Counterpoint: 634 books

Jan Karski, a young Polish diplomat turned cavalry officer, joined the Polish underground movement after escaping from a Soviet detention camp in 1939. He served as a courier for the underground, ferrying messages between occupied Poland and the exiled Polish leaders, before he was captured and brutally...

This account of one man’s trek as he tests the limits of his endurance is “a spellbinding journey” (Page Stegner, author of Winning the Wild West). Badwater Basin sits 282 feet below sea level in Death Valley, the lowest and hottest place in the Western Hemisphere. Mount Whitney rises...

“As [Altschul] observes in his brilliant new novel . . . there’s not much reality in reality television . . . One of the best novels about American culture in years.” —NPR   On a distant island, reality show contestants battle for bragging rights and a slot on next week’s episode....

A man’s determination to keep a deadly secret throws his life and community into chaos in this “brilliant novel of crime, love, and the American west” (Daniel Woodrell, author of Winter’s Bone).   Henry Brusett is the only one who can explain the mysterious death of Calvin Teague. The young...

When her long-time agent and friend Robert Lescher died in 2012, the manuscript of M.F.K. Fisher’s unpublished first novel was discovered packed tidily away in one of Lescher’s signature red boxes. Following on the success of Serve It Forth and written when she was in her early 30s, the...

TV/film rights to Eve’s canon of work were recently sold to Tristar (Sony) TV, on behalf of Elizabeth Cantilon and Amy Pascal, for a planned TV series The Eve Babitz resurgence remains in high gear with tons of media coverage for the reissue of her classic Eve’s Hollywood and Slow Days, Fast...

**A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice "Erotic, paranoiac and lightly fantastical." —The Wall Street Journal "Ismail Kadare's readers are astonished every year when the Nobel committee overlooks him. . . . A Girl in Exile, published in Albanian in 2009, may...

“A masterful study of one woman’s fight to stay afloat and alive in an era in which governance was consolidated with oppression and barbarism.” —Malcolm Forbes, Rain Taxi A grocer’s daughter in the Jewish townlet of Mosny, Berta Alshonsky revels in childhood memories of her time spent...

“A work of extraordinary imagination and sympathy, a journey from slavery to the mountaintop, perfectly realized.” —Ken Burns, American filmmaker Born on Emancipation Day, 1863, to a sharecropping family of black and Indian blood, Elijah Yancy never lived as a slave—but his self-image...

“Maggio’s tales of Sicily’s hidden villages reveal her own deep love and gentle understanding of her ancestors’ homeland” (The Boston Globe**).** In this sparkling book, Theresa Maggio takes us on a journey in search of Sicily’s most remote and least explored mountain towns. Using...

**WINNER OF THE ACORN FOUNDATION FICTION PRIZE AT THE OCKHAM NEW ZEALAND BOOK AWARDS “A remarkable book with a stunningly original twist.” —The Times (London) This international bestselling historical novel follows two children and a mysterious narrator as they navigate the falsehoods...

Four decades ago –– aged twenty –– the author experienced what he calls a “negative satori,” a fundamental and irrefutable realization not of enlightenment, but of himself as a predicament only enlightenment could resolve. This, shaped by the hammer blows of a singular American professor, Richard...

A “gripping” collection of short fiction about mountain climbers driven by risk and adventure (Sacramento Bee).   From varied backgrounds with diverse perspectives, the characters who populate Snowblind don’t feel quite whole until they’ve summited some of the world’s most dangerous peaks—an...

**Named a Best Book of the Year by The San Francisco Chronicle "Survivor Café...feels like the book Rosner was born to write. Each page is imbued with urgency, with sincerity, with heartache, with heart…. Her words, alongside the words of other survivors of atrocity and their descendants...