Fiction

The brutal killing of black drifter Edgar Parlance ignites a destructive circus of the media, power politics, legal infighting, passion, and more for a rural midwestern town and the diverse characters involved.

Stories from the author of The Giant's House follow a wife who becomes the canvas for her husband's tattoo art and a couple that receives a visit from an aunt they cannot locate on the family tree. Reprint.

Presents a collection of short fiction that explores the various ways in which human beings perceive each other and themselves, from a couple that suspects their friends think them boring to a funeral home that receives a letter rebuking it for linguistic errors.

Focusing on the condition of the modern family, a thematically linked collection of short fiction captures the lives, dreams, and fates of men, women, and children who live outside of the American Dream.

A best-selling collection of stories focusing on portrayals of the searching and the disaffected of modern-day America offers a trenchant combination of wit, empathy, and intelligence. Reprint. 100,000 first printing. NYT. PW.

The sixth collection of short stories by the award-winning author of World's End displays his remarkable gift for storytelling as well as his wide-ranging interests in everything from abortion doctors to air rage. 25,000 first printing.

Her life marked by such challenges as a best friend's betrayal, substance abuse, and the slow death of a parent, Charlotte Anne Byers navigates the turbulent waters of her career and the dating scene while working with an opera house children's choir. By the author of When the Messenger Is Hot. 25,000 first printing.

A compendium of definitive writings includes the psychological portrait, When She Was Good; the celebrity-making Portnoy's Complaint; the Swiftian takedown of the Nixon administration known as Our Gang; and The Breast, which introduced evolving protagonist David Kepesh.

An authoritative reader's edition of key writings by the provocative author includes the National Book Award-winning Goodbye, Columbus and the trenchant psychological portrait, Letting Go.

A debut collection of short fiction by a Chinese-American author focuses on the role of fate in the lives of characters living both in China and in the United States, in such works as "Immortality," about a young man who finds a calling because of his resemblance to the dictator, and "Extra" in which a middle-aged woman befriends a young boy who has become an outcast in his rural school. 30,000 first printing.

A proposed television miniseries becomes the focus of a brutal rivalry between a hot-tempered production head, a Sikh cab driver, a bipolar bicycle messenger, and other industry wannabes. By the author of The Black Veil and The Ice Storm. 100,000 first printing.

Facing unprecedented financial troubles when his daughter requires a medical treatment, Easy Rawlins takes a job tracking down a missing attorney and legal assistant, but when the assignment proves more complicated than anticipated, Easy wonders about the integrity of his employer. By the author of Little Scarlett. 125,000 first printing.

Coming of age in the early 1970s, middle-class African-American Rae finds her precarious optimism unbalanced when her mother abandons the family for her lover, a situation complicated by Rae's need to care for an ailing father, a hip older sister's return, and her own budding sexuality. Reprint. 15,000 first printing.

Facing an early midlife crisis after being fired, twenty-eight-year-old Dwight B. Wilmerding is unable to decide on a new career or on a girlfriend, an indecisiveness that he attempts to alleviate with a trial pharmaceutical aimed at enhancing courage and self-confidence, and heads to Ecuador to search for Natasha, an exotic former classmate. A first novel. 40,000 first printing.

A novel that studies the moral disintegration of a man whose obsessive desire to possess his step-daughter destroys the lives of those around him

Left destitute following her mother's death, a teenage Anne Bonny exchanges her petticoats and heads for the Bahamas, masquerading as a man named Bonn to take a job as a sailor under the command of Calico Jack Rackham, a notorious pirate, in a lyrical fictional portrait of the legendary exploits of the eighteenth-century, Irish-born woman pirate. Reader's Guide included. Original. 40,000 first printing.

The daughter of a British father and a Nigerian mother, Jessamy "Jess" Harrison is growing up feeling that she is caught between two different worlds, until she is sent to visit relatives in Nigeria, where she comes face to face with a mysterious new friend who apparently remains invisible to those around her. A first novel. 25,000 first printing.

Joking that he has been gaining and losing the same thirty-five pounds since junior high, Shulman, a chubby, middle-aged stationary store owner from New Jersey, is stunned when he actually meets this doppelganger Shulman, a successful man who made all the choices that the original Shulman had spurned.