“This gentle, gorgeously written book may be one of my favorites ever.” —Jenna Bush Hager (A Today show “Read with Jenna” Book Club Selection!) This “moving portrait of love and friendship set against a backdrop of social change” (The New York Times Book Review, Editor’s Choice) traces two married couples whose lives become entangled when the husbands become copastors at a famed New York city congregation in the 1960s. Charles and Lily, James and Nan. They meet in Greenwich Village in 1963 when Charles and James are jointly hired to steward the historic Third Presbyterian Church through turbulent times. Their personal differences however, threaten to tear them apart. Charles is destined to succeed his father as an esteemed professor of history at Harvard, until an unorthodox lecture about faith leads him to ministry. How then, can he fall in love with Lily—fiercely intellectual, elegantly stern—after she tells him with certainty that she will never believe in God? And yet, how can he not? James, the youngest son in a hardscrabble Chicago family, spent much of his youth angry at his alcoholic father and avoiding his anxious mother. Nan grew up in Mississippi, the devout and beloved daughter of a minister and a debutante. James’s escape from his desperate circumstances leads him to Nan and, despite his skepticism of hope in all its forms, her gentle, constant faith changes the course of his life. In The Dearly Beloved, Cara wall reminds us of “the power of the novel in its simplest, richest form: bearing intimate witness to human beings grappling with their faith and falling in love,” (Entertainment Weekly, A-) as we follow these two couples through decades of love and friendship, jealousy and understanding, forgiveness and commitment. Against the backdrop of turbulent changes facing the city and the church’s congregation, Wall offers a poignant meditation on faith and reason, marriage and children, and the ways we find meaning in our lives. The Dearly Beloved is a gorgeous, wise, and provocative novel that is destined to become a classic.

Johnny Craig's crisp, elegant, contemporary graphic style set a mood and a surprisingly sophisticated approach to these thirty-one EC crime and horror comics stories, which include his top murder mystery and his best terror tale. Introduction by Grand Master crime novelist Max Allan Collins.

A gated Philadelphia suburb is home to a shocking murder in this mystery featuring Armenian-American ex-FBI agent Gregor Demarkian. Fox Run Hill is the kind of place that men move to with their second wives, but Patsy MacLaren Willis has been married to Stephen, her first husband, for twenty-two years. Though outwardly happy, Patsy feels disconnected, hating their empty life. To wrench herself free, she shoots Stephen three times and leaves him dead in their bed. Calmly, she drives away and disappears. While investigating the case, former FBI agent Gregor Demarkian finds that every wife in Fox Run Hill has good reason to kill her husband—except for Patsy. It’s well-known that suburbanites lead lives of quiet desperation, but the families in Fox Run Hill are more desperate than any Demarkian has ever seen.

In Thurber's world, sex is less a quest for pleasure or an expression of love than it is the retardation of emotion. And this is where Thurber makes her mark as an artist: She shows us how some parents would rather keep their offspring in their muck than Quirky and original, Lucy Thurber's STAY confirms the talent that the playwright demonstrated a few years back in the equally brilliant Where We're Born. But while her previous play was grounded in a rugged naturalism, STAY sparkles with magic and surrea

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Toni Morrison’s Beloved is a spellbinding and dazzlingly innovative portrait of a woman haunted by the past. Sethe was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has borne the unthinkable and not gone mad, yet she is still held captive by memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. Meanwhile Sethe’s house has long been troubled by the angry, destructive ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved. Sethe works at beating back the past, but it makes itself heard and felt incessantly in her memory and in the lives of those around her. When a mysterious teenage girl arrives, calling herself Beloved, Sethe’s terrible secret explodes into the present. Combining the visionary power of legend with the unassailable truth of history, Morrison’s unforgettable novel is one of the great and enduring works of American literature.

Although his father has forbidden it, Ernie, a twelve-year-old business tycoon, makes a tidy profit in the pet funeral business, but when he refuses to give his star employee a raise and the business starts to fall apart, it takes the death of his own dog to bring everyone back together.