Most Popular Books by Julianna Baggott

A sweeping saga about a three generations of women wrestling with family secrets, including an unpublished novel by the family''s reclusive matriarch. New York Times Notable Book of 2015 "A mesmerizing tale of star-crossed love and of the dark secrets in a fracturing family. . . . It leaves you haunted, amazed, and, like every great read, irrevocably changed." —Caroline Leavitt, New York Times–bestselling author of Pictures of You The reclusive Harriet Wolf, revered author and family matriarch, has a final confession: a love story. Years after her death, as her family comes together one last time, the mystery of Harriet''s life hangs in the balance. Does the truth lie in the rumored final book of the series that made Harriet a world-famous writer, or will her final confession be lost forever? The Seventh Book of Wonders tells the moving story of the unforgettable Wolf women in four distinct voices: the mysterious Harriet, who, until now, has never revealed the secrets of her past; her fiery, overprotective daughter, Eleanor; and her two grown granddaughters—Tilton, the fragile yet exuberant younger sister, who''s become a housebound hermit, and Ruth, the older sister, who ran away at sixteen and never looked back. When Eleanor is hospitalized, Ruth decides it''s time to do right by a pact she made with Tilton long ago: to return home and save her sister. Meanwhile, Harriet whispers her true-life story to the reader. It''s a story that spans the entire twentieth century and is filled with mobsters, outcasts, a lonesome lion, and a home for wayward women. It''s also a tribute to her lifelong love of the boy she met at the Maryland School for Feeble-minded Children . . . With The Seventh Book of Wonders, Julianna Baggott offers a profound meditation on motherhood and sisterhood, as well as on the central importance of stories. This is a novel that affords its characters that rare chance we all long for—the chance to reimagine the stories of our lives while there''s still time. "Family secrets make for ripe hunting grounds for novelists. In this evocative book, those secrets hide mystery after mystery, like a set of Russian nesting dolls. . . . No spoilers, but we''ll say this: Baggott knows how and when to reveal answers for the ultimate emotional punch." ― Entertainment Weekly "A narrative that delivers a powerful sense of the meaning of motherhood and the bonds between sisters." ― Library Journal

Now a major motion picture starring Lucy Hale and Nat Wolff. A pair of romantic flameouts meet at a dull wedding and wind up entwined in a deserted coatroom. Shockingly, Jane and John decide not to have sex. Instead, they embark on a far more dangerous endeavor: sharing the stories of their past love affairs. They tell each other everything, aiming for radical honesty over polished seduction. Jaded as they may be, these two sense that they just might be soulmates. Which Brings Me to You, cowritten by bestselling authors Julianna Baggott (Pure, Harriet Wolf’s Seventh Book of Wonders) and Steve Almond (Candyfreak, All the Secrets of the World), is “poignant and meaningful...fresh and intriguing...a great story.”—Booklist. It has been brought to the screen by director Peter Hutchings (The Hating Game).

The stunning conclusion to the trilogy that began with Pure, recommended by People for those who loved The Hunger Games. With his father now dead, Partridge has assumed leadership of the Dome, one of the last few refuges from the ravaged wastelands of the outside world. At first, Partridge is intent on exposing his father''s lies, taking down the rigid order of the Dome, and uniting its citizens with the disfigured Wretches on the outside. But from his new position of power, things are far more complex and potentially dangerous than he could have ever imagined. On the outside, a band of survivors faces a treacherous journey to Dome. Pressia carries with her the key to salvation. If she can get it to the Dome, the Wretches could one day be healed and everyone might be able to put the horrors of the past behind them. Bradwell, the revolutionary, cannot forgive so easily. Despite Pressia''s pleas, he is determined to bring down the Dome and hold its citizens accountable for leaving the rest of the world to burn. El Capitan, the former rebel leader, wants to help Pressia save as many lives as possible--but he''s struggling to reconcile his newfound compassion with his vicious past. As former allies become potential enemies, the fate of the world is more uncertain than ever. Will humanity fall to destruction? Or will a new world rise from the ashes?

Julianna Baggott presents her beautifully written, riveting, breakout novel, PURE, the first volume in her new post-apocalypse thriller trilogy. We know you are here, our brothers and sisters . . . Pressia barely remembers the Detonations or much about life during the Before. In her sleeping cabinet behind the rubble of an old barbershop where she lives with her grandfather, she thinks about what is lost-how the world went from amusement parks, movie theaters, birthday parties, fathers and mothers . . . to ash and dust, scars, permanent burns, and fused, damaged bodies. And now, at an age when everyone is required to turn themselves over to the militia to either be trained as a soldier or, if they are too damaged and weak, to be used as live targets, Pressia can no longer pretend to be small. Pressia is on the run. Burn a Pure and Breathe the Ash . . . There are those who escaped the apocalypse unmarked. Pures. They are tucked safely inside the Dome that protects their healthy, superior bodies. Yet Partridge, whose father is one of the most influential men in the Dome, feels isolated and lonely. Different. He thinks about loss-maybe just because his family is broken; his father is emotionally distant; his brother killed himself; and his mother never made it inside their shelter. Or maybe it''s his claustrophobia: his feeling that this Dome has become a swaddling of intensely rigid order. So when a slipped phrase suggests his mother might still be alive, Partridge risks his life to leave the Dome to find her. When Pressia meets Partridge, their worlds shatter all over again.

A mosaic of memories, the poems of This Country of Mothers recollect Julianna Baggott’s experiences as both mother and daughter. With wit, compassion, aggression, and anxiety, Baggott examines her maternal history. She recalls moments of creation and destruction in her life, times of elation and of desperation that mold her as both a woman and a poet. This affecting study of motherhood is framed in issues of Catholicism and of poetry itself, challenging and espousing the roles of both. Throughout her poems, Baggott’s personal experiences embrace universal themes to birth poems in a language and style that is both powerfully feminine and accessibly human.

"In Instructions: Abject and Fuming, poet Julianna Baggott wrote some of the poems using words long lost from the English language, challenging our current language''s sense of restraint. Other poems are about faith, quite directly, set against the backdrop of contemporary life"--

Truman and his twin sister, Camille, have just met their grandmother. She whispers a tale about something called the Ever Breath, an amber orb that maintains the balance between our world and a dreamy one of imagination--and evil.

Lissy Jablonski was fifteen during the summer of 1985. That was the summer her father, a soft-spoken, seemingly passionless gynecologist, up and left her mother for a redheaded bank teller. The same summer Lissy and her mother disappeared from their quiet New Hampshire lives to have an adventure of their own amid a cast of unlikely characters, including a Valium-addicted ex-debutante and a suspected mobster. The summer the reliably comforting "girl talks" with her mother began to reveal startling secrets. It was also the summer that Lissy''s mother would ever after refer to as "the summer that never happened." Now an almost-thirty-years-old advertising executive in Manhattan, faced with her father''s imminent death and newly pregnant by her married ex-lover, an unmoored Lissy finds herself looking back across the years. Contending with her affections for an old boyfriend and his doomed marriage to a Korean stripper named Kitty Hawk, as well as the tangible legacies of that unmentionable summer with her mother, she realizes that she has become more like her mother than she ever could have imagined. In her debut novel, acclaimed short-story writer and poet Julianna Baggott has woven a precise, smartly comic, and compassionate tale of discovery and desire. With a lyrical sensibility, Baggott reminds us -- through the witty and unsparingly realistic voice of her narrator, Lissy -- of the pleasures and sorrows that can come from the most unreasonable realities of the heart.

Bestselling author Julianna Baggott delivers her mind-bending debut short-story collection, featuring an array of genres populated by deeply human characters, and with film rights to the stories already having been sold to Netflix, Paramount, Amblin, Lionsgate, and others! In the title story, set five minutes in the future where you not only have a credit score but also a dating score, a woman who’s been banished from all dating apps attends a weekly help group with others who have been “banned for life,” and finds herself falling in love. In “Backwards,” a twist on Benjamin Button, a woman reconnects with her estranged father as he de-ages ten years each day they spend together. In “Welcome to Oxhead,” all the parents in a gated community “shut off” when the power goes out. In “Portals,” a small town deals with hope and loss when dozens of portals suddenly open. In “How They Got In,” a grieving family starts to see a murdered girl in all of their old home videos. This fantastical collection from a unique voice contains a myriad of stories of the weird and wonderful. Julianna Baggott is a talented and clever guide, and I’d Really Prefer Not to Be Here with You will take the reader on a journey unlike anything they’ve experienced.

“Part primer, part credo, part arm-swinging gambol, this wonderful book is resonant with wit and insight.”—Linda Bierds Compulsions of Silkworms and Bees takes up the tradition of Rilke''s Letters to a Young Poet, but on poetry''s own terms. At first glance, Baggott''s candid counsel can be seen as a manual on writing poetry, written in poems. As the book unfolds, however, these poems take on the larger landscape of love and loss, the rigors of living fully, and the intricate, mysterious territory of our fragile, hardworking souls.

Women’s voices offering an intimate view into women’s lives Lizzie Borden in Love, a collection of poems by national bestselling author Julianna Baggott, offers poignant commentary in the voices of women as varied as Mary Todd Lincoln and Monica Lewinsky. The poems often focus on a particular moment in life: Katherine Hepburn discovers the dead body of her brother in an attic, or painter Mary Cassatt mourns the failure of her eyesight. Sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes ecstatic, the poems in this collection never fail the trust of the subjects of their intimate portrayals

Bestselling author Julianna Baggott presents the second volume in her new post-apocalyptic, dystopian thriller trilogy. We want our son returned. This girl is proof that we can save you all. If you ignore our plea, we will kill our hostages one at a time. To be a Pure is to be perfect, untouched by Detonations that scarred the earth, and sheltered inside the paradise that is the Dome. But Partridge escaped to the outside world, where Wretches struggle to survive amid smoke and ash. Now, at the command of Partridge''s father, the Dome is unleashing nightmare after nightmare upon the Wretches in an effort to get him back. At Partridge''s side is a small band of those united against the Dome: Lyda, the warrior; Bradwell, the revolutionary; El Capitan, the guard; and Pressia, the young woman whose mysterious past ties her to Partridge in ways she never could have imagined. Long ago a plan was hatched that could mean the earth''s ultimate doom. Now only Partridge and Pressia can set things right. To save millions of innocent lives, Partridge must risk his own by returning to the Dome and facing his most terrifying challenge. And Pressia, armed only with a mysterious Black Box containing a set of cryptic clues, must travel to the very ends of the earth, to a place where no map can guide her. If they succeed, the world will be saved. But should they fail, humankind will pay a terrible price . . .

The Miss America Family In this stunning follow-up to the acclaimed Girl Talk, a fading beauty-pageant veteran and her sixteen-year-old son team up as the delightfully nimble co-chroniclers of one family''s soulful, mordantly funny remembrance of things past. With her irreverent evocation of suburban dissolution, Julianna Baggott gives us a fictional world whose emotional complexity and comedic dysfunction closely resemble our own. It''s 1987 in Greenville, Delaware. Ezra Stocker is the son of an insomniac ex-Miss New Jersey named Pixie and a gay, absentee father; the stepson of an ex-quarterback dentist with a taste for turtle-patterned golf pants; and the grandson of a superstitious, stroke-addled woman with a passion for birds and some truly odd notions about fish and the family ancestry. He has created for himself a specific goal this summer vacation: to make a list of "Rules to Live By," his own set of guidelines to take him through life. A boy whose chief distinguishing traits include webbed toes and a knack for standardized aptitude tests, Ezra has no reason to expect that by the end of this particular summer, due largely to a doomed romance with a wealthy podiatrist''s daughter and a fateful episode with a gun, every one of those rules will be tossed out the window. It''s 1987 in Greenville, Delaware, but Pixie Stocker is consumed by the past. When she was Ezra''s age, she too sought the secret rules and how-to''s for negotiating life and attaining her dream of the all-American family. Pixie had found her answers in the comfortingly black-and-white strictures of Emily Post -- and later in the rigid absolutes of the beauty pageant circuit. Such certainties have long since vanished, replaced by the relentless haunting of her memory, and the ceaseless reverberations of a long-ago act of brutal violation. When Ezra''s grandmother, disoriented from her stroke, reveals to her daughter an explosive and longburied family secret, she spurs Pixie toward a series of bizarre and dangerous choices in an endeavor to reclaim her tragic past and, for better or worse, start anew. In the pages of The Miss America Family Julianna Baggott creates as unique a voice -- and as idiosyncratic a sensibility -- as any novelist has managed in years, extending her range and craft with dazzling, high-wire mixtures of absurdity and pathos, hilarity and darkness.

Our young narrator has many skins. Shedding and taking on new ones help them to find their way back home after leaving to avoid more tragedies and assaults. But what price do they have to pay to acquire the one true skin that fits the best? At the Publisher''s request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

In "The Virtual Swallows of Hog Island," a programmer finds himself working for the self-proclaimed "Bad-Boy of Virtual-Reality Therapy.” While his boss is breaking new ground and breaking the rules and his coworkers are engaging in questionable uses of the latest technology, the lonely programmer is in a state of mourning over his deep personal losses and must figure out his own form of therapy. At the Publisher''s request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

There seems to be a strange new disease spreading around the world. People are getting stuck in the past in mostly happy memories. They are straddling the line between now and then. Although the disease ends in death, the infected seem to go willingly. The epidemiologist seeks the answers to this viral mystery while she is falling in love and yet trying not to get infected, in Julianna Baggott''s Mental Diplopia. At the Publisher''s request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

For decades, science fiction has compelled us to imagine futures both inspiring and cautionary. Whether it''s a cryptic message encountered by a survey ship, the discovery of alien life in the distant reaches of space, a window into a future Earth, or the adventures of well-meaning AI, science fiction inspires our imagination and delivers a lens through which we can view ourselves and the world around us. At the very heart of the genre is short fiction, the secret lab that has introduced many of the new ideas, techniques, and voices prominent across all other media. In The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume Eight, Hugo and Locus Award-winning editor Neil Clarke provides a comprehensive year-in-review of 2022''s short fiction markets and selects thirty-one of its best stories from the wealth of magazines, anthologies, podcasts, and collections that make up the field. In these pages you''ll find works by both the new and established authors who are setting the pace for science fiction today and into tomorrow. Start your journey here.

Bestselling author Julianna Baggott delivers her mind-bending debut short-story collection, featuring an array of genres populated by deeply human characters, and with film rights to the stories already having been sold to Netflix, Paramount, Amblin, Lionsgate, and others! In the title story, set five minutes in the future where you not only have a credit score but also a dating score, a woman who''s been banished from all dating apps attends a weekly help group with others who have been "banned for life," and finds herself falling in love. In "Backwards," a twist on Benjamin Button, a woman reconnects with her estranged father as he de-ages ten years each day they spend together. In "Welcome to Oxhead," all the parents in a gated community "shut off" when the power goes out. In "Portals," a small town deals with hope and loss when dozens of portals suddenly open. In "How They Got In," a grieving family starts to see a murdered girl in all of their old home videos. This fantastical collection from a unique voice contains a myriad of stories of the weird and wonderful. Julianna Baggott is a talented and clever guide, and I''d Really Prefer Not to Be Here with You will take the reader on a journey unlike anything they''ve experienced.