Andrew Sean Greer

Presents selections of mainstream and alternative American literatue including both fiction and nonfiction, that discuss a broad spectrum of subjects.

Receiving an invitation to his ex-boyfriend's wedding, Arthur, a failed novelist on the eve of his fiftieth birthday, embarks on an international journey that finds him falling in love, risking his life, reinventing himself, and making connections with the past.

Today Show Book Club Pick An extraordinarily haunting love story told in the voice of a man who appears to age backwards We are each the love of someone's life. So begins The Confessions of Max Tivoli, a heartbreaking love story with a narrator like no other. At his birth, Max's father declares him a "nisse," a creature of Danish myth, as his baby son has the external physical appearance of an old, dying creature. Max grows older like any child, but his physical age appears to go backward--on the outside a very old man, but inside still a fearful child. The story is told in three acts. First, young Max falls in love with a neighborhood girl, Alice, who ages as normally as any of us. Max, of course, does not; as a young man, he has an older man's body. But his curse is also his blessing: as he gets older, his body grows younger, so each successive time he finds his Alice, she does not recognize him. She takes him for a stranger, and Max is given another chance at love. Set against the historical backdrop of San Francisco at the turn of the twentieth century, Max's life and confessions question the very nature of time, of appearance and reality, and of love itself. A beautiful and daring feat of the imagination, The Confessions of Max Tivoli reveals the world through the eyes of a "monster," a being who confounds the very certainties by which we live and in doing so embodies in extremis what it means to be human.

In the title story of this collection, neighborhood boys crouch in a backyard toolshed, and conspire to prove their piano teachers to be witches. In "Cannibal Kings," a disillusioned young man accompanies a troubled boy on a tour of prep schools through the Pacific Northwest, only to realize that he has lost his way in life. And in "Come Live With Me And Be My Love," a middle-aged gentleman looks back at his mannered early life as a Ivy Leaguer, married to a vivacious woman but silently yearning for his best friend -- and the sacrifices that each made to uphold their compromising bargain. With a classic storyteller's gift for nuance and understanding, and a poet's grace for language, Andrew Sean Greer makes a remarkable debut with How It Was For Me.

In 1965, on a small island in the South Pacific, a group of astronomers gather to witness the passing of a comet, but when a young boy dies during a meteor shower, the lives of the scientists and their loved ones change in subtle yet profound ways. Denise struggles for respect in her professional life, married Eli becomes increasingly attracted to Denise and her quixotic mind, and young Lydia attempts to escape the scientists’ long-casting shadows. Andrew Sean Greer’s remarkable and sweeping first novel is an exploration of chances taken and lost, of love found and broken, and of time’s subtle gravitational pull on the lives of everyday and extraordinary people.

After the death of her beloved twin brother, Felix, and the break up with her long-time lover, Nathan, Greta Wells embarks on a radical psychiatric treatment to alleviate her suffocating depression. But the treatment has unexpected effects, and Greta finds herself transported to the lives she might have had if she'd been born in a different era.

An ordinary soldier of the queen / Graham Joyce The nursery / Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum Purple bamboo park / E.V. Slate The bell ringer / John Burnside Uncle Musto takes a mistress / Mohan Sikka Kind / L.E. Miller Icebergs / Alistair Morgan The camera and the cobra / Roger Nash Tell him about Brother John / Manuel Muñoz This is not your city / Caitlin Horrocks The house behind a weeping cherry / Ha Jin Twenty-two stories / Paul Theroux The order of things / Judy Troy A beneficiary / Nadine Gordimer Substitutes / Viet Dinh Isabel's daughter / Karen Brown The visitor / Marisa Silver And we will be here / Paul Yoon Darkness / Andrew Sean Greer Wildwood / Junot Díaz Reading the PEN/O. Henry Prize stories 2009: A.S. Byatt on "An ordinary soldier of the Queen" by Graham Joyce ; Anthony Doerr on " Wildwood" by Junot Díaz ; Tim O'Brien on "An ordinary soldier of the Queen" by Graham Joyce

A reverse Lolita across America’s southern edge in pursuit of money, the past, and understanding.