"Torday is a singular American writer with a big heart and a real love for the world. He has the rare gift for writing dynamic action scenes while being genuinely funny." —George Saunders Bluegrass musician, former journalist and editor, and now PhD in English, Mark Brumfeld has arrived at his thirties with significant debt and no steady prospects. His girlfriend Cassie—a punk bassist in an all-female band, who fled her Midwestern childhood for a new identity—finds work at a “new media” company. When Cassie refuses his marriage proposal, Mark leaves New York and returns to the basement of his childhood home in the Baltimore suburbs. Desperate and humiliated, Mark begins to post a series of online video monologues that critique Baby Boomers and their powerful hold on the job market. But as his videos go viral, and while Cassie starts to build her career, Mark loses control of what he began—with consequences that ensnare them in a matter of national security. Told through the perspectives of Mark, Cassie, and Mark’s mother, Julia, a child of the '60s whose life is more conventional than she ever imagined, Boomer1 is timely, suspenseful, and in every line alert to the siren song of endless opportunity that beckons and beguiles all of us.

Fleeing the chaos of World War I and the terror of the Soviet Revolution, practical, sensible Pearl Kahn and her lovestruck, impulsive younger sibling Frieda sail for America to join their sister in New York. But discriminatory new immigration laws bar their entry, and the young women are turned back at Ellis Island. With few options, Pearl and Frieda head for Havana, Cuba, convinced they will find a way to overcome this setback. At first, life in big-city Prohibition-era Havana is overwhelming, like nothing Pearl and Frieda have ever experienced--or could have ever imagined in the rural shtetl where they grew up. As the sisters begin to adjust, their plans for going to America together become complicated. Frieda falls for the not-so-dreamy man of her dreams while Pearl's life opens up unexpectedly, offering her a taste of freedom and heady romance, and an opportunity to build a future on her own terms. Though to do so, she must confront her past and the shame she has long carried. A heartbreaking, epic family story, Hotel Cuba explores the profound courage of two women displaced from their home who strive to create a new future in an enticing and dangerous world far different from anything they have ever known.

"A brother is as easily forgotten as an umbrella."--James Joyce, Ulysses 1918 Audrey Death--feminist, socialist and munitions worker at Woolwich Arsenal--falls ill with encephalitis lethargica as the epidemic rages across Europe, killing a third of its victims and condemning a further third to living death. 1971 Under the curious eyes of psychiatrist Dr. Zack Busner, assumed mental patient Audrey Death lies supine in bed above a spring grotto that she has made every one of the forty-nine years she has resided in Friern Mental Hospital. 2010 Now retired, Dr. Busner travels waywardly across North London in search of the truth about that tumultuous summer when he awoke the post-encephalitic patients under his care using a new and powerful drug. Weaving together a dense tapestry of consciousness and lived life across an entire century, in his latest and most ambitious novel, Will Self takes up the challenge of Modernism and reveals how it--and it alone--can unravel new and unsettling truths about our world and how it came to be.

From the author of The New York Times #1 bestselling novel The Carpetbaggers comes the gutwrenching story of one woman's battle to break free of the male-dominated, sexual pay-to-play culture of Hollywood.... THE LONELY LADY JeriLee Randall is a young girl with dreams of being a writer. While she is discovering her own sexuality, she meets Walter Thornton, Jr., son of the world-famous playwright, Walter Thornton, Sr., whom she idolizes. After a humiliating "near" sexual encounter with JeriLee, Walt, Jr. participates in a brutal assault that traumatizes her and triggers unfettered chaos in their small, gossipy town. Trying to make amends for the deplorable behavior of his son, Walt's father befriends JeriLee. Despite their age difference the two become close and eventually marry. Inevitably, their union unravels, and JeriLee embarks on a path of sexual liberation in her pursuit of success-from stints in sleazy strip clubs to rendezvous on the casting couches of Hollywood moguls and eventually to the twilight world of drugs-moving restlessly from man to man and woman to woman. Can she find success in a brutal world while retaining her dignity, honesty, and the self-respect developed in her youth? As she struggles to retain her dreams of stardom, can her strength and cunning save her from Hollywood's death grip, allowing her to beat the smooth talking power players at their own game? When it was originally published in 1976, The Lonely Lady spent 24 weeks on the bestseller list, turning Hollywood on its ear. Could anyone have predicted then that JeriLee's story would still be so shockingly relevant over forty years later?

Samuel Perlman, the elderly narrator of Yasmina Reza’s deliriously dyspeptic novel, is surrounded by happy people. His wife Nancy is thrilled to be a member of the human race. His grown son is content crisscrossing the world to “sample exotic fruit with the savages.” But Samuel himself refuses to be happy and his attempt to explain his refusal (half to his son and half to himself) generates an epic, blasphemous, and hilarious rant against the compromises of his life. Whether he is recounting his pal Lionel’s heroic battle against impotence; lamenting the loss of his great love, the irresistible Marisa Botton; or pondering the possibility of a new love in the person of one Genevieve Abramowitz, the droll, irascible Perlman is one of the great talkers of contemporary fiction. And Desolation is one of the most dazzling performances ever written for one voice.

A very short novel with the power and resonance of a much longer one, Anne-Marie la Beaute is a profound and moving act of remembrance, a clear-eyed assessment of the hard-edged nature of fame, a meditation on aging - and a wonderfully observant and comic exploration of human foibles. In short, another thought-provoking master class in how we perform life by the peerless Yasmina Reza.

The New York Times and Globe & Mail -bestselling author of The Imperfectionists returns with an intricately woven novel about a bookseller who travels the world to make sense of her puzzling past. Tooly Zylberberg tells a story: as a child, she was stolen from home, stashed at a den of thieves, then adopted by crooks there, who ended up raising her and even using the little girl in capers around the globe. But Tooly understands only fragments of what happened in Thailand, Italy, New York and beyond. Then, a desperate message reaches her musty bookshop in Wales, and she is lured into a journey that will reveal the secret of her childhood. Celebrated for his ingenious plotting, humanity and humor, Tom Rachman has written a novel that will amplify his reputation as one of the most exciting young writers today.

New Page 1 "Its official title is Town House, but in Hollywood they're already calling Tish Cohen's novel About a Girl." --The Globe and Mail. Jack Madigan should be leading an enviable life. He's the sole heir of a '70s rock icon. He lives with his retro-obsessed teenage son, Harlan, in a once-magnificent Boston town house. But now 36, Jack's painting career is buckling under a raging case of agoraphobia. And when the foreclosure notice arrives, Jack must face losing the only home he's ever known--and his only safe zone. When Jack's ex-wife announces that Harlan would be better off living with her and her vitamin-enriched fiancé, Jack has to figure out how to deter the perky, inexperienced real-estate agent, hold on to his house, keep his son at home, and--through the tenacity of the little girl next door--finally step out onto the sidewalk. Fox 2000 swooped in to pre-empt the film rights while Town House was still on submission to publishers. Ridley Scott's Scott Free Productions is set to produce the movie and Pulitzer Prize- winning screenwriter Doug Wright (Memoirs of a Geisha) is adapting the screenplay. A book with the ability to both entertain and move us, Town House is a smart, acerbic novel bursting with heart and quirky charm.

A stunning psychological thriller about friship, drugs, and murder from the author of The Vanishing. Egon Wagter and Axel van de Graaf met when they were both fourteen and on vacation in Belgium. Axel is fascinating, filled with an amoral energy by which the more prudent, less adventurous Egon is both mesmerized and repelled. Even as a teen, Axel has a strange power over those around him. He defies authority, seduces women, breaks the law. Axel chooses Egon as a friend, a friendship that somehow ures over time and ends up determining Egon's fate. During his university studies, Egon frequents Axel's house in Amsterdam, where there is a party every night and women fill the rooms. Though Egon chooses geology over Axel's life of avarice and drug dealing, he remains intrigued by his friend's conviction that the only law that counts is the law he makes himself. Egon believes that Axel is a demonic figure who tempts others only because he knows they want to be tempted. By the time he is in his forties, Egon finds himself divorced and with few professional prospects. He turns for help to Axel, who sends him to Ratanakiri, a fictional country in Southeast Asia. Axel gives Egon a suitcase to deliver-and Egon never returns. Utterly compelling and resonant, The Cave is an unforgettable story of betrayal in the spirit of Tim Krabbé's remarkable first novel, The Vanishing .

Shulamit, a biblical scholar from England, returns to her grandparents' home in Jerusalem for a visit after an absence of many years. Almost immediately she becomes embroiled in a family feud over possession of the so-called Shepher Codex, a mysterious and valuable manuscript which has been discovered in the attic. In tracing the origins of the Codex she uncovers the history of the Shepher family itself: of her great-grandfather, who traveled to Babylon in search of the ten lost tribes; of her grandfather, a dreamer whose Zionist ideals brought him into conflict with his religion; of her parents, and their tormented love affair; and of her own orphaned and unhappy past. At the same time, she struggles to find answers to pressing questions: what is the significance of the Codex and where does it come from? Who is the stranger, Gideon, who is desperate to enlist her help? Above all, whom does the Codex belong to and what part must Shula play in its destiny? Set against the backdrop of a changing Jerusalem over a hundred and thirty years, The Genizah at the House of Shepher is a large-canvas novel of exile and belonging, displacement, and the quest for both love and a true promised land.

"A stunning novel about childhood, marriage, and divorce by one of the most interesting minds of the 20th century, now back in print for the first time since 1969. Sophie Blind is starting a new life. She has left her husband Ezra and taken her three children to Paris. She has lovers there and another in New York. She is lecturing and writing. And she is compulsively reviewing her own history, having resumed the "lifelong struggle" of "coming into consciousness." The task of reclaiming her existence is all the more urgent because, even as Sophie Blind undertakes this necessary transformation-Sophie Blind is dead. Dream and reality overlap in Divorcing, a book in which divorcing is not just a matter of marital collapse but names a rift that runs right through the inner and outer worlds of its brilliant but desperate protagonist. Can the rift be mended? Perhaps in the form of a novel, one that goes back from present day New York to her childhood in pre-World War II Budapest, that revisits the divorce between her Freudian father and her fickle mother, and finds a place for a host of further tensions and contradictions of Sophie's life now. The question that haunts Divorcing, however, is whether any novel can be fleet and bitter and true and light enough to gather up all the darkness of a given life. Susan Taubes's startlingly original novel was published in 1969 but largely ignored; after the author's tragic early death, it was forgotten. Its republication presents a chance to rediscover a dazzling intense and inventive writer whose work in many ways anticipates the fragmentary, glancing, lyrical novels that Renata Adler and Elizabeth Hardwick would write in the 1970s"--

Cliffhaven--Magnificent new resort near Big Sur. Surrounded by redwoods. Guarded by Oceanside cliffs. Protected from prying eyes. By reservation only. Cliffhaven--Founded by a man with very special interests, catering to a very special clientele. Margaret and Henry Brown, vacationing New Yorkers innocently driving down the sea-washed coast of California, are just the right sort of people. Cliffhaven--It has a spectacular entrance, a three-star restaurant, lavish accommodations--and no exit! "This novel should do for California vacation retreats what jaws did for swimming in the Atlantic."-- Los Angeles Times Book Review "A thrilling nightmare...A Dante's Inferno ...more than fulfills the remark "I read it all in one nail-biting session."--Eli Wallach "Not only a thriller...a parable and a warning to all who say 'It can't happen here.'"-- Jewish Post and Opinion

This classic novel by one of the greatest writers of Yiddish literature tells the unforgettable story of three men: Cornelius, an officer in the Roman garrison of Jerusalem in the first century A.D.; Joseph Arimathea, a young Pharisee student at the time; and Yeshua, a radical preacher from Galilee, better remembered by his Greek name of Jesus. The stories of these three men are narrated by Pan Viadomsky, an anti-Semitic Polish scholar who claims to have discovered the lost Fifth Gospel, containing the life of Christ according to his betrayer, Judas Iscariot. With unparalleled historical immediacy, Asch's inspired work presents a sweeping panorama of the Holy Land nearly two thousand years ago.

"Totempole is Sanford Friedman's radical coming-of-age novel, featuring Stephen Wolfe, a young Jewish boy growing up in New York City and its environs during the Depression and war years. In eight discrete chapters, which trace Stephen's evolution from a two-year-old boy to a twenty-two-year-old man, Friedman describes with psychological acuity and great empathy Stephen's intellectual, moral, and sexual maturation. Taught to abhor his body for the sake of his soul, Stephen finds salvation in the eventual unification of the two, the recognition that body and soul should not be partitioned but treated as one being, one complete man"--

"Robert Westbrook's novel strips the gilt off the Hollywood Golden Age to reveal the seamier underside. 'The Torch Singer' begins with an ending, a scene of murder and mayhem on St. Valentine's Night in 1956 Beverly Hills and unravels the many and various threads of the lives and careers that took them there." Time Out "The Torch Singer" is a sweeping historical saga that takes the reader from the horrors of Nazi-occupied Poland to the glittery excesses of Hollywood in the 1940s and 50s: the rise and fall of Sonya Saint-Amant, a singer who schemes her way to fame and glory breaking all the rules. Book One, "An Overnight Sensation" , charts the rise of Sonya from the age of 17 in 1940, a girl dreaming of being an understudy at the Krakow Opera when Nazis raid the theater. After witnessing the summary execution of her mother by German soldiers she escapes Poland and makes her way to London. Using guile and beauty, she finds passage to America in 1943 on the "Mauretania" , a dangerous North Atlantic crossing on a troop ship full of men. As the ship steams north into Arctic waters evading enemy submarines, Sonya almost wins at a high-stakes game of love . . . only to arrive in New York alone and desperate but determined to become a star. "A masterpiece of storytelling. A book of constant intrigue which from the outset creates that delicious paradox of it being immediately clear that nothing is ever quite as it seems." Daily Mail "Robert Westbrook is a born storyteller and a bit of a magician." Ally Sheedy "The Torch Singer" is an unforgettable journey through the shadowlands of fame.

Science fiction novel set in the year 2011 (about 40 year when book was written). Because capital punishment has been deemed too harsh, violent criminals are subjected to coercive therapy that effectively erases their memories and replaces them with artificially constructed memories to form a new personality deemed useful to society. Protagonist Paul Macy, a rehabilitated criminal, finds his original personality, a serial rapist named Nat Hamlin, reasserting itself in defiance of the mental conditioning.

Now back in print?a taut spy thriller from The New York Times bestselling author of The Company With the publication of his New York Times bestseller The Company , Robert Littell re-established his position among the highest ranks of writers of literary espionage novels. In The Debriefing , long out of print until now, Littell offers another novel of exquisite suspense. Stone is the head of an elite arm of the Joint Chiefs of Staff?and a master of the psychologically sophisticated art of debriefing. When Oleg Kulakov defects from Russia, handcuffed to a sealed diplomatic pouch, it?s Stone?s job to find out if he?s genuine. As Stone uncovers Kulakov?s darkest secrets, he penetrates Russia itself to learn the chilling truth . . . a truth that tears his own world apart.

"Algren's classic 1947 short story collection is the pure vein Algren would mine for all his subsequent novels and stories. The stories in this collection are literary triumphs that "don't fade away." Among the stories included here are "A Bottle of Milk for Mother," about a Chicago youth being cornered for a murder, and "The Face on the Barrome Floor," in which a legless man pummels another man nearly to death-the seeds that would grow into the novel Never Come Morning. Algren's World War II stories whose final expression would be in the novel The Man with the Golden Arm are also part of this collection. "So Help Me," Algren's first published work, is here. Other stories include, "The Captain Has Bad Dreams," in which Algren first introduced the character of the blameless captain who feels such a heavy burden of guilt and wonders why the criminal offenders he sees seem to feel no guilt at all. And then there is "Design for Departure," in which a young woman drifting into hooking and addiction sees her own dreaminess outlasting her hopes"--

Just One Big Happy Family... That's the way Preston Scott would have described his all-American family. His parents seemed to have everything, including the ideal marriage. But then their perfect life started to unravel. Mr. and Mrs. Scott began to. fight-vicious, hurtful, drawn-out battles that went on day after day. Finally one day Mrs. Scott moved out. And that's when Preston's nightmare began... Now, three years later, Preston's dad is getting out of prison, and Preston is no closer to coming to terms with his feelings about him. Because how can you forgive your father for killing someone...when that someone was your mother? Here is Preston's searing true story about upheaval, growth, faith ... and the power of love. No one has an inkling that handsome, athletic, and talented Preston Scott is carrying a terrible His father was imprisoned three years ago. Now Mr. Scott is coming home to live with Preston and his little brother, Tyler and Preston has yet to come to terms with his feelings about him. Because how can you forgive your father for killing someone . . . when that someone was your mother? This unforgettable novel is a fictionalized account based on the words of the boy who experienced these events firsthand. "Impossible to put down . . . a stunning novel." V. 1992 Best Books for Young Adults (ALA) Children's Choices for 1992 (IRA/CBC) Young Adult Choices for 1993 (IRA) 1992 Outstanding Young Adult Fiction Award (The Southern California Council on Literature) 1993 94 Sequoyah Young Adult Book Award (Oklahoma Library Association)