Addie is waiting for normal.But Addie's mom has an all-or-nothing approach to life: a food fiesta or an empty pantry, jubilation or gloom, her way or no way.All or nothing never adds up to normal. All or nothing can't bring you all to home, which is exactly where Addie longs to be, with her half sisters, every day.In spite of life's twists and turns, Addie remains optimistic. Someday, maybe, she'll find normal.Leslie Connor has created an inspiring novel about one girl's giant spirit. waiting for normal is a heartwarming gem.

In this splendid novel, Celeste finds herself engaged to Alex, a wealthy man whose standards are as exacting as her own -- or so she thought. As she begins to question their relationship and herself, Celeste is haunted by painful memories: of her past in well-heeled, blue-blooded Connecticut; of the friends and family who seem to have disappeared from her life; and of Nathan, for whom Celeste still carries a lingering passion. At last coming to terms with the lies and illusions that have propelled her forward for years, Celeste must take responsibility for the choices she has made. She decides to be true to herself -- and so challenges her fiancé, her family, and the very society in which she's steeped.

The lives of brothers Charlie and Owen Bender are changed forever on the night their father walks into the Vermont woods with a death wish and a shotgun. The second shock comes when his suicide note bequeaths the family's restaurant to Charlie alone, while leaving Owen with instructions to follow his own path, wherever it may take him.Years later, the restaurant is a success. The void in Charlie's life, created by his beloved brother's absence, is finally filled when a passionate affair becomes a deeply satisfying marriage. And now prodigal son Owen is returning home, to be welcomed back into the family fold. But the cruel legacy that tore a brotherhood apart created wounds not easily healed . . . and there must be reckoning.

So Dad's around lately. That's it. And I want to tell you things, throw fragments your way that I barely understand. Because it's just funny, flat out, the way someone you don't even know can get up in your face, tweak things that should be so ordinary. Or I think it's funny. Maybe you will too. Hailed by The New Yorker as "a fictional report from the strip-mall front lines of Generation Y," Important Things That Don't Matter is a provocative, moving, darkly funny portrait of family and divorce, a boy and his father, the eighties and nineties, and sex and intimacy that raises vital questions about a generation just now reaching adulthood.

Twenty-three-year-old Jo Green knows that if she has to spend one more night in ultra-provincial Niblet-Upon-Avon she'll go completely bonkers! So she answers an ad in the paper, bids her devoted boyfriend Shaun adieu, and heads off to the big city. With a new job that offers excitement; a cool car; and her own suite with a TV, DVD player, and a cell phone, how can she go wrong?Then she meets . . . the Fitzgeralds -- Dick and Vanessa and their unruly brood of rugrats who have suddenly been entrusted into Jo's care. There's eight-year-old "psycho-babe" Cassandra; bloodthirsty Zak, the six-year-old Terminator; and timid little Tallulah.So what else could go wrongHow about the arrival of Dick's children from his first marriage: teenage Toby and (gulp!) all-grown-up-and-very-nicely-at-that Josh the accountantAnd now that she has to temporarily share her room with Josh, Jo's head is really in a spin -- because with her hometown beau still in the picture and a sexy possibility sleeping just a foot away, life has suddenly gotten very complicated indeed!

Forty-two and divorced, Holli Templeton has just begun to realize the pleasures of owning her life for the first time. But the experience is short-lived. Her son Conner has unexpectedly fled college in Rhode Island and moved to Texas with his troubled girlfriend, Kilian. This alone is difficult to handle, but as Holli begins to understand the depth of the girl's problems, concern turns to crisis.Conner's situation is worsening, and as if that's not enough, Holli notices signs of serious decline in the beloved Texas grandmother who raised her. She has no choice but to leave the comfort zone of life in New York and return to her hometown in Texas to care for the people she loves.In the tight space between these two generations, Holli initially feels lost. The journey back stirs so many unresolved hurts from her childhood. But something else happens in this uneasy homecoming. Comfort arrives in the ethereal presence of the mother long lost to her, and Holli is surprised to find that as she struggles to help her son and grandmother, the wounds of her own past begin to heal.The space between before and after—easily the most challenging place she has ever known—begins to reveal an unanticipated hope for what the future might hold.

Despite being cursed with a boy's name, Kevin "Vi" Connelly is seriously female and a committed romantic. The affliction hit at the tender age of six when she was handed a basket of flower petals and ensnared by the "marry-tale." The thrill, the attention, the big white dress—it's the Best Day of Your Life, and it's seriously addictive. But at twenty-seven, with a closetful of pricey bridesmaid dresses she'll never wear again, a trunkful of embarrassing memories, and an empty bank account from paying for it all, the illusion of matrimony as the Answer to Everything begins to fray. As her friends' choices don't provide answers, and her family confuses her more, Vi faces off against her eminently untrustworthy boyfriend and the veracity of the BDOYL. Eleven weddings in eighteen months would send any sane woman either over the edge or scurrying for the altar. But as reality separates from illusion, Vi learns that letting go of someone else's story to write your own may be harder than buying the myth, but just might help her make the right choices for herself.

When Frank and Ellie Benton lose their only child, seven-year-old Benny, to a sudden illness, the perfect life they had built is shattered. Filled with wrenching memories, their Ann Arbor home becomes unbearable, and their marriage founders. But an unexpected job half a world away offers them an opportunity to start again. Life in Girbaug, India, holds promise—and peril—when Frank befriends Ramesh, a bright, curious boy who quickly becomes the focus of the grieving man's attentions. Haunted by memories of his dead son, Frank is consumed with making his family right—a quest that will lead him down an ever-darkening path with stark repercussions. Filled with satisfyingly real characters and glowing with local color, The Weight of Heaven is a rare glimpse of a family and a country struggling under pressures beyond their control. In a devastating look at cultural clashes and divides, Umrigar illuminates how slowly we recover from unforgettable loss, how easily good intentions can turn evil, and how far a person will go to build a new world for those he loves.

Miranda and her mama have always agreed about everything. So when Mama is offered a job with Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show painting scenery, she and Miranda certainly agree that it is time to get out of Fort Lincoln, where they've been doing soldiers' laundry for as long as Miranda can remember.But while Miranda blossoms on the road--meeting Annie Oakley, making friends with an Indian girl, and even participating in the show herself--Mama stews in her hatred of the Indians; she blames them all for her husband's death. And when Chief Sitting Bull joins the troupe, Miranda begins to see that there are two sides to every battle, a vision Mama won't share.Gloria Whelan combines expert storytelling and meticulous historical detail to create a provocative tale that shimmers with remarkable insight into the heart of American history.Notable Children's Trade Books in the Field of Social Studies 2000, National Council for SS & Child. Book Council

Tamara Contreras will never again settle for unmemorable sex. Her long-time boyfriend may look perfect to her traditional Mexican-American parents -- something Tamara has never been -- but at twenty-six she wants more from life than marriage and motherhood. So in front of everyone, Tamara does the unthinkable: She turns down her boyfriend's unexpected marriage proposal and leaves home for L.A.Tamara thinks she's got the single-girl-in-the-city thing down, until she runs into Will Benavides, the former high school bad boy turned firefighter. If Tamara's parents had known how Will lit up her teenage fantasies, she'd have been shipped off to the nuns for sure! Now Will wants to make those fantasies come true permanently.When an unexpected opportunity lands in her lap and Tamara has to choose between the career and the man of her dreams, she wonders if maybe la familia was right after all . . .

In the era before he created moody private investigator Matthew Scudder, burglar Bernie Rhodenbarr, sleepless spy Evan Tanner, and the amiable hit man Keller—and years before his first Edgar Award—a young writer named Lawrence Block submitted a story titled "You Can't Lose" to Manhunt magazine. It was published, and the rest is history.One Night Stands and Lost Weekends is a sterling collection of short crime fiction and suspense novelettes penned between 1958 and 1962 by a budding young master and soon-to-be Grand Master—an essential slice of genre history, and more fun than a high-speed police chase following a bank job gone bad.

When high school teacher Caelum Quirk and his wife, Maureen, a school nurse, move to Littleton, Colorado, they both get jobs at Columbine High School. In April 1999, while Caelum is away, Maureen finds herself in the library at Columbine, cowering in a cabinet and expecting to be killed. Miraculously, she survives, but at a cost: she is unable to recover from the trauma. When Caelum and Maureen flee to an illusion of safety on the Quirk family's Connecticut farm, they discover that the effects of chaos are not easily put right, and further tragedy ensues.

Between your full-length mirror and high-school biology class, you probably think you know a lot about the human body. While it's true that we live in an age when we're as obsessed with our bodies as we are with celebrity hairstyles, the reality is that most of us know very little about what chugs, churns, and thumps throughout this miraculous, scientific, and artistic system of anatomy. Yes, you've owned your skin-covered shell for decades, but you probably know more about your cell-phone plan than you do about your own body. When it comes to your longevity and quality of life, understanding your internal systems gives you the power, authority, and ability to live a healthier, younger, and better life.The flagship book of the YOU series, which spawned three subsequent New York Times bestsellers, has now been expanded and updated to make you understand your body even better—perhaps too well.YOU: The Owner's Manual, Updated and Expanded Edition challenges your preconceived notions about how the human body works and ages, then takes you on a tour through all of the highways, back roads, and landmarks inside of you. In this update, the doctors have included a new chapter on the liver and pancreas, which will finally demystify the most exotic parts of our bodies; a new workout chapter that will finally get you moving; and nearly one hundred Q&As asked by you, the reader. It has also been updated throughout to give you up-to-the-minute know-how to not just understand what to do to keep fit, but also why and how. The book opens with a quiz, "How Well Do You Know Your Body?," which sets the stage for the following chapters. After taking the quiz, you'll learn about all of your blood-pumping, food-digesting, and keys-remembering systems and organs, including the heart, brain, lungs, immune system, bones, and sensory organs. Each chapter also contains common myths of the particular body part that the authors will debunk.Just as important, you'll get the facts and advice you need to keep your body running long and strong. You'll find out how diseases start and how they affect your body—as well as advice on how to prevent and beat conditions that threaten your quality of life. Complete with exercise tips, nutritional guidelines, simple lifestyle changes, and alternative approaches, YOU: The Owner's Manual, Updated and Expanded Edition gives you an easy, comprehensive, and life-changing how-to plan for fending off the gremlins of aging. To top it off, this new edition includes even more great-tasting and calorie-saving recipes as part of the Owner's Manual Diet—an eating plan that is designed with only one goal in mind: to help you live a younger life.Welcome to your body. Why don't you come on in and take a look around?

Between your full-length mirror and high-school biology class, you probably think you know a lot about the human body. While it's true that we live in an age when we're as obsessed with our bodies as we are with celebrity hairstyles, the reality is that most of us know very little about what chugs, churns, and thumps throughout this miraculous, scientific, and artistic system of anatomy. Yes, you've owned your skin-covered shell for decades, but you probably know more about your cell-phone plan than you do about your own body. When it comes to your longevity and quality of life, understanding your internal systems gives you the power, authority, and ability to live a healthier, younger, and better life.The flagship book of the YOU series, which spawned three subsequent New York Times bestsellers, has now been expanded and updated to make you understand your body even better—perhaps too well.YOU: The Owner's Manual, Updated and Expanded Edition challenges your preconceived notions about how the human body works and ages, then takes you on a tour through all of the highways, back roads, and landmarks inside of you. In this update, the doctors have included a new chapter on the liver and pancreas, which will finally demystify the most exotic parts of our bodies; a new workout chapter that will finally get you moving; and nearly one hundred Q&As asked by you, the reader. It has also been updated throughout to give you up-to-the-minute know-how to not just understand what to do to keep fit, but also why and how. The book opens with a quiz, "How Well Do You Know Your Body?," which sets the stage for the following chapters. After taking the quiz, you'll learn about all of your blood-pumping, food-digesting, and keys-remembering systems and organs, including the heart, brain, lungs, immune system, bones, and sensory organs. Each chapter also contains common myths of the particular body part that the authors will debunk.Just as important, you'll get the facts and advice you need to keep your body running long and strong. You'll find out how diseases start and how they affect your body—as well as advice on how to prevent and beat conditions that threaten your quality of life. Complete with exercise tips, nutritional guidelines, simple lifestyle changes, and alternative approaches, YOU: The Owner's Manual, Updated and Expanded Edition gives you an easy, comprehensive, and life-changing how-to plan for fending off the gremlins of aging. To top it off, this new edition includes even more great-tasting and calorie-saving recipes as part of the Owner's Manual Diet—an eating plan that is designed with only one goal in mind: to help you live a younger life.Welcome to your body. Why don't you come on in and take a look around?

Between your full-length mirror and high-school biology class, you probably think you know a lot about the human body. While it's true that we live in an age when we're as obsessed with our bodies as we are with celebrity hairstyles, the reality is that most of us know very little about what chugs, churns, and thumps throughout this miraculous, scientific, and artistic system of anatomy. Yes, you've owned your skin-covered shell for decades, but you probably know more about your cell-phone plan than you do about your own body. When it comes to your longevity and quality of life, understanding your internal systems gives you the power, authority, and ability to live a healthier, younger, and better life.The flagship book of the YOU series, which spawned three subsequent New York Times bestsellers, has now been expanded and updated to make you understand your body even better—perhaps too well.YOU: The Owner's Manual, Updated and Expanded Edition challenges your preconceived notions about how the human body works and ages, then takes you on a tour through all of the highways, back roads, and landmarks inside of you. In this update, the doctors have included a new chapter on the liver and pancreas, which will finally demystify the most exotic parts of our bodies; a new workout chapter that will finally get you moving; and nearly one hundred Q&As asked by you, the reader. It has also been updated throughout to give you up-to-the-minute know-how to not just understand what to do to keep fit, but also why and how. The book opens with a quiz, "How Well Do You Know Your Body?," which sets the stage for the following chapters. After taking the quiz, you'll learn about all of your blood-pumping, food-digesting, and keys-remembering systems and organs, including the heart, brain, lungs, immune system, bones, and sensory organs. Each chapter also contains common myths of the particular body part that the authors will debunk.Just as important, you'll get the facts and advice you need to keep your body running long and strong. You'll find out how diseases start and how they affect your body—as well as advice on how to prevent and beat conditions that threaten your quality of life. Complete with exercise tips, nutritional guidelines, simple lifestyle changes, and alternative approaches, YOU: The Owner's Manual, Updated and Expanded Edition gives you an easy, comprehensive, and life-changing how-to plan for fending off the gremlins of aging. To top it off, this new edition includes even more great-tasting and calorie-saving recipes as part of the Owner's Manual Diet—an eating plan that is designed with only one goal in mind: to help you live a younger life.Welcome to your body. Why don't you come on in and take a look around?

What really happened at the back of the busDid they, or didn't theyDid she, or didn't sheSomething happened to fourteen-year-old Maisie Willard—something involving her three friends, all boys. But their stories don't match, and the rumors spin out of control. Then other people get involved . . . the school, the parents, the lawyers. The incident at the back of the bus becomes the center of Maisie's life and the talk of the school, and, horribly, it becomes news. With just a few words and a touch, the kids and their community are changed forever. From nationally acclaimed author Francine Prose comes an unforgettable story about the difficulties of telling the truth, the consequences of lying, and the most dangerous twist of all—the possibility that you yourself will come to believe something that you know isn't true.

Like a glass of lemonade that is both sweet and tart, writer Patricia Jones mixes up a refreshing blend of deep emotion and raw truth, tempered by a grounded dose of wisdom.To Lila Giles, the term "passing" refers to those pale-hued folks who take advantage of their creamy shade by crossing into the white world. Descended from a long line of an elite Baltimore family awash with "high-colored" skin just right for "passing", family lore told Lila that not one of them would have thought to deny their true selves and rich history in such a way. It is this sense of pride that bonds the Giles family together -- a bond strongly enforced by Lila's controlling stepmother Eulelie. But the delicate balance of this branch of the family Eulelie has so carefully engineered is threatened when Lila's brother decides to marry a woman from an oh-so-very-wrong family.A proud though severe matriarch, Eulelie Giles has ruled her four grown stepchildren with a heavy self-righteousness that could break the spirit of the most sound opponent, let alone the nearly thirty-year-old Lila. Relentlessly loyal to her privileged world, Eulelie has ingrained upon Lila and her three other stepchildren the importance of distinguishing between acceptable and unacceptable blacks. Despite her strident belief in an unyielding class line, Eulelie has kept a secret about her own past that manages to affect, in more ways than a few, anyone who enters her life. As the wedding day draws closer, Lila begins to look at her reality versus Eulelie's, and what Lila finds leads to a confrontation between stepmother and stepdaughter that could finally shatter Eulelie's reign over Lila and the family, but ultimately, one that will lead Eulelie back to the truth.Filled with multi-dimensional characters and rich with atmosphere, Passing is a story of tangled family relationships; the secrets, misunderstanding, and deceptions that hold them together.

The vampire in me was closer to the surface . . . Evernight Academy: an exclusive boarding school for the most beautiful, dangerous students of all—vampires. Bianca, born to two vampires, has always been told her destiny is to become one of them. But Bianca fell in love with Lucas—a vampire hunter sworn to destroy her kind. They were torn apart when his true identity was revealed, forcing him to flee the school. Although they may be separated, Bianca and Lucas will not give each other up. She will risk anything for the chance to see him again, even if it means coming face-to-face with the vampire hunters of Black Cross—or deceiving the powerful vampires of Evernight. Bianca's secrets will force her to live a life of lies. Yet Bianca isn't the only one keeping secrets. When Evernight is attacked by an evil force that seems to target her, she discovers the truth she thought she knew is only the beginning. . . .

A towering literary giant, Fyodor Dostoyevsky was—and remains—unparalleled in his understanding of the darkness that resides in the farthest corners of the human soul. Although his shorter works have been overshadowed by his astonishing novels—Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, to name but two—his stories and novellas deserve a place among the great literary inventions of the modern era, offering insight into the themes and ideas that drive his longer fiction. Included in this volume are some of Dostoyevsky's most troubling, moving, and poignant short works. Bonus storyHarper Perennial proudly supports the art of the short story. Included in this classic volume is a bonus story from one of our new writers, Barb Johnson, from her forthcoming collection, More of This World or Maybe Another. Read a short story today.

A short story from the collection Ugly Man by Dennis Cooper.

A short story from the collection Ugly Man by Dennis Cooper.