"A vintage version of 'Gossip Girl' meets bigger hair." —The Skimm "DiSclafani’s story sparkles like the jumbo diamonds her characters wear to one-up each other. Historical fiction lovers will linger over every lush detail." —People From the bestselling author of The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls comes a story of lifelong female friendship – in all its intimate agony and joy – set within a world of wealth, beauty, and expectation. Joan Fortier is the epitome of Texas glamour and the center of the 1950s Houston social scene. Tall, blonde, beautiful, and strong, she dominates the room and the gossip columns. Every man wants her; every woman wants to be her. Devoted to Joan since childhood, Cece Buchanan is either her chaperone or her partner in crime, depending on whom you ask. But when Joan’s radical behavior escalates the summer they are twenty-five, Cece considers it her responsibility to bring her back to the fold, ultimately forcing one provocative choice to appear the only one there is. A thrilling glimpse into the sphere of the rich and beautiful at a memorable moment in history, The After Party unfurls a story of friendship as obsessive, euphoric, consuming, and complicated as any romance.

A scientist goes on a mind-bending, violent chase across North America to save civilization from her creation in this science fiction thriller. It begins in Toronto, in the years after the smart drug revolution. Any high school student with a chemjet printer and internet connection can download recipes and print drugs, or invent them. A seventeen-year-old street girl finds God through a new brain-altering drug called Numinous, used as a sacrament by a new Church that preys on the underclass. But she is arrested and put into detention, and without the drug, commits suicide. Lyda Rose, another patient in that detention facility, has a dark secret: she was one of the original scientists who developed the drug. With the help of an ex-government agent and an imaginary, drug-induced doctor, Lyda sets out to find the other three survivors of the five who made the Numinous in a quest to set things right . . . Praise for Afterparty “I can’t recommend this novel highly enough!” —Nancy Kress, Hugo Award–winning author of Probability Space “This taut, brisk, gripping narrative, dazzlingly intercut with flashbacks and sidebars, oozes warmth and wit. A hugely entertaining, surprising and perhaps prophetic package that, without seeming to, raises profound questions about the human mind and the nature of perception.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE’S JOHN LEONARD PRIZE FOR BEST FIRST BOOK WINNER OF THE FERRO-GRUMLEY AWARD FOR LGBTQ FICTION Named a Best Book of the Year by: New York Times * NPR * Washington Post * LA Times * Kirkus Reviews * New York Public Library * Chicago Public Library * Harper’s Bazaar * TIME * Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air * Boston Globe* The Atlantic A vibrant story collection about Cambodian-American life—immersive and comic, yet unsparing—that offers profound insight into the intimacy of queer and immigrant communities Seamlessly transitioning between the absurd and the tenderhearted, balancing acerbic humor with sharp emotional depth, Afterparties offers an expansive portrait of the lives of Cambodian-Americans. As the children of refugees carve out radical new paths for themselves in California, they shoulder the inherited weight of the Khmer Rouge genocide and grapple with the complexities of race, sexuality, friendship, and family. A high school badminton coach and failing grocery store owner tries to relive his glory days by beating a rising star teenage player. Two drunken brothers attend a wedding afterparty and hatch a plan to expose their shady uncle’s snubbing of the bride and groom. A queer love affair sparks between an older tech entrepreneur trying to launch a “safe space” app and a disillusioned young teacher obsessed with Moby-Dick. And in the sweeping final story, a nine-year-old child learns that his mother survived a racist school shooter. The stories in Afterparties, “powered by So’s skill with the telling detail, are like beams of wry, affectionate light, falling from different directions on a complicated, struggling, beloved American community” (George Saunders).

Literary agent Valerie Morrell receives an email from prospective author William Mendez, containing the first chapters of a promising new novel. Mendez's book tells the story of an April night, when a nervous, nerdy journalist takes his boss's invitation to an A-list party and meets a reclusive film star, his junkie supermodel wife and a wide-eyed pop singer. Valerie is hooked by the scandalous tale of decadence, drugs and disasters, but as the book unfolds, chapter by chapter, email by email, building to a terrible climax, a parallel story emerges - of an author with an unusual, almost unreal, desire for anonymity. Who is William Mendez? And whose tale is he really telling... WITH PREVIOUSLY UNSEEN MATERIAL FOR THE PAPERBACK LONGLISTED FOR THE DESMOND ELLIOTT PRIZE

"Tired of always being the good girl, Emma forms a friendship with fun and alluring Siobhan. But Siobhan's dangerous lifestyle becomes more than Emma can handle"--Provided by publisher.

Following the suicide of a seventeen-year-old Toronto street girl who used a new brain-altering drug called Numinous, Lyda Rose, one of the original scientists who developed the drug, sets out to find the other three survivors of the five who made the Numinous in a quest to set things right.

Three women form an unbreakable bond in a sexy, suspenseful, and adventurous novel about empowerment and sisterhood through thick and thin. Venus McGee, Draya Carter, and Jackie Benson are coworkers with a lot in common. They're smart, independent, driven, and deserving of recognition--certainly more than they've been handed by a demoralizing boss. He's the topic of conversation at their impromptu get-together after the company holiday party, where the threesome fantasizes about a life without him. There has to be an alternative to taking a deep breath and sucking it up. There is. It's just not the one they expected. When morning comes, Venus, Draya, and Jackie are blindsided by murder--a twist of fate that brings a startling new challenge to the table and forces them to navigate a hair-raising detour they never saw coming. For better and (unless they can help it) for worse, it's going to turn their world upside down. What starts as a necessary bond of mutual trust soon morphs into an empowering and galvanizing friendship that Venus, Draya, and Jackie need now more than ever.

A memoir of a husband and father’s recovery from alcohol and drugs reveals how being alcohol-free has made his life richer. Many people struggle with substance abuse in the shadows feeling ashamed, alone, and inadequate. You are not alone. Many of us keep up appearances while at the same time kicking ourselves every time we stumble into bed drunk out of our minds. Many of us say, “never again,” only to drink again at 5:00pm. You are not alone. There is a way out of this. After Party is the story of how one person, Drew Charles, dug his way out of the spiral of drug and alcohol excess. While doing so, he discovered that sobriety is not the impossibly boring state of living so many of us fear but is filled with joy and excitement in ways we can’t predict when we are stuck in the loop of drinking and drug taking. After Party is the honest account of Drew’s first year of sobriety, how he did it, and more importantly, why he did it. Drew’s hope is that anyone who battles with alcohol and drugs, or just feels curious about sobriety, can take solace in knowing that life not only exists beyond alcohol, but that it sings with a clarity and depth of emotion many of us would never have thought possible.

Winner, 2019 ATHE Outstanding Book Award, given by the Association for Theatre in Higher Education Winner, 2018 Errol Hill Award in African American theater, drama, and/or performance studies, presented by the American Society for Theatre Research A new manifesto for performance studies on the art of queer of color worldmaking. After the Party tells the stories of minoritarian artists who mobilize performance to produce freedom and sustain life in the face of subordination, exploitation, and annihilation. Through the exemplary work of Nina Simone, Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas, Danh Vō, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Eiko, and Tseng Kwong Chi, and with additional appearances by Nao Bustamante, Audre Lorde, Martin Wong, Assata Shakur, and Nona Faustine, After the Party considers performance as it is produced within and against overlapping histories of US colonialism, white supremacy, and heteropatriarchy. Building upon the thought of José Esteban Muñoz alongside prominent scholarship in queer of color critique, black studies, and Marxist aesthetic criticism, Joshua Chambers-Letson maps a portrait of performance’s capacity to produce what he calls a communism of incommensurability, a practice of being together in difference. Describing performance as a rehearsal for new ways of living together, After the Party moves between slavery, the Civil Rights Movement, the first wave of the AIDS crisis, the Vietnam War, and the catastrophe-riddled horizon of the early twenty-first century to consider this worldmaking practice as it is born of the tension between freedom and its negation. With urgency and pathos, Chambers-Letson argues that it is through minoritarian performance that we keep our dead alive and with us as we struggle to survive an increasingly precarious present.

"A truly moving book." —John Ashbery Jana Prikryl’s The After Party journeys across borders and eras, from cold war Central Europe to present-day New York City, from ancient Rome to New World suburbs, constantly testing the lingua francas we negotiate to know ourselves. These poems disclose the tensions in our inherited identities and showcase Prikryl’s ambitious experimentation with style. “Thirty Thousand Islands,” the second half of the collection, presents some forty linked poems that incorporate numerous voices. Rooted in one place that fragments into many places—the remote shores of Lake Huron in Canada, a region with no natural resources aside from its beauty—these poems are an elegy that speaks beyond grief. Penetrating, vital, and visionary, The After Party marks the arrival of an extraordinary new talent.