Faced with the dissolution of familial ties and the prospective collapse of her marriage, alongside a looming nervous breakdown, Dunya's consequent actions exemplify both the strength and frailty of the human spirit. When the Haboob Sings paints a poignant picture of a woman whose unshakeable resolve to preserve her authenticity costs her more than she ever imagined.Winner Indie Discovery Awards, 2020Gold Winner Reader's Favorite Award in Fiction: Religious Theme

    Despite Zoe's initial hesitation, they begin to fall in love. Rose is thrilled, recognizing in Keevan the warm, fun-loving father hers could never be. But when Zoe's husband wakes from his depression to see his wife slipping away, Zoe is torn between her love for two men.

    

    He is a former MP, unseated by the expenses scandal, who is now spending time abroad to recover from a major illness. The other purpose of his stay is to write his memoirs in order to demonstrate that he was unfairly pilloried for 'a minor accounting error', having valiantly served his country for 30 years. He settles into his new surroundings but soon it becomes clear that all is not as it seems. For a start Bobby seems to have no memory of the immediate past. Each time he sits down to continue his memoirs he finds only a blank page. Every morning as he comes downstairs the same scene replays itself in front of him: a young woman and her son pass him on the stairs. And what has become of his wife?

    Limited to only 1500 copies.

    In a re-imagined A Midsummer Night's Dream, men and women speak of and desire their ideal mates; parents seek out their lost children; adult children try to come to terms with their own parents and, in some cases, find new ones.In vignettes both comic and sexy, the owner of a coffee shop recalls the day his first wife seemed to achieve a moment of simple perfection, while she remembers the women's softball game during which she was stricken by the beauty of the shortstop. A young couple spends hours at the coffee shop fueling the idea of their fierce love. A professor of philosophy, stopping by for a cup of coffee, makes a valiant attempt to explain what he knows to be the inexplicable workings of the human heart Their voices resonate with each other—disparate people joined by the meanderings of love—and come together in a tapestry that depicts the most irresistible arena of life.

    It’s firmly rooted in familial embarrassment (the Kellys’ house is “decorated like the inside of somebody’s hut in Guatemala”), reinforced by an abiding love of Dee Dee Ramone and other (lesser) gods of the rock pantheon, and cemented by the secret of a remarkable religious epiphany Francis experiences at the age of twelve.Clare and Francis become happy adults with rewarding careers and loving spouses. But when tragedy strikes, Francis finds his faith shattered and his life horribly transformed, and Clare doesn’t know how to help the brother she loves but has never fully understood.Nearly flattened by sadness, Francis turns to the angry, propulsive music that sustained him through adolescence and finds that you’re never too old to be punk rock. With the help of a bass guitar and the support of Clare and some unlikely new friends, Francis gradually finds his way back from the depths of despair to a life that feels worth living.Told in Clare’s wry, compassionate voice, Long Way Back is an original, moving novel about grief, guitars, and grace. It shows that the Velvet Underground didn’t lie: Your life really can be saved by rock and roll.From the Hardcover edition.

    But as she plans her escape to New York City, turmoil erupts and the demands of family stand between her and her suitcase. Darla must, for the first time in her life, cast an unflinching eye on the hard-to-accept truths regarding love, responsibility, and survival. The Bingo Queens of Paradise lyrically blends a powerful comic voice with a poignant tale of a woman who longs to pursue her dreams.

    Why, for sixty years, did she persist in loving someone who never gave as much as he was given? In her quest for understanding, she writes her story to this exceptional man. Meeting as children in Chicago, they move to opposite coasts. Elliot embarks on a remarkable legal career in Washington and New York while Judith raises her children alone in California, after tragedy. Coming together again and again throughout their lives, their love is never equal, Elliot defining the terms of the relationship.Judith examines the role of Beauty in love, for Elliot's face and form were beautiful. She considers the role of Consolation, how they supported one another in devastating times. Insanity, Magic, Deceit, Sensory Fulfillment, and, finally, Being Seen—Judith looks at these many aspects of her love.Her feelings for this man cost her, impinged on every other relationship in her life: friends, her two husbands, even her three children. After sixty years, however, it all changes. Judith makes one more profound sacrifice, finally achieving a sort of long-awaited happiness in her love.

    Shortly before the story opens he has endured a ridiculously humiliating incident that put him off his instrument—as part of a string quartet, he was sent unaware by the Musicians’ Union to “open” for a reunion tour of over-the-hill Hessian metal-gods Volstagg (based on Meat Loaf), who threw the classical musicians offstage. Biding his time until he can afford to leave Philth Town (a tweaked Philadelphia), he now works in a deli run by a despotic Dutchman and lives in a boarding house (The Desmon), among whose other residents are Armless Rob (self-explanatory), Yancey Fishnet (dominatrix), Emmylou Mattressback (basically what you’d expect), and others. Including Tinsel Greetz, an ill-informed anarchist prone to disaster, and Charlie's best friend.As the story opens, Tinsel has founded a “barter system” economy for the various misfits in the Desmon and its affiliated businesses (The Grain Shack, the dive bar Maxine’s, a veterinary office) which results in the destruction of the Shack, a huge pack of dogs being left at the Desmon for Tinsel to deal with, threats of lawsuits and bodily harm, and Tinsel hiding out with his inexplicably understanding girlfriend Zelda. Charlie has been supplementing his deli paycheck via the “Willard Rounds,” the illegal method Philth Town’s Sanitation Department has evolved to deal with its out-of-control sewer rat problem: paying “slag-hands” to go down into the sewers armed with pipes and duffel bags and pays them a fee per quantity of dead rats (“Willard,” above, and “Ben,” as the rats are collectively called, are references to the movies Willard [1971, recently remade starring Crispin Glover] and Ben [1972] in which rats avenge the wrongs done to their human guardians). Tinsel is persona non grata and has lost his gig playing guitar at a bar, so Charlie initiates him into life as a slag-hand, ending in a ridiculously generous haul. To celebrate, Charlie and Tinsel get drunk and—unfortunately—trash Zelda's apartment just as a foreign investor is about to come buy some of her photographs for a French media conglomerate. Furious, Zelda throws them out whereupon they are beaten up by skinheads and end up waking up the next morning worse for wear in a hotel room in one of the poshest hotels in the city, with Louise (the “investor,” who's actually a French journalist). Charlie is instantly, stupidly in love with Louise, reduced to stammering incoherence and suddenly relating to the lyrics of “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” And strange as it might seem, it appears to be mutual.Over the next forty-eight hours, Charlie is on a hellbent journey from disaffected, self-destructive, downwardly mobile slacker to redeeming his former creativity and maturity, as Tinsel and Louise vie for his loyalties. Along the way there are hilarious scenes where the two cleaned-up slag-hands attempt to navigate the stressful environment of a nice restaurant (complete with compulsive table-crumbers and a schmaltzy table-side troubadour who receives his comeuppance when Charlie takes his violin and bears down with classical fury, getting a standing ovation); the three play a vicious game of Death Match culminating in watching a Felix Trinidad-Hector Camacho fight at Maxine’s; and a final denouement in which fallen cinematic genius Delvin Corollo is shooting a vapid costume drama outside the hotel (based on Martin Scorsese and The Age of Innocence) and Tinsel and Charlie conspire to destroy the shoot.Brewing under the surface, Charlie is being forced to confront the “hate” part of his “love-hate” relationship with his extremely trying friend. Louise has offered to take him with her when she leaves town—to cover an uprising in New Guinea, and whatever comes next. Tinsel shows no sign of abandoning his hare-brained schemes—he’s planning to rob a bank now—and Charlie has become disgusted with himself for putting up with Tinsel’s behavior, which includes not only a lack of hygiene and normalcy, but more seriously a streak of casual misogyny and xenophobia that Charlie has always assumed was a joke, but now is not so sure. In a final scene both hilarious and poignant, Charlie takes his revenge on the evil Dutchman who persecuted him at the deli and gives Tinsel the means to attempt the bank job—in other words, enough rope to hang himself.

    Following his dream of becoming a writer, he turns away from everything he knows, and enters adulthood embittered, angry, and resentful.As he struggles to make a name for himself, he is presented with the opportunity of a lifetime. Although it requires a betrayal of his principles as an artist, he resigns himself to what appears to be fate. The writer’s compromise brings money and recognition, but these are fleeting and he soon finds himself caught in a web of depression and financial hardship. Desperate and sinking quickly, the writer begins taking trips to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where he hopes to reconnect with his muse. During one of these excursions, he meets Nigel Moon, a grizzled fellow author nearing the end of his career. Moon gives the writer a second golden opportunity and the chance to prove himself in the face of personal doubts—but only if the writer is able to set his past aside.Equal parts witty and dark and wry and tragic, the text uses simplicity as its focus. Raw and honest, Becoming Moon is an unforgettable book about exorcising past demons and finding personal redemption.

    "Nick Demske writes from culture like the Hollywood version of a rebellious slave, the role shredding off him, culture's synthetic exemplary tales shredding and piling up on the floor of the projector room."—Joyelle McSweeneyHis name is "a transcendant uber-obsenity that can be understood universally by speakers of any language."

    But now he's come to the Bar Harbor Home for the Elderly to spend the remainder of his days among kindred spirits: the publishing industry's nearly gone but never forgotten greats. Only now, at the end of his life, does he comprehend the price of appeasing every desire, and the consequences of forsaking love to pursue greatness. For Alfonse has an unshakeable case of writer's block that distresses him much more than his precarious health.Set on the water in one of New England's most beautiful locales, the Bar Harbor Home was established specifically for elderly writers needing a place to live out their golden years—or final days—in understated luxury and surrounded by congenial literary company. A faithful staff of nurses and orderlies surround the writers, and are drawn into their orbit, as they are forced to reckon with their own life stories. Among them are Cecibel Bringer, a young woman who knows first-hand the cost of chasing excess. A terrible accident destroyed her face and her sister in a split-second decision that Cecibel can never forgive, though she has tried to forget. Living quietly as an orderly, refusing to risk again the cost of love, Cecibel never anticipated the impact of meeting her favorite writer, Alfonse Carducci—or the effect he would have on her existence. In Cecibel, Alfonse finds a muse who returns him to the passion he thought he lost. As the words flow from him, weaving a tale taken up by the other residents of the Pen, Cecibel is reawakened to the idea of love and forgiveness.As the edges between story and reality blur, a world within a world is created. It’s a place where the old are made young, the damaged are made whole, and anything is possible…

    until he gets a call from his missing sister! It takes him on a journey where he meets a young hooker, hillbillies, truckers, and a crazy church. He also meets someone he never knew: himself.

    There's Todd, the handsome stay-at-home dad dubbed "The Prom King" by the moms at the playground, and his wife, Kathy, a documentary filmmaker envious of the connection Todd has forged with their toddler son. And there's Sarah, a lapsed feminist surprised to find she's become a typical wife in a traditional marriage, and her husband, Richard, who is becoming more and more involved with an internet fantasy life than with his own wife and child. And then there's Mary Ann, who has life all figured out, down to a scheduled roll in the hay with her husband every Tuesday at nine P.M.They all raise their kids in the kind of quiet suburb where nothing ever seems to happen - until one eventful summer, when a convicted child molester moves back to town, and two parents begin an affair that goes further than either of them could ever have imagined.