Dying St. Louis is turned inside-out by the appointment of a charismatic young woman from Bombay as police chief, an act which launches the city's prominent citizens into political conspiracy. Franzen's first novel is already a classic of contemporary fiction.

The big passionate novel of a woman daring to live and love freely—no matter what the price. She was forced to choose between one man's love and her own pride as a woman. Brigham married one woman too many when he took Ann Eliza Webb as his twenty-seventh wife. He was the leader of the polygamous Mormon faith, as powerful in the Utah Territory as the President of the United States. She was a great beauty with a quiet manner—and an iron will. For four years, Eliza lived in Brigham Young's harem as his 27th wife. Then, one summer morning, she walked out, deserting her husband and suing him for divorce...

The setting is a Soviet prison, 1952. Joseph Stalin's secret police have rounded up twenty-six writers, the giants of Yiddish literature in Russia. As judgment looms, a twenty-seventh suddenly appears: Pinchas Pelovits, unpublished and unknown. Baffled by his arrest, he and his cellmates wrestle with the mysteries of party loyalty and politics, culture and identity, and with what it means to write in troubled times. When they discover why the twenty-seventh man is among them, the writers come to realize that even in the face of tyranny, stories still have the power to transcend. In his last act of storytelling, Pelovits asks us: Who writes the eulogy when all the writers are gone?

Clear-sighted, darkly comic, and tender, The Twenty-Seventh Letter of the Alphabet is about a daughter's struggle to face the Medusa of generational trauma without turning to stone. Growing up in the New Jersey suburbs of the 1970s and 1980s in a family warped by mental illness, addiction, and violence, Kim Adrian spent her childhood ducking for cover from an alcoholic father prone to terrifying acts of rage and trudging through a fog of confusion with her mother, a suicidal incest survivor hooked on prescription drugs. Family memories were buried--even as they were formed--and truth was obscured by lies and fantasies. In The Twenty-Seventh Letter of the Alphabet Adrian tries to make peace with this troubled past by cataloguing memories, anecdotes, and bits of family lore in the form of a glossary. But within this strategic reckoning of the past, the unruly present carves an unpredictable path as Adrian's aging mother plunges into ever-deeper realms of drug-fueled paranoia. Ultimately, the glossary's imposed order serves less to organize emotional chaos than to expose difficult but necessary truths, such as the fact that some problems simply can't be solved, and that loving someone doesn't necessarily mean saving them.

This funny, exciting and best-selling story takes you behind the scenes as eight-year-old Edward trains for the greatest swimming marathon of all!

A regimental history focuses on the first infantry division assigned to the defense of Vicksburg, Mississippi, during the American Civil War. The Twenty-seventh Louisiana Volunteer Infantry was the first infantry division assigned to the defense of Vicksburg, Mississippi. The author, inspired by his great-grandfather, Burlin Moore Scriber, who served as a corporal in the Louisiana Infantry’s Company B, celebrates the undaunting courage of this regiment during the forty-seven-day siege by Union soldiers before the surrender of Vicksburg. This valuable historical and genealogical resource includes details about the Louisiana Secession Convention in 1861, the creation of Camp Moore, and the battles of Champion Hill, Grand Gulf, and Black River Bridge. Featuring a wealth of archival information and photographs, Twenty-seventh Louisiana Volunteer Infantry also includes a register of soldiers, including rank, promotions, service records, captures and paroles, medical history, and personal information. Praise for Twenty-seventh Louisiana Volunteer Infantry “A masterful job . . . Reads like a novel instead of just the dry facts about a battle. We see the human side of his facts.” —Paula Stobaugh, secretary, Conway County Genealogical Society

The most terrifying novel you will read this year... There are twenty-seven bones in the human hand. And there are three dead bodies on the island of St. Luke - each victim missing a hand. It's the strangest, most disturbing series of murders the Caribbean has ever known - and one of the few crimes that could pull FBI Special Agent E.L. Pender out of retirement. In all of his years, he's never faced such a diabolical underworld drenched in superstition. At the heart of this darkness is a husband-and-wife team with a perverse plan so powerfully consuming, so brilliantly evil, that Pender can only watch and wait...as the grisly hand of fate reaches out for its next victim. ‘Explosive’ San Francisco Chronicle ‘Move over, Hannibal Lecter’ Scottish Daily Record ‘A first-rate thriller’ Boston Globe