A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice A decade after the publication of Haussmann, or the Distinction, his acclaimed novel about nineteenth-century Paris, Paul La Farge turns his imagination to America at the dawn of the twenty-first century in Luminous Airplanes. In September 2000, a young computer programmer comes home from a festival in the Nevada desert and learns that his grandfather has died. He must return to Thebes, a town so isolated that its inhabitants have their own language, and clean out the house where his family has lived for five generations. While he's there, he remembers San Francisco in the wild years of the Internet boom, and begins an ill-advised romance in which past and present are dangerously confused. La Farge's Luminous Airplanes is an expansive, hugely imaginative, and very funny novel about history, love, memory, family, flying machines, dance music, and the end of the world.

Even a wrong turn leads somewhere... It's the year 2000 and a young man learns that his grandfather has died. He is faced with a choice: should he return to the family home in upstate New York for the last time? Or simply let his twin mothers, Marie Celeste and Celeste Marie, throw all his grandparents' possessions away? Going back would mean the chance of meeting again with childhood sweetheart Yesim, and finding out what really happened to his mysterious father, the charismatic Richard Ente. But the past has a way of turning into a messy present, and every choice has repercussions felt long after it is made. Exposing the fragility of love, sanity and family, 'Luminous Airplanes' resonates with the echoes of repeated mistakes, and the hope that one day things could be better.

After his grandfather dies, a young programmer must go back to Thebes, a town so isolated that the residents have their own language, and soon begins a romance with an old flame and reflects on other ghosts of the past. By the author of Haussmann, or the Distinction. 15,000 first printing.

A young boy looks at a plane in the sky and imagines flying one all the way to the moon.

"The Night Ocean" is told from the first person narrative and it follows the young painter who arrives in a small village of Ellston where he is supposed to enter a contest with his large mural. At first, he enjoys peace and quiet surroundings, but as he stays longer he start seeing and experiencing some strange things which, along with the loneliness, have strong effect to his psyche.

In this stunning, imaginative novel, LaFarge explores a secret in the life of Baron Georges-Eugene Haussmann, the great architect who demolished and rebuilt Paris in the middle of the 19th century. A "New York Times" Notable Book of 2001. 3 illustrations.

Here for the first time in a single volume are three of Richard Bach's most compelling works about flight. From his edgy days as a USAF Alert pilot above Europe in an armed F84-F Thunderstreak during the Cold War to a meander across America in a 1929 biplane, Bach explores the extreme edges of the air, his airplane, and himself in glorious writing about how it feels to climb into a machine, leave the earth, and fly. Only a handful of writers have translated their experiences in the cockpit into books that have mesmerized generations.