“Sit and stay a while in the strangely familiar rooms and landscapes that Monica Berlin’s Elsewhere, That Small constructs for us. Let Berlin stop the clock, just for a few seconds, so we can take stock of “the ordinary seen & seen / -through” of our day: a doorframe warped by humidity or an over-pruned tree. Here, we weather cycles of loss and recovery; here, we dwell in the contrary senses of belonging and longing to be elsewhere. Berlin’s beautifully structured and incisive poems ask us to face—and to marvel at—the brute force of the world’s ongoingness. More so, Elsewhere, That Small offers a lesson on how to region here—that is, how to accept, how to endure.” —EMILY ROSKO | “The contingency in Elsewhere, That Small is embodied by the sonnet form, its propensity to turn from abstract to concrete, map to memory “heavy-shaded by green.” It’s in the rhythm of Monica Berlin’s language, in iambs that sometimes strike in a clear pattern sturdy as a chair back before shifting “like some trick of maybe.” And yet: what is contingent in the form is inescapable in the fact of our being human. In these poems, we occupy spaces, patches of ground and perspectives that we may be so bold as to call our own. What a gift to be reminded of the view from where we’re standing, and how fleeting it is when the time comes to turn.” —BETH MCDERMOTT | “This sequence of poems makes me consider the solitary expanse of the sonnet, how the span of fourteen lines opens up a zone through which a thought can travel nimbly its avenues. Intimate, contemplative, seeking out the smallest folds of language, Berlin’s verse leads us through estrangements and dismantlings, whose phrases disclose their “beautiful, hardness, their sharp edges & / sharper heave of near-careless care.” This book makes palpable a certain kind of nearness, an almost, an about-to-rise, like orchestral instruments tuning up. Reader, bring your listening.” CAROLINA EBEID

Richly emotive and darkly captivating, with elements of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” and the imaginative depth of Margaret Atwood, Elsewhere by Alexis Schaitkin conjures a community in which girls become wives, wives become mothers and some of them, quite simply, disappear. Vera grows up in a small town, removed and isolated, pressed up against the mountains, cloud-covered and damp year-round. This town, fiercely protective, brutal and unforgiving in its adherence to tradition, faces a singular affliction: some mothers vanish, disappearing into the clouds. It is the exquisite pain and intrinsic beauty of their lives; it sets them apart from people elsewhere and gives them meaning. Vera, a young girl when her mother went, is on the cusp of adulthood herself. As her peers begin to marry and become mothers, they speculate about who might be the first to go, each wondering about her own fate. Reveling in their gossip, they witness each other in motherhood, waiting for signs: this one devotes herself to her child too much, this one not enough—that must surely draw the affliction’s gaze. When motherhood comes for Vera, she is faced with the question: will she be able to stay and mother her beloved child, or will she disappear? Provocative and hypnotic, Alexis Schaitkin’s Elsewhere is at once a spellbinding revelation and a rumination on the mysterious task of motherhood and all the ways in which a woman can lose herself to it; the self-monitoring and judgment, the doubts and unknowns, and the legacy she leaves behind.

From one of our most talented and original new literary voices comes the next great American supernatural novel: a work that explores the dark dimensions of the hometowns and the neighbors we thought we knew. Some places are too good to be true. Under a pink moon, there is a perfect little town not found on any map: Wink, New Mexico. In that town, there are quiet streets lined with pretty houses, houses that conceal the strangest things. After a couple years of hard traveling, ex-cop Mona Bright inherits her long-dead mother's home. And the closer Mona gets to her mother's past, the more she understands that the people of Wink are very, very different . . . "Perfect for fans of Stephen King and Neil Gaiman." -- Library Journal

For fans of Small Spaces, Coraline, A Series of Unfortunate Events, and James Howe's Bunnicula classics comes the first book in the award-winning, New York Times bestselling Books of Elsewhere series. This house is keeping secrets . . . When eleven-year-old Olive and her parents move into the crumbling mansion on Linden Street and find it filled with mysterious paintings, Olive knows the place is creepy—but it isn’t until she encounters its three talking cats that she realizes there’s something darkly magical afoot. Then Olive finds a pair of antique spectacles in a dusty drawer and discovers the most peculiar thing yet: She can travel inside the house’s spooky paintings to a world that’s strangely quiet . . . and eerily sinister. But in entering Elsewhere, Olive has been ensnared in a mystery darker and more dangerous than she could have imagined, confronting a power that wants to be rid of her by any means necessary. With only the cats and an unusual boy she meets in Elsewhere on her side, it’s up to Olive to save the house from the shadows, before the lights go out for good.

These intimate stories of South Indian immigrants and the families they left behind center women’s lives and ask how women both claim and surrender power—a stunning debut collection from an O. Henry Prize winner Traveling from Pittsburgh to Eastern Washington to Tamil Nadu, these stories about dislocation and dissonance see immigrants and their families confront the costs of leaving and staying, identifying sublime symmetries in lives growing apart. In “Malliga Homes,” selected by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie for an O. Henry Prize, a widow in a retirement community glimpses her future while waiting for her daughter to visit from America. In "No. 16 Model House Road," a woman long subordinate to her husband makes a choice of her own after she inherits a house. In "Nature Exchange," a mother grieving in the wake of a school shooting finds an unusual obsession. In "A Life in America," a professor finds himself accused of having exploited his graduate students. Sindya Bhanoo’s haunting stories show us how immigrants’ paths, and the paths of those they leave behind, are never simple. Bhanoo takes us along on their complicated journeys where regret, hope, and triumph appear in disguise.

Winner of the 2016 Bologna Ragazzi Award, My Little One is a series of sparse and rhythmic images drawn in simple grey pencil, measuring like a metronome the boundless love between mother and son. A mother, welcoming her tiny son into the world, tells him the story of their lives, whispering to him as she swings him gently around. With each successive page, he grows while she shrinks, until she is being held by the man he has become. Albertine's weightless strokes and billowing bodies recall the flitting procession of a flipbook or an ephermeral notebook sketch. She choreographs the peculiar dance of aging, of the way our bodies fold, lean, tuck into one another as we grow old. Filled with poetry and questioning, Germano whittles his words down - each precise line reminds us of the pithy goodness of childhood. An eloquent portrait of life's waxing and waning, My Little One is a moving celebration of constant, unconditional love.

A New York Times Notable Book of 2020 "'Saint X' is hypnotic. Schaitkin's characters...are so intelligent and distinctive it feels not just easy, but necessary, to follow them. I devoured [it] in a day." –Oyinkan Braithwaite, New York Times Book Review When you lose the person who is most essential to you, who do you become? Recommended by Entertainment Weekly, included in Good Morning America's 20 Books We're Excited for in 2020 & named as one of Vogue's Best Books to Read This Winter, Bustle's Most Anticipated Books of February 2020, and O Magazine's 14 of the Best Books to Read This February! Hailed as a “marvel of a book” and “brilliant and unflinching,” Alexis Schaitkin’s stunning debut, Saint X, is a haunting portrait of grief, obsession, and the bond between two sisters never truly given the chance to know one another. Claire is only seven years old when her college-age sister, Alison, disappears on the last night of their family vacation at a resort on the Caribbean island of Saint X. Several days later, Alison’s body is found in a remote spot on a nearby cay, and two local men–employees at the resort–are arrested. But the evidence is slim, the timeline against it, and the men are soon released. The story turns into national tabloid news, a lurid mystery that will go unsolved. For Claire and her parents, there is only the return home to broken lives. Years later, Claire is living and working in New York City when a brief but fateful encounter brings her together with Clive Richardson, one of the men originally suspected of murdering her sister. It is a moment that sets Claire on an obsessive pursuit of the truth–not only to find out what happened the night of Alison’s death but also to answer the elusive question: Who exactly was her sister? At seven, Claire had been barely old enough to know her: a beautiful, changeable, provocative girl of eighteen at a turbulent moment of identity formation. As Claire doggedly shadows Clive, hoping to gain his trust, waiting for the slip that will reveal the truth, an unlikely attachment develops between them, two people whose lives were forever marked by the same tragedy. For readers of Emma Cline’s The Girls and Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies, Saint X is a flawlessly drawn and deeply moving story that culminates in an emotionally powerful ending.