#1 New York Times Bestseller From #1 New York Times bestselling author Neil Gaiman, a haunting novel that explores the awesome power of memory, friendship, and sacrifice―one of ten classic Gaiman works repackaged with elegant original watercolor art by acclaimed artist Henry Sene Yee "A novel about the truths--some wonderful, some terrible--that children know and adults do not." --Time Magazine Returning to his childhood home to attend a funeral, a middle-aged man is drawn back to a place once alive with monsters and magic; to a past where the impossible is all too frighteningly real . . . A haunting meditation on memory, wonder, friendship, and sacrifice, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, which was named "Book of the Year" by the UK National Book Awards, is a groundbreaking triumph of storytelling as delicate as a butterfly's wing and as menacing as a knife in the dark.

From #1 New York Times bestselling author Neil Gaiman, an ingenious and captivating reimagining of Rudyard Kipling's adventure The Jungle Book that is a glorious meditation on love, loss, survival, sacrifice, and what it means to truly be alive―one of ten classic Gaiman works repackaged with elegant original watercolor art by acclaimed artist Henry Sene Yee. Nobody Owens, known to his friends as Bod, is a normal boy. He would have been completely normal if he didn't live in a sprawling graveyard, being raised and educated by ghosts, with a solitary guardian who belongs to neither the world of the living nor of the dead. There are dangers and adventures in the graveyard for a boy--an ancient Indigo Man beneath the hill, a gateway to a desert leading to an abandoned city of ghouls, the strange and terrible menace of the Sleer. But if Bod leaves the graveyard, then he will come under attack from the man Jack--who has already killed Bod's family. . . By turns macabre, uplifting, sinister, and heartwarming, Neil Gaiman's #1 national bestseller―winner of the Carnegie and Newbury Medals and the Hugo Award―is a "novel of wonder . . . a tale of unforgettable enchantment" (New York Times Book Review).

From #1 New York Times bestselling author Neil Gaiman, an outstanding array of short fiction that surveys the terrain between the illusory and the ordinary and reveals the terrors and wonders reflected in the funhouse mirrors of our dreams―one of ten classic Gaiman works repackaged with elegant original watercolor art by acclaimed artist Henry Sene Yee "He is a treasure-house of story, and we are lucky to have him." --Stephen King Spanning the realms of dark imagination, Smoke and Mirrors surveys the terrain between the illusory and the ordinary, treating readers to a gift of wonder and delight from one of the most unique literary artists of our time. The miraculous inventions contained herein - stories, novellas, and poems - reveal Gaiman to be a writer of immense talent and sophisticated invention. In his deft hands, magic is no mere illusion, but a powerful means of illumination, revelation, and reflection on what it means to be human. Poignant and haunting, humorous and unorthodox, Smoke and Mirrors is an outstanding array of short fiction from one of the world's most distinguished literary masters.

From #1 New York Times bestselling author Neil Gaiman, an astonishing collection of short fiction that stretches the boundaries of imagination, probes the depths of human experience, and reveals how the ordinary and the fantastical are intertwined―one of ten classic Gaiman works repackaged with elegant original watercolor art by acclaimed artist Henry Sene Yee Fragile Things showcases the distinctive storytelling genius that has made Neil Gaiman one of the most admired literary artists of our time. The thirty-two gems of prose and verse in this astonishing collection stretch the imagination and engage the intellect even as they illuminate the vagaries of human experience. Whether he's conjuring a mysterious traveling circus, exploring the rarefied tastes of an exclusive epicurean club, or visiting a strangely altered Victorian England, Gaiman reveals how the ordinary and the fantastical are transmutable and intertwined. With breathtaking clarity, Fragile Things illumines Gaiman's brilliance as well as his terrifyingly entertaining dark sense of humor. By turns delightful, disturbing, and diverting, this volume is a gift of enchantments that will startle the senses and stir the soul.

Acclaimed novelist Austin Grossman reimagines the ultimate American antihero. Richard Milhous Nixon lived one of the most improbable lives of the twentieth century. Our thirty-seventh president's political career spanned the button-down fifties, the Mad Men sixties, and the turbulent seventies. He faced down the Russians, the Chinese, and ultimately his own government. The man went from political mastermind to a national joke, sobbing in the Oval Office, leaving us with one burning question: how could he have lost it all? Here for the first time is the tale told in his own words: the terrifying supernatural secret he stumbled upon as a young man, and the truth behind the Cold War. What if the man we call our worst president was, in truth, our greatest? Combining Lovecraftian suspense and international intrigue, Crooked is a masterwork of alternative history, equal parts mesmerizing character study and nail-biting Faustian thriller.

FROM THE AUTHOR OF THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER THE PARTICULAR SADNESS OF LEMON CAKE - A RICHARD AND JUDY BOOK CLUB PICK LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/JEAN STEIN BOOK AWARD ' The Butterfly Lampshade is an unflinching, empathetic portrayal of a childhood touched by mental illness. As always, Aimee Bender's respect for the child and the child within translates into wisdom and magic on the page.' Jing-Jing Lee, author of How We Disappeared On the night her mother is taken to a mental health hospital after a psychotic episode, eight year-old Francie is mesmerised by a lamp adorned with butterflies as she falls asleep. When she wakes, Francie sees a dead butterfly matching the ones on the lamp floating in a glass of water. She drinks it before anyone sees. Twenty-years later, Francie is compelled to make sense of that moment and two other incidents that have haunted her life. But how close are her memories to reality, and will she ever be free of them?

"Contemporary fairy tales, cushioned by goofy humor and a deep tenderness for her characters, that aren't always as dark or as sinister as they initially appear." -- The New York Times Book Review Aimee Bender’s Willful Creatures conjures a fantastical world in which authentic love blooms. This is a place where a boy with keys for fingers is a hero, a woman’s children are potatoes, and a little boy with an iron for a head is born to a family of pumpkin heads. With her singular mix of surrealism, musical prose, and keenly felt emotion, Bender once again proves herself to be a masterful chronicler of the human condition.

An authentic literary great, Singer was an author whose extraordinary talents won him a worldwide audience. And with this impressive novel, he proved that he was at the height of his creative power until his recent death at age 86. Scum evokes the teeming life of 1906 Warsaw's backstreets. Max Barabander, distraught over the recent death of his son, flees the life of wealth and respectability he has attained in Buenos Aires, to return to the poverty and shadows of his youth spent in Warsaw. He fears impotence which leads him to the pursuit of mindless sex with five different women who view him only as an escape from their drab lives. The author recalls the teeming life of 1906 Jewish Warsaw in this impressive novel of changing mores and values. . .

A Library Journal Horror Best Seller From Nebula Award winner Sam J. Miller comes a frightening and uncanny ghost story about a rapidly changing city in upstate New York and the mysterious forces that threaten it. Ronan Szepessy promised himself he'd never return to Hudson. The sleepy upstate town was no place for a restless gay photographer. But his father is ill and New York City's distractions have become too much for him. He hopes that a quick visit will help him recharge. Ronan reconnects with two friends from high school: Dom, his first love, and Dom's wife, Attalah. The three former misfits mourn what their town has become--overrun by gentrifiers and corporate interests. With friends and neighbors getting evicted en masse and a mayoral election coming up, Ronan and Attalah craft a plan to rattle the newcomers and expose their true motives. But in doing so, they unleash something far more mysterious and uncontainable. Hudson has a rich, proud history and, it turns out, the real-state developers aren't the only forces threatening its well-being: the spirits undergirding this once-thriving industrial town are enraged. Ronan's hijinks have overlapped with a bubbling up of hate and violence among friends and neighbors, and everything is spiraling out of control. Ronan must summon the very best of himself to shed his own demons and save the city he once loathed.

It's 1922 and David Bendiger, an aspiring eighteen-and-a-half-year-old writer, arrives in Warsaw, penniless and homeless. His only contacts are Sonya, a young woman with whom he has had amorous dealings in the village they have left, and a Zionist functionary who informs him he has qualified for a certificate permitting him to emigrate to Palestine. But in order to make the journey David must enter into a fictitious marriage with a woman so eager to get to Palestine that she will pay all the expenses. While David waits for his certificate, he becomes involved not only with Sonya but with Edusha, the sexually avant-garde Communist Party member in whose apartment he finds a temporary haven; and with Minna, the well-to-do young woman who wants to join her fiance in Palestine and agrees to "marry" David. Grappling with romantic, political, and youthful turmoil, David also confronts his literary future and religious past when his older brother - a writer disillusioned by a recent sojourn in Russia - and his father, an Orthodox rabbi, both turn up in Warsaw. The Certificate was serialized in Yiddish in 1967, but may have been written much earlier. The translator, Leonard Wolf, in a postscript calls it "a very young man's book" and "certainly the most playful of Singer's long fictions", with its alternately comic and poignant shifts in plot. Young David's passions for women, philosophizing, Jewish religious speculation, and Walter Mitty-like fantasies make The Certificate a captivating novel in the great tradition of a master storyteller.

Twenty stories from the Nobel Prizewinner, including "Disguised," a transvestite tale of the yeshiva student whose deserted wife finds him dressed as a woman and married to a man, and the title story, which portrays Methuselah at the age of 969 -- "and when you pass your nine hundredth birthday, you are not what you used to be."

The Image is a collection of twenty-two entertaining stories that range in time from the old days in Warsaw to recent years in America. The title story is haunted by a unique love that falls like a shadow between a newly married couple.

Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction "A hilarious, richly imagined bear's eye view of love, music, alienation, manhood and humanity…that recalls Pynchon at his most controlled." —Publishers Weekly (starred review) The hero of this sensational debut novel is an alto-sax virtuoso trying to evolve a personal style out of Coltrane and Rollins. He also happens to be a walking, talking, Blake- and Shakespeare-quoting bear whose musical, spiritual, and romantic adventures add up to perhaps the best novel, ursine or human, ever written about jazz.

Jachin-Boaz is a maker and seller of maps. In his shop are maps that will lead you to whatever it is you most desire: love, inspiration, wealth. But his greatest achievement is a master-map showing the location of everything that has ever been found in the world, which he intends to give to his son, Boaz-Jachin. There is only one thing missing from the map: lions - for there are no more lions left. Or are there? When Jachin-Boaz sets out on a quest to find a lion for his son, Boaz-Jachin will follow in search of his father, and both will discover something wholly unexpected ... Russell Hoban's first novel for adults, The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz (1973) was widely acclaimed by critics and earned comparisons to Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. Both a humorous and light-hearted fantasy and an insightful meditation on the sometimes difficult relationships between fathers and sons, it is a perfect introduction to the work of this brilliant writer. 'A piece of invention as original as any of Tolkien's or C.S. Lewis's.' - New Statesman 'Magic at work ... Funny as well as beautiful.' - Irish Times 'Mr. Hoban is unclassifiable, thank goodness. His narrative is so minutely and compellingly realistic that after a time you cease to notice that he has stood reality on its head.' - Sunday Times 'Of outstanding quality ... unusually vivid imagination ... immensely striking use of words.' - Auberon Waugh, The Spectator

25th ANNIVERSARY EDITION Nadine Pagan's dyke sister Jane wants to find her. Her lover Rose wants to marry her. And her mother Fay wants to forget her. All Nadine wants is to stop the buzzing in her head. Running Fiercely Toward a High Thin Sound follows Nadine's (née Morningstar) adventures as she escapes from her incendiary Jewish family into the lesbian town of New Chelm--and far beyond. This is the novel Isaac Bashevis Singer might have written if he'd been a lesbian with a keen eye for contemporary middle-class assimilation. It's Jewish magical lesbian realism, a good story, and a dynamic piece of writing. Includes an all new introduction by the author Judith Katz is the author of two published novels, The Escape Artist and Running Fiercely Toward a High Thin Sound , which won the 1992 Lambda Literary Award for Best Lesbian Fiction. She teaches cultural studies and literature courses for the University of Minnesota's Center for Jewish Studies.

In The Book of Words, Jenny Erpenbeck captures with amazing virtuosity the inner life of a young girl who survives the totalitarian regime of a curiously unnamed South American country (most likely Argentina during its "dirty war"). Raised by parents whose real identity ends up shocking her, the girl comes of age in a country where gunshots are mistaken for blown tires, innocent citizens are dragged off buses, and tortured and disappeared friends and family return to visit her from the dead.