The child of Greek immigrants who grew up in a dangerous New York housing project, Max Pzoras triumphed over his upbringing and became a successful Wall Street analyst. Yet on the night he’s involved in a violent street scuffle, Max begins to confront questions about suffering and mortality that have dogged him since his mother’s death. In an ultimate bid for answers, he embarks on a dangerous solitary meditation in a freezing Himalayan cave, where his physical and spiritual endurance is put to its most extreme test.

In the 1940s and ’50s, when the newly minted Jet Propulsion Laboratory needed quick-thinking mathematicians to calculate velocities and plot trajectories, they didn't turn to male graduates. Rather, they recruited an elite group of young women who, with only pencil, paper and mathematical prowess, transformed rocket design, helped bring about the first American satellites, and made the exploration of the solar system possible. For the first time, RISE OF THE ROCKET GIRLS tells the stories of these women --- known as "human computers" --- who broke the boundaries of both gender and science.

From the moment Marija walks into Lara's classroom, freshly moved to Serbia from Sarajevo, Lara is enchanted by her vibrant beauty, confidence and wild energy. Closer than sisters, the girls share everything. But when the Bosnian War pits their homelands against each other in a bloodbath, Lara and Marija are forced to separate for the first time. In America, Lara seeks fulfillment through work and family, but when news from Marija ceases, the uncertainty torments Lara, driving her on a quest to find her friend. As Lara travels through war-torn Serbia and Bosnia, she must also wrestle with truths about her own identity.

The Freeman family has been invited to the Toneybee Institute to participate in a research experiment. They will live in an apartment on campus with Charlie, a young chimp abandoned by his mother. The Freemans were selected for the experiment because they know sign language; they are supposed to teach it to Charlie and welcome him as a member of their family. Isolated in their new, nearly all-white community not just by their race but by their strange living situation, the Freemans come undone. And when daughter Charlotte discovers the truth about the Institute’s history of questionable studies, the secrets of the past begin to invade the present.

On a post-college visit to Florence, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri fell in love with the Italian language. Twenty years later, seeking total immersion, she and her family relocated to Rome, where she began to read and write solely in her adopted tongue. A startling act of self-reflection, IN OTHER WORDS is Lahiri’s meditation on the process of learning to express herself in another language --- and the stunning journey of a writer seeking a new voice.

Beginning with her great-great grandfather, Moses Calhoun, a house slave who used the rare advantage of his education to become a successful businessman in post-war Atlanta, Gail Lumet Buckley follows her family’s two branches: one that stayed in the South, and the other that settled in Brooklyn. Through the lens of her relatives’ momentous lives, Buckley examines major events throughout American history --- from Atlanta during Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow, to New York City during the Harlem Renaissance, and then from World War II to the Civil Rights Movement.

Harris County, Georgia, 1912. A white man, the beloved nephew of the county sheriff, is shot dead on the porch of a black woman. Days later, the sheriff sanctions the lynching of a black woman and three black men, all of them innocent. In trying to figure out what led to this unthinkable crime, Karen Branan --- the great-granddaughter of that sheriff --- was forced to confront her own deep-rooted beliefs surrounding race and family, a process that came to a head when she learned a shocking truth: she is related not only to the sheriff, but also to one of the four who were murdered.

Meet the women of AMERICAN HOUSEWIFE. They wear lipstick, pearls and sunscreen, even when it’s cloudy. They casserole. They pinwheel. And then they kill a party crasher, carefully stepping around the body to pull cookies from the oven. Taking us from a haunted pre-war Manhattan apartment building to the unique initiation ritual of a book club, these 12 delightfully demented stories are a refreshing and wicked answer to the question: “What do housewives do all day?”

In MASTERS OF EMPIRE, the historian Michael A. McDonnell reveals the pivotal role played by the native peoples of the Great Lakes in the history of North America. Though less well known than the Iroquois or Sioux, the Anishinaabeg, who lived across Lakes Michigan and Huron, were equally influential. The book charts the story of one group, the Odawa, who settled at the straits between those two lakes, a hub for trade and diplomacy throughout the vast country west of Montreal known as the pays d’en haut.

In his first book of short stories since LOVE BEGINS IN WINTER, Simon Van Booy offers a collection of stories highlighting how human genius can emerge through acts of compassion. Through characters including an eccentric film director, an aging Cockney bodyguard, the teenage child of Nigerian immigrants, a divorced amateur magician from New Jersey, and a Beijing street vendor who becomes an overnight billionaire, TALES OF ACCIDENTAL GENIUS contemplates individuals from different cultures and races, and reveals how faith and yearning for connection helps us all transcend darkness of fear and misfortune.