A holiday collection of short fiction shares vignettes that capture the eccentric lives of the inhabitants of a small Southern town, from an efficiency expert who gets Christmas down to forty-five minutes flat, to a woman who claims John James Audubon is living in her attic.

Since he was disfigured in a fire sixteen years ago, recluse Louis Malone has remained hidden from the prying eyes of his neighbors in the small town of Waverly. Across town, Iris Shula, a lonely and unlovely nurse, knows at thirty-seven it is unlikely that her Prince Charming will ever appear. But Iris is about to learn how wrong she is. When Louis accidentally falls out of his second-story window, these two kindred souls are brought together. What...

It was the indifferent shrug and callous inertia that this 'optimism' concealed which so angered Voltaire, who found the 'all for the best' approach a patently inadequate response to suffering, to natural disasters - such as the recent earthquakes in Lima and Lisbon - not to mention the questions of illness and man-made war. Moreover, as the rebel whose satiric genius had earned him not only international acclaim, but two stays in the Bastille, flogging...

A collection of previously published comic strips.

"After two acclaimed story collections, Laura van den Berg brings us Find Me, her highly anticipated debut novel--a gripping, imaginative, darkly funny tale of a young woman struggling to find her place in the world. Joy has no one. She spends her days working the graveyard shift at a grocery store outside Boston and nursing an addiction to cough syrup, an attempt to suppress her troubled past. But when a sickness that begins with memory loss and...