"A beautiful and utterly original novel about making art, love, and children during the twilight of an empire Ben Lerner's first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, was hailed as "one of the truest (and funniest) novels. of his generation" (Lorin Stein, The New York Review of Books), "a work so luminously original in style and form as to seem like a premonition, a comet from the future" (Geoff Dyer, The Observer). Now, his second novel departs from...

"Set in the low hills just outside Oxford, Mississippi ... is the story of one year in the lives of four men and one little boy. ... There is Cortez Sharp, a farmer with a terrible secret and a newly dug pond he is stocking with catfish. Tommy Bright, from Arkansas, has a fish-stocking business he's all but gambled away. Cleve, a black neighbor down the road, has a daughter who's taken up with a man so unworthy he doesn't deserve to live. Little Jimmy,...

After losing his twin to a drowning accident and his wife to divorce, Zeke Cooper leaves his mother and two daughters behind in Tennessee and travels to Virginia horse country, where he considers his responsibility to repair his fractured family.