Julia, an aspiring poet, is living with her British boyfriend Ben, a restrained professor at Princeton, when she has a chance meeting with Michael, a long-ago friend. A charismatic composer, Michael was once a catalyzing muse for her, but now returns as a destabilizing influence. Julia longs to become involved with Michael, but hesitates to give up the security of her relationship with Ben. When Michael signals he is too wounded to make a commitment, Julia turns her triangular situation into a square by setting him up with a cousin. In the process she discovers, as Pascal once said, that "the heart has its reasons which reason does not know." This deeply psychological tale explores the surprising ways we make romantic choices.

    The anticipation, memories, and celebrated relief of the season when it finally came together are captured in this chronicle of the World Series season of the Giants. Written in entertaining prose, the book is as much an enjoyable story to be reread through the years as it is a factual account of the events that brought the elusive title to the Giants.

    As a straightforward case takes unexpected twists, Cal must quell a growing fear that an anguished mother may never see her child again. With a shadowy crime lord lurking behind every unexpected clue, Cal struggles to tie up loose ends before evil claims its next victim.Loose Ends is book one in a new P. I. mystery series from D. D. VanDyke. Set against the rich backdrop of the San Francisco Bay Area, Cal Corwin novels brim with intrigue and fully fleshed characters from cops and criminals to hit men, oddball family and unexpected allies.

    This collection's new novella is vintage Gilchrist, taking on the continuing joys and perils of Nora Jane and company.

    This time she describes a journey across America and Hawaii, on which she met a variety of unusual characters and experienced incidents which aroused a wide range of emotions. During her eight months on the road she saw race riots in Los Angeles, suffered intense heat in Death Valley, and witnessed sexual tantric seminars in Hawaii. From Utah to the Great Lakes, via improbable places such as Zzyzx and Squaw Tit, she offers a personal memoir of the United States as seen from the seat of a bicycle.

    Obsessed with the latest addition to his collection--a set of fangs embedded in silver--art collector Benjamin Byrd soon finds himself transforming into a nocturnal, bloodthirsty being.

    AND SO HELPFUL IN A FAMILY MURDER! Once you marry into a gypsy clan, just try to get out! Annie Szabo loved her husband, but after his death, she was only too happy to leave his outrageous clan behind, especially her pushy mother-in-law, Madame Mina. But Mina wasn't just any pushy relative. As the heart of the close-knit Szabo family, she was also powerful, stubborn, and devoutly to be avoided. Well, too bad for Annie! When her oldest friend, Jerry, turns up dead, she’s plunged back into the family she tried to leave behind. She knows Jerry was murdered, but how is she supposed to prove it? Easy, if you’ve got a gypsy family. Or anyway, easier. So before you know it, Annie’s knee-deep once again in ancient curses, petty theft, and, everyone’s favorite--love magic. All thanks to Madame Mina’s psychic skills and a certain wildly sexy gypsy and his shady P.I. father.

    

    In this remarkable memoir, writing with a wry and cutting edge, Canfield relates tales of a childhood in flux—being buffeted about among family friends, relatives, rebels, and born-again circus clowns, in an anarchist private school, communes, and libertarian enclaves—and of a young adulthood spent among the ruins of heroin addiction. Long Past Stopping is Oran Canfield’s often hilariously harrowing tale of surviving life in the strange lane.

    In a Southern Indian village, Asha doesn’t have much—raising two children in a tiny hut, she and her husband can barely keep a tin roof over their heads—but she wants a better education for her gifted son. Pressured by her family, Asha reluctantly checks into the Happy Mothers House: a baby farm where she can rent her only asset—her womb—to a childless couple overseas. To the dismay of friends and family, Priya places her faith in a woman she’s never met to make her dreams of motherhood come true.Together, the two women discover the best and the worst that India’s rising surrogacy industry has to offer, bridging continents and cultures to bring a new life into the world—and renewed hope to each other.

    And he has boiled it down to one key factor: walkability. The very idea of a modern metropolis evokes visions of bustling sidewalks, vital mass transit, and a vibrant, pedestrian-friendly urban core. But in the typical American city, the car is still king, and downtown is a place that's easy to drive to but often not worth arriving at. Making walkability happen is relatively easy and cheap; seeing exactly what needs to be done is the trick. In this essential new book, Speck reveals the invisible workings of the city, how simple decisions have cascading effects, and how we can all make the right choices for our communities. Bursting with sharp observations and real-world examples, giving key insight into what urban planners actually do and how places can and do change, Walkable City lays out a practical, necessary, and eminently achievable vision of how to make our normal American cities great again.

    His mission? To find signs of intelligent life and keep his species from turning the entire globe into a colossal landing strip. Instead, he's found time and again how pathetic humans can be Aliens, vampires, teenagers, the Goth scene itself... everyone's a target in this hilarious book Loaded to bear with satirical dark humor by the world's leading authority, Goth rocker Voltaire

    It's theme is the reader. Everyday we must live through moments of waiting--to get from one place to the next, from one appointment to another, for something to happen. This ingeniously useful compendium offers reading material to fill those gray moments with beauty, wonder, insight, and emotion. Organized by the time that the reader has available at that moment, the anthology provides a poem for that elevator ride to the lawyer's office; a short story for the thirty-minute commute; a novella for the three-hour plane ride. As ever, The Paris Review provides work from only the best writers of the last three generations.Among those to appear:- Mary Robison- Denis Johnson- Michael Chabon- Marilyn Hacker- Robert Pinsky- and many more.

    In the style of Studs Terkel (Working, Hard Times, The Good War) and Dave Isay (Listening Is an Act of Love), Londoners offers up  the stories, the gripes, the memories, and the dreams of those in the great and vibrant British metropolis who “love it, hate it, live it, left it, and long for it,” from a West End rickshaw driver to a Soldier of the Guard at Buckingham Palace to a recovering heroin addict seeing Big Ben for the very first time. Published just in time for the 2012 London Olympic Games, Londoners is a glorious literary celebration of one of the world’s truly great cities.

    A selection from Geoffrey Jellicoe's "The Atlanta Historical Garden" is included.