Likes [Paperback]

A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR:Library Journal,Electric Literature, The New York Public Library,PopMatters
A Finalist for theLos Angeles TimesBook Prize and the Story Prize

National Book Award finalist Sarah Shun-lien Bynums highly anticipated return weaves together like and unlike, mythic and modern

In nine stories that range from the real to the unreal, strange to familiar, funny to frightening, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum reminds us why her wildly original debut,Madeleine Is Sleeping, and her masterfulMs. Hempel Chronicleshave become contemporary classics--celebrated and beloved.

In a nimble dance of lightness and gravity,Likesexplores the full range and contradictions of our contemporary moment. Through unexpected visitors, Waldorf school fairs, aging indie-film stars, the struggle to gain a foothold in the capitalist shell-game of work, the Instagram posts of a twelve-year-oldthese stories of friendship and parenthood, celebrity and obsession, race and class and the passage of time, form an engrossing collection that is both otherworldly and suffused with the deceitful humdrum of everyday life.

For readers of Joy Williams, George Saunders, Lauren Groff, and Deborah Eisenberg,Likeshelps us see into our unacknowledged desires and, in quick, artful, nearly invisible cuts, exposes the roots of our abiding terrors and delights.

Sarah Shun-lien Bynum is the author of the novelsMs. Hempel Chronicles, a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, andMadeleine Is Sleeping, a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize. Her fiction has appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including theNew Yorker,Ploughshares,Tin House,The Best American Short Stories,and theO. Henry Prize Stories. The recipient of a Whiting Writers Award and an NEA Fellowship, she was named one of 20 Under 40 fictilÓ8