In this brilliantly told short story collection, critically acclaimed author David Updike skillfully portrays the multi-faceted nature of love and of the heart. From a father's painful realization his son has discovered the dark heart of racism still beats, to a quiet love affair that needs an audience to bloom; from the bumbling of a professor who unwittingly falls for one of his students to the wistful memories of a bittersweet affair tinged in regret, Updike portrays the intricacies of ...

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE • The arc of literary giant John Updike’s life emerges in these luminous daily letters to family, friends, editors, and lovers—a remarkable outpouring over six decades, from his earliest consciousness as a writer to his final days.As James Schiff writes in the introduction to this volume, of the writer who would eventually “express himself in written form as copiously and as elegantly as any American writer” b...

A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS’ CHOICE • The “exhilarating” (The Boston Globe) story of the legendary Random House founder, whose seemingly charmed life at the apogee of the American Century afforded him a front-row seat to literary and cultural history in the making“[A] big, beautiful biography . . . There’s a new Power Broker in town.”—The New York Times“Feldman depicts a lost world, at ti...

Pulitzer Prize FinalistFrom the bestselling author of The Circle and The Eyes and the Impossibles comes the “profoundly moving, occasionally angry, and often hilarious” (The New York Times Book Review) memoir chronicling Dave Eggers’s life after losing both of his parents within a span of five weeks.When twenty-one-year-old Dave Eggers loses both of his parents within weeks of each other, he suddenly becomes the p...

Jean Hubbard, forty-six, is a syndicated health columnist, her British husband, Mark, a successful advertising executive, and after more than twenty years together they revel in a sabbatical on a remote tropical island. But when Jean discovers a salacious love letter addressed to Mark, she realizes that she has misdiagnosed some acute pathologies in her own life. The long idyll of their mutual ease is over -- but a more vivid and compelling quest has just begun. Looking for answers, Jean g...

The fairy tale lives again in this book of forty new stories by some of the biggest names in contemporary fiction, science fiction, fantasy, and magical realism.Neil Gaiman, “Orange”Aimee Bender, “The Color Master”Joyce Carol Oates, “Blue-bearded Lover”Michael Cunningham, “The Wild Swans”These and more than thirty other stories by Francine Prose, Kelly Link, Jim Shepard, Lydia Millet, and many other extraordinary writers make up this...

Louis Holland arrives in Boston in a spring of ecological upheaval (a rash of earthquakes on the North Shore) and odd luck: the first one kills his grandmother. Louis tries to maintain his independence, but falls in love with a Harvard seismologist whose discoveries about the earthquakes' cause complicate everything.

“Killing yourself at any age is a seriously tricky business. But when I was seven, the odds felt insurmountable.”As a young girl, Terri Cheney’s life looked perfect. Her family lived in a lovely house in a tranquil Los Angeles suburb where the geraniums never once failed to bloom. She was pretty and smart, an academic superstar and popular cheerleader whose father doted on her. But starting with her first suicide attempt at age seven, it was clear that her...

Meet Peter and Rebecca Harris: mid-forties denizens of Manhattan’s SoHo, nearing the apogee of committed careers in the arts—he a dealer, she an editor. With a spacious loft, a college-age daughter in Boston and lively friends, they are admirable, enviable contemporary urbanites with every reason, it seems, to be happy. Then Rebecca’s much younger lookalike brother, Ethan (known in the family as Mizzy, “the mistake”), shows up for a visit. A beautiful, beguiling twenty-three-year-old with ...

**The #1 New York Times bestselling author of Ghost Story—and 8-time Bram Stoker Award winner—gathers 24 bone-chilling, nail-biting, frightfully imaginative stories that represent the best of contemporary horror writing.“Revelatory.... A remarkably consistent, frequently unsettling book.” —The Washington Post“[Straub] collects the best scary short stories out there.” —TimeDan Chaon “The Bees”Elizab...

This sophisticated, scary anthology collects the best horror fiction published between 1984 and 2005, one of horror’s most innovative eras. These exceptionally diverse stories, hand-picked by horror-expert editor Ellen Datlow, are tales of the subtly psychological, the unpredictably mischievous, and the disturbingly visceral.Here are classics, such as horror master Stephen King’s Chattery Teeth,” the tautly drawn account of a traveling salesman who unwisely picks up yet another hi...

An East German immigrant pleads with his estranged wife for mercy after kidnapping their daughter during a parental visit in this lyrical novel—A New York Times Notable Book—A Washington Times Book of the Year."Agile . . . transporting . . . a book that works as both character study and morality play, filled with questions that have no easy answers." —