And just when his diagnosis of autism sends her life reeling, she's dragged back into the orbit of her emotionally abusive father, Lance, after a heart attack leaves him with brain damage.Fred is in need of a friend. Lance is in need of care. And Piper just wants to feel stable ground beneath her feet. What she never expects is that Fred and Lance--both misunderstood by the world--will start to connect in the most miraculous of ways...

    Wry and sharp, dark and subversive, they keep watch as these characters make the choices that will change the course of their lives and run into each other in surprising, unforgettable ways.The Bowmans are declining Texas gentry, heirs to an airline fortune, surrounded by a patriarch's stuffed trophies and lost dreams. They will each be haunted by the past as they strive to escape its force. The Fosters are diplomats’ kids who might as well be orphans. Jill and Maizie grow up privileged amid poverty, powerless to change the lives of those around them and uncertain whether they have the power to change their own. The Guzmans have moved between Colombia and the United States for two generations, each seeking opportunity for the next, only to find that the American dream can be as crushing as it is elusive.Amy Parker's debut collection considers--with an unfailingly observant eye--our failures and our successes, our fractures and our connections, our impact and our evanescence. She marks herself a worthy heir to the long tradition of smart women casting cool and careful glances at the American middle class.

    A recent college graduate living in New York City finds himself in a strangely entangled friendship with his dry cleaner and her son. A daughter accompanies her father to Israel, where, seeing a new side of him away from her mother, she makes an unusual bargain.Through thirteen stories, some stand-alone, others woven with linked characters, Kane questions the tensions between friendship and neighborliness, home and travel, family and ambition. In writing filled with wit and humor and incredible poignancy, she deftly reveals the everyday patterns that, over time, can swerve a life off course.

    A professor of cardiovascular physiology lingers on the cusp of consciousness as he waits for his new heart to be delivered, still beating, from another body—and is carried on a tidal wave of memories to an attic room half a century ago. Visiting Sylvia Plath’s grave in Yorkshire, the author imagines a conversation with the poet, a fellow North American who settled in grey England. She reflects on the treasured photograph of Princess Diana she took as a teenager, one of a multitude taken during a life cut short. And at Charleston, Angelica Garnett, child of the Bloomsbury Group, is overpowered by echoes of the past—all the beloved ghosts that spring to life before her eyes. MacLeod’s characters hover on the border of life and death, where memory is most vivid and the present most elusive.

    Lost, lonely, and doubting everything he felt he knew about marriage and love—even as his eighty-year-old father begins to date again—Benjamin is trying to put his life back together when he recognizes someone down the street: his high school crush, the untouchable Audrey Martin. Audrey has just moved to the neighborhood with her high-powered lawyer husband and their rebellious teenager, Emily. As it turns out, Audrey isn’t so untouchable anymore, and she and Benjamin begin to discover, in each other’s company, answers to many of their own deepest longings. Meanwhile, as the neighborhood is wracked by a mysterious series of robberies, Audrey seems to be hiding a tragic secret, and her husband, Andrew, becomes involved in a dangerous professional game he can never win. And, by the way, who is paying attention to Emily?Powerful, provocative, and psychologically gripping, Housebreaking explores the ways that two families—and four lives—can all too easily veer off track, losing sight of everyone, and everything, they once held dear. Like the best from Tom Perrotta and Rick Moody, who capture the darker truths of modern suburban life, this literary triumph from an immensely talented writer offers an insightful and funny, yet terrifyingly authentic portrait of modern suburban life that reveals, hauntingly, how little we know of one another’s lives.

    Amy Gustine exhibits an extraordinary generosity toward her characters, instilling them with a thriving, vivid presence.

    A daughter disappears in the middle of the night. What happens in the aftermath of this tragedy—after the search is abandoned, after the TV crews move on to cover the latest horrific incident—is the story of Coyote. There is a marriage and a detective. There is a storm, a talk show host, and a roasted boar. People are murdered and things are hidden. Coyotes skulk in the woods, a man stands by the fence, and a tale emerges within this familiar landscape of the violent unknown."Like a modern-day Poe, [Winnette] has fashioned a narrator whose pull on the reader’s sympathy gradually fades as she recounts the aftermath of her daughter’s mysterious disappearance….Winnette’s deeply affecting story is hard to put down and even harder to forget.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)"Coyote has a strong and inviting voice and that voice wraps around a dark story, a contemporary story, and one that has its own velocity and fragmentation built in. I found myself swept along in it and impacted by its delicate/bleak movement.”—Aimee Bender, author of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, and Willful Creatures"While there’s a contemporary urgency to Winnette’s novel, it’s the small details (and how they’re revealed) that give this story its considerable sting."—Kirkus Reviews

      Stacey Lane feels like a monster. Tommy DeMarco might be one. Since her husband died eight months ago, Stacey’s been a certified mess—a poet who can’t write anymore, a good mother who feels like she’s failing her kids. She’s been trying to redefine herself, to find new boundaries. Tommy has no respect for boundaries. A surprisingly well-read A-list Hollywood star, Tommy’s fallen in love with Stacey’s novel-in-verse, a feminist reimagining of Frankenstein, no less. His passion for the book, and eventually its author, will set their lives on a collision course. They’ll make a movie, make each other crazy, and make love—but only in secret. As Stacey travels between her humdrum life in the suburbs of Omaha and the glamorous but fleeting escape Tommy offers, what begins as a distracting affair starts to pick up weight. It’s a weight that unbalances Stacey’s already unsteady life, but offers new depth to Tommy’s. About desire, love, grief, parenthood, sexual politics, and gender, Monsters: A Love Story is a witty portrait of a relationship gone off the rails, and two people who are made for each other—even if they’re not so sure they see it that way.

    Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting captures the many moments that comprise a soldier's life: driving down the Texas highway; waiting for the unknown in the dry Iraq heat; writing a love letter; listening to a mother recount her dreams. Written with evocative language and discernment, Powers's poetry strives to make sense of the war and its echoes through human experience.Just as The Yellow Birds was hailed as the "first literary masterpiece produced by the Iraq war," this collection will make its mark as a powerful, enduring work (Los Angeles Times).

    I thought I’d leave the red-headed stranger with dark green eyes behind and good freaking riddance. Except he’s not even close to being gone. Mason McConnell is everywhere, drawing me in, like an invisible thread. I just hope that string doesn't snap and break my heart. Mason: Two weeks was all I needed to go home, spread my cat’s ashes, and visit my brother. But one foolish decision at the airport managed to throw all my plans off track. Somehow, I had unknowingly cast the line, and Charlotte Kelley took the bait. The chatty, prying American somehow had a way of bringing me back to life. I didn’t want her under my skin, and I certainly wasn’t expecting her to make her way into my heart, yet once she did, I didn’t want her to leave. But with one secret wedged between us, I'm not sure I have the right to ask her to stay.

    Examining themes of identity, othering, and self-determination, The Trojan War Museum strives to bring light to the darkest corners of ourselves and our histories.

    In a California of the ’60s and ’70s, characters examine the contents of deceased relatives’ freezers, tape-record high-school locker-room chatter, or collect a community’s gossip while cleaning the teeth of its inhabitants. Mr. Darcy is the captain of the football team, Mansfield Park materializes in a suburb of L.A., bake sales replace balls, and station wagons, not horse-drawn carriages, are the preferred mode of transit. The stories of traversing class, race, and gender leap into our modern world with wit and humor.

    Perhaps no figure better embodies the transition from the Gothic tradition to modern horror than Arthur Machen. In the final decade of the nineteenth century, the Welsh writer produced a seminal body of tales of occult horror, spiritual and physical corruption, and malignant survivals from the primeval past which horrified and scandalized late-Victorian readers. Machen's "weird fiction" has influenced generations of storytellers, from H. P. Lovecraft to Guillermo Del Toro - and it remains no less unsettling today. This new collection, which includes the complete novel The Three Impostors as well as such celebrated tales as The Great God Pan and The White People, constitutes the most comprehensive critical edition of Machen yet to appear. In addition to the core late-Victorian horror classics, a selection of lesser-known prose poems and later tales helps to present a fuller picture of the development of Machen's weird vision. The edition's introduction and notes contextualize the life and work of this foundational figure in the history of horror.

    So when she meets Ethan, the awkward boy from the exclusive community of Crystal Waters, she can’t help being intrigued. He’s different, but in a good way.Along with her stand-in little brother Parker, and her best friend Meredith, the four of them form an unlikely friendship. But one morning, their idyllic summer is turned upside down when a dead body washes up on the beach…From the author of the critically acclaimed Hope for Garbage, comes another story of friendship, hope, and the incredible power of the human spirit.

    Infinite Possibilities.Sleep-deprived Faith Daniels is desperate for help to plan the charity bachelor auction for the fall festival. Surprisingly, her best friend agrees to chip in, but the offer comes with strings attached. Faith must toss a coin into the infamous “Fountain of Love” and then undergo a complete makeover. She knows it’s all just a ridiculous ploy to get her back into the dating pool, but she would be crazy to say no. Besides, it’s not like wishes in that fountain come true.Or do they?Like magic, men begin to appear out of nowhere. There’s a doctor, a lawyer, a firefighter, and a swimwear model, for starters. All of them kind, generous, successful, and drop-dead gorgeous. All of them interested in Faith. But what happens when she starts to enjoy the attention? Is it really possible to get a second chance at love?A feel-good romantic comedy novel about love, friendship, and living life to the fullest!