WINNER of the 2021 NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award. Finalist for the 2021 Dylan Thomas Prize. Longlisted for the 2021 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. One of Publishers Weekly's Best Fiction Books of 2020. One of Amazon's 100 Best Books of 2020. “The people of this community are stifling, and generous, cruel, earnest, needy, overconfident, fragile and repressive, which is to say that they are brilliantly rendered by their wise maker, Catherine Lacey.” --Rachel Kushner, author of The Flamethrowers A figure with no discernible identity appears in a small, religious town, throwing its inhabitants into a frenzy In a small, unnamed town in the American South, a church congregation arrives for a service and finds a figure asleep on a pew. The person is genderless and racially ambiguous and refuses to speak. One family takes in the strange visitor and nicknames them Pew. As the town spends the week preparing for a mysterious Forgiveness Festival, Pew is shuttled from one household to the next. The earnest and seemingly well-meaning townspeople see conflicting identities in Pew, and many confess their fears and secrets to them in one-sided conversations. Pew listens and observes while experiencing brief flashes of past lives or clues about their origin. As days pass, the void around Pew’s presence begins to unnerve the community, whose generosity erodes into menace and suspicion. Yet by the time Pew’s story reaches a shattering and unsettling climax at the Forgiveness Festival, the secret of who they really are—a devil or an angel or something else entirely—is dwarfed by even larger truths. Pew, Catherine Lacey’s third novel, is a foreboding, provocative, and amorphous fable about the world today: its contradictions, its flimsy morality, and the limits of judging others based on their appearance. With precision and restraint, one of our most beloved and boundary-pushing writers holds up a mirror to her characters’ true selves, revealing something about forgiveness, perception, and the faulty tools society uses to categorize human complexity.

In the spirit of Haruki Murakami and Amelia Gray, Catherine Lacey's Nobody Is Ever Missing is full of mordant humor and uncanny insights, as Elyria waffles between obsession and numbness in the face of love, loss, danger, and self-knowledge. Without telling her family, Elyria takes a one-way flight to New Zealand, abruptly leaving her stable but unfulfilling life in Manhattan. As her husband scrambles to figure out what happened to her, Elyria hurtles into the unknown, testing fate by hitchhiking, tacitly being swept into the lives of strangers, and sleeping in fields, forests, and public parks. Her risky and often surreal encounters with the people and wildlife of New Zealand propel Elyria deeper into her deteriorating mind. Haunted by her sister's death and consumed by an inner violence, her growing rage remains so expertly concealed that those who meet her sense nothing unwell. This discord between her inner and outer reality leads her to another obsession: If her truest self is invisible and unknowable to others, is she even alive? The risks Elyria takes on her journey are paralleled by the risks Catherine Lacey takes on the page. In urgent, spiraling prose she whittles away at the rage within Elyria and exposes the very real, very knowable anxiety of the human condition. And yet somehow Lacey manages to poke fun at her unrelenting self-consciousness, her high-stakes search for the dark heart of the self.

NAMED A TOP 10 NOVEL OF 2017 BY THE WALL STREET JOURNAL AND VOGUE, A BEST BOOK OF 2017 BY ESQUIRE, HUFFINGTON POST, POP SUGAR, ELECTRIC LITERATURE AND KIRKUS, AND A 2017 NPR GREAT READ. ONE OF DWIGHT GARNER'S TOP BOOKS OF 2017 IN THE NEW YORK TIMES. A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITOR'S CHOICE AND A FINALIST FOR THE CHICAGO REVIEW OF BOOKS FICTION AWARD. "Like Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, [The Answers] is also a novel about a subjugated woman, in this case not to a totalitarian theocracy but to subtler forces its heroine is only beginning to understand and fears she is complicit with." --Dwight Garner, New York Times Mary Parsons is broke. Dead broke, really: between an onslaught of medical bills and a mountain of credit card debt, she has been pushed to the brink. Hounded by bill collectors and still plagued by the painful and bizarre symptoms that doctors couldn’t diagnose, Mary seeks relief from a holistic treatment called Pneuma Adaptive Kinesthesia—PAKing, for short. Miraculously, it works. But PAKing is prohibitively expensive. Like so many young adults trying to make ends meet in New York City, Mary scours Craigslist and bulletin boards for a second job, and eventually lands an interview for a high-paying gig that’s even stranger than her symptoms or the New Agey PAKing. Mary’s new job title is Emotional Girlfriend in the “Girlfriend Experiment”—the brainchild of a wealthy and infamous actor, Kurt Sky, who has hired a team of biotech researchers to solve the problem of how to build and maintain the perfect romantic relationship, casting himself as the experiment’s only constant. Around Kurt, several women orbit as his girlfriends with specific functions. There’s a Maternal Girlfriend who folds his laundry, an Anger Girlfriend who fights with him, a Mundanity Girlfriend who just hangs around his loft, and a whole team of girlfriends to take care of Intimacy. With so little to lose, Mary falls headfirst into Kurt’s messy, ego-driven simulacrum of human connection. Told in Catherine Lacey’s signature spiraling, hypnotic prose, The Answers is both a mesmerizing dive into the depths of one woman’s psyche and a critical look at the conventions and institutions that infiltrate our most personal, private moments. As Mary struggles to understand herself—her body, her city, the trials of her past, the uncertainty of her future—the reader must confront the impossible questions that fuel Catherine Lacey’s work: How do you measure love? Can you truly know someone else? Do we even know ourselves? And listen for Lacey’s uncanny answers.

The age of multitasking needs better narrative history. It must be absolutely factual, immediately accessible, smart, and brilliantly fun. Enter Andrew Helfer, the award-winning graphic-novel editor behind Roadto Perdition and The History of Violence, and welcome the launch of a unique line of graphic biographies. If a picture is worth a thousand words, these graphic biographies qualify as tomes. But if you're among the millions who haven't time for another doorstop of a biography, these books are for you. With the thoroughly researched and passionately drawn Malcolm X, Helfer and award-winning artist Randy DuBurke capture Malcolm Little's extraordinary transformation from a black youth beaten down by Jim Crow America into Malcolm X, the charismatic, controversial, and doomed national spokesman for the Nation of Islam.

An epic, award-winning biography of Malcolm X that draws on hundreds of hours of personal interviews and rewrites much of the known narrative. Les Payne, the renowned Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative journalist, embarked in 1990 on a nearly thirty-year-long quest to create an unprecedented portrait of Malcolm X, one that would separate fact from fiction. The result is this historic, National Book Award–winning biography, which interweaves previously unknown details of Malcolm X’s life—from harrowing Depression-era vignettes to a moment-by-moment retelling of the 1965 assassination—into an extraordinary account that contextualizes Malcolm X’s life against the wider currents of American history. Bookended by essays from Tamara Payne, Payne’s daughter and primary researcher, who heroically completed the biography after her father’s death in 2018, The Dead Are Arising affirms the centrality of Malcolm X to the African American freedom struggle.

"In graphic novel format, explores the life and death of Malcolm X"--Provided by publisher.

Named one of the Ten Best Books of 2023 by Time (#1), Vulture, and Publishers Weekly, and one of the Best Books of 2023 by The New York Times, the New Yorker, NPR, the Los Angeles Times, Vanity Fair, Esquire, the Chicago Tribune, Kirkus, Lit Hub, and Amazon. National Bestseller. Winner of the 2024 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction and the 2023 Brooklyn Library Prize, a finalist for the Dylan Thomas Prize, and longlisted for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award. A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. “A major novel, and a notably audacious one.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times From one of our fiercest stylists, a roaring epic chronicling the life, times, and secrets of a notorious artist. When X—an iconoclastic artist, writer, and polarizing shape-shifter—falls dead in her office, her widow, CM, wild with grief and refusing everyone’s good advice, hurls herself into writing a biography of the woman she deified. Though X was recognized as a crucial creative force of her era, she kept a tight grip on her life story. Not even CM knows where X was born, and in her quest to find out, she opens a Pandora’s box of secrets, betrayals, and destruction. All the while, she immerses herself in the history of the Southern Territory, a fascist theocracy that split from the rest of the country after World War II, and which finally, in the present day, is being forced into an uneasy reunification. A masterfully constructed literary adventure complete with original images assembled by X’s widow, Biography of X follows CM as she traces X’s peripatetic trajectory over decades, from Europe to the ruins of America’s divided territories, and through her collaborations and feuds with everyone from Bowie and Waits to Sontag and Acker. At last, when she finally understands the scope of X’s defining artistic project, CM realizes her wife’s deceptions were far crueler than she imagined. Pulsing with suspense and intellect while blending nonfiction and fiction, Biography of X is a roaring epic that plumbs the depths of grief, art, and love. In her most ambitious novel yet, Catherine Lacey pushes her craft to its highest level, introducing us to an unforgettable character who, in her tantalizing mystery, shows us the fallibility of the stories we craft for ourselves.

Malcolm X's blazing, legendary autobiography, completed shortly before his assassination in 1965, depicts a remarkable life: a child born into rage and despair, who turned to street-hustling and cocaine in the Harlem ghetto, followed by prison, where he converted to the Black Muslims and honed the energy and brilliance that made him one of the most important political figures of his time - and an icon in ours. It also charts the spiritual journey that took him beyond militancy, and led to his murder, a powerful story of transformation, redemption and betrayal. Vilified by his critics as an anti-white demagogue, Malcolm X gave a voice to unheard African-Americans, bringing them pride, hope and fearlessness, and remains an inspirational and controversial figure today.

In this era of war, mendacity, clerical and political scandal, and personal disillusion, I hoped that the example of Bill's love of the Church, his love of the priesthood, his love of people...and his love of the woman he married could show that life can be lived honestly, uprightly, fulfillingly...and with kindness and humor." -Author Javan Kienzle Author William X. Kienzle touched readers, both on and off the page. His 24 Father Robert Koesler mysteries attracted an ever-growing following of faithful and new fans alike, while his status as a highly intelligent and thoughtful ex-priest sparked curiosity and interest in his unique perspective. When Bill died suddenly in December 2001 his readers were crushed, as were so many who knew him personally and professionally. After much reflection on his life, Bill's widow, Javan, chose to write his biography. Judged by Love is a loving but candid portrait of a deeply religious and spiritual person, one who dedicated his life to God by becoming a priest, then found himself separated from the priesthood he loved because of disagreements with its policies. While this is the individual story of Bill Kienzle from his youthful days in the seminary onward, it also serves as a reflection on the current examination of faith that much of the Catholic clergy and laity have experienced over the last 50 years. Complete with Bill and Javan's singular love story, Judged by Love is a moving tale of a remarkable man. Readers interested in religion and spiritual topics, as well as the faithful fans who purchased more than two million copies of Bill's hardcover and paperback mysteries, will be heartened and gratified by the chance to read about this extraordinary human being.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for History and a New York Times bestseller, the definitive biography of Malcolm X Hailed as "a masterpiece" (San Francisco Chronicle), Manning Marable's acclaimed biography of Malcolm X finally does justice to one of the most influential and controversial figures of twentieth-century American history. Filled with startling new information and shocking revelations, Malcolm X unfolds a sweeping story of race and class in America. Reaching into Malcolm's troubled youth, it traces a path from his parents' activism as followers of Marcus Garvey through his own work with the Nation of Islam and rise in the world of black nationalism, and culminates in the never-before-told true story of his assassination. Malcolm X is a stunning achievement, the definitive work on one of our greatest advocates for social change.