The harrowing and beautiful story of the first year of the author's second marriage.In a plainspoken, emotionally accessible voice that readers have not heard from him before, Rick Moody, author of The Ice Storm, Hotels of North America, and other fictions, and of The Black Veil, a prize-winning previous memoir, lays bare, in an eventful month-by-month account, the first year of his second marriage.At this story's start, Moody is, by his own description, "a balding middle-aged recovering alcoholic and sexual compulsive with a history of depression who wrote a novel that people liked in the 90s." He is also the newly divorced father of a beloved little girl and a man in love, whose answer to the question "Would you like to be in a committed relationship?" is, fully and for the first time, "Yes." And so his second marriage begins as he emerges from the wreckage of his past, humbly and with dearest hopes, only to be...

Two families intimately and dangerously converge in this boldly dark and tempestuous novel A potentially devastating blizzard approaches New Canaan, Connecticut, while internal forces of desire, frustration, and ennui threaten to tear apart two quintessentially affluent, suburban families. Elena Hood rightfully suspects her husband, Benjamin, is having an affair with neighbor Janey Williams, while Benjamin resents Elena and his mounting feelings of ineptitude. As the snow begins to fall, Benjamin and Elena, as well as Janey and her husband, attend a neighborhood "key party," where they and other respectable suburbanites agree to go home with whomever's keys they draw from a bowl. Meanwhile, the Hoods' and Williams's teenage children are caught up in their own experimentations with sex and drugs as they test the boundaries of their structured upbringing. With author Rick Moody's sharp eye for the nuances of suburban life and allusions to 1970s America...

During one month in the autumn of election year 2000, scores of movie-business strivers are focused on one goal: getting a piece of an elusive, but surely huge, television saga, the one that opens with Huns sweeping through Mongolia and closes with a Mormon diviner in the Las Vegas desert; the sure-to-please-everyone multigenerational TV miniseries about diviners, those miracle workers who bring water to perpetually thirsty (and hungry and love-starved) humankind. Among the wannabes: Vanessa Meandro, hot-tempered head of Means of Production, an indie film company; her harried and varied staff; a Sikh cab driver, promoted to the office of -theory and practice of TV; a bipolar bicycle messenger, who makes a fateful mis-delivery; two celebrity publicists, the Vanderbilt girls; a thriller writer who gives Botox parties; the daughter of an L.A. big-shot, who is hired to fetch Vanessa+s Krispy Kremes and more; a word man who coined the phrase--inspired by a true story; and a su...

RIGHT LIVELIHOODS begins with a cataclysmic vision of New York City after the leveling of 50 square blocks of Manhattan. Four million have died. Albertine, the "street name for the buzz of a lifetime," is a mind-altering drug that sets The Albertine Notes in motion. The collection's second novella, K & K, concerns a lonely young office manager at an insurance agency, where the office suggestion box is yielding unpleasant messages that escalate to a scary pitch. Ellie Knight-Cameron's responses to these random diatribes illuminate the toll that a lack of self-awareness can take. At the center of The Omega Force is a buffoonish former government official in rocky recovery. Dr. "Jamie" Van Deusen is determined to protect his habitat--its golf courses (and Bloody Marys), pizza places (and beers) from "dark-complected" foreign nationals. His patriotism and wild imagination are mainly fueled by a fall off the wagon. Only Rick Moody could lead us to feel affection for this man and the o...

Rick Moody's novels have earned him a reputation as a "breathtaking" writer (The New York Times) and "a writer of immense gifts" (The San Francisco Examiner). His remarkable short stories have led both the New Yorker and Harpers to single him out as one of the most original and admired voices in a generation. These stories are abundant proof of Rick Moody's grace as a stylist and a shaper of interior lives. He writes with equal force about the blithe energies of youth ("Boys") and the rueful onset of middle age ("Hawaiian Night"), about Midwestern optimists ("Double Zero") and West coast strategists ("Baggage Carousel"), about visionary exhilaration ("Forecast from the Retail Desk") and delusional catharsis ("Surplus Value Books: Catalog Number 13.") The astounding title story, which has already been reprinted in four different anthologies, is a masterpiece of remembrance and thwarted love.Full of deep feeling and stunningly beautiful language, the stories in D...