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Drinking Coffee Elsewhere

A collection that explores what it is to be human. Never neatly resolved, these provocative and unforgettable stories resonate with honesty and wry humour and introduce us to a major new talent.

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Foreskin's Lament

Shalom Auslander was raised with a terrified respect for God. Even as he grew up, defying and eventually being cast out of his community, he could not find his way to a life in which he wasn't locked in a daily struggle with Him. "Foreskin's Lament" is a rich and fascinating portrait of a man grappling with his faith, his family and his community.

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Refresh, Refresh

'The stories in "Refresh, Refresh" are big-hearted and drunk and dangerous, and there's a heightened, unnerving vibe as you travel through Percy's world. You never know where you will end up ...but you can be sure that he'll actually take you somewhere.' - Dan Chaon. Here is the United States of today. The young men and boys in this bold, fiery collection do the unthinkable to prove to themselves - to everyone - that they are strong enough to face the heartbreak in this world.The war in Iraq empties the small town of Tumalo, Oregon, of fathers, leaving their sons to fight among themselves. There is a bear on the loose, a house with a basement that opens up into a cave and a nuclear meltdown that renders the Pacific Northwest into a contemporary Wild West. 'Benjamin Percy moves instinctively toward the molten center of contemporary writing, the place where genre fiction ...overflows its boundaries and becomes something dark and grand and percipient. These stories contain a brutal power and are radiant with pain - only a writer of surpassing honesty and directness could lead us here.' - Peter Straub.

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In Other Rooms, Other Wonders

The linked stories in In Other Rooms, Other Wonders illuminate a place and a people as they describe the overlapping worlds of an extended Pakistani landowning family: the servants and dependents in Mr. K.K. Harouni's overflowing Lahore household, the peasants on his estates who rely on his favor, and the parallel world of his industrialist brother, who has distanced himself from the feudal past. Inextricably bound to each other, the characters confront the advantages and constraints of station, the dissolution of old ways, and the shock of change. A girl, a socialite from a decayed feudal family, tires of endless parties, of drinking and drugs, and marries a young landlord in an attempt to reinvent herself. A light-fingered electrician who by tricks and ingenuity supports his twelve daughters comes perilously close to losing all that he has worked for. Elsewhere, an aged laborer by a stroke of luck earns enough money to marry a young, mentally disturbed girl - who vanishes soon after the wedding, exposing the old man to charges of murder.These richly textured stories reveal - at times humorously, at times tragically - the complexities of Pakistani class and culture, as they describe the loves, triumphs, misunderstandings and tragedies of this diverse group of characters. In Other Rooms, Other Wonders marks the arrival of a major new literary talent.

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One More Year

The protagonists of Sana Krasikovâ s indelible stories are mostly women â some of them are new to America; some still live in the former Soviet Union, in Georgia or Russia; and some have returned to Russia to find a country they barely recognize and people they no longer understand. Mothers leave children behind; children abandon their parents. Almost all of them look to love to repair their lives, and when love isnâ t really there, they attempt to make do with a paler, lighter imitation of it, with substitutes for love.

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Everything Ravaged Everything Burned

A man is booted out of his home after his wife discovers that the sweat-smudged footprint on the inside of his windscreen doesn't match her own. Teenage cousins, drugged by summer, meet with a reckoning in the woods. A boy runs off to the carnival after his stepfather bites him in a brawl. In the stories of Wells Tower, families fall apart and messily, hilariously try to reassemble themselves. His characters - marauding Vikings, washed-up entrepreneurs, and jobbing hacks on local papers - are adrift from the mainstream, confused by contemporary masculinity, angry and aimless. Combining electric prose with compassion and dark wit, this is a major debut.

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The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Things have never been easy for Oscar. A ghetto nerd living with his Dominican family in New Jersey, he's sweet but disastrously overweight. He dreams of becoming the next J.R.R. Tolkien and he keeps falling hopelessly in love. Poor Oscar may never get what he wants, thanks to the Fuku - the curse that has haunted his family for generations. With dazzling energy and insight Diaz immerses us in the tumultuous lives of Oscar; his runaway sister Lola; their beautiful mother Belicia; and in the family's uproarious journey from the Dominican Republic to the US and back. Rendered with uncommon warmth and humour, "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" is a literary triumph, that confirms Junot Diaz as one of the most exciting writers of our time.

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The Broken Word

Set in the 1950s, "The Broken Word" is an extraordinary poetic sequence that animates and illuminates a dark, terrifying period in British colonial history. The combination here of language and imagery that feel utterly contemporary, and subject matter - tribal violence and subsequent retribution - that seems almost Homeric, gives the narrative all the febrile energy of classical drama, re-charged and re-imagined. Tom has returned to his family's farm in Kenya for the summer vacation between school and university when he is swept up by the events of the Mau Mau uprising. Beginning with sporadic, brutal attacks by dispossessed Kikuyu on the British now occupying their land - attacks often executed with nothing more than traditional panga knives - the conflict escalates as the terrified British stop at nothing to re-impose order, eventually driving most of the Kikuyu population into the prison camps of what has become known as 'Britain's Gulag'.As Tom is propelled into violence and horror the poem mutates into a meditation on the inheritance of conflict, the destruction of innocence and the impossibility of afterwards saying what one has seen. Written with rigour, intelligence, and a fierce, unsparing clarity, this is profound, lyrical work with that rare confidence and thrilling originality that announce the arrival of a significant new voice.

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Lost City Radio: A Novel (P.S.)

'Lost City Radio' is a poignant and deeply moving novel from a promising new author, which looks intensely at war's damaging effect on society and the individual. Ever since the civil war that took her husband ended, Norma has been the voice of consolation to a people broken by violence. Every week, bereft families listen to her radio show as she reads out the names of the missing, those who vanished in the clamour and brutality of the drawn-out conflict, with the hope of reuniting the few survivors with their families. Successes are few; her true gift is the offer of hope. Although her face is unknown to her listeners, her name and spirit are celebrated by a wayward nation searching for a guiding force. But her life is forever changed when a young boy from a jungle village enters her radio studio and provides a connection to the husband she thought lost -- the husband she has not seen for ten years since departing for the war. Her story and those tangled up in it reveal a country in flux, desperately seeking signs of life, and reasons to continue, amongst pain and uncertainty.Stunning, timely, powerful and absolutely mesmerizing, 'Lost City Radio' probes the deepest questions of war: from its wide reaching affect on a society to its intimate emotional impact on every person involved. This searing yet tender first novel marks Alarcon's emergence as a new voice in American fiction, fully-formed and ready to be heard.