The conflicts between love and hate, good and evil, and life and art are explored in a portrait of Alaric Darconville, a twenty-nine-year-old professor at Quinsy College--a women's college in Virginia--who falls in love with and is jilted by one of his students

The main story is a love affair between Alaric Darconville, an English professor at a Virginia women's college, and one of his students, Isabel, but includes long sections on other topics, including a general satire of the world of American academics.

A brilliant satire from one of the great novelists of his time. In his first novel in nearly twenty years, Alexander Theroux, National Book Award Nominee, returns with a compendious satire, a bold and inquisitorial circuit-breaking examination of love and hate, of rejection and forgiveness, of trust and romantic disappointment, of the terrors of contemporary life. Eugene Eyestones, an erudite sex columnist for a Boston cultural magazine, becomes enmeshed in the messy life of a would-be artist named Laura Warholic, who, repulsing and fascinating him at the same time, becomes a mirror in which he not only sees himself but through which he is forced to face his own demons. Not only does she inadvertently supply him with material for his columns, but she exemplifies all that Eugene considers wrong with contemporary America (of which the publishing profession and its recognizable denizens serves as a microcosm)a garish and dunce-filled Babylon that Theroux scorches with inventive and relentless satire. Nostalgic for the old days and old manners, a way of life lost to grace, loving from afar a mysterious beauty named Rapunzel Wisht, Eugene fights against the rising tide of stupidity, focusing on Laura in the hope that by saving her he can validate his ethical beliefs. But feckless Laura and the colorful but bizarre cast of characters surrounding Eugenebrilliant bigots, nihilists, Generation-X slackers and zanies of all sexual persuasionsthreaten to pull him under, leading to the novel's unforgettable conclusion, a climax of betrayal and redemption of Dostoevskyan power.

Since the publication of his first novel in 1972, Alexander Theroux has won great acclaim for his dazzling style and forceful intellect. That first novel, Three Wogs, was named Book of the Year by Encyclopedia Britannica and nominated for the National Book Award, as was his second novel, Darconville's Cat (1981), which Anthony Burgess called one of the 99 best novels of the 20th century. Since then Theroux has published numerous other books, won several awards, and has been the subject of academic studies and theses. In addition to Burgess, he has been praised by such writers as Saul Bellow, Guy Davenport, Robertson Davies, Fred Exley, Jonathan Franzen, William H. Gass, Norman Mailer, D. Keith Mano, Cormac McCarthy, James McCourt, Annie Proulx, John Updike, and Paul West. Alexander Theroux: A Fan's Notes is the first book-length study of Theroux's complete body of work, concluding with a chapter on his contentious relationship with his best-selling brother Paul Theroux. Critic Steven Moore, who has known Theroux for nearly 40 years and helped with the publication of some of his books, illuminates Theroux's work in a scholarly yet accessible style.

Alexander Theroux has taught at Harvard, MIT, Yale, and the University of Virginia, where he took his doctorate in 1968. He is the author of four highly regarded novels, Three Wogs (1972), Darconville's Cat (1981), An Adultery (1987), and Laura Warholic (2007), as well as Collected Poems (2015) and other books of non-fiction. Both Three Wogs and Darconville's Cat were nominated for the National Book Award. Early Stories, the first book of Theroux's fiction to be published in fourteen years, constitutes an addition to one of modern American literature's most lauded and entertaining bodies of work. It is also the first volume in his story triad (Fables and Later Stories soon to follow). Nobody writing today has a keener instinct for obsession, hypocrisy, sexual jealousy, envy, human folly, the lineaments of vanity, greed, and romantic disappointment, and, yes, grace. A feast of comic joy awaits you in this long-awaited collection. Here, the sword arm of satire is swung high! We encounter an intractable woman who refuses to divulge the secret to her spaghetti sauce. A tourist discovers a modern Nestor in an English pub. An idealistic teacher who is also a broken-hearted lover leaves us speechless over his overwhelming fixation. A hide-bound feminist goes to Italy to learn pasta making. A beautiful Bostonian, becoming a fashion model, achieves a much different goal. What is the effect of summer camp on a sensitive youngster? How does a hunt in Cracow for the alpenstock of great Copernicus end up a comic farce? Does a young boy with a genius IQ fulfill his promise? What happens when a collector discovers the rarest autograph in American letters? Nothing prepares the reader for the twists and turns of these unsparing but brilliantly plotted stories. Language is, however, the subject, the splendid gift of one of the nation's word-masters, a magician who fashions words out of his fingertips. Satire, it is said, swipes off the noggin but leaves the head in place. Here, the head still manages to find its voice-to our great and continuing pleasure.

"Brilliantly written...a joy to read...Bleeding Edge is totally gonzo, totally wonderful. It really is good to have Thomas Pynchon around, doing what he does best." - Michael Dirda, The Washington Post "Exemplary...dazzling and ludicrous." - Jonathan Lethem, The New York Times Book Review It is 2001 in New York City, in the lull between the collapse of the dot-com boom and the terrible events of September 11th. Maxine Tarnow runs a fine little fraud investigation business on the Upper West Side. All is ticking over nice and normal, until she starts looking into the finances of a computer-security firm and its billionaire geek CEO. She soon finds herself mixed up with a drug runner in an art deco motorboat, a professional nose obsessed with Hitler’s aftershave, a neoliberal enforcer with footwear issues, and an array of bloggers, hackers, code monkeys, and entrepreneurs, some of whom begin to show up mysteriously dead. Foul play, of course. Will perpetrators be revealed, forget about brought to justice? Will Maxine have to take the handgun out of her purse? Will Jerry Seinfeld make an unscheduled guest appearance? Will accounts secular and karmic be brought into balance? Hey. Who wants to know?

This is a collection of the National Book Award-nominated author’s poems: sonnets, odes, ballads, and more. The publication of Alexander Theroux’s Collected Poems, a gathering of more than 660 poems, an astonishing creative output, will be among the major literary events of the year. Here is a full cornucopia of sonnets, odes, ballads, free verse, triolets, pure, satires, narratives, dramatic monologues, fanciful meditations, flytings and harangues, ruminations on death and lost love, and no end of lyrics both beautiful and fierce. Taken altogether they contrive to make up a record of the author’s deepest thoughts and reflect the dramatis personae of his life. Theroux captures in his work those rare, frail, but precious truths, inaccessible to the common run of men that would otherwise have vanished into nescience. Sardonic, astute, impertinent, tender, clever, warmhearted, delphic, truculent, comic, defiantly aggressive, and often achingly personal, he shows an intensity of observation and invention.

From the best-selling coauthor of The Disaster Artist and “one of America's best and most interesting writers" (Stephen King), a new collection of stories that range from laugh-out-loud funny to disturbingly dark—unflinching portraits of women and men struggling to bridge the gap between art and life A young and ingratiating assistant to a movie star makes a blunder that puts his boss and a major studio at grave risk. A long-married couple hires an escort for a threesome in order to rejuvenate their relationship. An assistant at a prestigious literary journal reconnects with a middle school frenemy and finds that his carefully constructed world of refinement cannot protect him from his past. A Bush administration lawyer wakes up on an abandoned airplane, trapped in a nightmare of his own making. In these and other stories, Tom Bissell vividly renders the complex worlds of characters on the brink of artistic and personal crises—writers, video-game developers, actors, and other creative types who see things slightly differently from the rest of us. With its surreal, poignant, and sometimes squirm-inducing stories, Creative Types is a brilliant new offering from one the most versatile and talented writers working in America today.

"A novel that is as moving as it is cerebral, as poignant as it is daring." - Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times "Mason & Dixon - like Huckleberry Finn, like Ulysses - is one of the great novels about male friendship in anybody's literature." - John Leonard, The Nation Charles Mason (1728–1786) and Jeremiah Dixon (1733–1779) were the British surveyors best remembered for running the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland that we know today as the Mason-Dixon Line. Here is their story as reimagined by Thomas Pynchon, featuring Native Americans and frontier folk, ripped bodices, naval warfare, conspiracies erotic and political, major caffeine abuse. Unreflectively entangled in crimes of demarcation, Mason & Dixon take us along on a grand tour of the Enlightenment’s dark hemisphere, from their first journey together to the Cape of Good Hope, to pre-Revolutionary America and back to England, into the shadowy yet redemptive turns of their later lives, through incongruities in conscience, parallaxes of personality, tales of questionable altitude told and intimated by voices clamoring not to be lost. Along the way they encounter a plentiful cast of characters, including Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and Samuel Johnson, as well as a Chinese feng shui master, a Swedish irredentist, a talking dog, and a robot duck. The quarrelsome, daring, mismatched pair—Mason as melancholy and Gothic as Dixon is cheerful and pre-Romantic—pursues a linear narrative of irregular lives, observing, and managing to participate in the many occasions of madness presented them by the Age of Reason.