Secret Societies & Ancient Libraries: The Dark Academia Essential Roadmap

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Jack Marshall

"[Marshall] understands that all worlds, the material and the spiritual, are one, and that the neighborhoods and cities that no longer exist can be conjured by memory and reanimated by art."—San Francisco Chronicle

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/ L. Muthoni Wanyeki

Bringing together ongoing research into rural African women and land rights, this book has case studies from Nigeria, Cameroon, Senegal, Ethiopia and Uganda.

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Valeria Luiselli

This story begins when a mother and her daughter take off on a trip. It is a summer of rapidly changing winds, volcanic rumbles, and sudden tempests. They’ve landed in Sicily, near the ancient ruins where the mother’s grandmother worked long ago on an archaeological dig. The narrator’s marriage has collapsed, her mother is losing her memory, and her daughter is on the threshold of adolescence, starting to ask difficult questions and form complex memories. *How do you begin again?* the narrator wonders, pondering her family line. *How do you begin again if you got the beginning wrong?* While the mother tries to figure out how to reconstruct their lives as a duo—cooking meals side by side, reading out loud to each other, playing chess, bickering and making up—her daughter takes the reins of the story, and their journey soon becomes a quest for origins, not just to the familial past across continents, languages, and generations, but also farther back, to a mythical and even geological past. *Beginning Middle End* evolves into a road novel of exquisite tenderness, spanning four generations of women. In their travels through Sicily, mother and daughter cross paths with the island’s migrants, storekeepers, and elders, and also its volcanoes, its winds, and its waters. Weaving myths, ancient philosophy, and natural history with fleeting moments of contemporary life, the unforgettable characters in this novel take us on a journey across time, and confront some of life’s primary questions: How do stories shape our children’s memories and imagination? How do we situate ourselves deeply in the world while accepting our transience in it? How are a family’s memories made and what happens when they disappear? Warm, funny, and poetic, this novel is an ode to imagination and possibility in dark times.

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Luke Kennard

An out-of-work actor accepts the role of a lifetime—sitting soundlessly in a lecture theater, zipped into a large leather bag—to aid a professor’s psychological experiment. What could possibly go wrong? In Luke Kennard’s audacious new novel, a penniless and out-of-work actor picks up a job working for Dr. Blend, a university professor who is conducting a psychological experiment. Dr. Blend wants to know: how will his students react to someone zipped into an oversized bag, sitting at the back of the lecture hall over a series of Fall lectures? The role, eagerly accepted, soon yields unexpected consequences, from a professor of post-humanism developing research questions of her own—in particular, can you love someone secreted away inside a black bag?—to the actor’s childhood friend forming a vision for monetizing this unique new situation. In the end, only Black Bag will be able to say what it all means . . . A warped campus novel, an investigation into the crisis of masculinity, and an off-kilter love story, *Black Bag* is a firework of a novel: blazingly funny and profoundly humane.

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Julian Barnes

Departure(s) is a celebrated work by Julian Barnes (Booker Prize Winner), recognized for masterclass storytelling and lasting literary resonance.

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Edwidge Danticat

“Is home the place where we are born? Or is it the place where we die?” These questions haunt Magnolia, a successful Haitian American real estate agent in Miami. When she hears gunfire while at a shopping mall, she takes shelter in a nearby restaurant, cowering with fellow shoppers and diners. Once she’s safely home, Magnolia keeps this traumatic event from everyone. But given her life back, she begins to see everything clearly: her extraordinary bond with her daughter, Zoë; her nearly broken relationship with Zoë’s father; the challenges of her mentally troubled mother, whose unraveling patterns Magnolia worries she’s spiraling toward herself; and her father’s affair with a woman who has borne him a child. While struggling through the labyrinth of her past, Magnolia must also come to terms with the losses sustained that life-altering day, and nearly every day by her parents and sibling in Haiti. Can love or family protect us from harm? Does optimism or fear win out in one’s heart? Which side will prevail for Magnolia? Pulled between these questions, each of which involves a high-stakes choice—Miami or Haiti, single or married, mortal or ghost, before or after—Magnolia is a narrator who is “yon pati koukouy, part firefly”: flitting and shimmering between different worlds. Taking as its title a Haitian Kreyòl word for mourning, *Dèy* is a profoundly warm and moving novel about the importance not only of sharing grief but also of inseverable family ties. Brave and striking, *Dèy* is one of Danticat’s most powerful and deeply affecting works yet, told with her signature “unfaltering voice and evocative beauty” (*The Boston Globe*).