A "New York Times" Notable Book for 2011 A "Washington Post" Notable Fiction Book for 2011"The New York Times "bestseller now in paperback--A thought-provoking engrossing novel about love, connection, and loss from the author of "The Abstinence Teacher "and "Little Children

"What if your life was upended in an instant? What if your spouse or your child disappeared right in front of your eyes? Was it the Rapture or something even more difficult to explain? How would you rebuild your life in the wake of such a devastating event? These are the questions confronting the bewildered citizens of Mapleton, a formerly comfortable suburban community that lost over a hundred people in the Sudden Departure. Kevin Garvey, the new mayor, wants to move forward, to bring a sense of renewed hope and purpose to his traumatized neighbors, even as his own family disintegrates. His wife, Laurie, has left him to enlist in the Guilty Remnant, a homegrown cult whose members take a vow of silence but haunt the town's streets as "living reminders" of God's judgment. His son, Tom, is gone, too, dropping out of college to follow a crooked "prophet" who calls himself Holy Wayne. Only his teenaged daughter, Jill, remains, and she's definitely not the sweet "A" student she used to be.

Through the prism of a single family, Perrotta illuminates a familiar America made strange by grief and apocalyptic anxiety. "The Leftovers "is a powerful and deeply moving book about regular people struggling to hold onto a belief in their futures.

A brilliantly funny novel from the author of 'The Abstinence Teacher' and 'Little Children', made into an acclaimed film starring Reece Witherspoon and Matthew Broderick. Tracy Flick wants to be president of Winwood High. She's one of those ambitious girls who finds time to do it all: edit the yearbook, star in the school musical, sleep with her English teacher. Staunch idealist, Jim McAllister (aka 'Mr M') thinks the students deserve better. So he persuades Paul Warren - a well-liked, good-hearted jock - to run as well. But that puts Paul's sister, Tammy, in a snit. So she runs too, on an apathy platform - before starting a real campaign...to get herself kicked out of school. The idea was to educate the students of this suburban New Jersey school in the democratic process and the American way. But with all the sex scandals, smear campaigns and behind-the-scenes powerbrokers at Winwood High, it doesn't look as if they need any lessons...

The second novel from Tom Perrotta, author of 'Little Children', 'Election' and 'The Abstinence Teacher'. Everything is going pretty well for Dave Raymond. He's 31, but he still feels young. He's playing guitar with the Wishbones, a New Jersey wedding band, and while it isn't exactly the Big Time, it is music. He has a roof over his head...well, it's his parents' roof, but they don't hassle him much. Life isn't perfect. But it isn't bad. Not bad at all. But then he has to blow it all by proposing to his girlfriend... One man's treasure is another man's millstone. To Dave, the treasure in question is Gretchen; a sexy, bohemian poet Dave meets when playing at a wedding with his band. While Gretchen the poet plays 'the bridesmaid', Dave plays 'the rock-star'. And suddenly, the comfortable trajectory of his reality seems far less appealing.

The literary debut from the author of 'Little Children', 'Election' and 'The Abstinence Teacher'. Tom Perrotta's first novel takes readers to semi-fictional 'Cranwood', in small-town New Jersey. Set between fall 1969 and the summer of 1980, 'Bad Haircut' consists of ten tales; reflecting a coming-of-age in the 'kitsch' era of platforms and disco. The novel charts the struggles of a boy called Buddy with the timeless mysteries of sex, death, parents - and, of course, bad haircuts - as he grows from Cub Scout to college kid. A touching collection of tales, 'Bad Haircut' is Perrotta's perfect observation of the tribulations and tenderness of adolescence.

A sharp, funny and beautifully observed satire about the disturbing influence of the Christian right from one of America’s most cherished authors. Ruth Ramsey went too far. She hadn't noticed the changing climate. A Sex Ed teacher ‘championing’ oral sex!? Not now, not in this America… Cherished by her high school pupils as someone who'd tell it straight, after one innocent classroom indiscretion Ruth suddenly finds the curriculum she has taught for nigh on 15 years worryingly out of vogue. As the scandal flares up and attracts the unwelcome eye of the local evangelical Church, the appeasing high-school principal forces her into advocating a pro-abstinence agenda in the classroom that is at odds with all conventional wisdom. But jaded though she is by her recent divorce and fruitless search for a new love, Ruth is determined that the values she grew up with will not be sacrificed to Puritanism. It is a syllabus change which should be considered a victory by Tim Mason – recovering addict, local football coach and recent convert to the same plaintiff Church – but his new found faith is constantly put to the test by the temptations of his former life. When he makes the gesture of leading his football team in prayer after a hard-fought victory, in which Ruth's daughter Maggie starred, he manages not only to incur the wrathful attention of her mother, but to cement his position as the star evangelist of his church – an office he is none too sure about occupying. Scathing, witty and brilliantly observed,‘The Abstinence Teacher' is a cutting portrayal of modern America and the influence of the Christian right from the acclaimed, bestselling author of 'Election' and 'Little Children'.

New York Times bestseller! Now a major Sky/HBO TV series From the bestselling author of The Leftovers and Little Children comes a penetrating and hilarious new novel about sex, love, and identity on the frontlines of America's culture wars. Eve Fletcher is trying to figure out what comes next. A forty-six-year-old divorcee whose beloved only child has just left for college, Eve is struggling to adjust to her empty nest when one night her phone lights up with a text message. Sent from an anonymous number, the mysterious sender tells Eve, "U R my MILF!" Over the months that follow, that message comes to obsess Eve. While leading her all-too-placid life-serving as Executive Director of the local senior center by day and taking a community college course on Gender and Society at night-Eve can't curtail her own interest in a porn website called MILFateria.com, which features the erotic exploits of ordinary, middle-aged women like herself. Before long, Eve's online fixations begin to spill over into real life, revealing new romantic possibilities that threaten to upend her quiet suburban existence. Meanwhile, miles away at the state college, Eve's son Brendan-a jock and aspiring frat boy-discovers that his new campus isn't nearly as welcoming to his hard-partying lifestyle as he had imagined. Only a few weeks into his freshman year, Brendan is floundering in a college environment that challenges his white-dude privilege and shames him for his outmoded, chauvinistic ideas of sex. As the New England autumn turns cold, both mother and son find themselves enmeshed in morally fraught situations that come to a head on one fateful November night. Sharp, witty, and provocative, Mrs. Fletcher is a timeless examination of sexuality, identity, parenthood, and the big clarifying mistakes people can make when they're no longer sure of who they are or where they belong.

From the author of 'Little Children' and now a major new TV series, 'The Leftovers' asks what if one day some of us simply vanished? And some were left behind? Following the sudden disappearance of thousands of citizens, Kevin Garvey, Mapleton's new mayor, wants to bring a sense of hope to his traumatised community, but his family has fallen apart in the wake of disaster. Kevin's wife has joined a homegrown cult, and his son is a disciple of the prophet Holy Wayne. Only Jill, Kevin's daughter, remains, and she's no longer the sweet student she once was. Written with a rare ability to illuminate our everyday struggles, 'The Leftovers' is a startling novel about love, connection and loss.

New York Times bestseller! From the bestselling author of The Leftovers and Little Children comes a penetrating and hilarious new novel about sex, love, and identity on the frontlines of America's culture wars. Eve Fletcher is trying to figure out what comes next. A forty-six-year-old divorcee whose beloved only child has just left for college, Eve is struggling to adjust to her empty nest when one night her phone lights up with a text message. Sent from an anonymous number, the mysterious sender tells Eve, "U R my MILF!" Over the months that follow, that message comes to obsess Eve. While leading her all-too-placid life-serving as Executive Director of the local senior center by day and taking a community college course on Gender and Society at night-Eve can't curtail her own interest in a porn website called MILFateria.com, which features the erotic exploits of ordinary, middle-aged women like herself. Before long, Eve's online fixations begin to spill over into real life, revealing new romantic possibilities that threaten to upend her quiet suburban existence. Meanwhile, miles away at the state college, Eve's son Brendan-a jock and aspiring frat boy-discovers that his new campus isn't nearly as welcoming to his hard-partying lifestyle as he had imagined. Only a few weeks into his freshman year, Brendan is floundering in a college environment that challenges his white-dude privilege and shames him for his outmoded, chauvinistic ideas of sex. As the New England autumn turns cold, both mother and son find themselves enmeshed in morally fraught situations that come to a head on one fateful November night. Sharp, witty, and provocative, Mrs. Fletcher is a timeless examination of sexuality, identity, parenthood, and the big clarifying mistakes people can make when they're no longer sure of who they are or where they belong.

For many college students, Spring Break means fun and sun in Florida. For Danny, a Yale junior, it means two weeks behind the wheel of the Roach Coach, his father's lunch truck, which plies the parking lots of office parks in central New Jersey.
But Danny can use the time behind the coffee urn to try and make sense of a love life that's gotten a little complicated. There's loyal and patient hometown honey Cindy and her recently dropped bombshell to contend with. And there's also lissome Polly back in New Haven--with her shifting moods, perfect thrift store dresses and inconvenient liaison with a dashing professor.
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If girl problems aren't enough, there's the constant menace of the Lunch Monsters, a group of thugs who think Danny has planted the Roach Coach in their territory.
"Joe College "is Tom Perrotta's warmest and funniest fiction yet, a comic journey into the dark side of love, higher education and food service.

"Nine Inches," Tom Perrotta's first true collection, features ten stories--some sharp and funny, some mordant and surprising, and a few intense and disturbing. Whether he's dropping into the lives of two teachers--and their love lost and found--in "Nine Inches," documenting the unraveling of a dad at a Little League game in "The Smile on Happy Chang's Face," or gently marking the points of connection between an old woman and a benched high school football player in "Senior Season," Perrotta writes with a sure sense of his characters and their secret longings.

"Nine Inches" contains an elegant collection of short fiction: stories that are as assured in their depictions of characters young and old, established and unsure, as any written today.

"New York Times" bestselling author Tom Perrotta's first book is "more powerful than any coming-of-age novel" --"The Washington Post"

"Bad Haircut" explores the themes that have fascinated Perrotta throughout his career: suburban rituals and mores; sports and religion; the cheerful cheesiness of American consumer life; public tests of manliness; and the moral dilemmas faced by ordinary people, parents, and teenagers alike. Perrotta has continued to explore these subjects in novels from "Election" to "The Abstinence Teacher."

The ten rich stories here are linked by a single protagonist: Buddy, an adolescent suburban New Jersey boy who is truly seeing his world for the first time and already finding it both mysterious and lacking. Whether he's out on a Boy Scout trip with his mother and discovering that his mother actually knows--and has a history with--the man inside the battered foam hot dog costume in "The Weiner Man," feeling the first glimmer that sex might actually be possible for him in "Thirteen," or finding himself swept along on a prank gone very wrong in "Snowman," Buddy is both a recognizable American boy and a trademark Perrotta hero. "Bad Haircut" is a moving, spare book from a writer who, even this early in his career, had an assured sense of the complexity of his characters' emotional landscapes.

The new film from Oscar(R)-nominated writer/director Todd Field ("In the Bedroom"), based on the acclaimed novel by Tom Perrotta, starring Kate Winslet, Jennifer Connelly, and Patrick Wilson.
"Little Children" centers on a handful of individuals whose lives intersect on the playgrounds, town pools, and streets of their small community in surprising and potentially dangerous ways. While it is based on an acclaimed novel, Todd Field and Tom Perrotta wanted to create a film that stood on its own, independent of the book. Field says, "The struggle for identity is what these characters battle from the start; it leads to a hunger they are unable to satiate--violence and fear hold sway. The shame of how they see themselves when the fingers start pointing. It was with this idea in mind that Tom and I began our work together."
Tom Perotta elaborates, "For me, as a novelist, the attraction of a film adaptation lies precisely in this opportunity to re-imagine my book with someone else, and explore new possibilities for the characters and the story."
This fascinating Newmarket Shooting Script(R) book documents the successful collaboration between these two talented artists. The book includes an introduction by Tom Perrotta, the complete shooting script, critical essays, a Q&A with Todd Field, a section of 23 color photos, and the complete cast and crew credits.

Stonewood Heights is the perfect place to raise children: it has the proverbial good schools, solid values and a healthy real estate market. It's the kind of place where parents are involved in their children's lives-coaching sports, driving carpool, taking an interest in their development at every level. The Abstinence Teacher focuses on two divorced parents who each play key roles in the lives of other people's children: Ruth Ramsey is the human sexuality teacher at the local high school who believes that pleasure is good, shame is bad, and knowledge is power. Her younger daughter's soccer coach is Tim Mason, a former stoner and rocker whose response to hitting rock bottom was to reach out and be saved. Tim is a member of The Tabernacle, the local evangelical Christian church that wants to take its message outside the doors of its own sanctuary, and sees a useful target in Ruth Ramsey. Adversaries in a small-town culture war, Ruth and Tim instinctively distrust one another. But when a controversy on the playing field forces the two of them to actually talk to each other, an uneasy friendship begins to develop. The Abstinence Teacher illuminates the powerful emotions that run beneath the placid surface of modern family life, and explores the complicated spiritual and sexual lives of ordinary people. Elegantly and simply written, the book has the distinctive mix of satire and compassion readers have responded to in Perrotta's other novels. Ruth arrived late and mildly hungover for her daughter's soccer game on Saturday morning. Smiling queasily, she made her way down the sideline, nodding hello to the more punctual parents, many of whom she hadn't seen in quite a while. Afew of the spectators were sitting in collapsible chairs, but most were on their feet, chatting in sociable clumps as they sipped from state-of-the-art stainless steel travel mugs, giving the whole scene the air of an outdoor cocktail party. As usual, Ruth's ex-husband, Frank, had removed himself from the talkers, his attention focused solely on the game. He stood like the baseball player he'd once been - knees bent, hands resting on his thighs - observing the action with an expression of intense absorption that Ruth might have mistaken for disgust if she hadn't known him so well. Morning, she said, tugging gently on his sleeve. How we doing? Tied at two, he muttered, shooting her a reproachful glance. First half's almost over. Maggie thought you forgot. I overslept. Ever hear of an alarm clock? Didn't go off, she explained, leaving out the part about how she''unplugged the thing in a fit of three-in-the-morning insomniac misery. Because, really, what was worse than lying wide awake in the dark, watching your life drip away, one irreplaceable minute after another? --from The Abstinence Teacher From the Hardcover edition.

Tom Perrotta's thirty-ish parents of young children are a varied and surprising bunch. There's Todd, the handsome stay-at-home dad dubbed "The Prom King" by the moms of the playground; Sarah, a lapsed feminist with a bisexual past, who seems to have stumbled into a traditional marriage; Richard, Sarah's husband, who has found himself more and more involved with a fantasy life on the internet than with the flesh and blood in his own house; and Mary Ann, who thinks she has it all figured out, down to scheduling a weekly roll in the hay with her husband, every Tuesday at 9pm.
They all raise their kids in the kind of sleepy American suburb where nothing ever seems to happen-at least until one eventful summer, when a convicted child molester moves back to town, and two restless parents begin an affair that goes further than either of them could have imagined. Unexpectedly suspenseful, but written with all the fluency and dark humor of Perrotta's previous novels, "Little Children" exposes the adult dramas unfolding amidst the swingsets and slides of an ordinary American playground.

Following in the footsteps of the late great Lester Bangs -- the most revered and irreverent of rock 'n' roll critics -- twenty-four celebrated writers have penned stories inspired by great songs. Just as Bangs cast new light on a Rod Stewart classic with his story "Maggie May," about a wholly unexpected connection between an impressionable young man and an aging, alcoholic hooker, the diverse, electrifying stories here use songs as a springboard for a form dubbed the lit riff.

Alongside Bangs's classic work, you'll find stories by J.T. LeRoy, who puts a recovering teenage drug abuser in a dentist's chair with nothing but the Foo Fighters's "Everlong" -- blaring through the P.A. -- to fight the pain; Jonathan Lethem, whose narrator looks back on his lost innocence just as an extramarital affair careens to an end -- this to the tune "Speeding Motorcycle" as recorded by Yo La Tengo; and Jennifer Belle, who envisions a prequel to Paul Simon's "Graceland" -- one that takes place at a children's birthday party replete with a real live kangaroo.

With original contributions from Tom Perrotta, Nelson George, Amanda Davis, Lisa Tucker, Aimee Bender, Darin Strauss, and many more -- riffing on everyone from Tom Waits and Bruce Springsteen to the White Stripes, Cat Power, and Bob Marley -- this is both an astounding collection of short stories and an extraordinary experiment in words and music.

Soundtrack available from Saturation Acres Music & Recording Co.

Thirty-one-year-old Dave Raymond has an adoring girlfriend who's stuck by him since high school, and a steady gig as guitarist for The Wishbones, a New Jersey wedding band. He still lives with his parents, but that's a small price to pay for the freedom to play the music he loves. Granted, The Wishbones aren't the E Street Band, but all in all, life's been good to him so far. Dave's world changes the day three little words fly from his mouth: "Let's get married." His marital ambivalence takes a perilous turn when he embarks on an affair with Gretchen, a New York City poet. Dave finds himself torn between Gretchen and his fiancee, Julie, and the two sides of his own personality they represent. Is he an artist after all, a bohemian trapped in a suburbanite's body? Should he chuck his wedding band and follow his rock-'n'-roll dream? Or is he just an average Joe who should happily accept life with a loving wife and a center-hall colonial near the mall? And then there are the other Wishbones: Buzzy, the hard-drinking bass player whose roots are in heavy metal but whose heart belongs to his wife and kids; Stan, the brokenhearted drummer/accordionist; and Ian, the talented singer who's recently, improbably, completed a musical about the JFK assassination. Together the band careens toward a collective destiny as Dave fumbles toward his wedding day.

Tracy Flick wants to be President of Winwood High. She's one of those ambitious girls who finds time to do it all: edit the yearbook, star in the musical, sleep with her English teacher. But another teacher, staunch idealist Jim McAllister (aka "Mr. M."), thinks the students deserve better. So he persuades Paul Warren--a well-liked, good-hearted jock--to throw in his hat. But that puts Paul's sister, Tammy, in a snit. So she runs, too, on an apathy platform--before starting a real campaign...to get herself kicked out of school.

Tammy's upset because her secret, forbidden love has been lured away...by her own brother. Tracy's upset because losing this election might screw up her college chances. Mr. M.'s upset because ever since he embarked on his own extramarital affair, his life's been falling apart. As for Paul, well, he's not sure what's going on.

The whole idea was to educate the students at this suburban New Jersey school in the democratic process and the American way. But with all sex scandals, smear campaigns, and behind-the-scenes power brokers at Winwood High, it doesn't look as if they need any lessons...