A Life of Adventure and Delight delivers eight masterful stories from dazzlingly original and critically acclaimed author Akhil Sharma. Hailed as a storyteller whose fiction is “a glowing work of art” (Wall Street Journal), Akhil Sharma is possessed of a narrative voice “as hypnotic as those found in the pages of Dostoyevsky” (The Nation). In A Life of Adventure and Delight, Sharma delivers eight masterful stories that focus on Indian protagonists at home and abroad and that plunge the reader into the unpredictable workings of the human heart. A young woman in an arranged marriage awakens one day surprised to find herself in love with her husband. A retired divorcé tries to become the perfect partner by reading women’s magazines. A man’s longstanding contempt for his cousin suddenly shifts inward when he witnesses his cousin caring for a sick woman. Tender and darkly comic, the protagonists in A Life of Adventure and Delight deceive themselves and engage in odd behaviors as they navigate how to be good, how to make meaningful relationships, and the strengths and pitfalls of self-interest. Elegantly written and emotionally immediate, the stories provide an intimate, honest assessment of human relationships between mothers and sons, sons and lovers, and husband and wives from a dazzlingly original, critically acclaimed writer.

From bestselling author of The Book of Delights and award-winning poet, a book of lyrical mini-essays celebrating the everyday that will inspire readers to rediscover the joys in the world around us. In Ross Gay’s new collection of small, daily wonders, again written over the course of a year, one of America’s most original voices continues his ongoing investigation of delight. For Gay, what delights us is what connects us, what gives us meaning, from the joy of hearing a nostalgic song blasting from a passing car to the pleasure of refusing the “nefarious” scannable QR code menus, from the tiny dog he fell hard for to his mother baking a dozen kinds of cookies for her grandchildren. As always, Gay revels in the natural world—sweet potatoes being harvested, a hummingbird carousing in the beebalm, a sunflower growing out of a wall around the cemetery, the shared bounty from a neighbor’s fig tree—and the trillion mysterious ways this glorious earth delights us. The Book of (More) Delights is a volume to savor and share.

I: English literature. The genius of Shandy Hall : Laurence Sterne ; Double life : Jane Austen ; Best and worst : Charles Dickens ; Living with Trollope : Anthony Trollope ; Eminent Victorian : George Eliot ; The two Hardys : Thomas Hardy ; The King's trumpeter : Rudyard Kipling ; Life in the head : John Cowper Powys ; Nothing nasty in the woodshed : P.G. Wodehouse ; Like ink and milk : D.H. Lawrence ; Baby face : William Gerhardie ; The last Puritan : George Orwell ; Mr. Toad : Evelyn Waugh ; God's Greene : Graham Greene -- II: The English poets. Family man : William Wordsworth ; Unmisgiving : John Keats ; The all-star Victorian : Alfred, Lord Tennyson ; An art of self-discovery : Edward Thomas ; Fun while it lasted : Rupert Brooke ; Gallant pastiche : Cecil Day Lewis ; The best of Betjeman : John Betjeman ; The flight of the disenchanter : W.H. Auden ; The last romantic : Philip Larkin -- III: Mother Russia. Cutting it short : Alexander Pushkin ; Under the overcoat : Nikolai Gogol ; The strengths of his passivity : Ivan Turgenev ; An excellent man : Anton Chekhov ; The backward look : Ivan Bunin ; Poems with a heroine : Anna Akhmatova ; A poet's tragedy : Marina Tsvetaeva ; On the horse parsnip : Boris Pasternak ; The hard hitter : Isaac Babel ; A prig of genius : Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn -- IV: American poetry. Songs of a furtive self : Walt Whitman ; Mothermonsters and fatherfigures : E.E. Cummings ; Lowellship : Robert Lowell ; "One life, one writing" : James Merrill ; Richly flows contingency : John Ashbery -- V: Out of Eastern Europe. The power of delight : Bruno Schulz ; Something childish : Witold Gombrowicz ; Poet of holy dread : Paul Celan ; The art of austerity : Zbigniew Herbert ; Return of the native : Czeslaw Milosz -- VI: Aspects of novels. The point of novels ; Gossip in fiction ; Little green crabs : Marcel Proust ; The order of battle at Trafalgar ; In which we serve : Patrick O'Brian ; Seer of the ego : Stendhal ; What will you do to keep the s

Winner of the 2016 International Dublin Literary Award "Gorgeously tender at its core…beautiful, heartstopping…Family Life really blazes." —Sonali Deraniyagala, New York Times Book Review Hailed as a "supreme storyteller" (Philadelphia Inquirer) for his "cunning, dismaying and beautifully conceived" fiction (New York Times), Akhil Sharma is possessed of a narrative voice "as hypnotic as those found in the pages of Dostoyevsky" (The Nation). In his highly anticipated second novel, Family Life, he delivers a story of astonishing intensity and emotional precision. We meet the Mishra family in Delhi in 1978, where eight-year-old Ajay and his older brother Birju play cricket in the streets, waiting for the day when their plane tickets will arrive and they and their mother can fly across the world and join their father in America. America to the Mishras is, indeed, everything they could have imagined and more: when automatic glass doors open before them, they feel that surely they must have been mistaken for somebody important. Pressing an elevator button and the elevator closing its doors and rising, they have a feeling of power at the fact that the elevator is obeying them. Life is extraordinary until tragedy strikes, leaving one brother severely brain-damaged and the other lost and virtually orphaned in a strange land. Ajay, the family’s younger son, prays to a God he envisions as Superman, longing to find his place amid the ruins of his family’s new life. Heart-wrenching and darkly funny, Family Life is a universal story of a boy torn between duty and his own survival.

"Kooser has written more perfect poems than any poet of his generation." -Dana Gioia, Can Poetry Matter?