This funny, exuberant novel captures the reader with the grand sweep of seven-foot-tall David Lizard Hochmeyer s larger-than-life quest to unravel the mystery surrounding his parents deaths. It s a journey laden with pro football stars, a master chef and his beautiful transvestite lover, a world-famous ballerina and her English rocker husband, and a sister who s as brilliant as she is unstable. A wildly entertaining, plot-twisting novel of murder, seduction, and revenge--rich in incident, expansive in character, and lavish in setting"--Life Among Giants"is an exhilarating adventure. Editors pick for Amazon s Best of 2012

"Shelf Awareness"Top Ten Best Fiction of 2012

"Columbus Dispatch" s Top Books of 2012"

Into Woods is an exuberant, profound, and often wonderfully funny account of ten years in the life of author Bill Roorbach. A paean to nature, love, family, and place, it begins with his honeymoon on a wine farm in France's Loire Valley and closes with the birth of his daughter and he and his wife's return to their beloved Maine. These essays blend journalism, memoir, personal narrative, nature writing, cultural criticism, and insight into a flowing narrative of place, a meditation on being and belonging, love and death, wonder and foreboding.

Great blue herons, yellow birches, damselflies, and beavers are among the talismans by which Bill Roorbach uncovers a natural universe along the stream that runs by his house in Farmington, Maine. Populated by an oddball cast of characters to whom Roorbach ("The Professor") and his family might always be considered outsiders, this book chronicles one man's determined effort-occasionally with hilarious results-to follow his stream to its elusive source. Acclaimed essayist and award-winning fiction writer Bill Roorbach uses his singular literary gifts to inspire us to laugh, love, and experience the wonder of living side by side with the natural world.

"An epic love story . . . No greater reading pleasure to be had anywhere." --Kirkus Reviews, starred review "No one writes about love or the American wilderness like Bill Roorbach . . . Thrilling." --Lily King, author of Writers & Lovers and Five Tuesdays in Winter When sixteen-year-old Cindra Zoeller is sent to a reform camp in Montana after being involved in an armed robbery, she is thrust into a world of mountains and cowboys and prayers and miscreants and people from all walks of life like she's never seen in suburban Massachusetts. At Camp Challenge, she becomes transfixed by Lucky, a camp employee of mysterious origin--an origin of constant speculation--and the chemistry between them is instant, and profound. The pair escape together into the wilderness to create an idyllic life far from the reach of the law, living off their resounding love, Lucky's vast knowledge of the wilderness, and a little help from some friends. But they can run from the outside world for only so long, and the consequences of their naive fantasy of a future together--and circumstances shaped by skin color--will keep them apart for decades. Cindra gets trapped in a relationship, safely if stultifyingly suburban, where she is both cosseted and controlled by a man who claims to be her rescuer. But for Cindra, there will never be another Lucky, and she dreams of one day finding him, the only man she's ever fully trusted, her soulmate. Page-turning, full of vivid characters, delicious suspense, and ultimately joy, Lucky Turtle is a big- hearted, deeply engrossing love story from one of our most entertaining and perceptive writers.

How to Make Memories into Memoirs, Ideas into Essays, and Life into Literature

From drawing a map of a remembered neighborhood to signing a form releasing yourself to take risks in your work, Roorbach offers innovative techniques that will trigger ideas for all writers.

"Writing Life Stories" is a classic text that appears on countless creative nonfiction and composition syllabi the world over. This updated 10th anniversary edition gives you the same friendly instruction and stimulating exercises along with updated information on current memoir writing trends, ethics, internet research, and even marketing ideas. You'll discover how to turn your untold life stories into vivid personal essays and riveting memoirs by learning to open up memory, access emotions, shape scenes from experience, develop characters, and research supporting details.

This guide will teach you to see your life more clearly and show you why real stories are often the best ones.

They met in a bar on Martha's Vineyard. Bill was instantly smitten -- her cool beauty, her insouciance, her sassy youth -- but Juliet was unimpressed. Even so, a courtship began, and for the next eight summers, in sublime settings across North America, Bill Roorbach and Juliet Karelsen made circuitous progress toward a lasting love, and finally, marriage. In charming fashion, Summers with Juliet tells this tale, but it also chronicles a second awakening, as Juliet rekindles in Bill his childhood enchantment with nature. Now marvelous creatures abound: giant ocean sunfish and wild turkeys, bellicose hummingbirds and canny trout, all of them images and explications of the many facets of Juliet. Landscapes hold new mysteries, too, and the author vividly, describes his exuberant road trips with Juliet around the country, from the River of Promise in Montana, to the Gulf Coast of Florida. And at last, they come to a wooded lake in New Hampshire and the singular June day when "love's all there, sweeter than the cake".

A suspenseful first novel about two brothers and the thirty-year secret between them. Our secrets can come to define us, and sometimes after lying asleep for a long spell, a secret can awake frantic and hungry. Coop Henry's secret needs attention. His missing brother haunts his life and his life isn't holding up well under the strain. When his mother threatens to hire a detective in one last desperate attempt to discover what has happened to his brother thirty years before, Coop's life begins to come unglued. Not even a glimmer of new love in his life can rescue him. It may be that only his missing brother holds the answers --and that possibility is devastating, to Coop and to nearly everyone in his life.

This book of stories offers nine good reasons to get to know these tender, troubled, and endearing characters. These award-winning stories are full of grit and hope, good sex and bad luck. Bill Roorbach's men are sweet and passionate and usually kind. They may seem like losers but at least they're trying, and sometimes even when misguided, they actually get it right.In settings ranging from New York to California, Michigan to Texas, these stories are small miracles that offer the sweep and scope and completeness of little novels. There is a rare assuredness in these tales of men in motion --moving from swagger to sweetness, from machismo to tenderness, and from loneliness toward love.

Nine richly varied, often funny, always moving stories that reveal the complex workings of the human heart. Bill Roorbach conjures vivid characters whose layered interior worlds feel at once familiar and extraordinary. He first made his mark as the winner of an O. Henry Prize for the title story of Big Bend, his first collection, which won the Flannery O'Connor Award. His new collection, The Girl of the Lake, captures a virtuoso in his prime. Roorbach's characters are unforgettable: among them an adventurous boy who learns what courage really is when an aging nobleman recounts history to him; a couple hiking through the mountains whose vacation and relationship ends catastrophically; a teenager being pursued by three sisters all at once; a tech genius who exacts revenge on his wife and best friend over a stolen kiss from years past. These moving and funny stories are as rich in scope, emotional, and memorable as Bill Roorbach's novels. He has been called "a kinder, gentler John Irving... a humane and entertaining storyteller with a smooth, graceful style" (the Washington Post), and his work has been described as "hilarious and heartbreaking, wild and wise" (Parade magazine), all of which is evident in spades (and also hearts, clubs, and diamonds) in every story in this arresting new collection.

Through quirky plots, one-of-kind characters, and more than a few twists, the stories in "Big Bend" examine gentle-hearted men and their relationships. From made-in-heaven meetings to troublesome liaisons, Roorbach's characters experience romance in unexpected, sometimes disastrous ways.
In "Fog," a teenage boy learns hard lessons about canoes, the Gulf of Maine, sex, and love. A struggling young artist goes home for the holidays in search of succor for the stomach--and heart--with poor results in "Thanksgiving." Other stories recount the ultimately disastrous reunion of estranged friends, an unemployed architect's foolish courting with bad company, and a middle-aged rock star's struggle with the urge to settle down. In the tiitle story, "Big Bend," a grieving widower, troubled by his own waning years, is tempted by a seductively attentive birdwatcher no older than his daughter.
Poignant tales of hauntingly familiar situations, Bill Roorbach's stories are full of heart, romance, edgy humor, and the frequently concealed vulnerability of men.