"It's spring in the tiny town of Damariscotta, a tourist haven on the coast of Maine known for its oysters and antiques. Andrew, a high school English teacher recently returned to the area, has brought his family to Ed and Steph Thatch's sprawling riverside estate to attend a reception for the Amherst women's lacrosse team. Back when they were all teenagers, Andrew never could have predicted that Ed, descended from a long line of lobstermen, or Steph,...

"Rachel Cusk's Outline is a novel in ten conversations. Spare and stark, it follows a novelist teaching a course in creative writing during an oppressively hot summer in Athens. She leads her students in storytelling exercises. She meets other visiting writers for dinners and discourse. She goes swimming with an elderly Greek bachelor. The people she encounters speak, volubly, about themselves: their fantasies, anxieties, pet theories, regrets, and...

"Jason Fitger is a beleaguered professor of creative writing and literature at Payne University, a small and not very distinguished liberal arts college in the Midwest ... His once-promising writing career is in the doldrums, as is his romantic life, in part as the result of his unwise use of his private affairs for his novels ... In short, his life is a tale of woe, and the vehicle this ... novel uses to tell that tale is a series of ... letters...

It is October 1940 and Gervase Fen, Oxford don and part-time sleuth--is preparing for the new term. Trouble is in store when Robert Warner, up and coming playwright, chooses Oxford for the premiere of his latest play, Metromania. Together with his cast he comes to Oxford to rehearse a week before the opening, but Warner's motley troupe includes the beautiful but dangerous Yseut Haskell. When she is found shot dead in the college room of a young man...

"Forty years ago, Steven Smith found a copy of a famous children's book by disgraced author Edith Twyford, its margins full of strange markings and annotations. Severely dyslexic and wanting to know more, he took it to his remedial English teacher Miss Iles, not realizing the chain of events that he was setting in motion. Miss Iles became convinced that the book was the key to solving a puzzle, and that a message in secret code ran through all Twyford's...

"How long must we pay for the crimes of our youth? A prestigious boys' boarding school. A best friend's betrayal. A decades-old mystery of a missing student. In this sharp literary thriller, Matthias Glass gets drawn into his past as he attempts to come to terms with the long-ago disappearance of his prep-school roommate--and to become the man he is meant to be In the middle of his senior year at the Blackburne School in Virginia, Matthias Glass's...

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • We all have dreams—things we fantasize about doing and generally never get around to. This is the story of Azar Nafisi’s dream and of the nightmare that made it come true.
For two years before she left Iran in 1997, Nafisi gathered seven young women at her house every Thursday morning to read and discuss forbidden works of Western literature. They were all former students whom she had...

"Ben Jameson begins his teaching career in a small private school in Northern Virginia. He is idealistic, happy to have his first job after graduate school and hoping some day to figure out what he really wants out of life. In the two years he teaches English at Glenn Acres Preparatory School, he discovers what he believes will be his life's work; teaching is what he finally comes to with all his heart. His fiance believes he suffers from a 'Christ...