Sara Rubin

On stage during a snowstorm King Lear collapses, and the actor playing him, Hollywood star Arthur Leander, never gets up. Young Kirsten Raymonde, child actress, watches from the wings as Arthur dies. A former paparazzo-turned-EMT in the audience tries to save him, leaving to discover the early stages of a fast-spreading flu have descended on the city and the world. Arthur's former wife reflects on their time together and the graphic novel that is her great work of art. Fifteen years after Arthur's death, the Traveling Symphony tours the Great Lakes region of a sparsely populated, greatly altered United States. Time is marked as before and after the flu, and life—like the remnants of civilization—is still ever-fragile. An actress with the company, Kirsten bears an inscription from Star Trek on her arm—“Because survival is insufficient”—that is echoed on a Symphony caravan. In the town of St. Deborah by the Water, the Traveling Symphony provokes a local tyrant, a crisis that follows them onto the road. Emily St. John Mandel's New York Times bestselling Station Eleven is at once a gripping post-apocalyptic page turner and a hopeful, elegiac masterpiece that explores the connections that bind humanity. Shortlisted for the National Book Award and winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award, among many other honors and accolades, Station Eleven has joined the classic pantheon of imagined futures.

Now an HBO® Series from J.J. Abrams (Executive Producer of Westworld), Misha Green (Creator of Underground) and Jordan Peele (Director of Get Out) The critically acclaimed cult novelist makes visceral the terrors of life in Jim Crow America and its lingering effects in this brilliant and wondrous work of the imagination that melds historical fiction, pulp noir, and Lovecraftian horror and fantasy. Chicago, 1954. When his father Montrose goes missing, 22-year-old Army veteran Atticus Turner embarks on a road trip to New England to find him, accompanied by his Uncle George—publisher of The Safe Negro Travel Guide—and his childhood friend Letitia. On their journey to the manor of Mr. Braithwhite—heir to the estate that owned one of Atticus’s ancestors—they encounter both mundane terrors of white America and malevolent spirits that seem straight out of the weird tales George devours. At the manor, Atticus discovers his father in chains, held prisoner by a secret cabal named the Order of the Ancient Dawn—led by Samuel Braithwhite and his son Caleb—which has gathered to orchestrate a ritual that shockingly centers on Atticus. And his one hope of salvation may be the seed of his—and the whole Turner clan’s—destruction. A chimerical blend of magic, power, hope, and freedom that stretches across time, touching diverse members of two black families, Lovecraft Country is a devastating kaleidoscopic portrait of racism—the terrifying specter that continues to haunt us today.