimes challenging, sometimes embellishing her view.

From 1957 to 1964, Robert Kennedy and Jimmy Hoffa channeled nearly all of their considerable powers into destroying each other. Kennedy's battle with Hoffa burst into the public consciousness with the 1957 Senate Rackets Committee hearings and intensified when his brother named him attorney general in 1961. RFK put together a "Get Hoffa" squad within the Justice Department, devoted to destroying one man. But Hoffa, with nearly unlimited Teamster funds, was not about to roll over.

Set in Paris today, THE FESTIVAL OF INSIGNIFICANCE follows four friends who run into each other in the Luxembourg Gardens, attend parties, and conduct a long-running exchange on sex, desire, history, art, even the meaning of human existence. Alain, one of the friends, is fascinated by the exposed belly buttons of passing women --- the latest fashion --- and takes navel-gazing to imaginative, erotic heights. Another, who has just been told that he does not have cancer, tells a friend that his case is terminal.

The seven years between the birth of Etgar Keret’s son and the death of his father were good years, though still full of reasons to worry. Lev is born in the midst of a terrorist attack. Etgar’s father gets cancer. The threat of constant war looms over their home and permeates daily life. Etgar’s siblings, all very different people who have chosen radically divergent paths in life, come together after his father’s shivah to experience the grief and love that tie a family together forever.

Graham Swift presents a vision of a country, England, that is both a crucible of history and a maze of contemporary confusions. Moving from the 17th century to the present day, from world-shaking events to domestic dramas and frequently mixing tragedy with comedy, ENGLAND AND OTHER STORIES is bound together by an underlying instinct for the story of us all: an evocation of that mysterious thing, a nation, enriched by a clear-eyed compassion for how human individuals find or lose their way in the nationless territory of birth, growing up, sex, aging and death.

Joshua Levin has a reasonably comfortable Chicago apartment, a mildly dysfunctional family sprinkled throughout the suburbs, a steady job teaching ESL, a devoted girlfriend who lives down the block, and a laptop full of screenplay ideas --- one of which he thinks might turn out to be good: Zombie Wars. But all it takes is a few unexpected events for his life to descend into chaos. As the stakes quickly move from absurd to life-and-death matters, THE MAKING OF ZOMBIE WARS takes on real consequence.

From its opening pages on his youthful obsession with motorcycles and speed, ON THE MOVE is infused with Oliver Sacks’ restless energy. As he recounts his experiences as a young neurologist in the early 1960s, first in California, where he struggled with drug addiction, and then in New York, where he discovered a long-forgotten illness in the back wards of a chronic hospital, we see how his engagement with patients comes to define his life.