Orphaned as a teen, Carol Milford grew up in a city in Minnesota. Already a compassionate person, Carol's time studying in college and grad school exposed her to diverse, radical ideas and lifestyles, which she learned to either accept or tolerate. After college, Carol earns a position as a librarian in the state capital city, yet finds the work to be unsatisfying. This is why she agrees when her new husband, a doctor named Will, asks if they can...

"From the best-selling author of The Name of the Rose and The Prague Cemetery, a novel about the murky world of media politics, conspiracy, and murder. A newspaper committed to blackmail and mud slinging, rather than reporting the news. A paranoid editor, walking through the streets of Milan, reconstructing fifty years of history against the backdrop of a plot involving the cadaver of Mussolini's double. The murder of Pope John Paul I, the CIA, red...

"A wildly irreverent take on the coming-of-age story that turns a search for belonging into a riotous satire of identity politics. Starting at a prestigious private Australian girls' school, fifteen-year-old Ziggy Klein is confronted with an alienating social hierarchy that hurls her into the arms of her grade's most radical feminists. Tormented by a burgeoning collection of dark, sexual fantasies, and a biological essentialist mother, Ziggy sets...

"An ambitious mother puts her art career on hold to stay at home with her newborn son, but the experience does not match her imagination. Two years later, she steps into the bathroom for a break from her toddler’s demands, only to discover a dense patch of hair on the back of her neck. In the mirror, her canines suddenly look sharper than she remembers. Her husband, who travels for work five days a week, casually dismisses her fears from faraway...

"From the "startlingly talented" (New York Times) author of Everything Matters! - the compelling story of a man who takes everything far too literally, and his adventures as the star of a reality TV show Ron Currie's three previous works of fiction have dazzled readers and critics alike with their originality, audacity, and psychological insight. A writer of unique vision and huge imagination, Currie excels at creating complex, troubled, yet endearing...

"This hilarious, truth-telling debut upends notions of family, protest, and Appalachia, and forces us to reimagine an America we think we know"--

Evelyn Waugh's debut novel, Decline and Fall, is a biting satire that lampoons British society of the 1920s with razor-sharp wit and dark humor. The story follows the misadventures of Paul Pennyfeather, a hapless theology student at Oxford who finds himself expelled from university due to a farcical incident involving the raucous Bollinger Club. Forced to take a teaching position at an obscure Welsh private school, Paul becomes entangled in a series...

In the picaresque series of sketches in Pickwick Papers, Charles Dickens wrote one of the masterpieces of comic fiction, and presented readers with some of the most colorful and beloved characters of all time. In Dickens' first novel, initially based on a series of illustrations, members of the eponymous club recount their various experiences and encounters as they travel around England. Without the dark themes that dominated so many of his novels,...

In the classical tale "The Satyricon", Petronius Arbiter makes a strong, yet humorous, statement about the social life of ancient Rome. Rather than telling the story of Encolpius and his companions heroically, which was the typical approach of other writings of classical antiquity, Petronius chose to show the true life and vernacular of the Roman lower and middle class through satire and comedy. Narrator Encolpius, a former gladiator, goes on adventures...

"An excitement and a wonder: strange, crazed, urgent and funny...The wildly talented Adjei-Brenyah has made these edgy tales immensely charming, via his resolute, heartful, immensely likeable narrators, capable of seeing the world as blessed and cursed at once." -- George Saunders "This book is dark and captivating and essential...A call to arms and a condemnation. Adjei-Brenyah offers powerful prose as parable. The writing in this outstanding collection...