Ever since she made a deal to save her son's life in Roman-occupied Jerusalem, Rachel has been doomed to live eternally, but as her descendants develop new technologies for immortality, she realizes that, for them to live fully, she must die. "What would it really mean to live forever? Rachel is a woman with a problem: she can't die. Her recent troubles--widowhood, a failing business, an unemployed middle-aged son--are only the latest in a litany spanning dozens of countries, scores of marriages, and hundreds of children. In the 2,000 years since she made a spiritual bargain to save the life of her first son back in Roman-occupied Jerusalem, she's tried everything to free herself, and only one other person in the world understands: a man she once loved passionately, who has been stalking her through the centuries, convinced they belong together forever. But as the twenty-first century begins and her children and grandchildren--consumed with immortality in their own ways, from the frontiers of digital currency to genetic engineering--develop new technologies that could change her fate and theirs, Rachel knows she must find a way out. Gripping, hilarious, and profoundly moving. Eternal Life celebrates the bonds between generations, the power of faith, the purpose of death, and the reasons for being alive."--Dust jacket.

Twenty-nine-year-old widower Doug Parker finds his life spiraling out of control as he struggles to come to terms with grief, love, family, and suburbia while dealing with a bossy, pregnant twin sister who urges him to begin dating again, a younger sister planning her wedding, a mother dealing with her ailing husband, and a hostile teenage stepson.

At fifty, Pippa Lee seems just fine. The devoted wife of a brilliant publisher thirty years her senior, the proud mother of successful twins, and a lovely and adored friend and neighbor, she seems to glow with feminine serenity. But when her husband spontaneously decides they should cast off Gramercy Park for Marigold Village retirement home as a “preemptive strike against his decrepitude,” Pippa finds her beatific persona unraveling in alarming ways: the truth is that the gracious woman of the present day has seen more than her fair share of the wild side. By seventeen, Pippa had lived with a Dexedrine-addicted mother, felt the first stirrings of sexuality with a school girlfriend, had an affair with a teacher, and run away from home, set adrift on a course littered with broken hearts—until she seemingly found love and security in a family of her own. And now that established world, too, is in danger. In Pippa Lee we have an unforgettable heroine, and a quirky and acutely intelligent portrait of the many lives behind a single name. Even after we’ve read it, The Private Lives of Pippa Lee is a story that is still unfurling.

"Welcome to Heaven, Inc., the grossly mismanaged corporation in the sky. For as long as anyone can remember, the founder and CEO (known in some circles as "God") has been phoning it in. Lately, he's been spending most of his time on the golf course. And when he does show up at work, it's not to resolve wars or end famines, but to Google himself and read what humans have been blogging about him. When God decides to retire (to pursue his lifelong dream of opening an Asian Fusion restaurant), he also decides to destroy Earth. His employees take the news in stride, except for Craig and Eliza, two underpaid angels in the lowly Department of Miracles. Unlike their boss, Craig and Eliza love their jobs - uncapping city fire hydrants on hot days, revealing lost keys in snow banks - and they refuse to accept that earth is going under. The angels manage to strike a deal with their boss. He'll call off his Armageddon, if they can solve their toughest miracle yet: getting the two most socially awkward humans on the planet to fall in love. With doomsday fast approaching, and the humans ignoring every chance for happiness thrown their way, Craig and Eliza must move heaven and earth to rescue them - and the rest of us, too." -- back cover

Take an instantly recognizable social dilemma—attending a wedding alone—add a good laugh (and maybe a cry), and meet The Singles , the warm and witty debut by Boston Globe “Love Letters” columnist Meredith Goldstein. Beth “Bee” Evans’s first vow as a bride is that everyone on her list be invited to bring a guest to her lavish, Chesapeake Bay nuptials. When Hannah, Vicki, Rob, Joe, and Nancy one by one decline Bee’s generous offer, the frustrated bride dubs them the “Singles,” adrift on her seating chart as well as in life.

At fifteen Ruby left home, got herself an agent and became a film star. Now twenty, she lives alone, in a world of hotels and fast food. Destructive and charming, cutting is Ruby's hobby. Her hair, her arms and occasional tattoos - her newest accessory is a bloodline necklace. Ruby is a seductive blend of heroine and whore. She has left the man who loves her, been fired by her agent, and is starring in a film opposite the delectable Aslan. It is quite possibly her last chance. Striking, funny and razor sharp, Thin Skin is a novel in which we see that sometimes you have to look over the edge in order to see your way back.

"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"--

Upset when her stand-up comedian boyfriend dumps her on Christmas, Jewish Manhattan publicist Aimee Albert sets out to seek companionship with a nice Jewish man, only to find herself falling for Josh Hirsch, a gorgeous--and Jewish--man who mistakes her for a shiksa and who has a different attitude toward Judaism than she does.

Meet Viva Cohen: her bedroom walls are plastered with posters of silver-screen legends, and underneath her school uniform she wears vintage thigh-high stockings. Her best friends are a drugged-out beauty queen and an aging rock star. She lives in London with her gay uncle Manny. A bitingly funny and fiercely intelligent first novel, "Namedropper" takes you on a rowdy romp from London to Los Angeles, where Viva and her two best friends search for love, experience, and Jack Nicholson. It's a wild ride as she uncovers the icon in every person she meets.

Maybe you know Amanda. Maybe you are Amanda. Whoever you are, you will love Amanda. An important, shrewd, and laugh-out-loud funny debut novel that answers the question: What happens when Bridget Jones or the Sex and the City girls get married and have babies? Nothing ever prepared Amanda for this: not her elite college degree, not her brainy friends, not her mother the feminist heroine. At age 35, she finds herself at home with two children, mopping spills and singing The Itsy-Bitsy Spider. It doesn?t help that her husband?s face is all over national television or that her best friend is dating a billionaire or that every woman she knows seems to have a plastic surgeon and an interior decorator. While everyone else is racing up the fast track, it?s getting hard for Amanda to remember why she left work in the first place. Set amidst the glamor and power of boom-time Washington, D.C., Amanda Bright is a novel about status and ambition marriage and jealousy and a woman?s struggle to discover the things that matter most. Amanda Bright@Home will become an anthem for a generation of women that is learning that success is not always found at the office."

"This capstone novel in Library of America's Bernard Malamud edition brings together his three final novels: The Tenants, about the growing tension between two male writers--one Jewish, the other Black--who are the only inhabitants of a crumbling Manhattan tenement house; Dubin's Lives, a revealing study in the perils and promise of love in middle age thought to be Malamud's most autobiographical work; and God's Grace, a postapocalyptic tale of upended evolution in which redemption depends on the lone human survivor's ability to find common ground with a talking chimp. Edited by Malamud's definitive biographer, the volume is rounded out with thirteen masterful short stories and the memoir 'Long Work, Short Life' as well as a fascinating autobiographic sketch, 'A Lost Bar-Mitzvah,' published here for the first time."--Dust jacket.

Enraged about the literary successes of his ex-girlfriend and her new lover, Ian, an aspiring writer and coffee shop employee, becomes involved in a scheme to pen a bogus memoir and discovers unsettling industry hypocrisies.

"A romantic comedy about two twentysomething neighbors on a mission to find the founder of Starbucks"--Provided by the publisher.

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.

What if God fell in love and the person was already married? A bitter story of the very first love triangle between a man, his wife, and their God First came Adam, whose fall soured His quest for absolute authority, then Noah, whose dreary sense of duty He found dull. God resolves for a third and final time to get it right, to select a vessel through whom He can direct human affairs, and to whom He can communicate directly His will. He chooses a solitary figure whose trust must be wooed, but whose faith, once secured, will surely reflect even greater glory and love. Were matters only that simple. In Only Human , Jenny Diski's brilliant and affecting retelling of the Abraham and Sarah story, God learns that no man, chosen or not, is solitary, and that the bonds forged by the human heart are resilient even to divine commandment. Diski transforms an archetypal tale of Old Testament obedience into a fierce love triangle, a test of wills over not only mankind's future, but over who will tell the story of its past.

When Layla Brennan married her high school sweetheart, Brett Foster, she finally got the big, loving family she’d always wanted: his. Now she’s closer to Brett’s parents than he is, partners with his sister in a successful pet-photography business, and confidant to his younger brother. She couldn’t be more of a Foster if she’d been born one. There’s just one problem: Brett wants a divorce. Stunned and heartbroken, Layla turns to the Fosters for comfort, only to realize that losing Brett means losing them as well. What else can she do but sue him for the most valuable thing he’s got–namely, his family. Breaking up may be hard to do, but for Layla and Brett it’s even harder to undo. Fresh, funny, poignant, and brimming with insight into what makes modern families tick–and what can blow them apart– Family Affair proves that in love and war, everything’s relative.

Sam and Lucy seem like the perfect couple. Successful, happy and in love. But life isn't that simple. Lucy thinks thinks Sam is a sad, cold sensitivity-exclusion zone who would rather read a newspaper than have an emotion. Sam thinks Lucy is blaming him because she can't walk past Mothercare without getting all teary. The problem is that they might be infertile. And in more ways than one. Lucy wants a baby. Sam wants to write a hit movie. And given that the average IVF cycle has about a one in five chance of going into full production, Lucy's chances of getting what she wants are considerably better than Sam's. What Sam and Lucy are about to go through is absolutely inconceivable. The question is, can their love survive? Or are the odds stacked against them once again?

Daisy and Henry Lewis have been married for twenty years. They live near Harvard University where they have long served as a host family for its International students. With the departure of their son for college the empty nest turns into a gaping hole. Henry starts calling himself Henri, spattering his conversations with au contraires and mais ouis. She should have seen "it" coming. On the night they win the Host Family award, Henry tells Daisy over sushi that their marriage is finis. Daisy tries to pick up the pieces by falling in love with a parasitologist named Truman Wolff who finds extraordinary similarities between the behaviour of tapeworms and humans. But just as life is regaining some equilibrium, the arrival of a devastatingly good-looking Italian student shakes up the symbiotic combinations and challenges everything Daisy and believes about the meaning of family and the meaning of love.

"When Adam Freedman--a skinny, immature, and lackluster high school student from Piedmont, California--is sent by his parents to join his older sister Casey in New York City, he is hopeful that his life is about to change. And it sure does. It is the Summer of 2006--the year of gay marriage demonstrations and the rise of transgender rights--and Casey has thrust herself into New York's fringe lesbian, sexual, and political scene. Accustomed to being a social misfit, Adam now finds himself part of a wild subculture complete with underground clubs, drinking, and friendly women who take a surprisingly intense interest in him. It takes some time for him to realize many in this new crowd assume he is transgendered--a boy who was born a girl--or else why would he always be around? But then he meets Gillian, the girl of his dreams. If only she weren't a lesbian! And if only she didn't believe he was really (sort of) a girl. Ariel Schrag's scathingly funny and poignant debut novel puts a fresh spin on questions of love, attraction, self-definition, and what it takes to be at home in your own skin"--

"Perfect for your summer trip to the beach" (O, The Oprah Magazine), Kathi Kamen Goldmark's hilarious novel of musicians, love, family, sex, and success is now in paperback. Follow Sarah Jean Pixlie as she catapults from struggling back-up singer to blazing star on the country music scene. Along the way, she pours out her savvy soul in the humorous lyrics from more than two dozen original songs, including "Put Me on the Guest List (To Your Heart)," "Hell on Heels," and "My Baby Used to Hold Me (Now He's Putting Me on Hold)." "Funny, authentic, and moving," raves Dave Barry about this first novel, which Scott Turow says is "the best thing to happen to country music since the broken heart."