"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...

"Rachel Cusk's Outline is a novel in ten conversations. Spare and stark, it follows a novelist teaching a course in creative writing during an oppressively hot summer in Athens. She leads her students in storytelling exercises. She meets other visiting writers for dinners and discourse. She goes swimming with an elderly Greek bachelor. The people she encounters speak, volubly, about themselves: their fantasies, anxieties, pet theories, regrets, and...

In the wake of her family's collapse, a writer and her two young sons move to London. The process of this upheaval is the catalyst for a number of transitions-personal, moral, artistic, and practical-as she endeavors to construct a new reality for herself and her children. In the city, she is made to confront aspects of living that she has, until now, avoided, and to consider questions of vulnerability and power, death and renewal, in what becomes...

First, someone steals several valuable toy soldiers from the collection of the dean of a small liberal arts school. The dean asks Carl Burns, Chair of the English Department, to look into things. Then a college board member is killed, and one of the stolen soldiers is found at the scene. After another attempted murder, another soldier is found, making a clear link between the stolen toys and the shooting. Burns begins asking questions and finds himself...

After a series of apparent pranks that leave a faculty member badly injured and a student dead, Bowmouth College English professor Sarah Deane uncovers a tangled web of academic politics, extracurricular activities gone awry, and murder.

"In her second year teaching sixth grade English, Maggie Topper is chosen for a special assignment: to privately tutor a student with serious health issues that prevent him from attending class with other kids. Though she agrees to the assignment, her decision is clouded with painful memories from her own childhood. It isn't easy for her to make a connection with Yuri Krasny, the son of two Ukrainian immigrants, until Maggie uncovers his passion for...

Fifteen years ago Vida Avery arrived alone and pregnant at elite Fayer Academy. By living on campus, on an island off the New England coast, Vida has cocooned herself and her son, Peter, from the outside world and from an inside secret. For years she has lived largely through the books she teaches, but when she accepts the impulsive marriage proposal of ardent widower Tom Belou, the prescribed life Vida has constructed is swiftly dismantled. As Vida...

Successful professor Nick Hoffman finds his secure, happy, college-town life changed forever after a nightmarish encounter with police. A novel of suspense set in the academic world, Assault with a Deadly Lie probes the disturbing psychological impact of slander, harassment, stalking, police brutality, and the loss of personal safety.

"How long must we pay for the crimes of our youth? A prestigious boys' boarding school. A best friend's betrayal. A decades-old mystery of a missing student. In this sharp literary thriller, Matthias Glass gets drawn into his past as he attempts to come to terms with the long-ago disappearance of his prep-school roommate--and to become the man he is meant to be In the middle of his senior year at the Blackburne School in Virginia, Matthias Glass's...