1206 results for "Literary Fiction"

A Little Yellow Dog An Easy Rawlins Novel

Walter Mosley
Easy finally believes he can lead a simple life and leave his haunted past behind him—until he meets a woman who changes everything. November 1963: Easy's settled into a steady gig as a school custodian. It's a quiet, simple existence—but a few moments of ecstasy with a sexy teacher will change all that. When the lady vanishes, Easy's stuck with a couple of corpses, the cops on his back, and a little yellow dog who's nobody's best friend. With his not-so-simple past snapping at his heels, and with enemies old and new looking to get even, Easy must kiss his careful little life good-bye—and step closer to the edge.
Atria Books 2002-11-01 384 pages

The Female Persuasion A Novel

Meg Wolitzer
A New York Times Bestseller “A powerful coming-of-age story that looks at ambition, friendship, identity, desire, and power from the much-needed female lens." — Bustle “Ultra-readable.” — Vogue From the New York Times -bestselling author of The Interestings , comes an electric novel not just about who we want to be with, but who we want to be . To be admired by someone we admire—we all yearn for this: the private, electrifying pleasure of being singled out by someone of esteem. But sometimes it can also mean entry to a new kind of life, a bigger world. Greer Kadetsky is a shy college freshman when she meets the woman she hopes will change her life. Faith Frank, dazzlingly persuasive and elegant at sixty-three, has been a central pillar of the women’s movement for decades, a figure who inspires others to influence the world. Upon hearing Faith speak for the first time, Greer—madly in love with her boyfriend, Cory, but still full of longing for an ambition that she can’t quite place—feels her inner world light up. And then, astonishingly, Faith invites Greer to make something out of that sense of purpose, leading Greer down the most exciting path of her life as it winds toward and away from her meant-to-be love story with Cory and the future she’d always imagined. Charming and wise, knowing and witty, Meg Wolitzer delivers a novel about power and influence, ego and loyalty, womanhood and ambition. At its heart, The Female Persuasion is about the flame we all believe is flickering inside of us, waiting to be seen and fanned by the right person at the right time. It’s a story about the people who guide and the people who follow (and how those roles evolve over time), and the desire within all of us to be pulled into the light.
Penguin 2019-05-21 480 pages

Brooklyn Crime Novel

Jonathan Lethem
Named a Best Book of the Year by: Boston Globe * New Yorker * NPR * PopMatters From the bestselling and award-winning author of The Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn comes a sweeping story of community, crime, and gentrification, tracing more than fifty years of life in one Brooklyn neighborhood. "A blistering book. A love story. Social commentary. History. Protest novel. And mystery joins the whole together: is the crime 'time'? Or the almighty dollar? I got a great laugh from it too. Every city deserves a book like this." -- Colum McCann, author of Apeirogon and Let the Great World Spin On the streets of 1970s Brooklyn, a daily ritual goes down: the dance. Money is exchanged, belongings surrendered, power asserted. The promise of violence lies everywhere, a currency itself. For these children, Black, brown, and white, the street is a stage in shadow. And in the wings hide the other players: parents; cops; renovators; landlords; those who write the headlines, the histories, and the laws; those who award this neighborhood its name. The rules appear obvious at first. But in memory's prism, criminals and victims may seem to trade places. The voices of the past may seem to rise and gather as if in harmony, then make war with one another. A street may seem to crack open and reveal what lies behind its glimmering facade. None who lived through it are ever permitted to forget. Written with kaleidoscopic verve and delirious wit, Brooklyn Crime Novel is a breathtaking tour de force by a writer at the top of his powers. Jonathan Lethem, "one of America's greatest storytellers" (Washington Post), has crafted an epic interrogation of how we fashion stories to contain the uncontainable: our remorse at the world we've made.
HarperCollins Publishers 2024-09-24 384 pages

Sing You Home A Novel

Jodi Picoult
From the award-winning, #1 New York Times bestselling author whom USA TODAY calls a “master of the page-turner,” comes the spectacular story of a woman’s complex quest to form a family. Every life has a soundtrack. All you have to do is listen. Music has set the tone for most of Zoe Baxter’s life. There’s the melody that reminds her of the summer she spent rubbing baby oil on her stomach in pursuit of the perfect tan. A dance beat that makes her think of using a fake ID to slip into a nightclub. A dirge that marked the years she spent trying to get pregnant. For better or for worse, music is the language of memory. It is also the language of love. In the aftermath of a series of personal tragedies, Zoe throws herself into her career as a music therapist. When an unexpected friendship slowly blossoms into love, she makes plans for a new life, but to her shock and inevitable rage, some people—even those she loves and trusts most—don’t want that to happen. Sing You Home is about identity, love, marriage, and parenthood. It’s about people wanting to do the right thing for the greater good, even as they work to fulfill their own personal desires and dreams. And it’s about what happens when the outside world brutally calls into question the very thing closest to our hearts: family.
Simon and Schuster 2011-10-18 496 pages

Second Glance A Novel

Jodi Picoult
This breathtaking novel from #1 New York Times bestselling author Jodi Picoult asks: Do we love across time, or in spite of it? “Sometimes I wonder....Can a ghost find you, if she wants to?” An intricate tale of love, haunting memories, and renewal, Second Glance begins in current-day Vermont, where an old man puts a piece of land up for sale and unintentionally raises protest from the local Abenaki Indian tribe, who insist it’s a burial ground. When odd, supernatural events plague the town of Comtosook, a ghost hunter is hired by the developer to help convince the residents that there’s nothing spiritual about the property. Enter Ross Wakeman, a suicidal drifter who has put himself in mortal danger time and again. He’s driven his car off a bridge into a lake. He’s been mugged in New York City and struck by lightning in a calm country field. Yet despite his best efforts, life clings to him and pulls him ever deeper into the empty existence he cannot bear since his fiancée’s death in a car crash eight years ago. Ross now lives only for the moment he might once again encounter the woman he loves. But in Comtosook, the only discovery Ross can lay claim to is that of Lia Beaumont, a skittish, mysterious woman who, like Ross, is on a search for something beyond the boundary separating life and death. Thus begins Jodi Picoult’s enthralling and ultimately astonishing story of love, fate, and a crime of passion. Hailed by critics as a “master” storyteller ( The Washington Post ), Picoult once again “pushes herself, and consequently the reader, to think about the unthinkable” (Denver Post). Second Glance, her eeriest and most engrossing work yet, delves into a virtually unknown chapter of American history—Vermont’s eugenics project of the 1920s and 30s—to provide a compelling study of the things that come back to haunt us—literally and figuratively. Do we love across time, or in spite of it?
Washington Square Press 2008-08-05 448 pages

Handle with Care A Novel

Jodi Picoult
When Willow is born with severe osteogenesis imperfecta, her parents are devastated—she will suffer hundreds of broken bones as she grows, a lifetime of pain. In this provocative story from the #1 New York Times bestselling author, “Picoult writes with unassuming brilliance” (Stephen King). Every expectant parent will tell you that they don’t want a perfect baby, just a healthy one. Charlotte and Sean O’Keefe would have asked for a healthy baby, too, if they’d been given the choice. Instead, their lives are made up of sleepless nights, mounting bills, the pitying stares of “luckier” parents, and maybe worst of all, the what-ifs. What if their child had been born healthy? But it’s all worth it because Willow is, funny as it seems, perfect. She’s smart as a whip, on her way to being as pretty as her mother, kind, brave, and for a five-year-old an unexpectedly deep source of wisdom. Willow is Willow, in sickness and in health. Everything changes, though, after a series of events forces Charlotte and her husband to confront the most serious what-ifs of all. What if Charlotte had known earlier of Willow’s illness? What if things could have been different? What if their beloved Willow had never been born? To do Willow justice, Charlotte must ask herself these questions and one more. What constitutes a valuable life? Emotionally riveting and profoundly moving, Handle with Care is an unforgettable novel about the fragility of life and the lengths we will go to protect it.
Atria/Emily Bestler Books 2009-09-15 512 pages

Mysteries of Pittsburgh

Michael Chabon
The enthralling debut from bestselling novelist Michael Chabon is a penetrating narrative of complex friendships, father-son conflicts, and the awakening of a young man's sexual identity. Chabon masterfully renders the funny, tender, and captivating first-person narrative of Art Bechstein, whose confusion and heartache echo the tones of literary forebears like The Catcher in the Rye's Holden Caulfield and The Great Gatsby's Nick Carraway. The Mysteries of Pittsburgh incontrovertibly established Chabon as a powerful force in contemporary fiction, even before his PulitzerPrize-winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay set the literary world spinning. An unforgettable story of coming of age in America, it is also an essential milestone in the movement of American fiction, from a novelist who has become one of the most important and enduring voices of this generation.
HarperCollins Publishers 2016-06-13 320 pages

The group

McCarthy, Mary
Written with a trenchant, sardonic edge, The Group is a dazzlingly outspoken novel and a captivating look at the social history of America between two world wars. "Juicy, shocking, witty, and almost continually brilliant."--CosmopolitanAward-winning Mary McCarthy's most celebrated novel follows the lives of eight Vassar graduates, known simply to their classmates as “the group.” An eclectic mix of personalities and upbringings, they meet a week after graduation to watch Kay Strong get married. After the ceremony, the women begin their adult lives -- traveling to Europe, tackling the worlds of nursing and publishing, and finding love and heartbreak in the streets of New York City. Through the years, some of the friends grow apart and some become entangled in each other's affairs, but all vow not to become like their mothers and fathers. It is only when one of them passes away that they all come back together again to mourn the loss of a friend, a confidante, and most importantly, a member of the group.
Harcourt Brace 2001 487 pages

Our Story Begins New and Selected Stories

Tobias Wolff
“One of our most exquisite storytellers” (Esquire) gives us his first collection in over a decade: ten potent new stories that, along with twenty-one classics, display his mastery over a quarter century. Tobias Wolff’s first two books, In the Garden of the North American Martyrs and Back in the World, were a powerful demonstration of how the short story can “provoke our amazed appreciation,” as The New York Times Book Review wrote then. In the years since, he’s written a third collection, The Night in Question, as well as a pair of genre-defining memoirs (This Boy’s Life and In Pharaoh’s Army), the novella The Barracks Thief, and, most recently, a novel, Old School. Now he returns with fresh revelations—about biding one’s time, or experiencing first love, or burying one’s mother—that come to a variety of characters in circumstances at once everyday and extraordinary: a retired Marine enrolled in college while her son trains for Iraq, a lawyer taking a difficult deposition, an American in Rome indulging the Gypsy who’s picked his pocket. In these stories, as with his earlier, much-anthologized work, he once again proves himself, according to the Los Angeles Times, “a writer of the highest order: part storyteller, part philosopher, someone deeply engaged in asking hard questions that take a lifetime to resolve.”
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group 2009-04-07 400 pages

The Volcano Lover A Romance

Susan Sontag
Set in 18th century Naples, based on the lives of Sir William Hamilton, his celebrated wife Emma, and Lord Nelson, and peopled with many of the great figures of the day, this unconventional, bestselling historical romance from the National Book Award-winning author of In America touches on themes of sex and revolution, the fate of nature, art and the collector's obsessions, and, above all, love.
Macmillan 1992 419 pages

Flashlight

Choi, Susan
Short-listed for the Booker Prize Long-listed for the National Book Award "The first major American novel to be published this year." --Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal "Gorgeous . . . Almost impossibly heartbreaking." --Sam Worley, New York Magazine A Must-Read: The New York Times , New York Magazine, Time , The Washington Post , Los Angeles Times , The Boston Globe , Entertainment Weekly , USA Today , The Chicago Review of Books , Forbes , Literary Hub , and Town & Country "A major world writer . . . Choi is in thrilling command." ―Dwight Garner, The New York Times "Devastating." --Ron Charles, The Washington Post "Ranks among her best work." --Hamilton Cain, Los Angeles Times A Dakota Johnson x TeaTime Book Club Pick A novel tracing a father's disappearance across time, nations, and memory, from the author of Trust Exercise . One summer night, Louisa and her father take a walk on the breakwater. Her father is carrying a flashlight. He cannot swim. Later, Louisa is found on the beach, soaked to the skin, barely alive. Her father is gone. She is ten years old. Louisa is an only child of parents who have severed themselves from the past. Her father, Serk, is Korean, but was born and raised in Japan; he lost touch with his family when they bought into the promises of postwar Pyongyang and relocated to North Korea. Her American mother, Anne, is estranged from her Midwestern family after a reckless adventure in her youth. And then there is Tobias, Anne's illegitimate son, whose reappearance in their lives will have astonishing consequences. But now it is just Anne and Louisa, Louisa and Anne, adrift and facing the challenges of ordinary life in the wake of great loss. United, separated, and also repelled by their mutual grief, they attempt to move on. But they cannot escape the echoes of that night. What really happened to Louisa's father? Shifting perspectives across time and character and turning back again and again to that night by the sea, Flashlight chases the shock waves of one family's catastrophe, even as they are swept up in the invisible currents of history. A monumental new novel from the National Book Award winner Susan Choi, Flashlight spans decades and continents in a spellbinding, heart-gripping investigation of family, loss, memory, and the ways in which we are shaped by what we cannot see.
Picador 2026-05-05 450 pages

In Search of Lost Time

Proust, Marcel,Moncrieff, C. K. Scott
In Search of Lost Time , also translated as Remembrance of Things Past—is a novel in seven volumes, written by Marcel Proust (1871–1922). It is considered to be his most prominent work, known both for its length and its theme of involuntary memory, the most famous example being the "episode of the madeleine" which occurs early in the first volume. In Search of Lost Time follows the narrator's recollections of childhood and experiences into adulthood during late 19th century to early 20th century aristocratic France, while reflecting on the loss of time and lack of meaning to the world.
Independently published 2020-07-02 208 pages

Baron Wenckheim's homecoming

Krasznahorkai, László
WINNER OF THE 2025 NOBEL PRIZE Now in paperback, the capstone to Krasznahorkai’s four-part masterwork, and winner of the 2019 National Book Award for Translated Literature Set in contemporary times, Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming tells the story of a Prince Myshkin–like figure, Baron Béla Wenckheim, who returns at the end of his life to his provincial Hungarian hometown. Having escaped from his many casino debts in Buenos Aires, where he was living in exile, he longs to be reunited with his high-school sweetheart Marika. Confusions abound, and what follows is an endless storm of gossip, con men, and local politicians, vividly evoking the small town’s alternately drab and absurd existence. All along, the Professor―a world-famous natural scientist who studies mosses and inhabits a bizarre Zen-like shack in a desolate area outside of town?offers long rants and disquisitions on his attempts to immunize himself from thought. Spectacular actions are staged as death and the abyss loom over the unsuspecting townfolk.
New Directions Publishing 2025 576 pages

Topaz

Leon Uris
A #1 New York Times bestseller from the author of Exodus and Trinity, Topaz is the classic Cold War thriller of high intrigue and international suspense set during the Cuban Missile Crisis. On the eve of the Cuban Missile Crisis in Paris, 1962, Devereaux and Nordstrom uncover Soviet plans to ship nuclear arms. But when nobody acts after sharing his findings, Devereaux becomes the target of an assassination attempt and soon realizes the plot extends far beyond Cuba--and himself. A thrilling and well-paced novel filled with Cold War intrigue, Topaz features two agents on a journey around the world to save NATO and themselves.
Blackstone Audio, Incorporated 2022-11-22 332 pages

On the Way to the Wedding

Julia Quinn
A New York Times Bestseller From #1 New York Times bestselling author Julia Quinn comes the story of Gregory Bridgerton, in the final installment of her beloved Regency-set novels featuring the charming, powerful Bridgerton family, now a series created by Shondaland for Netflix. GREGORY'S STORY Unlike most men of his acquaintance, Gregory Bridgerton believes in true love. And he is convinced that when he finds the woman of his dreams, he will know in an instant that she is the one. And that is exactly what happened. Except ... She wasn't the one. In fact, the ravishing Miss Hermione Watson is in love with another. But her best friend, the ever-practical Lady Lucinda Abernathy, wants to save Hermione from a disastrous alliance, so she offers to help Gregory win her over. But in the process, Lucy falls in love. With Gregory! Except ... Lucy is engaged. And her uncle is not inclined to let her back out of the betrothal, even once Gregory comes to his senses and realizes that it is Lucy, with her sharp wit and sunny smile, who makes his heart sing. And now, on the way to the wedding, Gregory must risk everything to ensure that when it comes time to kiss the bride, he is the only man standing at the altar ...
HarperCollins Publishers 2021-06-02 469 pages

Lady Whistledown Strikes Back

Julia Quinn,Karen Hawkins,Suzanne Enoch,Mia Ryan
Join the Bridgertons, and the rest of the ton, as they pore over (and gossip about) Lady Whistledown's latest musings. The elusive Regency-era gossip columnist -- popularized in # 1 New York Times bestselling author Julia Quinn's Bridgerton novels, now a series created by Shondaland for Netflix - reveals society's most recent secrets in this second glittering anthology, following the New York Times bestseller, The Further Observations of Lady Whistledown. Who Stole Lady Neeley's Bracelet Was it the fortune hunter, the gambler, the servant, or the rogue All of London is abuzz with speculation, but it is clear that one of four couples is connected to the crime. --Lady Whistledown's Society Papers, May 1816 Julia Quinn enchants: A dashing fortune hunter is captivated by the Season's most desired debutante . . . and must prove he is out to steal the lady's heart, not her dowry. Suzanne Enoch tantalizes: An innocent miss who has spent her life scrupulously avoiding scandal is suddenly--and secretly--courted by London's most notorious rogue. Karen Hawkins seduces: A roving viscount comes home to rekindle the passionate fires of his marriage . . . only to discover that his beautiful, headstrong bride will not be so easily won. Mia Ryan delights: A lovely, free-spirited servant is dazzled by the romantic attentions of a charming earl . . . sparking a scandalous affair that could ruin them both. You'll hear it first from Lady Whistledown!
HarperCollins Publishers 2022-12-27 400 pages