In this novel, the author her remarkable storytelling skills and emotional insight to the lives of modern women, considering the precarious balance of marriage and career, motherhood and friendship. The seaside town of Gloucester, on Cape Ann, Massachusetts, is a place where the smell of the ocean lingers in the air. Fifty-nine-year-old Kathleen Levine, a longtime resident, is graceful, maternal, and steady, a devoted children's librarian, a convert...

These nine brilliantly inventive stories capture the eccentricities of the residents of Manhattan's West 89th Street. Five stories are set in one apartment building, where young Davie Birnbaum watches his neighbors' lives unfold. The title story reworks F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," with the hero fading away toward infancy on the third floor. In apartment 7E, a lawyer named Zauberman reenacts the life of Hawthorne's...

Many years have passed since Oliver Levin -- a bestselling mystery writer and a lifetime sufferer from blocked emotions -- has given any thought to his parents, Holocaust survivors who committed suicide. But now, after years of uninterrupted literary output, Oliver Levin finds himself blocked as a writer, too. Oliver's fourteen-year-old daughter, Ariel, sets out to free her father from his demons by summoning the ghosts of his parents, but, along...

Murder hits close to home as one of Pete's relatives is found dead in a seedy Manhattan hotel room. Missing from the scene is the dead man's teenage niece -- the last person to see the victim alive. It's been ten years since Pete walked the streets of New York, and now he has no choice but to return to the city's underground. When he finds the girl in the last place anyone would think to look, devastating family secrets emerge.

This book includes two works by Ilʹi͡a Ėrenburg : a book of witty amusing stories "Thirteen tubes" (not printed between 1928 to 2001), and the satirical novel "The Wild Life Lasik Roitschwantz" (1927), widely known in many countries, but in USSR banned (it was first published only in 1989). The publication is provided with an introductory article about the early prose Ehrenburg and detailed comments.

Three boys seeking a thief in their school building, befriend an amnesia-stricken boy hiding inside.