The White Room

At the turn of the 20th century, a young bride escapes the maddening prison of domestic life by serving the poor as an unlicensed nurse, but she risks the wrath of her lawyer husband, whose employer ruthlessly pursues and prosecutes unlicensed medical practitioners.

A gripping YA sci-fi thriller by German and Spiegel-bestselling author, Karl Olsberg. The Boy in a White Room was nominated for Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis 2018, Germany’s most prestigious youth fiction award. A fifteen-year-old boy wakes to find himself locked in a white, cube-shaped room. No windows. No doors. Total silence. He has no memories. No clue how he got there. No idea who he is. A computer-generated voice named Alice responds to his questions. Through her, he is able to access the internet. As the boy uncovers snippets of his story -- an attempted abduction, a critial injury, a murder -- it becomes clearer. But when some of the pieces don't fit, how can he tell what's real and what's not? Who can he trust? And who is he really?

More information to be announced soon on this forthcoming title from Penguin USA.

From celebrated South African novelist and playwright Craig Higginson, an international literary tale of loss and love. South African playwright Hannah Meade arrives in London for the opening night of her new play. She has arranged to meet Pierre, the student she was in love with when she taught English in Paris. During their time together, they lied their way towards truths they were too young and inexperienced to endure. Perhaps this time they will have a second chance. As the reader is drawn from contemporary London back to Paris on the eve of the war in Iraq, the mystery of past events is brought to vivid life in a series of dramatic, intriguing and deeply moving encounters. Written in layered, stark prose, The White Room lays bare many of our assumptions about language, identity, memory, loss and love.

As President Trump’s National Security Advisor, John Bolton spent many of his 453 days in the room where it happened, and the facts speak for themselves. The result is a White House memoir that is the most comprehensive and substantial account of the Trump Administration, and one of the few to date by a top-level official. With almost daily access to the President, John Bolton has produced a precise rendering of his days in and around the Oval Office. What Bolton saw astonished him: a President for whom getting reelected was the only thing that mattered, even if it meant endangering or weakening the nation. “I am hard-pressed to identify any significant Trump decision during my tenure that wasn’t driven by reelection calculations,” he writes. In fact, he argues that the House committed impeachment malpractice by keeping its prosecution focused narrowly on Ukraine when Trump’s Ukraine-like transgressions existed across the full range of his foreign policy—and Bolton documents exactly what those were, and attempts by him and others in the Administration to raise alarms about them. He shows a President addicted to chaos, who embraced our enemies and spurned our friends, and was deeply suspicious of his own government. In Bolton’s telling, all this helped put Trump on the bizarre road to impeachment. “The differences between this presidency and previous ones I had served were stunning,” writes Bolton, who worked for Reagan, Bush 41, and Bush 43. He discovered a President who thought foreign policy is like closing a real estate deal—about personal relationships, made-for-TV showmanship, and advancing his own interests. As a result, the US lost an opportunity to confront its deepening threats, and in cases like China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea ended up in a more vulnerable place. Bolton’s account starts with his long march to the West Wing as Trump and others woo him for the National Security job. The minute he lands, he has to deal with Syria’s chemical attack on the city of Douma, and the crises after that never stop. As he writes in the opening pages, “If you don’t like turmoil, uncertainty, and risk—all the while being constantly overwhelmed with information, decisions to be made, and sheer amount of work—and enlivened by international and domestic personality and ego conflicts beyond description, try something else.” The turmoil, conflicts, and egos are all there—from the upheaval in Venezuela, to the erratic and manipulative moves of North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, to the showdowns at the G7 summits, the calculated warmongering by Iran, the crazy plan to bring the Taliban to Camp David, and the placating of an authoritarian China that ultimately exposed the world to its lethal lies. But this seasoned public servant also has a great eye for the Washington inside game, and his story is full of wit and wry humor about how he saw it played.

In The Program Era, Mark McGurl offers a fundamental reinterpretation of postwar American fiction, asserting that it can be properly understood only in relation to the rise of mass higher education and the creative writing program. McGurl asks both how the patronage of the university has reorganized American literature and—even more important—how the increasing intimacy of writing and schooling can be brought to bear on a reading of this literature. McGurl argues that far from occasioning a decline in the quality or interest of American writing, the rise of the creative writing program has instead generated a complex and evolving constellation of aesthetic problems that have been explored with energy and at times brilliance by authors ranging from Flannery O’Connor to Vladimir Nabokov, Philip Roth, Raymond Carver, Joyce Carol Oates, and Toni Morrison. Through transformative readings of these and many other writers, The Program Era becomes a meditation on systematic creativity—an idea that until recently would have seemed a contradiction in terms, but which in our time has become central to cultural production both within and beyond the university. An engaging and stylishly written examination of an era we thought we knew, The Program Era will be at the center of debates about postwar literature and culture for years to come.

Dancing in the white room is slang for skiing or boarding in deep powder snow. The dancer is PD Bell, one of the best extreme skiers on the planet. Mallory Prescott, the woman who lives with him and loves him, is used to Bell's exploits. A patrolwoman at Whiteface Mountain near Lake Placid, New York, Mallory is no stranger to risk, but this time Bell is taking on the West Rib of Denali, highest and most dangerous mountain in North America. It's a descent that has never been done, though it's been tried. Five years ago, Bell tried it. The attempt nearly killed him. Five years ago he promised Mallory he wouldn't try again. Over the six weeks in which he's gone, Mallory begins to question her relationship with Bell. Does he really love her? Is he in it for the duration? What has loving him cost her? Mallory's life choices are thrown into stark relief when her daughter Emily takes a terrible fall. Together with her lifelong friend, Creech Creches, she must work her way through a maze of uncharted territory at a hospital miles from home. Dancing in the White Room is the story of the love we keep, the price we pay for that love, and the forgiveness it takes to hold on to what is precious.

"...please excuse yourself and apologize for the inconvenience of your incontinence." Arianna thought she had a good job working at ALACARC with Carrie Ritter, but when the mice went missing she got called into the office and then found herself brusquely escorted to an unmarked vehicle and confined within four walls of a prison cell deep in the bowels of the Totenbett Police Department. One lone visitor in seven years' confinement, madness rampant and time-keeping the only thing available to sustain her, her jail-keep is a giant Rat Sentry well-armed with weapons of antiquity and constantly searching for signs of escape. Not that Ben is faring much better, but at least he has his dreams, where Clarisa and the Mouse King not only keep him company and provide companionship but, eventually, they claim to be able to provide a way out of his four-walled cell-and a way back to his beloved Arianna, whose inexplicable arrest was the reason Ben went to the Totenbett Police Department in the first place. Mrs. Muñez is sick and tired of what's been happening in her hometown of Totenbett-from turning the Muñez house into a tourist attraction to generate revenue to recent national attention regarding the children born there: Telekinetic, pyrokinetic, facilitating children-often enrolled in Baby Baby Daycare Center, administered by the Totenbett Children's Society and "legitimized" by the Arizona Society for Psychical Research. Nevermind that she's also been doing well for herself over at Quercus Arizona, expanding that business from being merely an arboretum to being a manufacturer of home goods and furniture, purveyor of fine lumber, and provider of oak jewelry, trinkets, and watches: Mrs. Muñez is determined to get down to the bottom of Totenbett's problems, especially now that she's dealing with an unlikely pregnancy of her own...

The author spins a tale of excitement. Jonah Bosworth was only nineteen years old when he discovered a room full of unbelievably dark secrets, a room most people didn't make it out of alive. Four years later, Jonah tells the tale of the White Room, how he was forced to go in there, and how he managed to live to share the story.