Amy Hempel is a master of the short story. This celebrated volume gathers together her complete work -- four short collections of stunning stories about marriages, minor disasters, and moments of revelation.

With her inimitable compassion and wit, Hempel introduces characters who make choices that seem inevitable, and whose longings and misgivings evoke eternal human experience.

For readers who have known Hempel's work for decades and for those who are just discovering her, this indispensable volume contains all the stories in "Reasons to Live," "At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom," "Tumble Home," and "The Dog of the Marriage." No reader of great writing should be without it.

A Retirement Gift for Women Who are Solo Agers"When it comes to aging, you can't count on your children, especially if you don't have any. But help is on the way." Harry R. Moody, Ph.D., retired Vice President for Academic Affairs, AARP Wall Street Journal Best Books of 2018 on Aging Well #1 Best Seller in Aging, Aging Parents, Gerontology, Volunteer Work, Budgeting & Money Management, Almanacs & Yearbooks, Eldercare, Retirement Planning , Parenting & Relationships, and Reference American Baby boomers are aging and fifteen million of them are childfree. Who will take care of them as they retire? Unprecedented in U.S. history, this demographic is creating challenges for these individuals as well as for society. Childless Solo Agers. In Essential Retirement Planning for Solo Agers, Sara Zeff Geber, a Ph.D. in Counseling and Human Behavior and a Certified Retirement Coach, coins the term "Solo Ager." Solo Agers are the segment of society that either does not have adult children or is single and expects be on their own as they grow older. A Happy retirement gift for women and men. With a compelling and readable style, Geber takes her Solo Ager readers on a journey toward happy retirement, starting with the choice to be childless and why so many boomers were able to make that decision. Through stories and narrative, she explores housing choices, relationships, and building a support system. Geber shares her expertise on what constitutes a fulfilling older life and how Solo Agers can maximize their opportunities for financial security, physical health, meaning and purpose in the second half of life. Learn about: Levels of care and independence Types of living arrangements End-of-life issues Legal and financial decisions If you have read Who Will Take Care of Me When I'm Old?, Aging Alone, or The Ultimate Retirement Guide for 50+ by Suze Orman, you will love Essential Retirement Planning for Solo Agers.

Rick Moody's novels have earned him a reputation as a "breathtaking" writer (The New York Times) and "a writer of immense gifts" (The San Francisco Examiner). His remarkable short stories have led both the New Yorker and Harpers to single him out as one of the most original and admired voices in a generation.
These stories are abundant proof of Rick Moody's grace as a stylist and a shaper of interior lives. He writes with equal force about the blithe energies of youth ("Boys") and the rueful onset of middle age ("Hawaiian Night"), about Midwestern optimists ("Double Zero") and West coast strategists ("Baggage Carousel"), about visionary exhilaration ("Forecast from the Retail Desk") and delusional catharsis ("Surplus Value Books: Catalog Number 13.") The astounding title story, which has already been reprinted in four different anthologies, is a masterpiece of remembrance and thwarted love.
Full of deep feeling and stunningly beautiful language, the stories in Demonology offer the deepest pleasures that fiction can afford.

Crewdson's most recent series of photographs, Twilight, are created as elaborately constructed film stills, catching the mysterious moment of time between before and after, revealing unknowable or unimaginable aspects of domestic reality. A cow lies on its back on the lawn between two houses while firemen secure the area and a man searches the sky. Could the cow have rained down from above? In another image stacks and stacks of inedible slices of bread - bearing an odd resemblance to the mysterious monoliths at Stonehenge - are watched over by a gathering of birds. Both entirely foreign and oddly familiar, these images are carefully orchestrated events that challenge our very notions of familiarity, undermining our sense of certainty. These eerie and evocative photographs pair beauty with horror, obsession with disgust, and the real with the surreal, suggesting narratives open to endless interpretations. The book includes an essay written by fiction writer Rick Moody. The book and exhibitions are comprised of the forty images from his Twilight series which was begun in 1998 - these exhibitions and this book chronicle the completion of the series and mark the first time it will be seen in its entirety.

"To be up all night in the darkness of your youth but to be ready for the day to come...that was what going to Brown felt like." --Jeffrey Eugenides
In celebration of Brown University's 250th anniversary, fifty remarkable, prizewinning writers and artists who went to Brown provide unique stories--many published for the first time--about their adventures on College Hill. Funny, poignant, subversive, and nostalgic, the essays, comics, and poems in this collection paint a vivid picture of college life, from the 1950s to the present, at one of America's most interesting universities.
Contributors:
Donald Antrim, Robert Arellano, M. Charles Bakst, Amy DuBois Barnett, Lisa Birnbach, Kate Bornstein, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, Mary Caponegro, Susan Cheever, Brian Christian, Pamela Constable, Nicole Cooley, Dana Cowin, Spencer R. Crew, Edwidge Danticat, Dilip D'Souza, David Ebershoff, Jeffrey Eugenides, Richard Foreman, Amity Gaige, Robin Green, Andrew Sean Greer, Christina Haag, Joan Hilty, A.J. Jacobs, Sean Kelly, David Klinghoffer, Jincy Willett Kornhauser, Marie Myung-Ok Lee, David Levithan, Mara Liasson, Lois Lowry, Ira C. Magaziner, Madeline Miller, Christine Montross, Rick Moody, Jonathan Mooney, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, Dawn Raffel, Bill Reynolds, Marilynne Robinson, Sarah Ruhl, Ariel Sabar, Joanna Scott, Jeff Shesol, David Shields, Krista Tippett, Alfred Uhry, Afaa Michael Weaver, and Meg Wolitzer
"At Brown, we felt safely ensconced in a carefree, counterculture cocoon--free to criticize the university president, join a strike by cafeteria workers, break china laughing, or kiss the sky." --Pamela Constable

Montese Crandall is a downtrodden writer whose rare collection of baseball cards won't sustain him, financially or emotionally, through the grave illness of his wife. Luckily, he swindles himself a job churning out a novelization of the 2025 remake of a 1963 horror film, The Crawling Hand. Crandall tells therein of the United States, in a bid to regain global eminence, launching at last its doomed manned mission to Mars. Three space pods with nine Americans on board travel three months, expecting to spend three years as the planet's first colonists. When a secret mission to retrieve a flesh-eating bacterium for use in bio-warfare is uncovered, mayhem ensues.
Only a lonely human arm (missing its middle finger) returns to earth, crash-landing in the Arizona desert. The arm may hold the secret to reanimation or it may simply be an infectious killing machine. It's crawl through the heartbroken wasteland of civilization is recorded in this stunningly inventive, sometimes hilarious, monumental novel.

Rick Moody has been writing about music as long as he has been writing, and this book provides an ample selection from that output. His anatomy of the word cool reminds us that, in the postwar 40s, it was infused with the feeling of jazz music but is now merely a synonym for neat. "On Celestial Music," which was included in" Best American Essays," 2008, begins with a lament for the loss in recent music of the vulnerability expressed by Otis Redding's masterpiece, "Try a Little Tenderness;" moves on to Moody's infatuation with the ecstatic music of the Velvet Underground; and ends with an appreciation of Arvo Part and Purcell, close as they are to nature, "the music of the spheres."
Contemporary groups covered include Magnetic Fields (their love songs), Wilco (the band's and Jeff Tweedy's evolution), Danielson Famile (an evangelical rock band), The Pogues (Shane McGowan's problems with addiction), The Lounge Lizards (John Lurie's brilliance), and Meredith Monk, who once recorded a song inspired by Rick Moody's story "Boys." Always both incisive and personable, these pieces inspire us to dive as deeply into the music that enhances our lives as Moody has done--and introduces us to wonderful sounds we may not know.

Although admired by D. H. Lawrence, this modern classic went generally unnoticed during the years after its publication in 1925. Yet it is "a fundamental book, essential if one proposes to come to terms with American literature" (Times Literary Supplement). William Carlos Williams was not a historian, but he was fascinated by the texture of American history. Beginning with Columbus's discovery of the Indies and moving on through Sir Walter Raleigh, Cotton Mather, Daniel Boone, George Washington, Ben Franklin, Aaron Burr, Edgar Allan Poe, and Abraham Lincoln, Williams found in the fabric of familiar episodes new shades of meaning and configurations of character. He brought a poetic imagination to the task of reconstructing a live tradition for Americans, and what results is one of the finest works of prose to have been penned by any writer of the twentieth century.

At the center of The Omega Force, which opens RIGHT LIVELIHOODS, is a buffoonish former government official in rocky recovery. Dr. "Jamie" Van Deusen is determined to protect his habitat--its golf courses (and Bloody Marys), pizza places (and beers) from "dark complected" foreign nationals. His patriotism and wild imagination are mainly fueled by a fall off the wagon. The collection's second novella, K & K, concerns a lonely young office manager at an insurance agency, where the office suggestion box is yielding unpleasant messages that escalate to a scary pitch. Ellie Knight- Cameron's responses to these random diatribes illuminate the toll that a lack of self-awareness can take. The book ends with a cataclysmic vision of New York City, after the leveling of 50 square blocks of Manhattan. Four million have died. Albertine, the "street name for the buzz of a lifetime," is a mindaltering drug that sets The Albertine Notes in motion. Only Rick Moody could lead us to feel affection for the various misguided, earnestly striving characters in this alternately unsettling and warm trio of stories.

During one month in the autumn of election year 2000, scores of movie-business strivers are focused on one goal: getting a piece of an elusive, but surely huge, television saga, the one that opens with Huns sweeping through Mongolia and closes with a Mormon diviner in the Las Vegas desert; the sure-to-please-everyone multigenerational TV miniseries about diviners, those miracle workers who bring water to perpetually thirsty (and hungry and love-starved) humankind. Among the wannabes: Vanessa Meandro, hot-tempered head of Means of Production, an indie film company; her harried and varied staff; a Sikh cab driver, promoted to the office of -theory and practice of TV; a bipolar bicycle messenger, who makes a fateful mis-delivery; two celebrity publicists, the Vanderbilt girls; a thriller writer who gives Botox parties; the daughter of an L.A. big-shot, who is hired to fetch Vanessa+s Krispy Kremes and more; a word man who coined the phrase--inspired by a true story; and a supreme court justice who wants to write the script.A few true artists surface in the course of Moody+s rollicking but intricately woven novel, and real emotion eventually blossoms for most of Vanessa's staff at Means of Production, even herself. THE DIVINERS is a cautionary tale about pointless ambition; a richly detailed look at the interlocking worlds of money, politics, addiction, sex, work, and family in modern America; and a masterpiece of comedy that will bring Rick Moody to a still higher level of appreciation.

From the concentric rings of strangers passing on a New York City street to the rings of madness in a vainglorious college student's mind, Rick Moody opens up to us a world of frustration, yearning, lies, and neglect whose frontline soldiers are the young. In the stunning title novella, a tale of sexual decay and obsession, he challenges his characters and readers alike to open up and feel their pain—our pain—even when there can be no turning back.

Paperback is the ideal format for this acclaimed anthology in which twenty-one prominent American writers -- all of whom came of age in the baby boom and Generation X years -- look at the New Testament with a fresh eye toward its meaning for them, and for us, today. These thought-provoking essays will reassure, excite, and inspire anyone who has felt the need to approach spirituality in a personal or unorthodox way.

With an introduction by Rick Moody and an afterword by Darcey Steinke, Joyful Noise includes contributions from:

Madison Smartt Bell -- April Bernard -- Catherine Bowman -- Joseph Caldwell -- Benjamin Cheever -- Lydia Davis -- Jeffrey Eugenides -- Eurydice -- Coco Fusco -- Lucy Grealy -- Barry Hannah -- bell hooks -- Jim Lewis -- Ann Patchett -- Ann Powers -- Joanna Scott -- Lisa Shea -- Stephen Westfall -- Kim Wozencraft

With his two richly praised previous novels, Rick Moody has won a reputation as one of the most talented writers at work today. Now, in Purple America, he has written the breakthrough novel that readers have eagerly anticipated: a brilliantly written and emotional exploration of the unruly forces that surge inside every family.

Purple America brings us a family in extremis: a son is summoned home to care for his mother, who has long been sick, after she is abandoned by her husband. Over the course of a single weekend night, the son, Hex Raitliffe, sees his good intentions annihilated by a phalanx of opposing forces—not least of them his own predilection for strong drink. Hex confronts his stepfather, stirs up the heat of an old attraction, and tries to accommodate his mothers demands. What begins as a mission of mercy leads, one fatal step after another, to confusion, debauchery, old wounds reopened, and the stinging revelations that only a visit home can bring.

The story arrives in the voices of Hex, his mother, his stepfather, and others whose paths they cross this night. Through their thoughts and their memories we see also, amazingly, a portrait of the family in its heyday: the joy of new love, the innocence of young families, and the optimism that brings people together with the idea of creating something new. Even as Hex reels through the catastrophic present, amid tears and confrontations and the shadow of death, the novel shows with great tenderness the beauty of everyday longings for shelter, for company, for family, for peace.

The rich weave of Purple Americaencompasses the suburbs and the city, growing up and growing old, vanity and humility, ambition and surrender. Illuminated by a fierce intelligence and animated in rhapsodic prose, this is an original and unforgettable work from a writer with dazzling strengths.

Winner of the tenth annual Pushcart Press Editors' Book Award

The first novel by the acclaimed author of The Ice Storm and Demonology follows a group of friends in Haledon, New Jersey, through one spring in their rocky passage toward adulthood. They are out of school, trying to start a band, trying to find work—looking for something to do in the degraded terrain of their suburban hometown. Garden State captures the lyricism of stark lives in an intense and unforgettable story of friendship and betrayal.

Nixon and 'Nam, pet rocks and shag rugs, wife-swapping and party-hopping. Suburban New England, 1973, and the Hood family are about to wish they'd stayed home. Astutely acerbic, painfully funny, THE ICE STORM is an astonishing novel of the decade that taste forgot.

1973 - ‘The last year of the sixties’ as the author describes it. Amidst the worst storm for 30 years the local families gather for a party - the highlight of which is the wife-swapping ‘key game’ - and for two couples this supposedly harmless piece of liberal-minded entertainment spells permanent disaster. Rick Moody’s first novel is a dark satire on the 1970s, the gadgets, the music, the politics and most of all the people.
 

The year is 1973. As a freak winter storm bears down on an exclusive, affluent suburb in Connecticut, cars skid out of control, fathers and mothers swap partners, and their children experiment with sex, drugs, and even suicide. Here two families, the Hoods and the Williamses, come face-to-face with the seething emotions behind the well-clipped lawns of their lives—in a novel widely hailed as a funny, acerbic, and moving hymn to a dazed and confused era of American life.