Time to move up.When Donald was a kid in the late 60's on the South Side of Chicago, he had a Schwinn Sting Ray bike. Everyone did. But everyone else had a five-speed. Donald's was a three-speed. It was good enough, as was explained by his parents, just as their Ford Maverick wasn't the neighbor's Le Mans, but it was good enough. And that's the way Donald was taught to live his life. It was a three-speed life. It was good enough. He marries Emily because she's good enough. Emily marries Donald because that's what she had planned, and she is not going to experience divorce as did her parents. Donald opens a law practice with his two best friends and roommates from college because it's good enough.Then the Roths meet their son's future in-laws and everything changes. Donald wonders if, in fact, he could get that five-speed.In this hilarious and thought-provoking novel, the whole concept of morals and convention is turned inside out. Everything is perception. If you like Richard Russo, Tom Perotta, and Jonathan Franzen, you're going to love this book.

    A story about friendship and growth, love and loss, and life and death. Adam Spencer, a happily married 37 year-old father of two young boys, has everything he wants. A successful business, a beautiful home, two cars in the garage, and a dog. What he doesn't want is to die. But Adam doesn't have a say in the matter. He just found out he has brain cancer.Troubled by his newly-discovered death sentence, Adam joins a support group for the terminally ill. There, he meets six strangers who are struggling to cope with their own impending demises.When one member of the group dies, leaving behind an unfulfilled dream, the others realize just how limited their time is. Now, as the youngest member nears the end of his short life, they become determined to make sure the boy's dream comes true before it's too late. Together, they embark on a road trip that will teach them all what it means to live and to die.

    Although social realities -- racial and ethnic tensions, sexual harassment, and abuse -- make up their background, these are really love stories in which people discover and forgive one another. A daughter finds her father's kindness extends beyond her and their family; a wife discovers and forgives the affair between her husband and best friend; and, in the title story which takes the form of a letter to an almost-lover, the narrator winds through swirling eddies of memory and language to relate her present and past lives and the loves that have informed them.Written with a masterful sureness of hand and heart, these captivating, intimate stories display Sena Jeter Naslund's extraordinary presence as one of today's most rewarding writers of fiction.

    As a rank amateur who just thinks he can help, this Ames alter ego quickly becomes embroiled in the search for a missing NYU coed. He moves from one scrape to the next, all while trying to escape a life of periodic alcoholism, dead-end relationships, writer’s block, and hours of Internet backgammon. Bored to Death was originally published in McSweeney’s Issue 24 and is the centerpiece of Ames’s collection of essays and fiction, The Double Life Is Twice as Good. Bored to Death Artwork © 2009 Home Box Office, Inc. All rights reserved. HBO® and related channels and service marks are the property of Home Box Office, Inc.

    With "ONJ.com," a young woman in advertising decides she wants a gay man in her life, but the good-looking and fast-talking gay coworker she meets isn't as pleasant and "fun" as she had hoped. In "Dunford," a lonely, aging architect with a suppressed fascination for female escorts decides impulsively to take the opportunity of his wife's absence to set up a date. Sadly for Dunford, he realizes too late that his escort doesn't share his penchant for masturbation in car washes. And "Nightwalking" centers on a woman sleepwalker whose mother's death frames the occasion for a rocky family reunion. You Are Not the One marks the auspicious arrival of an exciting new talent.

    Gary Handler has issues. His boss hates him, his mother hounds him, and his cat thinks he’s an idiot. But that’s okay because Gary’s got the perfect solution to all of life’s troubles: a porn site subscription and his right hand.Sadly, all habits grow old, even the fun ones. Gary soon finds himself at the doorstep of a creepy old pawn shop where he buys a used adult novelty toy to spice up his one-man sex life.Pity for him that it’s cursed by the angry spirits of all the “kids” he’s flushed down the toilet. Needless to say, hairy palms are about to become the least of his worries.----------Jack on, jack off ... with the Jacklight in book 2 of Shingles, the horror comedy series that’s not for those with faint hearts or weak bladders.

    He can tell you everything there is to know about successful trade show programs. He can tell you stories about the thousands of people he has met, miles he has flown, hotel rooms he has stayed in, and ways to work the system to your advantage when you travel. But he can't tell the woman he loves how he feels. Think "Up in the Air meets Planes, Trains and Automobiles..". Based on his own extensive business trips, Paul Michael Peters brings us this funny, bittersweet story of a traveling software salesman. Filled with wry observations and entertaining vignettes, life moves fast in this quick read about a "trade show guy" and a love he thinks he can never have.

    A world of speakeasies and dancing girls where a gambler or bootlegger is perfectly normal and respectable in every way. Those familiar with "Guys and Dolls" know what to expect!

    Each book in the series has been designed with today's young reader in mind. As the words come to life, students will develop a lasting appreciation for great literature.The humor of Mark Twain...the suspense of Edgar Allan Poe...the danger of Jack London...the sensitivity of Katherine Mansfield. Creative Short Stories has it all and will prove to be a welcome addition to any library.

    His lyric, deceptively simple prose conjures a world where the default setting is violence, a world of hunting and fishing, gambling and losing, drinking and poaching—a world most of us have never seen. In the chilling title novella (selected for the anthologies New Stories from the South: The Year's Best, 1999 and Best Mystery Stories of the Century), three wild boys confront a mythic game warden as mysterious and deadly as the river they haunt. And, as a weathered, hand-painted sign reads: "Jesus is not coming;" This terrain isn't pretty, isn't for the weak of heart, but in these desperate, lost people, Franklin somehow finds the moments of grace that make them what they so abundantly are: human.

     For Jess, the campground holds bittersweet memories. It’s where she passed a childhood of carefree summers, but it’s also the scene of her first heartbreak at the hands of Hunter Aarden. The summer she turned seventeen he promised her he’d love her for always, then he drove out of camp never to be heard from again. Until now. After almost two decades, Jess is finally about to find out why. Both romantic and humorous, Pohutukawa Highway is a story that reminds us about the importance of family, and the magic of second chances.

    They are stories about the woods, houses hidden in the gaps between mountains. Behind them, the skeletons of old and powerful machines rust into the slate and leaves. Water red with iron leeches from the empty mines and pools near a stone foundation. The boy there plays in the bones because he is a child and this will be his childhood. He watches while winter comes falling slowly down over the road. Sometimes he remembers a girl, her hair and the perfume she wore. These are stories about her and where she might have gone. He waits for sleep because in the next story he will leave. The boy watches an airplane blink red past his window. From here, you can't hear its violence.

    From literary legends to emerging voices, the acclaimed writers featured in this collection view their hardscrabble South without romanticism or false nostalgia, not through moonlight and magnolia but moonshine and Marlboros. This is the dirty South as captured by those rooted in its land yet able to share its stories with candor and courage. Grit Lit guides readers through tales both tall and true, intoxicating stories of loss, violence, failure, feuds, family, and--above all--survival against the odds. Raw and raucous, Grit Lit gathers some of the most provocative writing to come out of the South in the last thirty years. With a preface by Edgar Award-winning author Tom Franklin and Brian Carpenter's introduction to the genre's origins and influences, this bold anthology lays bare the Rough South in all its battered glory and dares readers not to stare in awe.

    Pretentious web designers, reality show wannabes, and hipster party girls are among the characters populating a seemingly ordinary world teetering on the brink of chaos.

    The 14 stories of The Dogs of Detroit each focus on grief and its many strange permutations. This grief alternately devolves into violence, silence, solitude, and utter isolation. In some cases, grief drives the stories as a strong, reactionary force, and yet in other stories, that grief evolves quietly over long stretches of time. Many of the stories also use grief as a prism to explore the beguiling bonds within families. The stories span a variety of geographies, both urban and rural, often considering collisions between the two.