Old School

by Tobias Wolff

Determined to fit in at his New England prep school, the narrator has learned to mimic the bearing and manners of his adoptive tribe while concealing as much as possible about himself. His final year, however, unravels everything he&apo...

The Bell

by Iris Murdoch

The story of a lay community of mixed-up people encamped outside Imber Abbey, home of an enclosed order of nuns, including Dora Greenfield, an erring wife who returns to her husband, and Michael Meade, who is confronted by his homosexual fo...

Weather

by Jenny Offill

Lizzie Benson slid into her job as a librarian without a traditional degree. But this gives her a vantage point from which to practice her other calling: she is a fake shrink. For years, she has tended to her God-haunted mother and her reco...

Nobody Will Tell You This But Me: A True (as Told to Me) Story

by Bess Kalb

A funny, warm, original memoir in which a grandmother speaks to her granddaughter from beyond the grave, telling, with candor and humor, stories from both their lives — of kinship, loyalty, tenacity, and love.

All Aunt Hagar's Children: Stories

by Edward P. Jones

This collection of fourteen short stories — from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Known World — is set in Washington, D.C., and follows morally complex characters caught between the old ways of the South and t...

City of Girls

by Elizabeth Gilbert

Reviewed by Janet:It all begins in 1940, when Vivian Morris flunks out of Vassar. Her wealthy parents send her to New York City to live with her Aunt Peg, owner of a neighborhood theater in Midtown. Vivian immerses herself in this unco...

The Glass Hotel

by Emily St. John Mandel

Reviewed by Linda:The author of Station Eleven has written a new bestseller entitled The Glass Hotel. This superbly written book looks at the insecurity of modern life, and how easy it is to lose one's moral compass when t...

My Brilliant Friend

by Elena Ferrante

The story begins in the 1950s in a poor but vibrant neighborhood on the outskirts of Naples. Growing up on these tough streets, the two girls learn to rely on each other ahead of anyone or anything else. As they grow — and as their paths ...

The Paris Wife

by Paula McLain

Meeting through mutual friends in Chicago, Hadley is intrigued by brash "beautiful boy" Ernest Hemingway. After a brief courtship and small wedding, they take off for Paris, where Hadley makes a convincing transformation from an o...

The Next Queen of Heaven

by Gregory Maguire

As the new millennium approaches, the eccentric town of Thebes grows even stranger. Clocked by a Catholic statuette, Mrs. Leontina Scales begins speaking in tongues. Her daughter, Tabitha Scales, and her sons scheme to save their mother ...

Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son

by Michael Chabon

The author questions what it means to be a man today in a series of interlinked autobiographical reflections, regrets, and reexaminations, each sparked by an encounter, in the present, that holds some legacy of the past.

Mother's Milk

by Edward St. Aubyn

The once illustrious, once wealthy Melroses are in peril. Caught up in the wreckage of broken promises, child-rearing, adultery and assisted suicide, Patrick finds his wife Mary consumed by motherhood, his mother in thrall to a New Age ...

Through the Children's Gate: A Home in New York

by Adam Gopnik

Following Gopnik's Paris to the Moon, the adventure continues against the panorama of another storied city. Autumn, 2000: the Gopnik family moves back to a New York that seems, at first, safer and shinier than ever. Here are the triumphs and...

Lives of Girls and Women

by Alice Munro

The story of a young woman who journeys from the carelessness of childhood through an uneasy adolescence in search of love and sexual experience.

Life Stories: Profiles from The New Yorker

edited by David Remnick

An anthology of biographical profiles from The New Yorker covering some of the most influential and infamous people of the century, from Ernest Hemingway and Legs Diamond to Adolf Hitler and Edith Wharton.

Wonder Boys

by Michael Chabon

Pittsburgh professor and author Grady Tripp is working on an unwieldy 2,611 page manuscript that is meant to be the follow-up to his successful, award-winning novel The Land Downstairs, that was published seven years earlier. On the eve o...

The Mysteries of Pittsburgh

by Michael Chabon

Just graduated from college, Art Bechstein sets out on a journey to adulthood as he comes to terms with his gangster father and encounters a variety of unusual people along the way.

Hotel du Lac

by Anita Brookner

Recounts the holiday of Edith Hope, meek, unmarried, and thirty-nine, who, on the mend from a disastrous love affair, becomes intimately involved with her fellow guests at the Swiss Hotel du Lac.

Shadows on the Hudson

by Isaac Bashevis Singer

Boris Makaver, a wealthy Jewish businessman living in New York City after the Holocaust, endures the tribulations of his daughter, Anna, as she makes many unfortunate decisions in her love life.

Us

by David Nicholls

The highly anticipated new novel from David Nicholls, author of the mega-bestselling fiction sensation One Day, which follows one man's efforts to salvage his marriage — and repair his troubled relationship with his teenaged son — during ...

I Was Told There'd Be Cake

by Sloane Crosley

A debut compilation of literary essays offers a revealing and humorous look at human fallibility and the vagaries of modern urban life as the author details the despoiling of an exhibit at the Natural History Museum, the provocation of he...

The Liberated Bride

by A. B. Yehoshua

As Yohanan Rivlin, a professor at Haifa University, embarks on research into recent Algerian history with the help of a student, a young Arab bride from a Galilee village, he becomes obsessed with his son's failed marriage.

Bobcat, and Other Stories

by Rebecca Lee

Reviewed by Matt:

Sharply-observed short stories about heartbreak, dinner parties, plagiarism, and other topics. They pack a punch, they're funny, and they're full of incredible sentences.

Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress: Tales of Growing Up Groovy and Clueless

by Susan Jane Gilman

A collection of true stories by everyday women follows such remembrances as coming of age as an unfashionable white girl in an all-Puerto Rican neighborhood, experiencing embarrassment in front of a rock star, and receiving horrible mi...

A Girl Named Zippy: Growing Up Small in Mooreland, Indiana

by Haven Kimmel

Named "Zippy" for the way she would bolt around her home, Kimmel's witty memoir takes readers back to a time when small-town America was caught in the amber of the innocent post-war period, where people helped their neighbors, wen...

Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules

edited and introduced by David Sedaris

A collection of favorite contemporary and classical short fiction works, selected by the author of Barrel Fever and Me Talk Pretty One Day, includes pieces by such writers as Alice Munro, Tobias Wolff, and Joyce Carol...

Attack of the Theater People

by Marc Acito

In the zany sequel to How I Paid for College, aspiring actor Edward Zanni, kicked out of drama school, heads for 1980s New York, lands a job as a "party motivator," and becomes caught up in an insider trading scam with Chad, a hands...

Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim

by David Sedaris

In a collection of whimsical essays by the author of Me Talk Pretty One Day, the Rooster gets married at an uproarious wedding, an estrangement occurs over a rubber vs. plastic debate, and the author gets the upper hand during a slumber pa...

Everything Is Illuminated

by Jonathan Safran Foer

Jonathan is a Jewish college student searching Europe for the one person he believes can explain his roots. Alex, a lover of all things American and unsurpassed butcher of the English language, is his lovable Ukrainian guide. On the...

Freddy and Fredericka

by Mark Helprin

Mark Helprin’s legions of devoted readers cherish his timeless novels and short stories, which are uplifting in their conviction of the goodness and resilience of the human spirit. Freddy and Fredericka -- a brilliantly refashioned fairy ta...