LONGLISTED FOR THE 2015 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD A sharply observed, mordantly funny, and startlingly original novel from an exciting, unconventional new voice—the author of the acclaimed The Wallcreeper—about the making and unmaking of the American family that lays bare all of our assumptions about race and racism, sexuality and desire. Stillwater College in Virginia, 1966. Freshman Peggy, an ingénue with literary pretensions, falls under the spell of Lee, a blue-blooded poet and professor, and they begin an ill-advised affair that results in an unplanned pregnancy and marriage. The two are mismatched from the start—she’s a lesbian, he’s gay—but it takes a decade of emotional erosion before Peggy runs off with their three-year-old daughter, leaving their nine-year-old son behind. Worried that Lee will have her committed for her erratic behavior, Peggy goes underground, adopting an African American persona for her and her daughter. They squat in a house in an African-American settlement, eventually moving to a housing project where no one questions their true racial identities. As Peggy and Lee’s children grow up, they must contend with diverse emotional issues: Byrdie deals with his father’s compulsive honesty; while Karen struggles with her mother’s lies—she knows neither her real age, nor that she is “white,” nor that she has any other family. Years later, a minority scholarship lands Karen at the University of Virginia, where Byrdie is in his senior year. Eventually the long lost siblings will meet, setting off a series of misunderstandings and culminating in a comedic finale worthy of Shakespeare.

‘Heady and rambunctious ... Wake up, this book says: in its plot lines, in its humour, in its philosophical underpinnings and political agenda. I'll pay it the highest compliment it knows – this book is a wild thing.’ New York Times Book Review

‘Nell Zink is a writer of extraordinary talent and range. Her work insistently raises the possibility that the world is larger and stranger than the world you think you know.’ Jonathan Franzen Startlingly radical, dazzlingly witty, unlike anything that has come before – these are the two most exciting novels published this year.

One of Huffington Post’s 20 Fall 2016 Books You’ll Need for Your Bookshelf Featured in New York Magazine’s Fall 2016 Preview An Entertainment Weekly Fall 2016 Must-Read Featured in LitHub’s 2016 Bookseller’s Fall Preview Featured in The Guardian‘s Fall 2016 Books Preview: The Best American Writing From the “wonderfully talented” (Dwight Garner, New York Times) author of Mislaid and The Wallcreeper comes a fierce and audaciously funny new novel, dazzling in its energy and ambition: a story of obsession, idealism, and ownership, centered around a young woman who inherits her bohemian father’s childhood home. Recent business school graduate Penny Baker has rebelled against her family her whole life-by being the conventional one. Her mother, Amalia, was a member of an Amazonian tribe called the Kogi; her much older father, Norm, long ago attained cult-like deity status among a certain group of aging hippies while operating a ‘healing center’ in New Jersey. And she’s never felt particularly close to her much-older half-brothers from Norm’s previous marriage-one wickedly charming and obscenely rich (but mostly just wicked), one a photographer on a distant tropical island. But all that changes when her father dies, and Penny inherits his childhood home in New Jersey. She goes to investigate the property and finds it not overgrown and abandoned, but rather occupied by a group of friendly anarchist squatters whom she finds unexpectedly charming, and who have renamed the property Nicotine House. The residents of Nicotine House (defenders of smokers’ rights) possess the type of passion and fervor Penny feels she’s desperately lacking, and the other squatter houses in the neighborhood provide a sense of community Penny’s never felt before, and she soon moves into a nearby residence, becoming enmeshed in the political fervor and commitment of her fellow squatters. As the Baker family’s lives begin to converge around the fate of the Nicotine House, Penny grows ever bolder and more desperate to protect it-and its residents-until a fateful night when a reckless confrontation between her old family and her new one changes everything.

From the brilliant and incisive author of Mislaid—"a writer of extraordinary talent and range" (Jonathan Franzen) whose "capacity for inventions is immense" (BookForum)—comes a new collection of her earliest work: two wildly funny novellas (Sailing Towards the Sunset by Avner Shats and European Story for Avner Shats) available in one compact volume. Years ago, Nell Zink resolved to write a book for her friend, the Israeli novelist Avner Shats, that would mirror his remarkable style. Unable to read his Hebrew, she was forced to start from scratch. Now, this tongue-in-cheek homage is available to Nell’s growing readership for the first time, accompanied by a second dazzling and imaginative work that breathes—at Shats’s request—the perfumed air of the Old Europe and stars a figure very much like Shats. Sailing Towards the Sunset by Avner Shats is Zink’s faux-translation of Shats’s 1998 novel Lashut El Hashkia ("Sailing Towards the Sunset"). It flows with a narrative spin only the singular Zink could pull off—including both authentic and fictional versions of characters from Shats’s life and work such as the author herself. A fast-moving portrait of expat artists, authors, and academics on fellowships at the Villa Romana in Florence, European Story for Avner Shats centers on a trio of three indelible characters: an Israeli writer vaguely reminiscent of Shats, a German specialist in ancient lint, and a beautiful and fraudulent Russian performance artist. Demonstrating the hallmarks of Zink’s unique talent, Private Novelist is an intimate look into this acclaimed novelist’s early work that will please her coterie of admirers and further burnish her lustrous reputation.

A NEW YORK TIMES BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • A profound and singular story about a young woman searching for her place in the world, from one of America’s most original voices—the irresistible story of one teenager’s reckoning with society at large and her search for a personal utopia. “Effulgent and clever.... What fun.” —The New York Times Bran’s Southern California upbringing is anything but traditional. After her mother joins a Buddhist colony, Bran is raised by her “common-law stepfather” on Bourdon Farms—a plant nursery that doubles as a cover for a biker gang. She spends her days tending plants, slogging through high school, and imagining what life could be if she had been born to a different family. And then she meets Peter, a beautiful, troubled, and charming train wreck of a college student from the East Coast, who launches his teaching career by initiating her into the world of literature and aesthetics. As the two begin a volatile and ostensibly doomed long-distance relationship, Bran searches for meaning in her own surroundings—attending disastrous dance recitals, house-sitting for strangers, and writing scripts for student films. She knows how to survive, but her happiness depends on learning to call the shots. Exceedingly rich, ecstatically dark, and delivered with masterful humor, Avalon is a poignant portrait of a young woman who, against all odds, is determined to find her place in the world and find clarity in its remote corners.

Pornography keeps getting more extreme. Manufacturers, defenders and consumers of porn rely on a mix of wilful ignorance and bad faith to avoid serious discussion. When we do talk about violence against women in the porn world, the debate all too often becomes technical, complicated by legalities and outrage. But what are the moral and psychological consequences of the mercantilization of abuse? In this studied and ruthless examination of the place of pornography in contemporary life, translator and critic Adrian Nathan West treads dangerous literary and social ground, transcending cliches about free expression and the demands of the market to look at the moral discomfort of violent pornography from the perspective of the viewer. Collapsing distinctions between novel, memoir, and essay, this book will not make for light reading. But at its core is an extraordinarily brave and honest concern for the women and men who have been hurt in the name of sexual gratification.