The Love Song of Jonny Valentine
10 best books like The Love Song of Jonny Valentine (Teddy Wayne): The Fun Parts, We Sinners, Woke Up Lonely, Truth in Advertising, What the Family Needed, Elect H. Mouse State Judge, Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles, Head Games, Swimming Sweet Arrow, Little Known Facts
| Author | Sam Lipsyte |
| ISBN | 0374298904 |
A boy eats his way to self-discovery, while another must battle the reality-brandishing monster preying on his fantasy realm. Elsewhere, an aerobics instructor—the daughter of a Holocaust survivor—makes the most shocking leap imaginable to save her soul. These are just a few of the characters...
| Author | Hanna Pylväinen |
| ISBN | 0805095330 |
This stunning debut novel—drawn from the author's own life experience—tells the moving story of a family of eleven in the American Midwest, bound together and torn apart by their faith
The Rovaniemis and their nine children belong to a deeply traditional church (no drinking, no dancing,...
| Author | Fiona Maazel |
| ISBN | 1555976387 |
Woke Up Lonely is an original and deeply funny novel that explores our very human impulse to seek and repel intimacy with the people who matter to us most.
Thurlow Dan is the founder of the Helix, a cult that promises to cure loneliness in the twenty-first century. With its communes and speed-dating,...
| Author | John Kenney |
| ISBN | 1451675542 |
A wickedly funny, honest, and poignant debut novel in the spirit of Then We Came to the End and This Is Where I Leave You about the absurdity of corporate life, the complications of love, and the meaning of family.
“F. Scott Fitzgerald said that there are no second acts in American lives. I have...
| Author | Steven Amsterdam |
| ISBN | 1594486395 |
In this incandescent novel, a family’s superpowers bestow not instant salvation but the miracle of accepting who they are.
“Okay, tell me which you want,” Alek asks his cousin at the outset of What the Family Needed. “To be able to fly or to be invisible.” And soon Giordana, a teenager...
| Author | Nelly Reifler |
| ISBN | 0374710058 |
A terrible crime occurs in Elect H. Mouse State Judge.
Two young girl are abducted and held hostage by a band of religious fanatics. The girls' anxious father, a politician on the eve of an important election, has reasons of his own not to go to the police, so he hires a pair of shady private eyes to investigate....
| Author | Ron Currie Jr. |
| ISBN | 0670025348 |
In this tour de force of imagination, Ron Currie asks why literal veracity means more to us than deeper truths, creating yet again a genre-bending novel that will at once dazzle, move, and provoke.
The protagonist of Ron Currie, Jr.’s new novel has a problem—or rather, several of them....
| Author | Craig McDonald |
| ISBN | 1932557423 |
You start a book like Head Games, set as it is in the fifties, and you wonder if it has to go so hard on period details like casual homophobia, and so often at that. The first novel written in Craig McDonald's Hector Lassiter series, although the seventh chronologically, starts well. People die indiscriminately,...
| Author | Maureen Gibbon |
| ISBN | 0316355569 |
Evangeline Starr Raybuck -- plain-spoken, lusty, and hardworking -- and June Keel are high school seniors, best friends going out with best friends, working together at Noecker's chicken farm after school. Vangie and June make out with their boyfriends together in the same car; they pass dirty notes...
| Author | Christine Sneed |
| ISBN | 1608199584 |
The people who orbit around Renn Ivins, an actor of Harrison Ford-like stature--his girlfriends, his children, his ex-wives, those on the periphery--long to experience the glow of his flame. Anna and Will are Renn's grown children, struggling to be authentic versions of themselves in a world where...
| Author | Sean Ferrell |
| ISBN | 1616951257 |
Say you're a time traveler and you've already toured the entirety of human history. After a while, the outside world might lose a little of its luster. That's why this time traveler celebrates his birthday partying with himself. Every year, he travels to an abandoned hotel in New York City in 2071, the...
| Author | Jassy Mackenzie |
| ISBN | 1616952210 |
Book 4 in the PI Jade de Jong thriller series set in South Africa
Johannesburg, South Africa: At first, the case appears to be one of simple misadventure. Sonet Meintjies, a base jumper, falls to her death while attempting to parachute off a newly built sixty-five-story skyscraper. But Sonet’s...
| Author | Jonathan Dee |
| ISBN | 0812993217 |
For readers of Jonathan Franzen and Richard Russo, Jonathan Dee’s novels are masterful works of literary fiction. In this sharply observed tale of self-invention and public scandal, Dee raises a trenchant question: what do we really want when we ask for forgiveness?
Once a privileged...
Eric Muller has been trying to hack the girlfriend problem for half his life. As a teenage geek, he discovered his gift for programming computers-but his attempts to understand women only confirm that he's better at writing code than connecting with human beings. Brilliant, neurotic, and lonely,...
| Author | Eric Lundgren |
| ISBN | 1468306871 |
Along the streets of the once-great Midwestern city of Trude, the ornate old buildings lie in ruin. Shrouded in disappointment and nostalgia, Trude has become a place to “lose yourself,” as one tourist brochure puts it: a treacherous maze of convoluted shopping malls, barricaded libraries,...
| Author | MacKenzie Bezos |
| ISBN | 0307959732 |
The story of four very different women whose paths intersect--briefly, but significantly--in ways that will transform each of their lives forever: a propulsive reading experience that delivers the most abundant emotional satisfaction, in prose that is intelligent, nuanced, and riveting from...
| Author | Bruce Wagner |
| ISBN | 0399165886 |
Composed of two companion novellas, The Empty Chair is a profound, heart-wrenching piece of spiritual storytelling from Bruce Wagner, the internationally acclaimed author of such novels as Dead Stars, I’m Losing You and Force Majeure. In First Guru, a fictional Wagner narrates the tale of a Buddhist...
| Author | Lisa Brackmann |
| ISBN | 1616952342 |
Iraq War vet Ellie McEnroe has a pretty good life in Beijing, representing the work of controversial dissident Chinese artist Zhang Jianli. Even though Zhang's mysterious disappearance has attracted the attention of the Chinese authorities. Even though her Born-Again mother has come for a visit...
| Author | Katie Roiphe |
| ISBN | 0812992822 |
This powerful collection of essays ranges from pop culture to politics, from Hillary Clinton to Susan Sontag, from Facebook to Mad Men, from Joan Didion to David Foster Wallace to—most strikingly—the author’s own life. For fans of the essays of John Jeremiah Sullivan and Jonathan Lethem.
Named...
| Author | Adam Langer |
| ISBN | 1453297944 |
An enthralling literary mystery that connects some of the world’s most famous authors—from Norman Mailer and Truman Capote to B. Traven and J. D. Salinger—to a sinister collector in Chicago.
Adam Langer, the narrator of this deft and wide-ranging novel by the author of the same name,...
| Author | Stuart Nadler |
| ISBN | 0316126489 |
Hilly Wise is the son of one of the most powerful and wealthy lawyers in the United States. When Hilly meets Savannah, a young black girl on the beach at Cape Cod during the summer of 1952, his affection for her collides with his father's secrets. The result shatters his family, and hers.
Years...
| Author | Shawn Vestal |
| ISBN | 0544027760 |
In this stunning novel, Shawn Vestal transports us to the afterlife, the rugged Northwest, and the early days of Mormonism. From "The First Several Hundred Years Following My Death," an absurd, profound vision of a hellish heaven, to "Winter Elders," in which missionaries calmly and relentlessly...
| Author | Lauren Grodstein |
| ISBN | 1616201126 |
The Explanation for Everything explores humankind's insatiable search for meaning, the risks and rewards of faith, and the salvation that love can offer us all.
Lauren Grodstein's New York Times bestselling novel A Friend of the Family was hailed as "such an incisive diagnosis of aspirational...
| Author | William H. Gass |
| ISBN | 0307701638 |
Gass’s new novel moves from World War II Europe to a small town in postwar Ohio. In a series of variations, Gass gives us a mosaic of a life—futile, comic, anarchic—arranged in an array of vocabularies, altered rhythms, forms and tones, and broken pieces with music as both theme and structure,...
| Author | Philip Hensher |
| ISBN | 0007433700 |
“At that time, there were children you weren't supposed to play with. You knew why. Their parents had been informers during the war. And it hadn't been long since you could have got into trouble for singing a song. My grandfather hid all his Bengali poetry in the cellar.
“I was a baby during...
