When her health begins failing, the mysterious author Vida Winter decides to let Margaret Lea, a biographer, write the truth about her life, but Margaret needs to verify the facts since Vida has a history of telling outlandish tales.

Receiving an invitation to his ex-boyfriend's wedding, Arthur, a failed novelist on the eve of his fiftieth birthday, embarks on an international journey that finds him falling in love, risking his life, reinventing himself, and making connections with the past.

"Nothing short of astonishing." - New Yorker "A thing of beauty-lucidly written, artfully ordered, riddled with riddles and undergirded with dark layers of philosophical meditations." - Los Angeles Times The final book from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Carol Shields, Unless, is a harrowing but ultimately consoling story of one family's anguish and healing, proving Shields's mastery of extraordinary fiction about ordinary life. For all of...

Have you ever lost someone who meant more to you than your own soul? Ford Newcombe has. For years, he loved his wife, Pat, more than anyone -- and anything -- in the world. She came into his life when he was an inexperienced college student with big dreams of becoming a published author. Pat guided him down the path that eventually led to more success than he dreamed possible. Since Pat's death, Ford has lived a life of solitude, barely able to put...

In 1865, the preparations of the Dante Club--led by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Oliver Wendell Holmes--to release the first translation of Dante's "The Divine Comedy" are threatened by a series of murders that re-create episodes from "Inferno."

Miles Van Meter is on a book tour to promote his sensational bestseller, 'Sleeping beauty, ' a true-crime account of the attack by a serial killer that left his twin sister, Casey, in a coma. Tonight the audience waits to hear Miles discuss the startling developments that occurred after his book was published, which involve Ashley Spencer, the only other person who survived an attack by this merciless killer. Six years earlier, life was much simpler...

Pittsburgh professor and author Grady Tripp is working on an unwieldy 2,611 page manuscript that is meant to be the follow-up to his successful, award-winning novel The Land Downstairs, that was published seven years earlier. On the eve of a college-sponsored writers and publishers weekend called WordFest, two monumental things happen to Tripp: his wife walks out on him, and he learns that his mistress, who is also the chancellor of the college, Sara...

The protagonist of Tobias Wolff’s shrewdly—and at times devastatingly—observed first novel is a boy at an elite prep school in 1960. He is an outsider who has learned to mimic the negligent manner of his more privileged classmates. Like many of them, he wants more than anything on earth to become a writer. But to do that he must first learn to tell the truth about himself.
The agency of revelation is the school literary contest,...

"...Cassandra Fellows returns home to Baltimore, researching material for a new book, where she decides to weave the tragic story of an old classmate with memories of her school years."

Seventeen-year-old Edgar Poe's plans to escape his foster family, begin classes at the prestigious new university, and marry his beloved Elmira Royster go awry when a macabre Muse appears with a request.