Running in bed

Sample

Wendy Wasserstein

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and author of the essay collection Shiksa Goddess ("Utterly delicious"--Judith Thurman), a dazzling debut novel, a comedy about New York's urban gentry living in a post-9/11 world--the arbiters of fashion and the doyennes of charity balls; about the rich and the nouveau rich(er), the glamorous and the desperate to be.We meet Francesca Weissman, the Upper East Side pediatrician rated number one by Manhattan magazine, who takes us into the upper strata of privilege and aspiration (she's originally from Queens with a father in hosiery; life on the fringes of glittering New York is fine with her) . . . Samantha Acton, thoroughbred descendant of the Van Rensselaers and the Carnegies, who defines the social order in the great tradition of Mrs. Astor and Babe Paley . . . Judy Tremont from Modesto, California, daughter of a cop--her life's work, her obsession, is New York society and its richest families . . . Barry Santorini, Republican, moviemaker, winner of twelve Oscars, and his wife, the Italian supermarket heiress and former media rep for Giorgio Armani . . . and many more. As Elements of Style opens out, we see a madcap mosaic of the social lives and mores of twenty-first century Manhattan--of romance, work, family, and friendship. Satiric, fierce, touching--and deliciously Wasserstein."Pure Wendy! She effortlessly makes the leap from stage to page with a novel that is loving, compassionate, flat-out funny. Wendy loved the word 'scintillating,' which is the best way to describe her stunning Elements of Style."--John Guare"Wasserstein gets the trappings and tribulations (of friendship and of romance) right, making her depiction of the rich and fab trying to connect with one another witty and entertaining."--Publishers Weekly"Bold, nimble, and funny to its fingertips, Elements of Style is a delight, a triumph. A book that no self-respecting New Yorker should be without. Those cursed with the hell of multiple residences will self-evidently need several copies--and spares, for houseguests."--Flora FraserFrom the Hardcover edition.

Sample

Wendy Wasserstein

"A dinner party in an ornate mansion on the fashionable Upper East Side of Manhattan provides the scene for this witty and incisive play. Set in two eras - the early 1900s and our own Gilded Age - the characters move effortlessly from one period to the other. The host, a contemporary master of high-risk arbitrage, steps in and out of character as a robber baron of an earlier time. His guests of today include a Hollywood director, a not-so-cutting-edge sculptor, an online lingerie designer, an aggressive publicist, and an aging historian. Their counterparts from the past are the great man's rebellious son, a grand dame of New York society, the architect who built the mansion originally, and the maids and servants who maintain it. In this dance of rich storytelling and social commentary, it becomes strikingly clear that while old money has become new, little else has changed over the years. Children still rebel against their controlling parents, women still hope for love, and greed, snobbery, and angst persist. Black-and-white photos within text."--BOOK JACKET.

Sample

Merle Drown

"Jim Hutchins is holding a twelve gauge shotgun on his sworn enemy, his well-to-do brother-in-law, Emory Holler. What has made Jim snap?"--BOOK JACKET. "Well, Emory is rich because he's collected the insurance money for the supposedly accidental death of his wife, Jim's only sister. Pauline, Jim's wife, spends her spare time dancing naked for Emory. And Jim's best - his only - friend has suddenly died of an embolism."--BOOK JACKET. "In addition, the IRS is dunning Jim for back taxes; the town is about to seize the land on which the Hutchins have been living, in a trailer, since their house burned down; and each of his living children - two sons and a daughter - is in some sort of bizarre difficulty. Besides this, there is a panty thief roaming the area."--BOOK JACKET. "You might think this is enough for any man to confront but there is more, much more. Jim, an indomitable hero, shows us the hidden side of his small New Hampshire town with humor and penetrating insight into human frailty."--BOOK JACKET.

Sample

Amy Bloom

"Amy Bloom gets more meaning into individual sentences than most authors manage in whole books."--The New YorkerA great short story has the emotional depth and intensity of a poem and the wholeness and breadth of a novel. Amy Bloom writes great short stories. Her first collection, Come to Me, was a finalist for the National Book Award, and here she deepens and extends her mastery of the form. Real people inhabit these pages, the people we know and are, the people we long to be and are afraid to be: a mother and her brave, smart little girl, each coming to terms with the looming knowledge that the little girl will become a man; a wildly unreliable narrator bent on convincing us that her stories are not harmless; a woman with breast cancer, a frightened husband, and a best friend, all discovering that their lifelong triangle is not what they imagined; a man and his stepmother engaged in a complicated dance of memory, anger, and forgiveness. Amy Bloom takes us straight to the center of these lives with rare generosity and sublime wit, in flawless prose that is by turns sensuous, spare, heartbreaking, and laugh-out-loud funny. These are transcendent stories: about the uncertain gestures of love, about the betrayals and gifts of the body, about the surprises and bounties of the heart, and about what comes to us unbidden and what we choose.From the Hardcover edition.