From one of America’s most original voices comes a profound and singular story about a young woman searching for her place in the world.
AVALON
by Nell Zink
Knopf, June 2022
(via Writers House)
After her mother joins a Buddhist colony and dies, Bran’s southern California upbringing is anything but traditional. Raised by her “common-law-stepfather” on Bourdon Farms—a plant nursery that doubles as a cover for a biker gang—Bran spends her days tending plants, slogging through high school, and imagining what life could be if she were born to a different family. And then she meets Peter—a beautiful, troubled, and charming trainwreck of a college student from the east coast—who launches his teaching career by initiating her into the world of literature and aesthetics. As the two begin a volatile and ostensibly doomed long-distance relationship, she searches for meaning in her own surroundings—attending disastrous dance recitals, house-sitting for strangers, and writing scripts for student films. She knows how to survive, but her happiness depends on learning to call the shots.
Exceedingly rich, brilliantly observed, and delivered with Zink’s masterful humor, AVALON is the irresistible story of one teenager’s reckoning with society at large, and the ways art and desire can clarify all that goes overlooked and cast aside.
Nell Zink grew up in rural Virginia. She has worked in a variety of trades, including masonry and technical writing. In the early 1990s, she edited an indie rock fanzine. Her books include The Wallcreeper, Mislaid, Private Novelist, Nicotine, and Doxology, and her writing has appeared in n+1, Granta, and Harper’s. She lives near Berlin, Germany.
Years ago, in a still little-understood phenomenon known as The Blinding, all of mankind lost the ability to see. Now, people can “see” again thanks to vidders, devices that transmit radar and other visual information directly to the brain. It feels like slightly enhanced vision, complete with night vision and, alas, pop-up ads. But now someone’s figured out to hack it.
LOVE is a fever dream of a novel about a young sex worker whose life blurs the boundaries between violence and intimacy, objectification and real love. Startlingly vulnerable and lyrically deft, Maayan Eitan’s debut follows Libby as she goes about her work in a nameless Israeli city, riding in cars, seeing clients, meeting and befriending other sex workers and pimps. In prose as crystalline as it is unflinching, Eitan brings us into the mind of her fierce protagonist, as Libby spins a series of fictions to tell herself, and others, in order to negotiate her life under the gaze of men. After long nights of slipping in and out of the beds of strangers, in a shocking moment of violence, she seizes control of her narrative and then labors to construct a life that resembles normalcy. But as she pursues love, it continually eludes her. She discovers that her past nights in cheap hotel rooms eerily resemble the more conventional life she’s trying to forge. 
Kate Burns grows up wanting attention from her Ma, but her Ma wants only money and Kate learns how to get both. She and her childhood friend, Lacey, run kissing lessons for cash in the janitor’s closet of Fenbrook High, and, just like that, they find themselves in the sex work industry. When Ma dies, Kate discovers that the men her Ma was always inviting over to their home were, in fact, clients. Ma was no stranger to sex work either.
The party starts out innocently enough. On a Friday afternoon, with only six weeks ‘til graduation, a few local teenagers find a garage door opener on the deck of a nearly-fully-constructed luxury home. By evening, word has gotten out, and virtually the entire the senior class is partying at the house, music blasting, booze flowing. The skaters are using the empty swimming pool as a half-pipe, some kid is selling coke in the upstairs bathroom, and the stoners are building a fire pit in the backyard. It’s a bona fide rager. Of course nobody plans to trash the house, but somehow, by the end of the night, the kitchen is flooded, there are holes in the walls, the deck is singed, and the custom glass windows are shattered. What should have been the best party of the year has become the town’s worst ever case of vandalism.