Hoping to cheer up his dad after a disappointing soccer game, Splat enters a Cat School Picnic father-son six-legged race that does not turn out quite as expected.

Huger Dillard struggles to come to terms with his Charleston community and his past when his father and he stumble on the murdered body of a woman whose demise is linked to secret military forces and shadowy global networks.

Night Vale is a small town where ghosts, angels, aliens, and government conspiracies are all commonplace parts of everyday life. It is here that the lives of two women, with two mysteries, will converge. Nineteen-year-old Night Vale pawn shop owner Jackie Fierro is given a paper marked "KING CITY" by a mysterious man in a tan jacket holding a deer skin suitcase. Everything about him and his paper unsettles her, especially the fact that she can't seem...

On their trip to the zoo, a young son tries to reign in his rambunctious father who manages to lose his hat, spill his ice cream, and spend too much time in the souvenir shop.

"A novel about the role of stories in our lives, those we tell ourselves about ourselves and those we agree to live by." -Globe and Mail When Franklin Starlight is called to visit his father, he has mixed emotions. Raised by the old man he was entrusted to soon after his birth, Frank is haunted by the brief and troubling moments he has shared with his father, Eldon. When he finally travels by horseback to town, he finds Eldon on the edge of death,...

"Raised in the "agrarian ghetto" of Dickens--improbably smack in the middle of downtown L.A.--the narrator of The Sellout resigned himself to the fate of all other middle-class Californians: "to die in the same bedroom you'd grown up in, looking up at the crack in the stucco ceiling that had been there since '68 quake." Raised by a single father, a controversial sociologist at Riverside Community College, he spent his childhood as the subject in psychological...

For twenty years, Daniel Hardesty has borne the emotional scars of a childhood trauma which he is powerless to undo, which leaves him no peace. One August morning in 1995, the young Daniel and his estranged father Francis--a character of irresistible charm and roiling self-pity--set out on a road trip to the North that seems to represent a chance to salvage their relationship. ... But with every passing mile, the layers of Fran's mendacity and desperation...

"A long-awaited new novel from a National Book Award Finalist, the epic story of a restless young man who is captured during the Vietnam War and pressed into service for a clandestine branch of the United States government. A small boy speaking an unknown language is abandoned by his father at an international airport, with only the clothes on his back and a handful of money jammed in the pocket of his coat. So begins The Volunteer. But in order to...