In 1832, three years before Alexis de Tocqueville published Democracy in America, the English novelist Frances Trollope released Domestic Manners of the Americans, an eye-opening record of her travels in the young republic. Expecting a utopia of "justice and liberty for all," she is shocked to discover the contradictions at the heart of the American character. Funny and fearless, Trollope's biting critique became an international sensation. Yet, as...

"Three interlocking stories focusing on the residents of a town called Sam Dent, the undercurrent of the Trump movement in America, and a series of local tragedies"--

"Describes disgusting details about daily life in the American Colonies, including housing, food, and sanitation"--Provided by publisher.

In Roxana Robinson’s lucid and elegant prose, her characters’ inner worlds open up to us, revealing private emotional cores that are familiar in their needs, their secrets, and their longings. These people tell us the truth–not only about themselves, their relationships, and their lives, but about ourselves as well.
In “Family Christmas,” a young girl takes a holiday trip to her grandparents’, where the formal...

"Adam Chandler delivers his tribute to fast food with affection, zeal, and some humor... Mostly an enthusiast, he narrates his burger-infused stories energetically and persuasively." — AudioFile
This program is read by the author.

Most any honest person can own up to harboring at least one fast-food guilty pleasure. In Drive-Thru Dreams: A Journey Through the Heart of America's Fast-Food Kingdom, Adam

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One of America’s premier writers, the bestselling author of Ragtime, Billy Bathgate, The Book of Daniel, and World’s Fair turns his astonishing narrative powers to the short story in five dazzling explorations of who we are as a people and how we live.
Ranging over the American continent from Alaska to Washington, D.C., these superb short works are crafted with all the weight and resonance of the novels for which...

Provides an in-depth look at daily life and historical events in the American colonies during the Revolutionary War, including home life, work, medicine, and play.

From the national bestselling author of A Gate at the Stairs—and a master of contemporary American fiction—comes “a funny, cohesive, and moving collection of stories" (The New York Times Book Review). 

In these tales of loss and pleasure, lovers and family, a woman learns to conduct an affair, a child of divorce dances with her mother, and a woman with a terminal illness contemplates her exit. Filled...

"Compact and insightful. "--New York Times Book Review "Jack Larkin has retrieved the irretrievable; the intimate facts of everyday life that defined what people were really like."--American Heritage

This unlikely story begins on a sea that was a blue dream, as colorful as blue-silk stockings, and beneath a sky as blue as the irises of children's eyes. From the western half of the sky the sun was shying little golden disks at the sea-if you gazed intently, enough you could see them skip from wave tip to wave tip until they joined a broad collar of golden coin that was collecting half a mile out and would eventually be a dazzling sunset. About...