Renowned psychoanalyst Doctor Barnabus Middlebrook has called a high powered clandestine meeting to discuss a patient of St. Claire's psychiatric hospital. The person in question is Alice Denham, a young woman in her mid-twenties who had everything to live for. She had a good job and had recently moved into her new home with husband John. Everything was going fine but then suddenly in the space of two weeks, she was driven out of her mind and had to be sectioned. Little did they know that Alice's experiences would have far reaching implications for the human race and indeed the planet.

“Walter Jon Williams is a visionary of tremendous power and originality . . . He kills every damn time.” --Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Dagmar Shaw is back in Hollywood, with a plan to lasso a series of emerging technologies into a revolutionary new form of entertainment. Sean Makin is a washed-up child actor clinging to life on reality television, until Dagmar offers him the chance to be a star. Sean’s past, however, holds the darkest of secrets, and now it looks as if that secret threatens to break loose in a new cycle of violence and murder. Sean’s determined to succeed, even if the path to stardom is splashed with blood. But the ultimate secret is Dagmar’s, and Sean has to decide how much to pay in order to find out what’s on the other side of the fourth wall. “ . . . the blending of mystery-thriller, SF, and traditional Hollywood-story elements is hugely successful. It’s one of those ambitious, genre-bending books in which you keep seeing, as you read, ways the story could fall apart under its own weight—but it never does. Surely the best of the Dagmar Shaw series and one of the author’s finest novels.” --Booklist (starred review) “This is an ambitious novel, blending elements of science fiction, thriller and Hollywood epic into one wildly inventive narrative. It’s the kind of genre-bender that you can spend a lot of time trying to describe, or you can simply say: go read it, right now.” --David Pitt, Winnipeg Free Press

Longlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay In this essay collection David Lazar looks to our intimate relationships with characters, both well-known and lesser known, from Hollywood’s Golden Age. Veering through considerations of melancholy and wit, sexuality and gender, and the surrealism of comedies of the self in an uncanny world, mixed with his own autobiographical reflections of cinephilia, Lazar creates an alluring hybrid of essay forms as he moves through the movies in his mind. Character actors from the classical era of the 1930s through the 1950s including Thelma Ritter, Oscar Levant, Martin Balsam, Nina Foch, Elizabeth Wilson, Eric Blore, Edward Everett Horton, and the eponymous Celeste Holm all make appearances in these considerations of how essential character actors were, and remain, to cinema.

Originally published: The gifts of Asperger's syndrome. Dillsburg, PA: Asperger's Syndrome Institute, 2005.

FINALIST FOR THE 2024 GOTHAM BOOK PRIZE The devolution of the Sullivan Institute, from psychoanalytic organization to insular, radical cult. In the middle of the Ozzie and Harriet 1950s, the birth control pill was introduced and a maverick psychoanalytic institute, the Sullivan Institute for Research in Psychoanalysis, opened its doors in New York City. Its founders, Saul Newton and Jane Pearce, wanted to start a revolution, one grounded in ideals of creative expression, sexual liberation, and freedom from the expectations of society, and the revolution, they felt, needed to begin at home. Dismantling the nuclear family—and monogamous marriage—would free people from the repressive forces of their parents. In its first two decades, the movement attracted many brilliant, creative people as patients: the painter Jackson Pollock and a swarm of other abstract expressionist artists, the famed art critic Clement Greenberg, the singer Judy Collins, and the dancer Lucinda Childs. In the 1960s, the group evolved into an urban commune of three or four hundred people, with patients living with other patients, leading creative, polyamorous lives. But by the mid-1970s, under the leadership of Saul Newton, the Institute had devolved from a radical communal experiment into an insular cult, with therapists controlling virtually every aspect of their patients’ lives, from where they lived and the work they did to how often they saw their sexual partners and their children. Although the group was highly secretive during its lifetime and even after its dissolution in 1991, the noted journalist Alexander Stille has succeeded in reconstructing the inner life of a parallel world hidden in plain sight in the middle of Manhattan. Through countless interviews and personal papers, The Sullivanians reveals the nearly unbelievable story of a fallen utopia.

... Then a shadow cast itself across the table and Jessica glanced over her shoulder. Tammuz was standing there, his head eclipsing the sun, its corona framing his solemn face like a halo. He held out his hand and smiled.

All I want is someone to care, to know, to understand. And maybe, for a brief moment, I will be free... Finding Kansas is a memoir like no other, written by an unlikely author who at first never dreamed he would find even one reader. When he was diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome at age 20, Aaron Likens began to collect his thoughts and experiences on paper-the highs, the lows, the challenges, and the unexpected joys. What he found was hope -- not only for himself, but also for others with Asperger's. Now a sought-after speaker and blogger, he is passionate about sharing his insights into this often misunderstood condition. Aaron has another passion, too: the world of auto racing. A successful flag man at racing events across the country, Aaron calls racing his Kansas-a place where he feels safe, confident, and normal. For others on the autism spectrum, Kansas might be trains, history, or the weather. It is here where, like Aaron, they find freedom, and the possibility for growth and change Finding Kansas brings us into Aaron's world and, in the process, offers a richly observed, deeply thoughtful, and sometimes painful picture of what it's like to live on the autism spectrum.