Heads You Lose


Lisa Lutz - 2011
    When they find a headless corpse on their property they can't exactly call 911, so they simply move the body to another location. Let somebody else find it. Instead, the corpse reappears on their land. Clearly, someone is sending them a message, and it's getting riper by the day. But that's only half of the story...Enter authors Lisa Lutz and David Hayward-former real-life partners (professionally and personally) who have agreed to reunite for a tag- team mystery novel written in alternating chapters. One little problem: they disagree on pretty much every detail of how their novel should unfold. While the body count rises in Paul and Lacey's wildly unpredictable fictional world, so too does the intensity of Lisa and David's rivalry. The result is a literary brawl like no other, and a murder mystery every bit as unanticipated (and bloody).

Texts from Jane Eyre: And Other Conversations with Your Favorite Literary Characters


Mallory Ortberg - 2014
    Everyone knows that if Scarlett O’Hara had an unlimited text-and-data plan, she’d constantly try to tempt Ashley away from Melanie with suggestive messages. If Mr. Rochester could text Jane Eyre, his ardent missives would obviously be in all-caps. And Daisy Buchanan would not only text while driving, she’d text you to pick her up after she totaled her car. Based on the popular web-feature, Texts from Jane Eyre is a witty, irreverent mashup that brings the characters from your favorite books into the twenty-first century.

Cleaning Her House


Irene Vartanoff - 2018
    Yet her mom, always critical of her, is furious that Elinor is touching any part of the overflowing collection of random possessions. When county inspector Race Ericson threatens a court summons if the hoard isn’t massively reduced in a hurry, he pushes Elinor to choose: Surrender to her mother’s insistence that she do nothing, obey her bossy elder sister’s edict that she sort carefully through every single pile, or satisfy Race’s demand that she ruthlessly clear out the junk? Elinor has never been shy with attractive men. Satisfying Race would be a pleasure. But when family secrets come to light and surprises turn up on her doorstep, Elinor’s task gets even more complicated, forcing her to reevaluate her long-held beliefs about her family—and her life choices. Cleaning Her House is a meaty stand-alone women's fiction novel featuring a rich variety of characters, a romance with a hint of steam, family secrets, and a ton of clutter. There's a happy ending, too. (Maybe not for the clutter.)

My Mother's Eyes: A Short Story


Jeremy Ray - 2021
    You’ll see. Draw me just one more time.”No one knows if his mother will come out of her coma, so fourteen-year-old Jordie memorializes her in the only way he knows how: by drawing her. His older brother doesn’t approve of these sketches, but Jordie’s determined to capture the person she used to be. Unfortunately, Jordie must draw her from memory because his mom didn’t keep pictures, and her body in the hospital no longer looks like her. But the images of her are quickly fading, and if he doesn’t get a drawing right soon, the mother he remembers may slip away forever. No matter how close Jordie gets to completing a drawing, his mom’s most vital feature always evades him.Will Jordie capture his mother’s eyes? Or are they and his mother gone forever?Content Warning:SuicideDeathAnimal Death​Reader discretion advised

Birthdays of a Princess


Helga Zeiner - 2014
    not available

Sh*t My Dad Says


Justin Halpern - 2010
    Sam Halpern, who is "like Socrates, but angrier, and with worse hair," has never minced words, and when Justin moved back home, he began to record all the ridiculous things his dad said to him:"That woman was sexy. . . . Out of your league? Son, let women figure out why they won't screw you. Don't do it for them.""Do people your age know how to comb their hair? It looks like two squirrels crawled on their heads and started fucking.""The worst thing you can be is a liar. . . . Okay, fine, yes, the worst thing you can be is a Nazi, but then number two is liar. Nazi one, liar two."More than a million people now follow Mr. Halpern's philosophical musings on Twitter, and in this book, his son weaves a brilliantly funny, touching coming-of-age memoir around the best of his quotes. An all-American story that unfolds on the Little League field, in Denny's, during excruciating family road trips, and, most frequently, in the Halperns' kitchen over bowls of Grape-Nuts, Sh*t My Dad Says is a chaotic, hilarious, true portrait of a father-son relationship from a major new comic voice.

Fat Chance


Nick Spalding - 2014
    Greg's rugby-playing days are well and truly behind him, thanks to countless pints of beer and chicken curry.When Elise, a radio DJ and Zoe's best friend, tells them about a new competition, it seems like the perfect opportunity to turn their lives around. Fat Chance will pit six hefty couples against one another to see who can collectively lose the most weight and walk away with a £50,000 prize.So begins six months of abject misery, tears, and frustration--that just might turn out to be the best thing that ever happened to them--in another laugh-out-loud look at the way we live now from bestselling author Nick Spalding.

The Road To Revelation: The Beginning


Clifford Thomas - 2018
    It chronicles the time preceding the second coming of Jesus Christ. The first volume, The Beginning takes place between the opening of the first and second seals described in the The Book of Revelation. Ford and Samantha experience the beginning of the birth pains as described by Jesus in the Book of Matthew. They piece together various Biblical prophecy and identify the connections between the Books of Daniel, Ezekiel, Revelation, and more. They also realize that their world is changing right before their eyes and begin preparing themselves and their families for the coming tribulation.

To Dream the Blackbane


Richard J. O'Brien
    Scientists referred to the event as The Anomaly. A byproduct of The Anomaly was the advent of hybrid beings—people who became mixed with whatever animal or object was closest to them the moment the event occurred. Humans, or pedigrees, soon relegated fairy refugees and hybrids into ghetto zones in large cities.Seventy years later, Wolfgang Rex, a second-generation hybrid—part human, part Rhodesian Ridgeback—is a retired police detective who runs a private investigation business in Chicago’s Southside. It’s a one-hybrid show; though Rex couldn’t survive without his assistant, the faerie Sally Sandweb.One night, two vampires visit Rex and offer him a substantial reward for the recovery of a stolen scroll. Later that same evening, Charlotte Sweeney-Jarhadill, a pedigree woman from Louisiana, visits Rex and hires him to exorcize the headless ghost of a Confederate soldier from her home.To complicate matters, the private detective ends up falling for Charlotte. Meanwhile, the vampires demand results in the search for the missing scroll. When Rex’s assistant Sally goes missing, he must stay alive long enough to find her. Charlotte and the vampires, however, have other plans for Rex.

Care of Wooden Floors


Will Wiles - 2012
    Oskar is a minimalist composer best known for a piece called Variations on Tram Timetables. He is married to a Californian art dealer named Laura and he lives with two cats, named after Russian composers, in an Eastern European city. But this book isn't really about Oskar. Oskar is in Los Angeles, having his marriage dismantled by lawyers. He has entrusted an old university friend with the task of looking after his cats, and taking care of his perfect, beautiful apartment. Despite the fact that Oskar has left dozens of surreally detailed notes covering every aspect of looking after the flat, things do not go well. Care of Wooden Floors is about how a tiny oversight can trip off a disastrous and farcical (fatal, even) chain of consequences. It's about a friendship between two men who don't know each other very well. It's about alienation and being alone in a foreign city. It's about the quest for perfection and the struggle against entropy. And it is, a little, about how to take care of wooden floors.

Tales From The Crib


Jennifer Coburn - 2006
    She and her husband Jack have been trying to get pregnant for years throughout their rocky marriage. But before she can tell him the big news, Jack has something he needs to announce – he wants a divorce!Rather than split up, Lucy and Jack decide to live together as friends. This way, they can share expenses and parenting responsibilities. Co-parenting is a fine deal for Jack who is back in the dating scene by Lucy’s third trimester of pregnancy, but is a frustrating one for Lucy who has unfulfilled sexual fantasies about every man from restaurant delivery boys to puppeteers. Meanwhile, Lucy’s mother is taking over her life. The grand dame of Planet Earth, Anjoli frequently visits her daughter to share her own brand of maternal wisdom. As Anjoli leaves her Drama Queen bookstore to “help” Lucy with baby Adam, the new grandmother has an affair with baby’s pediatrician, hosts two weddings (including cousin Kimmy’s wedding to herself), and constantly frets about which kind of pie to serve guests. With a cast of family and friends from Lucy’s Jewish aunts to Junior League neighbor, Candace, Tales From the Crib is the story of how one baby can bring people together – so they can drive each other nuts!

On Turpentine Lane


Elinor Lipman - 2017
    It's a peaceful life, really, and surely with her recent purchase of a sweet bungalow on Turpentine Lane her life is finally on track. Never mind that her fiancé is off on a crowdfunded cross-country walk, too busy to return her texts (but not too busy to post photos of himself with a different woman in every state.) And never mind her witless boss, or a mother who lives too close, or a philandering father who thinks he's Chagall. When she finds some mysterious artifacts in the attic of her new home, she wonders whether anything in her life is as it seems. What good fortune, then, that Faith has found a friend in affable, collegial Nick Franconi, officemate par excellence . . .

Cargo of Orchids


Susan Musgrave - 2000
    Her work as a translator draws her into an underworld of family-controlled drug cartels operating out of South America, and she falls in love with a son in one such family. Pregnant, she is kidnapped to an island off the coast of Colombia and slowly tricked into a dependence on cocaine. Her narrative - violent and bizarre, but also riveting, erotic and filled with the heady flamboyance of orchids - runs parallel to her account of life in "Death Clinic," as Death Row is called at the Heaven Valley Facility for Women. It is a moving story of friendship amongst three female inmates - portrayed with devastating wit - who share only the fact that they each have a date with the executioner.Cargo of Orchids swings through comedy and tragedy to shed a gradual, eerie light on the questions of guilt and innocence and moral ambiguity that lie at its heart.Excerpt from Cargo of Orchids:"Despite the freight of anger she carries, Rainy seems so frail it is hard to imagine her giving birth to anything heavier than tears. Rainy gave birth to twins and six months later left them on the railway tracks. She claims it prejudiced the jury. If she'd smothered them or driven them off a pier, it would have been more socially acceptable.-- But abandoning your kids on the tracks wasn't in fashion. She wishes now she'd gone out drinking for the evening instead, but she didn't have enough money to hire a babysitter and pay for the beer."

Italian American Reconciliation


John Patrick Shanley - 1998
    He enlists the aid of his lifelong buddy, Aldo Scalicki, a confirmed bachelor who tries, without apparent success, to convince Huey that he would be better off sticking with his new lady friend, Teresa, a usually placid young waitress whose indignation flares when she learns what Huey is up to. In a moonlit balcony scene (hilariously reminiscent of Cyrano de Bergerac) Aldo pleads his lovesick friend's case and, to his astonishment, Janice capitulates although not for long. However we do learn that her earlier abuse of Huey was intended to make him "act like a man" which, at last, he does. And, more than that, he (and the audience) become aware that, in the final essence, "the greatest and only success is to be able to love" a truth which emerges delightfully from the heartwarming, wonderfully antic and always imaginatively conceived action of the play.

Very Valentine


Adriana Trigiani - 2009
    The adventures of an extraordinary and unforgettable woman as she attempts to rescue her family’s struggling shoe business and find love at the same time, Very Valentine sweeps the reader from the streets of Manhattan to the picturesque hills of la bella Italia.