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.