Struggling with encroaching middle age, advertising agent Finbar Dolan is forced to cancel his Christmas plans to tackle a last-minute assignment, only to learn that his estranged father has taken ill and that his siblings are unwilling to help.

An unvarnished family memoir of three generations of Irish-Catholic Boston firemen

By the Thurber Prize-winner and author of the New York Times bestseller, Love Poems for Married People, Talk to Me is a wry yet tenderhearted novel for our age, and a sharp look at how one man's mistake can be what leads him back to his family--and to the man he used to be. It's a story that Ted Grayson has reported time and time again as a network TV anchor: the public downfall of those at the top. He just never imagined that it would happen to him. After a profanity-laced tirade is caught on camera, his reputation and career are destroyed, leaving him without a script for the first time in years. While American viewers may have loved and trusted Ted for decades, his family certainly didn't. At the time of his meltdown, Ted is estranged from his wife, Claire, and his adult daughter, Franny, a writer for a popular website. When Franny's boss suggests that she confront Ted in an interview, it may be the chance for Ted to take a hard look at how he got here, and to find his way back before it's too late. Talk to Me is a sharply observed, darkly funny, and ultimately warm story about a man who wakes up too late to the mess he's made of his life...and about our capacity for forgiveness and empathy.

'Jazz on the River' describes how musical entrepreneurs gave the music of New Orleans to mainstream America in the 1920s, by quite literally sending their musicians upstream, aboard riverboats that plied the Mississippi waterways every summer.

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