DIVDIVThe everyday insanity of life at a fictional literary review/divDIV The journal Belles Lettres has a long and storied history, which is what enticed young editor Frank Page over its threshold in the first place. But Frank did not anticipate the infighting, backstabbing, and utter oddity that are all business as usual at the respected magazine. Still, nothing can match Frank’s thrill at discovering a new literary phenom./divDIV But the book industry seems to be on the decline. Integrity is going extinct as conglomerate giants gobble up smaller organs and trample innovation and daring into the muck of commerciality. At least Frank’s position gives him a front-row seat at the publishing world’s fight of the century, as deposed editorial icon Jonathan Margin takes on self-serving corporate overseer Newbold Press in an ink-splattered battle to the death./div/div

Winner of the PEN Open Book Award * Winner of the Whiting Award * Longlisted for the National Book Award and Aspen Words Literary Prize * Nominated for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize * Finalist for the Kirkus Prize and Los Angeles Times Book Prize Named a Best Book of the Year by Refinery29, NPR, The Root, HuffPost, Vanity Fair, Bustle, Chicago Tribune, PopSugar, and The Undefeated In one of the season’s most acclaimed works of fiction, Nafissa Thompson-Spires offers “a firecracker of a book...a triumph of storytelling: intelligent, acerbic, and ingenious” (Financial Times). Nafissa Thompson-Spires grapples with race, identity politics, and the contemporary middle class in this “vivid, fast, funny, way-smart, and verbally inventive” (George Saunders, author of Lincoln in the Bardo) collection. Each captivating story plunges headfirst into the lives of utterly original characters. Some are darkly humorous—two mothers exchanging snide remarks through notes in their kids’ backpacks—while others are devastatingly poignant. In the title story, when a cosplayer, dressed as his favorite anime character, is mistaken for a violent threat the consequences are dire; in another story, a teen struggles between her upper middle class upbringing and her desire to fully connect with so-called black culture. Thompson-Spires fearlessly shines a light on the simmering tensions and precariousness of black citizenship. Boldly resisting categorization and easy answers, Nafissa Thompson-Spires “has taken the best of what Toni Cade Bambara, Morgan Parker, and Junot Díaz do plus a whole lot of something we’ve never seen in American literature, blended it all together...giving us one of the finest short-story collections” (Kiese Laymon, author of Long Division).