In a desperate effort to liberate herself, a fourteen-year-old slave—mistress to the man who invented America—finds herself flung into a different time and worldSteve Erickson's provocative reimagining of American history, Arc d'X begins with the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. With "skin . . . too white to be quite black and too black to be quite white," Sally is loved only to the extent that she can be possessed, and finds hope on...

"If you read one philosophical-doomsday kinky-sex road-trip novel this year, make it this one." — SalonIt's New Year's Eve 1999, and the members of a powerful cult are about to commit ritual suicide. Fleeing their ranks at the final moment, teenager Kristin lands in Tokyo, where she gains employment listening to clients' stories in a "memory hotel" designed to address the decay of Japanese collective memory after the Second World War. But Kristin herself ha...

A washed-up novelist navigates the dreamscape of a cataclysm-ravaged Los AngelesIn the apocalyptic Los Angeles of Amnesiascope, time zones multiply freely, spectral figures roam the streets, and rings of fire separate the city from the rest of the country. The narrator, a former novelist, lives in a hotel and writes film criticism for a newspaper whose offices are located in a bombed-out theater. Viv, his girlfriend, is a sexually voracious artist, and toge...

In what the Guardian recently named one of the best literary debuts ever, a love triangle intersects with a lost film masterpiece and weather as turbulent as the heartLife stories converge and break away in Days Between Stations, Steve Erickson's searing first novel. At the center is the tumultuous union between Jason and Lauren, who fall in love as youths in Kansas, and later relocate to San Francisco. A cyclist training for the Olympics, Jason ...

A "brilliant" novel about an alternate America that has been split in two ( San Francisco Chronicle).In a dystopian Los Angeles, Cale is a newly released political prisoner under surveillance. Beset by dark visions and relegated to working in a desolate library, he's told, without explanation, that he's "the one everyone's looking for." For Catherine, a mysterious South American beauty, the crossing is no less extreme: Leaving her tribal life, she undergoes...

The course of a century is rewritten in this fabulously warped odyssey, named a best book of the year by the New York TimesTours of the Black Clock is a wild dream of the twentieth century as told by the ghost of Banning Jainlight. After a disturbing family secret is unearthed, Jainlight throws his father out of a window and burns down the Pennsylvania ranch where he grew up. He escapes to Vienna where he is commissioned to write pornography for ...

**A LA TIMES' BEST BOOK OF 2017 (FICTION)"A beautiful, moving, strange examination of apocalypse and rebirth.” - Neil Gaiman"Erickson has mobilized so much of what feels pressing and urgent about the fractured state of the country in a way that feels fresh and not entirely hopeless, if only because the exercise of art in opposition to complacent thought can never be hopeless." - New York Times Book Review**A chronicle of a weird road trip, a provocative wor...

Our Ecstatic Days begins as the memoir of a young mother desperate to forget a single act, committed out of love and fear, that has changed forever the world around her. In the waning days of summer, a lake appears, almost overnight, in the middle of Los Angeles. In an instant of either madness or revelation, convinced that the lake means to take her small son from her, Kristin becomes determined to stop it. Three thousand miles away, on the eve of a momentous eve...

On the same August day in 1969 that a crazed hippie "family" led by Charles Manson commits five savage murders in the canyons above Los Angeles, a young ex-communicated seminarian arrives with images of Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift—"the two most beautiful people in the history of the movies"—tattooed on his head. At once childlike and violent, Vikar is not a cineaste but "cineautistic," sleeping at night in the Roosevelt Hotel where he's haunted by the ghost of D. W. Grif...

A monstrous apparatus has been found on the surface of the moon. It devours and destroys in ways so incomprehensible to humans that a new language must be invented to describe it and a new kind of thinking to understand it. So far, the human guinea pigs sent there in hopes of unraveling the murderous maze have all died terrible deaths—except the last, now on suicide watch. The ideal candidate won’t go insane, even as he feels the end approaching. And now they think they’ve found their man....

Lester Ferris needs a rest. He's spent his life being shot at, and Afghanistan was the last stop on his road to exhaustion. Mancreu is the ideal place for Lester to relax. A former British colony, soon to be destroyed because of its very special version of toxic pollution. But Lester Ferris makes a friend: a street kid with a comicbook fixation who will need a home - who might, Lester hopes, become an adopted son. But in a place like Mancreu, just what sort of hero will the boy need?

A FINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF THE YEARThe dark, dangerous, funny and uplifting new novel from the author of Annihilation, the inspiration for the major motion picture directed by Alex Garland.‘Neither of us had control of our monsters anymore’In a ruined city of the future, Rachel scavenges a strange creature from the fur of a despotic bear.She names him Borne.He reminds her of her homeland lost to rising seas, but her l...