They are bonded by their loyalty to each other-and by their urgent desire to reconcile their own versions of the past. In what she means to be a rebellious act, Lily steals a car with her boyfriend and heads southwest to confront her mother. Mabel stays behind, hoping to commune somehow with her father's ghost...in a textured, eccentric, and redemptive tale as spare and compelling as the Nebraska landscape.

    Barraged by the constant advisements and bickerings of Aunt Penelope and Uncle Deva, who live with their nephew in the shimmering Void, Mr g proceeds to create time, space, and matter. Then come stars, planets, animate matter, consciousness, and, finally, intelligent beings with moral dilemmas. Mr g is all powerful but not all knowing and does much of his invention by trial and error.Even the best-laid plans can go awry, and Mr g discovers that with his creation of space and time come some unforeseen consequences—especially in the form of the mysterious Belhor, a clever and devious rival. An intellectual equal to Mr g, Belhor delights in provoking him: Belhor demands an explanation for the inexplicable, requests that the newly created intelligent creatures not be subject to rational laws, and maintains the necessity of evil. As Mr g watches his favorite universe grow into maturity, he begins to understand how the act of creation can change himself, the Creator.With echoes of Calvino, Rushdie, and Saramago, combining science, theology, and moral philosophy, Mr g is a stunningly imaginative work that celebrates the tragic and joyous nature of existence on the grandest possible scale.

    Moving between New Yorks Wall Street and the beauty of Corsica, Berberians novel is a literary rendering of Marxs Capital for the 21st century: where a fund trader makes his profits through the collapse of overseas markets--and ensures it with the aid of a hired assassin.

    Dr. Ray--a womanizer, small-town drunk, vigilante, poet, adoring husband--is a man trying to make sense of life in the twentieth century. In flight from the death he dealt flying over Vietnam, Dr. Ray struggles with those bound to him by need, sickness, lunacy, by blood and by love.

    Kelly Kelleher is an idealistic, twenty-six-year-old “good girl” when she meets the Senator at a Fourth of July party. In a brilliantly woven narrative, we enter her past and her present, her mind and her body as she is fatally attracted to this older man, this hero, this soon-to-be-lover. Kelly becomes the very embodiment of the vulnerable, romantic dreams of bright and brave women, drawn to the power that certain men command—at a party that takes on the quality of a surreal nightmare; in a tragic car ride that we hope against hope will not end as we know it must end. One of the acknowledged masters of American fiction, Joyce Carol Oates has written a bold tour de force that parts the black water to reveal the profoundest depths of human truth.

    That man may have been his best friend. Intolerable memory accompanies sobriety. A-sail on the high seas of literary tradition, Ottessa Moshfegh gives us a nasty heartless blackguard on a knife-sharp voyage through the fogs of recollection.They said I've done something wrong? . . . And they've just left me down here to starve. They'll see this inanition and be so damned they'll fall to my feet and pass up hot cross buns slathered in fresh butter and beg I forgive them. All of them . . . : the entire world one by one. Like a good priest I'll pat their heads and nod. I'll dunk my skull into a barrel of gin.Ottessa Moshfegh was awarded the 2013 Plimpton Discovery Prize for her stories in the Paris Review and a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She is currently a Wallace Stegner fellow at Stanford, and lives in Oakland, California.

    He and his three children are lost in their grief...until Sophie walks unexpectedly into their lives. Having left her native Czechoslovakia, Sophie has discovered the land which seemed so bright with promise is far from her dream. A highly educated woman, Sophie now finds herself keeping house for Alec and his family.How can Sophie find peace in her new job? Will God use her gentle spirit to help heal Alec's broken heart?25 years after its initial release comes this exquisite silver anniversary edition of Lori Wick's bestselling classic, Sophie's Heart (over 350,000 copies sold worldwide).Get swept up anew in Sophie and Alec's love story with this beautifully designed keepsake version of one of the most beloved Christian romance novels of all time.

    She was lonely and unsettled - her parents had been killed in a car accident, her boyfriend had decided to go back to his wife, and as a painter she led a solitary life in her North Yorkshire home town. But she felt immediately at home in the gracious stone house that had been bequeathed to her, and was made welcome by the local residents - in particular, by the members of the Mindon Amateur Dramatic Society (somewhat appropriately known as MADS) presided over by the formidable Ursula. Ursula liked to run things her way, and brooked no opposition when the ambitious decision was made (largely by herself) to put on A Midsummer Night's Dream as their next production. Petra , to her surprise and pleasure, was put in charge of the wardrobe. Rivalries, squabbles, love affairs and seething resentments threatened to scupper the production, and all Ursula's managerial skills were needed to prevent disaster. But Petra had more pressing things on her mind than the costumes for the cast. A mystery from her past began to haunt her - and the answer to that mystery might solve the puzzle of why she had been left such a beautiful house by a total stranger.

    Set in a ramshackle farmhouse in North Carolina, Life Without Water tells the story of a young Cedar and her mother, Sara, and as the girl's tries to repair the emotional damage done by the death of her beloved brother in Vietnam.

    One by one other men also vanish from outside Detroit where their fathers before them had lived, raised families, and, in a more promising era, lived. One man props open the door to his shoe Wisconsin. store and leaves a note. "I'm going to the moon," it reads. "I took the cash." The abandoned wives drink, brawl, and sleep around, gradually settling down to make new lives and shaking off the belief in an American dream that, like their husbands, has proven to be a thing of the past. Unable to leave the neighborhood their fathers abandoned, Michael and his friends stumble through their twenties until the restlessness of the fathers blooms in them, threatening to carry them away.

    But William is further weakened by the death of his mother, the arrival of a new step-mother, and his irrepressible crush on his new step-sister, Lulu. As Lulu faces down her own challenges, William watches his life shift into tumult and despair. Once Lulu departs for college, Will goes into the world to find himself — discovering Western philosophy, a cruel dating world, enduring friendship, and, ultimately, his true calling. Emboldened by his turn as a late-night radio personality, Will rescues himself from the self-image of weakness he'd long wished to escape. This debut novel explores the fundamental difference between where we come from — and the endless possibilities of where we may go.

    Leo’s bad behaviour, culminating in a car crash while under the influence—a nineteen-year-old waitress beside him—has endangered the Plumbs’ joint trust fund, or “the Nest,” as they’ve taken to calling it. The four siblings are at very different places in their lives, but all believe that this money will solve a host of self-inflicted problems and their consequences. And until Leo’s accident, they’d been mere months away from receiving it.Can Leo get the Plumbs out of this mess, as he’s always been able to do for himself before? Or will the Plumb siblings have to do without the money and the future lives they’ve envisioned? As the siblings grapple with family tensions, old histories and the significant emotional and financial cost of the accident, Sweeney introduces an unforgettable cast of supporting characters: Leo’s stalwart ex-girlfriend who now thinks that maybe, just maybe, he is capable of change; the waitress whose life was shattered in the accident and the Iraqi war veteran who falls in love with her; and a retired, grieving firefighter with a very big secret.Tender, funny and deftly written, The Nest explores what money does to relationships, what happens to our ambitions over the course of our lives, and the fraught but unbreakable ties we have with our families.

    On the last night of 1937, twenty-five-year-old Katey Kontent is in a second-rate Greenwich Village jazz bar when Tinker Grey, a handsome banker, happens to sit down at the neighboring table. This chance encounter and its startling consequences propel Katey on a year-long journey into the upper echelons of New York society—where she will have little to rely upon other than a bracing wit and her own brand of cool nerve. With its sparkling depiction of New York’s social strata, its intricate imagery and themes, and its immensely appealing characters, Rules of Civility won the hearts of readers and critics alike.

    The Indians are indifferent to Western notions of time and industry. The French, on the other hand, are sufficiently meticulous to import 2,348 pieces of cast iron to the desolate mining town of Santa Sofia, there to be assembled into a church under the supervision of a disciple of the renowned Gustave Eiffel.

    In the privacy of their homes, who can save them from themselves? In the forests and hills and on the beautiful lakes, what could possibly be wrong? Even in the sweet hometown, with its kindly police, menace lurks in a thousand disguises. Mystery and magic surround this metropolis of the imagination. Once again, James Tate has given us a world of surprising pleasures:... lost in the interstellar space between teacups in the cupboard, found in the beak of a downy woodpecker, the lovers staring into the void and then jumping over it, flying into their beautiful tomorrows like the heroes of a storm.