A NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER THE POSTHUMOUS MASTERWORK FROM "ONE OF THE GREATEST AND MOST INFLUENTIAL MODERN WRITERS" (JAMES WOOD, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW) Composed in the last years of Roberto Bolaño's life, 2666 was greeted across Europe and Latin America as his highest achievement, surpassing even his previous work in its strangeness, beauty, and scope. Its throng of unforgettable characters includes academics and convicts, an American sportswriter, an elusive German novelist, and a teenage student and her widowed, mentally unstable father. Their lives intersect in the urban sprawl of SantaTeresa—a fictional Juárez—on the U.S.-Mexico border, where hundreds of young factory workers, in the novel as in life, have disappeared.

Fourteen stories of colorful western characters and how they are transformed.

The best-known and most sensational event in Vincent van Gogh’s life is also the least understood. For more than a century, biographers and historians seeking definitive facts about what happened on a December night in Arles have unearthed more questions than answers. Why would an artist at the height of his powers commit such a brutal act? Who was the mysterious “Rachel” to whom he presented his macabre gift? Did he use a razor or a knife? Was it just a segment—or did Van Gogh really lop off his entire ear? In Van Gogh’s Ear, Bernadette Murphy reveals, for the first time, the true story of this long-misunderstood incident, sweeping away decades of myth and giving us a glimpse of a troubled but brilliant artist at his breaking point. Murphy’s detective work takes her from Europe to the United States and back, from the holdings of major museums to the moldering contents of forgotten archives. She braids together her own thrilling journey of discovery with a narrative of Van Gogh’s life in Arles, the sleepy Provençal town where he created his finest work, and vividly reconstructs the world in which he moved—the madams and prostitutes, café patrons and police inspectors, shepherds and bohemian artists. We encounter Van Gogh’s brother and benefactor Theo, his guest and fellow painter Paul Gauguin, and many local subjects of Van Gogh’s paintings, some of whom Murphy identifies for the first time. Strikingly, Murphy uncovers previously unknown information about “Rachel”—and uses it to propose a bold new hypothesis about what was occurring in Van Gogh’s heart and mind as he made a mysterious delivery to her doorstep. As it reopens one of art history’s most famous cold cases, Van Gogh’s Ear becomes a fascinating work of detection. It is also a study of a painter creating his most iconic and revolutionary work, pushing himself ever closer to greatness even as he edged toward madness—and one fateful sweep of the blade that would resonate through the ages.

In this first novel of the National Park Adventure Series, sixteen-year-old Darrell Freeman narrates the story of his ten-year-old brother Jarod and their strange camping experiences among the weird trees and peculiar critters of Joshua Tree National Park in the California desert. While their Mom, a book illustrator, pursues her art, the boys take off in their vintage orange VW camper bus to see the park. Jarod, an indigo child with psychic abilities, is able to call up the native critters and talk with the Joshua Trees and granite boulders that are scattered everywhere. Thus the brothers learn that the area is not only ancient but sacred, and that the trees and boulders need help—their help. The park lies between two Earth faults and the Earth is beginning to rumble. The brothers start their quest at once to find the special tree and particular boulder that will tell them what to do. Meanwhile, a lady and man in a black SUV start their own quest to find the brothers and steal the strange buzzing rock Jarod found the first day. What causes the rock to buzz? No one knows. Before the tale is done the SUV people steal the rock, but the boys recover it with the help of a mysterious Indian shaman. Then they must find the “proper resting place” to bury the rock to stabilize the park. Do they succeed?