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.

Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands


Michael Chabon - 2008
    Throughout, Chabon energetically argues for a return to the thrilling, chilling origins of storytelling, rejecting the false walls around "serious" literature in favor of a wide-ranging affection.Cover art by Jordan Crane.

Where We Belong


Catherine Ryan Hyde - 2013
    The problem is her little sister, Sophie. Sophie has an autism-like disorder, and a tendency to shriek. No matter where they live, home never seems to last long.Until they move in with Aunt Vi, across the fence from a huge black Great Dane who changes everything. Sophie falls in love immediately, and begins to imitate the “inside of the dog,” which, fortunately, is a calm place. The shrieking stops. Everybody begins to breathe again. Until Paul Inverness, the dog’s grumpy, socially isolated owner, moves to the mountains, and it all begins again.Much to Angie’s humiliation, when they’re thrown out of Aunt Vi’s house, Angie’s mom moves the family to the mountains after Paul and his dog. There, despite a fifty-year difference in their ages, Angie and Paul form a deep friendship, the only close friendship either has known. Angie is able to talk to him about growing up gay, and Paul trusts Angie with his greatest secret, his one dream. When the opportunity arrives, Angie decides to risk everything to help Paul’s dream come true, even their friendship and her one chance at a real home—the only thing she’s dreamed of since her father was killed. A place she can never be thrown out. A place she can feel she belongs.By the bestselling author of DON’T LET ME GO, WHEN I FOUND YOU, and WALK ME HOME, WHERE WE BELONG is a poignant, heartfelt, and uplifting story about finding your place in the world, no matter how impossible it seems.“Hyde has a sure touch with affairs of the heart.”-Publishers Weekly

Heat Wave


Nancy Thayer - 2011
    After her husband’s sudden death, Carley Winsted is determined to keep her two daughters in their beloved home on Nantucket. To ease the family’s financial strain, she decides to transform their grand, historic house into a bed-and-breakfast. Not everyone, however, thinks this plan prudent or quite respectable—especially not Carley’s mother-in-law. Further complicating a myriad of challenges, a friend forces Carley to keep a secret that, if revealed, will undo families and friendships. And her late husband’s former law partner is making Carley confront an array of mixed feelings. Then, during a late-summer heat wave, the lives of Carley and her friends and family will be forever changed in entirely unexpected ways.

The Endarkenment


Jeffrey McDaniel - 2008
    It will convert you and install a skylight in your brain. Alive and kicking in these pages is the voice of a brilliantly comic consciousness. McDaniel is a candid, frisky survivor: hyperalert, conversant with drugs and sobriety, obscene phone call addicts, 'boner etiquette, ' fatherhood, the special hell of family, being an 'emotional warrior' and so much more. He's an urban wordsmith of the first order. You hold in your hands his anguished autobiography, a smorgasbord of famished compassion, tenderness, luminous surprises, and armor-piercing humor. - Amy Gerstler It was an energetic moment when I encountered Jeffrey McDaniel for the first time. Even after a few lines it became obvious that he was someone who produced not only a very vivid but also innovative poetry. A fusion of pain and goodness, comic reliefs, and explosive moments on the crunchy surface of daily horrors/shocks

Undermajordomo Minor


Patrick deWitt - 2015
    He is a compulsive liar, a sickly weakling in a town famous for begetting brutish giants. Then Lucy accepts employment assisting the majordomo of the remote, foreboding Castle Von Aux. While tending to his new post as undermajordomo, he soon discovers the place harbours many dark secrets, not least of which is the whereabouts of the castle's master, Baron Von Aux. Thus begins a tale of polite theft, bitter heartbreak, domestic mystery, and cold-blooded murder.Undermajordomo Minor is an ink-black comedy of manners, an adventure, and a mystery, and a searing portrayal of rural Alpine bad behaviour, but above all it is a love story. And Lucy must be careful, for love is a violent thing.

Of Yesteryear


Lauren Eden - 2016
    In her debut, Lauren Eden’s succinct and beautiful observations of human nature and its gains and losses will lead readers to understand their own journey in love and self discovery - now, and of yesteryear.

Between


Megan Whitmer - 2014
    Seth whisks Charlie to Ellauria—a magical world filled with the creatures of myths and legends—and tells her of the Fellowship, the group charged with protecting mystical beings from human discovery. (All except Bigfoot: that attention whore is a total lost cause.) But when Charlie learns that she's under the Fellowship's protection herself, well, "stressed" is an understatement.Ellauria should be the safest place for Charlie while the Fellowship works to find her family, but things in the mystical realm aren’t what they seem.Magic is failing, creatures are dying, and the Fellowship insists Charlie holds the key to saving everyone. With her family still missing and the danger in Ellauria growing, Charlie doesn't know who she can trust. She's dealing with a power she never asked for, falling for a guy she can't have, and being forced to choose between her destiny and her heart. And if she chooses wrong, she could destroy magic forever.Charlie may be in over her head.

Beautiful Oblivion


Addison Moore - 2013
    She’s tired of dating Warren McCarthy just to make her father happy. Reese has long since had her eye on someone else, and this summer she’s determined to make it happen.Growing up in Lake Loveless there has always been a strict monetary divide—there was the rest of the Lake and then there were the Waterman’s. Ace Waterman has worked for everything he has, and he doesn’t have a lot. He breaks his back doing grunt work while putting himself through college. He’s used to life passing him by.Reese has loved Ace from afar for as long as she can remember. The summer of her freshman year she comes home with plans to land Ace in her bed at least for a few short weeks, and, if she’s lucky, forever.Ace has loved Reese for as long as he can remember, but their friendship has never graduated beyond platonic, so when Reese comes home from her first year away and proposes the two of them have a summer fling, Ace is quick to comply. The rules: no strings, no expectations, just something hotter than the sun to set the sheets on fire.But when their worlds collide, and neither of them is willing to admit to having true feelings, it becomes clear to Ace he’s nothing more than a dirty little secret—that the summer fling was just something meaningless to pass the time.Reese wonders if she can ever stop trying to please her father, and it’s only through her mother’s letters that she finds the answers she truly seeks, but will they be the ones she wants to hear?As summer draws to a close, Ace and Reese are still very much enraptured even though the time has come to douse the flame and move on—but neither one of them is prepared to leave this BEAUTIFUL OBLIVION.

After the Internship


Brooke Cumberland - 2014
    Fortune and fame have a price, and when the past comes back to ruin their perfectly, stable family, how will they recover their once epic love story?You thought their story was over, but it was only the beginning.After the Internship: A Novella should be read after The Intern, Vol. 1-3 are read.This is a continuation of Bentley & Ceci's story. Approx. 47,000 words.

Tempt Me


Isabel Morin - 2012
    After spending the last year struggling to make it as a painter, all she has to show for it are bills she can't pay. Out of money and sick of struggling, she decides it's time to pack it up and head back to her hometown in New Hampshire.When she meets Ian Sinclair at her going away party, Nina's instantly attracted to his dark, smoldering looks and lean athletic body. When he asks her back to his apartment, she's willing to overlook the fact that he's a high-powered lawyer. It's just for one night, and guys as gorgeous as Ian don't come around every day.Ian has never had a problem getting women into his bed, but after his hot night with Nina, all he wants is more of her. So he makes the curvy painter a deal - stay in the city for a few weeks and he'll take care of everything.Nina agrees, even though she knows better than to get attached. He's a rich corporate suit, she's a struggling artist. But as the connection between them deepens and Ian takes her to places she's never been - both in and out of the bedroom - Nina doesn't know how much longer she can resist.Tempt Me is a 28,000 word steamy romance novella.

You're The One That I Don't Want


Alexandra Potter - 2010
    And, caught up in the whirlwind of first love, they kiss under the Bridge of Sighs at sunset. Which - according to legend - will tie them together forever. But ten years later, they've completely lost contact. That is, until Lucy moves to New York and the legend brings them back together. Again. And again. And again. But what if Nate isn't The One? How is she going to get rid of him? Because forever could be a very long time...A funny, magical romantic comedy about how finding The One doesn't always have to mean happily ever after.

Meeting Trouble


Emme Rollins - 2013
    (Note: This title was originally published as “Happy Accident”)

The Current


Tim Johnston - 2019
    One girl’s survival, and the other’s death—murder, actually—stun the citizens of a small Minnesota town, thawing memories of another young woman who lost her life in the same river ten years earlier, and whose killer may yet live among them. One father is forced to relive his agony while another’s greatest desire—to bring a killer to justice—is revitalized . . . and the girl who survived the icy plunge cannot escape the sense that she is connected to that earlier unsolved case by more than a river. Soon enough she’s caught up in an investigation of her own that will unearth long-hidden secrets, and stoke the violence that has long simmered just below the surface of the town. Souls frozen in time, ghosts and demons, the accused and the guilty, all stir to life in this cold northern place where memories, like treachery, run just beneath the ice, and where a young woman can come home but still not be safe.Brilliantly plotted, unrelentingly suspenseful, and beautifully realized, The Current is a gripping page-turner about how the past holds the key to the future as well as an unbreakable grip on the present.

Teatro Grottesco


Thomas Ligotti - 2006
    The cycle of narratives that includes the title work of this collection, for instance, introduces readers to a freakish community of artists who encounter demonic perils that ultimately engulf their lives. These are selected examples of the forbidding array of persons and places that compose the mesmerizing fiction of Thomas Ligotti.