After falling in love with an underage girl and stirring the wrath of her older sister, New York native Miles Heller flees to Brooklyn and shacks up with a group of artists squatting in the borough's Sunset Park neighborhood.

"The New York Times bestselling author of Falling presents a warm, wise, and wonderfully vivid novel about a mother who asks her three estranged daughters to come home to help her end her life. Ronni Sunshine left London for Hollywood to become a beautiful, charismatic star of the silver screen. But at home, she was a narcissistic, disinterested mother who alienated her three daughters. As soon as possible, tomboy Nell fled her mother's overbearing presence to work on a farm and find her own way in the world as a single mother. The target of her mother's criticism, Meredith never felt good enough, thin enough, pretty enough. Her life took her to London--and into the arms of a man whom she may not even love. And Lizzy, the youngest, more like Ronni than any of them, seemed to have it easy, using her drive and ambition to build a culinary career to rival her mother's fame, while her marriage crumbled around her. But now the Sunshine sisters are together again, called home by Ronni, who has learned that she has a serious disease and needs her daughters to fulfill her final wishes. And though Nell, Meredith, and Lizzy have never been close, their mother's illness draws them together to confront the old jealousies and secret fears that have threatened to tear these sisters apart. As they face the loss of their mother, they will discover if blood might be thicker than water after all.."--

Rowan and Neil, in a committed long-distance relationship while attending different colleges in Boston and New York City, face the challenges of navigating the first months of college life and personal struggles as they strive to make their relationship last.

"You need to bribe someone into giving you weed? Don't worry, just step into this court room and call the defendant a murderer. You're a rich, lonely man and you want the joy of company? Don't worry, just buy up people's birthdays, and you'll have friends calling every day. You need to get girls into bed? Don't worry, you know a writer you can strong-arm into writing you a very persuasive story. You're stood on the edge of a very high building, with all of your wretched sorrows? Don't worry, fly already! In these 22 short stories, absurdity leaks out of the cracks in the everyday, wild capers reveal painful emotional truths, and the bizarre is just another name for the familiar. Wickedly funny and thrillingly smart, Fly, Already is a collage of the surrealism of life, written by veteran commentator on the circus farce that is the heart."--Provided by publisher.

Swann in Love , a book within a book contained within the first volume, Swann's Way , of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time , is an excellent entry point into the author's work and a compelling standalone novel. In its pages, the portrait of a stormy love affair between the courtesan Odette de Crécy and upper-class socialite Charles Swann serves as a springboard for the author's meditations on love and jealousy Swann's Way : https://www.amazon.com/dp/1520135157 We once dreamt of possessing the heart of our beloved; later, the feeling that we already possess a certain woman's heart could be all we need so that we fall in love. So at an age where it would seem that a woman's beauty and how it aligns with our tastes would play a larger role than ever, a love can be born, a love of the most physical kind even, without there having been any initial foundation of desire. At this stage in our life, we have already been touched by love more than once, it no longer evolves on its own, following its unknown, fatal laws before our passive and astonished hearts. We come to its aid; calling on our memories, yielding to suggestion, we act it out. In recognizing one of its symptoms, we recall, we recreate the others. As we possess its song, engraved on our heart in its entirety, we need only for a woman to provide the opening strands, filled with the admiration we feel at recognizing another's beauty, and we know what comes next. And if she starts in the middle, at the part where our two hearts come together, where we talk of existing each only for the other, we know this tune well enough that we can at once join our partner in the passage where she awaits us.

An ugly duckling as a child, Jodie Bentley had two dreams in life - to be beautiful and rich. She's achieved the first, with a little help from a plastic surgeon, and now she's working hard on the second. Her philosophy on money is simple: you can either earn it or marry it. Marrying is easy, it's getting rid of the husband afterwards that's harder, that takes real skill. But hey, practice makes perfect

Jules is confronted headlong and all at once by a series of challenges to his principles, livelihood, and home, forcing him to grapple with his complex past and find a way forward. He risks fraud to save his terminally ill infant grandson, matches wits with a renegade insurance investigator, is drawn into an act of savage violence, and falls deeply, excitingly in love with a young cellist a third his age. He forges a denouement that is staggering in its humanity, elegance, and truth.

Presenting the complete texts of eight of the world’s greatest plays, this important volume illuminates the changing concept of tragedy from Sophocles to O’Neill. Some of the world’s greatest dramas unfold on these pages. In the powerful and famous plays of Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Euripedes, Oedipus makes his disastrous marriage, Prometheus struggles against Zeus to break his painful chains, and the Love Goddess, Aphrodite, takes her revenge on the Theban prince who slighted her. Shakespeare’s King Lear suffers at the hands of his two evil daughters. The great Scandinavian dramatists Ibsen and Strindberg fearlessly present stories of infidelity and social disease, while Desire under the Elms, Eugene O’Neill’s savage picture of primitive desires in modern New England, rounds out this excellent anthology. Including important essays by noteworthy critics and philosophers, this book is an ideal companion to the editors’ Eight Great Comedies. Featured Plays: Prometheus Unbound (Aeschylus) Oedipus the King (Sophocles) Hippolytus (Euripedes) King Lear (William Shakespeare) Ghosts (Henrik Ibsen) Miss Julie (August Strindberg) On Baile’s Strand (William Butler Yeats) Desire under the Elms (Eugene O’Neill) Also includes essays by Aristotle, Hume, Emerson, Tillyard, Richards, and Krutch.

The Stars Shine Down is Sidney Sheldons twelfth and most passionate novel, set against the glamorous world of international business and featuring a complex and compelling heroine faced with a series of life-shattering decisions. Lara Cameron is young and beautiful. Rising from a past she seeks to repress, she achieves her wildest ambition, creating a much envied business empire. Then, overnight, all that has gone before, her fortune, her achievements, and her marriageeverythingis at risk. Paul Martin, a brilliant but mysterious lawyer who is captivated by Lara, finally is faced with her desire for independence and his own compulsion no to let her go. Howard Keller, Laras longtime friend and mentor, is torn between loyalty to her and maintaining a terrifying secret, one that must never be revealedespecially to Lara. It is Philip Adler who offers Lara an exciting new world, but at a devastating price that threatens to destroy them both. From Scotland to Nova Scotia, New York to London, Rome to Reno, The Stars Shine Down is classic Sidney Sheldon, featuring the startling shocks and amazing surprises millions of readers have come to expect and love. It is also a highlight in a continuum of virtuoso performances by the man everyone turns to for irresistible romance, cliff-hanger suspense, and the totally unexpected.

It is Christmas 1183, and Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine are together in the castle at Chinon. Henry flaunts his new mistress; Eleanor plots against him with their sons. They will do anything they can to hurt each other, and they love each other to distraction.

The most exciting historical retelling of 2023, Fair Rosaline is a subversive, powerful untelling of Romeo and Juliet by New York Times bestselling author Natasha Solomons, perfect for readers of Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell and Hester by Laurie Lico Albanese. Was the greatest ever love story a lie? The first time Romeo Montague sees young Rosaline Capulet he falls instantly in love. Rosaline, headstrong and independent, is unsure of Romeo's attentions but with her father determined that she join a convent, this handsome and charming stranger offers her the chance of a different life. Soon though, Rosaline begins to doubt all that Romeo has told her. She breaks off the match, only for Romeo's gaze to turn towards her cousin, thirteen-year-old Juliet. Gradually Rosaline realizes that it is not only Juliet's reputation at stake, but her life. With only hours remaining before she will be banished behind the nunnery walls, will Rosaline save Juliet from her Romeo? Or can this story only ever end one way? Bold, lyrical, and chillingly relevant, this spellbinding prequel to Shakespeare's best-known tale reveals the dark subtext of the timeless story of star-crossed lovers, shattering everything we thought we knew about Romeo and Juliet. "Irresistible." --Jennifer Saint, Sunday Times bestselling author of Ariadne "I have not been able to stop thinking about this book." --Elodie Harper, Sunday Times bestselling author of The Wolf Den "I absolutely devoured this thought-provoking, female-centric take on Shakespeare." -- Jillian Cantor, USA Today bestselling author of Beautiful Little Fools

"The New York Times bestselling author of Labor Day and After Her returns with a poignant story about the true meaning--and the true price--of friendship. Drinking cost Helen her marriage and custody of her seven-year-old son, Ollie. Once an aspiring art photographer, she now makes ends meet taking portraits of school children and working for a caterer. Recovering from her addiction, she spends lonely evenings checking out profiles on an online dating site. Weekend visits with her son are awkward. He's drifting away from her, fast. When she meets Ava and Swift Havilland, the vulnerable Helen is instantly enchanted. Wealthy, connected philanthropists, they have their own charity devoted to rescuing dogs. Their home is filled with fabulous friends, edgy art, and dazzling parties.Then Helen meets Elliott, a kind, quiet accountant who offers loyalty and love with none of her newfound friends' fireworks. To Swift and Ava, he's boring. But even worse than that, he's unimpressed by them. As Helen increasingly falls under the Havillands' influence--running errands, doing random chores, questioning her relationship with Elliott--Ava and Swift hold out the most seductive gift: their influence and help to regain custody of her son. But the debt Helen owes them is about to come due. Ollie witnesses an accident involving Swift, his grown son, and the daughter of the Havillands' housekeeper. With her young son's future in the balance, Helen must choose between the truth and the friends who have given her everything"--

Twenty-nine-year-old widower Doug Parker finds his life spiraling out of control as he struggles to come to terms with grief, love, family, and suburbia while dealing with a bossy, pregnant twin sister who urges him to begin dating again, a younger sister planning her wedding, a mother dealing with her ailing husband, and a hostile teenage stepson.

The seductively beautiful, street-smart, and powerful Lucky Santangelo, star of four of Jackie Collins’s previous international bestsellers returns in this “winning sequel” ( People ). In Chances, Lucky grew up in a top crime family; in Lucky, she was married three times; in Lady Boss, she took on Hollywood and bought Panther Studios; and in Vendetta, she fought off a lifelong enemy to keep the studio, and her husband. Now, in Dangerous Kiss, when a member of her family is brutally gunned down in a random holdup, her fury knows no bounds. While she is tracking the killer, her relationship with her husband, charismatic writer and director Lennie Golden, is put to the test. Then, suddenly, into her life comes a man from her past—a man with a dangerous kiss . This is a story of raw anger, love, lust, murder, and revenge, and at its white-hot center is Lucky Santangelo, a strong, exciting woman who dares to take chances—and always wins.

In 1907 novelist James Joyce was engaged as Svevo's English tutor in Trieste, and in the process they developed a friendship. When Joyce read Svevo's novel La coscienza di Zeno (Confessions of Zeno), he was so impressed with it that he encouraged the writer to publish it, and later helped to promote it. While Joyce became enthralled with the latest novelistic techniques -particularly the stream of consciousness and indirect free style- to get inside the mind of his characters, Svevo accomplished the same thing without the new tools. Zeno's consciousness is not the flowing of a stream, but the cascading, torrential avalanche of details that is the essence of humanness in all aspects: from low double entry bookkeeping, business, and economics, to manipulations of the Stock Market, to moral dilemmas, and raw passions. Italo Svevo's Confessions of Zeno belongs to the comic tradition of Don Quixote and Tristram Shandy, though not in the realist manner, but rather in a psychological vein. After reading a few pages the reader will have no doubt that he is confronting a paradoxical juxtaposition between things of the mind and things themselves. Zeno -the narrator and eponymous hero- on the surface is a hypochondriac, neurotic, quirky, solipsistic, self-examining and self-serving bourgeois; deep down, however, he is love and goodness incarnate, not by design but by the whims of life. Although Svevo wrote many other works, his opus magnum will remain his Confessions of Zeno. While Proust and others wrote lengthy psychological novels, by their sheer length and density, they become soporific. Not so with Zeno, which is intriguing, suspenseful, engaging-never boring, a magnificent tour de force.

From the writer of the award-winning Game of Thrones series for HBO based on the books of George R. R. Martin. Over the course of eight tales, often with an appealing touch of the surreal, we are introduced to a record comany exec searching for a rock star, an inexperienced Russian soldier trapped between his murderous colleagues and a clever old woman, a faded football star recalling his lost chance at love, an acress who has a shot at a role that will free her from a lifetime of waitressing, a young man who kidnap's his ex-girlfriend's father's ashes, and other young people on the cusp of discovery, jubilation or loss. As he evokes the various states of agony and pleasure - humiliation, rebellion, cameraderie, and desire - Benioff displays a profound understanding of how single moments lead to transformation, and how sadness can be illuminated by a humorous flip side.

Losing a friend in high school, Leora continues on to college, her career, and falling in love, while her lost friend's grandfather, Bill, remembers his experiences in Amsterdam and Austria.

An astounding new feat of storytelling from Brian Selznick, the award-winning creator of The Invention of Hugo Cabret and Wonderstruck. A ship. A garden. A library. A key. In Kaleidoscope, the incomparable Brian Selznick presents the story of two people bound to each other through time and space, memory and dreams. At the center of their relationship is a mystery about the nature of grief and love which will look different to each reader. Kaleidoscope is a feat of storytelling that illuminates how even the wildest tales can help us in the hardest times.

With language at once lyrical, bare-knuckled, and unabashedly candid in Andre Aciman casts a shimmering light over each facet of desire to probe how we ache, want, and waver, and ultimately how we sometimes falter and let go of the very ones who may want only to offer what we crave from them. Behind every step the hero takes, his hopes, denials, fears, and regrets are ready to lay their traps. Yet the dream of love casts its halo. We may not know what we want. We may remain enigmas to ourselves and others. But sooner or later we discover who we've always known we were.[Bokinfo]

Alfred Kazin burst onto the American literary scene in 1942, when his first book, "On Native Grounds," announced the arrival of an important new literary critic. "A Walker in the City," his second, signaled the other direction his career would follow: author of several intense, intimate, and lyrical memoirs. Years later he would admit how he struggled writing it. He thought he wanted to concentrate on New York itself, describing a series of walks around the city. But what emerged was the story of his own boyhood encounters with it, starting from Brownsville, the Brooklyn Jewish neighborhood of his birth, then stretching out to alluring, mysterious Manhattan and from there to the world. Each walk is simultaneously a journey out and a journey in: outward, from the neighborhood to the land beyond, the great, electric, canyoned streets of the city; inward, into his own soul, as it grows and falls in love with books and language and literature, with music and metaphysics and politics, with the city and the country and the world and rapturously tries to take them all in.