A once-respected college professor and novelist, Dale Stewart has sabotaged his career and his marriage — and now darkness is closing in on him. In the last hours of Halloween he has returned to the dying town of Elm Haven, his boyhood home, where he hopes to find peace in isolation. But moving into a long-deserted farmhouse on the far outskirts of town — the one-time residence of a strange and brilliant friend who lost his young life in a

...

Two American couples, one from the East and one from the West, form a fast and lifelong friendship during the mid-thirties of the Depression.

Tom Violet's life has brought a far different reality from his dreams of having a beautiful wife, a satisfying career as a successful novelist and a happy dog to greet him as he returns home. But his novel is currently hidden in his desk drawer while his father has just won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. And the dog has acute anxiety. But Tom has decided to do something to control of his own happiness, even if it means making a complete idiot of...

"A famous author of gory bestsellers and a former classmate of Charlie's, Godfrey Priest may be the pride of Athena, but Charlie remembers him as an arrogant, manipulative jerk--and he's not the only one. Godfrey's homecoming as a distinguished alumnus couldn't possibly go worse: by lunch, he's put a man in the hospital. And by dinner, Godfrey's dead. Now it's up to Charlie, with some help from Diesel, to paw through the town's grudges and find the...

A "stylish and sharp" character-driven suspense novel, "with wicked hairpin turns," about a famous novelist and a small-town striver locked in a struggle for fortune and fame. (Maria Semple, author of Where'd You Go, Bernadette?)Florence Darrow is a low-level publishing employee who believes that she's destined to be a famous writer. When she stumbles into a job the assistant to the brilliant, enigmatic novelist known as Maud Dixon -- whose true identity...

Alma Cruz, the celebrated writer at the heart of The Cemetery of Untold Stories , doesn’t want to end up like her friend, a novelist who fought so long and hard to finish a book that it threatened her sanity. So when Alma inherits a small plot of land in the Dominican Republic, her homeland, she has the beautiful idea of turning it into a place to bury her untold stories—literally. She creates a graveyard for the manuscript drafts and revisions,...

"Jean Hanff Korelitz's The Plot is a psychologically suspenseful novel about a story too good not to steal, and the writer who steals it. Jacob Finch Bonner was once a promising young novelist with a respectably published first book. Today, he's teachingin a third-rate MFA program and struggling to maintain what's left of his self-respect; he hasn't written-let alone published-anything decent in years. When Evan Parker, his most arrogant student,...

"In this twisted debut thriller, a reclusive author sets the perfect trap for her sister's murderer--but is he really the killer? For 11 years, the bestselling author Linda Conrads has mystified fans by never setting foot outside her home. Haunted bythe unsolved murder of her younger sister--who she discovered in a pool of blood--and the face of the man she saw fleeing the scene, Linda's hermit existence helps her cope with debilitating anxiety....

"Quichotte, an aging traveling salesman obsessed with the "unreal real" of TV, falls in impossible love with a queen of the screen; while obsessively writing her love letters, he wishes an imaginary son, Sancho, into existence. Together they set off across America in Quichotte's trusty Chevy Cruze to find her and convince her of his love. Meanwhile, Quichotte's tragicomic story is being told by the author who created him: Brother, a mediocre spy novelist...

"Rachel Cusk's Outline is a novel in ten conversations. Spare and stark, it follows a novelist teaching a course in creative writing during an oppressively hot summer in Athens. She leads her students in storytelling exercises. She meets other visiting writers for dinners and discourse. She goes swimming with an elderly Greek bachelor. The people she encounters speak, volubly, about themselves: their fantasies, anxieties, pet theories, regrets, and...