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Perfect. Pretty. Political. For nearly forty years, The Hellinger sisters of Hastings-on-Hudson-namely, Imperia (Perri), Olympia (Pia), and Augusta (Gus) -- have played the roles set down by their loving but domineering mother Carol. Perri, a mother of three, rules her four-bedroom palace in Westchester with a velvet fist, managing to fold even fitted sheets into immaculate rectangles. Pia, a gorgeous and fashionable Chelsea art gallery worker, still turns heads after becoming a single mother via sperm donation. And Gus, a fiercely independent lawyer and activist, doesn't let her break-up from her girlfriend stop her from attending New Year's Day protests on her way to family brunch. But the...
What if your best friend, whom you've always counted on to flounder in life and love (making your own modest accomplishments look not so bad), suddenly starts to surpass you in every way? Wendy's best friend, Daphne, has always been dependably prone to catastrophe. And Wendy has always been there to help. If Daphne veers from suicidal to madly in love, Wendy offers encouragement. But when Daphne is suddenly engaged, pregnant, and decorating a fabulous town house in no time at all, Wendy is . . . not so happy for her. Caught between wanting to be the best friend she prides herself on being and crippling jealousy of flighty Daphne, Wendy takes things to the extreme, waging a full-scale attack on her best friend -- all the while wearing her best, I'm-so-happy-for-you smile -- and ends up in way over her head. Rosenfeld has a knack for exposing the not-always-pretty side of being best friends -- in writing that is glittering and diamond-sharp. I'm So Happy For You is a smart, darkly humorous, and uncannily dead-on novel about female friendship.
Named one of the Best Books of 2017 by the Philadelphia Inquirer: All hell breaks loose in the liberal bubble when a mother's life spirals out of control when she's forced to rethink her bleeding heart ideals. For Karen Kipple, it isn't enough that she works full-time in the nonprofit sector for an organization that helps children from disadvantaged homes. She's also determined to live her personal life in accordance with her ideals. This means sending her daughter, Ruby, to an integrated public school in their Brooklyn neighborhood. But when a troubled student from a nearby housing project begins bullying children in Ruby's class, the distant social and economic issues Karen has always claimed to care about so passionately begin to feel uncomfortably close to home. A daring, discussable satire about gentrification and liberal hypocrisy, Class is also a smartly written story that reveals how life as we live it -- not as we like to imagine it -- often unfolds in gray areas.
You have to love her, even when you're laughing at her--Phoebe Fine, that is, the star of this hilariously eccentric and affecting new novel. On the cusp of thirty, Phoebe has fled the high life and, ultimately, the no life of trying and failing to "be somebody" in Manhattan. She returns to her parents' Depression-era bungalow across the river in New Jersey, the house she grew up in, to lie low with the crabgrass and dust bunnies and memories of her childhood, and perhaps just be herself. Easier said than done. Once resettled, Phoebe hatches a plan to resell her neighbors' garbage on eBay, begins work on a solo album for electric violin and voice called Bored and Lonely, and accepts a date w...
A fresh (in more than one sense) and honest new voice in fiction is extravagantly displayed in this first novel that candidly dissects modern romance. Plagued with weird parents, an underdeveloped body, and a mind on the verge of self-deconstruction, Phoebe Fine feels ill-equipped for a journey through the hardening chambers of the late twentieth-century heart. But from fifth grade and Roger Mancuso, equal parts baby Brando and court jester, through her early adult life with New Media executive Neil Schmertz, a babytalker who prefers spooning to sex, Phoebe trudges defiantly through guyland, armed with a tart tongue, and propelled by an insatiable desire to be loved.
Wendy's best friend, Daphne, has always been dependably prone to catastrophe. And Wendy has always been there to help. But when Daphne suddenly starts to surpass her in every way, Wendy is not so happy for her, in this darkly humorous take on female friendship.
Having depended on her best friend to continuously fail in life in order to make her look good, Wendy succumbs to jealousy when her friend enters a happy relationship, becomes pregnant, and begins decorating a fabulous home, a situation that prompts Wendy's extremely competitive response.
A middle-aged woman enters into a negotiation with her childhood best friend and confronts the damage done by their eighth grade teacher, who molested them both.
One of Vogue’s Best Books of the Year One of Esquire’s Best Books of the Year One of the Wall Street Journal’s Favorite Books of the Year One of the Most Anticipated Books of the Year: Vogue, Parade, Esquire, Bitch, and Maclean’s A New York Times and Washington Post Book to Watch A fiercely personal memoir about coming of age in the male-dominated literary world of the nineties, becoming the first female literary editor of Esquire, and Miller's personal and working relationship with David Foster Wallace A naive and idealistic twenty-two-year-old from the Midwest, Adrienne Miller got her lucky break when she was hired as an editorial assistant at GQ magazine in the mid-nineties. Even ...
100 EXTRAORDINARY STORIES ABOUT ORDINARY THINGS SIGNIFICANT OBJECTS: A Literary and Economic Experiment Can a great story transform a worthless trinket into a significant object? The Significant Objects project set out to answer that question once and for all, by recruiting a highly impressive crew of creative writers to invent stories about an unimpressive menagerie of items rescued from thrift stores and yard sales. That secondhand flotsam definitely becomes more valuable: sold on eBay, objects originally picked up for a buck or so sold for thousands of dollars in total — making the project a sensation in the literary blogosphere along the way. But something else happened, too: The stori...