Pot-growing siblings Paul and Lacey Hansen must investigate why the headless corpse of Lacey's ex-fiancé turned up on their property, in a metafictional mystery where the authors disagree as to how the story should progress.

"Anne Lamott enters a new and unexpected chapter of her own life: grandmotherhood. Stunned to learn that her son, Sam, is about to become a father at nineteen, Lamott begins a journal about the first year of her grandson Jax's life. In careful and often hilarious detail, Lamott and Sam, about whom she first wrote so movingly in Operating Instructions, struggle to balance their changing roles with the demands of college and work, as they both forge...

A seedy pulp novelist is recruited to ghost write the autobiography of an ex-Hollywood star who is living in exile on Malta to avoid a hitman the mob has sent after him.

Kay Effiel is an author writing her latest novel. Her story revolves about an isolated man named Harold Crick. What she doesn't know is that her fictionalized character is real. Harold is an IRS agent who has lived a dull existence. One day he begins to hear Karen's voice as she narrates what she is putting down on paper. Harold enlists the help of a literary professor to find out what is happening and ends up changing things about his life. He begins...

When Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. ducked into his classroom at the Iowa Writer's Workshop in September 1965, his jokes drew only weak laughter and a few rolled eyes. But workshop student Loree Rackstraw was quietly impressed by this "great bear of a man" and his down-to-earth sensibilities about writing. That fall, an impossible romance began between the then-unknown author and his student--a brief affair that matured into a joyful, lifelong friendship. Rackstraw...

The author traces her marriage and relocation to France at the height of her writing career, her devastation over her stillborn son in her ninth month of pregnancy, and her heart-wrenching grieving process.

Make a wish. . . . Lucy Hart knows better than anyone what it’s like to grow up without parents who loved her. In a childhood marked by neglect and loneliness, Lucy found her solace in books, namely the Clock Island series by Jack Masterson. Now a twenty-six-year-old teacher’s aide, she is able to share her love of reading with bright, young students, especially seven-year-old Christopher Lamb, who was left orphaned after the tragic death of his...

As bestselling novelist Amelie Ferrar knows, an affair with a married person is like a work of fiction: a kind of spy story with its rules and customs, negotiations and compromises, and many private rituals. But like any spy story, there will inevitably be a betrayal: something will slip, someone else will find out, someone may even die. As Amelie falls deeper into her obsession with the man she loves-and his wife-the line between the fiction she...

"After winning her local tennis club tournament, Scarlett Thomas, 41-year-old novelist, decided to dedicate a year of her life to tennis. At 12, Scarlett discovered her father was not the punk photographer who'd brought her up, but was in fact the man she previously knew as her godfather. At 14, she was sent to Mexico to connect with her terrifying grandmother. She was sent to a conservative boarding school in the middle of nowhere, her only link...