Preeminent Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro shows how the tumultuous events in England in 1606 affected Shakespeare and shaped the three great tragedies he wrote that year --- KING LEAR, MACBETH and ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA. THE YEAR OF LEAR sheds light on these tragedies by placing them in the context of their times, while also allowing us greater insight into how Shakespeare was personally touched by such events as a terrible outbreak of plague and growing religious divisions.

In 1942, Marie Jalowicz, a 20-year-old Jewish Berliner, made the extraordinary decision to do everything in her power to avoid the concentration camps. She removed her yellow star, took on an assumed identity and disappeared into the city. In the years that followed, Marie took shelter wherever it was offered, living with the strangest of bedfellows, from circus performers and committed communists to convinced Nazis. As Marie quickly learned, however, compassion and cruelty are very often two sides of the same coin. Fifty years later, she agreed to tell her story for the first time.

Unrelenting drought has transfigured Southern California into a surreal, phantasmagoric landscape. With the Central Valley barren, underground aquifer drained, and Sierra snowpack entirely depleted, most “Mojavs,” prevented by both armed vigilantes and an indifferent bureaucracy from freely crossing borders to lusher regions, have allowed themselves to be evacuated to internment camps. In Los Angeles’s Laurel Canyon, two young Mojavs squat in a starlet’s abandoned mansion. But when they cross paths with a mysterious child, the thirst for a better future begins.

The year 2015 marked the 400th anniversary of the publication of the complete DON QUIXOTE OF LA MANCHA. The novel has spawned ballets and operas, poems and plays, movies and video games, and even shapes the identities of entire nations. In QUIXOTE, Ilan Stavans explores these many manifestations. Training his eye on the tumultuous struggle between logic and dreams, he reveals the ways in which a work of literature is a living thing that influences and is influenced by the world around it.

Taking place nearly a century before the events of "Game of Thrones," A KNIGHT OF THE SEVEN KINGDOMS compiles the first three official prequel novellas to George R. R. Martin’s ongoing masterwork, A Song of Ice and Fire. These never-before-collected adventures recount an age when the Targaryen line still holds the Iron Throne, and the memory of the last dragon has not yet passed from living consciousness.

For Alex Mercer, his wife, Millicent, and their precocious 11-year-old son, Max, are everything. But when he and Max find their enigmatic next-door neighbor dead in his apartment, their lives are suddenly and irrevocably changed. The police begin an extremely methodical investigation, and Alex becomes increasingly impatient for them to finish. After all, it was so clearly a suicide. As new information is uncovered, troubling questions arise --- questions that begin to throw suspicion on Alex, Millicent and even Max. It seems each of them has secrets. And each has something to hide.

May Malone is said to have a monster in her house, but what Norman finds there may just be the angel he needs. Joe Quinn’s house is noisy with poltergeists, or could it be Davie’s raging causing the disturbance? Fragile Annie learns the truth about herself in a photograph taken by a traveling man near the sea. Set in the northern English Tyneside country of the author’s childhood, these eight short stories by the incomparable David Almond evoke gritty realities and ineffable longings, experiences both ordinary and magical. In autobiographical preludes to each story, the writer shows how all things can be turned into tales, reflecting on a time of wonder, tenderness and joy.

Brett had been in love with Charlie from the day she laid eyes on him in college. When Charlie is found murdered, Brett is devastated. But if she is honest with herself, their marriage had been hanging by a thread for quite some time. Though all clues point to Charlie’s brother Eli, who’s been in and out of psychiatric hospitals for years, any number of people might have been driven to slit the throat of Charlie Moss --- a handsome, charismatic man who unwittingly damaged almost every life he touched. Brett is determined to understand how such a tragedy could have happened --- and if she was somehow complicit.

Two seemingly unrelated stories --- one in words, the other in pictures --- come together with spellbinding synergy. The illustrated story begins in 1766 with Billy Marvel, the lone survivor of a shipwreck, and charts the adventures of his family of actors over five generations. The prose story opens in 1990 and follows Joseph, who has run away from school to an estranged uncle's puzzling house in London, where he, along with the reader, must piece together many mysteries.

Something really strange is happening in the City by the Bay. People are dying, but their souls are not being collected. Someone --- or something --- is stealing them, and no one knows where they are going, or why, but it has something to do with that big orange bridge. Death Merchant Charlie Asher is just as flummoxed as everyone else. He’s trapped in the body of a 14-inch-tall “meat puppet” waiting for his Buddhist nun girlfriend, Audrey, to find him a suitable new body to play host. To get to the bottom of this abomination, a motley crew of heroes will band together.