One dealer's journey from the populist mayhem of flea markets to the rarefied realm of auctions reveals the rich, often outrageous subculture of antiques and collectibles.Millions of Americans are drawn to antiques and flea-market culture, whether as participants or as viewers of the perennially popular Antiques Roadshow or the recent hit American Pickers. This world has the air of a lottery: a $20 purchase might net you four, five, or six figures...

The "mesmerizing . . . daring and important"* story of a risk-taking girlhood spent in a working-class prison town*Andre Dubus IIIFor Maureen Stanton's proper Catholic mother, the town's maximum security prison was a way to keep her seven children in line ("If you don't behave, I'll put you in Walpole Prison!"). But as the 1970s brought upheaval to America, and the lines between good and bad blurred, Stanton's once-solid family lost its way. A promising young...

When Maureen and Steve met in their twenties, he'd left behind a difficult marriage and she had ended a troubled relationship. In each other, they found a passionate love and shared a dream of a living off the land in rural Michigan. Three years later, when Steve, at twenty-nine, was diagnosed with cancer, they embarked on an all-out effort to save his life. When Steve's childhood friend, Joey, a drug addict, learned that Steve needed money for experimental cancer treatments that insurance...

For Maureen Stanton's proper Catholic mother, the town's maximum security prison was a way to keep her seven children in line ("If you don't behave, I'll put you in Walpole Prison!"). But as the 1970s brought upheaval to America, and the lines between good and bad blurred, Stanton's once-solid family lost its way. A promising young girl with a smart mouth, Stanton turns watchful as her parents separate and her now-single mother descends into shoplifting, then grand larceny, anything to kee...

After the sudden death of her husband, a woman unearths surprising revelations about the man she was married to for seventeen years. A compulsively readable, darkly funny, posthumous love story about loss, grief, and unresolved relationships.Jessica Waite’s successful, charismatic husband, Sean, is on his way home from a business trip when he collapses in a Houston airport. Having begun the day as a wife, by noon she is a widow and the sole living parent to their n...

In the whirlwind of life with three young sons, an active member in her tight-knit community, Ruth Rakoff felt in supreme control of her wide world. But when a routine mammogram revealed a tumor, that world rapidly shrunk down to the size of one breast.And so begins the journey of biopsy, surgery, chemotherapy, all accompanied by tidal waves of anxiety and grief: how to tell the children? Should she consider having a healthy breast removed, in case the cancer returns? Will food eve...

A BEST BOOK OF THE YEARNew York Times Book Review • The New Yorker • Entertainment Weekly • Time • Washington Post • San Francisco Chronicle • Chicago Tribune • Christian Science Monitor • Slate • St. Louise Post-Dispatch • Cleveland Plain Dealer • Seattle Times • NBCC Award FinalistMary Karr’s unforgettable sequel to her be...

Michelle Wildgen's debut novel You're Not You is "a complex and satisfying dish: a story of intimate strangers and their impact on each other's lives" ( O, The Oprah Magazine).Now a major motion picture directed by George C. Wolfe, produced by Denise Di Novi and starring Hilary Swank, Josh Duhamel and Emmy Rossum.Bec is adrift. It's the summer before her junior year in college. She's sleeping with a married professor, losing...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the award-winning, bestselling author of Snow Falling on Cedars comes an emotionally charged, provocative novel about what happens when a fifteen-year-old pill-popping runaway receives a visitation from the Virgin Mary. • "Surely one of this year’s best novels.”—The Plain DealerAnn Holmes is a fragile teenaged runaway who receives a visitation from the Virgin Mary one morning while picking mushrooms in the woods of North...

A woman considers pregnancy, motherhood, and the nature of female relationships in this profound and provocative novel.Twelve weeks pregnant for the first time, Anna speaks to her sister on the other side of the country and learns she has just miscarried her second child. As this loss strains their bond and complications with Anna's own pregnancy emerge, her tenuous steps towards motherhood are shadowed and illuminated by the women she meets along the way, whose st...

An extraordinary memoir of a family haunted by tragedy: "I've read very few contemporary novels that can rival Finneran's nonfiction." —Jonathan FranzenA superb portrait of family life, this "absorbing and thoughtful" memoir is a love story unlike any other ( Library Journal). The Finnerans—Irish Catholic parents with five children in St. Louis—are a seemingly unexceptional family whose lives are upended by a catastrophic event: the suicide of the author's ...

Critically acclaimed master of the short story Amy Hempel’s Tumble Home is narrated by people with skewed visions of home. Not exactly crazy, they become obsessed and irrational as their inner logic leads them astray. In the title novella, a woman living in a psychiatric halfway house writes to a man she has met only once. Proceeding in brief vignettes that link and illuminate, she recounts her peculiar life with the other patients. The accretions of anecdote lead deeper and deepe...