Friends! Enemies! Everyone in between!

I hope you're all doing as best as you can be and taking care of yourselves. It's time to vote for the June book club!

Two unlikely heroes embark on quests to win God’s favor in this outrageously entertaining, profoundly heartfelt novel that announces an ingenious new voice in the tradition of Chain-Gang All-Stars, No One Is Talking About This, and Martyr!

Yara can’t comprehend why God has chosen them to slay Dominic, the ruthless leader of the army of Bad Guys. Cast out by their family and reeling from a destructive relationship, Yara has never felt weaker—but with nothing left to lose, they strike a deal. Abandoning their solitary days of embroidery and obsessive cleaning, Yara reluctantly embarks on a perilous odyssey designed to prepare them for the daunting mission ahead.

Meanwhile, Adrena, a disillusioned prophet with a terrifying secret power, is determined to become the hero of this story. Desperately seeking the glory of God’s approval and the promise of heaven, where she hopes to reunite with her beloved mother, Adrena must first persuade Harpo, the leader of the Good Guys, that her plan is God’s will.

As their journeys unfold in a series of unforgettable adventures, Yara and Adrena are propelled toward each other and transformative revelations about life, death, and destiny in this intensely captivating, irreverent epic from a singularly brilliant new voice in fiction.

Dog Days unfolds in the long shadow of freak violence--where language stammers, time loops, and the body remembers what the mind can't.

"An incandescent book, a landmark in how to bring language to bear on the unspeakable. Beautiful, uncompromising, rigorous and totally original."--Olivia Laing, author of The Lonely City

In 2009, Emily LaBarge and her family were held hostage while on vacation. A crocheted blanket was placed over her head while Mrs. Doubtfire and "Agnus Dei" played on repeat.

In the years that follow, a therapist encourages her to lie in exactly the same position, "just like how it happened, for as long as it happened, and for as long as it takes until the pain comes out"--otherwise it will never leave. She tries to find "the good story" neat, polite, reassuring. But what happens to the things the good story leaves out?

A high-voltage synthesis of memoir, criticism, and psychoanalytic theory--drawing upon film and writing from Mulholland Drive to It's a Wonderful Life, Virginia Woolf to Janet Malcolm--Dog Days writes into this question. How do language and institutions constrain and distort our understanding of trauma, violence, and care? How might we write otherwise, telling a story, and its aftermath, on our own terms? The result is not only a prose work but also a practice: an insistence on more radical, more complex forms of engagement, a search for the place where writing becomes a way of surviving.

"Obscenely good and very funny."
—Catherine Lacey, author of The Möbius Book

In Avigayl Sharp’s brilliant and bold debut novel, Offseason, our fiercely observant but self-deluded narrator finds herself teaching at an all-girls boarding school on the Eastern Seaboard. In between manic lectures that veer from Charles Dickens’s Bleak House to the childhood maltreatment of her beloved Iosif Stalin and the generational legacy of the Holocaust, she consorts and canoodles with the town’s locals—including the possibly disgraced male teacher whose job she’s taken over—implicating everyone she meets in her obsessive quest to pin down where, exactly, her own life went wrong.

Though she's vowed never to return to her hometown in the middle of the country, the holiday season sends her careening back into the orbit of her overbearing, maladjusted family. Drunk at a bar on the frigid afternoon of the seventh night of Chanukah, she encounters the figure from her adolescence who may or may not be responsible for violating her, bringing her down, and ruining her life. The past collides with the present—but catharsis and closure are nowhere to be found. Not at the bar. Not in her childhood home. And certainly not in the unruly spirals of her mind.

Serious yet irreverent with a delirious velocity, Offseason reimagines the conversation around trauma while reckoning with the doomed project of “speaking your truth,” the compulsion to repeat, and whether we can be transformed by art and love.

National Book Award finalist Mónica Ojeda returns with a blazing, psychedelic novel about girlhood, violence, and the loss of innocence.

"Mónica Ojeda is a dazzling black sun in the astral chart of contemporary horror." --Fernanda Melchor, author of Paradais

In the near future, best friends Noa and Nicole flee their home in Guayaquil, Ecuador to attend the Solar Noise Festival, a week-long, retro-futuristic gathering at the foot of an active volcano. While Noa fully embraces the haze of narcotics and hedonism in an effort to obscure her true reason for attending, Nicole senses something darker at play behind the festival's so-called "celebration of life." Amid technoshamanic poetry, collective hallucinations, and ritualistic dances, each girl navigates her own path in an effort to escape her past and reclaim her right to a future.

Vivid, terrifying, and celebratory, Electric Shamans at the Festival of the Sun blends the primal with the supernatural, solidifying Mónica Ojeda as one of the most singular and exciting voices in Latin American and world literature today.

Four very compelling choices! Happy voting and remember we are reading The Hill by Harriet Clark in May, today is your last day to sign up.

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