Showing results by publisher "HighBridge, a Division of Recorded Books" in Dark Humour

Karl, Eleanor, and their daughter, Irina, arrive from New York City in the wake of Karl's infidelity to start anew. Karl tries to stabilize his flailing art career. Eleanor, a successful commercial novelist, eagerly pivots in a new creative direction. Meanwhile, 12-year-old Irina becomes obsessed with the brutal murders that occurred in the house years earlier. And, secretly, so does her mother.

Diane Williams, "godmother of flash fiction" (The Paris Review), returns with thirty-three brilliant short stories. In Williams's stories, life is newly alive and dangerous; whether she is writing about an affair, a request for money, an afternoon in a garden, or the simple act of carrying a cake from one room to the next, she offers us beautiful and unsettling new ways of seeing everyday life.

Evoking such classics as Elmer Gantry and The Day of the Locust, William Giraldi's About Face boldly transfers the perennial literary themes of celebrity, ambition, and obsession to twenty-first-century Boston. There we meet Val Face, a charismatic self-help guru who captivates multitudes with his uncanny ability to heal adherents using only the power of his words, the mysterious touch of his hands, and the transcendent beauty of his face.

There is a distinct surreal quality to some (including "Exposure" and "And Now Let's Have Some Fun"), a strong sense of irony (as in "You Too Can Graduate in Three Years with an Advanced Degree in Contextual Semiotics"), and moments of awkward and therefore very real grapplings with sex and romance (most especially in "The Rescues" and the title story, "Welcome Thieves").

One of the many well-educated Ivy League graduates with literary ambitions who flock to New York City every year, 25-year-old Melissa Fleischer has the great fortune to work as the assistant to Austin Bloch, an editor responsible for refining and publishing the work of some of America's most esteemed writers. But after she begins working at this prestigious magazine in the late 1970s, Mel soon learns that the extravagantly long lunches her boss indulges in actually belie his affairs with a stream of young women.