"In 1983, a wealthy businessman named Carl Fletcher is kidnapped from his driveway in the nicest part of Long Island, brutalized, and held for ransom. He is returned to his wife and kids less than a week later, only slightly the worse for wear, and the family begins the hard work of trying to move on with their lives and resume their prized places in the saga of the American dream, coming to understand that though their money may have been what put them in danger, it is also what guaranteed them their safety in the end. But forty years later, when Carl's mother dies and the family comes home to mourn her, it becomes clear that nobody ever really got over anything. Carl's wife, Ruth, has spent her potential protecting her husband's emotional health. Their three grown children are each a mess: Nathan cannot seem to advance at his law firm and may have made a terrible investment with his trust fund; Beamer, a Hollywood screenwriter, will consume anything-substance, foodstuff, women-in order to numb his own perpetual terror; and Jenny has spent her life so bent on proving that she is not a product of the family's pathology that she comes to define it. Then there's Carl himself, the prickly, still-terrified father, who has been secretly seeking closure to the matter of his kidnapping for years, and the unthinkable act he commits that will alter the family's path forever"--

In New York Times bestselling author Anthony Horowitz's ingenious fourth literary whodunit following The Word is Murder, The Sentence is Death, and A Line to Kill, Horowitz becomes the prime suspect in a murder investigation--and only one man can prove his innocence: his newly estranged partner in solving crime, Detective Hawthorne. "I'm sorry but the answer's no." Reluctant author, Anthony Horowitz, has had enough. He tells ex-detective Daniel Hawthorne that after three books he's splitting and their deal is over. The truth is that Anthony has other things on his mind. His new play, a thriller called Mindgame, is about to open at the Vaudeville Theater in London's West End. Not surprisingly, Hawthorne declines a ticket to the opening night. The play is panned by the critics. In particular, Sunday Times critic Margaret Throsby gives it a savage review, focusing particularly on the writing. The next day, Throsby is stabbed in the heart with an ornamental dagger which turns out to belong to Anthony, and has his fingerprints all over it. Anthony is arrested by an old enemy . . . Detective Inspector Cara Grunshaw. She still carries a grudge from her failure to solve the case described in the second Hawthorne adventure, The Sentence is Death, and blames Anthony. Now she's out for revenge. Thrown into prison and fearing for both his personal future and his writing career, Anthony is the prime suspect in Throsby's murder and when a second theatre critic is found to have died in mysterious circumstances, the net closes in. Ever more desperate, he realizes that only one man can help him. But will Hawthorne take the call?

Ijon Tichy, Lem's Candide of the Cosmos, encounters bizarre civilizations and creatures in space that serve to satirize science, the rational mind, theology, and other icons of human pride. Line drawings by the Author. Translated by Michael Kandel. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book

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!

A New York Times Book Review Best Book of the Year. A searing and wildly entertaining love letter to New York City from the bestselling author of Motherless Brooklyn and Fortress of Solitude . Chase Insteadman, former child television star, has a new role in life—permanent guest on the Upper East Side dinner party circuit, where he is consigned to talk about his astronaut fiancée, Janice Trumbull, who is trapped on a circling Space Station. A chance encounter collides Chase with Perkus Tooth, a wily pop culture guru with a vicious conspiratorial streak and the best marijuana in town. Despite their disparate backgrounds and trajectories Chase and Perkus discover they have a lot in common, including a cast of friends from all walks of life in Manhattan. Together and separately they attempt to define the indefinable, and enter into a quest for the most elusive of things: truth and authenticity in a city where everything has a price. "Full of dark humor and dazzling writing" -- Entertainment Weekly

These wickedly authentic introductions to twenty-first-century books preface tomes on teaching English to bacteria, using animated X-rays to create "pornograms," and analyzing computer-generated literature through the science of "bitistics." "Lem, a science fiction Bach, plays in this book a googleplex of variations on his basic themes" (New York Times Book Review). Translated by Marc E. Heine. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book

The second collection of short stories from the highly acclaimed author of THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER & CLAY and WONDER BOYS. There are the two boys of the title story, locked in their own world of fantasy and make-believe, reaching out to each other to survive the terrible prospect of fatherlessness. 'House Hunting' shows us the grim spectacle of a couple whose marriage is in its death throes, and whose search for a happy home is doomed; in another story a couple struggle to overcome the effects of a brutal rape. Elsewhere, a family therapist comes face to face with the dark secret of his childhood, and an American football star down on his luck makes his peace with his father. The collection culminates in a daring and wonderfully baroque horror story, 'In the Black Mill', which chronicles the terrifying fate that befalls an archaeologist as he uncovers cannibalism and ritual sacrifice in a gloomy Pennsylvanian town. Serious in their subject matter, yet shot through with wit, humour and compassion, these nine short stories are testament to Chabon's ability to weave together comedy and tragedy with unforgettable results.

"The acclaimed bestselling author of Sandwich is back with a wonderful novel, full of laughter and heart, about marriage, family, and what happens when life doesn't go as planned. If you loved Rocky and her family on vacation on Cape Cod, wait until you join them at home two years later. (And if this is your first meeting with this crew, get ready to laugh and cry-and relate.) Rocky, still anxious, nostalgic, and funny, is living in Western Massachusetts with her husband Nick and their daughter Willa, who's back home after college. Their son, Jamie, has taken a new job in New York, and Mort, Rocky's widowed father, has moved in. It all couldn't be more ridiculously normal . . . until Rocky finds herself obsessed with a local accident that only tangentially affects them-and with a medical condition that, she hopes, won't affect them at all. With her signature wit and wisdom, Catherine Newman explores the hidden rules of family, the heavy weight of uncertainty, and the gnarly fact that people-no matter how much you love them-are not always exactly who you want them to be"--

Acclaimed novelist Austin Grossman reimagines the ultimate American antihero. Richard Milhous Nixon lived one of the most improbable lives of the twentieth century. Our thirty-seventh president's political career spanned the button-down fifties, the Mad Men sixties, and the turbulent seventies. He faced down the Russians, the Chinese, and ultimately his own government. The man went from political mastermind to a national joke, sobbing in the Oval Office, leaving us with one burning question: how could he have lost it all? Here for the first time is the tale told in his own words: the terrifying supernatural secret he stumbled upon as a young man, and the truth behind the Cold War. What if the man we call our worst president was, in truth, our greatest? Combining Lovecraftian suspense and international intrigue, Crooked is a masterwork of alternative history, equal parts mesmerizing character study and nail-biting Faustian thriller.

An Edgar(R) Award Nominee for Best Novel Jesse Kellerman--the international bestselling author of The Executor and The Genius-- brings his prodigious talent to bear on a topic he knows well in this hilarious and surprising spin on the modern blockbuster thriller novel. Missing for months after a tragic boating accident, William de Vallée, the superstar thriller writer, is pronounced dead. His oldest friend, Arthur Pfefferkorn, receives the news with an unsettling mix of grief and envy. A middle-aged college professor with long-dead literary aspirations, Pfefferkorn can't help but feel outshone by his friend's success--especially since he married the woman Pfefferkorn loved. But now Bill is gone, and Pfefferkorn is there to comfort Carlotta in her time of grief. Reconnecting with de Vallée's widow makes more than one of his dreams come true . . . until it plunges him into a shadowy world of intrigue and double crosses, where no one can be trusted--and nothing can be taken seriously.

"The Bradford-Shmulkin family is falling apart. A very modern blend of Russian, Jewish, Korean, and New England WASP, they love one another deeply but the pressures of life in an unstable America are fraying their bonds. There's Daddy, a struggling, cash-thirsty editor whose Russian heritage gives him a surprising new currency in the upside-down world of twenty-first-century geopolitics; his wife, Anne Mom, a progressive, underfunded blue blood from Boston who's barely holding the household together; their son, Dylan, whose blond hair and Mayflower lineage provide him pride of place in the newly forming American political order; and, above all, the young Vera, half-Jewish, half-Korean, and wholly original. Observant, sensitive, and always writing down new vocabulary words, Vera wants only three things in life: to make a friend at school; Daddy and Anne Mom to stay together; and to meet her birth mother, Mom Mom, who will at last tell Vera the secret of who she really is and how to ensure love's survival in this great, mad, imploding world"--

An NPR Best Book of 2022 “Delectable. . . Huneven treats us to a savory plot that blends spiritual yearnings with earthly pleasures. Forks out!” —Oprah Daily From critically acclaimed, award-winning author Michelle Huneven, a sharp and funny novel of a congregational search committee, told as a memoir with recipes Dana Potowski is a restaurant critic and food writer and a longtime member of a progressive Unitarian Universalist congregation in Southern California. Under pressure to find her next book idea, she’s asked to join the church search committee for a new minister and agrees, resolving to secretly pen a memoir, with recipes, about the experience. That memoir, Search , follows the travails of the committee and their candidates—and becomes its own media sensation. Dana had good material to work with: the committee is a wide-ranging mix of Unitarian Universalist congregants, and their candidates range from a baker and microbrew master/pastor to a reverend who identifies as both a witch and an environmental warrior. Although she may have been ambivalent about joining the committee, Dana finds that she cares deeply about the fate of this institution and she will fight the entire committee, if necessary, to win the day for her side. This wry and wise tale will speak to anyone who has ever gone searching.

An “extremely funny...brilliantly alive” ( The New York Times Book Review ) social satire of the highest order from bestselling author Sam Lipsyte, centered around an unwitting mindfulness guru and the phenomenon he initiates. In an America convulsed by political upheaval, cultural discord, environmental catastrophe, and spiritual confusion, so many of us find ourselves anxious and distracted, searching desperately for peace, salvation, and—perhaps most immediately—just a little damn focus. Enter Hark Morner, a failed stand-up comic turned mindfulness guru whose revolutionary program is set to captivate the masses. But for Fraz and Tovah, a middle-aged couple slogging through a very rough patch, it may take more than the tenets of Hark’s “Mental Archery” to solve the riddles of love, lust, work, and parenthood on the eve of civilizational collapse. And given the sudden power of certain fringe players, including a renegade Ivy League ethicist, a gentle Swedish kidnapper, a social media tycoon with an empire on the skids, and a mysteriously influential (but undeniably slimy) catfish, it just might be too late. But what’s the point of a world, even a blasted-out post-apocalyptic world, if they don’t try with all their might to keep their marriage alive? In this “awfully funny...tartly effective sendup of 21st-century America” ( Star Tribune , Minneapolis) Sam Lipsyte reaches new peaks of daring in a novel that revels in contemporary absurdity and the wild poetry of everyday language while exploring the emotional truths of his characters. “Recommended reading” ( Vanity Fair ), in which “every line feels as thrillingly charged as a live wire” ( O, The Oprah Magazine ), Hark is a smart, incisive look at men, women, and children seeking meaning and dignity in a chaotic, ridiculous, and often dangerous world.

"Ted Fullilove, aka Mr. Peanut, is not like other Ivy League grads. He shares an apartment with Goldberg, his beloved battery-operated fish, sleeps on a bed littered with yellow legal pads penned with what he hopes will be the next great American novel, and spends the waning malaise-filled days of the Carter administration at Yankee Stadium, waxing poetic while slinging peanuts to pay the rent. When Ted hears the news that his estranged father, Marty, is dying of lung cancer, he immediately moves back into his childhood home, where a whirlwind of revelations ensues. The browbeating absentee father of his youth is living to make up for lost time, but his health dips drastically whenever his beloved Red Sox lose. And so, with help from a crew of neighborhood old-timers and the lovely Mariana--Marty's Nuyorican grief counselor--Ted orchestrates the illusion of a Sox winning streak, enabling Marty and the Red Sox to reverse the Curse of the Bambino and cruise their way to World Series victory. Well, sort of David Duchovny's richly drawn Bucky F&%@ing Dent is a story of the bond between fathers and sons, Yankee fans and the Fenway faithful, and grapples with the urgent need to find our story in an age of irony and artifice. Culminating in that fateful moment in October of '78 when the meek Bucky Dent hit his way into baseball history with the unlikeliest of home runs, this tragicomic novel demonstrates that life truly belongs to the losers--that the long shots are the ones worth betting on. Bucky F&%@ing is a singular tale that brims with the hilarity, poignance, and profound solitude of modern life"--

"A darkly comic mystery by the author of Hark and The Ask set in the vibrant music scene of early 1990s New York City"--

Darkly funny account of the office worker’s mindset by the celebrated French novelist A long-suffering employee in a big corporation has summoned up the courage to ask for a raise. But as he runs through the looming encounter in his mind, his neuroses come to the surface: What is the best day to see the boss? What if he doesn’t offer you a seat when you go into his office? The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise is a hilarious account of an employee losing his identity—and possibly his sanity—as he tries to put on the most acceptable face for the corporate world,with its rigid hierarchies and hostility to new ideas. If he follows a certain course of action, so this logic goes, he will succeed—but, in accepting these conditions, are his attempts to challenge his world of work doomed from the outset? Neurotic and pessimistic, yet endearing, comic and never less than entertaining, Perec’s Woody Allen-esque underling presents an acute and penetrating vision of the world of office work, as pertinent today as it was when it was written in 1968.

In The Player, the Hollywood classic that was adapted into the celebrated movie by Robert Altman, film executive Griffin Mill got away with murder. Now Mill is back, down to his last $6 million, and broke. His second wife wants to leave him. His first wife still loves him. His children hate him, and believing that the end of the world is happening, he wants to save them all, with one last desperate plan to save his life: quit the studio and convince an almost billionaire that he has the road map and the mettle to make them both achieve savage wealth. In The Return of the Player , Tolkin again delivers a brilliant, incise portrait of power, wealth, and family in contemporary society gone out of control with greed and excess.

Their friend Marcel Proust had killed himself after the fall in diamond shares, a collapse that annihilated a part of his fortune. This is the first-ever translation into English of this startling tour-de-force by one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers. The Lemoine Affair was inspired by the real-life French scandal involving Henri Lemoine, who claimed he could manufacture diamonds from coal and convinced numerous people—including officers of the De Beers diamond mine company and Proust himself—to invest in the scheme. In a series of pastiches—imitations written in the style of other writers—Proust tells the story of the embarrassment rippling across high society Paris in the wake of the scandal, poking fun at himself (in one story, a character declares that Marcel Proust is so embarrassed he’s suicidal) while lampooning some of France’s greatest writers, including Flaubert, Balzac, and Saint-Simon. Full of sophisticated wit and dazzling wordplay, and rife with allusions to his friend and fictional characters, many Proust scholars see the dead-on mimicry of The Lemoine Affair —written soon after Proust’s rejection of society life—as the work by which he honed his own unique, masterly voice. The Art of The Novella Series Too short to be a novel, too long to be a short story, the novella is generally unrecognized by academics and publishers. Nonetheless, it is a form beloved and practiced by literature's greatest writers. In the Art Of The Novella series, Melville House celebrates this renegade art form and its practitioners with titles that are, in many instances, presented in book form for the first time.

"Henry Mulcahy, a literature instructor at progressive Jocelyn College, is informed that his appointment will not be continued. Convinced he is disliked by the president of Jocelyn because of his abilities as a teacher and his independence of mass opinion, Mulcahy believes he is being made the victim of a witch-hunt. Plotting vengeance, Mulcahy battles to fight for justice and, in the process, reveals his true ethical nature." -- Publisher provided description.

Amanda Craig dissects & connects modern London, from its literary & media circuit to its hospitals & slums to its criminal underclass, & examines the moral choices made by the generation who reached adulthood as 'Thatcher's Children'.