Download or read book The View from Penthouse B written by Elinor Lipman and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2013 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two newly-single sisters, one a divorce?, the other a widow, become roommates with a handsome, gay cupcake-baker as they try to return to the dating world of lower Manhattan.

Download or read book The Pursuit of Alice Thrift written by Elinor Lipman and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In her newest well-tuned, witty, and altogether wonderful novel, bestselling author Elinor Lipman dares to ask: Can an upper-middle-class doctor find love with a shady, fast-talking salesman? Meet Alice Thrift, surgical intern in a Boston hospital, high of I.Q. but low in social graces. She doesn’t mean to be acerbic, clinical, or blunt, but where was she the day they taught Bedside Manner 101? Into Alice’s workaholic and wallflower life comes Ray Russo, a slick traveling fudge salesman in search of a nose job and well-heeled companionship, but not necessarily in that order. Is he a conman or a sincere suitor? Good guy or bad? Alice’s parents, roommate, and best friend Sylvie are appalled at her choice of mate. Despite her doubts, Alice finds herself walking down the aisle, not so much won over as worn down. Will their marriage last the honeymoon? Only if Alice’s best instincts can triumph over Ray’s unsavory ways.

Download or read book I Can t Complain written by Elinor Lipman and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2013-04-16 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the beloved and acclaimed novelist, a collection of witty, moving essays.In her two decades of writing, Elinor Lipman has populated her fictional universe with characters so utterly real that we feel like they’re old friends. Now she shares an even more intimate world with us—her own—in essays that offer a candid, charming take on modern life. Looking back and forging ahead, she considers the subjects that matter most: childhood and condiments, long marriage and solo living, career and politics. Here you’ll find the lighthearted: a celebration of four decades of All My Children, a reflection on being Jewish in heavily Irish-Catholic Lowell on St. Patrick’s Day, a hilariously unflinching account of her tiptoe into online dating. But she also tackles the serious and profound in eloquent stories of unexpected widowhood and caring for elderly parents that use her struggles to illuminate ours. Whether for Lipman’s longtime readers or those who love the essays of Nora Ephron or Anna Quindlen, I Can't Complain is a diverting delight.

Download or read book Rachel to the Rescue written by Elinor Lipman and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2021 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rachel Klein is sacked from her job at the White House after she sends an email criticizing Donald Trump. As she is escorted off the premises she is hit by a speeding car, driven by what the press will discreetly call "a personal friend of the President." Does that explain the flowers, the get-well wishes at a press briefing, the hush money offered by a lawyer at her hospital bedside? Rachel's recovery is soothed by comically doting parents, matchmaking room-mates, a new job as aide to a journalist whose books aim to defame the President, and unexpected love at the local wine store. But secrets leak, and Rachel's new-found happiness has to make room for more than a little chaos. Will she bring down the President? Or will he manage to do that all by himself? Rachel to the Rescue is a mischievous political satire, with a delightful cast of characters, from one of America's funniest novelists.

Download or read book Good Riddance written by Elinor Lipman and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2019-02-05 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a delightful new romantic comedy from Elinor Lipman, one woman’s trash becomes another woman’s treasure, with deliriously entertaining results. Daphne Maritch doesn't quite know what to make of the heavily annotated high school yearbook she inherits from her mother, who held this relic dear. Too dear. The late June Winter Maritch was the teacher to whom the class of '68 had dedicated its yearbook, and in turn she went on to attend every reunion, scribbling notes and observations after each one—not always charitably—and noting who overstepped boundaries of many kinds. In a fit of decluttering (the yearbook did not, Daphne concluded, "spark joy"), she discards it when she moves to a small New York City apartment. But when it's found in the recycling bin by a busybody neighbor/documentary filmmaker, the yearbook's mysteries—not to mention her own family's—take on a whole new urgency, and Daphne finds herself entangled in a series of events both poignant and absurd. Good Riddance is a pitch-perfect, whip-smart new novel from an "enchanting, infinitely witty yet serious, exceptionally intelligent, wholly original, and Austen-like stylist" (Washington Post).

Download or read book Isabel s Bed written by Elinor Lipman and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2010-12-14 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Harriet Mahoney first sees it, Isabel Krug's bed is covered with sheared sheep and littered with celebrity biographies. Unpublished, fortyish, and recently jilted, Harriet has fled Manhattan for Isabel's loudly elegant Cape Cod retreat, where she will ghostwrite The Isabel Krug Story, based on the sexy blond's scandalous tabloid past. Unusually "talented" in the man department ("I give lessons"), Isabel revamps and inspires Harriet as they gear up to tell all, including the tangled history Isabel shares with her odd lodger, Costas. Life according to Isabel is a nonstop soap opera extravaganza, an experience to be swallowed whole -- and the attitude is catching....

Download or read book The Inn At Lake Devine written by Elinor Lipman and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2012-08-02 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It's 1962 and Natalie Marx is shocked when her mother receives this reply to her enquiry about summer accommodation in Vermont: 'Our guests who feel most comfortable here, and return year after year, are Gentiles.' It was not complicated, as her mother pointed out. 'They had a hotel; they didn't want Jews. We were Jews.' For the intrepid twelve-year-old Natalie, the words are an infuriating, irresistible challenge. She manages to wangle an invitation to join a friend on holiday there - and, as her obsession begins with the family that has excluded her, she sets in train events which will change her life, and which will tie her forever to the eccentric family who run the Inn at Lake Devine

Download or read book Morningside Heights written by Cheryl Mendelson and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2005-07-12 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following the tremendous success of her first book, a nonfiction work on housekeeping that became a surprise bestseller, Cheryl Mendelson brings to her debut novel the same intensely readable style that made Home Comforts so popular. In the spirit of Anthony Trollope, she roots her story very much in a specific time and place—1999, in an old-fashioned New York City neighborhood that’s becoming rapidly gentrified—and the enormously engaging result resembles a twentieth-century version of The Way We Live Now. Anne and Charles Braithwaite have spent their entire married life in a sedate old apartment building in Morningside Heights, a northern Manhattan neighborhood filled with intellectual, artistic souls like themselves, who thrive on the area’s abundant parks, cultural offferings, and reasonably priced real estate. The Braithwaites, musicians with several young children, are at the core of a circle of friends who make their living as writers, psychiatrists, and professors. But as the novel opens, their comfortable life is being threatened as a buoyant economy sends newly rich Wall Street types scurrying northward in search of good investments and more space. At the same time, the Braithwaites weather the difficult love lives of their friends, and all of the characters confront their fears that the institutions and social values that have until now provided them with meaning and stability—science, religion, the arts—are in increasing decline. Though the group clings to the rituals and promises of such institutions, the Braithwaites’ imminent departure sends shock waves through their community. As the family contemplates the impossible—a move to the suburbs—their predicament represents the end of a cultured kind of city life that middle-class families can no longer afford. This intelligent and captivating social chronicle is the first of a trilogy of novels about Morningside Heights; readers sure to be drawn in by Mendelson’s habit-forming prose have much more to look forward to.

Download or read book Where We Belong written by Emily Giffin and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2012-07-24 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Her carefully constructed life thrown into turmoil by the appearance of an eighteen-year-old girl with ties to her past, New York television producer Marian Caldwell is swept up in a maelstrom of personal discovery that changes both of their perceptions about family.

Download or read book Four Miles to Pinecone written by Jon Hassler and published by Fawcett. This book was released on 2011-07-20 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: He was an eyewitness to a crime that his best friend committed. . . . “It all started the day school ended” That was when my English teacher decided not to flunk me—if I wrote a long story during my summer vacation. My name’s Tom Barry. I’m sixteen, and I really do want to be a junior next year at the high school in St. Paul where I live. But with my full-time job at Mr. Kerr’s grocery store, I didn’t think I’d have enough time to do it. But by the end of the week, the paper seemed small potatoes. You see, Mr. Kerr’s store was broken into—and my best friend Mouse was involved. I saw him, but I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to be a fink. I kept mum because it was right about then that I was invited to stay at my uncle’s resort near Pinecone. It’s a real neat place in the Minnesota woods, and I figured I would cool out there. And then I found that they have crime just like in St. Paul—but this time the stakes were much higher. Suddenly, my life was on the line. . . .

Download or read book Good In Bed written by Jennifer Weiner and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2008-09-04 with total page 607 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the bestselling author of In Her Shoes, All Fall Down and the forthcoming novel Who Do You Love, Good in Bedis a funny and tender story full of heart. Cannie Shapiro never wanted to be famous. The smart, sharp, plus-sized reporter was perfectly happy writing about other people's lives for her local newspaper. And for the past twenty-eight years, things have been tripping along nicely for Cannie. Sure, her mother has come charging out of the closet, and her father has long since dropped out of her world. But she loves her job, her friends, her dog and her life. She loves her apartment and her commodious, quilt-lined bed. She has made a tenuous peace with her body and she even felt okay about ending her relationship with her boyfriend Bruce. But now this... 'Loving a larger woman is an act of courage in our world,' Bruce has written in a national woman's magazine. And Cannie - who never knew that Bruce saw her as a larger woman, or thought that loving her was an act of courage - is plunged into misery, and the most amazing year of her life.

Download or read book High Maintenance written by Jennifer Belle and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2002-07-02 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: National Bestseller The story of an obsessive love affair between a woman and an apartment. The publication of her sexy, offbeat, riotous first novel, Going Down, won Jennifer Belle comparisons from everyone from Dorothy Parker and Lorrie Moore to J. D. Salinger and Liz Phair. In High Maintenance, Belle is back with another brilliantly twisted New York story that is as funny, sad, painful, ridiculous, wild, daring, and lovable as its predecessor. Set in the manic world of New York real estate, High Maintenance is the story of Liv Kellerman, a young woman who's just left her husband and, more important, their fabulous penthouse apartment with its Empire State Building view. On her own for the first time in her life, she relocates to a crumbling Greenwich Village hovel and contemplates her next move. Before long she finds her true calling: selling real estate. With her native eye for prime properties and an ability to lie with a straight face, Liv finds success and soon is swimming with the sharks-the hardcore, cutthroat brokers who'll do anything to close a deal. Along the way she picks up a maniacally ardent architect who likes to bite her, a few hilarious bosses, strange and exasperating clients, and a gun, and brings them with her on her search for the one thing she's really after: a home. Belle's gift for creating strange and winning characters and her acute observations of both the absurd and the poignant in everyday life are the hallmarks of her fiction. High Maintenance is generous and unsparing, tough and exciting and terrifically smart—a hot new property on the market.

Download or read book Last Man in Tower written by Aravind Adiga and published by Bond Street Books. This book was released on 2011-09-20 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The magnificent new novel from the million-selling Booker Prize-winning author of The White Tiger: one of the most eagerly anticipated literary novels of 2011--"a kaleidoscopic portrait of a changing Mumbai." — Guardian (Best Books of 2011) Ask any Bombaywallah about Vishram Society--Tower A of the Vishram Co-operative Housing Society--and you will be told that it is unimpeachably pucca. Despite its location close to the airport, under the flight path of 747s and bordered by slums, it has been pucca for some fifty years. But Bombay has changed in half a century--not least its name--and the world in which Tower A was first built is giving way to a new city; a Mumbai of development and new money; of wealthy Indians returning with fortunes made abroad. When real estate developer Dharmen Shah offers to buy out the residents of Vishram Society, planning to use the site to build a luxury apartment complex, his offer is more than generous. Initially, though, not everyone wants to leave; many of the residents have lived in Vishram for years, and many of them are no longer young. But none can benefit from the offer unless all agree to sell. As tensions rise among the once civil neighbours, one by one those who oppose the offer give way to the majority, until only one man stands in Shah's way: Masterji, a retired schoolteacher, once the most respected man in the building. Shah is a dangerous man to refuse, but as the demolition deadline looms, Masterji's neighbours--friends who have become enemies, acquaintances turned co-conspirators--may stop at nothing to score their payday. A suspense-filled story of money and power, luxury and deprivation, and a rich tapestry peopled by unforgettable characters, not least of which is Bombay itself, Last Man in Tower opens up the hearts and minds of the inhabitants of a great city--ordinary people pushed to their limits in a place that knows none. This eBook edition includes a Reading Group Guide.

Download or read book The Dearly Departed written by Elinor Lipman and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2002-08-13 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With her trademark humor and warmth, the beloved author of The Ladies' Man and The Inn at Lake Devine explores going home again; about finding light in the dark corners of one's inhospitable past; about love, golf, and DNA. Everyone in King George, New Hampshire, loved Margaret Batten, part-time amateur actress, full-time wallflower, and single mother to a now-distant daughter, Sunny. But accidents happen. The death of Margaret, side by side with her putative fiancé, brings Sunny back to the scene of the unhappy adolescence she thought she’d left behind. Reentry is to be dreaded; there’s no hiding in a town with one diner, one doctor, one stop sign, one motel. Yet allies surface; even high school tormentors have grown up in unforeseen and gratifying ways. Just possibly, Sunny begins to think, she wasn’t as beleaguered as she felt she was. And maybe her mother’s life was richer than anyone suspected. Add to the mix a chief of police whose interest in Sunny exceeds his civic duty, and you have the makings of an irresistibly beguiling tale from an author who writes with all the wit and wry authority of a latter-day Jane Austen.

Download or read book Beware the Cuckoo written by Julie Newman and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2021-05-31 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A reunion between childhood friends stirs up the traumas of the past—and poses a threat in the present . . . As a young, deeply insecure girl, Karen was targeted, and traumatized, by her friend Sandra’s father. Now, decades later, he is dead—and Karen has been reunited with Sandra, whom she hasn’t seen in ages. Against her better judgment, she agrees to meet Sandra at a nearby restaurant, and Sandra proves to be just as thoughtless and self-absorbed as she was back when the two of them and their friend Yvonne were attending school dances together. Karen has a husband and children now, and they live in a beautiful home thanks to a successful family business. Sandra is supposed to be in town only temporarily, so Karen tolerates her excessive drinking and intrusive questions. But things become more difficult as her life starts to go awry—and as this taut, unsettling novel moves between past and present, secrets come to the surface and both women will come to understand the true cost of betrayal . . .

Download or read book Exposed written by Kimberly Marcus and published by Ember. This book was released on 2012-02-28 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: High school senior Liz, a gifted photographer, can no longer see things clearly after her best friend accuses Liz's older brother of a terrible crime.

Download or read book Madame X written by Jasinda Wilder and published by Berkley. This book was released on 2015 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Madame X invites you to test the limits of control in this provocative new novel from New York Times bestselling author Jasinda Wilder. My name is Madame X. I'm the best at what I do. And you'd do well to follow my rules... Hired to transform the uncultured, inept sons of the wealthy and powerful into decisive, confident men, Madame X is a master of the art of control. With a single glance she can cut you down to nothing, or make you feel like a king. But there is only one man who can claim her body--and her soul. Undone time and again by his exquisite dominance, X craves and fears his desire in equal measure. And while she longs for a different path, X has never known anything or anyone else--until now.."--