Much more than a word list, the Oxford American Writer's Thesaurus is a browsable source of inspiration as well as an authoritative guide to selecting and using vocabulary. This essential guide for writers provides real-life example sentences and a careful selection of the most relevant synonyms, as[...]

Rick Moody has been writing about music as long as he has been writing, and this book provides an ample selection from that output. His anatomy of the word cool reminds us that, in the postwar 40s, it was infused with the feeling of jazz music but is now merely a synonym for neat. "On Celestial Musi[...]

The stories Moody has written, appearing in The New Yorker, Esquire, Harper's, and The Paris Review, form a dazzling body of work that marks the emergence of one of the strongest voices in a generation. These stories don't follow familiar paths: They compellingly map the loneliness of private experi[...]

Amy Hempel is a master of the short story. This celebrated volume gathers together her complete work -- four short collections of stunning stories about marriages, minor disasters, and moments of revelation.
With her inimitable compassion and wit, Hempel introduces characters who make choices t[...]

Winner of the 1976 National Book Award, J R is a biting satire about the many ways in which capitalism twists the American spirit into something dangerous, yet pervasive and unassailable. At the center of the novel is a hilarious eleven year old J R who with boyish enthusiasm turns a few basic lesso[...]

Set in an imaginary European city, The Passion Artist takes us into the dream-like interior world of Konrad Vost, a middle-aged widower grieving for his dead wife, devoted to his schoolgirl daughter, and obsessed with the memory and the fate of his mother, who is an inmate in the city's prison. Whe[...]