"Written late in Anita Desai's illustrious career, these three novellas ruminate on art and memory, illusion and disillusion, and the sharp divide between life's expectations and dreams and its realities. Set in India in the not too distant past, the stories' diverse surroundings and dramas frame universal themes, which illuminate the ways in which various aspects of the Indian culture can nourish or suffocate. All are served up with Desai's characteristic...

"The unattainable quest for middle-class stability is hauntingly captured in this biting portrayal of forgotten America Weaving the brackish humor of Chuck Palahniuk with the empathy of Barbara Ehrenreich, JR Helton brings to life an obscured underside of the American psyche in this unflinching account of life inside the working class of Texas in the 1980s. We first meet Helton as a struggling writer succumbing to the bleak reality of what it means...

"If you're looking for a parenting book, this is not it. This is not a treatise on how to be a mother. This is a book about a young girl who moves to a new town every couple of years; a misfit teenager who finds solace in a local music scene; an adrift twenty-something who drops out of college to pursue her dream of making cheesecake on a stick a successful business franchise (ah, the ideals of youth). Alone in a new city, she summons her inner strength...

"In this hilarious collection of personal essays, New York Times bestselling author Merrill Markoe reveals, among other things, the secret formula for comedy: Start out with a difficult mother, develop some classic teenage insecurities, add a few relationships with narcissistic men, toss in an unruly pack of selfish dogs, finish it off with the kind of crystalline perspective that only comes from years of navigating a roiling sea of unpleasant and...

Eileen is nine and too smart for the third grade, but when the clownish school psychologist tries to gain her trust with an offer of Oreos, she refuses. After all, she doesn’t accept gifts from strangers! This is the start of a love-hate relationship with the rules as they were laid out for a girl in 1960s upstate New York—and as they persist in some form today. As she ascends from her rural public high school, where she wasn't allowed to take...

"A unique collection of eulogies of the twentieth century's greatest figures, written by conservative icon William F. Buckley Jr. and compiled by National Review and Fox News chief Washington correspondent James Rosen. In a half-century on the national stage, William F. Buckley Jr. achieved unique stature as a polemicist and the undisputed godfather of modern American conservatism. He knew everybody, hosted everybody at his East 73rd Street maisonette,...

'The women of the world gave up romance, subservience and submission, and once empowered, took to hard work, truth and reality. Much good has it done them.' Ruth Patchett, the original She Devil, is now eighty-four and keen to retire. But who can take up her mantle? Enter Tyler Patchett, our new kind of heroine and Ruth's grandson. He's an ultra-confident, twenty-three-year-old man: beautiful, resentful and unemployed. Tyler won't be satisfied until...