New York Times bestselling author Steve Almond takes on America's biggest sacred cow: football

In Against Football, Steve Almond details why, after forty years as a fan, he can no longer watch the game he still loves. Using a synthesis of memoir, reportage, and cultural critique, Almond asks a series of provocative questions:

- Does our addiction to football foster a tolerance for violence, greed, racism, and homophobia? View More...

They call them "mediums"--professional dreamers who "dive" into the dream world to retrieve items that convert to valuable artworks in the waking world. What's more, the more dangerous the dream, the more valuable that artwork becomes.

In David Sarella's dreams, he's a professional jewel thief. With the help of his beautiful accomplice, Nadia, he breaks into jewelry stores and museums, lifts diamond necklaces and priceless art, and escapes ...
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In the not-too-distant future, competing giant fast food factions rule the world. Leonard works for Neetsa Pizza, the Pythagorean pizza chain, in a lonely but highly surveilled home office, answering calls on his complaints hotline. It's a boring job, but he likes it--there's a set answer for every scenario, and he never has to leave the house. Except then he starts getting calls from M...
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The Art of The Novella Series

Too short to be a novel, too long...
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A journalist who's been covering Molly joins the singer's personal assistant in an increasingly desperate search to find her, guided by a journal left behind in her hotel room, and possible clues hidden in her songs--all of which seem to point to an abandoned line in the Chic...
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And then one day, it happens: On a Saturday morning thick with fog, Beth takes Carmel to a local outdoor festival, they get separated in the crowd, and Carmel is gone.

Shattered, Beth sets herself on the grim and lonely mission to find her daug...
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Often cited as the best work of short fiction ever written, Joyce's elegant story details a New Year's Eve gathering in Dublin that is so evocative and beautiful that it prompts the protagonist's wife to make a shocking revelation to her husband--closing the story with an emotionally powerful epiphany that is unsurpassed in modern literature.

The Art of The Novella Series

Too short to be a novel, too long to be a short story, the novella is generally unrec...
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In a Spain still stifled under the rule of Franco, former CIA operative--and former Communist--Pepe Carvalho has become so cynical he seems to care about nothing except food and sex. He's even taken to burning the occasional book in his Barcelona apartment, just so he can have a fire going in the fireplace when he eats some bacalhao.

But when he sees the cops bungling a case he's hired to investigate--that of a body pulled out of the sea--he's roused ...
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The breakout novel by Francesco Pacifico, one of Italy's most acclaimed writers, hailed by Dana Spiotta as "brilliantly funny and weirdly subversive"

Ludovica and Lorenzo live in Rome. She works in her family's bookstore, and he's a filmmaker--or, rather, a "filmmaker" so far, all he's produced is one pretentious short film that even his friends don't take seriously. But somehow, he gets a scholarship to C...
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Set in a hazy Middle East that seems at once ancient and modern, The Apostle Killer features Gallio, an aging, hardboiled investigator who has one last chance to save his career: He's got to prove Christ's resurrection was a hoax.

To uncover the conspiracy behind the so-called resurrection, Gallio figures all he needs is for one of the apostles to crack. The only problem is that one by one, the apostles keep dying--and in ever more grotesque ways-...
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A signal event of literary scholarship, The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure compiles the biographies of history's most notable cases of a complete lack of literary success. As such, it is the world's leading authority on the subject.

Compiled in one volume by C. D. Rose, a well-educated person universally acknowledged in parts of England as the world's pre-eminent expert on inexpert writers, the book culls its information from lost or otherwise ignored archives sca...
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"A pleasure to read from beginning to end." --Geraldine Brooks, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of March

Esther, an American art conservator, has fled New York for London--partly to escape her failing marriage, partly to tend to her dying mother. On her first night there, she spots a young man returning home very late, wet and muddy, to the house next door. Their eyes connect and he disappears inside.

This first encounter sparks Esther's curiosity about her new neighbors: Amir, the moody college student she caught sneaking...
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