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Claire Messud's new novel, The Woman Upstairs, is fiercely intelligent and urgently intimate, written with precision, humor, and an incredible command of language. Nora Eldridge, an elementary school teacher in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is living a life of quiet desperation after her mother's death when she meets the Shahids — Sirena, a successful and enchanting Italian artist; Skandar, a brilliant professor of the ethics of history; and their charming son, Reza, a child in Nora's class. Nora falls in love with them all, in varying ways, and these relationships bring her ecstasy, artistic freedom, and, eventually, shattering pain and fury.

In a starred review, Kirkus called The Woman Upstairs "an astonishing feat of creative imagination: at once self-lacerating and self-pitying, containing enough truth to induce squirms....Brilliant and terrifying," and in another starred review, Booklist raved, "Messud’s scorching social anatomy, red-hot psychology, galvanizing story, and incandescent language make for an all-circuits-firing novel about enthrallment, ambition, envy, and betrayal. A tour de force." The Woman Upstairs may be the renowned author's finest work yet.

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Jill Owens: What was the genesis of The Woman Upstairs?

Claire Messud: There were several, I think. If you'll bear with me, I can tell you a few.

One impetus was a feeling as a reader that I had all my life read and greatly appreciated the ranting voices of misfit, dissatisfied, or antihero men, but I didn't know of any female equivalents. So part of me wanted to write in the voice of a woman whose voice had not been heard.

Another aspect for me was the whole question of the interior life. I think that's something that is absolutely universal. In Chekhov's "The Lady with the Little Dog," the protagonist — who's had many affairs but who has for the first time fallen in love with his mistress — reflects on the fact that what is most important to him, only he knows. It's completely secret, and nobody around him is aware of the things that matter to him most. Then he has the apprehension that this is true for everybody, so that all around him, he doesn't actually know what's most important to all the people he thinks he knows.

Anthony Marra's debut novel is a marvel. A Constellation of Vital Phenomena describes, in astonishingly beautiful prose, five days in a rural village and bombed-out hospital in Chechnya during wartime. As the characters — including a doctor, a hunted child, a historian, and an informant — try to adapt and survive, their histories, connections, and desires are unveiled. Marra has created a breathtaking work of haunting, evocative fiction.

Ann Patchett calls A Constellation of Vital Phenomena "Simply spectacular....If this is where Anthony Marra begins his career, I can't imagine how far he will go," and Maile Meloy declares, "You will finish it transformed." We are proud to have chosen A Constellation of Vital Phenomena for Volume 39 of Indiespensable.

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Jill Owens: The first sentence of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena sets the tone immediately. "On the morning after the Feds burned down her house and took her father, Havaa woke from dreams of sea anemones." Was that always the way the book began?

Anthony Marra: No, actually. That was one of the final sentences I wrote. It had a different opening paragraph for the first five drafts of the ...

Growing up in an Italian-American family in Danvers, Massachusetts, Domenica Ruta had a life filled with violence and poverty but also imagination and love. Ruta's mother, Kathi, who "believed it was more important to be an interesting person than it was to be a good one," cycled between welfare and great wealth, helped get her daughter into a prestigious boarding school, and gave her Oxycontin. In gorgeous, inventive prose, Ruta chronicles her coming of age, relationships, and struggles to define herself outside of her family. Darkly funny and painfully honest, With or Without You is an essential, necessary work.

We whole-heartedly agree with Amy Bloom's assessment: "In the world of memoir, Mary Karr's and Geoffrey Wolff's exceptional books burn and brighten, like actual stars among strings of tinsel. With or Without You is like that. I will read whatever Domenica Ruta writes."

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Jill Owens: How did With or Without You come about?

Domenica Ruta: I started toying around with the idea of writing a memoir. My initial idea was to write linked short essays but not an actual memoir — short essays about my life, but not with any kind ...

George Saunders fans have long been stalwart champions of his work, recommending CivilWarLand in Bad Decline and Pastoralia to anyone who would listen, pushing copies of In Persuasion Nation and The Braindead Megaphone into the hands of the unconverted. He's always had critical praise, from no less than Thomas Pynchon ("An astoundingly tuned voice — graceful, dark, authentic, and funny") and Tobias Wolff ("Scary, hilarious, and unforgettable....George Saunders is a writer of arresting brilliance and originality"). He's also won a MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. But with the publication of his first collection of short stories in six years, Tenth of December, Saunders has produced a most unlikely work: a wildly popular short story collection.

Jennifer Egan says, "Tenth of December shows George Saunders at his most subversive, hilarious, and emotionally piercing. Few writers can encompass that range of adjectives, but Saunders is a true original — restlessly inventive, yet deeply humane." And Dave Eggers raves, "You want stories that are actually about something — stories that again and again get to the meat of matters of life and death and justice and country? Saunders. There is ...

"Today is Christmas Eve. Today is my birthday. Today I am fifteen. Today I buried my parents in the backyard. Neither of them were beloved." Those dramatic first lines of Lisa O'Donnell's debut novel, The Death of Bees, launch the story of two sisters, 15-year-old Marnie and 12-year-old Nelly, who, in alternating voices (along with the voice of their neighbor Lennie), describe their lives growing up very poor in Scotland after burying their parents, Izzy and Gene. Struggling to keep their parents' death a secret as well as pay the bills, go to school, and maintain some semblance of a normal life, Marnie and Nelly cope in very different ways.

Though those opening sentences set the scene for the darkness of the subject matter, they don't necessarily convey how funny the book is, nor how realistic and beautifully written the girls' voices are. The Herald (Scotland) raves, "The Death of Bees is compelling stuff, engaging the emotions from the first page and quickly becoming almost impossible to put down."

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Jill Owens: What was the genesis of The Death of Bees?

Lisa O'Donnell: I suppose the story has always been inside ...

Leni Zumas's writing crackles. Her books are sharp, bleak, funny, and possibly dangerous. Her profoundly disquieting debut novel, The Listeners, portrays a world twisted on its axis by loss. Quinn is a musician and a survivor of a fractured and eccentric childhood marred by the death of her younger sister. Now in her mid-30s, years after the disintegration of her band, Quinn is at loose ends. Her relationships with her family and her ex-bandmates have been shaped by tragedy and haunted by the past. Zumas's style is hypnotic, and Quinn is a hyperalert, fascinating narrator.

Matthew Dickman is a very unusual creature: a famous poet, at least here in Portland. At his Powell's reading on October 1, he drew over 200 people for a standing-room-only crowd. He's a local — he grew up in Southeast Portland (as did his twin brother, Michael, who is also an award-winning poet) and is now the poetry editor for Tin House. Dickman's first book, All American Poem, won the American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize. His new collection, Mayakovsky's Revolver, is the winner of the May Sarton Poetry Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The collection centers around his older brother's suicide and includes poems of grief and joy, elegies and celebrations. Tony Hoagland raves, "Dickman is big news.... His work will make you love poetry again."

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Jill Owens: In the introduction to your first book, All American Poem, Tony Hoagland wrote, "We turn loose such poets into our culture so that they can provoke the rest of us into saying everything on our minds." Do you think that's true of your work or other poets' work, and if so, how does that play ...

J. Robert Lennon's first book, The Light of Falling Stars, got a glowing review from the New Yorker: "Lennon's impressive first novel — psychologically nuanced, richly detailed, unexpectedly comic — offers us an unsentimental examination of the ways in which we find and lose those we love, both before and after death." His novels and short stories have been exploring those same themes of mortality, relationships, and identity in the 15 years since. Familiar, Lennon's newest novel, is his most impressive work yet.

Elisa (Lisa) Brown is driving back from visiting her son Silas's grave when a crack in her windshield disappears and her world shifts completely. She's suddenly in a parallel world, where the last several years of her life have gone very differently and both her sons, Silas and Sam, are still alive. Library Journal raved in a starred review, "Stunning, convoluted, and compelling, this thoroughly mesmerizing work is recommended for discerning readers who savor an unusual story brilliantly presented." We agree, which is why we're thrilled to have chosen Familiar as Volume 36 of our Indiespensable subscription club.

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Jill Owens: How did Familiar begin? I heard ...

Emma Straub is a delight. Her first book of short stories, Other People We Married, was praised by Kirkus Reviews for its "fresh voice from a writer who deserves discovery," and Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia!, raved, "Emma Straub is worthy of our adoration. These stories are wise, surprising, hilarious, and unforgettable."

Her debut novel, Laura Lamont's Life in Pictures, is a beautifully written, epic story of the transformation of Elsa Emerson, a Midwestern girl who escapes a family tragedy and remakes herself as the movie star Laura Lamont. Lorrie Moore wrote, "Emma Straub is a magician, full of brilliance and surprise." In the following interview, Emma describes the best part of bookselling as being able to say, "You are going to love this. This book is incredible. You have to read this." Happily in this case, Emma's words apply to her own lovely new book.

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Jill Owens: The stories in Other People We Married are set mostly in the present. Why did you want to write a novel that began in the ...

John Brandon's debut novel, Arkansas, is a blackly funny chronicle of the lawless world of a couple of drug runners in the Southeast. His second, Citrus County, is a coming-of-age/love story between 14-year-old Toby and 13-year-old Shelby — even though Toby kidnaps Shelby's little sister (unbeknownst to Shelby) and is keeping her in a bunker underground. Both novels drew a committed, if not enormous, readership, and strong praise. The San Francisco Chronicle raved, "I finished the novel a true believer: that Citrus County is gorgeous and deserves to be read widely; and that John Brandon is a great young writer who can — and probably will — do just about anything."

A Million Heavens is just as tautly written and intelligent but perhaps less directly menacing, and it's a warmer book. Set outside of Albuquerque in a small town called Lofte, the novel has a large collection of characters, including Reggie, a recently deceased musician; Cecelia, Reggie's friend and a member of his band, Shirt of Apes; Soren, a boy who fell into a coma after playing the piano for the first time; Dannie, a woman who has left her entire life behind ...