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Cassandra Campbell

Cassandra Campbell

  • This is a classic domestic novel by the Italian-Cuban feminist writer Alba de Céspedes, whose work inspired contemporary writers like Elena Ferrante

    In this modern translation by acclaimed Elena Ferrante translator Ann Goldstein, The Forbidden Notebook centers the inner life of a dissatisfied housewife living in postwar Rome.

    Valeria Cossati never suspected how unhappy she had become with the shabby gentility of her bourgeois life—until she begins to jot down her thoughts and feelings in a little black book she keeps hidden in a closet. This new secret activity leads her to scrutinize herself and her life more closely, and she soon realizes that her individuality is being stifled by her devotion and sense of duty toward her husband, daughter, and son.

    As the conflicts between parents and children, husband and wife, and friends and lovers intensify, what goes on behind the Cossatis’ façade of middle-class respectability gradually comes to light, tearing the family’s fragile fabric apart.  

    An exquisitely crafted portrayal of domestic life, The Forbidden Notebook recognizes the universality of human aspirations.

  • It is the first century BC Cleopatra, the third of the pharaoh’s six children, is the one that her father has chosen to be the next queen of Egypt. But when King Ptolemy is forced into exile, Cleopatra is left alone to fend for herself in a palace rife with intrigue and murder. Smart, courageous, ambitious, and sensuously beautiful, she possesses the charm to cause two of history’s most famous leaders to fall in love with her. But as her cruel sisters plot to steal the throne, Cleopatra realizes there is only one person on whom she can rely—herself.

  • When tragedy strikes and everything she loves is threatened, Faye Longchamp will resort to desperate measures. Because some losses cut to the bone …

    The suspicious drowning death of Captain Edward Eubank breaks archaeologist Faye Longchamp’s heart. It also confuses her, because he was found in scuba gear and she’s never heard him even mention scuba diving. During their last conversation he told her that he believed he’d found a storied shipwreck, but when Faye checks it out she finds nothing there—not a plank, not a single gold coin, nothing. If there’s no treasure, then why is her friend dead?

    But the situation quickly escalates beyond a murder mystery. Surrounded by a community struggling in the aftermath of a major hurricane that has changed the very landscape, Faye grapples not only with the loss of her friend, but with her fears for her daughter, who is being romanced by a man who may be very dangerous.

    As a professional with her own consulting firm, Faye had long ago given up her “anything goes” attitude when the law stood between her and an interesting dig. Now that recklessness is back, and there’s nothing she won’t do to protect her daughter.

  • “Scheming mean girls, sex and scandal, secrets and lies…what’s not to love?” — Lisa Unger, New York Times bestselling author of Last Girl Ghosted

    The Real Housewives meets murder in this deliciously savage and wildly entertaining thriller from Jeneva Rose, New York Times bestselling author of The Perfect Marriage, You Shouldn’t Have Come Here, and Home Is Where the Bodies Are.

    Buckhead isn’t a place you live, it’s a place you survive. And that applies even to the wealthy housewives that have it all. Fancy cars, designer clothes, and daily salon appointments aren’t nearly enough to keep them fulfilled and happy. Because in this town, privilege and opulence go hand in hand with betrayal and revenge.

    Jenny, the owner of Glow, an exclusive membership-only beauty salon, knows that better than anyone, because she knows everything about these housewives—down to each individual strand of hair. Despite the toxicity, Jenny keeps her focus on running her business, and keeping the peace. However, peace proves to be impossible when one of her clients is murdered. Now, it’s up to Jenny and her knowledge of neighborhood secrets and gossip to help the police solve the case. It won’t be easy though, because while Buckhead may be all about appearances, nothing is as it seems.

    Never have mean girls been meaner, nor murder been so much fun than in this “sublimely bitchy” (Kirkus Reviews) and scandalous suspense novel from Jeneva Rose, the “queen of twists” (Colleen Hoover).

  • Award-winning Lily King’s first-ever collection of exceptional and innovative short stories

    With Writers & Lovers and Euphoria, Lily King’s books catapulted onto bestseller and best-of-the-year lists across the country and established her as one of our most “brilliant” (New York Times), “wildly talented” (Chicago Tribune), and beloved authors in contemporary fiction. Now, for the first time ever, King collects ten of her finest short stories—half published in leading literary magazines and half brand new—opening fresh realms of discovery for avid and new readers alike.

    Told in the intimate voices of unique and endearing characters of all ages, these tales explore desire and heartache, loss and discovery, moments of jolting violence, and the inexorable tug toward love at all costs. A bookseller’s unspoken love for his employee rises to the surface, a neglected teenage boy finds much-needed nurturing from an unlikely pair of college students hired to housesit, a girl’s loss of innocence at the hands of her employer’s son becomes a catalyst for strength and confidence, and a proud nonagenarian rages helplessly in his granddaughter’s hospital room. Romantic, hopeful, brutally raw, and unsparingly honest, some even slipping into the surreal, these stories are, above all, about King’s enduring subject of love.

    Lily King’s literary mastery, her spare and stunning prose, and her gift for creating lasting and treasured characters is on full display in this curated selection of short fiction. Five Tuesdays in Winter showcases an exhilarating new form for this extraordinarily gifted author writing at the height of her career.

  • A family’s only hope to heal their shattered lives is that love is stronger than grief

    When they meet in the 1930s, Doris and Tup’s love is immediate. They marry quickly and Doris commits to the only life Tup ever wanted: working the Senter family farm, where his parents and grandparents and great-grandparents are buried under the old pines. Their lives follow the calming rhythms of the land—chores in the cow barn, haying the fields, tending their gardens—and in this they find immeasurable joy.

    Soon their first child, Sonny, is born and Doris and Tup understand they are blessed. More children arrive—precocious, large-hearted Dodie and quiet, devoted Beston—but Doris and Tup take nothing for granted. They are grateful every day for the grace of their deep bonds to each other, to their family, and to their bountiful land. As they hold fast to this contentment, Doris is uneasy, and confesses, “We can’t ever know what will come.”

    When an unimaginable tragedy turns the family of five into a family of four, everything the Senters held faith in is shattered. The family is consumed by a dark shadow of grief and guilt. Slowly, the surviving Senters must find their way to forgiveness—of themselves and of each other.

  • The Nest meets The Vacationers in this novel of family dysfunction in which, for the Brights, normal has become whatever their crazy family says it is.

    When the four adult sons of recently retired senator John Bright, and their significant others, join their parents at the family’s Berkshire compound for their mandatory summer vacation, the matriarch Patty decides to hire a documentary filmmaker to memorialize their time together. The Brights, a family of outsized pride, are beautiful, competitive, athletic, and terrible. They have everything they need, except the ability to see themselves clearly. Naturally, they let their guard down.

    Caught up in the news of the day, the senator misses being in the limelight and so he floats, at least on camera, another political run, this time for governor. That is, until one by one family secrets start coming to light. And keep coming.

  • What secrets lie deep beneath the surface?

    A deafening explosion rocks a historic Oklahoma City hotel, sending archaeologist Faye Longchamp-Mantooth crashing to the marble floor of the lobby. She’s unhurt but shaken―after all, any time something blows up in Oklahoma City, the first word on everyone’s lips is the same: bomb.

    Faye is in town for a conference celebrating indigenous arts but is soon distracted by the aftermath of the explosion, which cracks open the old hotel’s floor to reveal subterranean chambers that had housed Chinese immigrants a century before. Faye is fascinated by the tunnels, which are a time capsule back to the early twentieth century―but when the bodies of three children are discovered deep beneath the city, her sense of discovery turns to one of dread.

  • From the internationally bestselling author of Einstein’s Dreams comes a deeply compelling story about the lives of a Cambodian family―set between 1973, just before the Cambodian Genocide by the Khmer Rouge―to 2015.

    The stories of one Cambodian family are intricately braided together in Alan Lightman’s haunting Three Flames, his first work of fiction in six years.

    Three Flames portrays the struggles of a Cambodian farming family against the extreme patriarchal attitudes of their society and the cruel and dictatorial father, set against a rural community that is slowly being exposed to the modern world and its values. A mother must fight against memories of her father’s death at the hands of the Khmer Rouge, and her powerful desire for revenge. A daughter is married off at sixteen to a wandering husband and his domineering aunt; another daughter is sent to the city to work in the factories to settle her father’s gambling debt. A son dreams of marrying the most beautiful girl of the village and escaping the life of a farmer. And the youngest daughter bravely challenges her father so she can stay in school and strive for a better future.

    A vivid story of revenge and forgiveness, of a culture smothering the dreams of freedom, and of tradition against courage, Three Flames grows directly from Lightman’s work as the founder of the Harpswell Foundation, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to advance a new generation of female leaders in Cambodia and all of Southeast Asia.

  • They’re the D’Artigo sisters: savvy half-human, half-fae agents of the Otherworld Intelligence Agency. Camille is the Queen of Dusk and Twilight. Delilah is a two-faced werecat and the Autumn Lord’s only living Death Maiden. And Menolly is a vampire princess and married to a gorgeous werepuma Amazon. It’s been four long years since they first found out about Shadow Wing … and now, they’re facing the end of the line. It’s time for the D’Artigo sisters to extinguish Shadow Wing’s evil forever, before he goes mad and tries to unravel the world …

  • In the early 1970s, literary journals that contained Andre Dubus’ short stories were passed around among admiring readers. When his debut collection, Separate Flights, arrived in 1975, it was immediately celebrated and won the Boston Globe’s Laurence L. & Thomas Winship / PEN New England Award.

    The collection includes the novella We Don’t Live Here Anymore, which served as the basis for the 2004 film of the same title (nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival); the novella also introduces Dubus’ writer-protagonist Hank Allison, a character who continues to appear throughout his work.

    Two years later, the title story of Dubus’ sophomore collection Adultery and Other Choices continued the exploits of Hank Allison. “The title story alone will make it worth your while to go out and get the book,” wrote the New York Times Book Review.

    While the collection’s opening stories focus on the fragile nature of youth, later stories shift to darker struggles of adulthood, such as in “Andromache”—Dubus’ first story to appear in the New Yorker (1968)—which traces the aftermath of a tragic death during wartime.

  • While the title novella of Dubus’ Finding a Girl in America returns to the somewhat off-the-rails literary life of Hank Allison, the collection’s opening story strikes a much darker tone: “Killings”—the basis of the Academy Award–nominated film In the Bedroom—is a swift tale of revenge that leaves readers wondering what they might do in the name of family love.

    Dubus’ prowess with narrative compression is on full display in the story “Waiting”: the hollow ache experienced by a woman widowed by the Korean War took Dubus fourteen months to write and was more than one hundred pages in early manuscript form but spans a mere seven pages in published form.

    Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Joyce Carol Oates called “The Pretty Girl”—the opening novella of The Times Are Never So Bad—“the most compelling and suspenseful work of fiction [Dubus] has written.”

    Richard Russo’s introduction to this volume grapples with his complex feelings on reading Dubus’ work over many decades, but when it comes to the much-anthologized masterpiece “A Father’s Story,” Russo writes: “I won’t mince words. It’s one of the finest stories ever penned by an American.”

  • The Cross Country Runner brings together Voices from the Moon, his longest, most masterful novella, and The Last Worthless Evening, Andre Dubus’ fifth collection of short stories and novellas, along with previously uncollected stories and a new introduction by PEN/Faulkner Award–winning author Tobias Wolff.

    “‘It’s divorce that did it,’ his father had said last night.” So begins Voices from the Moon, the 126-page novella that shows Dubus at the height of his empathetic powers. Alternating between the viewpoints of Richie Stowe, a serious twelve-year-old who plans to become a priest, and the five other members of his family, the story takes place over the course of a single day.

    The four novellas and two stories of The Last Worthless Evening range further than those of any previous Dubus collection—racial tension in the navy, a detective-story homage, a Hispanic shortstop, the unlikely pairing of an eleven-year-old kid and a dangerous Vietnam vet.

    This third volume in the series also draws together for the first time many of Dubus’ previously uncollected stories, including work from the mid-1960s and the late 1990s. The earliest story appearing here in book form for the first time is “The Cross Country Runner,” which was originally published in the long-defunct Midwestern University Quarterly in 1966 when Dubus was thirty years old and only recently graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. The final story—the Western-themed “Sisters”—is the last piece of fiction Dubus was working on when he died suddenly in 1999 at just sixty-three years old.

  • In Undercurrents, the eleventh Faye Longchamp Mystery, Faye has traveled to Memphis, a city steeped in music, poverty, history, and the smoky tang of barbecue. She’s there working alone to do an assessment of a site, welcome work for her small archaeological consulting firm.

    When Faye spies a child too young to be wandering along a creek alone, she follows the girl. A day later she uncovers a dying woman, buried alive near a spot where Kali might well be hiding. Nobody would blame Faye for running hard, but she can’t make herself leave Kali, the woman’s now-orphaned daughter, who might be in danger. She’s not welcomed by the people in Kali’s struggling community, nor by the police working the crime. Yet she stays, for Kali, and for the bereaved who need her to communicate their fears to a police department that they trust even less than they trust Faye.

    When they confide rumors of other women beaten to death by a man so obsessed with burial that he places fresh flowers in their cold hands, Faye begs the police to widen the investigation to seek a serial killer. They refuse. Faye’s gut is telling her that a monster is stalking Memphis, endangering the child she has come to love. If the police can’t catch him, then she will have no choice but to try to find him herself.

  • We’re the D’Artigo sisters: savvy half-human, half-Fae agents of the Otherworld Intelligence Agency. My sister Camille is the Queen of Dusk and Twilight. Menolly is now a vampire princess. And me? I’m Delilah, a two-faced werecat and the Autumn Lord’s only living Death Maiden. Even as Trytian’s father maintains the Daemon front raging against him, Shadow Wing is seeking greater power by draining his own armies of their lives. His necromancer Telazhar is dead, but the Demon Lord has found a new threat to move against us, putting my fiancé, Shade, in the most dangerous situation of his life …

    Shadow Wing sends Yerghan the Blade after us. The warrior led the battle alongside Telazhar during the Scorching Wars, and was banished to the Sub-Realms along with the ancient necromancer. Now, his new mission: kill my sisters and me. When Yerghan attacks my home, Shade finds himself fighting for his life. Deep in a coma, he’s lost in the Realm of Wandering Souls. My sisters and I must journey there to find him and bring him back. But in order to do so, we must face our darkest fears, or forever risk losing my love among the mists of limbo.

  • Exquisitely nuanced and profoundly intimate, The Night Child is a story of resilience, hope, and the capacity of the mind, body, and spirit to save itself despite all odds.

    Nora Brown teaches high school English and lives a quiet life in Seattle with her husband and six-year-old daughter. But one November day, moments after dismissing her class, a girl’s face appears above the students’ desks—“a wild numinous face with startling blue eyes, a face floating on top of shapeless drapes of purples and blues where arms and legs should have been. Terror rushes through Nora’s body—the kind of raw terror you feel when there’s no way out, when every cell in your body, your entire body, is on fire—when you think you might die.”

    Twenty-four hours later, while on Thanksgiving vacation, the face appears again. Shaken and unsteady, Nora meets with neurologists and eventually, a psychiatrist. As the story progresses, a terrible secret is discovered—a secret that pushes Nora toward an even deeper psychological breakdown.

    This breathtaking debut novel examines the impact of traumatic childhood experiences and the fragile line between past and present.

  • One of our most gifted writers of fiction returns with a bold and piercing novel about a young single mother living in New York, her eccentric aunt, and the decisions they make that have unexpected implications for the world around them.

    Reyna knows her relationship with Boyd isn’t perfect; yet she sees him through a three-month stint at Riker’s Island, their bond growing tighter. Kiki, now settled in the East Village after a youth that took her to Turkey and other far-off places—and loves—around the world, admires her niece’s spirit but worries that motherhood to four-year-old Oliver might complicate a difficult situation. Little does she know that Boyd is pulling Reyna into a smuggling scheme across state lines, violating his probation. When Reyna takes a step back, her small act of resistance sets into motion a tapestry of events that affect the lives of loved ones and strangers around them.

    A novel that examines conviction, connection, repayment, and the possibility of generosity in the face of loss, Improvement is as intricately woven together as Kiki’s beloved Turkish rugs, as colorful as the tattoos decorating Reyna’s body, with narrative twists and turns as surprising and unexpected as the lives all around us.

  • The third and final volume of the very best of Ben Bova, creator of the New York Times bestselling Grand Tour science fiction series, six-time Hugo award winner, and past president of the National Space Society—a grand master of science fiction storytelling. These stories span the five decades of Bova’s incandescent career.

    Here are tales of star-faring adventure, peril, and drama. Here are journeys into the mind-bending landscapes of virtual worlds and alternate realities. Here you’ll also find stories of humanity’s astounding future on Earth, on Mars, and in the Solar System beyond—stories that always get the science right. And Bova’s gathering of deeply realized, totally human characters are the heroic, brave, tricky, sometimes dastardly engineers, astronauts, corporate magnates, politicians, and scientists who will make these futures possible—and those who often find that the problems of tomorrow are always linked to human values, and human failings, that are as timeless as the stars.

  • We’re the D’Artigo sisters: savvy half-human, half-fae operatives for the Otherworld Intelligence Agency. My sister Delilah is a two-faced werecat and a Death Maiden. Menolly is a vampire married to a gorgeous werepuma and a vampire prince. And me? I’m Camille, a Moon Witch married to three gorgeous husbands, and I’m about to ascend to the throne of Dusk & Twilight. But the path to the throne lies through a labyrinth of dangers, which I must face alone …

    Before I can fulfill my destiny to become the queen of Dusk & Twilight, I must seek out the Keraastar Diamond. But to find the magical gem and take control over the Keraastar Knights, I must venture back to Otherworld, deep into the treacherous Tygerian Mountains. Once there, I face a magical trial by fire. If I fail, Pentangle, the Mistress of Magic, will destroy me. If I succeed, my life will forever change. And I’m not certain which prospect frightens me more.

  • A woman waits under five feet of dirt, a woman who is by now nothing but bones, stained the deep red of Oklahoma clay. A delicate silver necklace, a handful of ancient pearls, and a priceless figurine rest with her. Twenty-nine years is a long time to wait for a proper burial.

    Faye Longchamp-Mantooth, who runs a small and shakily financed archaeological consulting firm with her husband, Joe, has come to Sylacauga so she and Joe can join his father, Sly Mantooth, in dispersing his mother’s ashes. Fifteen years is a long time to wait for a proper ceremony.

    Faye has partially financed the trip by hiring on to consult on the reopening of a site closed down twenty-nine years ago when archaeologist Dr. Sophia Townsend disappeared—for good. The Muscogee (Creek) Nation intends to create a park, if nothing sacred lies in the soil. What no one expects is the lonely red bones that emerge as the backhoe completes its work. They prove to be those of Sophia Townsend, and examination shows Sophia was first killed by a blow to the head.

    Chief Roy Cloud of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation’s Lighthorse Tribal Police hires Faye, who clearly can’t be a suspect, to consult. This is fine with Faye, who won’t rest easy until Sophia’s murder is solved. But the investigation comes uncomfortably close to home when she learns that her father-in-law knows more about the dead woman than he is willing to admit. So, it appears, does everyone in tiny Sylacauga.

    Dr. Sophia Townsend had possessed a sexual magnetism as forceful as an Oklahoma tornado, and she had never hesitated to use it to manipulate everyone around her, people whose hearts she broke and whose marriages she destroyed. Was she killed by one of her lovers or by one of their wives? Or was it by the woman who became enthralled with her, or maybe by Sly Mantooth? Or was something else at work: elemental greed, buried treasure, fame?

    Faye’s obsession with this case tests her professional ethics and it tests her marriage. Such was the power of Sophia Townsend that, twenty-nine years after her murder, she wreaks havoc once again.

  • Gothic master Edgar Allan Poe’s complete works are collected in this multivolume set by Blackstone Audio. Here are his short stories, detective fiction, and poems in all their mysterious and macabre glory. Also included are Poe’s literary reviews and editorial musings, comprising an often caustic analysis of the poetry, drama, and fiction of the period.

    This collection includes Poe’s famous stories “The Masque of the Red Death,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” and “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Poe’s poetry features prominently in this collection, with well-known classics such as “The Raven,” “Annabel Lee,” and “Lenore” presented alongside lesser-known works like “Eulalie” and “The Conqueror Worm.” Poe fans will be treated to his fearless and acerbic analysis of then-modern works, a practice earning him the reputation as a “tomahawk man” in artistic circles.

  • In this vivid and compelling novel, Tim Murphy follows a diverse set of characters whose fates intertwine in an iconic building in Manhattan’s East Village, the Christodora. The Christodora is home to Milly and Jared, a privileged young couple with artistic ambitions. Their neighbor, Hector, a Puerto Rican gay man who was once a celebrated AIDS activist but is now a lonely addict, becomes connected to Milly and Jared’s lives in ways none of them can anticipate. Meanwhile, Milly and Jared’s adopted son Mateo grows to see the opportunity for both self-realization and oblivion that New York offers.

    As the junkies and protesters of the 1980s give way to the hipsters of the 2000s and they, in turn, to the wealthy residents of the crowded, glass-towered city of the 2020s, enormous changes rock the personal lives of Milly and Jared and the constellation of people around them.

    Moving kaleidoscopically from the Tompkins Square Riots and attempts by activists to galvanize a true response to the AIDS epidemic, to the New York City of the future, Christodora recounts the heartbreak wrought by AIDS, illustrates the allure and destructive power of hard drugs, and brings to life the ever-changing city itself.

  • What would you do if you Googled yourself and uncovered something shocking?

    In this gripping psychological thriller, a group of privileged suburban moms amuse themselves by Googling everyone in town, digging up dirt to fuel thorny gossip. Caroline Thompson, devoted mother of two, sticks to the moral high ground and attempts to avoid these women. She’s relieved to hear her name appears only three times, citing her philanthropy. Despite being grateful that she has nothing to hide, a delayed pang of insecurity prods Caroline to Google her maiden name—which none of the others know.

    The hits cascade like a tsunami. Caroline’s terrified by what she reads. An obituary for her sister, JD? That’s absurd. With every click, the revelations grow more alarming. They can’t be right. She’d know. Caroline is hurled into a state of paranoia—upending her blissful family life—desperate to prove these allegations false before someone discovers they’re true.

    The disturbing underpinnings of The Memory Box expose a story of deceit, misconceptions, and an obsession for control. With its twists, taut pacing, and psychological tenor, Natiello’s page-turning suspense cautions: be careful what you search for.

  • A chilling genre-busting memoir by a major American essayist

    Late in 2004, Maggie Nelson was looking forward to the publication of her book Jane: A Murder, a narrative in verse about the life and death of her aunt, who had been murdered thirty-five years before. The case remained unsolved, but Jane was assumed to have been the victim of an infamous serial killer in Michigan in 1969.

    Then, one November afternoon, Nelson received a call from her mother, who announced that the case had been reopened; a new suspect would be arrested and tried on the basis of a DNA match. Over the months that followed, Nelson found herself attending the trial with her mother and reflecting anew on the aura of dread and fear that hung over her family and childhood—an aura that derived not only from the terrible facts of her aunt’s murder but also from her own complicated journey through sisterhood, daughterhood, and girlhood.

    The Red Parts is a memoir, an account of a trial, and a provocative essay that interrogates the American obsession with violence and missing white women, and that scrupulously explores the nature of grief, justice, and empathy.

  • An encouraging collection of short stories by bestselling middle-grade authors.

    This one-of-a-kind treasury brings together the talents of nearly two dozen bestselling middle-grade authors including Shannon Hale, Brandon Mull, Ally Condie, and Jennifer A. Nielsen—who have created original short stories and modern-day fairy tales, based on the lives and dreams of children they have met who all have two things in common: they have very big hopes and dreams, and they are all cancer patients.

  • A contemporary gothic from an author in the company of Kelly Link and Aimee Bender, Mr. Splitfoot tracks two women in two times as they march toward a mysterious reckoning.

    Ruth and Nat are orphans, packed into a house full of abandoned children run by a religious fanatic. To entertain their siblings, they channel the dead. Decades later, Ruth’s niece Cora finds herself accidentally pregnant. After years of absence, Aunt Ruth appears, mute and full of intention. She is on a mysterious mission, leading Cora on an odyssey across the entire state of New York on foot. Where is Ruth taking them? Where has she been? And who—or what—has she hidden in the woods at the end of the road?

    In an ingeniously structured dual narrative, two separate timelines move toward the same point of crisis. Their merging will upend and reinvent the whole. A subversive ghost story that is carefully plotted and elegantly constructed, Mr. Splitfoot will set your heart racing and your brain churning. Mysteries abound, criminals roam free, utopian communities show their age, and the mundane world intrudes on the supernatural—and vice versa.

  • Guest-edited by longtime Lightspeed assistant editor Christie Yant, Women Destroy Science Fiction! contains eleven original science fiction short stories, four short-story reprints, a novella reprint, and for the first time ever, an array of flash fiction stories.

    This special issue includes

    • Original science fiction by Seanan McGuire, N. K. Jemisin, Charlie Jane Anders, Maria Dahvana Headley, Amal El-Mohtar, Kris Millering, Heather Clitheroe, Rhonda Eikamp, Gabriella Stalker, Elizabeth Porter Birdsall, and K. C. Norton;
    • Reprints by Alice Sheldon (a.k.a. James Tiptree Jr.), Eleanor Arnason, Maria Romasco Moore, Tananarive Due, and Maureen F. McHugh; and
    • Original flash fiction by Carrie Vaughn, Ellen Denham, Samantha Murray, Holly Schofield, Cathy Humble, Emily Fox, Tina Connolly, Effie Seiberg, Marina J. Lostetter, Rhiannon Rasmussen, Sarah Pinsker, Kim Winternheimer, Anaid Perez, Katherine Crighton, and Vanessa Torline.

  • The internationally bestselling author of Into the Wilderness makes her highly anticipated return with a remarkable epic about two female doctors in nineteenth-century New York and the transcendent power of courage and love.

    The year is 1883, and in New York City it’s a time of dizzying splendor, crushing poverty, and tremendous change. With the gravity-defying Brooklyn Bridge nearly complete and New York in the grips of anti-vice crusader Anthony Comstock, Anna Savard and her cousin Sophie—both graduates of the Woman’s Medical School—treat the city’s most vulnerable, even if doing so may put everything they’ve strived for in jeopardy.

    Anna’s work has placed her in the path of four children who have lost everything, just as she herself once had. Faced with their helplessness, Anna must make an unexpected choice between holding on to the pain of her past and letting love into her life.

    For Sophie, an obstetrician and the orphaned daughter of free people of color, helping a desperate young mother forces her to grapple with the oath she took as a doctor—and thrusts her and Anna into the orbit of Comstock, a dangerous man who considers himself the enemy of everything indecent and of anyone who dares to defy him.

    With its vivid depictions of old New York and its enormously appealing characters, The Gilded Hour is a captivating, emotionally gripping novel that proves Sara Donati is an author at the height of her powers.

  • Archaeologist Faye Longchamp-Mantooth has dug herself a deep hole, and she can’t make her way out of it. As she struggles to recover from a shattering personal loss, she sees that everyone she loves is trying to reach out to her. If only she could reach back. Instead she’s out digging holes all over her home, the Florida island of Joyeuse.

    In their old plantation home, Joe Wolf Mantooth is surrounded by family—Faye, the wife he loves; their toddler son he adores; and his father, who hasn’t gotten around to telling Joe how long he’s been out of prison or how he got there—yet Joe has never felt so helpless or alone.

    Then a close friend at the local marina is brutally murdered, the first in a string of crimes against women that rocks Micco County. Joe, desperate to help Faye, realizes she is in danger from both her inner demons and someone who has breached the island’s isolation. Local law and environmental officials say they want to help, but to Faye and Joe they feel more like invaders. A struggling Faye reaches back over a century into her family’s history for clues. And all the while, danger snakes further into their lives, threatening the people they love, their cherished home, even the very ground—some of it poisoned—beneath their feet.

  • A chance encounter between two lonely women leads to a passionate romance in this lesbian cult classic. Therese, a struggling young sales clerk, and Carol, a homemaker in the midst of a bitter divorce, abandon their oppressive daily routines for the freedom of the open road, where their love can blossom. But their newly discovered bliss is shattered when Carol is forced to choose between her child and her lover.

    Highsmith’s sensitive treatment of fully realized characters who defy stereotypes about homosexuality marks a departure from previous lesbian pulp fiction. Erotic, eloquent, and suspenseful, this story offers an honest look at the necessity of being true to one’s nature.

    The basis for the upcoming film Carol, starring Rooney Mara, Cate Blanchett, and Kyle Chandler, to be released November 20, 2015

  • From Bram Stoker Award nominee Ronald Malfi comes a brilliantly chilling novel of childhood revisited, memories resurrected, and fears reborn.

    When Laurie was a little girl, she was forbidden to enter the room at the top of the stairs. It was one of many rules imposed by her cold, distant father. Now, in a final act of desperation, her father has exorcised his demons. But when Laurie returns to claim the estate with her husband and ten-year-old daughter, it’s as if the past refuses to die. She feels it lurking in the broken moldings, sees it staring from an empty picture frame, hears it laughing in the moldy greenhouse deep in the woods.

    At first, Laurie thinks she’s imagining things. But when she meets her daughter’s new playmate, Abigail, she can’t help but notice her uncanny resemblance to another little girl who used to live next door … who died next door. With each passing day, Laurie’s uneasiness grows stronger, her thoughts more disturbing. Like her father, is she slowly losing her mind? Or is something truly unspeakable happening to those sweet little girls?

  • They are icons of the literary world whose soaring works have been discussed and analyzed in countless classrooms, homes, and pubs. Yet for most readers, the living, breathing human beings behind the classics have remained unknown—until now. In this utterly captivating book, Dr. Elliot Engel, a leading authority on the lives of great authors, illuminates the fascinating and flawed members of literature’s elite. In lieu of stuffy biographical sketches, Engel provides fascinating anecdotes.

    You’ll never look at these literary giants the same way again.

  • From former NPR correspondent Mary Louise Kelly comes a heart-pounding story about fear, family secrets, and one woman's hunt for answers about the murder of her parents.

    Two words: the bullet. That's all it takes to shatter her life.

    Caroline Cashion is beautiful, intelligent, a professor of French literature. But in a split second, everything she's known is proved to be a lie.

    A single bullet, gracefully tapered at one end, is found lodged at the base of her skull. Caroline is stunned. It makes no sense: She has never been shot. She has no entry wound, no scar. Then, over the course of one awful evening, she learns the truth: she was adopted when she was three years old, after her real parents were murdered. Caroline was there the night they were attacked. She was wounded too, a gunshot to the neck. Surgeons had stitched up the traumatized little girl, with the bullet still there, nestled deep among vital nerves and blood vessels.

    That was thirty-four years ago.

    Now, Caroline has to find the truth of her past. Why were her parents killed? Why is she still alive? She returns to her hometown, where she meets a cop who lets slip that the bullet in her neck is the same bullet that killed her mother—full-metal jacket, .38 Special. It hit Caroline's mother and kept going, hurtling through the mother's chest and into the child hiding behind her.

    Caroline is horrified—and in danger. When a gun is fired it leaves markings on the bullet, tiny grooves almost as unique as a fingerprint. The bullet in her neck could finger a murderer. Can Caroline unravel the clues to her past before the killer tracks her down?

  • With nearly half of marriages ending in divorce, an increasing number of people deciding not to have kids, and more people than ever identifying as LGBT, modern life is clearly in the need of modern relationship advice. Sex from Scratch analyzes the facets of contemporary relationships through the struggles, opinions, and experiences of a diverse group of individuals living in nontraditional relationships. Rather than telling readers how to snag a partner and find "true love," it gleans real-life knowledge from people of all sexualities and genders—including individuals trying to make open relationships work to those who have opted against having children—distilling their hard-earned wisdom. Contributions from Andi Zeisler, Stu Rasmussen, Betty Dodson, and others make this love and dating guidebook an essential, fun, and insightful resource for anyone in any type of relationship.

  • From the author of Little Women comes a collection of gothic, romantic, and spellbinding tales guaranteed to surprise and delight.

    This collection represents the best of Alcott's adult oeuvre. The stories in this volume display dramatic intensity and thrilling, suspenseful plots that show Alcott to be a complex and passionate writer. Listeners will discover within this maelstrom of murder, deceit, obsessive desire, treachery, duplicity, and betrayal that love and honor can still conquer all.

    The book takes its title from the tale "A Whisper in the Dark," arguably Alcott's gothic masterpiece, a story of imperiled innocence. Also featured are "The Mysterious Key and What It Opened," "The Abbot's Ghost; or, Maurice Treherne's Temptation: A Christmas Story," "La Jeune; or, Actress and Woman," "Ariel: A Legend of the Lighthouse," and "The Skeleton in the Closet."

  • Seventeen hard science fiction tales by today's top authors

    Hard science fiction is the literature of change, rigorously examining the impact—both beneficial and dangerous—of science and technology on humanity, the future, and the cosmos. As science advances, expanding our knowledge of the universe, astounding new frontiers in storytelling open up as well.

    In Carbide Tipped Pens, over a dozen of today's most creative imaginations explore these frontiers, carrying on the grand tradition of such legendary masters as Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and John W. Campbell, while bringing hard science fiction into the twenty-first century by extrapolating from the latest scientific developments and discoveries. Ranging from ancient China to the outer reaches of the solar system, this outstanding collection of original stories, written by an international roster of authors, finds wonder, terror, and gripping human drama in topics as diverse as space exploration, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, climate change, alternate history, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, interplanetary war, and even the future of baseball.

    From tattoos that treat allergies to hazardous missions to Mars and beyond, from the end of the world to the farthest limits of human invention, Carbide Tipped Pens turns startling new ideas into state-of-the-art science fiction.

    This collection includes stories by Ben Bova, Gregory Benford, Robert Reed, Aliette de Bodard, Jack McDevitt, Howard Hendrix, Daniel H. Wilson, and many others!

  • From the bestselling author of The Obituary Writer comes the stirring multigenerational story of an Italian family.

    An Italian Wife opens in turn-of-the-century Italy, when young Josephine Rimaldi is forced to follow her new husband to America in an arranged marriage and finds herself in a strange country with a man she doesn't know or love.

    Bound by tradition, she gives birth to seven children; the last, conceived in a passionate affair, Josephine must give up for adoption. Josephine spends the rest of her life searching for this child, keeping her secret even as her other children, whose stories unfold in surprising ways, go off to war, get married, and make their own mistakes: Her son suffers in World War I. Her daughter struggles to assimilate in the new world of the 1950s American suburbs. And her granddaughters experiment with the sex, drugs, and rock and roll of the 1970s.

    Poignant, sensual, and deeply felt, An Italian Wife is a sweeping and evocative portrait of a family bound by love and heartbreak.

  • With "incantatory prose" that "sweeps over the reader like a dream" (Philadelphia Inquirer), Hoffman follows her celebrated bestseller The Probable Future with an evocative work that traces the lives of the various occupants of an old Massachusetts house over a span of two hundred years.

    In a rare and gorgeous departure, beloved novelist Alice Hoffman weaves a web of tales, all set in Blackbird House. This small farm on the outer reaches of Cape Cod is a place that is as bewitching and alive as the characters we meet: Violet, a brilliant girl who is in love with books and with a man destined to betray her; Lysander Wynn, attacked by a halibut as big as a horse, certain that his life is ruined until a boarder wearing red boots arrives to change everything; Maya Cooper, who does not understand the true meaning of the love between her mother and father until it is nearly too late. From the time of the British occupation of Massachusetts to our own modern world, family after family's lives are inexorably changed, not only by the people they love but by the lives they lead inside Blackbird House.

    These interconnected narratives are as intelligent as they are haunting, as luminous as they are unusual. Inside Blackbird House more than a dozen men and women learn how love transforms us and how it is the one lasting element in our lives. The past both dissipates and remains contained inside the rooms of Blackbird House, where there are terrible secrets, inspired beauty, and, above all else, a spirit of coming home.

    From the writer that Time has said tells "truths powerful enough to break a reader's heart" comes a glorious travelogue through time and fate, through loss and love and survival. Welcome to Blackbird House.

  • The sequel to the international bestselling novel The Art of Hearing Heartbeats

    Almost ten years have passed since Julia Win came back from Burma, her father's native country. Though she is a successful Manhattan lawyer, her private life is at a crossroads; her boyfriend recently left her, she has suffered a miscarriage, and she is, despite her wealth, unhappy with her professional life. Julia is lost and exhausted.

    One day, in the middle of an important business meeting, she hears a stranger's voice in her head that causes her to leave the office without explanation. In the following days, her crisis only deepens. Not only does the female voice refuse to disappear, but it starts to ask questions Julia has been trying to avoid. Why do you live alone? To whom do you feel close? What do you want in life?

    Interwoven with Julia's story is that of a Burmese woman named Nu Nu who finds her world turned upside down when Burma goes to war and calls on her two young sons to be child soldiers. This spirited sequel, like The Art of Hearing Heartbeats, explores the most inspiring and passionate terrain: the human heart.

  • Faye Longchamp doesn't believe in ghosts. But she's an archaeologist—dead people are her life.

    While working in Rosebower, a rural New York town founded by spiritualists, Faye is surrounded by people who talk to the dead on a regular basis. When the most influential spiritualist in town, Tilda Armistead, invites Faye and her project assistant to commune with the dead, she can't say no.

    An hour later, her crystal ball shows Faye things no rational mind can explain. Tilda is dead. The evidence says that someone trapped Tilda in a small room, nailing its one door shut before setting her Victorian home on fire. There is no possible way for Tilda to have escaped the blaze, let alone drive for miles before finding Faye and dying in her arms. Yet Tilda did. How? And why?

    In this bizarre community, Faye finds herself surrounded by people who had reason to kill Tilda—her estranged daughter who may be the heir to the Armistead fortune; the daughter's husband, a stage magician with a long history of making things vanish; a rich developer with dreams of a ghostly Disneyland project in Rosebower, a project which Tilda fought with her considerable political clout; and the town's holistic doctor whose mysterious herbal potions are consumed by customers far and wide.

    As Faye watches the psychics and charlatans jockey for power, and sends a cry for help to her shrewd husband Joe, Tilda's sister, Myrna, is slowly dying. Will Rosebower reveal its secrets to Faye before more goes up in flames?

  • Faye Longchamp, back in school to pursue her archaeological aspirations, has landed a job as chief archaeologist for a rural development project, so she heads to the hills of Alabama with Joe, her Cherokee assistant. She's looking forward to a legitimate dig and hopes to uncover the mystery of the Sujosa, an ethnic group of mysterious origin. The Sujosa have lived in Alabama's most remote hills for centuries and have shown an impressive immunity to many diseases, including AIDS.

    Late one night, Faye awakens to find the house in flames. She saves herself and one of her housemates, but her friend Carmen, the project historian, never had a chance. The suspicious death leads Faye to a different sort of investigation. Then within days, a teenage boy jumps from a cell phone tower that, when completed, will connect the Sujosa with the outside world. Now Faye must use her professional and personal skills to identify the killer and discover the long-buried secret of the Sujosa as well.

  • They are hunting us.

    In this sweeping, threaded narrative of the global phenomenon known as the Vampire Wars, mankind is unwittingly infected by a millennia-old bacteria unknowingly exhumed by a scientific expedition in Antarctica. Now, in some rare cases, a person's so-called junk DNA becomes activated. Depending on their racial and ethnic heritage, they begin to manifest one of the many diverse forms of the "others" that are the true basis for the legends of supernatural creatures. These aren't your usual vampires and werewolves—it goes much deeper than that.

    Conceived by Jonathan Maberry, V Wars features stories from various frontlines as reported by such contributors as Nancy Holder, Yvonne Navarro, James A. Moore, Gregory Frost, John Everson, Keith R. A. DeCandido, and Scott Nicholson—as well as Maberry himself, of course. The result is a compelling series of tales that creates a unique chronicle of mankind's response to this sudden, hidden threat to humanity.

    The narrators of this audio production include Grammy, Emmy, Tony, and Audie award winners.

  • Faye Longchamp has lost nearly everything, except for her quick mind and a grim determination to keep her ancestral home, Joyeuse, a moldering plantation hidden along the Florida coast. No one knows how Faye's great-great-grandmother Cally, a newly freed slave barely out of her teens, came to own Joyeuse in the aftermath of the Civil War. No one knows how her descendants hung on to it through Reconstruction, world wars, the Depression, and Jim Crow, but Faye has inherited the island plantation—and the family tenacity.

    When the property taxes rise beyond her means, Faye sets out to save Joyeuse by digging for artifacts on her property and the surrounding national wildlife refuge and selling them on the black market. A tiny bit of that dead glory would pay a year's taxes, and a big, valuable chunk of the past would save her home forever. But instead of potsherds and arrowheads, she uncovers a woman's shattered skull, a Jackie Kennedy–style earring nestled against its cheek bone. Faye is torn. If she reports her find, she'll reveal her illegal livelihood, thus risking jail and the loss of Joyeuse. She doesn't intend to let that happen, so she probes into the dead woman's history herself, unaware that the past is rushing toward her like a hurricane across deceptively calm Gulf waters.

  • Archaeologist Faye Longchamp and her friend Joe Wolf Mantooth have traveled to Neshoba County, Mississippi, to help excavate a site near Nanih Waiya, the sacred mound where tradition says the Choctaw Nation was born. When farmer Carroll Calhoun refuses their request to investigate a nearby mound on his land, Faye and her colleagues are disappointed, but his next action breaks their hearts: he tries to bulldoze the huge relic to the ground. Faye and Joe rush to protect history—with their bodies, if necessary. Soon the Choctaws arrive to defend the mound, and the farmer’s white and black neighbors come to defend his property rights. Though a popular young sheriff is able to defuse the situation, tempers are short. But that night, Calhoun is found dead, his throat sliced with a handmade stone blade. Was he killed by an archaeologist angered by his wanton destruction of history? Or, since local farmers have been plowing up stone tools like the murder weapon for centuries, did one of them take this chance to even the score with an old rival? The sheriff is well aware that Faye and Joe were near the spot where Calhoun’s body was found and that their combined knowledge of stone tools is impressive. They had motive, means, and opportunity—but so does almost everyone in Neshoba County.

  • She is a painter. He is a poet. Their art bridges time. 

    It is 1978. Merle is in her first year at the Corcoran School of Art, catapulted from her impoverished Appalachian upbringing into a sophisticated, dissipated art scene. It is also 1870. The teenage poet Arthur Rimbaud is on the verge of breaking through to the images and voice that will make his name. The meshed power of words and art thins the boundaries between the present and the past—and allows these two troubled, brilliant artists to enter each other’s worlds.

    Radiant Days is a peerless follow-up to Elizabeth Hand’s unforgettable, multiple-starred Illyria.

  • Time is not on Faye Longchamp’s side. She and her husband Joe are working near the mouth of the Mississippi, researching archaeological sites soon to be swamped by oil. The Deepwater Horizon disaster has morphed her run-of-the-mill contract job into a task that might swamp her fledgling company. It isn’t helping that an injured babysitter has left Faye to work with a toddler underfoot.

    An adolescent girl is drawn to Faye, perhaps because she idolizes the confident archaeologist. Young Amande is bright and curious, but a poverty-stricken life on a houseboat with an eccentric grandmother doesn’t seem like a good way for Amande to get the education she deserves. Then when the girl’s grandmother and her no-account uncle are murdered, her prospects worsen. With only two known relatives, neither of whom is much more respectable than the dead uncle, Amande seems destined for neglect or worse.

    Soon, Faye and Joe find themselves among people fighting hard for Amande’s pathetic inheritance: a raggedy houseboat, a few shares of stock, and a hurricane-battered island that’s not even habitable. Pirate-era silver coins are found and disappear. Shadowing it all is the fact that the murderer is still on the loose. But why should Faye be surprised by such shady events, here in these watery lands settled by the greatest pirates of them all? And the oil slick looms, because this country is still being plundered, after all these years.

  • A poignant and inspirational love story set in Burma, The Art of Hearing Heartbeats spans the decades between the 1950s and the present.

    When a successful New York lawyer suddenly disappears without a trace, neither his wife nor his daughter Julia has any idea where he might be—until they find a love letter he wrote many years ago to a Burmese woman they have never heard of. Intent on solving the mystery and coming to terms with her father’s past, Julia decides to travel to the village where the woman lived. There she uncovers a tale of unimaginable hardship, resilience, and passion that will reaffirm the listener’s belief in the power of love to move mountains.

  • Margaret Stuart, the proud wife of a prosperous Iowa farmer, sets high standards for herself and others. Happy in her marriage, she tries to look the other way when her genial husband, Alec, takes to the bottle. When Elspeth, Margaret’s sister, comes to live with them, the young woman is immediately captivated by the beauty and vitality of the farm and by the affection she receives from those around her. But as summer turns into fall and the friendship between Alec and Elspeth deepens, Margaret finds her spirit tested by a series of events that seem as cruel and inevitable as the endless prairie winters.

    Remembering Laughter marked Wallace Stegner’s brilliant literary debut.

  • The remarkable renaissance of Patricia Highsmith continues with the publication of Patricia Highsmith: Selected Novels and Short Stories, featuring two groundbreaking novels as well as a trove of penetrating short stories. With a critical introduction by Joan Schenkar, situating Highsmith’s classic works within her own tumultuous life, this book provides a useful guide to some of her most dazzlingly seductive writing. Strangers on a Train, transformed into a legendary film by Alfred Hitchcock, displays Highsmith’s genius for psychological characterization and tortuous suspense, while The Price of Salt, with its lesbian lovers and a creepy PI, provides a thrilling and highly controversial depiction of “the love that dare not speak its name.” Patricia Highsmith: Selected Novels and Short Stories firmly establishes Highsmith’s centrality to American culture by presenting key works that went on to influence a half century of literature and film. Abandoned by the wider reading public in her lifetime, Highsmith finally gets the canonical recognition that is her due.