An astonishing, long-awaited collection of stories that intersect imaginatively with Pride and Prejudice, Frankenstein, The Wizard of Oz, and Flannery O'Connor. Includes John Kessel's modern classic "Lunar Quartet," a sequence about life on the moon.

“A sustained exploration of the ways gender dynamics can both empower and enslave us. Kessel's wit sparkles throughout, peaking with the most uproariously weird phone-sex conversation you'll ever read (“The Red Phone”).”—Entertainment Weekly

One early September night in Florida, a stripper brings her daughter to work as April’s usual babysitter is in the hospital. The only problem is that April works at the Puma Club for Men. Explosive elements comes a relentless, raw, passionate, page-turning narrative, a big-hearted and painful novel about sex and parenthood and honor and masculinity. Set in the seamy underside of American life at the moment before the world changed. It seizes the reader by the throat with the same psychological tension, depth, and realism that characterized House of Sand and Fog—and an even greater sense of the dark and anguished places in the human heart.

“Difficult to put down, impossible to forget.” – Kirkus Reviews

John Dufresne takes us to Requiem, Mass., heart of the Commonwealth, where Johnny’s mom, Frances, is driving in the breakdown lane once again. She thinks Johnny and his little sister Audrey have been replaced by aliens; she’s sure of it, and she’s pretty certain that she herself is already dead, or she wouldn’t need to cover the stink of her rotting flesh with Jean Naté Après Bain. Dad, truck driver and pathological liar, is down South somewhere living his secret life. And Audrey, when she’s not walking her cat Deluxe in a baby stroller, spends her time locked in a closet telling herself stories. Johnny, meanwhile, is hell-bent on saving the family from itself. In his “truly original voice” (Miami Herald) and with the “miraculous beauty of his tale-telling” (New York Times Book Review), Dufresne brings his unparalleled eye for the tragic and the absurd to the dysfunctions and joys of family in this powerful new novel.

“Dufresne’s witty, sardonic take on life’s fictions leaps off the page.” — Publisher’s Weekly

Breaking Dawn by Stephenie Meyer

Come dressed in your blood-thirstiest best and spend the bewitching hours prior to the book’s release amongst your most vampirish friends. Blood punch and other appetite-whetting refreshments will be served until 11:00 p.m. Contests, raffle prizes, and dancing throughout the evening.

“Farm Friends is a baby-boomer’s Blithedale Romance. Fels reminds the rest of us that the boomers really did make revolution even if it didn’t turn out the way they planned.” — Debby Applegate, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Most Famous Man in America

“Having amassed an aircraft carrier’s worth of lies about the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, Christopher Cerf and Victor Navasky can now crow ‘Mission Accomplished!.’ Indeed.” -- Vanity Fair

The Condition tells the story of the McKotches, a proper New England family that comes apart during one fateful summer. The year is 1976, and the family, has embarked on its annual vacation at the Captain’s House, the grand old family retreat on Cape Cod. One day on the beach, Frank is struck by an image he cannot forget: his thirteen-year-old daughter, Gwen, strangely infantile in her child-sized bikini, standing a full head shorter than her younger cousin Charlotte. At that moment he knows a truth that something is terribly wrong with his only daughter. The McKotch family will never be the same. Compassionate yet unflinchingly honest, witty and almost painfully astute, The Condition explores the power of family mythologies, the self-delusions, denials, and inescapable truths that forever bind fathers and mothers and siblings.

“Compelling; highly recommended.” – Library Journal

The Odyssey Bookshop’s Open Fiction Book Group will discuss Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje. From the celebrated author of The English Patient and Anil’s Ghost comes a remarkable, intimate novel of intersecting lives that ranges across continents and time. This month’s selection is discounted 20%.

Towner Whitney, the self-confessed unreliable narrator of The Lace Reader, hails from a family of Salem women who can read the future in the patterns in lace and who have guarded a history of secrets going back generations, but the disappearance of two women brings Towner home to Salem and the truth about the death of her twin sister to light. The Lace Reader is a mesmerizing tale that spirals into a world of secrets, confused identities, lies, and half-truths in which the reader quickly finds it's nearly impossible to separate fact from fiction, but as Towner Whitney points out early on in the novel, “There are no accidents.”

“Unusual and otherworldly, this is a blizzard of a story which surprisingly manages to pull together its historical, supernatural and psychiatric elements. A survivor’s tale of redemption, reached via a long and winding road.” – Kirkus Reviews

People die. Marriages fail. In the small Adirondack town of Millers Kill, New York, however, life doesn’t stop for heartbreak. A brand-new officer in the police department, a breaking-and-entering, and trouble within his own family keep Police Chief Russ Van Alstyne busy enough to ignore the pain of losing his wife---and the woman he loves.

“Keenly moving and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny, this is a tour de force in a series that seems to have jumped levels in quality.” – Booklist