Eliza Naumann, a seemingly unremarkable nine-year-old, expects never to fit into her gifted family: her autodidact father, Saul, absorbed in his study of Jewish mysticism; her brother, Aaron, the vessel of his father’s spiritual ambitions; and her brilliant but distant lawyer-mom, Miriam. But when Eliza sweeps her school and district spelling bees in quick succession, Saul takes it as a sign that she is destined for greatness. In this altered reality, Saul inducts her into his hallowed study and lavishes upon her the attention previously reserved for Aaron, who in his displacement embarks upon a lone quest for spiritual fulfillment. When Miriam’s secret life triggers a familial explosion, it is Eliza who must order the chaos. Myla Goldberg’s keen eye for detail brings Eliza’s journey to three-dimensional life. As she rises from classroom obscurity to the blinding lights and outsized expectations of the National Bee, Eliza’s small pains and large joys are finely wrought and deeply felt. Not merely a coming-of-age story, Goldberg’s first novel delicately examines the unraveling fabric of one family. The outcome of this tale is as startling and unconventional as her prose, which wields its metaphors sharply and rings with maturity. The work of a lyrical and gifted storyteller, Bee Season marks the arrival of an extraordinarily talented new writer.

ONE OF NPR’S BEST BOOKS OF 2019

2020 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence Finalist

2019 National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist

2020 Chautauqua Prize Finalist

“A daringly inventive parable of female creativity and motherhood” (O, The Oprah Magazine) from Myla Goldberg, the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of Bee Season, about a female photographer grappling with ambition and motherhood–a balancing act familiar to women of every generation.

Feast Your Eyes, framed as the catalogue notes from a photography show at the Museum of Modern Art, tells the life story of Lillian Preston: “America’s Worst Mother, America’s Bravest Mother, America’s Worst Photographer, or America’s Greatest Photographer, depending on who was talking.” After discovering photography as a teenager through her high school’s photo club, Lillian rejects her parents’ expectations of college and marriage and moves to New York City in 1955. When a small gallery exhibits partially nude photographs of Lillian and her daughter Samantha, Lillian is arrested, thrust into the national spotlight, and targeted with an obscenity charge. Mother and daughter’s sudden notoriety changes the course of both of their lives, and especially Lillian’s career as she continues a life-long quest for artistic legitimacy and recognition.

“A searching consideration of the way that the identities and perceptions of a female artist shift over time” (The New Yorker), Feast Your Eyes shares Samantha’s memories, interviews with Lillian’s friends and lovers, and excerpts from Lillian’s journals and letters–a collage of stories and impressions, together amounting to an astounding portrait of a mother and an artist dedicated, above all, to a vision of beauty, truth, and authenticity. Myla Goldberg has gifted us with “a mother-daughter story, an art-monster story, and an exciting structural gambit” (Lit Hub)–and, in the end, “a universal and profound story of love and loss” (New York Newsday).

In this short story by bestselling author Myla Goldberg (originally published in Harper’s magazine), an unemployed artist lands a freelance job that gives him a strange brand of influence over the population of a distant island nation and places him in an equally strange relationship with the woman who hires him.

From the bestselling author of Bee Season comes an astonishingly complex psychological drama with a simple setup: two  eleven-year-old girls, best friends and fierce rivals, go into the woods. Only one comes out . . .

Leaders of a mercurial clique of girls, Celia and Djuna reigned mercilessly over their three followers. One after­noon, they decided to walk home along a forbidden road. Djuna disappeared, and for twenty years Celia blocked out how it happened.

The lie Celia told to conceal her misdeed became the accepted truth: everyone assumed Djuna had been abducted, though neither she nor her abductor was ever found. Celia’s unconscious avoidance of this has meant that while she and her longtime boyfriend, Huck, are professionally successful, they’ve been unable to move forward, their relationship falling into a rut that threatens to bury them both.

Celia returns to her hometown to confess the truth, but her family and childhood friends don’t believe her. Huck wants to be supportive, but his love can’t blind him to all that contra­dicts Celia’s version of the past.

Celia’s desperate search to understand what happened to Djuna has powerful consequences. A deeply resonant and emotionally charged story, The False Friend explores the adults that children become—leading us to question the truths that we accept or reject, as well as the lies to which we succumb.

From the critically acclaimed bestselling author of BEE SEASON comes a travelogue through the magical and historic city of Prague – a city of vast beauty and wonderfully intimate detail. In TIME’S MAGPIE, Myla Goldberg uses her eye for the wonder of tiny objects and everyday things to put us in touch with the essence of this haunting and fantastical place. Goldberg takes us through the city’s historic streets, some eerily transformed by the devastating flood of 2002; to Lunapark, home to bumper cars, go-carts, and a discomfiting array of Technicolor confections; and through Strahov Monastery, where the cabinets of curiosity display everything from butterfly specimens to a supposedly real jabberwocky. We attend an anti-war protest in Old Town square and watch the skateboarders do tricks on a ramped marble pedestal that once held a statue of Lenin.

From the critically acclaimed bestselling author of Bee Season comes a travelogue through the magical and historic city of Prague – a city of vast beauty and wonderfully intimate detail. In Time’s Magpie, Myla Goldberg uses her eye for the wonder of tiny objects and everyday things to put us in touch with the essence of this haunting and fantastical place. Goldberg takes us through the city’s historic streets, some eerily transformed by the devastating flood of 2002; to Lunapark, home to bumper cars, go-carts, and a discomfiting array of Technicolor confections; and through Strahov Monastery, where the cabinets of curiosity display everything from butterfly specimens to a supposedly real jabberwocky. We attend an anti-war protest in Old Town square and watch the skateboarders do tricks on a ramped marble pedestal that once held a statue of Lenin.

The triumphant follow-up to the bestselling Bee Season, Wickett’s Remedy is an epic but intimate novel about a young Irish-American woman facing down tragedy during the Great Flu epidemic of 1918.

Wickett’s Remedy leads us back to Boston in the early part of the 20th century and into the world of Lydia, an Irish-American shop girl yearning for a grander world than the cramped confines of South Boston. She seems to be well on her way to the life she has dreamed of when she marries Henry Wickett, a shy medical student and the scion of a Boston Brahmin family. Soon after their wedding, however, Henry shocks Lydia by quitting medical school and creating a mail-order patent medicine called Wickett’s Remedy. And then just as the enterprise is getting off the ground, the Spanish Influenza epidemic of 1918 begins its deadly sweep across the world, drastically changing their lives.

In a world turned almost unrecognizable by swift and sudden tragedy, Lydia finds herself working as a nurse in an experimental ward dedicated to understanding the raging epidemic — through the use of human subjects.

Meanwhile, we follow the fate of Henry’s beloved Wickett’s Remedy as his one-time business partner steals the recipe and transforms it into QD Soda, a wildly popular soft drink.

Based on years of research and evoking actual events, Wickett’s Remedy perfectly captures the texture of the times and brings a colourful cast of characters vividly to life, including a sad and funny chorus of the dead. With wit and dexterity, Goldberg has fashioned a novel that is both charming and grand. Wickett’s Remedy announces her arrival as a major novelist.

South Boston belonged to Lydia as profoundly and wordlessly as her thimble finger. Her knowledge of its streets was more complete than any atlas, her mental maps reflecting changes that occurred from season to season, day to day, and hour to hour. Each time she left 28 D Street — one among a row of identical triple-decker houses, the tenements lining the street like so many stained teeth — her route reflected this internal almanac. . . .

For ten years this was enough. Then in fifth grade, Lydia saw a city map and realized her entire world was a mitten dangling from Boston’s sleeve. Across the bridge lay Washington Street — the longest street in all New England — which began like any other but then continued north, a single determined thread of cobblestone that wove itself through every town from Boston to Providence. Once Lydia saw Washington Street she knew she could not allow it to exist without her.
—excerpt from Wickett’s Remedy