Mona Awad

The Vegetarian meets Heathers in this darkly funny, seductively strange novel about a lonely graduate student drawn into a clique of rich girls who seem to move and speak as one "We were just these innocent girls in the night trying to make something beautiful. We nearly died. We very nearly did, didn't we?" Samantha Heather Mackey couldn't be more of an outsider in her small, highly selective MFA program at New England's Warren University. A scholarship student who prefers the company of her dark imagination to that of most people, she is utterly repelled by the rest of her fiction writing cohort--a clique of unbearably twee rich girls who call each other "Bunny," and are often found entangled in a group hug so tight they become one. But everything changes when Samantha receives an invitation to the Bunnies' fabled "Smut Salon," and finds herself inexplicably drawn to their front door--ditching her only friend, Ava, a caustic art school dropout, in the process. As Samantha plunges deeper and deeper into the sinister yet saccharine world of the Bunny cult and starts to take part in their ritualistic off-campus "Workshop" where they magically conjure their monstrous creations, the edges of reality begin to blur, and her friendships with Ava and the Bunnies are brought into deadly collision. A spellbinding, down-the-rabbit-hole tale of loneliness and belonging, creativity and agency, and friendship and desire, Bunny is the dazzlingly original second book from an author whose work has been described as "honest, searing and necessary" (Elle).

Bunny

"ALL'S WELL is about Miranda Fitch whose life is a waking nightmare after an accident ruins her acting career, and leaves her with chronic back pain, a failed marriage, and a deepening dependence on painkillers and alcohol. On the verge of losing her job as a college theater director, Miranda lives out her broken dreams through an upcoming production of Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well, when the unimaginable happens. She suddenly recovers, but at what cost?"--

A Novel

All's Well

From the critically acclaimed author of Bunny comes a horror-tinted, gothic fairy tale about a lonely dress shop clerk whose mother’s unexpected death sends her down a treacherous path in pursuit of youth and beauty. Can she escape her mother’s fate—and find a connection that is more than skin deep? For as long as she can remember, Belle has been insidiously obsessed with her skin and skincare videos. When her estranged mother Noelle mysteriously dies, Belle finds herself back in Southern California, dealing with her mother’s considerable debts and grappling with lingering questions about her death. The stakes escalate when a strange woman in red appears at the funeral, offering a tantalizing clue about her mother’s demise, followed by a cryptic video about a transformative spa experience. With the help of a pair of red shoes, Belle is lured into the barbed embrace of La Maison de Méduse, the same lavish, culty spa to which her mother was devoted. There, Belle discovers the frightening secret behind her (and her mother’s) obsession with the mirror—and the great shimmering depths (and demons) that lurk on the other side of the glass. Snow White meets Eyes Wide Shut in this surreal descent into the dark side of beauty, envy, grief, and the complicated love between mothers and daughters. With black humor and seductive horror, Rouge explores the cult-like nature of the beauty industry—as well as the danger of internalizing its pitiless gaze. Brimming with California sunshine and blood-red rose petals, Rouge holds up a warped mirror to our relationship with mortality, our collective fixation with the surface, and the wondrous, deep longing that might lie beneath.

Rouge

"This book sparkles with wit and at the same time comes across as so transparent and genuine--Awad knows how to talk about the raw struggles of female friendships, sex, contact, humanness, and her voice is a wry celebration of all of this at once." --AIMEE BENDER, author of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake "Hilarious and cutting . . . Mona Awad has a gift for turning the everyday strange and luminous, for finding bright sparks of humor in the deepest dark. She is a strikingly original and strikingly talented new voice." --LAURA VAN DEN BERG, author of Find Me and The Isle of Youth Growing up in the suburban hell of Misery Saga (a.k.a. Mississauga), Lizzie has never liked the way she looks--even though her best friend Mel says she's the pretty one. She starts dating guys online, but she's afraid to send pictures, even when her skinny friend China does her makeup: she knows no one would want her if they could really see her. So she starts to lose. With punishing drive, she counts almonds consumed, miles logged, pounds dropped. She fights her way into coveted dresses. She grows up and gets thin, navigating double-edged validation from her mother, her friends, her husband, her reflection in the mirror. But no matter how much she loses, will she ever see herself as anything other than a fat girl? In her brilliant, hilarious, and at times shocking debut, Mona Awad simultaneously skewers the body image-obsessed culture that tells women they have no value outside their physical appearance, and delivers a tender and moving depiction of a lovably difficult young woman whose life is hijacked by her struggle to conform. As caustically funny as it is heartbreaking, 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl introduces a vital new voice in fiction.

13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl

Michael Harris Cohen

Sarah Wilson

et al

Alex Stein

Paul Crenshaw

Sarah Elizabeth Schantz

Catee Baugh

Tim Belden

Danielle Bellone

Amanda Block

Angela Buck

Simon P. Clark

Kimberly Duede

Danielle Fontaine

J. M. R. Harrison

Joyce Winters Henderson

John Kiste

David Kolinski-Schultz

Maude Larke

Clayton Lister

Carlos F. Mason Wehby

Colleen Michaels

Jason Daniel Myers

Joann Oh

Elodie Olson-Coons

Julia Patt

Ariana Quinonez

Tay Sanchez

Cheryl Stiles

Erin Virgil

Jennifer Whitaker

Two hundred years ago, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm--better known as The Brothers Grimm--published their collection to ensure that the various German fables, tales and folklore of their age and before would not die out. Modern Grimmoire: Contemporary Fairy Tales, Fables & Folklore is a literary anthology in the Grimm persuasion. Awaiting you inside are the collected works of thirty-six emerging authors and artists from around the world. Through short fiction, poetry and artwork, you'll meet a talking cat-girl and a girl that talks to cats; librarians like you've never imagined and royalty like you always have; an ex-court painter, an all too persuasive frog, and an out-of-work wolfman. Some twist and twine their happily-ever-after predecessors in inventive ways; others craft entirely new magical faces and places. All collected, the anthology is ripe with sticky sweet revenge, altogether timely fates, and all-conquering (and conquesting) love.

Mona Awad

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