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Running With Scissors
A Memoir
by Augusten Burroughs
Running with Scissors is the true story of a boy whose mother (a poet with delusions of Anne Sexton) gave him away to be raised by her unorthodox psychiatrist who bore a striking resemblance to Santa Claus. At the age of twelve, Burroughs found himself amidst Victorian squalor, living with the doctor's bizarre family and befriending a pedophile who resided in the backyard shed. The story of an outlaw childhood... (more)
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The Glass Castle
by Jeannette Walls
Jeannette Walls's father always called her "Mountain Goat," and there's perhaps no more apt a nickname for a girl who navigated a sheer and towering cliff of childhood both daily and stoically. In THE GLASS CASTLE, Walls chronicles her upbringing at the hands of eccentric, nomadic parents: Rose Mary, her frustrated-artist mother, and Rex, her brilliant, alcoholic father. To call the elder Walls's childrearing... (more)
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White Teeth
by Zadie Smith
Zadie Smith’s dazzling debut caught critics grasping for comparisons and deciding on everyone from Charles Dickens to Salman Rushdie to John Irving and Martin Amis. But the truth is that Zadie Smith’s voice is remarkably, fluently, and altogether wonderfully her own. At the center of this invigorating novel are two unlikely friends, Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal. Hapless veterans of World War II, Archie and Samad... (more)
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Dear American Airlines
by Jonathan Miles
Sometimes the planes don't fly on time. Bennie Ford, a fifty-three-year-old failed poet turned translator, is traveling to his estranged daughter's wedding when his flight is canceled. Stuck with thousands of fuming passengers in the purgatory of O'Hare airport, he watches the clock tick and realizes that he will miss the ceremony. Frustrated, irate, and helpless, Bennie does the only thing he can: he starts to... (more)
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Broken for You
by Stephanie Kallos
National best seller and Today show Book Club selection, Broken for You is the story of two women in self-imposed exile whose lives are transformed when their paths intersect. Stephanie Kallos's debut novel is a work of infinite charm, wit and heart. It is also a glorious homage to the beauty of broken things. When we meet septuagenarian Margaret Hughes, she is living alone in a mansion in Seattle with only a... (more)
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The Contortionist's Handbook
by Craig Clevenger
Following a near fatal overdose of painkillers, Daniel Fletcher is resuscitated in a Los Angeles trauma center and detained for psychiatric evaluation. The hospital staff does not know that Daniel Fletcher is actually John Dolan Vincent - a talented young forger who continually reinvents himself to escape the legal and mental health authorities, and to save himself from a lifetime of incarceration.As... (more)
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The Road to Wellville
by T. Coraghessan Boyle
A snobbish wife and her henpecked husband travel to Dr. Kellogg's spa in turn-of-the-century Battle Creek, where the youth-crazed affluent succumb to quackery.
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Hard Love
by Ellen Wittlinger
Since his parents' divorce, John's mother hasn't touched him, her new fiancé wants them to move away, and his father would rather be anywhere than at Friday night dinner with his son. It's no wonder John writes articles like "Interview with the Stepfather" and "Memoirs from Hell." The only release he finds is in homemade zines like the amazing Escape Velocity by Marisol, a self-proclaimed "Puerto Rican Cuban... (more)
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My Booky Wook
A Memoir of Sex, Drugs, and Stand-Up
by Brand, Russell
Russell Brand learned early on to make a joke of fear and failure. From a troubled childhood in industrial Essex, England, to his descent into addictions to alcohol, drugs and sex in the seamy underbelly of London, Brand has seen his share of both and miraculously lived to tell the tale. In My Booky Wook he leads readers on a rollicking journey through his disastrous school career, his infamous antics on MTV and... (more)
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The Prince of Tides
by Pat Conroy
The stirring saga of a man’s journey to free his sister—and himself—from a tragic family history.Tom Wingo has lost his job, and is on the verge of losing his marriage, when he learns that his twin sister, Savannah, has attempted suicide again. At the behest of Savannah’s psychiatrist, Tom reluctantly leaves his home in South Carolina to travel to New York City and aid in his sister’s therapy. As Tom’s... (more)
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Crazy in Alabama
by Mark Childress
Meet Peter Joseph, aka Peejoe, a wide-eyed believer in the unbelievable, raised by his Meemaw in Pigeon Creek for a good part of his life. But it was his aunt Lucille who raised him for the better. And it all happened during that summer everyone was driven crazy in Alabama, with Lucille at the wheel. It's 1965, and no force on earth can come between Hollywood and Lucille Vinson, Alabama's answer to Veronica Lake.... (more)
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Adrian Mole: Book 7
Adrian Mole: The Prostrate Years
by Sue Townsend
Adrian Mole is 39 and a quarter. Unable to afford the mortgage on his riverside apartment, he has been forced to move into a semi-detached converted pigsty next door to his parents, George and Pauline. His ravishing wife Daisy loathes the countryside, longs for Dean Street and has yet to buy a pair of Wellingtons; they are both aware the passion has gone out of their marriage, but neither knows how to reignite the... (more)
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The Condition
by Jennifer Haigh
The Condition tells the story of the McKotches, a proper New England family that comes apart during one fateful summer. The year is 1976, and the family, Frank McKotch, an eminent scientist; his pedigreed wife, Paulette; and their three beautiful children has embarked on its annual vacation at the Captain's House, the grand old family retreat on Cape Cod. One day on the beach, Frank is struck by an image he... (more)
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The Bright Side of Disaster
by Katherine Center
“Offers credible descriptions of first-time motherhood, affecting characters and situations and low-key charm.”–Kirkus Reviews “Stellar . . . Center paints an accurate and humorous view of motherhood.”–Booklist Jenny Harris always expected that she’d fall in love, get married, and have a baby–in that order. Now, very pregnant and not quite married, she actually doesn’t mind that she and her live-in fiancé,... (more)
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Josie and Jack: A Novel
by Kelly Braffet
In Josie and Jack, Kelly Braffet gives us a deliciously dark, suspenseful debut novel in the tradition of Patricia Highsmith. Beautiful, brilliant, and inseparable, Josie and Jack Raeburn live a secluded, anarchic existence in their decaying western Pennsylvania home. The only adult in their lives is their rage-prone father, a physicist, whose erratic behavior finally drives them away. Without a moral compass... (more)
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Capote
A Biography
by Gerald Clarke
Based on hundreds of hours of interviews with the man who authored In Cold Blood and Breakfast at Tiffany's, as well as with nearly everyone who knew him, this absorbing, definitive biography follows Truman Capote from his eccentric childhood in Alabama to the heights of New York society. Featuring many photographs, this book also candidly recounts a gifted and celebrated writer's descent into the life of... (more)
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Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
by Anne Tyler
“Beautiful . . . funny, heart-hammering, wise . . . superb entertainment.” –The New York Times “A book that should join those few that every literate person will have to read.” –The Boston Globe Pearl Tull is nearing the end of her life but not of her memory. It was a Sunday night in 1944 when her husband left the little row house on Baltimore’s Calvert Street, abandoning Pearl to raise their three children... (more)
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Dry.
A Memoir
by Augusten Burroughs
From the bestselling author of Running with Scissors comes Dry —the hilarious, moving, and no less bizarre account of what happened next. You may not know it, but you've met Augusten Burroughs. You've seen him on the street, in bars, on the subway, at restaurants: a twenty-something guy, nice suit, works in advertising. Regular. Ordinary. But when the ordinary person had two drinks, Augusten was circling the... (more)
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Flesh and Blood
by Michael Cunningham
In 1950, Constantine Stassos, a Greek immigrant laborer, marries Mary Cuccio, an Italian-American girl, and together they produce three children: Susan, an ambitious beauty, Billy, a brilliant homosexual, and Zoe, a wild child. Over the years, a web of tangled longings, love, inadequacies and unfulfilled dreams unfolds as Mary and Constantine's marriage fails and Susan, Billy, and Zoe leave to make families of... (more)
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The Fermata
by Nicholson Baker
Having turned phone sex into the subject of an astonishing national bestseller in Vox, Baker now outdoes himself with an outrageously arousing, acrobatically stylish "X-rated sci-fi fantasy that leaves Vox seeming more like mere fiber-optic foreplay" (Seattle Times). "Sparkling."--San Francisco Chronicle.

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