A Wide Range

To learn more about the books to your left, roll over their covers with your mouse.

Nora Pierce

The Insufficiency of Maps

Atria/Simon & Schuster

Nora Pierce is a lecturer in creative writing at Stanford University, where she was formerly a Wallace Stegner fellow, and was recently named a PEN Emerging Voices fellow.  Her first novel, The Insufficiency of Maps, is an unsentimental coming-of-age story that takes place on an Arizona reservation, and was praised by Sherman Alexie and Janet Fitch, among many others.

Shanthi Sekaran

The Prayer Room

MacAdam/Cage

Sekaran’s debut novel The Prayer Room was called “a perfect debut novel” by Stephen Dixon, and has also received praise from Julia Glass, Porochista Khakpour, The New York Times Book Review and The San Francisco Chronicle, among many others.

Laurence Douglas

The Catastrophist

Other Press

Daniel Wellington is a man on the edge in this academic drama by Amherst professor Lawrence Douglas.  When his wife announces her pregnancy, superstar scholar Daniel launches into a downward spiral that threatens his integrity, his career, and his marriage.  The book received a rave review in the Boston Globe and was praised by authors William H. Pritchard, Alison Lurie, and Frederick Reiken, who says, “With its many moments of searing insight, as well as moments of laugh-out-loud hilarity, it is clear at all times that we are in the hands of a gifted storyteller.”

Chuck Klosterman

Downtown Owl

Scribner/Simon & Schuster

A first novel by pop culture critic and New York Times bestselling author Chuck Klosterman.  Set in fictionalized Owl, North Dakota, The Boston Globe calls Downtown Owl, “an astonishingly moving book, a minor masterpiece in the genre we might call small-town quirkiana.”  Klosterman is the author of the pop culture classic Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs, as well as two bestselling memoirs Killing Yourself to Live and Fargo Rock City.

Jenoyne Adams

Resurrecting Mingus

Free Press/Simon & Schuster

This first novel by PEN Center USA West Emerging Voices Fellow Jenoyne Adams was a national bestseller, and introduces Mingus Browning, a successful young lawyer whose family is falling apart.  The LA Times wrote, “Adams is courageous enough to work with three of the most volatile ingredients of life—love, sex, and family—and she adds the provocative element of race to what is already an explosive tale.”

Gayle Brandeis

The Book of Dead Birds

Harper/HarperCollins

Winner of Barbara Kingsolver’s Bellweather Prize for Fiction, The Book of Dead Birds s an intimate portrait of a young woman at a defining moment in her life, who stands at the intersection of two cultures and races.  Toni Morrison wrote that the novel “has an edgy beauty that enhances perfectly the seriousness of its contents.”