A woman who has recently been elevated to prominence for her social media posts travels around the world. She must navigate the new language and etiquette of what she terms "the portal," where she grapples with an unshakable conviction that a vast chorus of voices is now dictating her thoughts. When existential threats --- from climate change and economic precariousness to the rise of an unnamed dictator and an epidemic of loneliness --- begin to loom, she posts her way deeper into the portal's void. An avalanche of images, details and references accumulate to form a landscape that is post-sense, post-irony, post-everything. Suddenly, two texts from her mother pierce the fray: "Something has gone wrong" and "How soon can you get here?"

Tiller is an average American college student with a good heart but minimal aspirations. Pong Lou is a larger-than-life, wildly creative Chinese American entrepreneur who sees something intriguing in Tiller beyond his bored exterior and takes him under his wing. When Pong brings him along on a boisterous trip across Asia, Tiller is catapulted from ordinary young man to talented protégé, and pulled into a series of ever more extreme and eye-opening experiences that transform his view of the world, of Pong and of himself. The narrative alternates between Tiller’s outlandish, mind-boggling year with Pong and the strange, riveting, emotionally complex domestic life that follows it, as Tiller processes what happened to him abroad and what it means for his future.

In his long career as an acclaimed journalist covering the “hot” moments of the Cold War and its aftermath, Robert D. Kaplan often found himself crossing paths with Bob Gersony, a consultant for the U.S. State Department whose quiet dedication and consequential work made a deep impression on Kaplan. Gersony, a high school dropout later awarded a Bronze Star for his service in Vietnam, conducted on-the-ground research for the U.S. government in virtually every war and natural-disaster zone in the world. Kaplan saw in Gersony a powerful example of how American diplomacy should be conducted. Set during the State Department’s golden age, THE GOOD AMERICAN is a story about the loneliness, sweat and tears, and the genuine courage, that characterized Gersony’s work in far-flung places.

For the last 20 years, George Saunders has been teaching a class on the Russian short story to his MFA students at Syracuse University. In A SWIM IN A POND IN THE RAIN, he shares a version of that class with us, offering some of what he and his students have discovered together over the years. Paired with iconic short stories by Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy and Gogol, the seven essays in this book are intended for anyone interested in how fiction works and why it’s more relevant than ever in these turbulent times.

In the early hours of New Year’s Eve 1969, in the small soft coal mining borough of Clarksville, Pennsylvania, longtime trade union insider Joseph “Jock” Yablonski and his wife and daughter were brutally murdered in their old stone farmhouse. Behind the assassination was the corrupt president of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), Tony Boyle, who had long embezzled UMWA funds, silenced intra-union dissent, and served the interests of Big Coal companies --- and would do anything to maintain power. The most infamous crimes in the history of American labor unions, the Yablonski murders catalyzed the first successful rank-and-file takeover of a major labor union in modern US history.

Once a promising actor, Tim Brettigan has gone missing. His father thinks he may have seen him among some homeless people. And though she knows he left on purpose, his mother has been searching for him all over their home city of Minneapolis. She checks the usual places --- churches, storefronts, benches --- and stumbles upon a local community group with lofty goals and an enigmatic leader. Christina, a young woman rapidly becoming addicted to a boutique drug that gives her a feeling of blessedness, is inexplicably drawn to the same collective by a man who’s convinced he may start a revolution.

On the morning after the 2016 presidential election, Thomas Ricks awoke with a few questions on his mind: What kind of nation did we now have? Is it what was designed or intended by the nation’s founders? Trying to get as close to the source as he could, Ricks decided to go back and read the philosophy and literature that shaped the founders’ thinking, and the letters they wrote to each other debating these crucial works --- among them the Iliad, Plutarch’s Lives, and the works of Xenophon, Epicurus, Aristotle, Cato and Cicero. Although much attention has been paid to the influence of English political philosophers like John Locke, the founders were far more immersed in the literature of the ancient world.

In the introduction to her new collection of essays, Michiko Kakutani writes: "In a world riven by political and social divisions, literature can connect people across time zones and zip codes, across cultures and religions, national boundaries and historical eras. It can give us an understanding of lives very different from our own, and a sense of the shared joys and losses of human experience." Readers will discover novels and memoirs by some of the most gifted writers working today; favorite classics worth reading or rereading; and nonfiction works, both old and new, that illuminate our social and political landscape and some of today’s most pressing issues, from climate change to medicine to the consequences of digital innovation.

It is Super Bowl Sunday in the year 2022. Five people, dinner, an apartment on the east side of Manhattan. The retired physics professor and her husband and her former student waiting for the couple who will join them from what becomes a dramatic flight from Paris. The conversation ranges from a survey telescope in North-central Chile to a favorite brand of bourbon to Einstein’s 1912 Manuscript on the Special Theory of Relativity. Then something happens, and the digital connections that have transformed our lives are severed. What follows is a dazzling and profoundly moving conversation about what makes us human.

Since his first performance at the legendary New York nightclub “Catch a Rising Star” as a 21-year-old college student in the fall of 1975, Jerry Seinfeld has written his own material and saved everything. “Whenever I came up with a funny bit, whether it happened on a stage, in a conversation, or working it out on my preferred canvas, the big yellow legal pad, I kept it in one of those old school accordion folders,” Seinfeld writes. “So I have everything I thought was worth saving from forty-five years of hacking away at this for all I was worth.” For this book, Seinfeld has selected his favorite material, organized decade by decade. Readers will witness the evolution of one of the great comedians of our time and gain new insights into the thrilling but unforgiving art of writing stand-up comedy.