From the author of "Face-Time" comes an engaging, hilarious, sexy romp of a book about a college professor's unorthodox take on the academic imperative to publish or perish.

    Fidgeting over coffee with sugar and cream he explains: Their sister is gone. Three days earlier Goldie left to go shopping and she has not returned. With Goldie's disappearance as the catalyst, The First Desire takes us deep into the life of the Cohen family and Buffalo, New York, from the Great Depression to the years immediately following World War II. Shifting perspectives from siblings Sadie, Jo, Goldie, and Irving we learn of the secrets they have managed to keep hidden--and of Lillian, the beautiful woman their father took as a lover while his wife was dying. In this astonishing novel Reisman brings to life the love, grief, and desires that ultimately bind one family together.

    Through family rituals with his word-obsessed parents and sister, failed first love, an ill-fated run for class president, as the only Jewish boy on an otherwise all-black basketball team, all of the passages of Jeremy's life are marked in some way by his stutter and his wildly off-the-mark attempts at a cure. It is only when he enters college and learns his strong-willed mother is dying that he realizes all languages, when used as hiding places for the heart, are dead ones.

    Two old friends strike up an old feud filled with dangerous games on the vast preserve of their hunting club in this rollicking story of boyhood rivalries pushed to the limit.

    An English teacher at the naval academy, he is married to a woman young enough to be his daughter and has a little son whom he loves. He sits in a mountain garden in Niterói, overlooking the ocean.As he reminisces and writes, placing the pages carefully in his antproof case, we learn that he was a World War II ace who was shot down twice, an investment banker who met with popes and presidents, and a man who was never not in love. He was the thief of the century, a murderer, and a protector of the innocent. And all his life he waged a valiant, losing, one-man battle against the world’s most insidious enslaver: coffee.Mark Helprin combines adventure, satire, flights of transcendence, and high comedy in this "memoir" of a man whose life reads like the song of the twentieth century.

    Now his incommunicado wife wants a divorce, the teenage vixen of his disgrace is suing him for a cool $5 million, a fresh start in Montana offers no hope for ex-cons of any religious persuasion, and the refuge provided by his sister turns as nasty as his parole officer.Talk about a crisis of faith. On the upside, a solicitous member of Joel’s former congregation invites him into a scam that could yield some desperately needed cash, and soon the down-on-his-luck preacher is involved with a flock of charming con men, crooked lawyers, and conniving youth.In a feat of bravura storytelling, Martin Clark ranges from the cross to the double cross, from Virginia to Las Vegas, from jail cells to trout streams, as he follows his Job-like hero through dubious choices and high-dollar insurance hustles to a redemption that no reader could possibly predict. Wildly imaginative, at times comic, at times profoundly sobering, and even more audacious than his wonderfully idiosyncratic debut, Plain Heathen Mischief is a spiritual revelation of the first order.

    Seven years into their marriage, they decide to take a sabbatical, a sailboat journey on which they sum up their years together and try to make important decisions about the years ahead. (Google Books)

    Shelter is an astonishing portrayal of an American loss of innocence as witnessed by a mysterious drifter named Parson, two young sisters, Lenny and Alma, and a feral boy called Buddy. Together they come to understand bravery and the importance of compassion.Phillips unearths a dangerous beauty in this primeval terrain and in the hearts of her characters. Lies, secrets, erotic initiations, and the bonds of love between friends, families, and generations are transformed in a leafy wilderness undiminished by societal rules and dilemmas. Cast in Phillips’ stunning prose, with an unpredictable cast of characters and a shadowy, suspenseful narrative, Shelter is a an enduring achievement from one of the finest writers of our time.

    

    Henry Porter's summer begins when his daughter Nicole-whom he hasn't seen in five years-shows up on his doorstep. Days later his girlfriend, Elizabeth, announces that she is pregnant. That Henry is speechless at these two events throws into sharp relief his emotional landscape, and this novel charts that landscape's exact contours. Anyone who has ever wondered what a man is saying when he isn't talking will find at least a large part of the answer here. Robert Bausch deciphers with perfect economy and unstinting honesty the code embodied in this man's (and a great many men's) words and actions, and discovers there the world of family legacies, love, and abuse. A Hole in the Earth brilliantly draws the webs that attract us to and repel us from our families, as well as the enduring strength that they can provide.

    How To Be A Public Author will take the debate to another level. It will get everyone talking – and laughing – even more about Britain’s biggest annual book bonanza.Francis Plug is a troubled and often drunk misfit who causes chaos and confusion wherever he goes – and where he most likes to go is to real author events, collecting signatures from the likes of Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Eleanor Catton.As he adds to this collection of signed Booker first editions, Francis – a wannabe author himself – is also helpfully writing a self-help manual. This is devised with the novice writer in mind, and full of sage wisdom and useful tidbits to help ease freshly published novelists into the demands and rigors of author events, readings, and general life in the public eye.So, “If you’re provided with a hands-free mic, clipped to your lapel, don’t forget to turn it off when you visit the toilet, or if you need to vomit before your event.” Likewise, it’s always good to be wary of the germs of fans – and “considering the use of elbow-length dishwashing gloves at book signings, and a large, easy-wipe kitchen apron.” And so too, cultivating a photographic ‘look’ for the many publicity shots you will be subjected to is also a good idea – Francis’s personal choice being that of Macaulay McCulkin in Home Alone.With advice like this, and Francis’ warm and deranged personality, How To Be A Public Author will prove ESSENTIAL reading for anyone with an interest in the literary world.How To Be A Public Author is a brilliant slapstick comedy, blurring fact and fantasy to astonishing effect, and it is also a surprising and touching meditation on loneliness and finding a place in the world. The Man Booker Prize becomes a springboard to explore what it means to be an author – and a human being – in the twenty-first century.

    Rudolfo, a true misfit, is content orchestrating the spectacle, but Jurgen, stricken since childhood with the irrational desire to make magic, hungers for more. He finds it in a musty, mysterious collection of old manuscripts and magic cabinetry that once belonged to Houdini. And when he turns into the miracle-working saint of Las Vegas, chaos results. In a narrative that is whimsical, comic and melancholy by turns, Quarrington takes dead aim at the place in the human heart that hopes that doves can bloom from top hats and illusions can come true.

    His father has mysteriously disappeared, and Grant’s brother, Max, a lifelong rival, takes off on the day Grant returns, leaving him with a sickly flock and a pile of debt. When Max returns a year later with a young woman named Sophia, a contest of will begins between the brothers, reviving ghosts that Grant had hoped were banished from the homestead.

    The normally lush, green countryside is in the grip of the worst drought in years: stunted cornstalks rasp in the hot July breeze, parched vegetable gardens wither and die, the Chittenden River shrinks to a trickle, and the drilling trucks are booked solid as one by one the wells give out. Patience Avery, known nationwide as a gifted "water witch", is having a busy summer, too. Using the tools of the dowser's trade —divining sticks, metal rods, bobbers, and pendulums—she can locate, among other things, aquifers deep within the earth. In the midst of this crisis, Scottie Winston lobbies for permits to expand Powder Peak, a local ski area that's his law firm's principal client. As part of the expansion, the resort seeks to draw water for snowmaking from the beleaguered Chittenden, despite opposition from environmentalists who fear that the already weakened river will be damaged beyond repair.

    Finding each other's voice attractive, they soon switch to a private, "one-to-one" connection. Their seduction-through-conversation begins hesitantly and then becomes erotic.