Beatrice Baker may be a struggling artist, but she believes all hardships have silver linings...until she follows her boyfriend to New Orleans and finds him with another woman. Instead of turning those lemons into lemonade, she drinks lemon drop martinis and keys the wrong man's car. Now she works for Huxley Marlow of the Marvelous Marlow Boys, getting shoved in boxes as an on-stage magician's assistant. A cool job for some, but Bea's been coerced...

"Fenna Vos has learned to focus on her own survival-even now, with the Second World War raging in faraway countries. She works on-stage as the assistant to an unruly escape artist-behind the curtain as the mastermind of their act. After all, her honed ability to control her surroundings and elude entrapments, physical or otherwise, reliably suppresses the trauma and tragedy of her youth. For all her calculations, however, Fenna neglects to foresee...

Chloe Brown is a chronically ill computer geek with a goal, a plan, and a list. After almost-but not quite-dying, she's come up with seven directives to help her "Get a Life", and she's already completed the first: finally moving out of her glamorous family's mansion. The next items? Enjoy a drunken night out. Ride a motorcycle. Go camping. Have meaningless but thoroughly enjoyable sex. Travel the world with nothing but hand luggage. And... do something...

Performance artists Caleb and Camille Fang dedicated themselves to making great art. But when an artist's work lies in subverting normality, it can be difficult to raise well-adjusted children. Just ask Buster and Annie Fang. For as long as they can remember, they starred (unwillingly) in their parents' madcap pieces. But now that they are grown up, the chaos of their childhood has made it difficult to cope with life outside the fishbowl of their...

In the Highlands village of Lochdubh, every season has its special flavor. Lanky, red-haired constable Hamish Macbeth relishes them all, but spring is the grandest. Now the winter storms have blown out to sea, the loch is smooth as glass, and Macbeth is content with his dog, cat, and cup of tea...until his quiet life is shattered by a shocking death. High up in the mountains, the body of eccentric dreamer Effie Garrard has been found. The authorities...

"On a day that contains much conversation and some rain, the seventy-eight-year-old painter Hope Chafetz, who in the course of her eventful life has been Hope Ouderkirk, Hope McCoy, and Hope Holloway, answers questions put to her by a New York interviewer named Kathryn, and recapitulates, through the story of her own career, the triumphant, poignant saga of postwar American art. In the evolving relation between the two women, the interviewer and interviewee...

"Mark Pryor's Die Around Sundown is the first entry in an exciting mystery series set in Paris during World War II, where a detective is forced to solve a murder while protecting his own secrets. Summer 1940: In German-occupied Paris, Inspector Henri Lefort has been given just five days to solve the murder of a German major that took place in the Louvre Musuem. Blocked from the crime scene but given a list of suspects, Henri encounters a group of...

The story of the actor Jack Burns. His mother, Alice, is a Toronto tattoo artist. When Jack is four, he travels with Alice to several North Sea ports; they are trying to find Jack's missing father, William, a church organist who is addicted to being tattooed. But Alice is a mystery, and William can't be found. Even Jack's memories are subject to doubt. Jack Burns goes to schools in Canada and New England, but what shapes him are his relationships...

When Corey moves away from Lost Creek, Alaska, she makes her friend Kyra promise to stay strong during the long, dark winter, and wait for her return. Just days before Corey is to return home to visit, Kyra dies. The entire Lost community speaks in hushed tones, saying her death was meant to be. And they push Corey away like she's a stranger. With every hour, Corey's suspicion grows. Lost is keeping secrets-- but piecing together the truth about what...

Short stories of life in New York during the 1980's.