Hauntingly observant and insightful, this poignant debut novel delves into the intricate bonds between mothers and daughters and offers an unflinching, darkly funny look at the relationships between love, sex, and death. Rachel Spark is an irreverent, sexually eager, financially unstable thirty-year-old college instructor who moves back home when her mother is diagnosed with terminal breast cancer. As she tries to ease her mother, a perpetually cheerful woman, toward the inevitable, Rachel turns from one man to the next -- sometimes comically, sometimes catastrophically -- as if her own survival depended upon it. "If I slept only with men who knew my full name, if I signed up for dance classes, if I ate more fruit -- even then there was no guarantee I'd get what I wanted," she thinks. And so she goes off with Johnny, who wears "all silk: black silk pants, a red silk shirt, even a silk band holding his hair in a ponytail." Or with Adam, an old boyfriend who remembers her with a bob she never had and tries to seduce her in his car with dark-tinted windows. Regardless of her unsuitable and unlikely bedmates, Rachel can't distract herself from what she knows about cancer -- that it disappears or returns, seemingly with a will of its own. But Rachel's not the only one struggling with the uncertain turns life takes... Ella Bloom, an adult student in Rachel's poetry class, aspires to more than her work at a local family planning clinic. But she spends her nights wondering why her husband kissed one of her colleagues and whether it will lead to a full-fledged affair, and she is also preoccupied with one of her repeat patients, Georgia, a teenager who frequents the clinic and has a story of her own. What they all have in common is their desire for love, despite its many obstacles. A Girl Becomes a Comma Like That is a novel rife with wit and compassion. A provocative, assured new voice in literary fiction, Lisa Glatt knows the yardsticks by which we constantly measure our world and ourselves -- devotion, lust, forgiveness, and courage.

My name is Amber Reynolds. There are three things you should know about me: 1. I’m in a coma. 2. My husband doesn’t love me anymore. 3. Sometimes I lie. Amber wakes up in a hospital. She can’t move. She can’t speak. She can’t open her eyes. She can hear everyone around her, but they have no idea. Amber doesn’t remember what happened, but she has a suspicion her husband had something to do with it. Alternating between her paralyzed present, the week before her accident, and a series of childhood diaries from twenty years ago, this brilliant psychological thriller asks: Is something really a lie if you believe it's the truth?

A hit-and-run accident sends the lives of both driver and victim into unforeseen trajectories in a family drama set against the backdrop of the sexual revolution and 1970s California. On the morning that Nina and Asher Teller's marriage falls apart in their Southern Californian kitchen, their young daughter, Hannah, is the victim of a hit-and-run accident that will leave her leg in a cast for much of the next decade. Nina's next husband introduces her to nudism and soon suggests they plunge further into the sexual revolution of the 1970s. Meanwhile, the remorseful driver, Martin, tries to bury his dark secret under the flashing lights and ringing bells of Las Vegas. The Nakeds is an absorbing, darkly comical story of love and desire, of forgiveness and the unforgivable, and the truths we sometimes hide underneath our very own skin.

Told in their separate voices, sixteen-year-old Prince Oliver, who wants to break free of his fairy-tale existence, and fifteen-year-old Delilah, a loner obsessed with Prince Oliver and the book in which he exists, work together to seek his freedom.

From the bestselling author of A Girl Becomes a Comma Like That, a moving, disturbing, and utterly original collection of stories that examine a universe where memory and fact collide, and the imagination fills in the gaps left behind. The stories in The Apple's Bruise take a smart and unflinching look at love, frailty, and happiness and prove beyond doubt that Glatt is a modern master at blending heartbreak and hilarity. In "Dirty Hannah Gets Hit by a Car," a seven-year-old girl bullied by a neighbor across the street gains strength after a serious accident; in "Animals," a zoo veterinarian from a family of butchers tries at once to deal with his marital problems and the high rate at which his animals are dying; and in "Soup," a young widow tries to reconcile her feelings for her teenage son's friend, the town delinquent. With tenderness, insight, and humor, Glatt casts her gaze simultaneously on the beauty and the absurdity of our humanity, creating unforgettable portrayals of unusual characters and the complexities of desire and fidelity that compel them.

Today's writer needs more than just a solid knowledge of usage and composition to write successfully. Bestselling author Arthur Plotnik reveals the secrets to attention-grabbing, unforgettable writing, in this trade paperback edition. Updated with all-new writing exercises, Spunk & Bite will help writers take books, articles, business reports, memos, and even e-mail messages to the next level.

New York Times Bestseller Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, Wall Street Journal, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, and Library Journal "Hilarious…This book charmed my socks off." —Patricia O’Conner, New York Times Book Review Mary Norris has spent more than three decades working in The New Yorker’s renowned copy department, helping to maintain its celebrated high standards. In Between You & Me, she brings her vast experience with grammar and usage, her good cheer and irreverence, and her finely sharpened pencils to help the rest of us in a boisterous language book as full of life as it is of practical advice.