A Wide Range

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

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.

Simon Rich

Elliott Allagash

Random House

SNL writer Simon Rich’s first novel (following his humor collections Ant Farm and Free Range Chickens) is a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice.  Judd Apatow calls it “suspenseful and hilarious.  I am so glad I don't have to lie in this blurb like I usually do,” and A.J. Jacobs calls it “one of the funniest books about high schoolers since The Catcher in the Rye.  We must all pray that Simon Rich won’t move to New Hampshire and become a recluse who spends his time reading Eastern philosophy.  Because we need more books from this guy.”

Alice LaPlante

Turn of Mind

Grove/Atlantic

Respected Stanford and San Francisco State writing teacher Alice LaPlante’s debut novel is a stunning literary thriller about an orthopedic surgeon with dementia—who may or may not have murdered her lifelong best friend.  Turn of Mind has been sold in 11 countries, is a number one Indie Next pick, received a starred Kirkus review, and has been praised by dozens of acclaimed writers, including Colin Harrison, who says, “LaPlante possesses both the wild audacity to attempt such a tour-de-force and the pure talent to pull it off.  Completely unforgettable.”

Lawrence Douglas

The Vices

Other Press

Lawrence Douglas’s second novel (following his debut, Kirkus Best Book of the Year The Catastrophist) has been widely praised.  As Ed Park writes in Bookforum, “Playful and profound…As dazzlingly constructed as it is limpidly told, The Vices is a duplicitous delight that feels at home in this age of YouTube, e-mail, and the myriad other ways we consume and connect in this world…Lawrence Douglas gives conclusive evidence that he’s the real thing.” As Adam Kirsch says in Tablet, “The Vices does justice to its elegant Nabokovian inspiration.”

Mark Watson

Eleven

Scribner/Simon & Schuster

Mark Watson’s Eleven is the story of lonely radio-show host Xavier Ireland and the unexpected impact one moment has on the lives of everyone surrounding him. Selected as an Indie Next pick, and applauded by the London Times as “funny, sharply observed, and unexpectedly moving,” this novel by one of Britain’s most popular stand-up comedians humorously and poignantly explores life and death, strangers and friends, heartache and comfort, and whether the choices we don’t make affect us just as powerfully as the ones we do.

Chuck Klosterman

The Visible Man

Scribner/Simon & Schuster

New York Times bestselling author Chuck Klosterman is back with his second novel, which Kirkus calls “daring and ambitious," and which Publishers Weekly, in a starred review, calls "strikingly original, a vibrant mix of thriller, sci-fi, and literary fiction genres."