A young woman dressed in Victorian finery is found strangled in Mingo House, a morbid brownstone and museum, a nineteenth-century time capsule in Boston's Back Bay. Dubbed the "Victorian Girl" by the media everywhere, she becomes the eye of a hurricane of publicity and speculation and of a darkness reaching back to the Mingo family's roots in England—and to the builders of the mansion, a Civil War arms dealer and his s├®ance-holding wife.Boston comic Mark Winslow and the other trus...

Spiraling off the tip of Cape Cod, Provincetown has long been a place of escape, new beginnings, and diverse communities. Famous as an art colony, known for the Cape Cod School, its gallery scene is vibrant. Gay life is everywhere. Boston comic Mark Winslow has arrived this summer with a group of fellow improv actors ready to break into Provincetown's club circuit. It should be a carefree summer, but currents swirl beneath the sunny surface. Does the tall ship out in the harbor herald an u...

With a gay resort, an art colony, and a working fishing port, Provincetown has long been a place of freedom, escape, diversity, and risk. Mark Winslow, a Boston comic, arrives with his troupe of actors, ready to break into the Provincetown club circuit. But the town and the region are far from peaceful this summer. When a public fight makes Mark the prime suspect in the grisly death of a Boston blueblood, Mark believes his choice is simple. He must find the killer or be charged with the cr...

In middle age, debt has become the most significant relationship in Harry Salter's life. He was born to wealthy parents in leafy and privileged Rosedale, at a time when the city was still defined by its WASP elite. But nothing in life has turned out the way Harry was led to expect. He's unsure of his place in society, his marriage is crumbling, his son is bordering on estranged, and on top of it all his father is dying.As he sits at his father's bedside, Harry inevitably daydreams ...

Internationally bestselling novelist and American icon Tom Robbins' legendary memoir—wild tales of his life and times, both at home and around the globe.Tom Robbins' warm, wise, and wonderfully weird novels—including Still Life with Woodpecker, Jitterbug Perfume, and Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates—provide an entryway into the frontier of his singular imagination. Madcap but sincere, pulsating with strong social and philosophical undercurrents, his irreverent...

The mesmerizing bestseller that combines the storytelling gifts of Donna Tartt and the suspense of Alfred Hitchcock—A New York Times Ten Best Book of the YearSpecial Topics in Calamity Physics is a darkly hilarious coming-of-age tale and a richly plotted suspense story, told with dazzling intelligence and wit. At the center of the novel is clever, deadpan Blue van Meer, who has a head full of literary, philosophical, scientific, and cinematic know...

**A New York Times Notable Book for 2011One of Entertainment Weekly's Top 10 Nonfiction Books of the Year 2011A Time Magazine Top 10 Nonfiction book of 2011A Boston Globe Best Nonfiction Book of 2011One of Library Journal's Best Books of 2011**A sharp-eyed, uniquely humane tour of America's cultural landscape—from high to low to lower than low—by the award-winning young star of the literary nonfiction...

A stunning coming-of-age novel about one boy's mystical bond to the sea."[A] graceful and inventive first novel." -The New York Times Book Review**"The fertile strangeness of marine tidal life becomes a subtly executed metaphor for the bewilderments of adolescence in this tender and authentic coming-of-age novel." -Publishers Weekly"As crisp and clean as a cool dip into the water, and just about as refreshing." -

**A New York Times and Los Angeles Times Bestseller“Doughty chronicles [death] practices with tenderheartedness, a technician’s fascination, and an unsentimental respect for grief.” —Jill Lepore, The New Yorker**Fascinated by our pervasive fear of dead bodies, mortician Caitlin Doughty embarks on a global expedition to discover how other cultures care for the dead. From Zoroastrian sky burials to wish-granting Bolivian skulls, she investigates the...

"I fell in love with Maupin’s effervescent Tales of the City decades ago, and his genius turn at memoir is no less compelling. Logical Family is a must read."—Mary KarrIn this long-awaited memoir, the beloved author of the bestselling Tales of the City series chronicles his odyssey from the old South to freewheeling San Francisco, and his evolution from curious youth to ground-breaking writer and gay rights pioneer.Born in the mid-twentieth century and raised in the heart o...

A brilliant collection of 26 original stories from the best women crime writers of our times, introduced and edited by Sara ParetskyFrom wicked irony and white-collar crime in Amanda Cross’s “The Baroness,” to the chilling “Only A woman,” Algerian writer Amel Benaboura’s English-language debut, here are voices known and unknown at home and abroad, as familiar crime turf in America and England is expanded to Russia, Algeria, Austria, Germany, and South America....

"A modern knight-errant on a quest after evil; grotesque, convincing and chilling." — The New York Times Book ReviewFed up with the excesses of the 1970s, Lancelot Andrews Lamar, a liberal lawyer and distinguished member of the New Orleans gentry, is determined to stop the modern world's ethical collapse. His quest begins with his wife—an actress who he suspects has been cheating on him for years. Though he initially plans only to gather proof of her infide...