Leopold Portman, a young IT manager a few years out of college, dreams of settling down and starting a family with his fiancée, Nora. Nora’s best friend, Stephen, Leopold’s brother, privately questions Leo and Nora’s relationship. On June 16, 2004, the three are brought together --- first for a funeral, then for an annual Bloomsday party. As the long-simmering tensions between them come to a head, they are forced to confront the choices of their pasts and their hopes for the future.

Claudia Roth Pierpont, a writer for The New Yorker for more than 20 years, tells an engaging story even as she delves into the many complexities of Philip Roth’s work and the controversies it has raised. This is not a biography --- though it contains many biographical details --- but something more rewarding: an attempt to understand a great writer through his art.

J. Michael Lennon knew Norman Mailer for 35 years. In this biography --- written with the cooperation of Mailer’s late widow, Norris Church, his ex-wives, and all of his children, as well as his sister, Barbara --- Lennon captures Mailer in all his sharp complexities and shows us how he self-consciously invented and reinvented himself throughout his lifetime.

The funeral of Charles Henry Topping would have been a minor affair but for the presence of one particular mourner: author A. N. Dyer, whose novel Ampersand stands as a classic of American teenage angst. But as Andrew Newbold Dyer delivers the eulogy for his oldest friend, he suffers a breakdown over the life he’s led and the people he’s hurt and the novel that will endure as his legacy. He must gather his three sons for the first time in many years --- before it’s too late.
 

In 1962, a young innkeeper in Italy spies an apparition: a tall, thin woman approaching him on a boat. He soon learns that she’s an American actress --- and she’s dying. And the story begins again today, when an elderly Italian man shows up on a movie studio's back lot, searching for the mysterious woman he last saw at his hotel decades earlier.

High above the bustling streets of Dubai, in the world's tallest and most luxurious skyscraper, reside the gods and goddesses of the modern world, who have wreaked mischief and havoc on mankind. Ike Karton, an unemployed butcher from New Jersey, is their current obsession.

Spanning Korea and the United States, from the postwar era to contemporary times, Krys Lee's stories illuminate a people torn between the traumas of their collective past and the indignities and sorrows of their present.

Drawing upon years of research, acclaimed biographer Mary Gabriel brings to light the story of Karl and Jenny Marx's marriage. We follow them as they roam Europe, on the run from governments amidst an age of revolution and a secret network of would-be revolutionaries.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert K. Massie brings us the extraordinary story of an obscure young German princess who traveled to Russia at 14 and rose to become one of the most remarkable, powerful and captivating women in history.