TIME ’S #1 FICTION TITLE OF THE YEAR • NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2018 FINALIST for the MAN BOOKER PRIZE and t he NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD LONGLISTED for the ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL An instant New York Times bestseller from two-time National Book Award finalist Rachel Kushner, The Mars Room earned tweets from Margaret Atwood—“gritty, empathic, finely rendered, no sugar toppings, and a lot of punches, none of them pulled”—and from Stephen King—“ The Mars Room is the real deal, jarring, horrible, compassionate, funny.” It’s 2003 and Romy Hall, named after a German actress, is at the start of two consecutive life sentences at Stanville Women’s Correctional Facility, deep in California’s Central Valley. Outside is the world from which she has been severed: her young son, Jackson, and the San Francisco of her youth. Inside is a new reality: thousands of women hustling for the bare essentials needed to survive; the bluffing and pageantry and casual acts of violence by guards and prisoners alike; and the deadpan absurdities of institutional living, portrayed with great humor and precision. Stunning and unsentimental, The Mars Room is “wholly authentic…profound…luminous” ( The Wall Street Journal ), “one of those books that enrage you even as they break your heart” ( The New York Times Book Review, cover review)—a spectacularly compelling, heart-stopping novel about a life gone off the rails in contemporary America. It is audacious and tragic, propulsive and yet beautifully refined and “affirms Rachel Kushner as one of our best novelists” ( Entertainment Weekly ).

Gina Berriault had written critically acclaimed stories and novels for decades, but in 1996 she was in the literary spotlight as never before, winning both the PEN/Faulkner Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Women in Their Beds. This new collection, compiled by Berriault's daughter and her longtime companion, Leonard Gardner, opens with five stories, including ?The Figure Skater,” the final story she saw to publication before her death in 1999. Berriault's stories have been praised for their elegance, compassion, and psychological intelligence. We are first drawn in by her deep understanding of human emotions and predicaments, and then astounded by her remarkable eye for detail. Essays on topics as diverse as topless dancers and firing squads are also included, together with three rare self-revelatory pieces on why the world needs writers, comprising a sort of ars poetica for Berriault. As a whole, this collection becomes her credo on American culture, politics, and the written word.

An astonishing collection of short stories--set deep in the twisted heart of middle class America--from one of America's most promising and highly acclaimed young writers. Leavitt lays bare the terrible lies of love and pain that bind us all in this "astounding collection of short stories".--New York Times. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award.

The award-winning author of Minor Characters writes with delicious transparency about a love that cannot be harnessed and a woman who refuses to be deceived In the great wave of husband-leaving ushered in by the Sexual Revolution, Molly Held frees herself from her cold, flagrantly unfaithful husband after their final quarrel turns violent. With her five-year-old son, she lights out for an Upper West Side apartment and the new life she hopes to find with Conrad Schwartzberg-the charismatic radical lawyer who has recently become her lover. Having escaped from a desert, she lands in a swamp. While Conrad radiates positive energy, he is unable to tell Molly-or anyone who loves him-the truth. No longer the wronged wife, Molly now finds herself the Other Woman. She is sharing Conrad with Roberta, another refugee from marriage-with Conrad's movements between the two of them disguised by his suspiciously frequent out-of-town engagements. Roberta either knows nothing or prefers to look the other way, but Molly's maddening capacity for double vision takes over her mind. What saves her from herself is her well-developed sense of irony, which never fails her-or the reader. "Ironic, witty and always graceful." -Marilyn French, author of The Women's Room "Johnson . . . reveals a knack for lyric bitterness." -Kirkus Reviews "Another superb novel of feminine risk-taking." -Ann Douglas " Bad Connections] is controlled, smooth, deftly written: it evokes scene and character with admirable sure swiftness. . . . Joyce Johnson's touches are all true." -Harper's Magazine "Joyce Johnson is a writer of wit and perception . . . and she has a keen eye for the irony of modern life." -The New York Times Book Review "Often funny, sometimes cathartically angry, always skillful in rendering the small, excruciating moments that add up to the misery of love gone bad." -The Village Voice "The new literature of the aggrieved woman has produced something here quite memorable, a sad, beautiful casebook of unrequited love, unrequited humanity." -E. L. Doctorow "Painfully perceptive, psychologically accurate." -Judith Rossner "A subtle, witty, rueful tour de force of that strange new territory which all of us now inhabit: modern women's modern lives." -Barbara Probst Solomon Joyce Johnson was born in 1935 in New York City, the setting for all her fiction: Come and Join the Dance, recognized as the first Beat novel by a woman writer, Bad Connections, and In the Night Caf . She is best known for her memoir Minor Characters, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1983 and dealt with coming of age in the 1950s and with her involvement with Jack Kerouac. She has published two other Beat-related books: Door Wide Open: A Beat Love Affair in Letters, and The Voice Is All: The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac. She has also written a second memoir, Missing Men, and the nonfiction title What Lisa Knew: The Truths and Lies of the Steinberg Case.