Rare & Endangered Species demonstrates how a wife and mother's suicide reverberates in the small community where she lived, and affects the lives of people who don't even know her. Finally, Spirits is about the pain that men and women can -- and do -- inflict upon each other. These three very different works illuminate the unadorned core of love -- not the showy, more celebrated sort but what remains when lust, jealousy, and passion have been stripped away.

    This catastrophic discovery sets off Anne Lamott's unexpectedly sweet and funny first novel, which is made dramatic not so much by Wallace's illness as by the emotional wake it sweeps under Jen and her brothers, self-contained Ben and feckless, lovable Randy. With characteristic affection and accuracy, Lamott sketches this offbeat family and their nearest and dearest as they draw ever closer in the intimacy Jen prizes "among the other estimable things: good music, good hard laughter, good sex, good industry, and good books."

    With an ear for acid dialogue and an eye for everyday ironies, Ciresi unfolds Rosa Salvatore's tale: growing up on fantasies, guilt, and fagioli in the New Haven working-class Italian neighborhood of Pizza Beach; working her way through a local college by slinging hash, while agonizing over her thighs and aching for passion; landing a job and meeting Gary Fisher, a nice Jewish lawyer from Flushing with a great butt and angst of his own. Rosa and Gary fall in love, make love, get married, fight, make up, fight again--until Gary is diagnosed with a terminal illness, and Rosa realizes the power of her love--and the crushing force of regret.Frank and warm, crackling with razor-sharp wit, Blue Italian is a love story about an ill-fated couple who almost missed realizing how much they loved each other. It establishes Rita Ciresi as a writer with a unique gift for language, character, and emotion--a novelist to read, and a novelist to watch.

    After losing his fellowship, he is out of work and one thesis short of a PhD. Rather than doom his career by taking what he considers to be an unsuitable job, he finds a temporary position at the Nutting Research and Development Corporation in Los Angeles, a city whose superficial charms signal an adventure. He is ready to make the best of his year out west among the beatniks and Hollywood hippies. The only thing holding him back is his wife. Katherine is a New Englander through and through, and as soon as she steps into the LA smog, she knows this transition will be a struggle. What Paul sees as fun, she considers vulgar. Bogged down by her allergies and crumbling marriage, she seeks out a shrink, who surprises and transforms her. While Los Angeles may be a cultural wasteland, this East Coast girl will find that West Coast pleasures can be quite a lot of fun.

    A young, American-born child of an aristocratic Mandarin family that has fled China struggles to assimilate in 1950s San Francisco in a novel from "an incredibly rich and new voice." (Amy Tan).

    Minutes after the axe falls, his right index finger is severed in a freak accident. Doctors manage to reattach the finger, but when the bandages come off, Nelson realizes that he has acquired a strange power—he can force his will onto others with a touch of his finger. And so he obtains an extension on the lease of his university-owned townhouse and picks up two sections of freshman composition, saving his career from utter ruin. But soon these victories seem inconsequential, and Nelson's finger burns for even greater glory. Now the Midas of academia wonders if he can attain what every struggling assistant professor and visiting lecturer covets—tenure. The Lecturer's Tale is a pitch-perfect blend of satire and horror.

    His characters, for whom the closest-though hopelessly inadequate-description might be "eccentrics," share the stage with swamp elves and midgets living in the backyard. His fiction is unlike anybody else's and is as dark, hilarious, and affecting as any ever written. It's also writing that lays bare the agony of adolescence and plows, as the Cleveland Plain Dealer once put it, "the fields of puzzling wonder that precede the responsibilities and disappointments of adulthood."What bred and fed Nordan's imagination, his originality, his indefatigable sense of humor? The answers aren't obvious. But now that Lewis Nordan produces, directs, and stars in his own story, we just might find out.Nordan's mother was widowed when he was a baby, and she went back to her home town to remarry and raise her only son "Buddy." Itta Bena, Mississippi, was a prototypical fifties Delta town, so drowsy that even before puberty, Nordan had made his escape plans. What happened next was pretty typical-a stint in the Navy, college in Mississippi, very early marriage, young fatherhood, alcoholism, infidelities, broken hearts. But in Nordan's hands, the typical turns into the transcendent and, at the heart of things, there is always the irrepressible laughter.Horrible things and horribly funny things happen in Boy with Loaded Gun, but it's that heart that leads us through Lewis Nordan's dark tunnel and back into the light.

    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.

    I suspect it may be both.” --Toby Young, New York Times bestselling author of How to Lose Friends and Alienate PeopleAn offensive, in-your-face, brutally honest and completely hilarious look at male inner life and sexual fantasy. In the course of this hilariously honest book, our narrator suffers through a relationship with his vapid wannabe-actress girlfriend until he finds the perfect girl. But when he moves into the new relationship, he slowly learns that all women are pretty much the same, that man's true desires will never be fulfilled, and the decision between living life alone or biting the marriage bullet must be made.

    From the author of "Face-Time" comes an engaging, hilarious, sexy romp of a book about a college professor's unorthodox take on the academic imperative to publish or perish.

    A globetrotting Irish travel writer, Kathleen de Burca is used to living--and loving--on the run. On the brink of fifty, she decides to leave her job and rethink her life. Intrigued by a divorce case dating back to the days of the Potato Famine, she tries hand at writing about it. The case, called "The Talbot Affair," detailed the clandestine liaison between the wife of a British landlord and an Irish servant in Ireland in the 1850s. After a bitter thirty-year absence, Kathleen returns to Ireland, the land of her troubled childhood and turbulent heritage, in search of answers to her questions about desire and lasting love.

    Gita's beloved Aunty has consulted her astronumerologist and, according to the stars, Gita is soon destined to meet her jori--or, as they say in America, Mr. Right.

    A land whose borders change as frequently as its history, and yet whose heart somehow remains reassuringly unchanged: by turns captivating, infuriating, bureaucratic, anarchic, comic and sinister. Slaka! A land that is instantly recognisable to any traveller who has ever grappled with an unyielding language, argued with officialdom, outdrunk their welcome, mislaid their luggage, missed their train or just misjudged a tip. Malcolm Bradbury's hilariously entertaining and witty novel, Rates of Exchange, introduces the small, eastern European country of Slaka. In less than two short weeks there, first-time visitor Dr. Petworth manages to give a rather controversial lecture, get embroiled in the thorny thickets of sexual and domestic intrigues, fall in love, and still find time to see the main tourist attractions. In his wickedly funny satire Why Come to Slaka? Malcolm Bradbury offers the would-be visitor, a la Dr Petworth, a wealth of information about the Slakan state, its pageantry and politics, its people and public figures, as well as some essential Slakan phrases—"American Express? That will do very nicely". Stories and narratives bubble up between the lines to keep you reading and chuckling.

    Simon Rich is "one of the funniest writers in America" (Daily Beast) -- a humorist who draws comparisons to Douglas Adams (New York Times Book Review), James Thurber, and P.G. Wodehouse (The Guardian). With Hits and Misses, he's back with a hilarious new collection of stories about dreaming big and falling flat, about ordinary people desperate for stardom and the stars who are bored by having it all. Inspired by Rich's real experiences in Hollywood, Hits and Misses chronicles all the absurdity of fame and success alongside the heartbreaking humanity of failure. From a bitter tell-all by the horse Paul Revere rode to greatness to a gushing magazine profile of everyone's favorite World War II dictator, these stories roam across time and space to skewer our obsession with making it big -- from the days of ancient Babylon to the age of TMZ. The baby --Riding solo: the Oatsy story --The foosball championship of the whole entire universe --Birthday party --The book of Simon --Relapse --Hands --New client --The great jester --Physicians' lounge, April 1st --Menlo Park, 1891 --Tom Hanks stories --Adolf Hitler: the GQ profile --Any person, living or dead --Upward mobility --Dinosaur --Artist's revenge --Stage 13

    And so is her kitchen.Divorced, heartbroken and living in a lonely New York apartment with a tiny kitchen, Rachel Goldman realizes she doesn't even know how to cook the simplest meal for herself. Can learning to fry an egg help her understand where her life went wrong? She dives into the culinary basics. Then she launches a blog to vent her misery about life, love and her goal of an unburnt casserole. To her amazement, the blog's a hit. She becomes a minor celebrity. Next, a sexy Spaniard enters her life. Will her souffles stop falling? Will she finally forget about the husband she still loves? And how can she explain to her readers that she still hasn't learned how to cook up a happy life from scratch?