Winner of the 2012 Story Prize.Recipient of the 2012 American Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Foundation Award.A National Book Foundation "5 Under 35" fiction writer of 2012.Like the work of Cormac McCarthy, Denis Johnson, Richard Ford, and Annie Proulx, Battleborn represents a near-perfect confluence of sensibility and setting, and the introduction of an exceptionally powerful and original literary voice. In each of these ten unforgettable stories, Claire Vaye Watkins writes her way fearlessly into the mythology of the American West, utterly reimagining it. Her characters orbit around the region's vast spaces, winning redemption despite — and often because of — the hardship and violence they endure. The arrival of a foreigner transforms the exchange of eroticism and emotion at a prostitution ranch. A prospecting hermit discovers the limits of his rugged individualism when he tries to rescue an abused teenager. Decades after she led her best friend into a degrading encounter in a Vegas hotel room, a woman feels the aftershock. Most bravely of all, Watkins takes on — and reinvents — her own troubled legacy in a story that emerges from the mayhem and destruction of Helter Skelter. Arcing from the sweeping and sublime to the minute and personal, from Gold Rush to ghost town to desert to brothel, the collection echoes not only in its title but also in its fierce, undefeated spirit the motto of her home state.

A new novel from an American master, Bay of Souls is a gripping tale of romantic obsession set against the backdrop of an island revolution. Michael Ahearn is a midwestern English professor who abandons his comfortable life when he becomes obsessed with a new colleague from the Caribbean, Lara Purcell. When Lara claims a vodoun spirit has taken possession of her soul, Michael follows her to her native St. Trinity, only to find himself in a whirlpool of Third World corruption. A finely wrought tale of one man's moral dissolution, Bay of Souls showcases Robert Stone at his most provocative and psychologically acute.

The stories collected in Bear and His Daughter span nearly thirty years — 1969 to the present — and they explore, acutely and powerfully, the humanity that unites us. In "Miserere," a widowed librarian with an unspeakable secret undertakes an unusual and grisly role in the anti-abortion crusade. "Under the Pitons" is the harrowing story of a reluctant participant in a drug-running scheme and the grim and unexpected consequences of his involvement. The title story is a riveting account of the tangled lines that weave together the relationship of a father and his grown daughter.

The stunning new novel from the prize-winning author of The Wake.'Come to a place like this. . and you will understand soon enough that this world is a great animal, alive and breathing.'Beast plunges you into the world of Edward Buckmaster, a man alone on a west-country moor. What he has left behind we don't yet know; what he faces is an existential battle with himself, the elements and with something he begins to see in the margins of his vision: some creature that is tracking him, the pursuit of which will become an obsession.This is a vivid exploration of isolation, courage and the search for truth. Short, shocking and exhilarating, it confirms Paul Kingsnorth as one of our most daring and rewarding contemporary writers.

Official tie-in to the Netflix film featuring Idris Elba (Thor, Prometheus and Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom) and directed by Cary Fukunaga (Jane Eyre). Agu is just a boy when war arrives at his village. His mother and sister are rescued by the UN, while he and his father remain to fight the rebels. 'Run!' shouts his father when the rebels arrive. And Agu does run. Straight into the rebels' path. In a vivid, sparkling voice, Agu tells the story of what happens to him next; his life as a child-soldier. His story is shocking and painful, and completely unforgettable. Beasts of No Nation gives us an extraordinary portrait of the chaos and violence of war.

A searing, surreal novel that bleeds fantasy and reality — and Beatles fandom — from one of literature's most striking contemporary voices, author of the international sensation City of Bohane.It is 1978, and John Lennon has escaped New York City to try to find the island off the west coast of Ireland he bought nine years prior. Leaving behind domesticity, his approaching forties, his inability to create, and his memories of his parents, he sets off to find calm in the comfortable silence of isolation. But when he puts himself in the hands of a shape-shifting driver full of Irish charm and dark whimsy, what ensues can only be termed a magical mystery tour.Beatlebone is a tour de force of language and literary imagination that marries the most improbable element to the most striking effect.

At last! An astonishing and original new novel by the author of Life of Pi.A famous author receives a mysterious letter from a man who is a struggling writer but also turns out to be a taxidermist, an eccentric and fascinating character who does not kill animals but preserves them as they lived, with skill and dedication – among them a howler monkey named Virgil and a donkey named Beatrice…

Premio Nadal 1998Tres mujeres: Cat, lesbiana convencida, Mónica devorahombres compulsiva Y Beatriz, que considera que el amor no tiene género. Tres momentos de la vida de una mujer y dos ciudades, Edimburgo y Madrid, para una novela únicasobre el amor a los amigos, a la familia y a los amantes.

Juego de falsas apariencias y medias verdades que terminan por desvelar una sola verdad última, Beatus Ille reveló a uno de los jóvenes narradores más rigurosos y mejor dotados de nuestra llteratura actual.Minaya es un joven estudiante, implicado en las huelgas universitarias de los años 60, que se refugia en un cortijo a orillas del Guadalquivir para escribir una tesis doctoral sobre Jacinto Solana, poeta republicano, condenado a muerte al final de la guerra, indultado y muerto en 1947 en un tiroteo con la Guardia Civil. La investigación biográfica permite a Minaya descubrir la huella de un crimen y la fascinante estampa de Mariana, una mujer turbadora, absorbente, de la que todos se enamoran. Envuelto por las omisiones, deseos y temores de los habitantes del cortijo, Minaya se acerca lentamente hacia la verdad oculta. La indagaci6n del protagonista de Beatus Ille permlte al autor una delicada evocación literaria, de impecable belleza expresiva, con técnica segura y eficaz, de una época, de una casa y los personajes que en ella viven y se esconden.

One Saturday night in Las Vegas, twelve-year-old Newell Ewing goes out with a friend and doesn't come home. In the aftermath of his disappearance, his mother, Lorraine, makes daily pilgrimages to her son's room and tortures herself with memories. Equally distraught, the boy's father, Lincoln, finds himself wanting to comfort his wife even as he yearns for solace, a loving touch, any kind of intimacy.As the Ewings navigate the mystery of what's become of their son, the circumstances surrounding Newell's vanishing and other events on that same night reverberate through the lives of seemingly disconnected strangers: a comic book illustrator in town for a weekend of debauchery; a painfully shy and possibly disturbed young artist; a stripper who imagines moments from her life as if they were movie scenes; a bubbly teenage wiccan anarchist; a dangerous and scheming gutter punk; a band of misfit runaways. The people of Beautiful Children are urban nomads; each with a past to hide and a pain to nurture, every one of them searching for salvation and barreling toward destruction, weaving their way through a neon underworld of sex, drugs, and the spinning wheels of chance.In this masterly debut novel, Charles Bock mixes incandescent prose with devious humor to capture Las Vegas with unprecedented scope and nuance and to provide a glimpse into a microcosm of modern America. Beautiful Children is an odyssey of heartache and redemption; heralding the arrival of a major new writer.

Beautiful Girls is a dazzling debut collection about the secret lives of girls and women. The characters who inhabit Beth Ann Bauman’s stories are the timid, the not-quite-fabulous, the public school Ophelias, who yearn for something grander than their current lot. Told with irresistible humor and remarkable grace, these stories illuminate the search for love, friendship, connection, and identity. In “True,” an exquisitely shy teenage girl tries to fathom the hidden secrets of beauty from a boy who’s “the prettiest person in the entire school.” A lonely divorcée in “Safeway,” wanders the darkened aisles of a grocery store during a power outage, and becomes “certain a touch of rot had taken root in her heart… and that she still might live better.” In “Wash, Rinse, Spin”, a hapless young woman loses her laundry and must resort to the decrepit wardrobe she wore while working in B movies, as her dying father fades in her hometown. And in the title story, voracious girls who long for love and admiration compete in a town pageant. From the fierce bonds among sisters, to the discoveries of a girl who roams her neighborhood in the wee hours of the morning, to the allure of a tropical paradise where anything feels possible, Beautiful Girls explores what it means to be a woman in the modern world, looking for a place to call home. At once magical, tender, and wise, this book establishes Beth Ann Bauman as a bold new literary voice.

The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love is a Pulitzer Prize-winning contemporary American classic, a book that still captivates and inspires readers twenty years after its first publication. Now, in Beautiful Maria of My Soul, Oscar Hijuelos returns to this indelible story, to tell it from the point of view of its beloved heroine, Maria.She's the great Cuban beauty who stole musician Nestor Castillo's heart and broke it, inspiring him to write the Mambo Kings' biggest hit, ''Beautiful Maria of My Soul.'' Now in her sixties and living in Miami with her pediatrician daughter, Teresa, Maria remains a beauty, still capable of turning heads. But she has never forgotten Nestor, and as she thinks back to her days-and nights-in Havana, an entirely new perspective on the Mambo Kings story unfolds.

The epic novel Beauty Is a Wound combines history, satire, family tragedy, legend, humor, and romance in a sweeping polyphony. The beautiful Indo prostitute Dewi Ayu and her four daughters are beset by incest, murder, bestiality, rape, insanity, monstrosity, and the often vengeful undead. Kurniawan's gleefully grotesque hyperbole functions as a scathing critique of his young nation's troubled past: the rapacious offhand greed of colonialism; the chaotic struggle for independence; the 1965 mass murders of perhaps a million "Communists," followed by three decades of Suharto's despotic rule.Beauty Is a Wound astonishes from its opening line: "One afternoon on a weekend in May, Dewi Ayu rose from her grave after being dead for twenty-one years…" Drawing on local sources — folk tales and the all-night shadow puppet plays, with their bawdy wit and epic scope — and inspired by Melville and Gogol, Kurniawan's distinctive voice brings something luscious yet astringent to contemporary literature.

Beauty is Convulsive is a biographical meditation on one of the twentieth century's most compelling and famous artists, Frida Kahlo (1907–1954).At the age of nineteen, Kahlo's life was transformed when the bus in which she was riding was hit by a trolley car. Pierced by a steel handrail and broken in many places, she entered a long period of convalescence during which she began to paint self-portraits. In 1928, at twenty-one, she joined the Communist Party and came to know Diego Rivera. The forty-one-year-old Rivera, Mexico's most famous painter, was impressed by the force of Kahlo's personality and by the authenticity of her art, and the two soon married. Though they were devoted to each other, intermittent affairs on both sides, Frida's grief over her inability to bear a child, and her frequent illnesses made the marriage tumultuous. This prose poem is typical Maso-vigorous, daring, always original. She brings together parts of Kahlo's biography, her letters, medical documents, and her diaries with language that is often as erotic and colorful as Kahlo's paintings."Maso's precise and poetic prose… brims with emotion, imagination, intelligence, and beauty." — Review of Contemporary Fiction"… a supple, discerning, and haunting prose poem, a biographical meditation that elegantly charts Kahlo’s epic resiliency, artistic daring, unrelenting suffering, soul-saving 'sense of the ridiculous,' and glorious defiance. Maso’s spare yet lyric tribute, a genuine communion, is a welcome antidote to the mawkishness and sensationalism that is starting to blur our appreciation for Kahlo’s pioneering art and incandescent spirit." — Booklist

The summer Opal and her father, the preacher, move to Naomi, Florida, Opal goes into the Winn-Dixie supermarket—and comes out with a dog. A big, ugly, suffering dog with a sterling sense of humor. A dog she dubs Winn-Dixie. Because of Winn-Dixie, the preacher tells Opal ten things about her absent mother, one for each year Opal has been alive. Winn-Dixie is better at making friends than anyone Opal has ever known, and together they meet the local librarian, Miss Franny Block, who once fought off a bear with a copy of WAR AND PEACE. They meet Gloria Dump, who is nearly blind but sees with her heart, and Otis, an ex-con who sets the animals in his pet shop loose after hours, then lulls them with his guitar.Opal spends all that sweet summer collecting stories about her new friends and thinking about her mother. But because of Winn-Dixie or perhaps because she has grown, Opal learns to let go, just a little, and that friendship—and forgiveness—can sneak up on you like a sudden summer storm. Recalling the fiction of Harper Lee and Carson McCullers, here is a funny, poignant, and utterly genuine first novel from a major new talent.

Because She Never Asked is a story reminiscent of that reached by the travelers in Patricia Highsmith's Stranger on a Train. The author first writes a piece for the artist Sophie Calle to live out: a young, aspiring, French artist travels to Lisbon and the Azores in pursuit of an older artist whose work she’s in love with. The second part of the story tells what happens between the author and Calle. She eludes, him; he becomes blocked, and suffers physical collapse.“Something strange happened along the way,” Vila-Matas wrote. “Normally, writers try to pass a work of fiction off as being real. But in Because She Never Asked, the opposite occurred: in order to give meaning to the story of my life, I found that I needed to present it as fiction.”

A man tells a story to a woman sitting beside him on a plane, little suspecting what it reveals about his capacity for cruelty and contempt. A callow runaway girl is stranded in a strange city with another woman’s fractiously needy children. An uncomprehending father helplessly lashes out at the daughter he both loves and resents. In these raw, startling, and incandescently lovely stories, the author of Veronica yields twelve indelible portraits of people struggling with the disparity between what they want and what they know. Because They Wanted To is further evidence that Gaitskill is one of the fiercest, funniest, and most subversively compassionate writers at work today.

"Compelling and gorgeously written, this is a coming-of-age novella like no other. Chris Abani explores the depths of loss and exploitation with what can only be described as a knowing tenderness. An extraordinary, necessary book." — Cristina Garcia, author of Dreaming in Cuban"Abani's voice brings perspective to every moment, turning pain into a beautiful painterly meditation on loss and aloneness." — Aimee Bender, author of The Girl in the Flammable Skirt“Abani's empathy for Abigail's torn life is matched only by his honesty in portraying it. Nothing at all is held back. A harrowing piece of work.”—Peter Orner, author of The Esther StoriesTough, spirited, and fiercely independent Abigail is brought as a teenager to London from Nigeria by relatives who attempt to force her into prostitution. She flees, struggling to find herself in the shadow of a strong but dead mother. In spare yet haunting and lyrical prose reminiscent of Marguerite Duras, Abani brings to life a young woman who lives with a strength and inner light that will enlighten and uplift the reader.Chris Abani is a poet and novelist and the author, most recently, of GraceLand, which won the 2005 PEN/Hemingway Prize, a Silver Medal in the California Book Awards, and was a finalist for several other prizes including the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His other prizes include a PEN Freedom-to-Write Award, a Prince Claus Award, and a Lannan Literary Fellowship. He lives and teaches in California.

A fictional portrait of Jiang Ching follows her life from her youth as the unwanted daughter of a concubine, to her search for fame as an actress in Shanghai, to her marriage to revolutionary Mao Zedong, to her role in the turbulent Communist rule of China.