Adult

In 991 AD, Vikings attacked an Anglo-Saxon defense-force led by their duke, Beorhtnoth, resulting in brutal fighting along the banks of the river Blackwater, near Maldon in Essex. The attack is widely considered one of the defining conflicts of 10th-century England, due to it being immortalized in the poem “The Battle of Maldon.” Written shortly after the battle, the poem would inspire J.R.R. Tolkien to compose his own dramatic verse-dialogue, “The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son,” which imagines the aftermath of the great battle. Leading Tolkien scholar Peter Grybauskas presents for the very first time Tolkien’s own prose translation of “The Battle of Maldon,” together with the definitive treatment of “The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth” and its accompanying essays.

Dr. Gregory Weber, a renowned clinical psychologist, feels increasingly disconnected. His marriage is strained, his children are distant, and he can’t stop fixating on an unforgivable mistake he made when he was 17. So when an unscheduled client named Mira starts to appear in his office every Wednesday at 1 p.m. with knowledge about his past, Gregory quickly grows obsessed with her. Is she a new patient? A secret referral from a colleague? Someone connected to his teenage transgression? As his attraction for Mira grows more intense with each session, so does her probing scrutiny of him. Soon Gregory’s professional boundaries begin to dissolve, and he becomes the patient, desperate to uncover his connection to this mysterious woman and find out what she wants from him.

Every cop in the city knows his name, but no one says it out loud. In fact, they don't talk about him at all. He doesn't wear a uniform, but he is the most powerful cop in New York. Nick Ryan can find a criminal who's vanished. Or he can make a key witness disappear. He has cars, safe houses, money and weapons hidden all over the city. He's the mayor's private cop, the fixer, the first call when the men and women who protect and serve are in trouble and need protection themselves. With conflicted loyalties and a divided soul, he's a veteran cop still fighting his own private war. He's a soldier of the streets with his own personal code. But what happens when the man who knows all the city's secrets becomes a threat to both sides of the law?

It’s the summer of ’74. Richard Nixon has resigned from office, CB radios are the hot new thing, and in the great state of Texas two cousins hatch a plan to drive $1 million worth of stolen weed to Idaho, where some lunatic is gearing up to jump Snake River Canyon on a rocket-powered motorcycle. But with a vengeful sheriff on their tail and the revered and feared marijuana kingpin of Central Texas out to get his stash back, Chuck and Dean are in for the ride of their lives --- if they can make it out alive.

After her troublemaker mother’s mysterious death, Kira fled her wealthy Texas town and never looked back. Now, decades later, Kira is invited to an old frenemy’s vow renewal celebration. Though she is reluctant to go, there are things pulling her home --- but none more important are the urgent texts from her grandmother, who says she has something for Kira. Something related to her mother’s death, something that makes it look an awful lot like murder. When her grandmother gives Kira a memoir that her mother had been working on before she died, Kira is drawn into the past and all the sizzling secrets that come along with it. As she gets closer to discovering what --- and who --- might have brought about her mother’s end, it becomes clear that someone wants the past to stay buried.

When their newly engaged kids ask all four divorced parents to meet each other over brunch, everyone RSVPs yes --- secretly hoping that someone at the table will get to the bottom of the bottomless mimosas fast enough to say what they’re all thinking: that this engagement, coming after a whirlwind romance between two people barely out of college, is too much too soon. But at that brunch it’s not the impulsive couple's decisions that end up under the microscope, as it turns out that June, mother of the bride, and Amy, mother of the groom, certainly do know each other. Reeling from their unwanted reunion and eager to shift the spotlight off their past as decades-old secrets and rivalries come to light, the two moms battle it out for the prize of Most Enthusiastic About This Wedding.

2150: Eight years after the murder of Akira Kimura, Water City’s renowned scientist and anointed “God,” the nameless antihero who tracked down Akira’s killer is no longer a detective. While his wife climbs the corporate ladder of the city’s police department, he raises their now nine-year-old daughter and occasionally takes the odd job as a bounty hunter. His domestic bliss is threatened when Ascalon’s Scar --- the mark left by Akira’s destruction of Sessho-seki, the asteroid that nearly wiped out life on Earth --- vanishes from the sky and a familiar face thought dead returns from the ocean depths to exact revenge on humanity. On a journey to the moon and back, Water City’s antihero will risk everything, including his family, to save the last of the human race.

A young woman bonds with an encampment of poets after a devastating earthquake. Against her better judgment, a college student begins to fall for an acquaintance who might be dead. And a Confucian disciple returns to the Master bearing a jar full of grisly remains. Weaving between reality and dreamy surreality, these nine stories wend toward elsewhere, a comforting, frustrating, just-out-of-reach place familiar to anyone who has ever experienced longing. Through it all, Yan Ge’s protagonists peer thoughtfully at their own feelings of displacement --- physical or emotional, the result of travel, emigration or exile. ELSEWHERE explores the utility (or not) of art in the face of lonesomeness, quotidian and spectacular.

On the night of her high school graduation, a young woman follows her older sister, Debbie, to a bar. After the two share a bag of unidentified pills, the evening turns into a haze of sensual and risky interactions. Our unnamed narrator has always been under Debbie’s spell. Despite her own hesitations, she has always said yes to nights like these. That is, until Debbie disappears. Falling deeper into the life she cultivated with her sister, our narrator gets a job as an emergency room secretary where she steals pills to sell on the side. Cue Sasha, a Jewish refugee from the former Soviet Union who claims to be a psychic tasked with acting as the narrator’s spiritual guide. The nature of this relationship evolves and blurs, a kaleidoscope of friendship, sex, mysticism and ambiguous power dynamics.

When Nora, a withdrawn American teenager, is sent to live with relatives in Turin, she meets Nicola, the enigmatic son of the most powerful aristocratic family in Italy. Years later, the two reconnect in New York and begin a heated affair. Propelled by disorienting desire, Nora quickly becomes entangled in Nicola’s insular, menacing world of old-world luxury and family secrets. When she suspects she’s being used in a secret plot to overthrow his corrupt father, Nora willfully turns submissive to Nicola, pushing against the boundaries of her own moral limits until she finds herself spiraling on a path of self-destruction.