1 New York Times bestseller Beautiful Ruins, a father-son story that underscores why Jess Walter is not only among the funniest writers working today but among the most bighearted and humane.Jay is nothing like his hard-drinking, skirt-chasing, blue-collar dad. He’s college-educated, works as a graphic designer, prefers white wine to whiskey, and is gay—a fact that’s been lost, with so much else, in the growing fog of his father’s dementia. When the woman with whom his dad has lived for decades throws him out (thanks to a little neighborly infidelity), Jay moves his dad to Boise to live with him—at least temporarily—until he can find an eldercare facility for the old man. But the search turns out to be far more complicated than Jay realized—what place will not only care for his dad but let him be who he imperfectly is, bad habits and all? The answer to that question takes father and son to a 1950s-style motor inn, the Town & Country Senior Inn, where the only therapy on offer is nostalgia and happy hour starts at 3:30.In turns hilarious and heartbreaking, Town & Country describes a son’s greatest act of tolerance and acceptance in a world—a distinctly American one—that hasn’t always shown him the same. It’s a story, as only Jess Walter could write it, about all the ways we cannot help but love each other even when, owing to political, regional, and generational divisions, we do not, and maybe cannot, understand each other.

    Recently, however, his own life has become overwhelmed by wrong choices. When a love affair is mysteriously ended by a Post-it note and followed up by a random street assault, Andy locks himself in his Hell's Kitchen apartment. In solitude, he thinks, he might be able to get a grip on his life. But when he is forced to reemerge six months after the attacks of September 11, the city awaiting him is more bewildering than ever and all the people in his world seem to be part of a vast conspiracy.Equal parts noir, French farce, and homage to New York, Suspension is a surprisingly heartfelt novel about learning to live in a world where nearly everything is decided behind our backs.

    She was that person to me. She will always be that person to me.And this is her story.Before you get your hopes up, I need to issue a warning about this story. There’s happiness. And there’s an ending. But there’s not a happy ending. At least, not in the conventional sense.Anyway, my moment came at freshman orientation when the girl who would eventually become my everything stood up during introductions and proudly announced, “My name is Willow Stone, and I’m going to die on December 27th, 2019.”

    Now, after breaking up with his longtime boyfriend, Smith looks back to his painfully normal childhood to see where all the trouble really began. Like every other American kid, Bob's adolescence was marked by alternating moments of blissful ignorance, hazy confusion, and humiliating self-consciousness. And in these pages, Bob evokes his youth with a vividness that will make you shudder and howl with recognition.In these hysterically humorous pages, Bob Smith introduces readers to his comically unsympathetic grandmother, who makes light of his carsickness: "Bob only throws up because he's near the window and he can"; to his first teacher crush, whose "five-o'clock shadow could plunge a room into darkness"; and to his first brush with fame, when he fainted from his chair during a biology filmstrip ("Way to go, Smith!"). Sharp, observant, ingeniously ironic and wholly satisfying, this new Lambda Award-nominated collection is at once bittersweet nostalgic fun and a testament to the unquestionable gifts of a highly original comic writer.

    A rent boy with a heart of gold. These two will leave you breathless in more ways than one. Get five books for the price of one in this hotter-than-you-can-handle bundle! Jacob's never really found the "right" person for him, which is why he's left a virgin nearing his 30th birthday. Finally giving in, he hires a rent boy to break him in gently. He isn't expecting it to turn into more. Evan is highly sought-after rent boy with one goal: keep his customers happy. When that turns out to mean visiting his virgin billionaire over and over again, never quite sealing the deal, he's left wondering why the man keeps seeking him out. And why Jacob seems like he's teetering on the brink of jealousy. Will Evan manage to break down Jacob's steel-plated walls? Or will Jacob keep the world from seeing who he really is forever? These five titles are intended for adults only. Grab this bundle now to swoon over friends becoming lovers, swanky billionaires, first-timers, virgins, and so much more. Remember, no matter what, there's always a happily ever after by the last page and no cheating!

    What is the difference, he asks, between good and evil, cruelty and instruction, risk and trust? Against the backdrop of the natural world, Phillips pitches the restlessness of what it means to be human, as he at once deepens and extends a meditation on that space where the forces of will and imagination collide with sexual and moral conduct.

    Ben likes Noah back. No one must know. But somebody does ... Between his depression and anxiety disorder and his secret relationship with popular jock Ben Hynes, seventeen-year-old Noah Simmons has already more than enough to deal with. But there is always room for deterioration.When an anonymous blackmailer threatens to publish a salacious video of them unless they comply with his demands, Noah and Ben are hard-pressed to figure out the lesser of two evils. Ben has a reputation to lose. Noah has one hardly worth fighting for, but he doesn't want to lose Ben. Neither of them wants to be an inadvertent teenage porn star, so how far are they willing to go to protect their secret?Get your copy of Instafamous now for a fresh and relevant look at the intricacies of social media, teenagers, and mental health.

    Now, he’s returned to Kippen for the first time in twenty years because his cousin Tony has been found dead under the local bridge.The news that Tony has left him the entire family farm triggers James’s journalistic curiosity – and his anxiety – both of which cropped up during his turbulent journey to adulthood. But it is the unexpected homophobic attack he survives that draws James into a hunt for the reasons one lonely Kippen farm boy in every generation kills himself.Standing in the way is James’s father, the town’s recently retired top cop, who is not prepared to investigate crimes no-one reckons have taken place. James must use every newshound’s trick he ever learned in order to uncover the brutal truth.A coming-of-age story and crime thriller with a large and gentle heart.

    The Glanville clan includes Edwin, a retired bishop who has lost his faith; his wife Marta, a controversial anthropologist and child of the Warsaw Ghetto; their son, Clement, a celebrated gay painter traumatized by the death of his twin; and their daughter, Susannah, a music publicist recovering from an affair with a convicted murderer. Each of them must face down a personal demon--Clement's work and reputation are violently attacked and his privacy is shattered, Susannah's exploration of the kabbalah transports her into the closed world of Chassidic Jews and a seemingly impossible love, and Edwin's illness forces Marta to confront the horrors of her past. These memorable figures are portrayed with wit, wisdom, and shattering emotional power.

    Very few people suspected, and even fewer actually knew, that the Duchess cuckolded him—and almost gave him up—for a gay playboy twenty years her junior.Blond and slender, Jimmy Donahue was the archetypal post-war playboy. He could fly a plane, speak several languages, play the piano, and tell marvelous jokes. People loved him for his wit, charm and personality. The grandson of millionaire Frank W. Woolworth, Jimmy knew he would never need to work. Instead, he set about carving for himself a career of mischief. Some said evil. Gay at a time when the homosexual act was still illegal, Jimmy was notorious within America’s upper class, and loved to shock. Though press agents arranged for him to be seen with female escorts, his pursuits, until he met the Duchess of Windsor, were exclusively homosexual. He was thirty-five when he was befriended by the Duke and Duchess of Windsor in 1950. The Duchess was fifty-four, and despite the difference in age, there was an instant attraction. A burgeoning sexual relationship – a perverse sort of love – was formed between Jimmy and the Duchess. Together with the Duke, they became an inseparable trio, the closest of friends. As Jimmy had planned, the royal couple became obsessed with him.With information from surviving contemporaries, Dancing with the Devil is the extraordinary tale of three remarkable people and their unique and twisted relationship.

    William Laird is her devoted father who has kept a secret from his fanatical daughter.

    Sirius Black is an immature twenty-something, living with a couple of other immature twenty-somethings. Both are obsessed with the same obscure book, which becomes their coping mechanism for navigating their instant and torrid love affair. Life, they discover, is precarious at best, but from each other, they learn how to make it something that’s worth living.

    S. Merwin. The book is an intriguing set of variations on the theme of identity. Arnold plays on the idea of the shell as both the dazzling surface of the self and a hard case that protects the self against the assaults of the world. His poems narrate amatory and culinary misadventures. “Friendships based on food,” Arnold writes, “are rarely stable”—this book is full of wildly unstable and bewitching friendships and other significant relations.

    Set in upstate New York, the novel follows these characters as they achieve their aims in lives redolent with loss and hope, humor and sadness, union and alienation. Russell picks up the thread of his critically acclaimed novel The Salt Point 20 years later and tracks the lives of these friends, some of whom not only lost touch with each other but have also lost their way. Moving, at times shocking, and always memorable, Immaculate Blue points to where the personal and the political come together and shape our lives in unexpected ways. With this newest novel, Paul Russell reminds us of why he is one of the most important voices on the literary scene.

    A band of swordsmen on a failed mission. The forbidden love of Zheng He, the great Chinese Admiral. A young daughter forming a strange bond with her deceased father’s cat. Presenting ten stories in his fifth collection, O Thiam Chin plumbs the joy and despair, hopes and fears of men and women caught up by their past and confounded by lost loves. Taut, dark and visceral, these stories reveal, once again, the mysteries that lie in the heart of man.