Guadalupe Nettel
Intricately woven masterpieces of craft, mournful for their human cries in defiance of our sometimes less than human surroundings, Nettel’s stories and novels are dazzlingly enjoyable to read for their deep interest in human foibles. Following on the critical successes of her previous books, here are six stories that capture her unsettling, obsessive universe. “Ptosis” is told from the point of view of the son of a photographer whose work involves before and after pictures of patients undergoing cosmetic eye surgeries. In “Through Shades,” a woman studies a man interacting with a woman through the windows of the apartment across the street. In one of the longer stories, “Bonsai,” a man visits a garden, and comes to know a gardener, during the period of dissolution of his marriage. “The Other Side of the Dock” describes a young girl in search of what she terms “True Solitude,” who finds a fellow soul mate only to see the thing they share lose its meaning. In “Petals,” a woman’s odor drives a man to search for her, and even to find her, without quenching the thirst that is his undoing. And the title story, “Bezoar,” is an intimate journal of a patient writing to a doctor. Each narrative veers towards unknown and dark corridors, and the pleasures of these accounts lie partly in the great surprise of the familiarity together with the strangeness.

From the award-winning creative studio behind Me: A Compendium is a new journal designed to help kids find mindful moments every day. Be: My Mindfulness Journal teaches kids ages 6-12 how to feel feelings without letting them take over, handle challenges, express themselves, and build confidence to be exactly who they are.

Mariano Azuela

Hailed as the greatest novel of the Mexican Revolution, The Underdogs recounts the story of an illiterate but charismatic Indian peasant farmer’s part in the rebellion against Porfirio Díaz, and his subsequent loss of belief in the cause when the revolutionary alliance becomes factionalized. Azuela’s masterpiece is a timeless, authentic portrayal of peasant life, revolutionary zeal, and political disillusionment.

In the spirit of his New York Times bestseller Love Poems for Married People and Love Poems for People with Children, as well as his wildly popular New Yorker pieces, Thurber Prize-winner John Kenney presents a hilarious new collection of poetry for anxious people.

With the same brilliant wit and hilarious realism that made Love Poems for Married People and Love Poems for People with Children such hits, John Kenney is back with a brand new collection of poems, this time taking on one of the most common feelings in our day-and-age: anxiety. Kenney covers it all, from awkward social interactions and insomnia to nervous ticks and writing and rewriting that email.

A young girl spends her summer vacation in a country house where a tiger roams . . . A man reading a mystery finds out too late that he is the murderer’s intended victim . . .

Originally published in hardcover as End of the Game and Other Stories, the fifteen stories collected here—including “Blow-Up,” which was the basis for Michelangelo Antonioni’s film of the same name—shows Julio Cortázar's nimble capacity to explore the shadowy realm where the everyday meets the mysterious, perhaps even the terrible.

Gabriel García Márquez

On her twelfth birthday, Sierva Maria – the only child of a decaying noble family in an eighteenth-century South American seaport – is bitten by a rabid dog. Believed to be possessed, she is brought to a convent for observation. And into her cell stumbles Father Cayetano Delaura, who has already dreamed about a girl with hair trailing after her like a bridal train. As he tends to her with holy water and sacramental oils, Delaura feels something shocking begin to occur. He has fallen in love – and it is not long until Sierva Maria joins him in his fevered misery. Unsettling and indelible, Of Love and Other Demons is an evocative, majestic tale of the most universal experiences known to woman and man.

Alejandro Zambra
When it was first published in 2006, then-literary critic and poet Alejandro Zambra’s first novel, Bonsai, caused a sensation. “It was said,” according to Chile’s newspaper of record, El Mercurio, “that it represented the end of an era, or the beginning of another, in the nation’s letters.” Zambra would go on to become a writer of international renown, winning prizes in Chile and around the world for his funny, tender, sly fictions.

Here, in a brilliant new translation from four-time International Booker Prize nominee Megan McDowell, is the little book that started it all: The story of Julio and Emilia, two Chilean university students who, seeking truth in great literature, find one another instead. As they fall together and drift apart over the course of young adulthood, Zambra spins an emotionally engrossing, expertly distilled, formally inventive tale of love, art, and memory.

Emily Flake
ABOUT THAT WAS AWKWARD
A Lit Hub “Most Anticipated Books of 2019”
A Read It Forward “Perfect Gifts for a White Elephant Exchange”

From New Yorker humorist Emily Flake, a hilarious, oddly enlightening book of illustrations, observations, and advice that embraces the inescapable awkwardness of two human beings attempting to make physical contact with each other.

We’ve all been there.
You encounter the mother of your recent ex. That guy your best friend dated sophomore year. That friend-of-a-friend who you’ve met once but keeps popping up in your “People You May Know” feed.

Do you shake hands? Do you hug? Do you–horrors–kiss on the cheek? And then the inevitable: The awkward hug. That cultural blight we’ve all experienced.

Emily Flake–keen observer of human behavior and life’s less-than-triumphant moments–codifies the most common awkward hugs that have plagued us all. Filled with laugh-out-loud anecdotes and illustrations, astute observations, and wise advice, That Was Awkward is a heartwarming reminder that we’re all in this together, grasping hastily at each other in an attempt to say: let’s embrace to remind ourselves of our essential and connecting humanity, but also, please don’t touch me for more than three seconds.

A remarkable Pocket Poets anthology of poems from around the world and across the centuries about illness and healing, both physical and spiritual.

From ancient Greece and Rome up to the present moment, poets have responded with sensitivity and insight to the troubles of the human body and mind. Poems of Healing gathers a treasury of such poems, tracing the many possible journeys of physical and spiritual illness, injury, and recovery, from John Donne’s “Hymne to God My God, In My Sicknesse” and Emily Dickinson’s “The Soul has Bandaged moments” to Eavan Boland’s “Anorexic,” from W.H. Auden’s “Miss Gee” to Lucille Clifton’s “Cancer,” and from D.H. Lawrence’s “The Ship of Death” to Rafael Campo’s “Antidote” and Seamus Heaney’s “Miracle.” Here are poems from around the world, by Sappho, Milton, Baudelaire, Longfellow, Cavafy, and Omar Khayyam; by Stevens, Lowell, and Plath; by Zbigniew Herbert, Louise Bogan, Yehuda Amichai, Mark Strand, and Natalia Toledo. Messages of hope in the midst of pain—in such moving poems as Adam Zagajewski’s “Try to Praise the Mutilated World,” George Herbert’s “The Flower,” Wisława Szymborska’s “The End and the Beginning,” Gwendolyn Brooks’ “when you have forgotten Sunday: the love story” and Stevie Smith’s “Away, Melancholy”—make this the perfect gift to accompany anyone on a journey of healing.