The Available World is strikingly original and often exhilarating. This is a refreshing and knowledgeable voice that drew me into listening carefully. There are only a few books of poems a year that engross you so convincingly.---Jim Harrison Monson's poems celebrate defiant excess. In this land of scarcity, right living involves using up what you have, where you have it; otherwise someone might wreck, steal, or use it and you might not get any more....[A] carpe diem for obscure, doomed youth.---Stephen Burt in The Believer "I would like some kind of notification/that I am not alone" writes Ander Monson in poems full of hard-earned music, punctuated with upholstery, gasoline fumes, kitchen cabinets, calculus, emergency rooms, baseball, bathroom floors, and other details of twenty-first-century American life. Monson forces these details into a lyric to make a sermon for our days. Rarely will a reader these days find sermons that are so utterly contemporary and yet so unmistakably a part of a long tradition in the American lyric. There are "forces at work here that are not apparent on the first viewing" in this book, and there are "fireworks dismantling the sky." "Of all the somnambulists / trolling the floors of the town" of American poetics, Ander Monson is surely a master whose work will be remembered by more than "a line in the paper" of tomorrow. For his is the poetry of "necessary glory."---Ilya Kaminsky In The Available World, poet Ander Monson parses, sings, and sifts his way through the abundant offerings of the modern, digital world. The result is a whirlwind of linguistic energy. Some poems are sermons, others elegies, addressing the margin between real and virtual, where we increasingly spend out time. Here, human and machine memory collide; bodies are interchangeable with the ghosts of cyberspace. Vectors bind these poems together: "There is a missing mother, a damaged / armless brother, a drunk father, a car crash." As always, Monson has an eye to the weather and its godlike force. "There / are a lot of forces working here that are not all / apparent on first viewing," he writes. Perhaps most of all, The Available World invokes Katamari Damacy, a Japanese phrase for "clump spirit," and also the title of a puzzle-action video game that asks you to roll the world's objects into a ball and throw it into space where, if big and beautiful enough, it will become a star.

“Stunning . . . . This is a novel that rewards reading, and even re-reading. The World We Found is a powerful meditation.” —Boston Globe Thrity Umrigar, acclaimed author of The Space Between Us and The Weight of Heaven, returns with a breathtaking new novel—a skillfully wrought, emotionally resonant story of four women and the indelible friendship they share As university students in late 1970s Bombay, Armaiti, Laleh, Kavita, and Nishta were inseparable. Spirited and unconventional, they challenged authority and fought for a better world. But over the past thirty years, the quartet has drifted apart, the day-to-day demands of work and family tempering the revolutionary fervor they once shared. Then comes devastating news: Armaiti, who moved to America, is gravely ill and wants to see the old friends she left behind. For Laleh, reunion is a bittersweet reminder of unfulfilled dreams and unspoken guilt. For Kavita, it is an admission of forbidden passion. For Nishta, it is the promise of freedom from a bitter, fundamentalist husband. And for Armaiti, it is an act of acceptance, of letting go on her own terms. The World We Found is a dazzling masterwork from the remarkable Thrity Umrigar, offering an unforgettable portrait of modern India while it explores the enduring bonds of friendship and the power of love to change lives.

This “wicked, melancholy, and . . . astonishing” novel reimagines the lives of three wildly different men adrift in the 20th century: Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell, and G. E. Moore (Newsday). When Bruce Duffy’s The World As I Found It was first published, critics and readers were bowled over by its daring reimagining of the lives of three very different men, the philosophers Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. A brilliant group portrait with the vertiginous displacements of twentieth-century life looming large in the background, Duffy’s novel depicts times and places as various as Vienna 1900, the trenches of World War I, Bloomsbury, and the colleges of Cambridge, while the complicated main characters appear not only in thought and dispute but in love and despair. Wittgenstein, a strange, troubled, and troubling man of gnawing contradictions, is at the center of a novel that reminds us that the apparently abstract and formal questions that animate philosophy are nothing less than the intractable matters of life and death.

When Luke O’Neil isn’t angry, he’s asleep. When he’s awake, he gives vent to some of the most heartfelt, political and anger-fueled prose to power its way to the public sphere since Hunter S. Thompson smashed a typewriter’s keys. Welcome to Hell World is an unexpurgated selection of Luke O’Neil’s finest rants, near-poetic rhapsodies, and investigatory journalism. Racism, sexism, immigration, unemployment, Marcus Aurelius, opioid addiction, Iraq: all are processed through the O’Neil grinder. He details failings in his own life and in those he observes around him: and the result is a book that is at once intensely confessional and an energetic, unforgettable condemnation of American mores. Welcome to Hell World is, in the author’s words, a “fever dream nightmare of reporting and personal essays from one of the lowest periods in our country in recent memory.” It is also a burning example of some of the best writing you’re likely to read anywhere.

“Pemberton’s beautifully told story is a rags to riches journey—beginning in a place and with a jarring set of experiences that could have destroyed his life. But Steve’s refusal to give in to those forces, and his resolve to create a better life, shows a courage and resilience that is an example for many of us to follow.” —Stedman Graham, author, educator Home is the place where our life stories begin. A Chance in the World is the astonishing true story of a boy destined to become a man of resilience determination and vision. Down in the dank basement, amidst my moldy, hoarded food and beloved worm-eaten books, I dreamed that my real home, the place where my story had begun, was out there somewhere, and one day I was going to find it. Taken from his mother at age three, Steve Klakowicz lives a terrifying existence. Caught in the clutches of a cruel foster family and subjected to constant abuse, Steve finds his only refuge in a box of books given to him by a kind stranger. In these books, he discovers new worlds he can only imagine and begins to hope that one day he might have a different life, that one day he will find his true home. A fair-complexioned boy with blue eyes, a curly Afro, and a Polish last name, he is determined to unravel the mystery of his origins and find his birth family. Armed with just a single clue, Steve embarks on an extraordinary quest for his identity, only to find that nothing is as it appears. Through it all, Steve’s story teaches us that no matter how broken our past, no matter how great our misfortunes, we have it in us to create a new beginning and to build a place where love awaits.