The Sleep Over Artist Fiction

Beller's stories trace the life of Alex Fader, New Yorker, from age six to age 30. He drifts in and out of relationships. goes to London after losing his job and meets glamorous Katrina, a soon-to-be-divorced mother, and begins a complicated long-distance affair. Each of the stories stands alone, but their cumulative effect tells the boy-to-man story of Alex's scattered life.

"In the same way Salinger carved out the niche of male adolescence ....Beller approaches that mutable boy-to-man territory."—San Francisco Chronicle Writing with the sparkling wit and insight of his highly praised debut, Seduction Theory ("Brilliantly captures the great expectations and recurring ambivalence of youth."—The New York Times), Thomas Beller continues to plumb the adventures of his hero, Alex Fader, a youthful existentialist and sensualist with an insatiable appetite for trouble. The Sleep-Over Artist is an account of critical stages in Alex's life, mapping his progress from youthful delinquent to filmmaker whose career begins when he makes a documentary film exposing the prep school from which he has been expelled. Alex longs for the taste of family life that the early death of his father has denied him. As a young boy he sleeps over at his friends' houses and ingratiates himself with their families; as a young man he extends his sleep-overs to the lives of women, culminating in the ultimate sleep-over—an affair in England with a glamorous, slightly older woman, the mother of a young boy. Beller has a pitch-perfect ear for emotional nuance and a microscopic eye for rendering the wordless moments when a relationship catches fire and all too often begins to falter. The high-wire tension that electrifies The Sleep-Over Artist is Beller's ingenious portrait of a young man who longs to disappear and belong all at the same time. "Hilarious....captures perfectly the myriad stages of fear, discovery and elation that mark one's first sexual experience."—The New York Times Book Review, Katherine Dieckmann, 16 July 2000 "[W]ell-crafted stories recall the witty phrasing of Updike, the poignant nostalgia of Cheever, the earnest but confused innocence of Salinger."—Library Journal "Featuring a New York that, like Kundera's Prague, is a vast hive of seductions....A moving portrait."—Publishers Weekly, 17 April 2000 "The gentle humor and delicacy of Sleep-Over Artist remind me of the stories of another young cosmopolite, F. Scott Fitzgerald."—Stewart O'Nan, author of A Prayer for the Dying "Fresh, sophisticated and most of all utterly readable...strikes a perfect balance between timely ironies and perennial emotional truths."—Eva Hoffman "Tom Beller is gifted with a wry, dry appreciation of life's sweet and unlikely subtleties."—Elizabeth Wurtzel, author of Prozac Nation and Bitch "A fine novel of Manhattan manners."—New York Observer

Perfect for fans of Stranger Things, this middle grade graphic novel follows a group of kids trying to cheer up their friend after a recent loss with a fun-filled sleepover, but their plans soon take a dark turn when they discover his new nanny may literally be a monster. When the Russo family returns home from vacation to discover their nanny, Ruby, has unexpectedly passed away, Matthew takes the news the hardest. After weeks of reeling, his three best friends decide to cheer him up with a night of junk food, prank calls, and scary movies. But their plans for a sleepover are jeopardized when Matt's single mother—unable to take any more time off of work—is forced to hire a new nanny on the fly to watch over Matt and his younger sister, Judy. Miss Swan, however, is all too happy to have the boys over. And although she seems like the perfect babysitter, letting the kids eat whatever they want and mostly leaving them alone, there's something about her that Matt doesn't trust. He thinks she may actually be the witch from local legend—the one who torments children into the night and then eats them. Is he just having a hard time dealing with Ruby's replacement, as his friends suspect? Has he watched one too many scary movies, as his mom fears? Or are he and his horror-buff friends in for the fright of their lives as they come face-to-face with a real monster?

The #1 New York Times Bestseller: “A hilarious take on that age-old problem: getting the beloved child to go to sleep” (NPR). “Hell no, you can’t go to the bathroom. You know where you can go? The f**k to sleep.” Go the Fuck to Sleep is a book for parents who live in the real world, where a few snoozing kitties and cutesy rhymes don’t always send a toddler sailing blissfully off to dreamland. Profane, affectionate, and radically honest, it captures the familiar—and unspoken—tribulations of putting your little angel down for the night. Read by a host of celebrities, from Samuel L. Jackson to Jennifer Garner, this subversively funny bestselling storybook will not actually put your kids to sleep, but it will leave you laughing so hard you won’t care.

With eight short stories and a novella that travel from dusty city streets to humid beaches, Cristina Henríquez carves out a distinctive and unforgettable vision of contemporary Panama. The stories of Come Together, Fall Apart combine to create a seamless fictional world in which the varied landscapes and shifting culture of a country in transition—and the insistent voices of its young people—are vividly represented. In “Yanina,” a young man’s fidelity is tested when a new living situation strains his relationship with his girlfriend. For the young woman in “Ashes,” the very notion of fidelity is shattered—and her lover’s philandering is only one link in a chain of traumatic events that begins with her mother’s death. In “Mercury,” an American girl visits her grandparents in Panama while her parents divorce at home, and attempts to connect with her ailing grandfather in broken Spanish that he’ll never understand. Again and again, characters find their fates irrevocably tied to those of their families—in “Beautiful,” as fortunes rise; and in “Come Together, Fall Apart,” as they collapse. These are stories of family bonds and generational conflicts, youthful infatuation and genuine passion that are tender, ambitious, and unflinching, from a bold and original young writer who is not only an accomplished prose stylist but also an irresistible storyteller.

Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf's fourth novel, offers the reader an impression of a single June day in London in 1923. Clarissa Dalloway, the wife of a Conservative member of parliament, is preparing to give an evening party, while the shell-shocked Septimus Warren Smith hears the birds in Regent's Park chattering in Greek. There seems to be nothing, except perhaps London, to link Clarissa and Septimus. She is middle-aged and prosperous, with a sheltered happy life behind her; Smith is young, poor, and driven to hatred of himself and the whole human race. Yet both share a terror of existence, and sense the pull of death. The world of Mrs Dalloway is evoked in Woolf's famous stream of consciousness style, in a lyrical and haunting language which has made this, from its publication in 1925, one of her most popular novels.

'Moving and inspiring, courageous and true: real art. Just reading her is pleasure' Amy Liptrot, author of The Outrun Just days into motherhood, a woman begins dying. Fast and without warning. On return from near-death, Tanya Shadrick vows to stop sleepwalking through life. To take more risks, like the characters in the fairy tales she loved as a small girl, before loss and fear had her retreat into routine and daydreams. Around the care of young children, she starts to play with the shape and scale of her days: to stray from the path, get lost in the woods, make bargains with strangers. As she moves beyond her respectable roles as worker, wife and mother in a small town, Tanya learns what it takes - and costs - to break the spell of longing for love, approval, safety, rescue.

From one of our boldest, most celebrated new literary voices, a novel about a young woman's efforts to duck the ills of the world by embarking on an extended hibernation with the help of one of the worst psychiatrists in the annals of literature and the battery of medicines she prescribes Our narrator should be happy, shouldn't she? She's young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate, works an easy job at a hip art gallery, lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for, like the rest of her needs, by her inheritance. But there is a dark and vacuous hole in her heart, and it isn't just the loss of her parents, or the way her Wall Street boyfriend treats her, or her sadomasochistic relationship with her best friend, Reva. It's the year 2000 in a city aglitter with wealth and possibility; what could be so terribly wrong? My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a powerful answer to that question. Through the story of a year spent under the influence of a truly mad combination of drugs designed to heal our heroine from her alienation from this world, Moshfegh shows us how reasonable, even necessary, alienation can be. Both tender and blackly funny, merciless and compassionate, it is a showcase for the gifts of one of our major writers working at the height of her powers.