A loner who spent years living on the run, Samuel Hawley raised his daughter, Loo, on the road, always watching his back. Now that Loo is a teenager, Hawley wants only to give her a normal life. In his late wife’s hometown, he finds work as a fisherman, while Loo struggles to fit in at the local high school. She also grows more and more curious about the death of the mother she never knew. Soon, everywhere she turns, she encounters the mysteries of her parents’ lives before she was born. As Loo uncovers a history that’s darker than she could have known, the demons of her father’s past spill over into the present --- and together both Hawley and Loo must face a reckoning yet to come.

While her parents are away, a teenager finds herself home alone, with the household staff mysteriously gone, no phone connection, and news of an insurgency on the radio --- and then she hears a knock at the door. Her teacher, who has been kidnapped by guerrillas, recites Shakespeare in the jungle to a class of sticks, leaves and stones while his captors watch his every move. Another classmate, who has fled Colombia for the clubs of New York, is unable to forget the life she left behind without the help of the little bags of powder she carries with her. Taking place over two decades, THE LUCKY ONES presents us with a world in which perpetrators are indistinguishable from saviors, the truth is elusive, and loved ones can disappear without a trace.

A boy on the edge of adolescence fears his mother might be a robot; a psychotically depressed woman is entrusted with taking her niece and nephew trick-or-treating; a reluctant dad brings his baby to a coke-fueled party; a teenage boy tries to prevent his mother from putting his estranged father’s dogs to sleep. Ranging from a youth arts camp to an aging punk band’s reunion tour, from a dystopian future where parents no longer exist to a ferociously independent bookstore, LAST DAY ON EARTH revolves around the endlessly complex, frequently surreal system that is family.

When the Twin Towers suddenly reappear in the Badlands of South Dakota two decades after their fall, nobody can explain their return. To the tens of thousands drawn to the “American Stonehenge” --- including Parker and Zema, siblings driving from L.A. to Michigan --- the Towers seem to sing, even as everybody hears a different song. And on the 93rd floor of the South Tower, Jesse Presley, the stillborn twin of the most famous singer who ever lived, suddenly awakes. Over the days and months and years to come, he’s driven mad by a voice in his head that sounds like his but isn’t, and by the memory of a country where he survived in his brother’s place.

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.