Get the phone. You’re going to want to call your mother/daughter after reading this one. 

Natalie Serber’s “achingly true to life” (O Magazine) debut short story collection, SHOUT HER LOVELY NAME, available now, explores the tangled, intense relationships between mothers and daughters, and will deepen the love you share with the most important women in your life. 

Mothers—both reluctant and euphoric—ride the familial tide of joy, pride, regret, guilt, and love in these stories of resilient and flawed women. In a battle between a teenage daughter and her mother, wheat bread and plain yogurt become weapons. An aimless college student, married to her much older professor, sneaks cigarettes while caring for their newborn son. On the eve of her husband’s fiftieth birthday, a pilfered fifth of vodka, an unexpected tattoo, and rogue teenagers leave a woman questioning her place. And in a suite of stories, we follow capricious, ambitious single mother Ruby and her cautious, steadfast daughter Nora through their tumultuous life—stray men, stray cats, and psychedelic drugs—in 1970s California. 

Gimlet-eyed and emotionally generous, achingly real and beautifully written, these unforgettable stories cut to the heart of the connection and conflict in families. SHOUT HER LOVELY NAME heralds the arrival of a writer who will delight readers of Jo Ann Beard and Elizabeth Strout. 

Download a sneak peek of Natalie Serber’s short story collection SHOUT HER LOVELY NAME, available June 26. 

Download a free excerpt on your Kindle or Nook. Or any ereader!

“Funny, heart-felt, and keenly perceptive, this is a book worth shouting about.” —Dan Chaon

GIVE ME YOUR HEART, the chilling collection of stories by Joyce Carol Oates is now available in paperback!

In the suspenseful “Strip Poker,” a reckless adolescent girl must find a way of turning the tables on a gathering of increasingly threatening young men—Can she “outplay” them? In the award-winning “Smother!” a young woman’s nightmare memory of childhood brings trouble on her professor-mother—Which of them will “win”? In “Split/Brain” a woman who has blundered into a lethal situation confronts the possibility of saving herself—Will she take it? In “The First Husband,” a jealous man discovers that his wife seems to have lied about her first marriage, and exacts a cruel revenge, years after the fact. In these and other powerful tales, children veer beyond their parents’ control, wives and husbands wake up to find that they hardly know each other, haunted pasts intrude upon uncertain futures, and those who bring us the most harm may be the nearest at hand.

In ten razor-sharp stories, National Book Award winner Joyce Carol Oates shows that the most deadly mysteries often begin at home.

New from the three-time Booker Prize nominee Anita Desai, The Artist of Disappearance is now available.

Award-winning, internationally acclaimed author Anita Desai ruminates on art and memory, illusion and disillusion, and the sharp divide between life’s expectations and its realities in three perfectly etched novellas. Set in India in the not-too-distant past, the stories’ dramas illuminate the ways in which Indian culture can nourish or suffocate. All are served up with Desai’s characteristic perspicuity, subtle humor, and sensitive writing.

Overwhelmed by their own lack of purpose, the men and women who populate these tales set out on unexpected journeys that present them with a fresh sense hope and opportunity. Like so many flies in a spider’s web, however, they cannot escape their surroundings—as none of us can. An impeccable craftsman, Desai elegantly reveals our human frailties and the power of place.

420 Characters by Lou Beach is now available!

Alternately surreal, funny, ominous, and lyrical, Lou Beach’s 420 Characters offers an experience as dazzling as any in contemporary fiction. Revealing worlds of meaning in single paragraphs, these crystalline miniature stories began as Facebook status updates, and mark a new turn in an acclaimed artist and illustrator’s career. 420 Characters features original collages by the author.

Click here for more from Lou Beach.

Out this week, ten remarkable stories that tackle what it means to be a man, from the author of Wake of Forgiveness.

Whether they find themselves walking the fertile farmland of south Texas, steering trucks through the suffocating sprawl of Houston, or turning logs into loose leaf in the mills just west of the Sabine River, the men of these stories find themselves beset by the insufficiencies of their own ingrained ideas of manhood. Like Richard Russo, Bruce Machart has a profound knowledge of the male psyche and a gift for conveying the absurdity and brutality of daily life with humor and compassion. Alternately lush with lyricism and starkly candid, these stories emerge from inside a vividly scrutinized everyday of farms, refineries, hospitals, and homes to explore what it means to be a man at the rise of a new millennium. What it means to be a man who can’t protect his wife from violence, or protect his children from tragic accidents, or protect himself from loss and heartbreak. Machart’s characters have a deep and abiding humanity that makes their hardscrabble lives all the more unforgettable.   

A portrait of a fictional village, by one of the world’s most admired writers, Scenes from Village Life is now available!

In the village of Tel Ilan, something is off kilter. An elderly man complains to his daughter that he hears the sound of digging under his house at night. Could it be his tenant, a young Arab? But then the tenant hears the mysterious digging sounds too. The mayor receives a note from his wife: “Don’t worry about me.” He looks all over, no sign of her. The veneer of new wealth around the village—gourmet restaurants and art galleries, a winery—cannot conceal abandoned outbuildings, disused air raid shelters, rusting farm tools, and trucks left wherever they stopped.

Amos Oz’s novel-in-stories is a brilliant, unsettling glimpse of what goes on beneath the surface of everyday life. Scenes from Village Life is a parable for Israel, and for all of us.

 ”Finely wrought… Oz writes characterizations that are subtle but surgically precise, rendering this work a powerfully understated treatment of an uneasy Israeli conscience.”
-Publishers Weekly, starred