Kirsten Potter

"An audacious, darkly glittering novel about art, fame, and ambition set in the eerie days of civilization's collapse, from the author of three highly acclaimed previous novels. One snowy night a famous Hollywood actor slumps over and dies onstage during a production of King Lear. Hours later, the world as we know it begins to dissolve. Moving back and forth in time-from the actor's early days as a film star to fifteen years in the future, when a...

Why is America living in an age of profound economic inequality? Why, despite the desperate need to address climate change, have even modest environmental efforts been defeated again and again? Why have protections for employees been decimated? Why do hedge-fund billionaires pay a far lower tax rate than middle-class workers? The conventional answer is that a popular uprising against "big government" led to the ascendancy of a broad-based conservative...

Unwillingly brought together to care for their ailing mother, three sisters who were named after famous Shakespearean characters discover that everything they have been avoiding may prove more worthwhile than expected.

Brian Darby lies dead on the kitchen floor. His wife, state police trooper Tessa Leoni, claims to have shot him in self-defense, and bears the bruises to back up her tale. For veteran detective D. D. Warren it should be an open-and-shut case. But where is their six-year-old daughter? As the homicide investigation ratchets into a frantic statewide search for a missing child, D. D. Warren must partner with former lover Bobby Dodge to break the case....

Julene Bair has inherited part of a farming empire and means to create a family and preserve the Bair farm for the next generation. But part of her legacy is a share of the ecological harm the Bair farm has done as it pumps over two hundred million gallons out of the Ogallala aquifer each growing season. The rapidly disappearing aquifer is the sole source of water on the vast western plains, and her family's role in its depletion haunts her.

""Don't take women when you go exploring!" In 1932, Roy Chapman Andrews, the president of the Explorers Club, told hundreds of female students at Barnard College that women and exploration could never mix. He obviously didn't know a thing about either... The Girl Explorers is the inspirational and untold story of the women who broke apart the stuffy men's club and founded the Society of Woman Geographers (SWG), and how some key members -- including...

This richly textured novel tells a story of love and loss, sex and longing, and of the deceit that can lie at the heart of family relationships. Set in California, Liars and Saints follows four generations of the Catholic Santerre family from World War II to the present. In a family driven as much by jealousy and propriety as by love, an unspoken tradition of deceit is passed from generation to generation. When tragedy shatters their precarious domestic...

Who gets to shape the narrative of our times? The current moment is a battle royale over that foundational power, one in which women, people of color, non-straight people are telling other versions, and white people and men and particularly white men are trying to hang onto the old versions and their own centrality. In Whose Story Is This? Rebecca Solnit appraises what's emerging and why it matters and what the obstacles are.

"A revelatory reflection on America's role in the world from the perspective of a young woman who has been living in Istanbul for the past six years"--

Young Emma Wagner chafes at the constraints of Bethel colony, an 1850s religious community in Missouri that is determined to remain untainted by the concerns of the world. A passionate and independent thinker, she resents the limitations placed on women, who are expected to serve in quiet submission. In a community where dissent of any form is discouraged, Emma finds it difficult to rein in her tongue, and often doesn't even try to do so. This fuels...