The Dead Cat Tail Assassins are not cats. Nor do they have tails. But they are most assuredly dead. Nebula and Alex Award winner P. Djèlí Clark introduces a brand-new world and a fantastical city full of gods and assassins. Eveen the Eviscerator is skilled, discreet, professional, and here for your most pressing needs in the ancient city of Tal Abisi. Her guild is strong, her blades are sharp, and her rules are simple. Those sworn to the Matron of Assassins―resurrected, deadly, wiped of their memories―have only three unbreakable vows. First, the contract must be just. That’s above Eveen’s pay grade. Second, even the most powerful assassin may only kill the contracted. Eveen’s a professional. She’s never missed her mark. The third and the simplest: once you accept a job, you must carry it out. And if you stray? A final death would be a mercy. When the Festival of the Clockwork King turns the city upside down, Eveen’s newest mission brings her face-to-face with a past she isn’t supposed to remember and a vow she can’t forget.

Bear it or Perish. Those are the words Helen Jean hears that fateful night in her cousin’s outhouse that changes the trajectory of her life.  
 
Spanning decades, PERISH tracks the choices Helen Jean—the matriarch of the Turner family—makes and the way those choices have ripped across generations, from her children, to her grandchildren and beyond.
Told in in alternate chapters that follows four members of the Turner clan: Julie B., a woman who regrets her wasted youth and the time spent under Helen Jean's thumb; Alex, a police officer grappling with a dark and twisted past; Jan, mother of two, who yearns to go to school and leave Jerusalem and all of its trauma behind for good; and Lydia, a woman whose marriage is falling apart because her body can't seem to stay pregnant; as they're called home to say goodbye to their mother and grandmother.
 
  This family's "reunion" unearths long-kept secrets and forces each member to ask themselves important questions about who is deserving of forgiveness and who bears the cross of blame.
 
 With stirring, evocative prose and a sense of place that is wholly immersive, offering a nuanced look into Black communities in Texas, and tackling themes like family, trauma, legacy, home, class, race and more, this beautiful yet heart-wrenching debut novel, will appeal to anyone who is interested in the intricacies of family and the ways bonds can be made, maintained or irrevocably broken.

A celebration of the beguiling power of literature, from one of the world’s greatest storytellers
 
At the Pigeon Book Club, a circle of readers gathers for exhilarating meetings to discuss literature. The only requirements for entry are an all-encompassing love of books and the intuition that to read is to love and to love is to read. Xiao Sang, a department store clerk, wonders if life can ever be as captivating as a novel. Newlyweds Fei and Han Ma struggle to build a marriage as Han Ma discovers a surprising gift for storytelling. Xiao Ma, a hopeful dreamer, explores the possibility of romance with an older man. Bound by a shared passion for fiction, each book club member seeks to understand the relationship between the stories they read and the lives they lead, reveling in both the quotidian details and the ecstasy of aesthetics.

This is the most accessible work yet from the celebrated writer Can Xue: a utopian comedy and a work of profound joy, a love song to literary inspiration and the remarkable beauty of the ordinary. The Enchanting Lives of Others explores what it means to know and be known to others through the transformative power of reading.

The dazzling romantic fantasy world of House of Marionne continues in this dark and deadly sequel full of forbidden magic, devastating lies, and broken hearts.

A must read for fans of Stephanie Garber, Leigh Bardugo, and Alex Aster.

Unleash the darkness. Claim your power.

Quell Marionne’s explosive final Rite of Induction to House Marionne sent shockwaves through the magical world, unearthing long buried secrets and her own deadly power. But she paid a steep price: her family and her love. Fleeing Chateau Soleil for House of Perl, for once Quell is celebrated instead of shunned. She has finally found somewhere to belong. But secrets lurk in every House, and Quell’s quest to find her mom threatens to lead her deeper into the shadows.

Assassin Jordan Wexton, second-in command of the Dragun brotherhood, must protect the source of all magic, the Sphere. Yet the biggest threat to the Sphere is Quell Marionne—the girl he loved, until she claimed the deadly, outlawed toushana. As the Sphere cracks and war brews among the Houses, can the only way to save the world be to kill his own heart?

Now, these two lovers-turned enemies must confront their competing ambitions and conflicting loyalties. Or die. The future of magic hangs on their decision.

Seductive magic. Deadly betrayal.

Don’t miss the explosive finale of the dark, romantic fantasy of the New York Times-bestselling House of Marionne series, which #1 bestselling author Alex Aster praises as "a sweeping fantasy brimming with magic, secrets, and romance."

The stunning first printing of Fortress of Ambrose will feature a gorgeous designed case and exclusive metallic endpapers!

With the future of the Order clouded in uncertainty, and the evil within its ranks coming to the surface, Quell Marionne has nowhere left to turn.

Everyone Quell cares about is gone and she still can’t escape the powerful legacy that wants to destroy her. But when she uncovers an earth-shattering revelation, she must choose: be the hero the magic world needs or save Jordan.

Meanwhile, a darkness festers inside Dragunheart Jordan Wexton. His path to survival means becoming the monster he was bred to hate, if he can overcome the power rotting within himself.

In a world where the line between proper and forbidden magic blurs, Quell and Jordan, along with two unlikely allies – bitter assassin Yagrin Wexton and magicless Heir Nore Ambrose, must navigate a treachero's path where freedom hangs by a thread. Can love tip the scales toward freedom? Or will rivalries and deadly betrayals shatter their hearts and destroy the world they once knew?

Fransisco ‘Faxx’ Wellington saw Crescent at Myth and knew she would become his obsession.
Their connection created a soul tie he wasn’t prepared for. But secrets and hidden agendas reveal themselves, leaving Faxx teetering on the edge of darkness that only Cresent can pull him from.

Crescent ‘Cent’ Johnson is questioning the authenticity of her connection with Fransisco. Deep-seated doubts and insecurities from her past plague her heart, casting a shadow over their vibrant connection. Forced into close proximity with him, it begins to get harder and harder to hide her sordid past. She doesn’t want the ghost of her past to show up on his doorstep, but it already looks like she’s too late.
Will they be able to deal with their individual demons and prove their connection can stand strong through it all?

Lakyn ‘Link’ Moore is determined to ensure he forgets all things Mala, but a chance encounter at Myth as the Black Wolf changes everything. Standing before a woman, lying with her hands tied above her head, waiting for him. When he heard the safe word was ‘Kite,’ that could be explained away, but when the woman lying before him moaned his name, he knew exactly who lay behind the mask. Payback was the sweetest revenge, and Link would ensure that payback included making Malikita remember the name “The Black Wolf.”

Malikita ‘Mala’ Samuels was living a lie she couldn’t escape.
Her heart beats only for Link, a man who had intensely captured her soul when they were teens. Their connection was undeniable, and while their love blossomed, promises were made, only to be broken. At eighteen, Mala found herself trapped in a web of obligations and deceit, torn between her desires and the damning evidence that her now fiancé, Charles, held against Link. Mala’s heartache grew with each passing day, torn between the love she craved and the fear of the consequences that would bury them.

Will Mala risk it all, defy Charles, and embrace a love that burned with an intensity that could never be extinguished? Or will she sacrifice her own happiness to keep the man she loves safe?

*** This book contains explicit language, graphic violence, and strong sexual content. It is intended for adults. ***

A Guardian Best Book of the Year

Finalist for the T. S. Eliot Prize and The Costa Poetry Award

“Exquisite.” ―The New York Times Book Review

“Brave, tender and generous. . . . A haunting study of what we can find in the silences of history when history is recognized as more than a noun, when recognized as something alive and kinetic.” ―Camonghne Felix, author of Build Yourself a Boat

On the heels of his much-lauded debut collection, Raymond Antrobus continues his essential investigation into language, miscommunication, place, and memory in All The Names Given, while simultaneously breaking new ground in both form and content. 

The collection opens with poems about the author’s surname―one that shouldn’t have survived into modernity―and examines the rich and fraught history carried within it. As Antrobus outlines a childhood caught between intimacy and brutality, sound and silence, and conflicting racial and cultural identities, the poem becomes a space in which the poet reckons with his own ancestry, and bears witness to the indelible violence of the legacy wrought by colonialism. The poems travel through space―shifting fluidly between England, South Africa, Jamaica, and the American South―and brilliantly move from an examination of family history into the wandering lust of adolescence and finally, vividly, into a complex array of marriage poems―matured, wiser, and more accepting of love’s fragility. Throughout, All The Names Given is punctuated with [Caption Poems] partially inspired by Deaf sound artist Christine Sun Kim, in which the art of writing captions attempts to fill in the silences and transitions between the poems as well as moments inside and outside of them. 

Formally sophisticated, with a weighty perception and startling directness, All The Names Given is a timely, tender book full of humanity and remembrance from one of the most important young poets of our generation.

The #1 New York Times bestselling author of Between the World and Me journeys to three resonant sites of conflict to explore how the stories we tell—and the ones we don’t—shape our realities.

Ta-Nehisi Coates originally set out to write a book about writing, in the tradition of Orwell’s classic “Politics and the English Language,”but found himself grappling with deeper questions about how our stories—our reporting and imaginative narratives and mythmaking—expose and distort our realities.

In the first of the book’s three intertwining essays, Coates, on his first trip to Africa, finds himself in two places at once: in Dakar, a modern city in Senegal, and in a mythic kingdom in his mind. Then he takes readers along with him to Columbia, South Carolina, where he reports on his own book’s banning, but also explores the larger backlash to the nation’s recent reckoning with history and the deeply rooted American mythology so visible in that city—a capital of the Confederacy with statues of segregationists looming over its public squares. Finally, in the book’s longest section, Coates travels to Palestine, where he sees with devastating clarity how easily we are misled by nationalist narratives, and the tragedy that lies in the clash between the stories we tell and the reality of life on the ground. 

Written at a dramatic moment in American and global life, this work from one of the country’s most important writers is about the urgent need to untangle ourselves from the destructive myths that shape our world—and our own souls—and embrace the liberating power of even the most difficult truths.

The concluding volume in a poetic trilogy, Alexis Pauline Gumbs's Dub: Finding Ceremony takes inspiration from theorist Sylvia Wynter, dub poetry, and ocean life to offer a catalog of possible methods for remembering, healing, listening, and living otherwise. In these prose poems, Gumbs channels the voices of her ancestors, including whales, coral, and oceanic bacteria, to tell stories of diaspora, indigeneity, migration, blackness, genius, mothering, grief, and harm. Tracing the origins of colonialism, genocide, and slavery as they converge in Black feminist practice, Gumbs explores the potential for the poetic and narrative undoing of the knowledge that underpins the concept of Western humanity. Throughout, she reminds us that dominant modes of being human and the oppression those modes create can be challenged, and that it is possible to make ourselves and our planet anew.

Whitney Graves didn’t build Ellswood’s most respected gallery by playing it safe. She’s spent years cultivating the perfect reputation—and keeping her heart firmly out of frame. What her gallery needs is a masterpiece to cement her legacy. So when whispers surface about a highly coveted private collection, she’s determined to claim it. She just didn’t expect Warner Easton, six-foot-infinity stunner, enigmatic billionaire, reclusive widower, and the estate representative.

Warner isn’t just another powerful man with deep pockets. He’s rebuilding his life, and parting with his late wife’s art is another step toward healing. So when a local gallery’s brochure is hand-delivered along with an invitation to an upcoming exhibit, it feels like a sign. A fresh start. A chance to meet the captivating woman featured inside… not so much the scandalous “Restroom Rendezvous” that makes the next day’s headlines.

Now no other gallery will touch him. And Whit may be his only option.

Soon, Warner asks her to venture to his remote Caribbean island to assess the collection. There’s just one catch: isolation changes everything. Alone in paradise with an unfairly beautiful man as guarded as she is, Whit finds herself entangled in more than brushstrokes and contracts. As secrets surface and an unexpected art thief closes in, what begins as a high-stakes acquisition turns dangerous. And if they’re not careful, surviving may be the least of their worries—a second chance at love could leave their hearts in ruins.