In his books and in a string of wide-ranging and inventive essays, Luc Sante has shown himself to be not only one of our pre-eminent stylists, but also a critic of uncommon power and range. Kill All Your Darlings is the first collection of Sante's...

My aim … to rescue from oblivion the lives of ordinary people – Athol Fugard In 2005, Patricia Neate inherited a dusty Regency desk that had once belonged to her husband's great grandfather, George Augustus Macirone. Sagging under the weight of papers, it sat in the spare room, shedding rosewood veneer. Something had to be done. Patricia took a deep breath and opened it up. She pulled out a packet of yellowed letters, brown at the edges – scores of tiny envelopes addressed to George Macirone, George Augustus’s father, at a place called Heigham Hall. On an impulse she looked it up straight away. It had been a private Lunatic Asylum. She sat down to read there and then. Patricia began to pick her way through a treasure trove of family letters spanning the reign of Queen Victoria. It contained vivid stories – from a first hand account of the young Queen’s wedding to a plan to spring Napoleon from St Helena via brushes with cultural icons like Dickens, Keats and Mendelssohn. But, the most gripping were the personal ones – of mental illness and manic invention, grand houses and debtors’ prison, flawed hopes of colonial emigration, and the religious schisms that almost tore the Macirones apart. And through them all ran the lives of George Augustus’s sisters, Clara and Emily, who sacrificed any hope of romantic love or children to support their family – two enterprising, resilient, talented women, two notable omissions from “Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls”! More than a decade later, Patricia completed “All My Darlings”. It is a remarkable achievement: a quotidian tale of Victorian life, a vital social history, and a simple family portrait - open-ended, unguarded and brimming with humanity.

Ivy Darling can’t have children of her own, and her husband Nick’s resentment is forcing them apart. And while Ivy has the support and love of her large, close-knit family, Nick’s family has never welcomed her into the fold. When the three children next door are abandoned by their mother, Ivy and Nick take them in for the night. One night becomes several, and suddenly Ivy and Nick find themselves foster parents to the only African-American kids in the town of Copper Cove, Maine. As Ivy grows more attached to the children, Nick refuses to accept their eclectic household as a permanent family. Just as Ivy begins to question whether or not she wants to save her emotionally barren marriage, Nick begins to discover how much Ivy and the children mean to him. But is his change of heart too little, too late?

Seraphina Darling has always struggled to stand out. With her weight issues at the forefront of her mind, Sephy prefers to place herself comfortably in the background. But when Sephy’s best friend and older brother announce their engagement, she vows to make a permanent change in her appearance and her life. Meanwhile her younger sister, Amy, lands her dream job: coordinating the restoration of the community theater’s arts programs. As the deadline for the project’s completion approaches, Amy continues to run herself ragged, struggling to delegate and trust anyone but herself. As the Darling sisters move through tragedy and triumph, between shadows and the limelight, each must find a path into the freedom of who God intended her to be.

A Bonfire of the Vanities for our times, by an author who “knows her way around 21st-century wealth and power” (The Wall Street Journal). Since he married Merrill Darling, daughter of billionaire financier Carter Darling, attorney Paul Ross has grown accustomed to all the luxuries of Park Avenue. But a tragic event is about to catapult the Darling family into the middle of a massive financial investigation and a red-hot scandal. Suddenly, Paul must decide where his loyalties really lie. Debut novelist Cristina Alger is a former analyst at Goldman Sachs, an attorney, and the daughter of a Wall Street financier. Drawing on her unique insider's perspective, Alger gives us an irresistible glimpse into the highest echelons of New York society—and a fast-paced thriller of epic proportions that powerfully echoes Claire Messud's The Emperor's Children and reads like a fictional Too Big to Fail.

Gregory Keays is a writer whose brilliant future is behind him. Corroded with envy, Gregory watches as his contemporaries produce better work and live happier lives while he teaches community college composition classes and compiles books about other books. One day, Gregory is convinced, the world will recognize his talents. In the meantime, his marriage to a new-age feng shui artist has become cold and distant, and his relationship with his reclusive teen-age son is in free-fall. But when a brilliant student enters his life, Gregory is offered one last, glorious chance to save his career. Soon, however, Gregory's Faustian pact with success unravels around him, and he must turn to darker, more duplicitous means to secure his fame. Set in the dangerous world where real life and literary ambition collide, Kill Your Darlings is an unforgettable novel of ego and delusion, villainy and the betrayal of love.

My Darlings is a memoir of the rollicking life and times of the grande dame of Oakland, Florida—from growing up in the frontier town of Denver, to studying voice in the big city of Chicago, to pioneering in the backwoods of central Florida. Grace was born in 1884 in Denver and moved to Chicago around the turn of the century to study voice in hopes of becoming an opera singer. Instead, she married the delightful Charles Frederic Mather-Smith, twenty years her senior, and the newlyweds made their winter home in rural Oakland, Florida, when central Florida was still a primeval jungle teeming with wild animals and exotic flora just beginning to be tamed by homesteading farmers, ranchers, and fishermen. As Grace says, it was the hand of Destiny that led her new husband and her to Oakland, where Grace raised her family, shook up the community, and lived for more than fifty happy years. As recounted in her memoir, Grace was a devoted wife and mother, a pioneer, a community organizer, an opera singer, a midwife, a businesswoman, a philanthropist—and a great beauty whom men found irresistible. Grace was the first woman in Florida to drive a car; the owner of the first telephone and phonograph in Oakland, and of the first bathtub and flushing toilet in central Florida; and the first person to drive a car to the top of Pike’s Peak without a mechanic. Grace’s voice comes across loud and clear in her memoir, which is illustrated with more than 20 family photos. She was flamboyant, theatrical, uninhibited, adventurous, energetic, glamorous, exuberant, unconventional, willful, irrepressible, big-hearted, and generous to a fault. Her memoir quotes family and friends who describe Grace as being “like a thoroughbred horse … always out there in the limelight,” “born for the concert stage and the opera,” and “prone to gallivantin’ around.” She was larger than life—a force of nature—and has been likened to Auntie Mame. As Eve Bacon wrote in her book Oakland: The Early Years, Grace “hit staid little Oakland” like “a social bombshell.”