Nora Eldridge, an elementary school teacher in Cambridge, Massachusetts, long ago abandoned her dream to be a successful artist. Instead she has become the "woman upstairs," a reliable friend and tidy neighbor always on the fringe of others' achievements. Then into her classroom walks Reza Shahid, a child who enchants as if from a fairy tale, and Nora is drawn into the complex world of his glamorous and cosmopolitan family. As happiness explodes her...

In retreat from a devastating loss and crushing injustice, Katie lives alone in a fortresslike stone house on Jacob's Ladder island. Once a rising star in the art world, she finds refuge in her painting. The neighboring island of Ringrock houses a secret: a government research facility. And now two agents have arrived on Jacob's Ladder in search of someone--or something--they refuse to identify. Although an air of menace hangs over these men, an infinitely...

Vicki Bennett asks her friend, Ryan Sullivan, to pose as her boyfriend to ward off some unwanted advances, but when their pretend relationship becomes all-too real, they both face some difficult decisions.

Following her retirement from Princeton University, celebrated historian Dr. Nell Irvin Painter surprised everyone in her life by returning to school--in her sixties--to earn a BFA and MFA in painting. In Old in Art School, she travels from her beloved Newark to the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design; finds meaning in the artists she loves, even as she comes to understand how they may be undervalued; and struggles with the unstable balance...

Banned in the United States until 1934 on account of its "pornographic" content, this controversial classic transforms a single day in Dublin into an experimental epic. James Joyce's psychological novel vividly re-creates the sights, sounds, smells, and voices of a June day in 1904 within a structure loosely based on Homer's Odyssey. Famed for the stream-of-consciousness technique that marked the beginning of modernist literature, the tale abounds...

Friends since earliest childhood, Annie, Jake, and Mason have a special bond. When Annie's parents die on the same night that she and Mason get married, the three friends decide to raise Annie's infant sister, Opal, together. Not surprisingly, their bonds of intimacy, already deeply entangled, become strained. As Annie struggles to be both a sister and a mother to Opal, and a wife and friends to Mason and Jake, events take on a momentum of their own....

"In his widely anticipated memoir, Ai Weiwei-one of the world's most famous artists and activists-tells a century-long epic tale of China through the story of his own extraordinary life and the legacy of his father, Ai Qing, the nation's most celebrated poet. Hailed as "the most important artist working today" by the Financial Times and as "an eloquent and unsilenceable voice of freedom" by The New York Times, Ai Weiwei has written a sweeping memoir...

A new biography of the wildly unconventional 19th-century animal painter and gender equality pioneer Rosa Bonheur.

After years of pain and turmoil, stained glass restoration expert Mira Gallier is on the verge of having it all - again. But her perfect life, like the magnificent windows blown to bits by Hurricane Katrina, is about to be shattered. Mira wakes in the night to the scent of her dead husband's aftershave; catches a glimpse of him in a crowd; senses his presence; hears his voice. Could Jeffery, swept away by Katrina's flood waters, still be alive? Then...