Young Jude Brighton has been missing for three days, and while the search for him is in full swing in the small town of Deer Valley, Oregon, the locals are starting to lose hope. Stevie Clark knows what each ticking moment may mean for his cousin, Jude. There was Max Larsen, a young boy who was found dead after also disappearing under mysterious circumstances. And then there were the animals: pets gone missing out of yards. For years, the residents of Deer Valley have murmured about these unsolved crimes…and that a killer may still be lurking around their quiet town. For Stevie, who is determined to find out what really happened to Jude, the awful truth may be too horrifying to imagine.

The characters in these 13 stories exist on the edge of danger, where landscapes melt into dreamscapes and every house is haunted. A drug dealer’s girlfriend signs up for the first manned mission to Mars. A girl falls in love with a man who wants to turn her into a bird. A teenaged girl and her best friend test their relationship by breaking into suburban houses. A wife finds a gaping hole in the floor of the home she shares with her husband, a hole that only she can see. Full of longing and strange humor, these tales --- about the love between a man and his pet crow, an alcoholic and his AA sponsor, a mute migrant and a newspaper reporter --- show how love ties us to each other and to the world.

In A BOOK OF AMERICAN MARTYRS, Joyce Carol Oates tells the story of two very different and yet intimately linked American families. Luther Dunphy is an ardent Evangelical who envisions himself as acting out God’s will when he assassinates an abortion provider in his small Ohio town. Augustus Voorhees, the idealistic doctor who is killed, leaves behind a wife and children scarred and embittered by grief.

There's something eerily unsettling about Ottessa Moshfegh's stories, something almost dangerous, while also being delightful and even laugh-out-loud funny. Her characters are all unsteady on their feet in one way or another; they all yearn for connection and betterment, though each in very different ways, but they are often tripped up by their own baser impulses and existential insecurities. HOMESICK FOR ANOTHER WORLD is a master class in the varieties of self-deception across the gamut of individuals representing the human condition. But part of the unique quality of Moshfegh’s voice is the way the grotesque and the outrageous are infused with tenderness and compassion.

ALWAYS HAPPY HOUR weaves tales of young women --- deeply flawed and intensely real --- who struggle to get out of their own way. They love to drink and have sex; they make bad decisions with men who either love them too much or too little; and they haunt a Southern terrain of gas stations, public pools and dive bars. Though each character shoulders the weight of her own baggage --- whether it’s a string of horrible exes, a boyfriend with an annoying child, or an inability to be genuinely happy for a best friend --- they are united in their unrelenting suspicion that they deserve better.

Isolated at home and an outlander at school, 14-year-old Linda is drawn to the enigmatic, attractive Lily and new history teacher Mr. Grierson. When Mr. Grierson is charged with possessing child pornography, the implications of his arrest deeply affect Linda as she wrestles with her own fledgling desires and craving to belong. And then the young Gardner family moves in across the lake, and Linda finds herself welcomed into their home as a babysitter for their little boy, Paul. It seems that her life finally has purpose, but with this new sense of belonging she is also drawn into secrets she doesn’t understand. Over the course of a few days, Linda makes a set of choices that reverberate throughout her life.

On a cold winter’s day, a pre-school teacher is shot to death in front of parents and children at the Jewish Congregation in Stockholm. Just a few hours later, two Jewish boys go missing on their way to tennis practice, and an unexpected blizzard destroys any trace of the perpetrator. As investigative analyst Fredrika Bergman and police superintendent Alex Recht struggle to pin down a lead, someone or something called the Paper Boy --- a mysterious old Israeli legend of a nighttime killer --- keeps popping up in the police investigation. But who was the Paper Boy really? And how could he have resurfaced in Stockholm?

Siri Hustvedt has always been fascinated by biology and how human perception works. She is a lover of art, the humanities and the sciences. She is a novelist and a feminist. Her lively, lucid essays in A WOMAN LOOKING AT MEN LOOKING AT WOMEN begin to make some sense of those plural perspectives. There has been much talk about building a beautiful bridge across the chasm that separates the sciences and the humanities. At the moment, we have only a wobbly walkway, but Hustvedt is encouraged by the travelers making their way across it in both directions.

It has been 20 years since the god-like Augurs were overthrown and killed. Now, those who once served them --- the Gifted --- are spared only because they have accepted the rebellion's Four Tenets, vastly limiting their powers. As a Gifted, Davian suffers the consequences of a war lost before he was even born. He and others like him are despised. But when Davian discovers he wields the forbidden power of the Augurs, he sets into motion a chain of events that will change everything. To the west, a young man whose fate is intertwined with Davian's wakes up in the forest, covered in blood and with no memory of who he is. And in the far north, an ancient enemy long thought defeated begins to stir.

Alexander Bruno travels the world winning large sums of money from amateur “whales” who think they can challenge his peerless acumen at backgammon. But after a troubling run of bad luck in Singapore and Berlin --- perhaps brought on by his chance encounter with childhood acquaintance Keith Stolarsky and his girlfriend Tira Harpaz, or perhaps the emergence of a blot that distorts his vision --- Bruno passes out and is brought to the hospital. There, he’s given a depressing diagnosis and his only hope is to return to Berkeley, where he discovered his psychic abilities, and undergo experimental surgery paid for by the scheming Stolarsky.