"[A] portrait of a family, and a testament to the redemptive power of storytelling. On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family's history that began before he was born--a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam--and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable...

Jamie Conklin, a boy born with an unnatural ability to see and learn things no one else can, is enlisted to help an NYPD detective pursue a killer who has threatened to strike from beyond the grave.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize

"A masterwork . . . the novel astonishes with its inventiveness . . . it is nothing less than a grand comic fugue."—The New York Times Book Review

A Confederacy of Dunces is an American comic masterpiece. John Kennedy Toole's hero, one Ignatius J. Reilly, is "huge, obese, fractious, fastidious, a latter-day Gargantua, a Don Quixote of the French Quarter. His story bursts with wholly

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Joachim von Hartmann was born and raised in Buenos Aires by his loving German mother, inseparable from his identical twin. When Joachim moves to Paris with his mother in his late teens, his twin stays behind and enters a dark world. Meanwhile, Joachim begins training to be a butler, fascinated by the precision and intense demands and goes on to work in some of the grandest homes in England. His brother never reappears. Olivia White has given ten years...

"At the front of a middle school classroom in Oklahoma, a boy named Khosrou (whom everyone calls "Daniel") stands, trying to tell a story. His story. But no one believes a word he says. To them he is a dark-skinned, hairy-armed boy with a big butt whose lunch smells funny; who makes things up and talks about poop too much. But Khosrou's stories, stretching back years, and decades, and centuries, are beautiful, and terrifying, from the moment his...

This book was never meant to exist. No one needs to know the details. Just know this: there's a Merry, a Larry, a missing tooth, and a teachers' strike that is crippling Timmy Failure's academic future. Worst of all, Timmy is banned from detective work. It's a conspiracy of buffoons. He recorded everything in his private notebook, but then the manuscript was stolen. If this book gets out, he will be grounded for life. Or maybe longer. And will Timmy's...

It's homecoming in Absaroka County, Wyoming, but the festivities are interrupted when a homeless boy wanders into town. A Mormon "lost boy," Cord Lynear is searching for his missing mother. Sheriff Longmire and companions Victoria Moretti and Henry Standing Bear embark on a high plains scavenger hunt to reunite mother and son. The trail leads to an interstate polygamy group that's harboring a stockpile of weapons and a vicious vendetta.

"Bud Threadgoode grew up in the bustling little railroad town of Whistle Stop, Alabama, with his mother Ruth, church going and proper, and the fun-loving hell-raiser, his Aunt Idgie. Together they ran the town's popular Whistle Stop Café, known far and wide for its famous "Fried Green Tomatoes." And as Bud often said of his childhood, "How lucky can you get?" But sadly, the railroad yards began to shut down and the town became a ghost town, with...

When Chester the raccoon is reluctant to go to kindergarten for the first time, his mother teaches him a secret way to carry her love with him.

First published serially between January and December of 1878 in the sensationalistic monthly London magazine "Belgravia", Thomas Hardy's "The Return of the Native" is the author's sixth published novel. Set in Egdon Heath, an area of Thomas Hardy's fictionalized Wessex known for the thorny evergreen shrubs, called furze or gorse, which are cut there by its residents for fuel. When the story begins, on Guy Fawkes Night, we find Diggory Venn, a merchant...