Over the course of one school year --- seventh grade --- 12-year-old Kevin Brockmeier sets out in search of himself. Along the way, he happens into his first kiss at a church party, struggles to understand why his old friends tease him at the lunch table, becomes the talk of the entire school thanks to his Halloween costume, and booby-traps his lunch to deter a thief.

Nina is a harried young mother who spends her evenings spying on the older couple across the street, drawn to their quiet contentment. One night, through that same window, she spies a young couple in the throes of passion. In the coming weeks, Nina encounters the older couple, their daughter and her fiancé, and many others on the streets of her Upper West Side neighborhood, eroding the safe distance of her secret vigils.

In the summer of 1998, Walter Kirn set out to personally deliver a crippled hunting dog from his home in Montana to the New York apartment of Clark Rockefeller, a secretive young banker and art collector who had adopted the dog over the Internet. Thus began a 15-year relationship that drew Kirn deep into the fun-house world of an outlandish, eccentric son of privilege who ultimately would be unmasked as a brazen serial impostor, child kidnapper and brutal murderer.

THE UNAMERICANS, a stunning exploration of characters shaped by the forces of history, is the debut work of fiction by Molly Antopol, a 2013 National Book Foundation "5 Under 35" Honoree. Again and again, Antopol’s deeply sympathetic characters struggle for footing in an uncertain world, hounded by forces beyond their control.

Rebecca Mead was a young woman in an English coastal town when she first read George Eliot's MIDDLEMARCH. After gaining admission to Oxford and moving to the US to become a journalist, through several love affairs, then marriage and family, Mead read and reread MIDDLEMARCH, which offered her something that modern life and literature did not. Here, she leads us into the life that the book made for her, as well as the many lives the novel has led since it was written.

In THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN EXECUTION, David Dow enraptured readers with a searing and frank exploration of his work defending inmates on death row. But when Dow's father-in-law receives his own death sentence in the form of terminal cancer, and his gentle dog Winona suffers acute liver failure, the author is forced to reconcile with death in a far more personal way --- both as a son and as a father.

A contemporary of Ann Beattie and Tobias Wolff, Frederick Busch was a master craftsman of the form; his subjects were single-event moments in so-called ordinary life. The stories in this volume, selected by Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout, are tales of families trying to heal their wounds, save their marriages, and rescue their children.

Daniel Menaker started as a fact checker at The New Yorker in 1969. With luck, hard work, and the support of William Maxwell, he was eventually promoted to editor. Never beloved by William Shawn, he was advised early on to find a position elsewhere; he stayed for another 24 years. Now Menaker brings us a new view of life in that wonderfully strange place and beyond, throughout his more than 40 years working to celebrate language and good writing.

The 12 stories in A PERMANENT MEMBER OF THE FAMILY examine the myriad ways that we try --- and sometimes fail --- to connect with one another, as we seek a home in the world. The book charts with subtlety and precision the ebb and flow of both the families we make for ourselves and the ones we're born into, as it asks how we know the ones we love and, in turn, ourselves.

In these linked novellas in which characters walk out the back door of one story and into the next, love is "dirty" --- tangled up with need, power, boredom, ego, fear and fantasy. These narratives express extraordinary tenderness toward human beings, our vulnerable hearts and bodies, our fulfilling and unfulfilling lives alone and with others.