Dynasty recounts this golden age of baseball, when DiMaggio, Mantle, and Maris were in their heyday. 8-page photo insert.

    Annie is deaf, and has spent years changing herself—how she communicates—to fit in with “proper” society. She’s even learned to speak, for goodness’ sake! But the only thing these people seem to care about is how different she sounds, and it’s darned galling to know that she is still not acceptable. In fact, the only person in New York who tries to make her feel comfortable at all is Dr. Reginald Carderock. Reggie knows what it’s like to feel like you don’t belong someplace. He was born and raised among the Fifth Avenue elite, but is only barely tolerated these days. His friends and family don’t understand how he can spend all of his time treating the city’s poor at his clinic, or what he could possibly see in his brother’s little deaf student. But the more time he spends in Annie’s company, the more intrigued he is by her strength, determination, and compassion. Just when the two of them figure they’ve reached an understanding, they get the worst possible news from Annie’s family in Cheyenne. Now they’re stuck together in a mad dash across the country, dreading what they’ll find at the end. It’s a crummy way to spend Christmas Eve, and Reggie knows that he might lose her forever when they reach their destination. He’ll need to figure out a way to show her that he can see her for who she truly is. Which is good, because all she wants for Christmas is for him to hear the words she’s not saying. ******************************** Heat Level: 1.5 out of 5 (sweet) Book 6 in the Sweet Cheyenne Quartet.

     Earnestly optimistic and completely confident in his fate, Gary writes of his trials and tribulations securing a roommate, a girlfriend, and even a band—the “world’s most inclusive band”—complete with a gay synth player, a hot chick drummer, and a cool black bassist. Calling their not- quite-musical sound “indie prog,” they combine the most pretentious music of the 1970s with the most pretentious music of today. But after a dozen shows and even an album, the band begins to fall apart, and Gary finds himself increasingly disillusioned with his rock star fantasies. In Gary’s world, though, the glass is always half full. Gary Benchley, Rock Star is a hilarious, satirical debut that grew out of Ford’s popular column on TheMorningNews.org.

    Amanda sizzles in the high stakes arena of New York City real estate - but drags herself home each night to a cold, empty bed. From top executive at Prada, Serena is now an over-the-top stay-at-home Mum, plunging her marriage into crisis and her four-year-old into therapy. Laura spent the last six years caring for their dying mother. Now she is trying to breathe new life into her abandoned music career.Emotions explode when the sisters learn that their mother left everything - the multi-million dollar family home and a priceless painting - to Serena. But why? In an effort to make sense of the bequest, the girls journey to glamorous East Hampton to unravel the mystery behind their mother's past, setting off a chain of events that threatens the very core of their sisterhood.

    Decorating his apartment with the furniture and objects he found on Manhattan's streets, he soon realized he wasn't the only person finding things of value in the garbage, and he began meeting all kinds of collectors. Mongo is Botha's remarkable record of his travels among these varied and eccentric people-an appropriately addictive tribute to this longtime, universal phenomenon.

    Ian Frazier, long considered one of our most treasured humorists, proves that comedy can be just as smart as it is entertaining.

    Yet its true origins, man-made character, and importance to the city have been largely forgotten.

    Barnett speaks from the middle of hope and confusion, carrying philosophy into the everyday. Watching a son become a young man, a father become a restless beloved shell, and a country betray its democratic ideals, the speakers try to make sense of such departures. Four lyric essays investigate the essential urge and appeal of questions that are “accursed,” that are limited—and unanswered—by answers. What are we to do with the endangered human hours that remain to us? Across the leaps and swerves of this collection, the fevered mind tries to slow—or at least measure—time with quiet bravura: by counting a lover’s breaths; by remembering a father’s space-age watch; by envisioning the apocalyptic future while bedding down on a hard, cold floor, head resting on a dictionary. Human Hours pulses with the absurd, with humor that accompanies the precariousness of the human condition.

    was about a young man’s. She felt some part of herself relax when she was with him. She could shut off the part of her brain that was always monitoring whether she was talking too much, being "selfish." A few years before the start of The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., twentysomething writer Nathaniel Piven admires a piece of published work by a young woman named Aurit Arazi, and writes her an email expressing his appreciation. After this introduction, they meet for a drink. At the time, Nate is dating gorgeous, moody Elisa, and Aurit has an older, successful novelist boyfriend named Carter, but Nate and Aurit become friends. In the months, even years, that pass, Nate’s and Aurit’s romantic partners change, but their friendship carries on. And then, one New Year’s eve, it seems that the nature of their relationship may change. Like many readers who got to know Nate P. in The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., Aurit is pretty sure that, when it comes to relationships with women, Nate can be an asshole, but is there more to him than that? In New Year’s, author Adelle Waldman exposes the mating psyche of one brilliant young female writer, with the same shockingly accurate eye that brought the world Nathaniel P.

    Her aging parents have already slipped into a great depression of their own. Her brothers named her 'Queenie' and it stuck. Queenie steps from the barn to welcome a man from a neighboring farm. A frustrated man drunk on corn liquor and rage.Three children, an alcoholic husband and a monkey later, she's living in the city and struggling to keep a clean house and beans on the stove when the "Eye-talian" pilot from New York City asks her opinion on fryer hens in the grocery. He's smooth. He takes her to places with white table cloths.World War II deploys the pilot to Europe and Queenie to the Big Apple. Survival on the streets of NYC for Queenie and her baby girl, Abba Gee, is a war story of another kind. Queenie makes decisions without options. Her's is a story of what can happen to any of us if we are not paying attention."Told from a Southern point of view, funny, sad, and partially true. Queenie is the grandmother I did not know. A lifetime of rumors and over heard gossip painted this character. Others speak of grandmothers who smelled of talcum powder and passed on receipes while Queenie's legacy echos stories of grit and how life can change in the Spit of a Minute.""Dickson's language is palpably evocative of the period--you could vividly imagine the scenes in sepia, peopled by those long-ago characters that now only exist as memory.""Dickson writes with a relaxed, leisurely cadence with confidence in her own literary powers. She effectively simulates the feel and mood of the South, as well as the hustle and bustle of the city--something about the writing, not the plot, that reminds me so much of Harper Lee's classic `To Kill a Mockingbird.'"Dickson's compelling narrative subtly shifts in tone and texture according to the changes in time, and this is one of the qualities in her writing that makes me hope she actually writes more, and soon."

    Having survived a turbulent childhood, Kara understands that life could've just as easily gone another way . . . and even if she isn't gliding through the trials of lost library books, entitled customers and routine date nights, at least she's not sipping a Dewar's all day like her mother did.But then Kara unexpectedly encounters paintings by her now-famous college boyfriend just as she's beginning to suspect that her daughter Henny's difficulties may be the sign of something serious, and all of her past decisions are thrown into dramatic relief.Kara's narration, at turns heartbreaking and hilarious, captures the imperfect thoughts we have about ourselves and those around us. Rebecca Land Soodak's debut novel asks the difficult questions about the choices we make while revealing the minute details that end up defining our lives.