Meet John Gullivan, age thirteen, obsessed with the moles that dot most of his body. Meet his brother Gully, who can't stop laughing at them. Now meet the brothers ten years later, in the middle of the most ferocious blizzard anyone can remember. Set in an Irish working-class suburb of Boston in the 1960s and 1970s, Puff centers on a quest as the soon-to-be-orphaned brothers, posing as rescue personnel, attempt to steer their dilapidated van through insurmountable snow, all to score a bag ...

Thirteen “dazzling” (Associated Press) and “wonderfully wicked” (USA TODAY) stories from #1 New York Times bestselling author Stephen King.A book salesman with a grievance picks up a mute hitchhiker, not knowing the silent man in the passenger seat listens altogether too well. An exercise routine on a stationary bicycle takes its rider on a captivating—and then terrifying—journey. A blind girl works a miracle with a kiss and the touch of her hand....

Master storyteller Stephen King (writing as Richard Bachman) presents this gripping and remarkable New York Times bestselling crime novel about a damaged young man who embarks on an ill-advised kidnapping plot—a work as taut and riveting as anything he has ever written.Once upon a time, a fellow named Richard Bachman wrote Blaze on an Olivetti typewriter, then turned the machine over to Stephen King, who used it to write Carrie. Bachman d...

Only Stephen King, writing as Richard Bachman, can imagine the horror of a good and angry man who fights back against bureaucracy when it threatens to destroy his vitality, home, and memories. “Under any name King mesmerizes the reader” (Chicago Sun-Times).Barton Dawes is standing in the way of progress when his unremarkable but comfortable existence suddenly takes a turn for the worst. A new highway extension is being built right over the laundry plant wh...

A beautiful reporter. A secret ritual in a graveyard. A disembodied hand on the side of the road. Mike Hammer returns in one of the most shocking cases of his storied career.Private Investigator Mike Hammer may be getting older, but he hasn’t lost his step. So when he spots a brutally destroyed corpse on the side of the road in upstate New York, unrecognizable as human except for the disembodied hand lying next to it, there’s no question of him not taking the case....

This "impressive crime anthology" presents a century of American greed, crime and comeuppance by some of the genre's greatest authors ( Publishers Weekly, starred review).James Ellroy, the author of such noir classics as The Black Dahlia and L.A. Confidential, joins forces with award-winning editor Otto Penzler to present this treasure trove of stories. Ranging from the 1920s to the present day, this collection represents noir at its best...

A boy and his grandfather hunt for a stolen horse in this novel "evoking William Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy" ( Booklist).Longlisted for the American Library Association's Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in FictionIn the summer of 1995, Jim Falls, a Korean War vet, struggles to raise his sixteen-year-old mixed-race grandson, Quentin, on a farm in southern Indiana. In July, they receive a mysterious gift—a beautiful quarter horse—whic...

An engaging, often hilarious coming-of-age novel of uncertainty and discovery oozing with early 90s nostalgia."Funny and unpredictable...(Charles) proves impressively adept at capturing the inchoate ache of adolescent longing."— Washington PostIt's 1992, and America is caught in the grip of major Angst. In Washington, D.C., George H. W. Bush is rattling the mother of all sabres at Saddam Hussein. In Seattle, Curt Kobain is h...

[A] heartbreaking novel about the devastations of severed attachments.” —NPRFor Clay Blackall, a lifelong resident of Providence, Rhode Island, the place has become an obsession. Here live the only people who can explain what happened to his brother, Eli, whose suicide haunts this heartbreaking, hilarious novel–in–fragments.A failed actor impersonates a former movie star; an ex–con looks after a summer home perched atop a rock in the bay; a broken–hearted s...

From the wild and wacky world of favorite funnyman Jean Shepherd, a dozen truer-than-life tales of tailgating on the Jersey Tumpike, infuriating infants, and other everyday catastrophes, defeats, and humiliations that are the familiar fate of Americans everywhere.Jean Shepherd was one of America’s favorite humorists, his most notable achievement being the creation of the indefatigable Ralphie Parker and his quest for a BB gun in the holiday classic A Christmas ...

From the acclaimed musician comes a tender, surprising, and often uproarious memoir about his dirt-poor southeast Texas boyhood.The only child of a hard-drinking father and a Holy Roller mother, Rodney Crowell was no stranger to bombast from an early age, whether knock-down-drag-outs at a local dive bar or fire-and-brimstone sermons at Pentecostal tent revivals. He was an expert at reading his father’s mercurial moods and gauging exactly when his mother was likely to erupt, and eve...

Fifty remarkable short stories from a range of contemporary fiction authors including Junot Diaz, Amy Tan, Jamaica Kincaid, Jhumpa Lahiri, and more, selected from a survey of more than five hundred English professors, short story writers, and novelists.Contributors include Russell Banks, Donald Barthelme, Rick Bass, Richard Bausch, Charles Baxter, Amy Bloom, T.C. Boyle, Kevin Brockmeier, Robert Olen Butler, Sandra Cisneros, Peter Ho Davies, Janet Desaulniers, Junot...