The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune keep hitting beleaguered English professor Jason Fitger right between the eyes in this hilarious and eagerly awaited sequel to the cult classic of anhedonic academe, the Thurber Prize-winning Dear Committee Members. Once more into the breach ... Now is the fall of his discontent, as Jason Fitger, newly appointed chair of the English Department of Payne University, takes arms against a sea of troubles, personal...

Fifty-year-old Alice Howland, a Harvard professor of cognitive psychology, is at the top of her game. Her kids are grown, her marriage secure, her career on fire, when after mere months of forgetfulness she finds herself in the rapidly downward spiral of early onset Alzheimer's disease. With no cure or treatment, Alice struggles to find meaning and purpose in her everyday life as her concept of self slips away. Without memory or hope, she is forced...

"Jane Start is thirty-three, broke, and recently single. Ten years prior, she had a hit song -- written by world-famous superstar Jonesy -- but Jane hasn't had a breakout since. Now she's living out of four garbage bags at her parents' house, reduced to performing to Karaoke tracks in Las Vegas. But when her longtime manager Pippa sends Jane to London to regroup, she's seated next to an intriguing stranger on the flight -- the other Tom Hardy, an...

When Chicagoan Russell Stone finds himself teaching a Creative Nonfiction class, he encounters a young Algerian woman with a disturbingly luminous presence. Thassadit Amzwar's blissful exuberance both entrances and puzzles the melancholic Russell. How can this refugee from perpetual terror be so happy? Won't someone so open and alive come to serious harm? Wondering how to protect her, Russell researches her war-torn country and skims through popular...

"In the Midst of Winter begins with a minor traffic accident -- which becomes the catalyst for an unexpected and moving love story between two people who thought they were deep into the winter of their lives. Richard Bowmaster -- a 60-year-old human rights scholar -- hits the car of Evelyn Ortega -- a young, undocumented immigrant from Guatemala -- in the middle of a snowstorm in Brooklyn. What at first seems just a small inconvenience takes an unforeseen...

Don Tillman, a professor of genetics, sets up a project designed to find him the perfect wife, starting with a questionnaire that has to be adjusted a little as he goes along. Then he meets Rosie, who is everything he's not looking for in a wife, but she ends up his friend as he helps her try and find her biological father.

Connie Goodwin is an expert on America's fractured past with witchcraft. A young, tenure-track professor in Boston, she's earned career success by studying the history of magic in colonial America -- especially women's home recipes and medicines -- and by exposing society's threats against women fluent in those skills. But beyond her studies, Connie harbors a secret: She is the direct descendant of a woman tried as a witch in Salem, an ancestor whose...

A vibrant and perceptive novel about a father's plot to win back his children's inheritance. Arthur Alter is in trouble. A middling professor at a Midwestern college, he can't afford his mortgage, he's exasperated his much-younger girlfriend, and his kids won't speak to him. And then there's the money -- the small fortune his late wife Francine kept secret, which she bequeathed directly to his children. Those children are Ethan, an anxious recluse...

"Meera, always gracious Meera, is happily submerged in the role of corporate wife and cookbook writer. Then, one day, her husband fails to come home. Overnight, Meera, disoriented, emotionally fragile Meera, becomes responsible not just for her two children, but also her mother, grandmother and the running of Lilac House, their rambling old family home in Bangalore. A few streets away, Professor J.A. Krishnamurthy or Jak, cyclone studies expert, survivor...

"Laura, a brilliant student and promising scholar, escapes from her small town, working class background to join the ranks of the academic elite on a Weatherfield scholarship to Oxford University. She enthusiastically throws herself into her schoolwork, yet she is never able to escape a feeling of unease and dislocation among the anointed "best and brightest" of her generation. Years later, back in the U.S. with a Ph.D. in Henry James studies, she...