Marie Sharp, a child of the 1960s, is entering her own 60s. Behind her is a life full of experiences: not just marriage, family, divorce, and work but also experimenting with drugs and having unprotected sex. In other words, Marie has lived. She has had adventures. She has been known to be reckless and irresponsible, at least by today’s standards. Now she’s old and wants to feel that way.
In No! I Don’t Want to Join a Book Club, Marie swears off all kinds of things that her friends and contemporaries are embracing: book clubs,
read more
Heat started out as an article Buford wrote for The New Yorker food issue in 2002 about working in the kitchen of Mario Batali’s three-star restaurant, Babbo. The impetus for the article—Buford’s desire to learn how professional chefs are different than home cooks—quickly became a full-fledged obsession. From attempting to carry a newly slaughtered pig back from the green market to his Manhattan apartment, to his quest to learn the history of pasta right down to when the egg first appeared, to his apprenticeship with a Dante-quoting butcher in the Tuscan hills, Buford imbues all of his adventures with his trademark energy and hilarity.
read more
A long overdue retelling of New Grub Street—George Gissing’s classic satire of the Victorian literary marketplace—Grub chronicles the triumphs and humiliations of a group of young novelists living in and around New York City.
Eddie Renfros, on the brink of failure after his critically acclaimed first book, wants only to publish another novel and hang on to his beautiful wife, Amanda, who has her own literary ambitions and a bit of a roving eye. Among their circle are writers of every stripe—from the Machiavellian Jackson Miller to the ‘experimental writer’
read more
After nursing a broken engagement with Jane Austen novels and Absolut, Courtney Stone wakes up and finds herself not in her Los Angeles bedroom or even in her own body, but inside the bedchamber of a woman in Regency England. Who but an Austen addict like herself could concoct such a fantasy?
Not only is Courtney stuck in another woman’s life, she is forced to pretend she actually is that woman; and despite knowing nothing about her, she manages to fool even the most astute observer. But not even her love of Jane Austen has prepared Courtney for the chamber pots and filthy coaching inns of nineteenth-century England,
read more
“Beautifully crafted”, “Fantastically funny.” “Compulsively readable.” Jonathan Tropper has earned wild acclaim—and comparisons to Nick Hornby and Tom Perrotta—for his biting humor and insightful portrayals of families in crisis and men behaving badly.
Now the acclaimed author of The Book of Joe and Everything Changes tackles love, lust, and lost in the suburbs—in a stunning novel that is by turns heartfelt and riotously funny.
Doug Parker is a widower at age twenty-nine, and in his quiet suburban town, that makes him something of a celebrity—the object of sympathy,
read more
The author of the Tony Award winner The History Boys, Alan Bennett is one of Britain’s best-loved literary voices. With The Uncommon Reader, he brings us a playful homage to the written word, imagining a world in which literature becomes a subversive bridge between powerbrokers and commoners. By turns cheeky and charming, the novella features the Queen herself as its protagonist. When her yapping corgis lead her to a mobile library, Her Majesty develops a new obsession with reading. She finds herself devouring works by a tantalizing range of authors, from the Brontë sisters to Jean Genet.
read more
