Master of razor-edged literary humor Binnie Kirshenbaum returns with her first novel in a decade, a devastating, laugh-out-loud funny story of a writer’s slide into depression and institutionalization.

It’s New Year’s Eve, the holiday of forced fellowship, mandatory fun, and paper hats. While dining out with her husband and their friends, Kirshenbaum’s protagonist—an acerbic, mordantly witty, and clinically depressed writer—fully unravels. Her breakdown lands her in the psych ward of a prestigious New York hospital, where she refuses all modes of recommended treatment. Instead, she passes the time chronicling the lives of her fellow “lunatics” and writing a novel about what brought her there. Her story is a brilliant and brutally funny dive into the disordered mind of a woman who sees the world all too clearly.

Propelled by razor-sharp comic timing and rife with pinpoint insights, Kirshenbaum examines what it means to be unloved and loved, to succeed and fail, to be at once impervious and raw. Rabbits for Food shows how art can lead us out of—or into—the depths of disconsolate loneliness and piercing grief. A bravura literary performance from one of our most indispensable writers.

About the Author

Binnie Kirshenbaum is the author of the story collection History on a Personal Note and six novels, including On Mermaid Avenue, Hester Among the Ruins, An Almost Perfect Moment, and The Scenic Route. Her novels have been chosen as Notable Books of the Year by The Chicago Tribune, NPR, TIME, the San Francisco Chronicle, and The Washington Post. Her work has been translated into seven languages.

Praise For…

An Amazon Best Book of the Month for May 2019
A LitHub Most Anticipated Book of 2019

Praise for Rabbits for Food

“A bitingly funny, and occasionally heartbreaking, look at mental illness, love and relationships, with Kirshenbaum’s familiar black humor.”
—The New York Times

“Binnie Kirshenbaum has hit her considerable stride in Rabbits for Food. This novel is compulsive reading; it’s wonderfully paced, explosively funny and witty, and very, very wise about many grave things—but mostly about merely being human.”
—Richard Ford

“Psychiatric dayroom dark and just as funny, Rabbits for Food breaks down the mental breakdown into disquieting bite-sized pieces. It’s fast-paced and turbulent, but beautifully complex, and the details are stunning. So chew slowly—this is one you’ll want to savor.”
—Paul Beatty, author of The Sellout

“Brilliant insight and gleaming prose light up this report from the darkest interior, where Binnie Kirshenbaum’s acerbic, grieving, all-too clear-sighted protagonist has become imprisoned by despair. Enduring love is no match here for irremediable loss, but Kirshenbaum conducts us on the journey with steady authorial nerves, high-wire insouciance, quicksilver wit, and limitless compassion.”
—Deborah Eisenberg, author of Your Duck Is My Duck

“The female narrator I’ve been waiting for. Wickedly funny as well as seriously depressed, she waits while in the psychiatric hospital for the therapy dog that never shows up. Trying to read her face is ‘like trying to figure out what a napkin is thinking.’ Her mania flies ‘like a bat at night.’ A birthday card from her best friend Stella reads: ‘You Put the Fun in Dysfunctional.’ Binnie Kirshenbaum, the great novelist of female neurosis, has given us, in Rabbits for Food, the only story that really matters—a troubled soul deciding if life is worth living or not.”
—Darcey Steinke, author of Flash Count Diary 

“Every now and then you’re lucky enough to read a book that declares its own authority in a straightforward and unapologetic way. Rabbits for Food is that kind of book—haunted, astringent, and grimly funny, it explores without a grain of sentimentality or exaggeration the sort of crisis that any of us might fall prey to. In her ‘unlikeable’ protagonist, Binnie Kirshenbaum has created a hero for our time: articulate but misunderstood, loved but lonely, unsuccessful but not a failure, sophisticated to the point of jadedness, and on the verge of a devastating breakdown. Prepare to recognize yourself in both the petty details of her life and the profound distortions of her thinking.”
—Christopher Sorrentino, author of The Fugitives

“Rabbits for Food is startling and fascinating. Binnie Kirshenbaum’s complex and insightful novel looks seriously, and ironically, at the life of a clinically depressed woman, and her  commitment in a ‘psycho ward.’ Kirshenbaum might have written this with a blade, her wit is that sharp and deep. Cutting to the bone, Kirshenbaum allows no sentimentality in this  bracing novel. Rabbits for Food is stark in its descriptions, beautifully written, weirdly funny, and engrossing. I was riveted.”
—Lynne Tillman, author of Men and Apparitions

“Binnie Kirshenbaum is an unflinching teller of truths. She’s also sublimely funny. Rabbits for Food shows this immensely gifted writer at the height of her powers. It’s a pitch perfect account of what it means to descend into madness and belongs on the same shelf as Fitzgerald’s The Crack-Up.”
—Jenny Offill

“A joy-giving and hilarious letter from the realm of despair. Also, somehow, a gentle love story.  Marvelous and beautiful.”
—Rivka Galchen

“Funny, tender and heartbreaking, often in the same line, Rabbits for Food is a remarkable examination of the fault lines that run through us all. Wit and anger jostle for space with constant intelligence and subversiveness.”
—Tash Aw

“A burst of energy . . . our narrator examines her surroundings—the eccentric patients and doctors, the absurd daily activities, the Kafkaesque system—with a blunt and biting wit.”
—BuzzFeed Books

“A remarkable achievement that expertly blends pathos and humor . . . comparisons to One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest are obvious and warranted, but Kirshenbaum’s dazzling novel stands on its own as a crushing work of immense heart.”
—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

“Kirshenbaum is a remarkable writer of fiercely observed fiction and a bleak, stark wit; her latest novel is as moving as it is funny, and that—truly—is saying something.”
—Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review 

“In her first novel in a decade, Kirshenbaum reclaims her scepter as a shrewdly lacerating comedic writer, joining Sylvia Plath, Ken Kesey, Will Self, Ned Vizzini, Siri Hustvedt, and others in writing darkly funny and incisive fiction about life in a psychiatric hospital ward.”
—Booklist

“Warning: do not start this book if you don’t have several hours to devote to finishing it. This compelling story is both heartbreaking and hilarious . . . This book will make you laugh at what seems to be unlaughable and will make you question why someone who is labeled as crazy keeps making so much sense.”
—Chelsea Bauer, Union Ave. Books

Praise for Binnie Kirshenbaum

“Champagne—the driest, with giddy pinpoint bubbles—to accompany death row’s last meal.”
—The New York Times

“Kirshenbaum’s barrage of wit in both expository prose and dialogue has the reader in a titter while contemplating issues of recrimination and forgiveness.”
—Philadelphia Inquirer

“[Her characters are] deeply, even ludicrously flawed, but they’re not figures of fun because they all carry the existential burden of loneliness . . . funny and compassionate.”
—Washington Post

“A refreshingly gimlet-eyed examination of memory, one that cuts through the gauzy layers imposed by time.”
—Time Out New York

“A reality check, sobering truths about family, regret, loss, history . . . Just about the only thing she doesn’t serve up is a happy ending.”
—Daily Beast

“The cinematic, effortlessly beautiful descriptions will spark the reader’s imagination.”
—Chicago Tribune

“Lyrical and prosaic, laced with sardonic wit, often hilarious, yet filled with an overwhelming sadness.”
—The Review of Contemporary Fiction

“Kirshenbaum refuses to corral what is funny or sad into separate camps, but allows one to flip over into the other, creating unexpectedly poignant effects . . . A litany of longing, at once unsettling and deeply moving.”
—San Francisco Review of Books

“Binnie Kirshenbaum is a rare and remarkable writer.”
—Michael Cunningham, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Hours

“Binnie Kirshenbaum is a fearlessly unsentimental storyteller, a gifted comic writer and a thoughtful archaeologist of family life.”
—Gary Shteyngart, New York Times bestselling author of Super Sad True Love Story

“Bitter truths [are] rendered palatable by the delicious sauciness of Kirshenbaum’s prose.”
—San Francisco Chronicle

“Writing swift, pointed chapters . . . Kirshenbaum offers hilarious and sage advice in the battle of the sexes. Readers anxious for an entertaining female character to emulate, if only in their fantasies, will find themselves in good company.”
—People

“Kirshenbaum has an original voice and, even better, an original sensibility.”
—Los Angeles Times

As seen on CBS Sunday Morning

In Furious Hours, Casey Cep unravels the mystery surrounding Harper Lee’s first and only work of nonfiction, and the shocking true crimes at the center of it

“A triumph on every level . . . Casey Cep has excavated this mesmerizing story and tells it with grace and insight and a fierce fidelity to the truth.” –David Grann, best-selling author of Killers of the Flower Moon

Reverend Willie Maxwell was a rural preacher accused of murdering five of his family members for insurance money in the 1970s. With the help of a savvy lawyer, he escaped justice for years until a relative shot him dead at the funeral of his last victim. Despite hundreds of witnesses, Maxwell’s murderer was acquitted–thanks to the same attorney who had previously defended the Reverend.

Sitting in the audience during the vigilante’s trial was Harper Lee, who had traveled from New York City to her native Alabama with the idea of writing her own In Cold Blood, the true-crime classic she had helped her friend Truman Capote research seventeen years earlier. Lee spent a year in town reporting, and many more years working on her own version of the case.

Now Casey Cep brings this story to life, from the shocking murders to the courtroom drama to the racial politics of the Deep South. At the same time, she offers a deeply moving portrait of one of the country’s most beloved writers and her struggle with fame, success, and the mystery of artistic creativity.

About the Author

CASEY CEP is a writer from the Eastern Shore of Maryland. After graduating from Harvard with a degree in English, she earned an M.Phil in theology at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The New Republic, among other publications. This is her first book.

Praise For…

“A triumph on every level. One of the losses to literature is that Harper Lee never found a way to tell a gothic true-crime story she’d spent years researching. Casey Cep has excavated this mesmerizing story and tells it with grace and insight and a fierce fidelity to the truth.”
—David Grann, author of Killers of the Flower Moon

“It’s been a long time since I picked up a book so impossible to put down. Furious Hours made me forget dinner, ignore incoming calls, and stay up reading into the small hours. It’s a work of literary and legal detection as gripping as a thriller. But it’s also a meditation on motive and mystery, the curious workings of history, hope, and ambition, justice, and the darkest matters of life and death. Casey Cep’s investigation into an infamous Southern murder trial and Harper Lee’s quest to write about it is a beautiful, sobering, and sometimes chilling triumph.”
—Helen Macdonald, author of H is for Hawk

For Stella Fortuna, death has always been a part of life. Stella’s childhood is full of strange, life-threatening incidents—moments where ordinary situations like cooking eggplant or feeding the pigs inexplicably take lethal turns. Even Stella’s own mother is convinced that her daughter is cursed or haunted.

In her rugged Italian village, Stella is considered an oddity—beautiful and smart, insolent and cold. Stella uses her peculiar toughness to protect her slower, plainer baby sister Tina from life’s harshest realities. But she also provokes the ire of her father Antonio: a man who demands subservience from women and whose greatest gift to his family is his absence.

When the Fortunas emigrate to America on the cusp of World War II, Stella and Tina must come of age side-by-side in a hostile new world with strict expectations for each of them. Soon Stella learns that her survival is worthless without the one thing her family will deny her at any cost: her independence.

In present-day Connecticut, one family member tells this heartrending story, determined to understand the persisting rift between the now-elderly Stella and Tina. A richly told debut, The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna is a tale of family transgressions as ancient and twisted as the olive branch that could heal them.

About the Author

Juliet Grames was born in Hartford, Connecticut, and grew up in a tight-knit Italian-American family. A book editor, she has spent the last decade at Soho Press, where she is associate publisher and curator of the Soho Crime imprint. This is her first novel.

Praise For…

“As Stella strives to prove herself among the many messy and aggressive men in her life, Grames uses her heroine’s story to reflect on motherhood, inherited trauma and survival.”
— Time

“Grames’ witty and deeply felt family saga begins in a pre-WWII Italian village, where young Stella Fortuna learns the hard truths of life (and death) as she grows up with an abusive father and immigrates with her family to the U.S.”
— Entertainment Weekly

“This debut novel…follows one fascinating family as they make their way from Italy to America on the brink of the Second World War, only to find that some problems—often ones that have to do with who you are and who you’re related to—aren’t so easy to outrun.”
— Town & Country

“Takes a sprawling approach to several decades of American history, exploring the life of a woman whose proximity to death is far greater than most of her peers. Grames incorporates themes of immigration and inter-generational conflict into her work, creating a powerful and resonant work.”
— Vol 1Brooklyn

“Entrancing…. Grames’ debut will find broad appeal as both an illuminating historical saga and a vivid portrait of a strong woman struggling to break free from the confines of her gender.”
— BookPage

“[A] vivid and moving debut…. With her story of an “ordinary” woman who is anything but, Grames explores not just the immigrant experience but the stages of a woman’s life. This is a sharp and richly satisfying novel.”
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Fictionalized details from the life of the author’s own grandmother inspire this tale of an Italian American family and the complicated woman at its heart…. Readers who appreciate narratives driven by vivid characterization and family secrets will find much to enjoy here…. [Grames is] an author to watch.”
— Booklist

“Juliet Grames has written a magnificent debut, creating a deeply felt, richly imagined world based upon her family history. The dark beauty of Calabria and the promise of America sets the stage for Stella’s volatile life…. Moody, original and profound.”
— Adriana Trigiani, bestselling author of Tony’s Wife

“Reading The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna is like listening to the rollicking stories of your Italian grandmother— full of memorable characters and speckled with fascinating bits of history. This is a fantastic and timely family story.”
— Jessica Shattuck, bestselling author of The Women in the Castle

“Juliet Grames has delved into the family secrets of an Italian American family and the ways in which those secrets, as well as slights and injustices, can both cross oceans and trickle down through the generations. This quintessential American immigrant story feels important right now, and I highly recommend it.”
— Lisa See, author of Snow Flower and the Secret Fan and The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane

“The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna  is a novel you can’t put down. Above all, I envied its sureness, an effortless control remarkable in a debut novel, in which the shrewd and humorous confidence of the narrator’s voice powers a breakout saga of immigration and familial love.”
— Gina Apostol, author of Insurrecto

By the widely celebrated New York Times bestselling author of Last Call—the powerful, definitive, and timely account of how the rise of eugenics helped America close the immigration door to “inferiors” in the 1920s.

A forgotten, dark chapter of American history with implications for the current day, The Guarded Gate tells the story of the scientists who argued that certain nationalities were inherently inferior, providing the intellectual justification for the harshest immigration law in American history. Brandished by the upper class Bostonians and New Yorkers—many of them progressives—who led the anti-immigration movement, the eugenic arguments helped keep hundreds of thousands of Jews, Italians, and other unwanted groups out of the US for more than 40 years.

Over five years in the writing, The Guarded Gate tells the complete story from its beginning in 1895, when Henry Cabot Lodge and other Boston Brahmins launched their anti-immigrant campaign. In 1921, Vice President Calvin Coolidge declared that “biological laws” had proven the inferiority of southern and eastern Europeans; the restrictive law was enacted three years later. In his characteristic style, both lively and authoritative, Okrent brings to life the rich cast of characters from this time, including Lodge’s closest friend, Theodore Roosevelt; Charles Darwin’s first cousin, Francis Galton, the idiosyncratic polymath who gave life to eugenics; the fabulously wealthy and profoundly bigoted Madison Grant, founder of the Bronx Zoo, and his best friend, H. Fairfield Osborn, director of the American Museum of Natural History; Margaret Sanger, who saw eugenics as a sensible adjunct to her birth control campaign; and Maxwell Perkins, the celebrated editor of Hemingway and Fitzgerald. A work of history relevant for today, The Guarded Gate is an important, insightful tale that painstakingly connects the American eugenicists to the rise of Nazism, and shows how their beliefs found fertile soil in the minds of citizens and leaders both here and abroad.

About the Author

Daniel Okrent was the first public editor of The New York Times, editor-at-large of Time, Inc., and managing editor of Life magazine. He worked in book publishing as an editor at Knopf and Viking, and was editor-in-chief of general books at Harcourt Brace. He was also a featured commentator on two Ken Burns series, and his books include Last Call, The Guarded Gate, and Great Fortune, which was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize in history. He lives in Manhattan and on Cape Cod with his wife, poet Rebecca Okrent.

Praise For…

“A frighteningly timely book about a particularly ugly period in American history, a bigotry-riddled chapter many thought was closed but that shows recent signs of reopening… One of the narrative’s great strengths is the author’s inclusion of dozens of minibiographies illuminating the backgrounds of the racist politicians and the promoters of phony eugenics ‘research’… [A] revelatory and necessary historical account.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Engrossing… this fascinating study vividly illuminates the many injustices that the pseudoscience of eugenics inflicted on so many would-be Americans.” —Publishers Weekly

“A sobering, valuable contribution to discussions about immigration.” —Booklist

“A steely-eyed look at America’s eugenics movement.” —Library Journal

“What’s so unsettling about Daniel Okrent’s spellbinding history of a previous immigration controversy is how it resonates with today’s debate. Insightful, unsparing, and totally absorbing, this book frames the discussion against a compelling historical backdrop that describes the gap between the American ideal and the American reality.” —Lawrence Wright, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Looming Tower and God Save Texas

“In The Guarded Gate, Daniel Okrent has again taken a largely forgotten epoch in American history and brilliantly brought it back to life. Written with a grace that any novelist would envy, Okrent’s book tells the story of the immigration battles of the early twentieth century in a way that’s both fascinating on its own terms, but also, alas, all-too-relevant to today’s news.” —Jeffrey Toobin, CNN, author of American Heiress

“Our two oceans have protected and insulated us, but they have also helped to incubate less attractive features. Daniel Okrent artfully and faithfully records our (earlier) dismal record on immigration and how those home-grown racist and xenophobic policies metastasized into exports with horrific worldwide consequences. This is a masterful, sobering, thoughtful, and necessary book.” —Ken Burns

“The Guarded Gate delivers a timely history of anti-immigrant fever centered in the elite eugenics movement a century ago. In this masterful narrative, sprinkled with wit, Daniel Okrent shows how the lesser angels of our heritage ‘depopulated Ellis Island as if by epidemic,’ leading to cycles of disgrace and reform.” —Taylor Branch, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63

“Daniel Okrent is a gifted social historian. In this powerful, fast-paced, and highly relevant chronicle of bad science and fearful prejudice, Okrent helps us understand how and why our country lost its way about a century ago. Read it so that history does not find new ways of repeating itself.” —Evan Thomas, author of The War Lovers