Lauren and Ben are dealing with very different problems in their lives. Lauren came back home after a chain of violent events in the medical field left her jobless, while Ben bottomed out after a series of bad decisions. Their paths intertwine, and it isn't too long before they are questioning if each is what the other needs, or the last thing in the world either one can handle.

Lysander Rief, a young English actor, becomes caught up in a feverish affair with a beautiful, enigmatic woman. When she goes to the police to press charges of rape, however, he is stunned. Only a carefully plotted escape saves him from trial. But the frenzied getaway sets off a chain of events that steadily dismantles Lysander's life as he knows it.

In 10 erudite essays, novelist Marilynne Robinson explores a variety of political, religious and personal subjects, offering a liberal humanist perspective grounded in her Congregationalist faith on some of the dilemmas facing American society.

In FARTHER AWAY, which gathers together essays and speeches written mostly in the past five years, Jonathan Franzen returns with renewed vigor to the themes, both human and literary, that have long preoccupied him. These pieces deliver on Franzen’s implicit promise to conceal nothing.

Faced with a diagnosis of prostate cancer at age 64, novelist Howard Frank Mosher embarked on a 20,000-mile book promotion tour that took him to some 150 independent bookstores. In this memoir, he recounts that journey, as well as one back to the roots of his writing career.

Julia Severn is a student at an elite institute for psychics. Her mentor, Madame Ackermann, afflicted by jealousy, refuses to pass the torch to her young disciple. Instead, she subjects Julia to the humiliation of reliving her mother's suicide when Julia was an infant. As the two lock horns, Madame Ackermann launches a desperate psychic attack that leaves Julia the victim of a crippling ailment.

When Edward Schuyler, a modest 62-year-old science teacher, is widowed, he finds himself ambushed by female attention. Edward is still in mourning, but when his stepchildren place a personal ad in the newspaper for him, he is torn between his loyalty to Bee’s memory and his growing longing for connection.

Pico Iyer sets out to unravel the mysterious closeness he has always felt with English writer Graham Greene. He investigates all he has in common with Greene, and the deeper he delves, the more he begins to wonder if the man within his head is not Greene but his own father --- or even himself.

This is a definitive, hand-picked selection of Hunter S. Thompson's finest pieces ever published in Rolling Stone --- the magazine that helped to put him on the map in the 1970s. 

Though best known for his fiction, William Gibson is as much in demand for his cutting-edge observations on the world we live in now. Originally printed in publications as varied as Wired, the New York Times and the Observer, these articles and essays cover 30 years of thoughtful, observant life, and are reported in the wry, humane voice that lovers of Gibson have come to crave.