"For Chicago sociology professor Amelia Emmet, violence was a research topic-until a student she'd never met shot her"-- "For Chicago sociology professor Amelia Emmet, violence was a research topic--until a student she'd never met shot her. He also shot himself. Now he's dead and she's back on campus, trying to keep up with her class schedule, a growing problem with painkillers, and a question she can't let go: Why? All she wants is for life to...

"Rachel Cusk's Outline is a novel in ten conversations. Spare and stark, it follows a novelist teaching a course in creative writing during an oppressively hot summer in Athens. She leads her students in storytelling exercises. She meets other visiting writers for dinners and discourse. She goes swimming with an elderly Greek bachelor. The people she encounters speak, volubly, about themselves: their fantasies, anxieties, pet theories, regrets, and...

An aspiring feminist and underappreciated housewife embarks on an odyssey to find human decency and goodness—and her high school English teacher—in New York Times bestselling author Matthew Quick’s offbeat masterpiece, a quirky ode to love, fate, and hair metal.

Portia Kane is having a meltdown. After escaping her ritzy Florida life and her cheating pornographer husband, she finds herself back in South Jersey, a place

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BONUS: This edition contains an excerpt from Mary Balogh's The Secret Mistress.

New York Times bestselling author Mary Balogh returns to the seductive world she knows so well–Regency England–in a new novel filled with her trademark wit, sensuality, and breathtaking storytelling. With this, the first in a dazzling new quartet of novels, Balogh invites us into a special world–a select academy for young ladies–...

Natalie Greco loves being a law professor, even though she can't keep her students from cruising sex.com during class. When a colleague talks Nat into teaching a class at a local prison, her comfortable world turns upside. A violent prison riot breaks out, and in the chaos, Nat rushes to help an injured guard. Before he dies, he asks her to deliver a cryptic message. The dying declaration plunges Nat into a nightmare. Suddenly, the girl who has always...

Ms. Beatrice Hempel, teacher of seventh grade, is new-new to teaching, new to the school, newly engaged, and newly bereft of her idiosyncratic father. Grappling awkwardly with her newness, she struggles to figure out what is expected of her in life and at work. Is it acceptable to introduce swear words into the English curriculum, enlist students to write their own report cards, or bring up personal experiences while teaching a sex-education class? Sarah...

New York Times bestselling author Mary Balogh's new Wescott series continues as a young woman deals with her father's death and a reversal of fortune. With her parent's marriage declared bigamous, Camille Westcott is now illegitimate and without a title. Looking to eschew the trappings of her old life, she leaves London to teach at the Bath orphanage where her newly-discovered half-sister lived. But even as she settles in, she must sit for a portrait...

When Hannah goes to the beach with her mother, she is shocked to find her first-grade teacher, Mrs. Connor, lying there in a bathing suit as if she were an ordinary person.

No longer certain of the woman she has become when her husband abandons her for another woman, Madrid college professor Blanca Perea heads to San Francisco and becomes enmeshed in a late Spanish writer's tumultuous life as Blanca learns how to reinvent herself. 384pp., 75K, Auth res: Murcia, Spain

Mona Gray is a quirky young woman who hides in a private world of numbers after her beloved mathematician father falls ill. But when Mona is offered a job as an elementary school math teacher, she will introduce the students to her own eccentric gift for numerical obsession. Can the joys of arithmetic multiplied by a shy romance with the school science teacher help Mona discover a new life she can count on?