The acclaimed New York Times–bestselling biography and “emotionally detailed portrait of the artist as a young man” (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times) In the first biography of the iconic David Foster Wallace, D.T. Max paints the portrait of a man, self-conscious, obsessive and struggling to find meaning. If Wallace was right when he declared he was “frightfully and thoroughly conventional,” it is only because over the course of his short life and stunning career, he wrestled intimately and relentlessly with the fundamental anxiety of being human. In his characteristic lucid and quick-witted style, Max untangles Wallace’s anxious sense of self, his volatile and sometimes abusive connection with women, and above all, his fraught relationship with fiction as he emerges with his masterpiece Infinite Jest. Written with the cooperation of Wallace’s family and friends and with access to hundreds of unpublished letters, manuscripts and journals, this captivating biography unveils the life of the profoundly complicated man who gave voice to what we thought we could not say.

A “soul-stirring debut,” Boys of Alabama tells the “bewitching” (Michelle Hart, O, The Oprah Magazine) tale of sixteen-year-old Max’s first year in America. “Daring, unusual . . . and startlingly fresh” (Don Noble, Alabama Public Radio), Boys of Alabama announced Genevieve Hudson’s place in the canon of the southern gothic alongside Donna Tartt and Harper Lee. Newly arrived in Alabama, Max falls in love, questions his faith, and navigates a strange power. Although his German parents don’t know what to make of a South pining for the past, shy Max thrives after being taken in by the football team. But when he meets fishnet-wearing Pan in physics class, they embark on a quixotic, consuming relationship. Writing in “prose that is always imaginative and sensual” (Sarah Neilson, Believer), Hudson offers a complex portrait of masculinity, religion, immigration, and the adolescent pressures that require total conformity.

Jack is not a normal boy. He can talk to ghosts. In his new home, an aging farmhouse, he meets the Ghost Mother, a grief-stricken spirit who becomes very attached to him...too attached. He learns that the Ghost Mother is preying in the cruelest imaginable way on four child ghosts who are trapped in the house, stealing their energy to sustain her own. Before Jack can figure out how to help them, the Ghost Mother takes possession of his real mother’s body. Jack wants to fight back, but he has severe asthma and risks fatal attacks with any physical exertion. It will take all his resources, and his mother’s as well, to fight off the Ghost Mother and save the ghost children from a horrible fate.

It stood over six feet tall and was the color of dried blood. It was absurdly reminiscent of some giant plucked bird, like an ostrich-but it had the head of a reptile. The partly opened mouth revealed rows of curved, pointed teeth. It was a walking impossibility-a creature that had died out sixty-five million years ago-but it was alive. And it wasn't the only one. In a sleepy rural town, one man's dream had become everyone else's nightmare-and dinosaurs once more roamed the earth. First published in 1984, six years before Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park, Harry Adam Knight's Carnosaur is a gory dinosaur-filled romp sure to delight fans of '80s paperback horror fiction.

"I Can See Right Through You", by Kelly Link, is an off-kilter ghost story (or not) about an estranged couple who have remained friends long after they were originally paired in a vampire movie that made them famous. Now the demon lover searches out his former lover in Florida while she is in the middle of filming a tv episode about ghost hunting.

In this groundbreaking work, Robert Sternberg opens the book of love and shows you how to discover your own story--and how to read your relationships in a whole new light. What draws us so strongly to some people and repels us from others? What makes some relationships work so smoothly and others burst into flames? Sternberg gives us new answers to these questions by showing that the kind of relationship we create depends on the kind of love stories we carry inside us. Drawing on extensive research and fascinating examples of real couples, Sternberg identifies 26 types of love story--including the fantasy story, the business story, the collector story, the horror story, and many others--each with its distinctive advantages and pitfalls, and many of which are clashingly incompatible. These are the largely unconscious preconceptions that guide our romantic choices, and it is only by becoming aware of the kind of story we have about love that we gain the freedom to create more fulfilling and lasting relationships. As long as we remain oblivious to the role our stories play, we are likely to repeat the same mistakes again and again. But the enlivening good news this book brings us is that though our stories drive us, we can revise them and learn to choose partners whose stories are more compatible with our own. Quizzes in each chapter help you to see which stories you identify with most strongly and which apply to your partner. Are you a traveler, a gardener, a teacher, or something else entirely? Love is a Story shows you how to find out.