In this incisive collection of speeches and essays, Jonathan Franzen returns with renewed vigor to the themes, both human and literary, that have long preoccupied him. Whether recalling his violent encounter with bird poachers in Cyprus, examining his feelings about the suicide of his friend and rival David Foster Wallace, or offering a moving and witty take on the ways that technology has changed how people express their love, these pieces deliver on Franzen's implicit promise to conceal nothing. A remarkable and revelatory work from one of our greatest living novelists, Farther Away traces the progress of a unique and mature mind wrestling with itself, with literature, and with some of the most important issues of our day.

Within Roger Fanning's first collection of poems, the mundane is redeemed: the soft glow given off from a dying man's gold tooth, a plumber's battle with a "family of furtive opulence," and the strange poignancy that is evoked by large underwear hanging on a clothesline in the moonloght. The everyday is made complex and mysterious through Fanning's simple lines and stanzas.

It’s the early 1980s—the country is in a deep recession, and life after college is harder than ever. In the cafés on College Hill, the wised-up kids are inhaling Derrida and listening to Talking Heads. But Madeleine Hanna, dutiful English major, is writing her senior thesis on Jane Austen and George Eliot, purveyors of the marriage plot that lies at the heart of the greatest English novels. As Madeleine tries to understand why “it became laughable to read writers like Cheever and Updike, who wrote about the suburbia Madeleine and most of her friends had grown up in, in favor of reading the Marquis de Sade, who wrote about deflowering virgins in eighteenth-century France,” real life, in the form of two very different guys, intervenes. Leonard Bankhead—charismatic loner, college Darwinist, and lost Portland boy—suddenly turns up in a semiotics seminar, and soon Madeleine finds herself in a highly charged erotic and intellectual relationship with him. At the same time, her old “friend” Mitchell Grammaticus—who’s been reading Christian mysticism and generally acting strange—resurfaces, obsessed with the idea that Madeleine is destined to be his mate. Over the next year, as the members of the triangle in this amazing, spellbinding novel graduate from college and enter the real world, events force them to reevaluate everything they learned in school. Leonard and Madeleine move to a biology Laboratory on Cape Cod, but can’t escape the secret responsible for Leonard’s seemingly inexhaustible energy and plunging moods. And Mitchell, traveling around the world to get Madeleine out of his mind, finds himself face-to-face with ultimate questions about the meaning of life, the existence of God, and the true nature of love.

Are the great love stories of the nineteenth century dead? Or can there be a new story, written for today and alive to the realities of feminism, sexual freedom, prenups, and divorce? With devastating wit and an abiding understanding of and affection for his characters, Jeffrey Eugenides revives the motivating energies of the Novel, while creating a story so contemporary and fresh that it reads like the intimate journal of our own lives.

Characters make discoveries about themselves and their relationships, in seven stories that comment on topics ranging from suburbia to Central American politics. Eisenberg's second collection.

Seven stories tell of a tragic love affair, a teenager's involvement with an older man, a struggle to quit smoking, and a woman who discovers she is in love with an old friend. Eisenberg's first collection of stories.

When Deborah Eisenberg's first book of stories, Transactions in a Foreign Currency, was published, John Updike noted: "Whenever a new writer arrives, a new window of life is opened, and this has happened here." The scope and depth of Eisenberg's idiosyncratic vision were even more apparent in her second collection, Under the 82nd Airborne, which The New York Times Book Review called "nothing short of extraordinary." As these two collections gathered here into one volume show, Eisenberg's stories have an astonishing power and range. Her characters, whether they are walking in the streets of Manhattan or seemingly abandoned in foreign countries, continually make disquieting and sometimes life-threatening discoveries about themselves, discoveries that illuminate not only their own lives but also the wider net of relationships in which they are enmeshed.

Deborah Eisenberg's deeply etched and mysterious stories focus on individuals grappling with dislocations, ironies, and compromises levied by ordinary reality and the vivid, troubling worlds her characters inhabit. With lyrical and gleaming prose, Eisenberg pries open daily life to explore the hidden mechanisms of human behavior.

No Moon is a book of poems about the powers and misadventures of memory, about chancy intimacies and unquiet departures parceled out as time, loss, death—an almanac of forces that mystify and transform our everyday lives.

Time is the hour at which a pub closes, the moment we must put our pencils down, a way of paying later for something now. A Grammar to Waking explores moments we wake to the grammar of living time, what Virginia Woolf called "moments of being." In the drift of the present, of song in the throat of its bird and the verb in its sentence, the drift of loved one into memory, of talk from the talker to the listener, how and where does meaning live? "There are so many rules we don't even know," writes Nancy Eimers, "but we wake to them anyway." This collection offers a reflective, loving look at the mystery of the time being.

For the last decade, Gretel Ehrlich has been obsessed by an island, a terrain, a culture, and the treacherous beauty of a world that is defined by ice. In This Cold Heaven she combines the story of her travels with history and cultural anthropology to reveal a Greenland that few of us could otherwise imagine.

Ehrlich unlocks the secrets of this severe land and those who live there; a hardy people who still travel by dogsled and kayak and prefer the mystical four months a year of endless darkness to the gentler summers without night. She discovers the twenty-three words the Inuit have for ice, befriends a polar bear hunter, and comes to agree with the great Danish-Inuit explorer Knud Rasmussen that “all true wisdom is only to be found far from the dwellings of man, in great solitudes.” This Cold Heaven is at once a thrilling adventure story and a meditation on the clarity of life at the extreme edge of the world.