Academic Life

"Jason Fitger is a beleaguered professor of creative writing and literature at Payne University, a small and not very distinguished liberal arts college in the Midwest ... His once-promising writing career is in the doldrums, as is his romantic life, in part as the result of his unwise use of his private affairs for his novels ... In short, his life is a tale of woe, and the vehicle this ... novel uses to tell that tale is a series of ... letters...

When an acclaimed writer and college professor is killed in a hit-and-run accident, speculations about his unwritten final novel run rampant in the intellectual community, prompting his literary executor to begin a search through the professor's personal records.

"One daring to-do list and a crash course in flirtation turn a Type A overachiever's world upside down. When her flailing department lands on the university's chopping block, Professor Naya Turner's friends convince her to shed her frumpy cardigan for an evening on the town. For one night her focus will stray from her demanding job and she'll tackle a new kind of to-do list. When she meets a charming stranger in town on business, he presents the perfect...

"As an adjunct professor of English with a draining and tedious courseload, Dorothy feels "like a janitor in the temple who continued to sweep because she had no idea what else to do but who had lost her belief in the essential sanctity of the enterprise." No one but her partner knows that she's just had a miscarriage, not even her therapists--Dorothy being the kind of person who begins seeing a second because she's too conflict-averse to break things...

"Edward Fosca is a murderer. Of this Mariana is certain. But Fosca is untouchable. A handsome and charismatic Greek tragedy professor at Cambridge University, Fosca is adored by staff and students alike-particularly by the members of a secret society of female students known as The Maidens. Mariana Andros is a brilliant but troubled group therapist who becomes fixated on The Maidens when one member, a friend of Mariana's niece Zoe, is found murdered...

Struggling with a stale marriage and the misguided passions of his three adult children, art professor Howard Belsey finds his family life thrown into turmoil by his son's engagement to the socially prominent daughter of a right-wing icon.

Heather Wells Rocks! Or, at least, she did. That was before she left the pop-idol life behind after she gained a dress size or two, and lost a boyfriend, a recording contract, and her life savings (when Mom took the money and ran off to Argentina). Now that the glamour and glory days of endless mall appearances are in the past, Heather's perfectly happy with her new size 12 shape (the average for the American woman!) and her new job as an assistant...

In "the funniest serious novel . . . since "Portnoy's Complaint"" ("New York Times Book Review"), the bestselling author of "Nobody's Fool" introduces Henry Deveraux--reluctant chairman of the English department at a badly underfunded college--who's slowly coming to terms with his dysfunctional life.

"In the offbeat style of Wes Anderson, a hilariously charming novel about a heartbroken man trying to redeem himself by championing forgotten books. Fleeing heartbreak, an unnamed author goes to an unnamed city to give a series of lectures at an unnamed university about forgotten books ... only to find himself involved in a mystery when it turns out the professor who invited him is no where to be found, and no one seems quite sure why he's there"--...