“A powerful allegory of our civilization’s many maladies, artfully and elegantly articulated, by one of the young wise women of our generation.” —New York Times Book Review An intelligent and madly entertaining debut novel reminiscent of The Crying of Lot 49, White Noise, and City of Glass that is at once a missing-person mystery, an exorcism of modern culture, and a wholly singular vision of contemporary womanhood from a terrifying and often funny voice of a new generation. A woman known only by the letter A lives in an unnamed American city with her roommate, B, and boyfriend, C, who wants her to join him on a reality show called That’s My Partner! A eats (or doesn’t) the right things, watches endless amounts of television, often just for the commercials—particularly the recurring cartoon escapades of Kandy Kat, the mascot for an entirely chemical dessert—and models herself on a standard of beauty that only exists in such advertising. She fixates on the fifteen minutes of fame a news-celebrity named Michael has earned after buying up his local Wally Supermarket’s entire, and increasingly ample, supply of veal. Meanwhile B is attempting to make herself a twin of A, who hungers for something to give meaning to her life, something aside from C’s pornography addiction, and becomes indoctrinated by a new religion spread throughout a web of corporate franchises, which moves her closer to the decoys that populate her television world, but no closer to her true nature.

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE • A novelist discovers the dark side of Hollywood and reckons with ambition, corruption, and environmental collapse in “a darkly satirical reflection of ecological reality” (Time) LONGLISTED FOR THE JOYCE CAROL OATES PRIZE • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, Time, Los Angeles Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Vulture, Thrillist, Literary Hub “An urgent novel about our very near future, and a deeply addictive pleasure.”—Katie Kitamura, author of Intimacies Novelist Patrick Hamlin has come to Los Angeles to oversee the film adaptation of one of his books and try to impress his wife and daughter back home with this last-ditch attempt at professional success. But California is not as he imagined. Drought, wildfire, and corporate corruption are everywhere, and the company behind a mysterious new brand of synthetic water seems to be at the root of it all. Patrick finds an unlikely partner in Cassidy Carter—the cynical starlet of his film—and the two investigate the sun-scorched city, where they discover the darker side of all that glitters in Hollywood. Something New Under the Sun is an unmissable novel for our present moment—a bold exploration of environmental catastrophe in the age of alternative facts, and “a ghost story not of the past but of the near future” (The New York Times).

Praised by the New York Times Book Review as “a powerful allegory of our civilization’s many maladies, artfully and elegantly articulated, by one of the young wise women of our generation,” Alexandra Kleeman’s debut novel, You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine, earned her comparisons to Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Ben Marcus, and Tom Perrotta. In her second book, a collection of twelve stories irresistibly seductive in their strangeness, she explores human life from beginning to end: the distress of birth into a world already formed; the brief and confusing period of “living” when we understand what is expected of us and struggle to do it; and, finally, the death-y period, when we sense everything is winding down and that it will conclude only partially understood, at best. The title Intimations is taken from one of the stories but is also a play on Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality”—in this case it’s not clear exactly what is being intimated, only that it’s nothing so gleaming and good as Immortality. At once familiar and mysterious, these stories have an eerie resonance as the characters find themselves in new and surprising situations. An unnamed woman enters a room with no exit and a ready-made life; the disappearance of people, objects, and memory creates an apocalypse; the art of dance is used to try to tame a feral child; the key to surviving a house party lies in knowing the difference between fake and real blood. Elegant, surprising, wondrous, and haunting, Intimations is an utterly transporting collection from one of our most ingenious and brilliant young writers.

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice "A radiant first novel. . . . [Neon in Daylight] has antecedents in the great novels of the 1970s: Renata Adler’s Speedboat, Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights, Joan Didion’s Play It as It Lays. . . . Precision—of observation, of language—is Hoby’s gift. Her sentences are sleek and tailored. Language molds snugly to thought." —Parul Sehgal, The New York Times "What do you get when a writer of extreme intelligence, insight, style and beauty chronicles the lives of self–absorbed hedonists—The Great Gatsby, Bright Lights, Big City, and now Neon in Daylight. Hermione Hoby paints a garish world that drew me in and held me spellbound. She is a marvel."" —Ann Patchett, author of Commonwealth New York City in 2012, the sweltering summer before Hurricane Sandy hits. Kate, a young woman newly arrived from England, is staying in a Manhattan apartment while she tries to figure out her future. She has two unfortunate responsibilities during her time in America: to make regular Skype calls to her miserable boyfriend back home, and to cat–sit an indifferent feline named Joni Mitchell. The city has other plans for her. In New York's parks and bodegas, its galleries and performance spaces, its bars and clubs crowded with bodies, Kate encounters two strangers who will transform her stay: Bill, a charismatic but embittered writer made famous by the movie version of his only novel; and Inez, his daughter, a recent high school graduate who supplements her Bushwick cafe salary by enacting the fantasies of men she meets on Craigslist. Unmoored from her old life, Kate falls into an infatuation with both of them. Set in a heatwave that feels like it will never break, Neon In Daylight marries deep intelligence with captivating characters to offer us a joyful, unflinching exploration of desire, solitude, and the thin line between life and art.

Set in the near future, in a Paris devastated by revolution and disease, Empire of the Senseless is narrated by two terrorists and occasional lovers, Thivai, a pirate, and Abhor, part robot and part human. Together and apart, the two undertake an odyssey of carnage, a holocaust of the erotic. "An elegy for the world of our fathers," as Kathy Acker calls it, where the terrorists and the wretched of the earth are in command, marching down a road charted by Genet to a Marseillaise composed by Sade.

Now every parent, grandparent, or teacher can explain to a child the difference between appropriate and inappropriate touching in a way that young boys and girls can understand. As a child, there are constantly people trying to pick you up, hug you, or tickle you. Sometimes, though, children fall victims to people who try to touch them inappropriately. But how do you tell someone, most likely an adult, that you don’t want to be touched? Or, if it has already happened, how do you tell an adult you trust about what happened? You’re only a child, and they’re the adults. Why would they believe you? My Body Belongs to Me from My Head to My Toes is an educational tool to help instill confidence in children when it comes to their bodies. The narrative of the story is led by a girl named Clara, who encourages kids to say “no” if they are uncomfortable with physical contact. The narrator gives readers tips about what they can say or do to avoid unwanted physical contact, or how to tell the right people in the event it has already occurred. My Body Belongs to Me from My Head to My Toes is an invaluable resource that gives children a voice in uncomfortable situations.

A gothic twist on the classic tale of innocents abroad, THE ZERO AND THE ONE is a meditation on the seductions of friendship and the power of dangerous ideas that registers the dark, psychological suspense of Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley and the intellectual and philosophical intrigue of John Banville's The Book of Evidence. A shy, bookish scholarship student from a working-class family, Owen Whiting has high hopes of what awaits him at Oxford, only to find himself adrift and out of place among the university's dim aristocrats and posh radicals. But his life takes a dramatic turn when he is assigned to the same philosophy tutorial as Zachary Foedern, a visiting student from New York City. Rich, brilliant, and charismatic, Zach takes Owen under his wing, introducing him to a world of experiences Owen has only ever read about. From the quadrangles of Oxford to the seedy underbelly of Berlin, they practice what Zach preaches, daring each other to transgress the boundaries of convention and morality, until Zach proposes the greatest transgression of all: a suicide pact. But when Zach's plans go horribly awry, Owen is left to pick up the pieces in the sleek lofts and dingy dives of lower Manhattan. Now he must navigate the treacherous boundary between illusion and reality if he wants to understand his friend and preserve a hold on his once bright future.