Not every gift is a blessing. Every morning, Melanie waits in her cell to be collected for class. When they come for her, Sergeant Parks keeps his gun pointing at her while two of his people strap her into the wheelchair. She thinks they don't like her. She jokes that she won't bite. But they don't laugh. Melanie is a very special girl...

A ravishing first novel, set in vibrant, tumultuous turn-of-the-century New York City, where the lives of four outsiders become entwined, bringing irrevocable change to them all.

Down the road from a working-class British pub, along the brick wall of a narrow alley, if the conditions are exactly right, you'll find the entrance to Slade House: a surreal place where visitors see what they want to see, including some things that should be impossible. Every nine years, the house's residents--an odd brother and sister--extend a unique invitation to someone who's different or lonely: a precocious teenager, a divorced policeman, a shy college student. But what really goes on inside Slade House? For those who find out, it's already too late...

Crosley's easy, charming voice in the face of minor suffering or potential drudgery has been described as a mix between Dorothy Parker and David Sedaris. In these hilarious and insightful essays, she packs up her sensibility and takes readers with her to Paris, to Portugal (where she falls in with a group of Portuguese clowns), and to Alaska (where she discovers wearing bear bells is a matter of self-defense). Then it's back to New York, where new apartments beckon and taxi rides go awry.

Billy Dean is a secret child. He has a beautiful young mother and a father who arrives at night carrying the scents of candles and incense and cigarettes. Birds fly to his window. Mice run out from his walls. His world is a carpet, a bed, pictures of the holy island, and a single locked door. His father fills his mind and his dreams with mysterious tales and memories and dreadful warnings. But then his father disappears, and Billy’s mother brings him out into the world at last. He learns the horrifying story of what was saved and what was destroyed on the day he was born, the day the bombers came to Blinkbonny...

Receiving a threatening phone call and obscene messages in her peer evaluations, university writing workshop teacher Amy Gallup is forced to reevaluate her students' assignments in the aftermath of a murder to see if any of them demonstrated homicidal tendencies.

Suffering a head injury after decades of isolation, Amy Gallup participates in a scheduled newspaper interview by a journalist who perceives her post-injury confusion for the rambling of a genius, a mistake that reunites her with former friends, catapults her to fame and rekindles her literary ambitions.

From Douglas Adams, the legendary author of one of the most beloved science fiction novels of all time, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, comes a wildly inventive novel — For Dirk Gently, private detective, a simple search for a missing cat uncovers a bewildered ghost, a secret time traveller, and a devastating secret that threatens the future of humanity... A hilarious yet touching romp that was strangely prescient of many modern trends, this is book one of the two-part Dirk Gently "duology."

A comedian's charming, funny memoir about first love, denial, sleepwalking and the perils and pitfalls of being ... himself.

You only think you know this story. In 1991, Jeffrey Dahmer—the most notorious serial killer since Jack the Ripper—seared himself into the American consciousness. To the public, Dahmer was a monster who committed unthinkable atrocities. To Derf Backderf, "Jeff" was a much more complex figure: a high school friend with whom he had shared classrooms, hallways, and car rides. In My Friend Dahmer, a haunting and original graphic novel, writer-artist Backderf creates a surprisingly sympathetic portrait of a disturbed young man struggling against the morbid urges emanating from the deep recesses of his psyche—a shy kid, a teenage alcoholic, and a goofball who never quite fit in with his classmates. With profound insight, what emerges is a Jeffrey Dahmer that few ever really knew, and one readers will never forget.