Buy from Amazon.com here<\/a>.<\/p>\n Here is the blurb from Farrer, Straus and Giroux:<\/p>\n New Yorker<\/i> book critic and award-winning author James Wood delivers a novel of a family struggling to connect with one another and find meaning in their own lives.<\/p>\n In the years since his daughter Vanessa moved to America to become a professor of philosophy, Alan Querry has never been to visit. He has been too busy at home in northern England, holding together his business as a successful property developer. His younger daughter, Helen?a music executive in London?hasn\u2019t gone, either, and the two sisters, close but competitive, have never quite recovered from their parents\u2019 bitter divorce and the early death of their mother. But when Vanessa\u2019s new boyfriend sends word that she has fallen into a severe depression and that he\u2019s worried for her safety, Alan and Helen fly to New York and take the train to Saratoga Springs.<\/p>\n Over the course of six wintry days in upstate New York, the Querry family begins to struggle with the questions that animate this profound and searching novel: Why do some people find living so much harder than others? Is happiness a skill that might be learned or a cruel accident of birth? Is reflection conducive to happiness or an obstacle to it? If, as a favorite philosopher of Helen\u2019s puts it, \u201cthe only serious enterprise is living,\u201d how should we live? Rich in subtle human insight, full of poignant and often funny portraits, and vivid with a sense of place, James Wood\u2019s Upstate <\/i>is a powerful, intense, beautiful novel.<\/p>\n Buy from Amazon.com here<\/a>.<\/p>\n Here is the blurb from Farrer, Straus and Giroux:<\/p>\n Rachel Cusk, the award-winning and critically acclaimed author of Outline <\/i>and Transit<\/i>, completes the transcendent literary trilogy with Kudos, a novel of unsettling power.<\/p>\n A woman writer visits a Europe in flux, where questions of personal and political identity are rising to the surface and the trauma of change is opening up new possibilities of loss and renewal. Within the rituals of literary culture, Faye finds the human story in disarray amid differing attitudes toward the public performance of the creative persona. She begins to identify among the people she meets a tension between truth and representation, a fissure that accrues great dramatic force as Kudos <\/i>reaches a profound and beautiful climax.<\/p>\n In this conclusion to her groundbreaking trilogy, Cusk unflinchingly explores the nature of family and art, justice and love, and the ultimate value of suffering. She is without question one of our most important living writers.<\/p>\n Buy from Amazon.com here<\/a>.<\/p>\n Here is the blurb from NYRB Classics:<\/p>\n Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Bedford’s autobiographical novel paints a vivid picture of life in 1920s Europe between the wars.<\/p>\n Sybille Bedford placed the ambiguous and inescapable\u00a0stuff of her own life at the center of her fiction, and in\u00a0Jigsaw<\/i>\u2014her fourth and final novel, which was shortlisted for the 1989 Booker Prize\u2014she did it with particular\u00a0artistry. \u201cWhat I had in mind,\u201d she was later to say,\u00a0\u201cwas to build a novel out of the events and people who\u00a0had made up, and marked, my early youth…Truth here\u00a0was an artistic, not moral, requirement…It involved…writing about myself, my feelings, my actions.\u201d And so\u00a0she assembled the puzzle pieces of her singular past into\u00a0a picture of her \u201cunsentimental education.\u201d We learn of a\u00a0childhood spent alone with her father, \u201ca stranded man\u00a0of the world\u201d living a life of \u201cungenteel poverty in quite\u00a0grand surroundings,\u201d a ch\u00e2teau, that is, deep in the\u00a0German countryside, with wine but little else for him\u00a0and his young daughter to hold body and soul together.\u00a0We learn of her return to Italy and her mother, \u201cthe one\u00a0character I wished to keep minor and knew all along that\u00a0it could not be done,\u201d and the dark secret consuming her\u00a0mother\u2019s life. Finally, she tells us how she lived with and\u00a0learned from Aldous and Maria Huxley on the French\u00a0Riviera, developing the sense of purpose and determination\u00a0that made her the great writer she would become.<\/p>\n Buy from Amazon.com here<\/a>.<\/p>\n Here is the blurb from Riverhead Books:<\/p>\n In her thrilling new book, Lauren Groff brings\u00a0the reader into a physical world that is at once domestic and wild\u2014a place where the hazards of the natural world lie waiting to pounce, yet the greatest threats and mysteries are still of an emotional, psychological nature. A family retreat can be derailed by a prowling panther, or by a sexual secret. Among those navigating this place are a resourceful pair of abandoned sisters; a lonely boy, grown up; a restless, childless couple, a searching, homeless woman; and an unforgettable, recurring character\u2014a steely and conflicted wife and mother.<\/p>\n The stories in this collection span characters, towns, decades, even centuries, but Florida\u2014its landscape, climate, history, and state of mind\u2014becomes its gravitational center: an energy, a mood, as much as a place of residence. Groff transports the reader, then jolts us alert with a crackle of wit, a wave of sadness, a flash of cruelty, as she writes about loneliness, rage, family, and the passage of time. With shocking accuracy and effect, she pinpoints the moments and decisions and connections behind human pleasure and pain, hope and despair, love and fury\u2014the moments that make us alive. Startling, precise, and affecting,\u00a0Florida<\/i>\u00a0is a magnificent achievement.<\/p>\n Buy from Amazon.com here<\/a>.<\/p>\n Here is the blurb from NYRB Classics:<\/p>\n Kolyma Stories<\/i>\u00a0is a\u00a0masterpiece of twentieth-century literature,\u00a0an epic array of short fictional tales reflecting the fifteen years that Varlam Shalamov spent in the Soviet Gulag. This is the first of two volumes (the second to appear in 2019) that together will constitute the first complete English translation of Shalamov\u2019s stories and the only one to be based on the authorized Russian text.<\/p>\n Shalamov spent six years as a slave in the gold mines of Kolyma before finding a less intolerable life as a paramedic in the prison camps.\u00a0He began writing his account of life in Kolyma after Stalin\u2019s death\u00a0in 1953. His stories are at once the biography of a rare survivor, a historical record of the Gulag, and a literary work of unparalleled creative power, insight, and conviction.<\/p>\n Buy from Amazon.com here<\/a>.<\/p>\n Here is the blurb from Two Lines Press:<\/p>\n Where once was a beautiful wood now stands a desolate field smothered in ash and garbage, and here a young man named Waller has terrorizing encounters with grotesque figures named “the garbagemen.” As Waller becomes fascinated with these desperate men who eke out a survival by rooting through their nation\u2019s waste, he imagines they are also digging through its past as their government erases its history and walls itself off from the outside world.<\/p>\n One of celebrated East German author Wolfgang Hilbig\u2019s most accessible and resonant works, The Tidings of the Trees<\/i> is about the politics that rip us apart, the stories we tell for survival, and the absolute importance of words to nations and people. Featuring some of Hilbig\u2019s most striking, poetic, and powerful images, this flawless novella perfectly balances politics and literature.<\/p>\n Buy from Amazon.com here<\/a>.<\/p>\n Here is the blurb from NYRB Classics:<\/p>\n Ole Jastrau is the very model of an enterprising and ambitious young man of letters, poised on the brink of what is sure to be a distinguished career as a critic. In fact he is teetering on the brink of an emotional and moral abyss. Bored with his beautiful wife and chafing at the burdens of fatherhood, disdainful of the commercialism and political opportunism of the newspaper he works for, he feels more and more that his life lacks meaning. He flirts with Catholicism and flirts with Communism, but somehow he doesn\u2019t have the makings of a true believer. Then he takes up with the bottle, a truly meaningful relationship. \u201cSlowly and quietly,\u201d he intends to go to the dogs.<\/p>\n Jastrau\u2019s romance with self-destruction will take him through all the circles of hell. The process will be anything but slow and quiet.<\/p>\n![\"James](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/Upstate.jpg?resize=294%2C450\")
Upstate<\/strong><\/em>
\nby James Wood
\nFarrer, Straus and Giroux<\/p>\n![\"Rachel](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/Kudos.jpg?resize=300%2C450\")
Kudos<\/strong><\/em>
\nby Rachel Cusk
\nFarrer, Straus and Giroux<\/p>\n![\"Sybille](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/Jigsaw.jpg?resize=281%2C450\")
Jigsaw: An Unsentimental Education<\/strong><\/em>
\nby Sybille Bedford
\nNYRB Classics<\/p>\n![\"Lauren](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/Florida.jpg?resize=289%2C450\")
Florida<\/strong><\/em>
\nby Lauren Groff
\nRiverhead Books<\/p>\n
\nJune 12<\/strong><\/h3>\n
![\"Varlam](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/Kolyma-Stories.jpg?resize=281%2C450\")
Kolyma Stories
\n<\/strong><\/em>by Varlam Shalamov
\ntranslated from the Russian by Donald Rayfield
\nNYRB Classics<\/p>\n![\"Wolfgang](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/The-Tidings-of-the-Trees.jpg?resize=290%2C450\")
The Tidings of the Trees<\/i><\/strong>
\nby Wolfgang Hilbig
\ntranslated from the German by Isabel Fargo Cole
\nTwo Lines Press<\/p>\n![\"Tom](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/Havoc.jpg?resize=281%2C450\")
Havoc<\/i><\/strong>
\nby Tom Kristensen
\ntranslated from the Danish by Carl Malmberg
\nNYRB Classics<\/p>\n
\nJune 19<\/h3>\n
![\"Wolfgang](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/Sand.jpg?resize=281%2C450\")
Sand<\/strong><\/em>
\nby Wolfgang Herrndorf
\ntranslated from the German by Tim Mohr
\nNYRB Classics<\/p>\n
![\"Ahmed](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/The-Hospital.jpg?resize=292%2C450\")
The Hospital<\/strong><\/em>