""If ever I do write anything of length--good or bad--it will be written with you in mind." Kurt Vonnegut's oldest daughter, Edith, was cleaning out her mother's attic when she stumbled upon a dusty box. Inside were more than two-hundred love letters written by Kurt to Jane, spanning the early years of their relationship: from 1941, when nineteen-year-old Kurt heads off to college, to his deployment to Europe in 1944 and the couple's marriage in 1945....

Imagine that your husband wrote you a letter, to be opened after his death. Imagine, too, that the letter contains his deepest, darkest secret, something with the potential to destroy not just the life you built together, but the lives of others as well. Imagine, then, that you stumble across that letter while your husband is still very much alive. Cecilia Fitzpatrick has achieved it all; she is an incredibly successful businesswoman, a pillar of...

DCI Nelson has been receiving threatening letters. They are anonymous, yet reminiscent of ones he has received in the past, from the person who drew him into a case that's haunted him for years. At the same time, Ruth receives a letter purporting to be from that very same person-her former mentor, and the reason she first started working with Nelson. But the author of those letters is dead. Or is he? The past is reaching out for Ruth and Nelson,...

"It's spring and Three Pines is reemerging after the harsh winter. But not everything buried should come alive again. Not everything lying dormant should reemerge. But something has. As the villagers prepare for a special celebration, Armand Gamache and Jean-Guy Beauvoir find themselves increasingly worried. A young man and woman have reappeared in the Sûreté du Québec investigators' lives after many years. The two were young children when their...

"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...

McSweeney's Quarterly Concern has been printing issues since 1998, and sending them into the world with reckless faith. Now and then, the world writes back. In two decades and change, we've accumulated a heady archive of dispatches, pleas, confessions, treatises, ruminations, rants, raves, and the occasional misdirected customer service query. Collected here are one hundred installments from this sprawling many-to-one correspondence, including but...

"A chance encounter during the holiday season brings two people together as quickly as it tears them apart--until fate intervenes again (and again) in this romantic debut novel in the tradition of One Day in December. Every December, Josie posts a letter from her home in London to the parents she lost on Christmas night many years ago. Each year, she writes the same three words: Missing you, always. But this year, her annual trip to the postbox is...

Intimacy has always eluded twenty-seven-year-old Maggie Krause-despite being brought up by married parents, models of domestic bliss-until, that is, Lucia came into her life. But when Maggie's mom, Iris, dies in a car crash, Maggie returns home only to discover a withdrawn dad, an angry brother, and, along with Iris's will, five sealed envelopes, each addressed to a mysterious man she's never heard of. In an effort to run from her own grief and discover...

Sixteen-year-old Min Green writes a letter to Ed Slaterton in which she breaks up with him, documenting their relationship and how items in the accompanying box, from bottle caps to a cookbook, foretell the end.