Babbitt turns the spotlight on middle America and strips bare the hypocrisy of business practice, social mores, politics, and religious institutions. In his introduction and notes Gordon Hutner explores the novel's historical and literary contexts, and highlights its rich cultural and social references. --from publisher description

Follows a middle-aged man as he reflects on a past he thought was behind him, until he is presented with a legacy that forces him to reconsider different decisions, and to revise his place in the world.

"As he pushes fifty, painter and petty thief Oliver Otway Orme reflects on his life, trying to uncover the answer to how and why things have turned out as they have, excavating memories of family, of places he has called home, and of the way he has apprehended the world around him"--

When it was published in 1955, Lolita immediately became a cause celebre because of the freedom and sophistication with which it handled the unusual erotic predilections of its protagonist. But Vladimir Nabokov's wise, ironic, elegant masterpiece owes its stature as one of the twentieth century's novels of record not to the controversy its material aroused but to its author's use of that material to tell a love story almost shocking in its beauty...

"From the beloved and best-selling Anne Tyler, a sparkling new novel about misperception, second chances, and the sometimes elusive power of human connection. Micah Mortimer is a creature of habit. A self-employed tech expert, superintendent of his Baltimore apartment building, cautious to a fault behind the steering wheel, he seems content leading a steady, circumscribed life. But one day his routines are blown apart when his woman friend (he refuses...

After thirty years, Wilson Lewis is forced to face a painful truth: the romance has gone out of his marriage. His wife, Jane, has fallen out of love with him, and it is entirely his fault. Despite the shining example of his in-laws, Noah and Allie Calhoun, and their fifty-year love affair (originally recounted in The Notebook), Wilson himself is a man unable to express his true feelings. He has spent too little time at home and too much at the office,...

Sixty-one-year-old fifth-grade teacher Liam Pennywell, having been forced into retirement, is attacked shortly after moving into his new condominium on the outskirts of Baltimore, and embarks on a mission to recover memories which he lost during the incident, which results in an unlikely friendship with a woman half his age.