Counterpoint

"Polchin knows the era, and brings to his account a wealth of colorful supporting detail . . . With its layers of taboos and public spectacle, the case feels, a century later, as relevant as ever." —Marisa Meltzer, The New York Times Book ReviewFrom Edgar Award finalist James Polchin comes a thrilling examination of the murder that captivated Jazz Age America, with echoes of the decadence and violence of The Great GatsbyOn the morning of May 16, 1922, a young man’s body was found on a desolate road in Westchester County. The victim was penniless ex-sailor Clarence Peters. Walter Ward, the handsome scion of the family that owned the largest chain of bread factories in the country, confessed to the crime as an act of self-defense against a violent gang of “shadow men,” blackmailers who extorted their victims’ moral weaknesses. From the start, one question defined the investigation: What scandalous secret could lead Ward to murder?For sixteen months, the media fueled a firestorm of speculation. Unscrupulous criminal attorneys, fame-seeking chorus girls, con artists, and misogynistic millionaires harnessed the power of the press to shape public perception. New York governor and future presidential candidate Al Smith and editor of the Daily News Joseph Medill Patterson leveraged the investigation to further professional ambitions. Famous figures like Harry Houdini, Arthur Conan Doyle, and F. Scott Fitzgerald weighed in. As the bereaved working-class Peters family sought to bring the callous Ward to justice, America watched enraptured.Capturing the extraordinary twists and turns of the case, Shadow Men conjures the excess and contradictions of the Jazz Age and reveals the true-crime origins of the media-led voyeurism that reverberates through contemporary life. It’s a story of privilege and power that lays bare the social inequity that continues to influence our system of justice.

National Book Award finalist Karen E. Bender returns with stunning speculative stories of parents and children, together and apart, surviving near-future dystopias that feel all-too-possible—and realities that can be even strangerGrounded in both the contemporary United States and a variety of dystopias, celebrated author Karen E. Bender’s otherworldly collection examines the evolving dynamics of the nuclear family during adolescence, motherhood, the empty nest, and caring for an aging parent.A young woman seeks to learn the magical words that can terminate her unwanted pregnancy. A mother discovers an extra child in her home she had forgotten about. A couple is separated from their son and encased in globes orbiting the Earth. Society develops a terrible plan to leave the burning planet for a life on Mars. Each story honors the emotional force of its situation by grappling with themes of freedom, self-definition, youth, aging, control, and power. Using settings both familiar and fantastic, Bender’s work explores the ordinary in the extraordinary to discover secret, hidden truths in the lifelong connection between parents and their children.

This haunting Western story features a man brought back from the dead to exact revenge upon those who have wronged him, only to discover that the world is capable of good—from the author of The Houseboat and StagMontana, 1935. Bludgeoned and buried alive by his bank-robbing partner and half brother, Benjamin Kilt should have been a corpse. But now very much on this side of heaven, Kilt’s quest for revenge will be unlike anything the West has ever seen.Kilt is joined on his journey by Bonnie, a thirteen-year-old Indigenous girl he somewhat reluctantly rescues from her abusive “keeper.” It is through Bonnie’s recollections in old age of Kilt’s thorny quest for justice that Dane Bahr’s masterful tale unwinds, showcasing the tragic, complicated history of the two brothers and leading to a showdown at the very ranch where they were raised.For readers of Charles Portis, Elmore Leonard, and Annie Proulx, The Dead Ringer explores the slippery justification of questionable deeds done for honorable ends, a bold and haunting novel featuring a man brought back from the dead to exact revenge, only to discover that the world is capable of good no matter how tragic the end may be.

An absorbing tale of science and showmanship, ideology and enterprise, that provides not just a fascinating history of our country, but also crucial insight into the deep currents that continue to propel modern lifeDuring the contentious and progressive antebellum era, the Fowler family preached a gospel of self-improvement to a nation eager to embrace its foundational beliefs. For the first time, this new “science” of phrenology offered all Americans the ability to improve their station by unlocking their innate mental and emotional truths. Revered politicians, quirky celebrities, infamous criminals, and social outcasts all found their way to the Fowlers for skull readings.Brimming with the energy to change the world, the Fowlers connected phrenology to practically every aspect of life in the young nation—from abolition to women’s rights, temperance to prison reform, spiritualism and mesmerism to vegetarianism and sexual education. But there was a dark side to this fad and to the Fowlers, and soon nefarious forces co-opted this once-hopeful sensation to justify racism and xenophobia.Phrenology’s complex history stands as a commentary on the dreams and follies of the American republic. Though phrenology (and the Fowlers) ran afoul of the tide of history, its aspirational insistence on an individual’s ability to improve oneself became embedded in the fabric of the nation.

“Masterfully rendered and mercilessly readable. Kohnstamm populates these pages with insight, hilarity, emotion, and unforgettable characters. Supersonic is a novel with so much narrative propulsion that it manages to live up to its name.” —Jonathan Evison, author of Small World and Lawn BoyWhen PTA president Sami Hasegawa-Stalworth petitions to rename a Seattle elementary school after her late grandmother, she ignites a battle over the school’s future and the history of its surrounding neighborhood. Supersonic launches readers into a kaleidoscopic tale of the generations of interrelated families who breathed life into that small, hilltop community.The story cuts in time from the arrival of white settlers’ ships to the last indigenous landowner fighting to hold on to scraps of his ancestral home and back to the school’s PTA auction. It interweaves an opioid-addicted nineteenth-century con man–cum–civic booster, a disgraced Navy seaman building an airplane that travels faster than sound, a stay-at-home dad hustling to open the city’s first legal weed shop and Sami’s grandmother, a survivor of Japanese American incarceration during World War II, who founded the school’s once-celebrated music program.The novel traces their false starts, triumphs, and heartbreaks through the booms and busts of the Yukon gold rush, the jet age, Big Tech, and beyond. By exploring the converging and often clashing personalities that make up the dynamic soul of a place, Supersonic illuminates themes of identity, displacement, destruction, and reinvention that give rise to all great American cities.

A collection of stories drawn from the ample body of work published only in the New Yorker, alongside a few other stories long out of print and out of the public eye. Ruth Jhabvala began publishing in the New Yorker in 1957 and this collection spans decades. This story collection showcases Jhabvala''s powers of keen observation as she examines the westernization of India''s middle class, the interplay of social and romantic ambition, and the social mores that plague her characters, regardless of their geographical background. The introduction will be from the lecture Jhabvala gave when awarded the Neil Gunn Prize in Scotland in 1979, a piece titled ''Disinheritance'' that examines the effects Germany, the UK, India, and New York had on her journey as a writer and how they influenced her buoyant, satiric fiction.

As a child in a small barrio in the Philippines, Deja Vu Prem faced neglect and physical abuse. At age seventeen, desperate to escape her situation and claim a better life for herself beyond the mountains of her town, she became a mail-order bride and moved to San Francisco. But the challenges of her childhood didn''t go away - they merely evolved into the form of her emotionally abusive husband. Cut off from her family and any kind of emotional or financial support, Prem was a prisoner in her own home, unable even to use the phone or check the mail. But she wasn''t helpless. Relying on her deep faith and the fire within that had always pushed her to achieve, Prem made the brave decision to escape her situation to provide a better life for herself and her two young children. Recounting Prem''s harrowing yet hopeful journey, Beyond the Mountains is a stirring and moving portrait of one immigrant''s refusal to be defined as a victim and a testament on finding the strength to forgive in order to reclaim the power that lives within us all.

Andy Catlett''s story begins as his grandfather, Marce Catlett, rises in the dark to go from his farm, by horseback and train, to Louisville for the sale of his tobacco crop at the auction house. The price paid for each year''s crop is determined and destroyed by the power of a single buyer, James B. Duke. This year is especially grim since the price offered to each grower is less than the expense of bringing the crop to market. A year''s worth of labour is lost. Marce returns to his family determined to discover some way to proceed. Many of his fellow farmers lack the resiliency and resourcefulness to continue, and the end for them is nearing. But only with the help of other neighbours and growers can a way be found that protects the farmers and keeps these rural families vital and in place. The power and depth of this story - and of the many stories within the Port William Membership - resonate with love, memory, kindness, and a sense of eternity. In Marce Catlett, celebrated author Wendell Berry brings to life a character that the devoted readers of the series will cherish. This moving story is a testament to the goodwill that lives within the human heart and a stirring reminder that standing up for what we believe in is always a cause worth fighting for.

It has been called Wonderland, America''s Serengeti, the crown jewel of the National Park System, and America''s best idea. But how did this faraway landscape evolve into one of the most recognizable places in the world? As the birthplace of the national park system, Yellowstone witnessed the first-ever attempt to protect wildlife, to restore endangered species, and to develop a new industry centered on nature tourism. Yellowstone remains a national icon, one of the few entities capable of bridging ideological divides in the United States. Yet the park''s history is also filled with episodes of conflict and exclusion, setting precedents for Native American land dispossession, land rights disputes, and prolonged tensions between commercialism and environmental conservation. Yellowstone''s legacies are both celebratory and problematic. A Place Called Yellowstone tells the comprehensive story of Yellowstone National Park as the story of the nation itself.

Rina Kirsch is a young mother and Modern Orthodox Jew in the Pico-Robertson neighbourhood of Los Angeles. Dutifully keeping to the formidable expectations of a traditional household connects Rina with generations past and those to come. But a contradiction burns at her centre: Rina is an atheist. She is also stymied in her life and marriage. Hoping to reinvigorate their relationship, Rina''s husband convinces her to partake in a night of wife swapping with other Orthodox couples. Rather than preserve her marriage, however, the swap plunges Rina down a heady path that begins with a rekindled passion for painting and culminates in an intoxicating affair with Will Ochoa, her married art teacher. Clandestine rendezvous and stolen moments of ardour awaken Rina to an existence beyond the confining parameters of tradition, offering a glimpse at the possible life she left behind in the olive groves of her youth. As the blush of erotic thrill comes into sharp contrast with the complications of living a secret life, Rina must decide if it''s worth sacrificing everything she''s ever known to fully inhabit the uncharted landscape unfolding before her, one where her needs take precedence. Told in the fevered tenor common to both lust and religious devotion, Olive Days is an unforgettable story of the agonizing choices women make to balance duty against desire.

Thirty years ago, John Lo, the only Asian American partner at a prestigious New York City law firm, was acquitted of the murder of an employee he was having an affair with. The repercussions of that long-ago event still haunt his adult children. Brennan, a lawyer following in her father''s footsteps in more ways than one, has always maintained that the trial got it right. Hunter, a disgruntled war correspondent whose similarities to his father run more than skin-deep, believes their father got away with murder. Their convictions have pushed them apart. Now, spurred on by their mother''s failing health, the estranged siblings decide to reconcile their differences by reinvestigating the murder to come to a definitive conclusion, and, in the process, salvage what''s left of their fragmented family. Told in a dual timeline that moves between John''s perspective thirty years prior and Brennan and Hunter''s present-day investigation, Hollow Spaces is a moving portrait of a flawed man''s shocking fall from grace and a gripping exploration of race in corporate America, filial loyalty, ambition, and the fallout of a sensational trial for those caught in its wake.

March 31, 1985. Two white patrol officers in search of a gang member followed a pickup truck carrying seven young Black men up a dirt driveway in the Encanto neighbourhood of Southeastern San Diego. Minutes later, gunshots rang out, and the truck''s driver, Sagon Penn, fled the scene in an officer''s patrol car. The incident stunned the city. What followed would change it forever. Penn was an idealist who believed in the power of Buddhist chants to bring about the oneness of humanity. The two police officers were rising stars in one of the most progressive police departments in the country, yet one that had suffered more officers killed in the line of duty than any other. While the facts of the case were never in dispute, what remained unresolved was what, if anything, could justify such a violent confrontation? For over two years, a determined prosecutor and a charismatic defence attorney engaged in a sensational courtroom drama that revolved around matters of mental health, racial biases, and the self-image of a once-sleepy beach town grappling with its transformation into a major metropolitan area. The Sagon Penn incident forever altered how San Diego would respond to incidents involving police and communities of colour. Based on court transcripts, personal interviews, and archival police reports, Reap the Whirlwind is a gripping true-crime narrative set against the evocative backdrop of Southern California.

As a Hungarian immigrant working as a studio hack writing monster movies in 1950s Hollywood, George Curtis must navigate the McCarthy-era studio system filled with possible communists and spies, the life of closeted men along Sunset Boulevard, and the inability of the era to cleave love from persecution and guilt. But when Madeline, a famous actress, offers George a writing residency at her estate in Malibu to work on the political writing he cares most deeply about, his world is blown open. Soon Madeline is carrying George like an ornament into a class of postwar L.A. society ordinarily hidden from men like him. What this lifestyle hides behind, aside from the monsters on the screen, are the monsters dwelling closer to home: this bacchanalia covers a gnawing hole shelled wide by the horror of the war they thought they''d left behind and the glimpse of an atomic future. It''s here that George understands he can never escape his past as Gyorgy, the queer Jew who fled Budapest before the war and landed in New York, all alone, a decade prior. Spanning from sun-drenched Los Angeles to the hidden corners of working-class New York to a virtuosic climax in the Las Vegas desert, The Future Was Color is an immaculately written exploration of postwar American decadence, reinventing the self through art, and the psychosis that lingers in a world that''s seen the bomb.

Grounded in both the contemporary United States and a variety of dystopias, the new stories in Karen E. Bender''s third collection examine the evolving dynamics of the nuclear family in adolescence, motherhood, the empty nest, and caring for the aging parent. From a young woman who wants to learn secret words to terminate a pregnancy to a mother who discovers an extra child in her home she had forgotten about, to a couple separated from their son in globes orbiting the Earth, to society''s terrible plan to leave the burning planet for a life on Mars, the stories honour the emotional force of these situations by grappling with themes of freedom, self-definition, youth, aging, control, and power. Bender''s work explores the ordinary in the extraordinary, using settings both familiar and fantastic to discover new truths in the lifelong connection between parents and their children.

For decades, a dark force has terrorized the Languille Lake reservation. Only spoken of in whispers as ''the sandman,'' he lurks in the Hidden Atlantis Lake Resort and Casino, the reservation''s main attraction and source of revenue, leeching its patrons'' dreams and ambitions and also preventing the ghosts that linger there from moving on. Fleeing a breakup, Marion Lafournier, a mid-twenties Ojibwe, seeks solace in the slot machine''s siren song. Here he falls afoul of the sandman, an encounter Marion barely escapes through the timely intervention of his cousins Alana and Cherie, who both work at the casino and are intimately aware of the sandman''s power. Meanwhile, Glenn Nielan, only recently out of the closet and an aspiring documentarian, hopes to capture the faces of the Ojibwe land while experiencing the casino''s thrills. But he will learn that all who choose to play the sandman''s games are in danger of falling into his grasp. Marion and Alana are members of the Bullhead clan, a family with ties to a sacred past and a fierce determination to ensure their future. Alana, with her seven-fire sight, is the only person to fully grasp the danger the sandman poses. Aware of Marion''s occasional ability to navigate the spirit world, she enlists his aid in defeating this wraith. But the power and reach of the sandman go far beyond Alana''s worst fears. Soon she and Marion find themselves in a battle for their lives and for the souls of the reservation''s residents, both the living and the dead.

For acclaimed writer and environmental activist Rick Bass, it can be wearying to dwell relentlessly upon the broken, the fragmented, the dead and dying and doomed to extinction. Activism is a necessary part of the environmental movement, but so is the time-honoured celebration of the beauty that inspires us. Spanning his storied career, these new and selected essays attempt to take a brief step to the side, away from lamentation and prescription, to inhabit, as deeply as possible, the greater depths of the beauty in each moment. With Every Great Breath ranges from the extremely local - a long-form essay about the community affected by the largest Superfund site in U.S. history, in Libby, Montana - to the far-flung: the Galapagos, Namibia, and Alaska. Throughout, Bass offers a portrait of our planet that is always alert to its wonders, even in the face of environmental crisis.