At 1:59 a.m. in Spokane, Washington--eight days before the 1980 presidential election--Vince Camden pockets his stash of stolen credit cards and drops by an all-night poker game before heading to his witness-protection job dusting crullers at Donut Make You Hungry. Along with a neurotic hooker girlfriend, this is the total sum of Vince's new life. But when a familiar face shows up in town, Vince realizes his sordid past is still too close behind him. During the next unforgettable week, he'll negotiate a coast-to-coast maze of obsessive cops, eager politicians, and assorted mobsters--only to find that redemption might exist, of all places, in the voting booth.

What happens when small-time reporter Matthew Prior quits his job to gamble everything on a quixotic notion: a Web site devoted to financial journalism in the form of blank verse?

Before long, he wakes up to find himself jobless, hobbled with debt, spying on his wife's online flirtation, and six days away from losing his home. . . . Until, one night on a desperate two a.m. run to 7-Eleven, he falls in with some local stoners, and they end up hatching the biggest--and most misbegotten--plan yet.

The cover of this paperback edition comes in three different colors: green, blue, and orange.

While working the weekend night shift, Caroline Mabry, a weary Spokane police detective, encounters a seemingly unstable but charming derelict who tells her, "I'd like to confess." But he insists on writing out his statement in longhand. In the forty-eight hours that follow, the stranger confesses to not just a crime but an entire life--spinning a wry and haunting tale of youth and adulthood, of obsession and revenge, and of two men's intertwined lives.

Fiendishly clever and darkly funny, "Land of the Blind" speaks to the bonds and compromises we make as children--and to the fatal errors we can make at any time.

In this dazzling collection of stories, a son must repeatedly come out to his senile father while looking for a place that will care for the old man. An elderly couple confronts the note-taking fiction writer eavesdropping on their conversation. A famous actor in recovery has a one-night stand with the world's most surprising film critic. And in the beautifully romantic title story, a shy twenty-one-year-old studying Latin in Rome during "the year of my reinvention" finds himself face-to-face with the gorgeous Italian actress of his adolescent dreams. Funny, poignant, and redemptive, this collection takes the reader to Italy and Idaho, Washington and Mississippi. With his signature wit and bighearted approach to the darkest parts of humanity, Walter tackles the modern condition with a timeless touch.

The first collection of short fiction from Jess Walter, New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Ruins, We Live in Water is a diverse suite of stories marked by the wry wit and generosity of spirit that has made him one of America's most talked-about writers. Stories in We Live in Water range from comic tales of love to social satire and suspenseful crime fiction. Traveling from hip Portland to once-hip Seattle to never-hip Spokane, to a condemned casino in Las Vegas and a bottomless lake in the dark woods of Idaho, this is a world of lost fathers and redemptive con men, of personal struggles and diminished dreams. In title story "We Live in Water," a lawyer returns to his corrupt hometown to find his father, who disappeared 30 years earlier. In "Thief," a blue-collar worker turns unlikely detective to find out which of his kids is stealing from the family fund. "Anything Helps" sees a homeless man try to raise money to buy his son the new Harry Potter book; and in "Virgo," a newspaper editor attempts to get back at his superstitious ex-girlfriend by screwing with her horoscope. Also included are "Don't Eat Cat" and "Statistical Abstract of My Hometown, Spokane, Washington," both of which achieved cult status after their first publication online.

'A beautiful, lyric hymn to the power of social unrest in American history. Jess Walter is a national treasure' Anthony Doerr, author of All the Light We Cannot See _____________________________________________ It is 1909 in Spokane, Washington. The Dolan brothers are living by their wits, jumping freight trains and lining up for work at crooked job agencies. While sixteen-year-old Rye yearns for a steady job and a home, his dashing older brother Gig dreams of a better world, fighting alongside other union men for fair pay and decent treatment. When Rye finds himself drawn to suffragette Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, her passion sweeps him into the world of protest and dirty business. But a storm is coming, threatening to overwhelm them all . . . The Cold Millions is an intimate story of brotherhood, love, sacrifice and betrayal set against the panoramic backdrop of an early 20th century America. Jess Walter offers a stunning, kaleidoscopic portrait of a nation grappling with the chasm between rich and poor, dreams and reality, in a sensational tale that resonates powerfully with our own time. ___________________________________________ 'A work of irresistible characters, harrowing adventures and rip-roaring fun . . . One of the most captivating novels of the year' Washington Post 'Stunning' San Francisco Chronicle 'Warm and deeply humane, this transporting novel is a staggering achievement from a landmark writer' Esquire 'A vivid, propulsive, historical novel with a politically explosive backdrop that reverberates through our own' USA Today

During a routine drug bust, on a narrow bridge over white-water falls in the center of town, Spokane detective Caroline Mabry finds herself face-to-face with a brutal murderer. Within hours, the body of a young prostitute is found on the riverbank nearby. What follows confronts our fascination with pathology and murder and stares it down, as Caroline and her cynical partner, Alan Dupree--thrown headlong into the search for a serial murderer who communicates by killing women--uncover some hard truths about their profession . . . and each other.

Rich with the darkly muted colors of the Pacific Northwest skies, "Over Tumbled Graves" established Jess Walter as a novelist of extraordinary emotional depth and dimension.

"One of the most captivating novels of the year." - Washington Post NATIONAL BESTSELLER A Best Book of the Year: Bloomberg Boston Globe Chicago Public Library Chicago Tribune Esquire Kirkus New York Public Library New York Times Book Review (Historical Fiction) NPR's Fresh Air O Magazine Washington Post Publishers Weekly Seattle Times USA Today A Library Reads Pick An Indie Next Pick From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Ruins comes another "literary miracle" (NPR)--a propulsive, richly entertaining novel about two brothers swept up in the turbulent class warfare of the early twentieth century. An intimate story of brotherhood, love, sacrifice, and betrayal set against the panoramic backdrop of an early twentieth-century America that eerily echoes our own time, The Cold Millions offers a kaleidoscopic portrait of a nation grappling with the chasm between rich and poor, between harsh realities and simple dreams. The Dolans live by their wits, jumping freight trains and lining up for day work at crooked job agencies. While sixteen-year-old Rye yearns for a steady job and a home, his older brother, Gig, dreams of a better world, fighting alongside other union men for fair pay and decent treatment. Enter Ursula the Great, a vaudeville singer who performs with a live cougar and introduces the brothers to a far more dangerous creature: a mining magnate determined to keep his wealth and his hold on Ursula. Dubious of Gig's idealism, Rye finds himself drawn to a fearless nineteen-year-old activist and feminist named Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. But a storm is coming, threatening to overwhelm them all, and Rye will be forced to decide where he stands. Is it enough to win the occasional battle, even if you cannot win the war? Featuring an unforgettable cast of cops and tramps, suffragists and socialists, madams and murderers, The Cold Millions is a tour de force from a "writer who has planted himself firmly in the first rank of American authors" (Boston Globe).

The No. 1 New York Times Bestseller Jess Walter's Beautiful Ruins is a gorgeous, glamorous novel set in 1960s Italy and a modern Hollywood studio. The story begins in 1962. Somewhere on a rocky patch of the sun-drenched Italian coastline a young innkeeper, chest-deep in daydreams, looks out over the incandescent waters of the Ligurian Sea and views an apparition: a beautiful woman, a vision in white, approaching him on a boat. She is an American starlet, he soon learns, and she is dying. And the story begins again today, half a world away in Hollywood, when an elderly Italian man shows up on a movie studio's back lot searching for the woman he last saw at his hotel fifty years before. Gloriously inventive, funny, tender and constantly surprising, Beautiful Ruins is a novel full of fabulous and yet very flawed people, all of them striving towards another sort of life, a future that is both delightful and yet, tantalizingly, seems just out of reach. 'Magic...A monument to crazy love with a deeply romantic heart' New York Times 'A novel shot in sparkly Technicolor' Booklist 'Hilarious and compelling' Esquire 'Beautiful Ruins is a novel unlike any other you're likely to read this year' Nick Hornby, The Believer

On the last hot day of summer in 1992, gunfire cracked over a rocky knob in northern Idaho, just south of the Canadian border. By the next day three people were dead, and a small war was joined, pitting the full might of federal law enforcement against one well-armed family. Drawing on extensive interviews with Randy Weaver's family, government insiders, and others, Jess Walter traces the paths that led the Weavers to their confrontation with federal agents and led the government to treat a family like a gang of criminals.

This is the story of what happened on Ruby Ridge: the tragic and unlikely series of events that destroyed a family, brought down the number-two man in the FBI, and left in its wake a nation increasingly attuned to the dangers of unchecked federal power.

From the moment it opens--on a rocky patch of Italian coastline, circa 1962, when a daydreaming young innkeeper looks out over the water and spies a mysterious woman approaching him on a boat--Jess Walter's Beautiful Ruins is a dazzling, yet deeply human, roller coaster of a novel. From the lavish set of Cleopatra to the shabby revelry of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, to the back lots of contemporary Hollywood, Beautiful Ruins is gloriously inventive and constantly surprising--a story of flawed yet fascinating people navigating the rocky shores of their lives while clinging to their improbable dreams.

'A beautiful, lyric hymn to the power of social unrest in American history...funny and harrowing, sweet and violent, innocent and experienced; it walks a dozen tightropes' Anthony Doerr, author of All the Light We Cannot See _____________________________________________ 1909. Spokane, Washington. The Dolan brothers are living by their wits, jumping freight trains and lining up for work at crooked job agencies. While sixteen-year-old Rye yearns for a steady job and a home, his dashing older brother Gig dreams of a better world, fighting alongside other union men for fair pay and decent treatment. But then Rye finds himself drawn to suffragette Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and her passion sweeps him into the world of protest and dirty business. As a storm starts brewing, questions of love, sacrifice, brotherhood and betrayal emerge, threatening to overwhelm them all. . . The Cold Millions is at once an intimate story and a stunning, kaleidoscopic portrait of a nation grappling with the chasm between rich and poor, dreams and reality. Set against the panoramic backdrop of an early 20th century America, Jess Walter offers a sensational tale that resonates powerfully with our own time. ___________________________________________ 'A brilliantly multifaceted panorama of early 20th-century America...Walter is a writer whose work deserves a wide readership' Sunday Times 'A work of irresistible characters, harrowing adventures and rip-roaring fun . . . One of the most captivating novels of the year' Washington Post

Authentic reproductions of fascinating masked figures and elaborately carved dolls symbolizing gods and departed ancestors of the Pueblo Indians. Identification key.