A meditation on southwestern terrains, intergenerational queer dynamics, and surveilled brown artists that crosses physical and conceptual borders. Part butch memoir, part ekphrastic travel diary, part queer family tree, Raquel Gutiérrez’s debut essay collection, Brown Neon, gleans insight from the sediment of land and relationships. For Gutiérrez, terrain is essential to understanding that no story, no matter how personal, is separate from the space where it unfolds. Whether contemplating the value of adobe as both vernacular architecture and commodified art object, highlighting the feminist wounding and transphobic apparitions haunting the multigenerational lesbian social fabric, or recalling a failed romance, Gutiérrez traverses complex questions of gender, class, identity, and citizenship with curiosity and nuance.

In the stories that make up Oblivion, David Foster Wallace joins the rawest, most naked humanity with the infinite involutions of self-consciousness -- a combination that is dazzlingly, uniquely his. These are worlds undreamt of by any other mind. Only David Foster Wallace could convey a father's desperate loneliness by way of his son's daydreaming through a teacher's homicidal breakdown (The Soul Is Not a Smithy). Or could explore the deepest and most hilarious aspects of creativity by delineating the office politics surrounding a magazine profile of an artist who produces miniature sculptures in an anatomically inconceivable way (The Suffering Channel). Or capture the ache of love's breakdown in the painfully polite apologies of a man who believes his wife is hallucinating the sound of his snoring (Oblivion). Each of these stories is a complete world, as fully imagined as most entire novels, at once preposterously surreal and painfully immediate.

There is no neon to match Nevada’s. The combination of Wild West mythology and the remaining untamed pitch-black nighttime landscape, replete with real cowboys and real gambling, makes the Silver State a unique and appropriate canvas for neon art. Modern Nevada began with a nonstop desire for riches. It continues for many as a state of dreams often vividly expressed through exploding neon. Neon Nevada brings all this alive. Cameras in hand, authors Sheila Swan and Peter Laufer embarked on their first Nevada neon trek in the 1970s. They followed this up with a second nocturnal treasure hunt in the early 1990s—and a third in 2010, in the course of which they discovered that neon is fading fast; most notably on the Las Vegas Strip. Most of all, though, they realized that their passion for the art and craft of neon had not waned. A compelling blend of full-color photographs and absorbing prose, Neon Nevada takes us on a literal and figurative journey not only down the Las Vegas strip but also down quiet two-lane roads punctuated occasionally with neon signs, those glittering beacons of civilization against the desert night sky. The authors talk with sign owners, with those who created and maintained the neon, and those who collect it.

A National Book Foundation "5 Under 35" Honoree “An enchanting, sparkling book about the many meanings of sisterhood.” —Kristin Iversen, Refinery29 Claire Luchette's debut, Agatha of Little Neon, is a novel about yearning and sisterhood, figuring out how you fit in (or don’t), and the unexpected friends who help you find your truest self Agatha has lived every day of the last nine years with her sisters: they work together, laugh together, pray together. Their world is contained within the little house they share. The four of them are devoted to Mother Roberta and to their quiet, purposeful life. But when the parish goes broke, the sisters are forced to move. They land in Woonsocket, a former mill town now dotted with wind turbines. They take over the care of a halfway house, where they live alongside their charges, such as the jawless Tim Gary and the headstrong Lawnmower Jill. Agatha is forced to venture out into the world alone to teach math at a local all-girls high school, where for the first time in years she has to reckon all on her own with what she sees and feels. Who will she be if she isn’t with her sisters? These women, the church, have been her home. Or has she just been hiding? Disarming, delightfully deadpan, and full of searching, Claire Luchette’s Agatha of Little Neon offers a view into the lives of women and the choices they make.

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice "A radiant first novel. . . . [Neon in Daylight] has antecedents in the great novels of the 1970s: Renata Adler’s Speedboat, Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights, Joan Didion’s Play It as It Lays. . . . Precision—of observation, of language—is Hoby’s gift. Her sentences are sleek and tailored. Language molds snugly to thought." —Parul Sehgal, The New York Times "What do you get when a writer of extreme intelligence, insight, style and beauty chronicles the lives of self–absorbed hedonists—The Great Gatsby, Bright Lights, Big City, and now Neon in Daylight. Hermione Hoby paints a garish world that drew me in and held me spellbound. She is a marvel."" —Ann Patchett, author of Commonwealth New York City in 2012, the sweltering summer before Hurricane Sandy hits. Kate, a young woman newly arrived from England, is staying in a Manhattan apartment while she tries to figure out her future. She has two unfortunate responsibilities during her time in America: to make regular Skype calls to her miserable boyfriend back home, and to cat–sit an indifferent feline named Joni Mitchell. The city has other plans for her. In New York's parks and bodegas, its galleries and performance spaces, its bars and clubs crowded with bodies, Kate encounters two strangers who will transform her stay: Bill, a charismatic but embittered writer made famous by the movie version of his only novel; and Inez, his daughter, a recent high school graduate who supplements her Bushwick cafe salary by enacting the fantasies of men she meets on Craigslist. Unmoored from her old life, Kate falls into an infatuation with both of them. Set in a heatwave that feels like it will never break, Neon In Daylight marries deep intelligence with captivating characters to offer us a joyful, unflinching exploration of desire, solitude, and the thin line between life and art.

It's not easy landing unprepared in a country like Japan. The eccentricities of the calendar, the indecipherable postal system, not to mention the alien alphabet, language and culture, have all to be confronted before the disorientated traveller can feel at ease. Trying to ride a bicycle through the streets of one of the most congested cities in the world would seem to compound your problems. For Josie Dew, however, with over 200,000 miles already clocked up in the saddle few things could be more challenging - or for the reader of A RIDE IN THE NEON SUN, more wonderfully entertaining. From Kawasaki to Kagoshima, Odawara to Okinawa, Josie discovered a nation rich in dazzling contrasts. The neon and concrete were there in greater abundance than even she had imagined, but so too were bottomless baths, love burgers, long-tailed cocks, musical toilet rolls, oriental Elvises, cardboard police and a sense of fun belying the population's rigourous work ethic. Far from being the reserved race that she had heard about, the Japanese welcomed her into their homes with bountiful smiles and bows - and skin-scorching baths.

Society darling Persephone Dimitriou wants nothing to do with her mother's ambitions. She's biding her time until she's able to leave the ultra-modern city of Olympus and start her doctorate degree. The one thing she never planned on? Her mother ambushing her with an engagement to Zeus--a man with more than a few dead wives in his past. Persephone will do anything to escape that fate...even flee the sparkling upper city and make a devil's bargain with a man she once believed was a myth. Hades has spent his life in the shadows, and he has no intention of stepping into the light. Not even for the woman who flees into his territory as if the very hounds of hell are on her heels. But when he finds that Persephone can offer a little slice of the revenge he's spent his entire life craving? It's all the excuse he needs to agree to help her--for a price. She'll be his for the summer, and then he'll see her safely out of Olympus and away from her mother and Zeus. Hades and Persephone's deal might seem simple enough, but they both quickly realize it's anything but. With every breathless night spent with Hades, Persephone wonders at her ability to leave him behind. And Hades? Now that he has a taste for Persephone, he's willing to go to war with Olympus itself to keep her...