Enter our November 2023 Goodreads Giveaways!

“Green World is one of the funnier and most captivating memoirs I’ve read in years. Ephraim’s wit flies off the page.”—Chris Monks, managing editor, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency

“Michelle Ephraim has delighted audiences on The Moth stage, and you will find her wit, compassion for those around her, and deep self awareness on every page of Green World. She expertly weaves complex Shakespearean characters and plots into tales of the highly relatable highs and lows of her own life. It is a lively, well written and deeply human book.”—Catherine Burns, Artistic Director, The Moth 

At twenty-three, Michelle Ephraim was failing at everything. The only child of reclusive Holocaust-survivor parents who were dismayed by her literary studies, she found herself dumped by her boyfriend and bombing out of graduate school. Then, one night, she crashed a Shakespeare recitation party. Loopy from vodka and never having read a single line of Shakespeare, she was transfixed.

“This new collection is a lightning storm, revelatory and galvanic—I love The Long Swim, and Svoboda’s crackling, hilarious, gorgeous prose-music.”—Karen Russell, author of Orange World and Other Stories and Swamplandia!

“These stories, so precise and joyful in language and movement, don’t hesitate to dive meaningfully into heaviness and honesty. What musical and beautifully-written pieces to read aloud and savor.”—Aimee Bender, author of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

A runaway circus lion haunts a small town where two lovers risk more than their respective marriages. A junket to Cuba and an ambassador’s dalliance with a niece hide dark secrets and political revolution. “I’ve always had a knife,” says the unstable stepson to his parents. Inventive, dark, and absurd, the stories in The Long Swim capture Terese Svoboda’s clear-eyed, wry angle on the world: a place of violence and uncertainty but also wild beauty, adventure, and love both lasting and ephemeral. Her characters strive for escape—through romance, travel, or more self-destructive pursuits—and collide with the constraints of family and home, their longing for freedom and autonomy often at odds with the desire for safety and harmony.

“In an age when domestic and personal dramas capture most literary attention, Fine Dreams breaks the mold, bravely and forthrightly investigating geo-religious and political history via the personal. Four kidnapped teenage schoolgirls guide us through the seemingly unbearable—appalling brutality and collective terror—toward life, death, and hope beyond. I read this book straight through. It was impossible not to.”—Robin McLean, author of Pity the Beast

Set in a fictional town, at a fictional school, Linda N. Masi’s debut novel, Fine Dreams, rewrites myth and history. Framed by a ghost’s first-person narrative, the book centers on four young friends, the stars of their school’s track team. While studying for exams, they are kidnapped and taken to a terrorist encampment. Two are claimed as “wives” by their captors, one is forced to wear a suicide vest, and each is subjected to appalling violence and terror. While their stories resonate with a widely publicized 2014 abduction, these four young women could have been taken in any of the many incidents that have plagued the Nigerian people for years.

Even though they are abducted and abused by men in power and forced to survive in a dark place like Persephone, Masi’s protagonists offer new endings for Persephone’s story. In Masi’s telling, these resilient young women recover their dreams and hopes to live in daylight once again. No matter where they travel or where they stay, they gain self-determination and reclaim their dreams.