"A Perfect Day for Bananafish" is a short story by J. D. Salinger, originally published in the January 31, 1948 issue of The New Yorker. It was anthologized in 1949's 55 Short Stories from The New Yor…
An exhilarating, thoughtful, and beautifully written debut memoir by musician, songwriter, and lead singer-lyricist of Grammy award-winning metal band, System of a Down, Serj Tankian
Nine Stories (1953) is a collection of short stories by American fiction writer J. D. Salinger published in April 1953. It includes two of his most famous short stories, "A Perfect Day for Bananafish"…
Originally written in 1952 but not published till 1985, Queer is an enigma - both an unflinching autobiographical self-portrait and a coruscatingly political novel, Burroughs' only realist love story …
"A deeply beautiful book, with the fierce galloping pace of a great novel."―Liz Rosenberg Boston Globe Informed by the death of a beloved brother, here are the stories of childhood, its thicket of sex…
A former sorority girl starts a prestigious poetry MFA program only to discover that one of her fellow grad students is her high school crush-turned-nemesis—who can't stop writing about her.
Ocean Vuong's first full-length collection aims straight for the perennial "big"—and very human—subjects of romance, family, memory, grief, war, and melancholia. None of these he allows to overwhelm h…
The 2020 Nobel Prize winner Louise Glück's thirteenth book is among her most haunting. Here as in the Wild Iris there is a chorus, but the speakers are entirely human, simultaneously spectral and anci…
Before his 1959 breakthrough, Naked Lunch, an unknown William S. Burroughs wrote Junky, his first novel. It is a candid eye-witness account of times and places that are now long gone, an unvarnished f…
Here is Ignatius Reilly: slob extraordinary, a mad Oliver Hardy, a fat Don Quixote, a perverse Thomas Aquinas rolled into one, who is in violent revolt against the entire modern age, lying in his flan…
Bright Dead Things examines the chaos that is life, the dangerous thrill of living in a world you know you have to leave one day, and the search to find something that is ultimately “disorderly, and m…
Restless, contradictory, and witty, Megan Fernandes’ I Do Everything I’m Told explores disobedience and worship, longing and possessiveness, and nights of wandering cities. Its poems span thousands of…
It’s November 3, 1957. As Sputnik 2 launches into space, carrying Laika, the doomed Soviet dog, a couple begin their day. Virgil Beckett, an insurance salesman, isn’t particularly happy in his job but…
