Kissing In America

Acclaimed writer Margo Rabb’s Kissing in America is “a wonderful novel about friendship, love, travel, life, hope, poetry, intelligence, and the inner lives of girls,” raves internationally bestselling author Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love). In the two years since her father died, sixteen-year-old Eva has found comfort in reading romance novels—118 of them, to be exact—to dull the pain of her loss that’s still so present. Her romantic fantasies become a reality when she meets Will, who can relate to Eva’s grief. Unfortunately, after Eva falls head-over-heels for him, he picks up and moves to California with barely any warning. Not wanting to lose the only person who has been able to pull her out of sadness—and, perhaps, her first shot at real love—Eva and her best friend, Annie, concoct a plan to travel to the west coast. As they road trip across America, Eva and Annie confront the complex truth about love. In this honest and emotional journey that National Book Award Finalist Sara Zarr calls “gorgeous, funny, and joyous,” readers will experience the highs of infatuation and the lows of heartache as Eva contends with love in all of its forms. Since publication, this novel received 4 starred reviews and has been named: A Chicago Public Library Best Teen Book of 2015 A New York Public Library Best Book for Teens 2015 A Miami Herald Best Book of the Year A Spirit of Texas selection A TAYSHAS High School Reading List Selection An Oprah Summer Reading List selection A Junior Library Guild selection An Amazon Best Book of the Month A Publisher’s Lunch 2015 Buzz Book for Young Adults

As she navigates adolescence, ninth-grader Mia must deal with her mother' s recent death and her father's illness while she searches for friendship and love in the world around her.

Offers practical advice on fleeing the confines of a cubicle for more spiritually rewarding endeavors, including choosing a self-employed profession, managing time, money, and resources, and following one's dream.

A short-story collection about women who defy expectations and take outrageous chances in the face of a life that might turn out to be anything less than extraordinary. After spending a post-college year abroad at Oxford, where she found herself having dinner with famous poets and kissing all the wrong people, Sylvie moves to New York City to begin a life that is full of possibility. Her choices seem endless: from new jobs to new friends to new kissing partners, her future is hers to create. But what she doesn’t realize is that each exciting life that she envisions for herself is inevitably shadowed with potential disappointment: the stultifying temp job, the disastrous first date, the surprising and heart-breaking loss of friends, lovers, and roommates. In a modern world that is increasingly unforgiving, Sylvie and the friends she meets along the way test the boundaries of how far they will go to carve out unique and brilliant adult lives for themselves. Written in exuberant, imaginative, and sardonically funny prose, these interlocking stories take place in a fictional universe where sex is casually exchanged for a designer dress, a vacation home is surrendered to mice in the hope of saving a relationship, a jealous argument leads to a life-threatening game, and a headless woman gives an impatient speech on the many varieties of tears. Shot through with laugh-out-loud lines, yet still wrenchingly emotional and resonant, The Kissing List is a book about women who bravely defy expectations and take outrageous chances in the face of living a life that might turn out to be anything less than extraordinary.

Anna had everything figured out – she was about to start senior year with her best friend, she had a great weekend job and her huge work crush looked as if it might finally be going somewhere... Until her dad decides to send her 4383 miles away to Paris. On her own. But despite not speaking a word of French, Anna finds herself making new friends, including Étienne St. Clair, the smart, beautiful boy from the floor above. But he's taken – and Anna might be too. Will a year of romantic near-misses end with the French kiss she's been waiting for?

Hilarious, sexy, and deeply tender, Kissing in Manhattan was one of the most celebrated debuts in recent years. Acclaimed author David Schickler’s collection of linked stories follows a troupe of love-hungry urbanites through a charmed metropolis and into the Preemption--a mythic Manhattan apartment building. The Preemption sets the stage for a romantic fantasy as exuberant, dark, and dazzling as the city it occupies. Behind closed doors, the paths of an improbable cast of tenants--a seductive perfume heiress; a crabby, misunderstood actor; a preternaturally sharp-sighted priest--tangle and cross, while a perilous love triangle builds around three characters: James Branch, a shy young accountant with an unusual love for the Preemption’s antique elevator, and a strange destiny... Patrick Rigg, a Wall Street lothario who soothes his pain by seducing beautiful women, carrying a gun, and attending the nightly sermons of a foreboding priest... Rally McWilliams, a fetching, hopeful young writer who roams the city at night, searching for the soulmate she believes in but can’t find... Charged with joy and a deadly sense of humor, Kissing in Manhattan is a daring new writer’s vision of a world where men and women, good and evil, love and sex, meet, battle, and embrace on every street corner.

Growing up in a New Jersey factory town in the 1980s, Daisy Hernández believed that her aunt had become deathly ill from eating an apple. No one in her family, in either the United States or Colombia, spoke of infectious diseases. Even into her thirties, she only knew that her aunt had died of Chagas, a rare and devastating illness that affects the heart and digestive system. But as Hernández dug deeper, she discovered that Chagas—or the kissing bug disease—is more prevalent in the United States than the Zika virus. After her aunt’s death, Hernández began searching for answers. Crisscrossing the country, she interviewed patients, doctors, epidemiologists, and even veterinarians with the Department of Defense. She learned that in the United States more than three hundred thousand people in the Latinx community have Chagas, and that outside of Latin America, this is the only country with the native insects—the “kissing bugs”—that carry the Chagas parasite. Through unsparing, gripping, and humane portraits, Hernández chronicles a story vast in scope and urgent in its implications, exposing how poverty, racism, and public policies have conspired to keep this disease hidden. A riveting and nuanced investigation into racial politics and for-profit healthcare in the United States, The Kissing Bug reveals the intimate history of a marginalized disease and connects us to the lives at the center of it all.

Written with buoyant humor and a sharp sense of human desire, this is the story of love pursued at any cost, of how friendship and history unite people for better or worse, and of the hope for that redemptive kiss capable of reconciling estranged lovers and countries.