This Twentysomething Life: A sort-of prequel to This Thirtysomething Life


Jon Rance - 2013
    

The Family Fang


Kevin Wilson - 2011
    and Mrs. Fang called it art.Their children called it mischief.Performance artists Caleb and Camille Fang dedicated themselves to making great art. But when an artist’s work lies in subverting normality, it can be difficult to raise well-adjusted children. Just ask Buster and Annie Fang. For as long as they can remember, they starred (unwillingly) in their parents’ madcap pieces. But now that they are grown up, the chaos of their childhood has made it difficult to cope with life outside the fishbowl of their parents’ strange world.When the lives they’ve built come crashing down, brother and sister have nowhere to go but home, where they discover that Caleb and Camille are planning one last performance -– their magnum opus -– whether the kids agree to participate or not. Soon, ambition breeds conflict, bringing the Fangs to face the difficult decision about what’s ultimately more important: their family or their art.

The Cat's Guide to Human Behavior


Xina Marie Uhl - 2013
    Humans have proved this by worshipping them as gods since the days of Ancient Egypt. But despite their clear superiority, felines continue to be frustrated with humans' bizarre actions and incomprehensible desires — until now. In The Cat's Guide to Human Behavior, the great feline humanologist Professor F.L. Uffy advises cats on how to solve some of their most difficult human-related issues:• Chase away your human's romantic partners• Increase your food supply• And more!What does your cat REALLY think of you? The Cat's Guide to Human Behavior reveals all--even why you refuse to groom yourself with your tongue!

The Cat and The City


Nick Bradley - 2020
    And, with each detour, she brushes up against the seemingly disparate lives of the city-dwellers, connecting them in unexpected ways.But the city is changing. As it does, it pushes her to the margins where she chances upon a series of apparent strangers – from a homeless man squatting in an abandoned hotel, to a shut-in hermit afraid to leave his house, to a convenience store worker searching for love. The cat orbits Tokyo’s denizens, drawing them ever closer.

Funny Farm


Jay Cronley - 1985
    Andy and Elizabeth Farmer exchange New York for a rural paradise but find that the pond next to their new house has snakes, the house is infested with mosquitoes, and the former owner is buried in the yard

The Lurking Fear


H.P. Lovecraft - 1923
    P. Lovecraft was one of the greatest horror writers of all time. His seminal work appeared in the pages of legendary Weird Tales and has influenced countless writer of the macabre. This is one of those stories.

Fup


Jim Dodge - 1983
    The tale revolves around three characters: two humans and one duck. Jim Dodge is the author of "Not Fade Away" and "Stone Junction".

Men Of Greywater Station


George R.R. Martin - 1976
    

Cool Water (Juliet in August)


Dianne Warren - 2010
    Situated on the edge of the Little Snake sand hills, Juliet and its inhabitants are caught in limbo between a century — old promise of prosperity and whatever lies ahead.But the heart of the town beats in the rich and overlapping stories of its people: the foundling who now owns the farm his adoptive family left him; the pregnant teenager and her mother, planning a fairytale wedding; a shy couple, well beyond middle age, struggling with the recognition of their feelings for one another; a camel named Antoinette; and the ubiquitous wind and sand that forever shift the landscape. Their stories bring the prairie desert and the town of Juliet to vivid and enduring life.This wonderfully entertaining, witty and deeply felt novel brims with forgiveness as its flawed people stumble towards the future.

Locos: A Comedy of Gestures


Felipe Alfau - 1936
    Alfau's "comedy of gestures" - a mercurial dreamscape of the eccentric, sometimes criminal, habitues of Toledo's Cafe of the Crazy - was written in English and first published in 1936, favorably reviewed for "The Nation" by Mary McCarthy, as she recounts here in her Afterword, then long neglected.

When Loss is Gain


Pavan K. Varma - 2012
    

The Girl with the Dogs


Anna Funder - 2015
    But Tess senses she's at a hinge moment, poised between the life she thought she wanted and the one she long ago decided against. The demands of her Sydney family seem unrelenting: an uneasy teenage daughter, a father who has just been placed in care, the impending sale of her childhood home. Sent to London for a conference, she's unable to resist the pull of that relinquished life. What, she wonders, would it be like now? And might it have suited her better after all?Deceptively concise, moving, elegant, The Girl with the Dogs was published online in 2014 under the title of Everything Precious.

Going to Meet the Man


James Baldwin - 1965
    But you try all kinds of ways to keep from drowning in it." The men and women in these eight short fictions grasp this truth on an elemental level, and their stories, as told by James Baldwin, detail the ingenious and often desperate ways in which they try to keep their head above water. It may be the heroin that a down-and-out jazz pianist uses to face the terror of pouring his life into an inanimate instrument. It may be the brittle piety of a father who can never forgive his son for his illegitimacy. Or it may be the screen of bigotry that a redneck deputy has raised to blunt the awful childhood memory of the day his parents took him to watch a black man being murdered by a gleeful mob.By turns haunting, heartbreaking, and horrifying--and informed throughout by Baldwin's uncanny knowledge of the wounds racism has left in both its victims and its perpetrators--Going to Meet the Man is a major work by one of our most important writers.