This one-of-a-kind collaboration between acclaimed author Susan Orlean and celebrated artist Philip Taaffe unites the literary and the visual, the nostalgic and the optimistic, and brings greenery to your bookshelf. Taking inspiration from the rapidly dwindling flower district of New York City, Orlean and Taaffe offer tandem musings on the conceit of the floral ghost. Orlean's essay, one of her first botanically themed writings since she penned the widely lauded The Orchid Thief, reflects on a poignant moment when she first visited the district in its resplendent heyday. Her text is accompanied by Taaffe's colorful silkscreen monotypes--a bouquet of paper and ink recalling the unique yet universal nature of time passing and petals fading. An evocative rendering of both the memories of youth and the ephemeral nature of the cityscape, The Floral Ghost makes an elegant gift for every aspiring writer, artist and dreamer who moves to a city to make his or her mark or who admires its mutable glory from afar. Susan Orlean (born 1955) is the bestselling author of eight books, including The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup; My Kind of Place; Saturday Night; and Lazy Little Loafers. In 1999, she published The Orchid Thief, a narrative about orchid poachers in Florida, which was made into the Academy Award-winning film Adaptation, written by Charlie Kaufman and directed by Spike Jonze. Her 2011 book, Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend, was a New York Times bestseller. Orlean has been a staff writer for the The New Yorker since 1992. She lives in Los Angeles and upstate New York. Philip Taaffe was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey, in 1955, and studied at the Cooper Union in New York. He has exhibited worldwide since his first solo exhibition in New York, in 1982. Taaffe has traveled widely in the Middle East, South America and Morocco, where he collaborated with Mohammed Mrabet on the 1993 book Chocolate Creams and Dollars, translated by Paul Bowles. His work is in numerous public collections, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Taaffe lives and works in New York and West Cornwall, Connecticut.

An Post Irish Book Awards Nonfiction Book of the Year • A Guardian Best Book of 2020 • Shortlisted for the 2021 Rathbones Folio Prize • Longlisted for the 2021 Republic of Consciousness Prize • Winner of the James Tait Black Biography Prize • A New York Times New & Noteworthy Title • Longlisted for the 2021 Gordon Burn Prize • A Buzzfeed Recommended Summer Read • A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2021 • A Book Riot Best Book of 2022 • An NPR Best Book of 2021 • A Chicago Public Library Best Book of 2021 • A Globe and Mail Book of the Year • A Winnipeg Free Press Top Read of 2021 • An Entropy Magazine Best of the Year • A LitHub Best Book of 2021 • A New York Times Critics' Top Book of 2021 • A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist When we first met, I was a child, and she had been dead for centuries. On discovering her murdered husband’s body, an eighteenth-century Irish noblewoman drinks handfuls of his blood and composes an extraordinary lament. Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill’s poem travels through the centuries, finding its way to a new mother who has narrowly avoided her own fatal tragedy. When she realizes that the literature dedicated to the poem reduces Eibhlín Dubh’s life to flimsy sketches, she wants more: the details of the poet’s girlhood and old age; her unique rages, joys, sorrows, and desires; the shape of her days and site of her final place of rest. What follows is an adventure in which Doireann Ní Ghríofa sets out to discover Eibhlín Dubh’s erased life—and in doing so, discovers her own. Moving fluidly between past and present, quest and elegy, poetry and those who make it, A Ghost in the Throat is a shapeshifting book: a record of literary obsession; a narrative about the erasure of a people, of a language, of women; a meditation on motherhood and on translation; and an unforgettable story about finding your voice by freeing another’s.

As a doctor in Vietnam, Lily survived unimaginable terror and loss. Now, safely ensconced in a close-knit Maine town and a seemingly comfortable marriage, she no longer needs to be afraid, but she is: afraid of light, afraid of sudden sounds, afraid of seeing the wide-eyed child of war who haunts her. So Lily is unprepared for the act of betrayal that threatens to take away the one thing she cannot live without: her young son. Plunged into a bitter custody battle, befriended by a man with a heartbreaking secret of his own, Lily must fight–to escape her own memories, to survive an uncertain future, and to protect, above all else, the love between a mother and child.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK A modern classic of personal journalism, The Orchid Thief is Susan Orlean’s wickedly funny, elegant, and captivating tale of an amazing obsession. Determined to clone an endangered flower—the rare ghost orchid Polyrrhiza lindenii—a deeply eccentric and oddly attractive man named John Laroche leads Orlean on an unforgettable tour of America’s strange flower-selling subculture, through Florida’s swamps and beyond, along with the Seminoles who help him and the forces of justice who fight him. In the end, Orlean—and the reader—will have more respect for underdog determination and a powerful new definition of passion. In this new edition, coming fifteen years after its initial publication and twenty years after she first met the “orchid thief,” Orlean revisits this unforgettable world, and the route by which it was brought to the screen in the film Adaptation, in a new retrospective essay. Look for special features inside. Join the Random House Reader’s Circle for author chats and more. Praise for The Orchid Thief “Stylishly written, whimsical yet sophisticated, quirkily detailed and full of empathy . . . The Orchid Thief shows [Orlean’s] gifts in full bloom.”—The New York Times Book Review “Fascinating . . . an engrossing journey [full] of theft, hatred, greed, jealousy, madness, and backstabbing.”—Los Angeles Times “Orlean’s snapshot-vivid, pitch-perfect prose . . . is fast becoming one of our national treasures.”—The Washington Post Book World “Orlean’s gifts [are] her ear for the self-skewing dialogue, her eye for the incongruous, convincing detail, and her Didion-like deftness in description.”—Boston Sunday Globe “A swashbuckling piece of reporting that celebrates some virtues that made America great.”—The Wall Street Journal

Fifty years after humanity desperately sought and found a new home on Jurthaan IV, tension with neighboring planet Palnach necessitates a peace treaty as well as the arranged marriage of Princess Kylee Wen Dao to Palnach’s Prince Maju. Taren Platinum is the best—now banished—guard on Princess Kylee’s security team. He’s also in love with her. After crashing the royal wedding, rescuing the princess, and fleeing Jurthaan IV in a stolen spacecraft, Taren finds himself on the run with Kylee, pursued by soldiers from both Jurthaan IV and Palnach. The lovers crash-land on Cartiss, leaving them stranded on a dying planet with targets on their backs. To escape, Taren must repair the ship with the help of a select few trustworthy citizens from the downtrodden city of Hurren. Without an official governing authority, the local gangsters are running Hurren and refusing to spread the wealth. While Taren’s priority is getting off Cartiss and disappearing somewhere safe, Kylee believes he has what it takes to turn things around in Hurren. Drawing attention to himself is the last thing he wants to do, but his princess is right. If there’s one thing Taren can’t overlook, it’s those who threaten the lives of innocents, even when his own life is on the line.

The famous Victoria ghost who appeared to a tour group listening to her story, the little boy playing with a red ball in Nanaimo, the phantom “helper” in a restaurant kitchen – these are among the true stories in Robert Belyk’s new Ghosts. Encounters with entities from a different reality do occur in the rational, modern world; the experiences collected here range from the colonial days to the year 2000. Many ghosts haunt private houses, but some are associated with public places and buildings, such as Beacon Hill Park in Victoria, the Vancouver General Hospital and the Qualicum Heritage Inn on Vancouver Island. Ghosts: True Tales of Eerie Encounters is an expanded and updated collection of stories , some of which first appeared in Ghosts: True Stories from British Columbia.

"A one-of-a-kind love story...Those who enjoy fables or magical realism will be spellbound by this redemptive story of a search for love, love lost and love (of a sort) found again...exquisite prose." – Publishers Weekly Maddy, an old lady now, arrives home one day to find a peculiar boy waiting for her. Over tea, she tells him the story of her life long ago, when she wished for her days to be as romantic and mysterious as a fairy tale. It was then that she fell painfully in love with a free spirit named Feather, who put aside his wild ways to live with her in a little cottage, conceived with her a child never to be born, and disappeared -- leaving an inconsolable Maddy to follow after him on a fantastical journey across the sea. In a beautifully crafted tale Sonya Hartnett masterfully explores the mysteries of the heart, the sustaining power of memory, and the ultimate consolation that comes to souls who live fully and fearlessly.