Medical school dropout Victor Mancini comes up with a complicated but ingenious scam to pay for his mother's elder care, cruises sex addiction groups for action, and visits his zany mother, whose Alzheimer's disease hides the bizarre truth about his parentage.

A memoir of drug and alcohol abuse and the rehabilitation experience examines addiction and recovery through the eyes of a man who had taken his addictions to deadly extremes, describing the battle to confront the consequences of his life.

Taking place mere hours following the events seen in The Gunslinger, The Drawing of the Three continues with Roland of Gilead on his solitary quest for the Dark Tower, leading him to a seemingly endless stretch of beach along the Western Sea -- a terrain filled with unearthly monstrosities that mean certain death if he lets his guard down. But there are other mysteries along this desolate shoreline as well: three arcane doorways standing freely in...

"Stranded in a volatile, ever-shifting family, saddled with a mercurial mother mired in crack addiction, and demeaned daily for his perceived weakness, Joseph Earl Thomas was under constant threat. Roaches fell from the ceiling, colonizing bowls of noodles and cereal boxes. Fists and palms pounded down at school and at home, leaving welts that ached long after they disappeared. An inescapable hunger gnawed at his frequently empty stomach, and requests...

Very few books have resulted in the controversy that "The Diary of a Drug Fiend" has caused since its original publication in 1922. While much of the debate is centered on the novel's author Aleister Crowley, the story itself has both enchanted and enraged audiences for nearly a century. Despite being a fictional work, Crowley drew from his own experiences as a heavy drug user for the context of the plot. Peter Pendragon and Louise Laleham, in a drug-induced...

From the New York Times bestselling author of Hallelujah Anyway, Almost Everything, and Bird by Bird, a powerful and redemptive novel of love and family
Rosie Ferguson is seventeen and ready to enjoy the summer before her senior year of high school. She's intelligent-she aced AP physics; athletic-a former state-ranked tennis doubles champion; and beautiful. She is, in short, everything her mother, Elizabeth, hoped...

The author chronicles the dark secret life he led when, despite building for himself a respectable career as a literary agent, he embraced crack cocaine; went on a two-month binge; and lost his job, his home, and all his money

Along with Saul Bellow's Herzog, Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint defined Jewish American literature in the 1960s. Roth's masterpiece takes place on the couch of a psychoanalyst, an appropriate jumping-off place for an insanely comical novel about the Jewish American experience. Roth has written several great books--Goodbye, Columbus and When She Was Good among them, but it is perhaps Portnoy's Complaint for which he is best known.

"In a small New England town over half a century ago, a boy is playing with his new toy soldiers in the dirt in front of his house when a shadow falls over him. He looks up to see a striking man, the new minister, Jamie learns later, who with his beautiful wife, will transform the church and the town. The men and boys are a bit in love with Mrs. Jacobs; the women and girls, with the Reverend Jacobs--including Jamie's sisters and mother. Then tragedy...

Presents an exploration of addiction that blends memoir, cultural history, literary criticism, and journalistic reportage to analyze the role of stories in conveying the addiction experience, sharing insights based on the lives of artists whose achievements were shaped by addiction. "A transformative work showing that sometimes the recovery is more gripping than the addiction. With its deeply personal and seamless blend of memoir, cultural history,...