With a chirp, a smirk, and a nod, Kent Russell crisscrosses the country, seeking immersive experiences and revelations on society’s ragged edge. He pitches a tent among the Insane Clown Posse’s fans, known as Juggalos, treks to the end of the continent to find out how a legendary hockey enforcer is preparing for his own death, and explores the Amish obsession with baseball as well as his own obsession with horror, blood, and guts. Between these reports from the world at large, Russell introduces us to his raging and inimitable forebears—above all, his large-living, volatile, hard-as-nails dad. I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son is a haunting and howling portrait of America—and American manhood—and the introduction of a ferociously brilliant new voice navigating the junctures between savagery and civilization within himself.

Kent Russell's essays take him to society's ragged edges - the places where savagery and civilization collide. Perhaps among the misfits and the misunderstood - the losers, the hardcore, the alarming, the crazed, the downright frightening - he can find a way to reconcile his uneasy adult desires and his deepest childhood demons. He goes 'horrorcore' at a four-day music festival in Illinois. He spends a long weekend getting drunk with a man who claims he has conditioned his body to withstand the bites of the most venomous snakes. He finds a castaway on a tiny atoll off the coast of Australia. He explores the Amish obsession with baseball. Bristling with violence, tragedy and humour and wit, I Am Sorry To Think I Have Raised A Timid Son is a raw personal journey and an unforgettable portrait of masculinity in our time, by a ferociously brilliant and distinctive young voice in literary nonfiction.

A wickedly smart, funny, and irresistibly off-kilter account of an improbable thousand-mile journey on foot into the heart of modern Florida, the state that Russell calls "America Concentrate." In the summer of 2016, Kent Russell--broke, at loose ends, hungry for adventure--set off to walk across Florida. Mythic, superficial, soaked in contradictions, maligned by cultural elites, segregated from the South, and literally vanishing into the sea, Florida (or, as he calls it: "America Concentrate") seemed to Russell to embody America's divided soul. The journey, with two friends intent on filming the ensuing mayhem, quickly reduces the trio to filthy drifters pushing a shopping cart of camera equipment. They get waylaid by a concerned citizen bearing a rifle; buy cocaine from an ex-wrestler; visit a spiritual medium. The narrative overflows with historical detail about how modern Florida came into being after World War II, and how it came to be a petri dish for life in a suddenly, increasingly diverse new land of minority-majority cities and of unrivaled ethnic and religious variety. Russell has taken it all in with his incomparably focused lens and delivered a book that is both an inspired travelogue and a profound rumination on the nation's soul--and his own. It is a book that is wildly vivid, encyclopedic, erudite, and ferociously irreverent--a deeply ambivalent love letter to his sprawling, brazenly varied home state.

BOOKER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A novel that follows a middle-aged man as he contends with a past he never much thought about—until his closest childhood friends return with a vengeance: one of them from the grave, another maddeningly present. A novel so compelling that it begs to be read in a single setting, The Sense of an Ending has the psychological and emotional depth and sophistication of Henry James at his best, and is a stunning achievement in Julian Barnes's oeuvre. Tony Webster thought he left his past behind as he built a life for himself, and his career has provided him with a secure retirement and an amicable relationship with his ex-wife and daughter, who now has a family of her own. But when he is presented with a mysterious legacy, he is forced to revise his estimation of his own nature and place in the world.

I know God doesn't make mistakes, and if I'm gay it's because that's what he wanted. What you wanted. And I think the challenge is to get everyone else to see that. This is their test, not mine. If only Taylor Adams had kept on lying to his parents, none of this would have happened. He wouldn't have been shipped off to Straight to God, an institution devoted to "deprogramming" troubled teenagers and ridding them of their vices--whether it's drugs, violence, or in Taylor's case, other boys. Not that Taylor has a problem with being gay, or with reconciling his love for God with his love for his boyfriend Will. . . At Straight to God, such thoughts--along with all other reminders of Taylor's former "sinful" life--are forbidden. Every movement is monitored, privacy is impossible, and no one--from staff to residents--is quite who they first appear to be. There's Charles, Taylor's clean-cut roommate, desperate to leave his past behind. . .Nate Devlin, a handsome, inscrutable older boy who's alternately arrogant and kind. . . gorgeous, secretive Sean, who returns to Straight to God each year to avoid doing prison time for drugs. Here, where piety can be a mask for cruelty and the greatest crimes go unpunished, Taylor will learn more than he ever dreamed about love, courage, rebellion, and betrayal--but the most surprising lessons will be the truths he uncovers about himself. In this smart, insightful new novel, Robin Reardon presents a compelling exploration of the journey from boy to man, and a testament to the strength that comes with accepting both who we are, and who we love. . .

An experience of the fragility of conventional images of masculinity is something many modern men share. Psychoanalyst Guy Corneau traces this experience to an even deeper feeling men have of their fathers' silence or absence—sometimes literal, but especially emotional and spiritual. Why is this feeling so profound in the lives of the postwar "baby boom" generation—men who are now approaching middle age? Because, he says, this generation marks a critical phase in the loss of the masculine initiation rituals that in the past ensured a boy's passage into manhood. In his engaging examination of the many different ways this missing link manifests in men's lives, Corneau shows that, for men today, regaining the essential "second birth" into manhood lies in gaining the ability to be a father to themselves—not only as a means of healing psychological pain, but as a necessary step in the process of becoming whole.

From Sigrid Nunez, the National Book Award-winning author of The Friend, comes A Feather on the Breath of God: a mesmerizing story about the tangled nature of relationships between parents and children, between language and love A young woman looks back to the world of her immigrant parents: a Chinese-Panamanian father and a German mother. Growing up in a housing project in the 1950s and 1960s, she escapes into dreams inspired both by her parents' stories and by her own reading and, for a time, into the otherworldly life of ballet. A yearning, homesick mother, a silent and withdrawn father, the ballet--these are the elements that shape the young woman's imagination and her sexuality.