"A novel about a young Chinese woman whose graduate studies in chemistry go off track and lead her to discover the truths about her goals and desires"-- Three years into her graduate studies at a demanding Boston university, our unnamed narrator finds her one-time love for chemistry is more hypothesis than reality. Tormented by her failed research, there's another, nonscientific question looming: the marriage proposal from a fellow scientist, whose...

"Samantha Heather Mackey couldn't be more of an outsider in her small, highly selective MFA program at New England's Warren University. A scholarship student who prefers the company of her dark imagination to that of most people, she is utterly repelled by the rest of her fiction writing cohort--a clique of unbearably twee rich girls who call each other "Bunny," and are often found entangled in a group hug so tight they become one. But everything...

During a volatile year of self-discovery in the shared and private spaces of Iowa City, three friends preparing for an uncertain future head to a cabin to bid goodbye to their former lives--a moment of reckoning that leaves each of them irrevocably altered.

"A novel of rare emotional power that excavates the social intricacies of a late-summer weekend -- and a lifetime of buried pain. Almost everything about Wallace, an introverted African-American transplant from Alabama, is at odds with the lakeside Midwestern university town where he is working toward a biochem degree. For reasons of self-preservation, Wallace has enforced a wary distance even within his own circle of friends -- some dating each other,...

"Zachary Ezra Rawlins is a graduate student in Vermont when he discovers a rare book hidden in the stacks. As he turns the pages, entranced by tales of lovelorn prisoners, key collectors, and nameless acolytes, he reads something strange: a story from his own childhood. Bewildered by this inexplicable book and desperate to make sense of how his own life came to be recorded, Zachary uncovers a series of clues--a bee, a key, and a sword--that lead him...

In this story the main character is "a perpetual graduate student with a birth defect in his urinary tract--a man on the threshold of committing himself to a second marriage that bears a remarkable resemblance to his first."--Cover.

"A sharp, timely debut about a young woman's toxic relationship with an older man and her battle to free herself from the suffocating expectation to be "good." When personal scandal forces her to leave Paris, Frances, a young British graduate student, travels to southern France one summer to volunteer on a farm. Almost as soon as she arrives, she is pulled into a relationship with the farm's enigmatic owner, Paul, a well-traveled older artist. Alone...

Amanda Brooks is a born-and-bred New Yorker with an envious life: she's in a great graduate school program, lives in a cozy Tribeca apartment, and is head-over-heels for her handsome, committed boyfriend. But Amanda's life isn't as picture perfect as it seems. For over a decade she's been hiding a dark secret--a secret that goes back to that summer at Camp Catalpa when a man died in the woods. Fellow campers Catherine and Meg were there too, and in...