Disaster reigns when A.J. participates in the school's holiday pageant celebrating Christmas, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa.

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.

Alice Howland, happily married with three grown children and a house on the Cape, is a celebrated Harvard professor at the height of her career when she notices a forgetfulness creeping into her life. As confusion starts to cloud her thinking and her memory begins to fail her, she receives a devastating diagnosis: early onset Alzheimer's disease.

"The many lives of theoretical physicist Elsie Hannaway have finally caught up with her. By day, she's an adjunct professor, toiling away at grading labs and teaching thermodynamics in the hopes of landing tenure. By other day, Elsie makes up for her non-existent paycheck by offering her services as a fake girlfriend, tapping into her expertly honed people-pleasing skills to embody whichever version of herself the client needs. Honestly, it's a pretty...

"In this wickedly sharp, propulsive debut, a classicist must outmaneuver her manipulative mentor. Tessa Templeton has thrived at Oxford University, under the tutelage and praise of esteemed classics professor Christopher Eccles. Yet shortly before her thesis defense, Tessa learns that Chris has sabotaged her career--and realizes their relationship is not at all what she believed. Driven by what he mistakes as love for Tessa, Chris has ensured that...

Relegated to the status of schoolteacher and friendly neighbor after abandoning her dreams of becoming an artist, Nora advocates on behalf of a charismatic Lebanese student and is drawn into the child's family until his artist mother's careless ambition leads to a shattering betrayal.

"From the award-winning novelist, a compact narrative that turns on the death of a vivid and particular woman, and becomes the occasion for a man's deeper examination of love, friendship, and biography. This beautiful, spare novel of platonic unrequited love springs into being around the singular character of the stoic, exacting Professor Elizabeth Finch. Neil, the narrator, takes her class on Culture and Civilization, taught not for undergraduates...

"When Professor Hess stumbles across an unusual letter to the editor in an art journal, he is surprised to have known so little about the brilliant and mysterious artist it describes, the late Harriet Burden. Intrigued by her story, and by the explosive scandal surrounding her legacy, he begins to interview those who knew her, hoping to separate fact from fiction, only to find himself tumbling down a rabbit's hole of personal and psychological intrigue....

She was a schoolmistress with a difference. Proud, cultured, romantic, her ideas were progressive, even shocking. And when she decided to transform a group of young girls under her tutelage into the "creme de la creme" of Marcia Blaine school, no one could have predicted the outcome. A teacher at a girl's school in Edinburgh during the 1930s, she comes into conflict with school authorities because of her unorthodox teaching methods.

"Billington, Texas, is a place where nothing changes. Well, almost nothing. For the first time in nearly four decades, Mary Alice Roth is not getting ready for the first day of school at Billington High. A few months into her retirement--or, district mandated exile as she calls it--Mary Alice does not know how to fill her days. The annual picnic is coming up, but that isn't nearly enough since the menu never changes and she had the roles mentally...