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 ...

"More engaging than any new fiction in years." —Chuck PalahniukAn unforgettable work of fiction that peers into the soul of a tough Midwestern American town to reveal the sad, stunted but resilient lives of its residents. Knockemstiff is a genuine entry into the literature of place.Spanning a period from the mid-sixties to the late nineties, the linked stories that comprise Knockemstiff feature a cast of recurring characters who are irresis...

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....

Introducing the hilarious new heroine, Mazie Maguire, in Juliet Rosetti’s irresistible debut novel that follows the outrageous adventure of a woman on the run.Wrongly convicted of killing her philandering husband, Mazie Maguire is three years into her life sentence when fate intervenes—in the form of a tornado. Just like that, she’s on the other side of the fence, running through swamps and cornfields, big box stores and suburban subdivisions. Hoping to find out wh...

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...

It's the 1950s. There's always something good on the radio, cherry red Cadillacs cruise the streets and everything is always perfect. Marilyn is still alive and the War is over. America goes to bed, nuclear annihilation postponed another day.Welcome to the American Nightmare.Nuclear families dabbling in the occult. Little League games in the summer, old blood spilled in the dust. Unspeakable things hiss and crawl, unseen along the 38th parallel, camouflaged under muzzle fla...

**In the final volume of the Pulitzer Prize–winner's bestselling and beloved American saga that began with All Over but the Shoutin’ and continued with Ava’s Man,this "evocative family memoir” (Boston Globe)delivers an unforgettable rumination about fathers and sons.Bragg documents a mesmerizing journey back in time to the lush Alabama landscape of his youth, to Jacksonville's one-hundred-year-old mill and to his father, the troubled, charismatic...

As a middle child raised middle class and stuck out in the middle of Louisiana, hilarious writer and actress Sarah Thyre often found her in–between existence far less than desirable. Even from a young age, Sarah found ways of shirking her own hated identity — whether by stealing someone else's or lying about her own. She changed her name, claimed to be a great outdoorsman, and solicited donations for her favorite charity — which turned out to be, in fact, her. In addition, Sarah lived thro...