[This story] is about Marilyn Monroe- voiced by her dog, Mafia Honey, or "Maf," for short. Maf is, naturally, versed in the classics, and as he and his owner spend time with such notables as Natalie Wood, Frank Sinatra, and JFK, he offers erudite commentary, sometimes in dialogue with other dogs, on such subjects as interior decorating, celebrity, authenticity, religion, and death. The strangeness of the scenario becomes more sensible as the book...

"A funny and whip-smart memoir about a feisty young woman's quest for independence in an isolated Mennonite community. Carla Funk is a teenager with her hands on the church piano keys and her feet edging ever closer to the flames. Coming of age in a remote and forested valley--a place rich in Mennonites, loggers, and dutiful wives who submit to their husbands--she knows her destiny is to marry, have babies, and join the church ladies' sewing circle....

Ben Schrank's Love Is a Canoe is a smart, funny, romantic, and hugely satisfying novel about the fragility of human relationships and a heartwarming reminder of what it really means to be good to those we love. The author of a classic self-help guide to love and relationships, Peter Herman has won the hearts of romantics and cynics alike. But, decades have passed since Marriage Is a Canoe was published and a recently widowed Peter begins to question...

"The Soviet and post-Soviet world, with its untold multitude of crimes, is a natural breeding ground for ghost stories. No one writes them more movingly than Russian author Sergei Lebedev, who in this stunning volume probes a collective guilty conscience marked by otherworldliness and the denial of misdeeds. These eleven tales share a mystical topography in which the legacy of totalitarian regimes is ever-present--from Katyn to Chechnya, from Lithuanian...

"When Nora, a withdrawn American teenager, is sent to live with relatives in Turin, she meets Nicola, the enigmatic son of the most powerful aristocratic family in Italy. Years later, the two reconnect in New York and begin a heated affair. Propelled by disorienting desire, Nora quickly becomes entangled in Nicola's insular, menacing world of old-world luxury and family secrets. When she suspects she's being used in a secret plot to overthrow his...

Although John D. MacDonald published seventy novels and more than five hundred short stories in his lifetime, he is remembered best for his Travis McGee series. He introduced McGee in 1964 with The Deep Blue Goodbye. With Travis McGee, MacDonald changed the pattern of the hardboiled private detectives who preceded him. McGee has a social conscience, holds thoughtful conversations with his retired economist buddy Meyer, and worries about corporate...

Wyatt Earp. Doc Holliday. Ike Clanton. You think you know the story. You don't. Tombstone, Arizona in 1881 is the site of one of the richest mineral strikes in American history, where veins of silver run like ley lines under the earth, a network of power that belongs to anyone who knows how to claim and defend it. Above the ground, power is also about allegiances. A magician can drain his friends' strength to strengthen himself, and can place them...

"The innocence of childhood collides with the stark aftermath of war in this wrenching and ultimately redemptive tale of family, seemingly impossible choices, and the winding paths to destiny, which sometimes take us to places far beyond our imaginings." - Lisa Wingate, #1 New York Times Bestselling Author of Before We Were Yours and The Book of Lost Friends Based on true events, a heartbreaking story of love, family, hope, and survival set in post-World...

Hans Christian Andersen was a master of other literary forms besides the fairy story - in particular, the novella for an adult readership. The Ice Virgin (1862) is the most ambitious and searching of all his narratives. Its subject is Switzerland, which Andersen saw as a paradigm of the human condition. The relationship between a gifted young climber-hunter from the remote Bernese Oberland and a prosperous miller's daughter from a comfortable French-speaking...

"When the manuscript of a debut crime novel arrives at a Parisian publishing house, everyone in the readers' room is convinced it's something special. And the committee for France's highest literary honour, the Prix Goncourt, agrees. But when the shortlist is announced, there's a problem for editor Violaine Lepage: she has no idea of the author's identity. As the police begin to investigate a series of murders strangely reminiscent of those recounted...