Harold Silver has spent a lifetime watching his younger brother, George, acquire a wife, two kids, and a beautiful home in the suburbs of New York City. But Harry also knows George has a murderous temper, and when George loses control, the result is an act of violence so shocking that both brothers are hurled into entirely new lives in which they both must seek absolution.

Throughout the course of his ordeal battling esophageal cancer, Christopher Hitchens refused the solace of religion, preferring to confront death with both eyes open. In this riveting account of his affliction, Hitchens poignantly describes the torments of illness, discusses its taboos, and explores how disease transforms experience and changes our relationship to the world around us.

Facing his 63rd winter, Paul Auster sits down to write a history of his body and its sensations --- both pleasurable and painful. Thirty years after the publication of THE INVENTION OF SOLITUDE, in which he wrote so movingly about fatherhood, Auster gives us a second unconventional memoir in which he writes about his mother's life and death.

In the summer of 1938, Hollywood film star Fredric Stahl is on his way to Paris to make a movie for Paramount France. The Nazis know he’s coming; for their purposes, Fredric Stahl is a perfect agent of influence, and they attack him. What they don’t know is that Stahl, horrified by the Nazi war on Jews and intellectuals, has become part of an informal spy service being run out of the American embassy in Paris.

Janet Groth recalls the two decades she spent as a receptionist for The New Yorker in this memoir that details the comings and goings, marriages and divorces, scandalous affairs, failures, triumphs, and tragedies of the eccentric inhabitants of the eighteenth floor. During those single-in-the-city years, Groth tried on many identities, but eventually she would have to leave The New Yorker to find her true self.

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.