Daren's tendency to blame everyone but himself when anything goes wrong causes problems with his best friend, with a young neighbor who idolizes him, and with one of his basketball teammates.

Having been recently dumped for the nineteenth time by a girl named Katherine, recent high school graduate and former child prodigy Colin sets off on a road trip with his best friend to try to find some new direction in life while also trying to create a mathematical formula to explain his relationships.

Her despicable husband left her for a lingerie model who's barely more than a teenager, and her kids are busy with their own lives. But before Miriam Elizabeth Swanson can work herself up into a true snit about it all, her newest tenant, Liz, arrives from Birmingham with plenty of troubles of her own. Then Miriam meets a man named Harrison, who makes her laugh, makes her cry, and makes her feel like a brand-new woman.

It's almost too much

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"Changez is living an immigrant's dream of America. At the top of his class at Princeton, he is snapped up by the elite valuation firm of Underwood Samson. He thrives on the energy of New York, and his budding romance with elegant, beautiful Erica promises entry into Manhattan society at the same exalted level once occupied by his own family back in Lahore. But in the wake of September 11, Changez finds his position in his adopted city suddenly overturned...

Would-be supervillain Doctor X-Ray swoops into the mall, threatening destruction, only to be confronted by a little girl asking "why" to his every declaration, until finally he is forced to reveal, and understand, the root of his anger--and so departs in peace.

After she dies in a car crash, teenaged Samantha relives the day of her death over and over again until, on the seventh day, she finally discovers a way to save herself.

New York Times Bestseller

""Inspired. . . . Kundera's most brilliantly imagined novel. . . . A book that entrances, beguiles and charms us from first page to last."" — Cleveland Plain Dealer

Milan Kundera's sixth novel springs from a casual gesture of a woman to her swimming instructor, a gesture that creates a character in the mind of a writer named Kundera. Like Flaubert's Emma or Tolstoy's

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Charlie, the smallest child in his first grade class, is amazed to discover that of the three pumpkins his teacher brings to school, the tiniest one has the most seeds.

A little girl struggling to find her place within her family is shown how special she is through a set of nesting dolls.

It's 1946 in the hardscrabble industrial city of Trenton, New Jersey, a woman made strong by wartime factory work kills her army veteran husband in a domestic brawl, disposes of his body, and assumes his identity. The family life Abe has so carefully constructed is crumbling under the intolerable pressures of his long ruse. Desperate to hold on to what he has left, Abe searches for solutions in the dying city. Written in brilliantly stylized prose,...