Award-winning novelist, journalist, and playwright Rick Salutin takes us into the world of his protagonist, Max -- economist, leftist, and reluctant but incorrigible womanizer. Max’s amorous adventures begin at the age of eight when the young Casanova finds himself running from the scene of his first crime, a surreptitious kiss on the couch with the neighbour’s daughter. For the next few decades women become participants in Max’s awkward and often hilarious journey to self-discovery -- some willing, some reluctant, some unwitting. We follow Max from the 50s to the 90s, through shifting sexual codes and practices, from Toronto to London and Paris, and, most importantly, from one woman to another. He is doomed to repeat this history until he learns from it. Resonant with authority, experience, and self-deprecating insight, The Womanizer explores the riddles of growing up and the discovery that we understand ourselves only through others and that our most intimate moments are clues to our true selves.

What happens when four guys confront the enormity of being thirty? If it’s Sandy Stern, he worries about the fact that he’s a down-and-out artist about to lose both his apartment and his girl. If it’s Joel Harlowe, a materialistic drug dealer, his charmed life in the fast lane is leading to a dead end. If it’s Edmund Black, he’s crushed by the weight of the past, seeking a precarious refuge in madness. And if it’s George Wells, he’s a waiter with a unfinished Ph.D., trying to cope with the impending death of his once powerful politician father. So when Joel Harlowe plans the biggest, most outrageous Halloween party ever to hit Excelsior Springs, New York, all hell breaks loose. A series of absurd and tragic events reveals each of these men’s most secret dreams, hopes and fears, and transforms his life in this once elegant upstate town. Four friend emerge from the illusions of youth to discover who ther really are in this unforgettable chronicle of life in a typical American town, 80s style James Howard Kunstler, author of five critically acclaimed novels, has created a masterfully drawn tragi-comic universe, poignant and devastating

“A moving act of absolution . . . . This strong novel about a girl who is debased but never destroyed pushes the reader to a new level of understanding of the things people do—and the things that are done to them.”— Washington Post Book World She has hair of ginger and lovely green eyes, and she has just been transported with her family from Terezín to Auschwitz. In short order, her father commits suicide, and her mother and younger brother are dispatched to the gas chambers, but fifteen-year-old Hanka Kauderzová is still alive. Faced with the choice of certain death in the camp or working in a German military brothel, she chooses a chance at life. Passing for an Aryan, Hanka spends her days in the brothel cold, hungry, fearful, and ashamed. She is sustained only by her loathing of the men who visit her and by a fierce, indomitable will to live. This devastatingly beautiful novel explores and delineates the impossible choices one sometimes has to make in life, when the fabric of the world is rent asunder. Soaring beyond the nightmare, it leaves the reader with a transcendent sense of hope. Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade, Yucca, and Good Books imprints, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in fiction—novels, novellas, political and medical thrillers, comedy, satire, historical fiction, romance, erotic and love stories, mystery, classic literature, folklore and mythology, literary classics including Shakespeare, Dumas, Wilde, Cather, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

From his cult classic, I Smell Esther Williams, to his wildly popular and insightful column "Wild Kingdom" appearing in Esquire magazine every month, Mark Leyner has been giving us up close and personal encounters of the most hilarious kind for over a decade. Now, in his new novel The Tetherballs of Bougainville, Leyner shares with us, long last, the quintessential coming of age story that every writer, at some point, is compelled to tell. In the novel we meet young Mark Leyner, 13-years-old to be exact, as he waits in a New Jersey prison to witness his father's execution. Adolescence is never easy, and it just so happens that this junior high schooler is on deadline to turn in a screenplay for which he has already been awarded the Vincent and Lenore DiGiacomo/Oshimitsu Polymers America Award. And, as it was for all of us during out teenage years, nothing seems to go as planned. Written as autobiography, screenplay and movie review, The Tetherballs of Bougainville twists three familiar narrative forms into an outlandishly compelling story. Leyner's use of the media-driven formats brilliantly reflects our secret, shameful and hilarious desire to experience our private lives as mass entertainment. The Tetherballs of Bougainville skewers and celebrates American pop culture in the late twentieth century. Leyner's version of our lives is so deeply funny because it is so painfully true.

Seventeen-year-old Elizabeth Stein returns from a year of madness to discover that everything she’s ever known is falling apart, leaving her to fight for happiness in a life filled with confusion and turbulence as she untangles the mysteries of the past in this “beautiful and significant book about love” ( The New York Times). Seventeen going on thirty, Elizabeth Stein has just survived three suicide attempts and a stint of treatment in numerous mental hospitals. Returning to the mother that everyone desires and a father sliding into alcoholism, as well as two lovers and all the freedom in the world, she is unsure how to move forward with scars on her wrist, scars on her soul, and all of life’s problems dancing in her head. In this rich and sensual novel, as timeless as Catcher in the Rye and as moving as Ordinary People , Elizabeth sets out on a journey of discovery, courage, hope, and fear. After a year when the loneliness and pain seemed to have no end, she is back in the world again. Now is the time when she must search for the meaning in the madness, all while fighting for happiness and facing the future for the first time on her own.

This 1927 novel by Oppenheim revisits the plot device of a young man who comes into a large fortune suddenly and explores the class differences between the lower middle, and the upper class. In South America, a young Englishman steals the wife, baby girl, and money of two contemptible criminals. 15 years later, they come to England intent on revenge. In Norfolk, a young leather salesman, Martin Barnes, is wandering the streets late at night, when he is drawn into a mysterious and imposing house. While there, he is given a huge fortune by Lord Ardrington who is dying, and who wishes to disinherit his undeserving nephew. Suddenly wealthy, Martin begins to experience a change of attitude and inclination. He becomes a sudden snob, turning his nose up at his former friends and quickly abandoning (with cause) his fiancé. Returning to London, Martin meets Gerald Garnham, the disinherited nephew of Lord Ardrington, and Lady Blanche Banningham, beautiful, athletic, bohemian, and sympathetic. How will Martin handle his new fortune? Will the two evil men succeed in revenge against Ardrington and his adopted daughter. Will Martin find love, or even acceptance by society?