Fiction

Leah is living in Queens with a possessive husband she doesn t love and a long list of unfulfilled ambitions, when she's jolted from a thick ennui by a call from the past. Her beloved former boss and friend, Judy, has died in a car accident and left Leah her most prized possession and, as it turns out, the instrument of Judy's death: a red sports car.

Hey Harry, Hey Matilda is the story told entirely in hilarious emails of fraternal twins Harry and Matilda Goodman as they fumble into adulthood, telling lies and keeping secrets, and finally confronting their complicated twinship. 

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BERLIN, 1931: Sisters raised in a Catholic orphanage, Berni and Grete Metzger are each other's whole world. That is, until life propels them to opposite sides of seedy, splendid, and violent Weimar Berlin. Berni becomes a cigarette girl, a denizen of the cabaret scene alongside her transgender best friend, who is considering a risky gender reassignment surgery.

At the edge of the Russian wilderness, winter lasts most of the year and the snowdrifts grow taller than houses. But Vasilisa doesn't mind she spends the winter nights huddled around the embers of a fire with her beloved siblings, listening to her nurse's fairy tales.

Ten years after the conclusion of Renato Stillamare’s defiant confessions in Renato, the Painter, Alba, his beloved wife of fifty years, dies without warning, and the blow leaves him in pieces. When he resumes his narrative, this larger-than-life artist has been reduced to a gray existence of messy confusion — broken belief, crazy hope, desperate philosophy.

How far will a candidate go to become president? Erica Sparks, America's top-rated cable-news host is about to find out.

Mike Ortiz is a dynamic war hero favored to win the White House. Standing by his side is his glamorous and adoring wife, Celeste. But something about this seemingly perfect couple troubles Erica. Is Celeste really who she seems? And most importantly, what really happened in that squalid Al-Qaeda prison where Mike Ortiz spent nine months?

Horace is a horse, and Agnes is a squirrel, though there are no boundaries when it comes to true love and genuine companionship. Bursting with color, style, and humor, this is the photographic journal of Horace and Agnes's romance, and their life of simple pleasures walks on the beach, jigsaw puzzles, quick getaways to Las Vegas, visits with relatives, festive parties, and quiet nights at home. In a series of self-portraits created by photographer Asia Kepka, we follow Horace and Agnes through their highs and their lows with spectacular detail and charm.

Two local novelists present their latest works.

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Ananda Devi will be in conversation with Michelle Hoover.

Sex. Wine. Jazz. Existential dread.

Bonnie Jo Campbell reads at Porter Square along with her cousin Mimi Lipson, a short story writer and memoirist.