Warren Adler is the acclaimed author of 25 novels, published in 30 languages. Two of his books, "The War of the Roses" and "Random Hearts" were made into major motion pictures. He lives in Jackson Hole, Wyoming and New York City. Ken and Sheila Kramer have a comfortable life and loving marriage. But when Ken is introduced to Carol, the wife of his wife's major client, we discover that she is Ken's old flame, the love of his life and the object of his sexual obsession as a young man. Carol has totally reinvented herself and married a rich husband who has no knowledge of her early life. While unbeknownst to Ken, his wife is carrying on a steamy affair with her client, Carol's husband. When love and sexual obsession again bursts into flames between Ken and Carol, the plot of this masterful black comedy thickens as both couples embark on an African Safari with startling and tragic results. The author of The War of the Roses surpasses himself with this powerful novel of love and betrayal, sexual passion and emotional obsession. It is storytelling at its dramatic best and once again shows Warren Adler's indisputable mastery of contemporary marital relationships. "A masterpiece of gallows humor." .New York Daily News "Warren Adler does for infidelity and betrayal what his The War of the Roses did for incompatibility and greed. He has with delicious tension, carved out the state of matrimony as his exclusive theater of war." .Fred Mustard Stewart, author of The Glitter and the Gold "Adler at his steamy, schemey best if you enjoyed the nice nastiness of The War of the Roses, this is right up your dastardly alley. .Palm Springs Desert Sun

Warren Adler is the acclaimed author of 25 novels, published in 30 languages. Two of his books, "The War of the Roses" and "Random Hearts" were made into major motion pictures. He lives in Jackson Hole, Wyoming and New York City. During a reunion at their ancestral castle, the famed Von Kassel family - arm dealers for over a hundred years - suddenly find themselves in possession of stolen plutonium capable of creating the most destructive weapon on earth. The family is soon torn apart by the deadly potential of their recent acquisition. Through fascinating and brilliantly explored familial relationships, this penetrating novel draws the reader into the frightening web of power and intrigue that motivates people who believe they are above moral or ethical considerations. "A truly riveting tale of suspense and intrigue." .King Features Syndicate "Another superb mystery by author Warren Adler." .Virginia Daily Press

In spite of remarkable differences, Eric and Tommy are as close as brothers. Eric, a Nordic Adonis, is graced by a seemingly endless supply of good fortune, Tommy is a sickly black boy, cursed with health problems, who yet remains optimistic and strong. After tragedy rips this makeshift family apart, the lives of these boys diverge astonishingly: Eric, the golden youth, is given everything but trusts nothing; Tommy, motherless and impoverished, has nothing, but feels lucky every day of his life. In a riveting story of modern-day resilience and redemption, the two confront separate challenges, and when circumstances reunite them years later, they draw on their extraordinary natures to confront a common enemy and, ultimately, save lives. Fortunate Son has the same brilliant observations of the hidden currents of modern life that won great praise for The Man in My Basement. It is a gripping literary novel that puts complex ideas and forces in play with irresistible drama.

Tzippy Goldman's mother has been planning her wedding since before she was born. Her four younger sisters want her to marry the fairy tale Jewish prince of their mother's stories. But Tzippy, approaching spinsterhood at the age of twenty-two, has other ideas. She is hungry for experience and longs to escape the suffocating expectations of religious stricture and romantic obligation. But when she falls in love with Bryan Miller she surprises everyone. Bryan comes from a different kind of family. Like Orthodox Jews anywhere in the world, they spend Saturdays in synagogue, and the rest of the week like suburbanites everywhere. But to Bryan, this middle road looks more and more like hypocrisy. He longs for conviction, for the relief of absolutes. To his parents' bewilderment, Bryan decides to embrace a very different kind of lifestyle, swapping his beloved Yankees cap for something else entirely. In the courtship and marriage of Bryan and Tzippy, Tova Mirvis illuminates an insular world, where ancient and modern collide in a warm and hilarious novel about two very different families brought together by the marriage of their children.

The Kaiser's Germany is the setting of Sybille Bedford's first and best-known novel, in which two families -- one from solid, upholstered Jewish Berlin, the other from the somnolent, agrarian Catholic South -- become comically, tragically, irrevocably intertwined. "Each family," writes the author, "stood confident of being able to go on with what was theirs, while in fact they were playthings, often victims, of the now united Germany and what was brewing therein." Did the monstrous thing that followed have its foundation in families such as these? "Writing about them made me think so. Hence the title."

From the author of Anya and Buffalo Afternoon comes a haunting novel of twin sisters. At the height of her fame, 27-year old Florence Meek disappears. Years later, driven by new information, her twin Doris begins to hunt for her. But Doris's search for her sister soon becomes secondary to her search through the past for the truth about their complex relationship.

An intelligent erotic novel that explores intimacy outside the gender binary. "Underneath all the androgyny and fluctuation, the book's about human connection. Rosenthal's use of sex and gender identities to illustrate how we reach toward and away from relationships is merely a new approach to an old idea: We all need intimacy with others to deepen our understanding of ourselves."- Time Out Chicago. Matt is dating Rye, a willfully free androgynous school teacher. Attracted to Matt's kinkiness and groundedness, Rye develops a taste for his masculinity and their top-bottom dynamic. At a weekend SexxCamp retreat, Matt meets Rain, a charming and snarky twenty-something GenderQueer woman. An unconventional three-way relationship develops, expanding their understanding of polyamory, gender identity, love and connection. "I spent some time devouring Rye and really really enjoyed not only the story and the characters and the death snark, but also the way that Sam tackled the new thing about relationships. It's the same as it ever was, and it's not the same as it ever was. And that melds so beautifully in Rye. Thanks for the good read "- Carol Queen, The Center for Sex and Culture, San Francisco. Read the first few chapters of Rye by clicking on the book cover above, to 'Look Inside.' In Rye, Brooklyn-based musician Sam Rosenthal expands his horizons beyond Black Tape For A Blue Girl, with a novel that takes the reader on a steamy, snarky and erotic walk on the wild side. "Rye is as intellectually stimulating as erotically charged. As for the erotic content, I can't hope to list of all that is covered, toys, BDSM, roleplay, gender fluidity in sex... the list goes on. A sense of realism triumphs; don't expect to read erotica with paper-thin characters you are only meant to overlay with your own fantasies (although if some of the book's scenes push your fantasy buttons in a good way, that's great too ). With fully developed characters who struggle through relationships, gender, and sexuality in an erotic context, Rye, is a unique work; quite the refreshing read " - Marilyn Roxie, genderqueerid.com ryethenovel.com

Author Robert Westbrook is the pampered son of the late Sheilah Graham, the former famous columnist and confidante of the stars. Now he has written Rich Kids, a novel about the fascinating and bizarre world he knows all too well--the sons and daughters of the stars, in the skies over Sunset Boulevard and on the skids beneath it.

First published in 1969, this novel by one of the most prolific authors in the history of science fiction explores an idea that is truly "far out." Imagine a future world where death is not exactly the end. You can record everything about you that ever made you a distinct human being and then be implanted in the mind of someone living.

A classic tale of supernatural horror.Richard Marsh's novel "The Beetle" is the story of a British statesman, Paul Lessingham, who is haunted by his youthful indiscretions in Egypt. A shape-shifting figure follows him from Egypt, intent upon getting revenge on Lessingham.The characters are well drawn: Paul Lessingham, a budding cabinet minister with an ominous gap in his past; lovely Marjorie Linton, a witty New Woman caught between her Radical lover (Paul) and her Tory father; madcap young scientist Sydney Atherton who also adores Miss Linton and is meanwhile working on weapons of mass destruction for the glory of the British Empire; Robert Holt, down-and-out clerk who falls into the clutches of the Beetle.

If you like the fiction of Henry James, the psychology of his brother William, and have a taste for Gothic mysteries you will enjoy The Dark Sister . The novel is a curious mixture of the Victorian repressiveness about sex, intricate stories within stories, and Jewish humor. With a new afterword

Double or Nothing is a concrete novel in which the words become physical materials on the page. Federman gives each of these pages a shape or structure, most often a diagram or picture. The words move, cluster, jostle, and collide in a tour de force full of puns, parodies, and imitations. Within these startling and playful structures Federman develops two characters and two narratives. These stories are simultaneous and not chronological. The first deals with the narrator and his effort to make the book itself; the second, the story the narrator intends to tell, presents a young man's arrival in America. The narrator obsesses over making his narrative to the point of not making it. All of his choices for the story are made and remade. He tallies his accounts and checks his provisions. His questioning and indecision force the reader into another radical sense of the novel. The young man, whose story is to be told, also emerges from his obsessions. Madly transfixing details—noodles, toilet paper, toothpaste, a first subway ride, a sock full of dollars—become milestones in a discovery of America. These details, combined with Federman's feel for the desperation of his characters, create a book that is simultaneously hilarious and frightening. The concrete play of its language, its use of found materials, give the viewer/reader a sense of constant and strange discovery. To turn these pages is to turn the corners of a world of words as full as any novel of literary discourse ever presented. Double or Nothing challenges the way we read fiction and the way we see words, and in the process, gives us back more of our own world and our real dilemmas than we are used to getting. Picked for American Book Review's 100 Best First Lines from Novels

Never Come Morning is unique among the novels of Algren. The author's only romance, the novel concerns Bruno Bicek, a would-be boxer from Chicago's Northwest side, and Steffi, the woman who shares his dream while living his nightmare. "It is an unusual and brilliant book," said The New York Times. "A bold scribbling upon the wall for comfortable Americans to ponder and digest." This new edition features an introduction by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. and an interview with Nelson Algren by H.E.F. Donohue.

Claudia Corvette. From her tousled bedroom hair to her name–all the porn stars in this world take their names from supermodels and sports cars–she is adult entertainment's prototypical femme fatale. Her life is the collision of countless troubled–childhood cliches and grown–up wet dreams, projected onto her as surely as her videos project their blue light onto lonely men around the world. From its first panel, How to Make Money Like a Porn Star draws the reader into the dark world of girls like Claudia, the men who fantasize about them, and the monsters who control them. In the hands of Rolling Stone writer Neil Strauss and illustrator Bernard Chang, this adult graphic novel weaves together black humor and blacker reality. Like all great American stories, it features humble beginnings, life–changing tragedy, stripping, abuse, implants, fame, addiction, bigger implants, abduction, gunplay, downfall, and even bigger implants. Not to mention a thousand shades of latex and L'Oreal. Part parody, part morality tale, here is the truth about the porn life, its outsized visual splendor captured in a comic parade of doe–eyed centerfolds, its essence distilled in a story that will haunt every reader who has ever wondered where his next fantasy is coming from.

"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.

"The hauntingly beautiful epistolary novel from 'a glowing light of modern Italian literature' (New York Times Book Review). At the heart of Happiness As Such is an absence, an abyss that draws everyone nearer to its edge, created by the departure of a family's wayward only son, Michele, who has fled from Italy to England to escape the dangers and threats of his radical political ties. This novel is part epistolary: his mother writes letters to him, nagging him; his sister Angelica writes to him too; so does Mara, his former lover, who gave birth to a child who could be his own. Left to clean up Michele's mess, his family and friends complain and commiserate, making mistakes and missteps, attempting to cope in the only ways that they know how. With a few brushstrokes, Natalia Ginzburg can flesh out an entire existence and all its pitfalls and disappointments with unmatched clarity. One of Natalia Ginzburg's finest achievements, Happiness As Such is an experimental, wise, raw, comic novel, written in powerful prose that cuts to the bone with surgical precision"--

A novel for secondary school English classes with great writing and important themes.

Meyer Levin was a Chicago-born Jewish author. His best-known book is "Compulsion", which is a novelization of the notorious Loeb and Leopold murder case of 1924. Levin was in a special position to tell the story, because he was personally acquainted with the perpetrators. Levin is also famous for bringing Anne Frank's diary to light. But "The Old Bunch" may be his greatest work. "The Old Bunch" was written in the mid-1930's, and it tells the tales of the kids of a Chicago Jewish ghetto coming of age and stepping out into the world. It's presumably something of a fantasy autobiography, echoing Levin's own adventures -- Levin was born in 1905, and the events in this book take place beginning in the year 1921 (when the "bunch" is graduating from school), and running through to 1934. The book is compelling for its individual stories and for its living window into times past. Because it was written prior to the horrors of WWII, it's a very pure view of the pre-war era. (Anything written later will necessarily be done with hindsight, and will likely de-emphasize "unimportant" details in favor of those that connect to major war events.) But the history is merely a fascinating byproduct of the vivid human stories that fill the pages. "The Old Bunch" is surprisingly unknown today, which is a shame. This really is one of the great novels, in a class with Tolstoy and Steinbeck. It conveys the entirety of the era: The people, the culture, the economics, Chicago politics (very dirty!), with a global perspective as well (some characters travel to Europe and Palestine). It covers the Roaring Twenties, Prohibition, the Great Depression, and the New Deal. To read the book is to live and breathe in these bygone days. Most importantly, Meyer Levin depicts events without agenda or judgment. Characters may be Democrats or Republicans or workers or bosses or religionists or atheists or many other things, but all are portrayed with depth, and none are simple heroes or villains or symbols. These are, in the end, tales about the very personal and individual transitions to adulthood, and the elusive quest for wisdom. It is the same challenge that every generation must face. "The Old Bunch" was critically acclaimed and went through numerous print editions, but it eventually passed into the public domain and was temporarily forgotten. A Wall Street Journal article in 2012 ("Destiny's Children", by Joseph Epstein) sparked a revival of interest, and Rancho Lazarus Publications is proud to present a new edition, accurately rendered and true to the original text, and with the addition of occasional footnotes to clarify details of historical accuracy that the modern reader may not have on tap. With almost 700 pages of text (the original hardback book ran to almost 1000 pages), this is an epic novel. But far from being overlong, it's the sort of reading that leaves you wishing there was more. "Written in good hard-driving colloquial prose, full of sharp characterizations. . . A very fine novel." -- New Republic "A landmark -- vivid and exciting reading. It brilliantly succeeds in taking the reader on a memorable tour of the world in which the old bunch lived." -- The New York Times

Following her acclaimed, Los Angeles Times Book Prize–nominated novel, The God of War , Marisa Silver’s extraordinary book, Alone With You , is a starkly elegant and superbly rendered collection of short stories. Marisa Silver dazzled and inspired readers with her critically acclaimed The God of War (a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist), praised by Richard Russo as “a novel of great metaphorical depth and beauty.” In this elegant, finely wrought new collection, Alone With You, Silver has created eight indelible stories that mine the complexities of modern relationships and the unexpected ways love manifests itself. Her brilliantly etched characters confront life’s abrupt and unsettling changes with fear, courage, humor, and overwhelming grace. In the O. Henry Prize–winning story “The Visitor,” a VA hospital nurse’s aide contends with a family ghost and discovers the ways in which her own past haunts her. The reticent father in “Pond” is confronted with a Solomonic choice that pits his love for his daughter against his feelings for her young son. In “Night Train to Frankfurt,” first published in The New Yorker, a daughter travels to an alternative-medicine clinic in Germany in a gambit to save her mother’s life. And in the title story, a woman vacations in Morocco with her family while contemplating a decision that will both ruin and liberate them all. From “Temporary,” where a young woman confronts the ephemeral nature of companionship, to “Three Girls,” in which sisters trapped in a snowstorm recognize the boundaries of childhood, the nuanced voices of Alone With You bear the hallmarks of an instant classic from a writer with unerring talent and imaginative resource. Silver has the extraordinary ability to render her fictional inhabitants instantly relatable, in all their imperfections. Her stories have the singular quality of looking in a mirror. We see at once what is familiar and what is strange. In these stirring narratives, we meet ourselves anew.

The nineteen stories contained herein, all beautifully translated for the first time into English by Sue Boswell, combine work published by Marcel Schwob (1867-1905) in newspapers together with manuscripts never published in his lifetime. From historical pieces, such as "Poupa", an early unfinished novel which takes place in ancient Rome, to horrific tales, such as "The Hand of Glory" and "The Maison Close", and others, such as "On Umbrellas", which are completely unclassifiable, the present collection displays the diversity and genius of one of France's greatest yet largely forgotten writers.