Richard Powers

The Overstory unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fable that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. An air force loadmaster in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan. An artist inherits a hundred years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself,...

Composer Peter Els --the "Bioterrorist Bach" -- pays a final visit to the people he loves, those who shaped his musical journey and, through the help of his ex-wife, his daughter, and his longtime collaborator, he hatches a plan to turn his disastrous collision with Homeland Security into a work of art that will reawaken its audience to the sounds all around them.

Presents twenty of the best works of short fiction of the past year from a variety of acclaimed sources.

Loved by the latest descendant of the starman who brought him to Earth to be a family pet, Lummox the alien beast eats a neighbor's cat and begins to grow to the point that he alarms authorities, who resolve to take Lummox away.

Returning unannounced to his dilapidated family home on Maine's Monhegan Island, rakish prodigal son Spark launches an unforgettable summer marked by his temperamental son's claims about a spiritual vision, which is exploited by his grandfather to revive a flagging church.

At once intimate and sweeping, Bottomland-the anticipated second novel from Michelle Hoover-follows the Hess family in the years after World War I as they attempt to rid themselves of the anti-German sentiment that left a stain on their name. But when the youngest two daughters vanish in the middle of the night, the family must piece together what happened while struggling to maintain their life on the unforgiving Iowa plains.In the weeks after Esther...