About Lauren Elkin:

About Scaffolding:

Paris, 2019. An apartment in Belleville. Following a miscarriage and a breakdown, Anna, a psychoanalyst, finds herself unable to return to work. Instead, she obsesses over a kitchen renovation and befriends a new neighbor—a younger woman called Clémentine who has just moved into the building and is part of a radical feminist collective.

Paris, 1972. The same apartment in Belleville. Florence and Henry are renovating their kitchen. She is finishing her degree in psychology, dropping into feminist activities, and devotedly attending the groundbreaking, infamous seminars held by the renowned analyst Jacques Lacan. She is hoping to conceive their first child, though Henry isn’t sure he’s ready for fatherhood.

Two couples, fifty years apart, face the challenges of marriage, fidelity, and pregnancy. They inhabit this same small space in separate but similar times—times charged with political upheaval and intellectual controversy. A novel in the key of Éric Rohmer, Lauren Elkin’s Scaffolding is about the way our homes collect and hold our memories and our stories, about the bonds we create and the difficulty of ever fully severing them, about the ways all the people we’ve loved live on in us.

About Fawn Parker:

About Hi, It's Me:

Wrestling with longstanding compulsive and harmful behaviours, as well as severe self-doubt, Fawn is confronted with the reality of her mother’s death. It is her responsibility to catalogue the furniture and possessions in the room, then sell or dispose of them. Instead, Fawn becomes fixated on archiving her mother’s writing and documents, searching for signs, and drawing tenuous connections to help her understand more about the enigmatic woman in the pages.

I am surrounded by mocking evidence of her inhabitancy of this room. Quickly, it is expiring. Today she was alive. When the day runs out that will no longer be true. Tomorrow I will be able to say that yesterday she was alive, at least. The next day, nothing. She will just be dead. The fact seems to be at its smallest now, growing with time. For now she is many things, and there are many places left to find her.

In Hi, It’s Me, Fawn Parker is unafraid to explore the bewildering relationship between the living and the dead. Strikingly original, provocative, and engrossing Hi, It’s Me takes us into the furthest corners of grief, invoking the physicality and painful embodiment of terminal illness with astonishing precision and emotional force. This mesmerizing, devastating novel asks: Why must it be this way?

About Sofia Ajram:

About Coup de Grâce:

Vicken has a plan: throw himself into the Saint Lawrence River in Montreal and end it all for good, believing it to be the only way out for him after a lifetime of depression and pain. But, stepping off the subway, he finds himself in an endless, looping station.

Determined to find a way out again, he starts to explore the rooms and corridors ahead of him. But no matter how many claustrophobic hallways or vast cathedral-esque rooms he passes through, the exit is nowhere in sight.

The more he explores his strange new prison, the more he becomes convinced that he hasn’t been trapped there accidentally, and amongst the shadows and concrete, he comes to realise that he almost certainly is not alone.

A terrifying psychological nightmare from a powerful new voice in horror.

In celebration of our 100th episode, Alex and Sruti reflect on just a few of their favourite conversations throughout the years, including conversations with Elif Batuman, Sean Thor Conroe, Lillian Fishman, Isle McElroy, Ottessa Moshfegh, Larissa Pham, and Marie-Helene Bertino.

About Nora Lange:

About US Fools:

Joanne and Bernadette Fareown are raised on their family farm in rural Illinois, keenly affected by their parents’ volatile relationship and mounting financial debt, haunted by the cursed history of the women in their family. Largely left to their own devices, the sisters educate themselves on Greek mythology, feminism, and Virginia Woolf, realizing they must find unique ways to cope in these antagonistic conditions, questioning the American Dream as the rest of the country abandons their community in crisis.

As Jo and Bernie’s imaginative solutions for escape come up short against their parents’ realities, the family leaves their farm for Chicago, where Joanne—free-spirited, reckless, and unable to tame her inner violence—rebels in increasingly desperate ways. After her worst breakdown yet, Jo goes into exile in Deadhorse, Alaska, and it is up to Bernadette to use all she’s learned from her sister to revive a sense of hope against the backdrop of a failing world.

With her debut novel, Nora Lange has crafted a rambunctious, ambitious, and heart-rending portrait of two idiosyncratic sisters, determined to persevere despite the

About Kevin Lambert:

Donald Winkler is a translator of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. He is a three-time winner of the Governor General's Literary Award for French-to-English translation. He lives in Montreal.

About May Our Joy Endure:

Céline Wachowski, internationally renowned architect and accidental digital-culture icon, unveils her plans for the Webuy Complex, her first megaproject in Montreal, her hometown. But instead of the triumph she anticipates in finally bringing her reputation to bear in her own city, the project is excoriated by critics, who accuse her of callously destroying the social fabric of neighborhoods, ushering in a new era of gentrification, and many even deadlier sins. When she is deposed as CEO of her firm, Céline must make sense of the charges against herself and the people in her elite circle. For the first time in danger of losing their footing, what fictions must they tell themselves to justify their privilege and maintain their position in the world that they themselves have built?

Moving fluidly between Céline’s perspective and the perspectives of her critics, and revealing both the ruthlessness of her methods and the brilliance of her aesthetic vision, May Our Joy Endure is a shrewd examination of the microcosm of the ultra-privileged and a dazzling social novel that depicts with razor-sharp acuity the terrible beauty of wealth, influence, and art.

About Kristen Felicetti:

About Log Off:

But her online diary isn't entirely serious, it's also where she can gossip and rant about music, books, and everyone at her high school, including two intriguing new friends, Alice, a reformed bad girl, and Tiff, a cocky musical prodigy. As the school year unfolds, Ellora shares every challenge she faces with her growing LiveJournal readership: memories of her estranged mother, frustration with Brian's lack of parenting, concern for Alice's health, romantic feelings for Tiff, and her place in a post-Y2K world on the cusp of major change.

About Jeff VanderMeer:

About Absolution:

When the Southern Reach trilogy was first published a decade ago, it was an instant sensation, celebrated in a front-page New York Times story before publication, hailed by Stephen King and many others. Each volume climbed the bestseller list; awards were won; the books made the rare transition from paperback original to hardcover; the movie adaptation became a cult classic. All told, the trilogy has sold more than a million copies and has secured its place in the pantheon of twenty-first-century literature.

And yet for all this, for Jeff VanderMeer there was never full closure to the story of Area X. There were a few mysteries that had gone unsolved, some key points of view never aired. There were stories left to tell. There remained questions about who had been complicit in creating the conditions for Area X to take hold; the story of the first mission into the Forgotten Coast—before Area X was called Area X—had never been fully told; and what if someone had foreseen the world after Acceptance? How crazy would they seem?

Structured in three parts, each recounting a new expedition, Absolution is a brilliant, beautiful, and ever-terrifying plunge into unique and fertile literary territory. There are some long-awaited answers here, to be sure, but also more questions, and profound new surprises. It is the final word on one

About Kenzie Allen:

About Cloud Missives:

Cloud Missives is an investigation, a manifestation, and a celebration: of the body, of what we make and remake, of the self, and of the heart. With care and deep attention, it asks what one can reimagine of Indigenous personhood in the wake of colonialism, what healing might look like when loving the world around you—and introduces readers to a profound new voice in poetry.

About Charlotte Shane:

About An Honest Woman:

Shane uses her “unsparing honestly” (The New York Times Book Review) and her personal and professional history to examine how men and women struggle in their attempts at a romantic and sexual bonding, no matter how true their intentions. As she takes stock of her relationships—with clients, with her father, with friends, with married men, and later, with her own husband—she tells a candid and haunting tale of love, marriage, and (in)fidelity, as seen through the eyes of the perpetual “other woman.”

Braiding the personal and the universal, An Honest Woman is a merciless and moving love letter to men and an indictment of habitual dishonesty, a condemnation of every social constraint acting on heterosexual unions, and a hopeful affirmation of the possibility for true connection between men and women.