Dog Days

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Eric Kraft

"In Passionate Spectator, memoirist Peter Leroy and his wife, Albertine, are living in Manhattan - by the skin of their teeth. Casting about for a source of income, Peter purchases a book from a homeless street corner peddler, Creative Self-Promotion for Taxidermists, hoping he can adapt its techniques to promote his fledgling business, Memoirs While You Wait, a writing service designed to satisfy the contemporary compulsion for confession and self-revelation." "That book opens into a journey from fiction to truth and back again, involving Peter, his childhood friend Matthew Barber (a pseudonymous restaurant reviewer who is undergoing emergency heart surgery), and Matthew's witty, urbane alter ego, Bertram W. Beath - an erotic opportunist and "passionate spectator" of beauty and human folly. As Peter solicits potential clients for his service, he finds that autobiography requires a measure of deception - well, lying - and that his own life depends on fictions he has created and sustained."--BOOK JACKET.

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Meg Cabot

Things are looking up for Mia: She's the newest staffer on the school paper, and her miraculous completion of freshman Algebra is just around the corner. Plus she's about to get a new baby brother or sister. Could things possibly get any better? But in her heart of hearts, Mia has one wish: an evening spent with Michael in a tux and a corsage on her wrist -- in other words, the PROM. Michael, however, does not seem to share the dream that is the prom. Worse still, a service workers strike (with Grandmere and Lilly at the heart of it and on opposite sides) threatens the very existence of this year's prom. Will the strike end in time? Can Michael be dissuaded from his anti-prom views? Most importantly, will Mia get to wear her pink prom dress?

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written and

Grandfather and his dog Roo are off to Australia to find long-lost Uncle Vincent. Grandfather's letters home tell the story of their extraordinary and immensely funny adventure.

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Debra Ginsberg

"Part memoir, part social commentary, part guide to how to behave when dining out, Debra Ginsberg's book takes readers on her twent-year journey as a waitress at a soap-operatic Italian restaurant, an exclusive five-star dining club, the dingiest of diners, and more. While chronicling her evolution as a writer, Ginsberg takes a behind-the-scenes look at restaurant life--revealing that yes, when pushed, a server will spit in food, and, no, that's not really decaf you're getting--and how most people in this business are in a constant state of waiting to do something else" -- back cover.