***"If you're fascinated by unexplained phenomena, hop in a beat-up Audi with the kooky and supersmart Cassie Klein and her dog Luna for a voyage of discovery involving a giant moth, a West Virginia bridge collapse and a hot cryptozoologist. The droll Ms. Coll strikes again!"--People Magazine***Cassie Klein has always used stories to help her fly, but now her plot points aren't lining up.In her 50s, Cassie has already weathered mor...

A perfect storm of comedic proportions erupts in a DC bookstore over the course of one soggy summer week—narrated by two very different women and punctuated by political turmoil, a celestial event, and a perpetually broken vacuum cleaner.Independent bookstore owner Sophie Bernstein is burned out on books. Mourning the death of her husband, the loss of her favorite manager, her only child’s lack of aspiration, and the grim state of the world, she fantasizes about go...

A comic chronicle of a year in the life in the college admissions cycle.It's spring break of junior year and the college admissions hysteria is setting in. "AP" Harry (so named for the unprecedented number of advanced placement courses he has taken) and his mother take a detour from his first choice, Harvard, to visit Yates, a liberal arts school in the Northeast that is enjoying a surge in popularity as a result of a statistical error that landed it on the top-fifty list of the

Ah, "beach week": a time-honored tradition in which the D.C. suburbs' latest herd of high school grads flocks to Chelsea Beach for seven whole days of debauched celebration. In this dark comedy, ten teenage girls plan an unhinged blowout the likes of which their young lives have never seen. They smuggle vodka in water bottles and horde prescription drugs by the dozen. Meanwhile, their misguided, affluent parents are too busy worrying about legal liabilities to fret over some missing pills ...

"Like Bookish People, the novel sparkles with kooky details plucked from literary culture. A comedy of errors that gets it just right." --KirkusAn unexpected catastrophe of literary proportions . . .Aspirant, bookish, and close to broke, 26-year-old Clemi steps into her dream job at a prestigious literary nonprofit and finds herself in the bull's eye of a financial, legal, and existential calamity. The executive director h...

Matilda loves logic and order, and now her structured world is falling apart—in a bookstore.Former economics major Matilda is moving back to her hometown of Washington D.C. to care for her ailing mother, and she’s desperate for money. She takes a job at her neighborhood bookstore and tries, in vain, to make sense of illogical business of books. To make things worse, she’s forced to team up with a new hire—the enigmatic, flaky, larger-than-life, Sage—who shows up on...

Jane Kramer never imagined a life selling discount furniture and commuting between grocery stores and soccer fields via minivan. But when her father-in-law has a heart attack, she and her husband, Leon, trade in their glamorous New York life for a stint running the family business on Rockville Pike, a tributary of the suburban sprawl line extending outward from Washington, D.C. Kramer's Discount Furniture Depot sits away from several lanes of traffic, near the tombstone of Zelda and F. Sco...

On the assumption that John Updike was correct when he asserted, in a 1978 letter to Joyce Carol Oates, that "Nobody can read like a writer," Why I Like This Story presents brief essays by forty-eight leading American writers on their favorite American short stories, explaining why they like them. The essays, which are personal, not scholarly, not only tell us much about the story selected, they also tell us a good deal about the author of the essay, about what elements of fiction...

The Stager is a comedy of rabbits and real estate in the D.C. suburbs from Susan Coll, the author of Acceptance and Beach WeekDominique is one very bitter rabbit. His owner, Lars Jorgenson, is a former tennis pro who has blown out both knees, become obese, and is now addicted to a cocktail of prescription drugs containing the letters X and Z, one weird side-effect of which is that he has developed an omniscient point of view. Both Dominique and Lars are goi...

***"If you're fascinated by unexplained phenomena, hop in a beat-up Audi with the kooky and supersmart Cassie Klein and her dog Luna for a voyage of discovery involving a giant moth, a West Virginia bridge collapse and a hot cryptozoologist. The droll Ms. Coll strikes again!"--People Magazine***Cassie Klein has always used stories to help her fly, but now her plot points aren't lining up.In her 50s, Cassie has already weathered mor...

A perfect storm of comedic proportions erupts in a DC bookstore over the course of one soggy summer week—narrated by two very different women and punctuated by political turmoil, a celestial event, and a perpetually broken vacuum cleaner.Independent bookstore owner Sophie Bernstein is burned out on books. Mourning the death of her husband, the loss of her favorite manager, her only child’s lack of aspiration, and the grim state of the world, she fantasizes about go...

"Like Bookish People, the novel sparkles with kooky details plucked from literary culture. A comedy of errors that gets it just right." --KirkusAn unexpected catastrophe of literary proportions . . .Aspirant, bookish, and close to broke, 26-year-old Clemi steps into her dream job at a prestigious literary nonprofit and finds herself in the bull's eye of a financial, legal, and existential calamity. The executive director h...