Raw, scorned, and finally free from my disastrous marriage, I flee the lies, humiliation, and manipulation of my old life like a bat out of hell, leaving it all in my rearview mirror. Seduced by the sunny, diverse, laid-back Denver, Colorado, I settle in and set up a new life. New job. New house. New friends… Freedom. ​ The idea was to start over. Fresh. Anew. But I didn’t anticipate starting over with my twenty-year-old student. ​Nero Gunnar might be twelve years my junior, but he’s the manliest man I’ve ever met. He has his sights set on me and he’s not letting up. It’s wrong. Forbidden. A disaster waiting to happen. But sinful wrongs have never tasted so, so sweet. KEYWORDS: student teacher romance, age-gap romance, older woman younger man romance, black woman white man, MC romance, motorcycle romance, biker bad boy, bwwm, multicultural romance, interracial romance,

In The Program Era, Mark McGurl offers a fundamental reinterpretation of postwar American fiction, asserting that it can be properly understood only in relation to the rise of mass higher education and the creative writing program. McGurl asks both how the patronage of the university has reorganized American literature and—even more important—how the increasing intimacy of writing and schooling can be brought to bear on a reading of this literature. McGurl argues that far from occasioning a decline in the quality or interest of American writing, the rise of the creative writing program has instead generated a complex and evolving constellation of aesthetic problems that have been explored with energy and at times brilliance by authors ranging from Flannery O’Connor to Vladimir Nabokov, Philip Roth, Raymond Carver, Joyce Carol Oates, and Toni Morrison. Through transformative readings of these and many other writers, The Program Era becomes a meditation on systematic creativity—an idea that until recently would have seemed a contradiction in terms, but which in our time has become central to cultural production both within and beyond the university. An engaging and stylishly written examination of an era we thought we knew, The Program Era will be at the center of debates about postwar literature and culture for years to come.

A tribute to a man whose life's work has centered on the study of authorship and who is a scholar and book collector of the first magnitude, The Professions of Authorship examines the business of writing, publishing, and selling books - or what George V. Higgins describes in this volume as a "perplexing, disorganized, chameleonic enterprise". Twenty-three authors, publishing professionals, and scholars who share Matthew J. Bruccoli's love and knowledge of books offer candid observations and opinions about the past, present, and future of publishing. In doing so, they unravel many of the mysteries surrounding this tradition-bound endeavor.

Called by Raymond Chandler “a sleazy, corrupt but completely believable story of a North Carolina town,” this tough, realis­tic novel exemplifies Depression literature in the United States. Falling somewhere between the hard-as-nails writing of James M. Cain and the early stories of Ernest Hemingway, James Ross’s novel was for sheer brutality and frankness of language considerably ahead of his reading public’s taste for realism untinged with sentiment or profundity. In his brilliant Afterword to this new edition, George V. Higgins, author of the recent best-seller Cogan’s Trade, pays tribute to Ross for his courage in telling his story truthfully, in all its ugliness. The setting of They Don’t Dance Much is a roadhouse on the outskirts of a North Carolina town on the border with South Carolina, complete with dance floor, res­taurant, gambling room, and cabins rented by the hour. In the events described, Smut Milligan, the proprietor, seeks money to keep operating and commits a brutal murder.

Members of the Lost Generation, American writers and artists who lived in Paris during the 1920s, continue to occupy an important place in our literary history. Rebelling against increased commercialism and the ebb of cosmopolitan society in early twentieth-century America, they rejected the culture of what Ernest Hemingway called a place of “broad lawns and narrow minds.” Much of what we know about these iconic literary figures comes from their own published letters and essays, revealing how adroitly they developed their own reputations by controlling the reception of their work. Surprisingly the literary world has paid less attention to their autobiographies. In Writing the Lost Generation, Craig Monk unlocks a series of neglected texts while reinvigorating our reading of more familiar ones. Well-known autobiographies by Malcolm Cowley, Ernest Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein are joined here by works from a variety of lesser-known—but still important—expatriate American writers, including Sylvia Beach, Alfred Kreymborg, Samuel Putnam, and Harold Stearns. By bringing together the self-reflective works of the Lost Generation and probing the ways the writers portrayed themselves, Monk provides an exciting and comprehensive overview of modernist expatriates from the United States.