Simply Put

Grifter extraordinaire, Alex shuttles from man to man, apartment to apartment. Then she meets Simon, a wealthy older guy, a bit of a control freak (he has ‘psychotic discipline’), with a Hamptons beach house. When he invites her for the summer Alex carefully keeps it together, until she doesn’t. She is sent packing but lingers on Long Island…. Cline’s first novel was The Girls, about the Manson family, followed by Daddy, a collection of short stories. She told the Paris Review, “I think of novel writing as almost like surgery—the stakes are very high—and I think of stories more like acupuncture.” The stakes are definitely high in her thrilling new novel. Limited signed copies available.

Following her enormous success with last year’s dark fantasy, Babel, Huang turns to a very timely satire of racial prejudice and literary theft. Educated at Oxford and Yale, the author has an inside view of the competition between young writers trying to get published. When June’s friend and more successful Chinese American colleague at Yale suddenly dies, she cannot resist stealing her work-in-progress and presenting it as her own to instant acclaim. What follows is a sly commentary on the state of publishing today, and how factors of race, cultural diversity, and desperate ambition can have dangerous consequences. Another terrific read for Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month. Limited signed copies available.