Mcsweeney S: 43 books

The Believer’s mission is to introduce readers to the best and most interesting work in the world of art, culture, and thought-whether that means literature, painting, wrestling, philosophy, or cooking-in an attractive vehicle that’s free from the bugbears of condescension, mustiness, and jargony...

At 28 years old, Eli "Berg" Koenigsberg has never encountered a challenge he couldn't push through, until a head injury leaves him with lingering headaches and a weakness for opiates. Berg moves to a remote Northern California town, seeking space and time to recover, but soon finds himself breaking...

To those outside it, Pilsen is a vast barrio on the south side of Chicago. To Alexai Galaviz-Budziszewski, it is a world of violence and decay and beauty, of nuance and pure chance. It is a place where the smell of cooking frijoles is washed away by that of dead fish in the river, where vendettas...

Named a best book of 2015 by NPR, The Boston Globe, and Electric Literature. My Documents is the latest work from Alejandro Zambra, the award-winning Chilean writer whose first novel was heralded as the dawn of a new era in Chilean literature, and described by Junot Díaz as "a total knockout."...

In Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty, Diane Williams lays bare the urgency and weariness that shape our lives in stories honed sharper than ever. With sentences auguring revelation and explosion, Williams's unsettling stories—a cryptic meeting between neighbors, a woman's sexual worries, a graveside discussion,...

A mosaic of interrelated stories exploding with personality, myth, and geohistorical weight, Morning in Serra Mattu is a profound, joyful meditation on life in modern Sudan. Arif Gamal seamlessly blends large-scale political realities with the local and the traditional: "old villages/whose ancient...

Kit, Zander, and M. K. West are settling into their new lives as students at the Academy for the Exploratory Sciences when Kit finds another mysterious map left for him by their father, the brilliant, famous — and presumed dead — explorer Alexander West. Why did Alexander leave the maps behind,...

From bestselling author Amy Krouse Rosenthal and award-winning artist Gracia Lam, a "delightful" read-aloud book about a child's day, told solely through words beginning with the first three letters of the alphabet. (The New York Times) New York Times best-selling picture-book author...

In eleven expertly crafted stories, John Brandon gives us a stunning assortment of men and women at the edge of possibility—gamblers and psychics, wanderers and priests, all of them on the verge of finding out what they can get away with, and what they can't. Ranging from haunted deserts to alligator-filled...

The secular and the pious. The rich and the poor. Those with "a capacity for destiny" and those who "cannot afford it." Emmaus is a world of stark contrasts, one in which four young men—all from proud, struggling families, and all lusting after Andre, a hyper- sexual woman—are...

On the top floor of a small hospital, an unlikely piano prodigy lies in a coma, attended to by his gruff, helpless father. Outside the clinic, a motley vigil assembles beneath a reluctant New Mexico winter—strangers in search of answers, a brush with the mystical, or just an escape. To some the...

The fifth volume in the ludicrously misinformative HOW Series. For many years the scientific and educational community has wondered and worried about the possibility that semi-sane scholar pretenders would find the means to put out a series of reference books aimed at children but filled with...

A few years ago, the novelist T Cooper wrote his parents a letter telling them he "wasn't their daughter anymore." And that was the "good news." Real Man Adventures is Cooper's brash, wildly inventive, and often comic exploration of the paradoxes and pleasures of masculinity....

Elf and Yoli are sisters. While on the surface Elfrieda's life is enviable (she's a world-renowned pianist, glamorous, wealthy, and happily married) and Yolandi's a mess (she's divorced and broke, with two teenagers growing up too quickly), they are fiercely close — raised in a Mennonite household...