Reminiscent of the novels of Nora Ephron, this brilliantly written, hilariously touching tale explores a contemporary woman's quirky love life. Katinka O'Toole has discovered that a degree from Harvard does not always lead to fame and fortune. Divorced and struggling to make a living as a writer, the highlight of her day has become the arrival of the mail. Or, more precisely, the mailman. Yes, she hopes for an acceptance letter, but she also has a fierce crush on Louie Capetti, her gorgeous postal carrier, who she hopes will carry her away to romantic bliss. So while she has taken to receiving her mail in "discount Dior", she also has to deal with her pretentious ex-husband (a noted Joycean scholar), her class-conscious mother, the unwanted affections of a corporate lawyer, and various other roadblocks to true love that plague smart women in today's society.

A funny and original novel about how to really get away from it all! You know life can't be going that well when getting hit by a car is the best thing that happens to you all week. But although not generally considered to be a Good Thing, for Jordan Landeua, desperate to escape her nightmare family, her dead-end job, and most of all her lying, cheating boyfriend, it's the perfect opportunity to start over. Coming to in hospital after the accident she decides to fake amnesia and reinvent herself. It's goodbye to Jordan the pushover and hello to the life she's always dreamed of. But then the unthinkable happens and she has to start over for real. Now Jordan must decide what (and who) honestly makes her happy and figure out how best to live a truly memorable life...

By national best-selling author, Robert Littell, whose most recent novel The Company received rave reviews across the nation, The Once and Future Spy is finally back in print. This is Littell at the top of his form, constructing a tale of espionage and counterespionage revealing the dirty tricks and dangerous secrets about the subjects he knows intimately the CIA and American history, past and present. Littell proves beyond all doubt that he is a storyteller of inimitable caliber. As Stephen Coonts put it, “Eric Ambler invented the modern spy novel. Robert Littell perfected it. The Once and Future Spy is a classic spy story.” At the center of Littell’s plot is an elite plan, so secret and so dangerous that its existence is known only to a tiny group of specialists within CIA headquarters. There is virtually no paper trail but, somehow, the plan has sprung a leak. The plotters must urgently trace it or face deadly consequences. Meanwhile, at work elsewhere on another highly sensitive project for "the Company" is an operative known as “the Weeder” a man obsessed with American history and one of its heroes. When the Weeder's and Washington's clandestine worlds collide, the present faces the past and disturbing moral choices are weighed against a shining patriotic dream. What is the truth? Whose truth should be believed?

"The virtuoso performances of a sophisticated stylist ... compact, skilful, and hilarious." - Randall Reid American modernist Nathanael West's first novel, The Dream Life of Balso Snell, is an anti-künstleroman; it's a portrait of a young artist discovering his powerlessness. The title character, a lyric poet, takes a nightmare tour through the bowels of the Trojan Horse, meeting a series of failed and frustrated writers along the way. Each surrealistic episode underscores the futility of the literary vocation and gleefully mocks the pipe dreams of amateurs who aspire to wealth and immortality. It was first published in 1931 in an edition of only 500 copies. "West's aesthetic sensibilities transform ugly material into a beautiful composition ... that, by its very artistry, celebrates that which it wishes to destroy" - Deborah Wyrick "[Balso] undertakes not just a disavowal of high modernism and the idealism of its art-for-art's sake aestheticism, but a critique of nothing less than the grand tradition of Western culture upon which it depends. That critique results in a thorough housecleaning, an operation that will dispense with everything from Plato to Picasso" - Jonathan Veitch 'Beneath this gloom that [West] was pouring at you, there was a streak of the most diabolical humor, you couldn't imagine ...' - John Fante "Scenes of extraordinary power ... vividly drawn grotesques." - F. Scott Fitzgerald "By applying the magpie aesthetics of Surrealism and T.S. Eliot to the 'American Grain, ' by delving into the popular culture and emerging not with surrender or refusal but a razor-cool critique, West became the great precursor to Heller, Pynchon, Philip K. Dick, George Saunders, and so much else." -Jonathan Lethem "[West's] novels say more about the way we live now - and the things that brought us to our present pass - than any other work of fiction I can think of." - The New Yorker "Nathanael West's stunning four novels are American tales, rooted in our transmogrifying soil. Morality plays they are, classified as comedies. They are indeed often funny. Funny as a crutch." - Elizabeth Hardwick, The New York Review of Books About the author Nathanael West published four novels during the thirty-six years of his life. The first, The Dream Life of Balso Snell, an experimental work written in the 1920s, was well-received but sales were poor. The second, the brilliant Miss Lonelyhearts, was published in 1933, a few months before his publisher went bankrupt. The third, A Cool Million, vanished into the depths of the Depression. It was at this point that West went to Hollywood to earn his living as a scriptwriter. From his Hollywood experience came The Day of the Locust. Publishing in 1939, the novel received very little recognition. The following year, on December 22nd, the day after his neighbour F. Scott Fitzgerald died of a heart attack, Nathanael West and his wife were killed in a California highway accident. When West died, at the age of thirty-seven, his originality and brilliance were little known outside an intensely admiring circle of fellow writers: William Carlos Williams, Edmund Wilson, S. J. Perelman, and others. Not until West's four novels were reissued in the late 1950s was he acknowledged as one of the most gifted writers of his generation. His masterpieces blend manic farce and despairing compassion, and their vision of an America awash in its own mass-produced fantasies, read like a prophecy of much that was to come in American literature and life.

" What do a chamber pot, a famous poet, a family feud, and a long-ago suitor all have in common? In this delicious laugh-out-loud new novel of love and loss, rivalry and reconciliation, treasure and trash, by acclaimed author Mameve Medwed (Mail, The End of an Error), we see what happens when past and present collide. . . ." Elizabeth Barrett Browning might have written about the length and breadth of love, but Abby Randolph has given up on all that, preferring to spend her time between her cluttered "needs work" apartment and the overcrowded antiques mart -- the optimistically named Objects of Desire. Yet Abby can't help but wonder what happened to her earlier passionate self who rejected the path set out for her, dropping out of Harvard and falling headfirst into an ill-fated love affair. . . . Then the "Antiques Roadshow" comes to town, and Abby turns up at the crack of dawn, artifact in hand, standing alongside thousands of Boston's hopefuls. But there, among the carousel horses, pipe sets, potbellied stoves, and bedraggled stuffed animals, it is Abby's rather ordinary -- and squalid -- piece of porcelain that gets the star treatment. Abby is barely able to enjoy her good news, for the moment the show airs, life comes back at her at full force. Everything changes: friendship, finances, family, love affairs, career, her view of others, and the way she sees herself. With this, her fourth novel, Medwed once again returns to Cambridge and, in her "sardonic, funny voice" ("Chicago Tribune"), "homes in on the rarified self-important atmosphere of our Ivy League institutions -- and the reflected snobbishness of the people who serve them" ("New York Times Book Review"). This novel is a gift to anyone who goes to a flea market or watches "Antiques Roadshow," anyone who has ever defied expectations, or, especially, anyone who has never been able to extinguish an old flame.

'A . . . tender love story . . . This book is alive. It pulses with warmth and intelligence' The Times A wickedly observed novel about falling in love at the end of your life, by the Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Finkler Question. At the age of ninety-something, Beryl Dusinbery is forgetting everything - including her own children. She spends her days stitching morbid samplers and tormenting her two carers with tangled tales of her husbands and affairs. Shimi Carmelli can do up his own buttons, walks without a frame and speaks without spitting. Among the widows of North London, he's whispered about as the last of the eligible bachelors. He forgets nothing -especially not the shame of a childhood incident that has long hung over him. There's very little left remaining for either of them. . . But perhaps just enough to heal some of the hurt inflicted along the way, and find new meaning in what's left. * SHORTLISTED FOR THE WINGATE LITERARY PRIZE 2020*

The hero of Carl Reiner's nutty and wonderful novel, Nat Noland, is hard at work on his fifth book, his own version of Genesis, concentrating on the relationship between Cain and Abel. While investigating their relationship, he starts to investigate his relationship with himself. His doting wife, Glennie, gets worried when she hears him having a loud, heated discussion while he's alone in the basement. Because he is unaware that he is talking to himself -- in two distinct voices -- she encourages him to seek the help of the famous Viennese psychiatrist Dr. Frucht. After a few sessions, Dr. Frucht elicits descriptions of Nat's recurring childhood dreams and the fact that he never knew his biological parents. In the lobby, when Nat bumps into the lovely Dr. Gertrude Trampleasure, an empathologist, she tells him how much he resembles her old teenage sweetheart, Buddy Keebler: "You two could be twins!" With the assistance of a private eye, Nat embarks on a quest to search for this "twin" and his unknown past, while continuing to work on his biblical novel, "NNNNN.

A New York story, a dark comedy, Balls: A Novel tells of the 30-year-old Henry Schiller, a songwriter and lounge-player, in love with a woman far younger and more musically gifted than himself, one with her eye on other men and the rise of her own career, whose crisis deepens when he discovers he has testicular cancer.

Featuring interviews with Chris Hardwick on The Nerdist Podcast and Marc Maron on WTF with Marc Maron Bad Sex On Speed is a savage, careening, hyper-real nightmare of a novel, taking us to the depths of Amphetamine America. Told with no concession to traditional narrative, in the voices of those in the grips and on the fringes, the stories that emerge are at once devastating, hysterical, and--perhaps most terrifying of all--going on all around you, all the time. Stahl digs deep into the psyche of the most demented and dispossessed among us, returning with a vision so unsparing that those not prepared to experience the screaming depths of speed psychosis up close and on the page should back slowly away and return to their lives unscathed.

Leib Goldkorn, aged musician, first appeared almost a quarter-century ago in The Steinway Quintet. Now Leib has replaced his magic flute with his phallus: it is love, longing, and the quest for sexual fulfillment that must stave off both his own death and the imminent destruction of the Jews. In Ice he rescues the celebrated skater Sonja Henie from Hitler's clutches. In Fire his paramour is Carmen Miranda. And in Water he engages in a South Sea Island intrigue with a famous swimming star of the 1940s. Meanwhile, in the present, Leib seeks consummation with three other inamoratas: Clara, his wife; Hustler model Miss Crystal Knight; and the critic Michiko Kakutani (causing a real-life literary scandal). In this "wickedly funny" (Elle) and no less heartbreaking novel, Leib Goldkorn emerges as one of American literature's most enduring, and endearing, creations. A New York Times Notable Book; a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year.

In this wise and funny novel, three single women, all expatriates living in Rome, face middle age: Margaret walked out on her husband as soon as her son was old enough to leave home, and she's never regretted it. She relishes her solitary lifestyle until illness threatens her independence. Katja, a former model, still believes that Mr. Right will come along, and she fights hard to stay beautiful until he does. Francesca has recently ended a relationship with a man she hopes will be her last big mistake. She wants to slink into a cozy old age alone, but the dark-eyed men of Rome are impossible to ignore. Cover illustration by Augusto Ranocchi Author photo by Rudi Weislein

An amazing comic novel by Kersh (Night and The City). It's the tale of a young man who enters the peculiar underworld of Cockney Theatre, and quickly finds himself wrapped up in scams, treachery, nitro-glycerine and midgets. This bawdy, rollicking novel, featuring in Sam Yudenow the most fittingly peculiar dialogue since Sheridan's Mrs. Malaprop graced the stage, is the last to be written by Kersh. Published in 1957, only a year after The Ginger Man's runaway success in London, the work may have suffered by its release from a mainstream UK publisher. (Where were the censors?) So to guarantee success this time around, when we print Fowlers End, we're going to go the extra mile and make sure to have ads in the back for some of the most spectular Olympia titles. Kersh deserves no less.

A dark, moving, and beautifully written novel about family, honor, and justice - exploring the world of young Russian immigrant Slava Gelman who stumbles from one tragicomic incident to another.

'I had this vision very clearly of a book in which I would record my total experience, and I knew how it should sound: with all the tones that no one ever admires, âe" the Gruesome, Tender, Needy, Sleazy, Boring, the Lurid and the Cute.âe(tm) In this way the hero of Adam Thirlwellâe(tm)s new novel describes the book you hold between your hands: a delirious tale of backchat and low tricks, all of which begin when our hero wakes beside a woman who is bleeding, unconscious and not, unfortunately, his wife... And then, of course, events get very much worse. SHORTLISTED FOR THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE 2015 WINNER OF THE E.M. FORSTER AWARD 2015

Take chocolate candy, add a family business at war with itself, and stir with an outsider's perspective. This is the recipe for True Confections , the irresistible new novel by Katharine Weber, a writer whose work has won accolades from Iris Murdoch, Madeleine L'Engle, Wally Lamb, and Kate Atkinson, to name a few. Alice Tatnall Ziplinsky's marriage into the Ziplinsky family has not been unanimously celebrated. Her greatest ambition is to belong, to feel truly entitled to the heritage she has tried so hard to earn. Which is why Zip's Candies is much more to her than just a candy factory, where she has worked for most of her life. In True Confections , Alice has her reasons for telling the multigenerational saga of the family-owned-and-operated candy company, now in crisis. Nobody is more devoted than Alice to delving into the truth of Zip's history, starting with the rags-to-riches story of how Hungarian immigrant Eli Czaplinsky developed his famous candy lines, and how each of his candies, from Little Sammies to Mumbo Jumbos, was inspired by an element in a stolen library copy of Little Black Sambo, from which he taught himself English. Within Alice's vivid and persuasive account (is her unreliability a tactic or a condition?) are the stories of a runaway slave from the cacao plantations of C�te d'Ivoire and the Third Reich's failed plan to establish a colony on Madagascar for European Jews. Richly informed, deeply moving, and spiked with Weber's trademark wit, True Confections is, at its heart, a timeless and universal story of love, betrayal, and chocolate. From the Hardcover edition.

As she lay on her deathbed, Stella Folger had some things to say to her husband. Like "You should paint the living room. I noticed there were brown spots on the ceiling." And "Be sure to take the car in for a tune-up every three months." In life, Stella always took care of business. In death, she's doing the same. Because Stella is communicating with Roger from her hotel room in Heaven-and it seems that entering paradise hasn't made her any less bossy. The truth is, she still cares about Roger. She worries about him. She loves him-so much, in fact, that she's determined to find him a new wife, someone to take care of him like she did. But as the celestial matchmaking progresses, one thing becomes clear: according to his departed wife, no woman on earth could be good enough for Roger Folger...

Mindy Solomon absolutely has to leave Miami. Florida is bad for her head and her hair. She dreams of a dancing career on Broadway and moves to New York, but after a string of failures and mishaps, she realizes that she needs to rethink her grand plan. Finding herself spending way too much time in the comedy club where her future ex-boyfriend works, she nervously goes up onstage one night. People laugh. Not in the places where Mindy thought they'd laugh, but hey, it's a start. Mindy and her friend Ursula Duran, a man-magnet model-slash-actress-slash-deeply troubled woman, soon embark on a wild ride that ricochets from New York's East Side Hotel for Women to the comedy circuit, auditions, photo shoots, film premieres, cable TV specials, Hollywood studios, late-night TV talk shows, and beyond. Surrounded by sleazy agents, sleazier lovers, and Ursula's even sleazier mother, the two find that life writes a few punch lines they weren't expecting...but through it all, they somehow manage to have the last laugh. Rita Rudner has crafted a debut novel that is not just funny, but moving and insightful. With its insider's viewpoint of the world of stand-up comedy, Tickled Pink is also, at its core, a touching tale of love, loss, female friendship, and forgiveness.

If you're a loner, beware. Abused and misunderstood, beware. Proud and lustful, beware. Dregs and druggies and transgressive artists, beware. If you're on your own, you might end up in the FORBIDDEN ZONE! Experience the bizarre and musical tale of a girl who travels to another world through a gateway in her family's basement. Follow the dysfunctional Hercules Family into the erotic and hellish catacombs of the Sixth Dimension. Meet the sinister and scintillating residents of the Forbidden Zone and party down with the Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo! Richard Elfman's transgressive cult sensation is now a novel, oozing with sex, mayhem, and body horror. This irreverent reimagining isn't for the faint of heart-or the easily offended!

These are the tales of Eternal Voyager. Tales from a distant future in which all life is virtual. Everyone in the Metaverse takes for granted the ability to teleport; to change shape; to create entire planets for their playgrounds and to make backup copies of themselves, so they cannot permanently die. And what do these people who live beyond the conventional universe do with their powers? Mostly they play RPGs. ***** "I loved Conor Kostick's Epic and these six short novels (more like long, self-contained chapters) are sort of related. They are set in a universe (called the Metaverse) where virtual characters have come alive and have fun and adventures." Reader Review ***** "From a plague of vampyrism to silver orb aliens, to talking to dragons and battling orcs, Eternal Voyager [party animal] tackles them all with sharp humour and several quick avatar changes. Have you ever solved your own murder? Join a romp through metaversal adventures which just about cover every possible realm and involves a broad spectrum of characters. Parallels between the avatar world and our own are unmistakable - sometimes amusing, sometime deadly serious. Highly recommended." Reader Review

Kathi Kamen Goldmark's first novel, And My Shoes Keep Walking Back to You, earned praise from an assortment of well-known authors including Amy Tan, Maya Angelou, Scott Turow, Judy Collins, Rita Mae Brown, Carl Hiaasen, and Roddy Doyle; and received positive reviews in O, the Oprah Magazine, the Miami Herald, the San Francisco Chronicle, and other publications. Completed shortly before her untimely death from breast cancer, Goldmark's Her Wild Oats is a honky-tonk road story about two unlikely pals: A smart young woman, Arizona Rosenblatt, leaves home and her role as assistant to a high-powered Hollywood executive when she discovers her husband is having an affair with a woman from Jews for Jesus; and thirteen-year-old Otis Ray "Wild Oats" Pixlie, boy genius harmonica player. In the end, Otis Ray learns what it means to be an adult, Arizona discovers the life she wants, and they both figure out the true meaning of love and family.