Lew McCreary's brilliant, chilling novel enters the mind of a harmless drifter whose idea of intimacy is murder. Vann Siegert is by all appearances an ordinary man. With only his truck and a few possessions, he has moved cross-country to start a new life, taking a temporary holiday job at the post office in a small Massachusetts town. But when the urge calls him, Vann takes to the road-armed with a poisoned flask of liquor and a smile that strangers trust. Woe to those who accept his comfort-junkies, hitchhikers, a high school football star, Vann gathers his victims like moths to a flame. A harrowing journey inside the mind of a disquietingly compassionate psychopath, The Minus Man is an unforgettable literary experience and is sure to be one of the year's most talked-about movies.

    The memory of this journey will haunt him for the rest of his life. On this trip, he meets the enigmatic Cousin Aubrey, a man of "irregular kinship," the black sheep of the Longfort clan. As the years pass, and Aubrey disappears into the world, Nathan begins to compulsively collect rumors about his faraway life—as Nathan's mother's first true love, a charmer of European society, a Don Juan, a worldly success—and sees it in stinging contrast to his own unfulfilled dreams of becoming an artist. Much later in life, the two men—now old—will meet again.

    William Styron traces the betrayals and infidelities—the heritage of spite and endlessly disappointed love—that afflict the members of a Southern family and that culminate in the suicide of the beautiful Peyton Loftis.

    From within a small iron cage, this small, often fearful woman is challenging herself to face the planet's largest land carnivores in the bone-aching cold of an unforgiving terrain. Before long, disaster strikes, and she must draw on her every strength in order to survive.

    Six years later, that child meets his father for the first time and discovers the athlete within. Before long he is on the fast-track to the NFL, coached by a relentless Vietnam veteran uncle, nourished by a patient working mom, and defended by an ambitious girlfriend, all of whom tie their own hopes to his career. When he finally makes it, as Mitch "Wilk" Wilkins, New England's fearsome middle linebacker, it all seems preordained. Then, almost immediately, his life begins to fall apart: a billionaire owns him, his marriage is on the rocks, and his body is betraying him in stages. As Mitch and his wounded family press on, seeking meaning in a relentlessly incentive-driven and forward-moving life, the sacrifices necessary for success in sports―and in attaining the “American Dream”―are laid painfully and tragically bare.

    The collection includes the following titles: Almost by Elizabeth Benedict, Those Who Save Us by Jenna Blum, The Hearts of Horses by Molly Gloss, The Last Chinese Chef by Nicole Mones, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O'Farrell, and The Magician's Assistant by Ann Patchett.

    Eddie Carbone is a Brooklyn longshoreman, a hard-working man whose life has been soothingly predictable. He hasn't counted on the arrival of two of his wife's relatives, illegal immigrants from Italy; nor has he recognized his true feelings for his beautiful niece, Catherine. And in due course, what Eddie doesn't know?about her, about life, about his own heart?will have devastating consequences.

    In The Road Show we meet Zachary Edge, a Confederate soldier, on his way home at the war's close. He stumbles upon a traveling troupe, a chance encounter that is the start of an unforgettable odyssey. Edge hits the road with bawdy showgirls, roguish tricksters, and a host of colorful characters. He soon finds himself in the arms of Autumn Auburn, the lithesome artiste known for her breathtaking sensuality.

    With an oddball cast of conniving White House staffers, corrupt politicos, sleazy journalists, and rancid pro football coaches, this novel is a brilliant send-up of modern America-and the D.C. three-ring circus-at its most absurdly entertaining.

    It falls to Rose to bring up her young sister and run the household, with little thanks from either of her parents. But just as Rose has almost given up hope, she realises she has a secret admirer of her own.

    At stake: the lives of three men. There's the defendant, lawyer, and legendary bootlegger George Remus, whose crime of passion may seal his fate. Against him is the ambitious son of a former president, whose future rests on this monumental case. And then there's the federal agent whose obsession with taking Remus down started the entire tragedy. Three men separated by law and fate, but connected by something more seductive than either justice or corruption -- the impassioned, untamed heart of an enigmatic woman known as the Jazz Bird.Based on a true story, "The Jazz Bird" is an exquisitely written novel of love, betrayal, money, and power in an age of American innocence.

      The title story, inspired by Raymond Carver’s masterpiece, is a provocative portrait of two marriages in which the Holocaust is played out as a devastating parlor game. In the outlandishly dark “Camp Sundown” vigilante justice is undertaken by a group of geriatric campers in a bucolic summer enclave. “Free Fruit for Young Widows” is a small, sharp study in evil, lovingly told by a father to a son. “Sister Hills” chronicles the history of Israel’s settlements from the eve of the Yom Kippur War through the present, a political fable constructed around the tale of two mothers who strike a terrible bargain to save a child. Marking a return to two of Englander’s classic themes, “Peep Show” and “How We Avenged the Blums” wrestle with sexual longing and ingenuity in the face of adversity and peril. And “Everything I Know About My Family on My Mother’s Side” is suffused with an intimacy and tenderness that break new ground for a writer who seems constantly to be expanding the parameters of what he can achieve in the short form.   Beautiful and courageous, funny and achingly sad, Englander’s work is a revelation.

    It is the story of Lassiter, a gunslinging avenger in black, who shows up in a remote Utah town just in time to save the young and beautiful rancher Jane Withersteen from having to marry a Mormon elder against her will. Lassiter is on his own quest, one that ends when he discovers a secret grave on Jane’s grounds. “[Zane Grey’s] popularity was neither accidental nor undeserved,” wrote Nye. “Few popular novelists have possessed such a grasp of what the public wanted and few have developed Grey’s skill at supplying it.”

    The walks meet a need for Julius: they are a release from the tightly regulated mental environment of work, and they give him the opportunity to process his relationships, his recent breakup with his girlfriend, his present, his past.But it is not only a physical landscape he covers; Julius crisscrosses social territory as well, encountering people from different cultures and classes who will provide insight on his journey—which takes him to Brussels, to the Nigeria of his youth, and into the most unrecognizable facets of his own soul.

    According to his obituary, Wesley Sultan led a quiet, respectable, and unremarkable life. Our narrator, however, is about to discover that nothing could be further from the truth.Using Sultan’s obituary as a road map to the unknown terrain of the man himself, our narrator discovers dead-ends, wrong turns, and unexpected destinations in every line. As he travels from the bleak Michigan winter to the steamy streets of Miami to the idyllic French countryside, in search of those who knew Wesley best, he gradually reconstructs the life of an exceptionally handsome, ambitious, and deceptive man to whom women were everything. And as the margins of the obituary fill with handwritten corrections, as details emerge and facts are revised, our mysterious narrator–whose interest in his quarry is far from random–has no choice but to confront the truth of his own life as well.