Gaby Stanton is fired from her professor job, and then hired as a salesperson by an outfit called Gone With the Wind, which supplies fantasy funerals for the rich. When she meets a man whose son has mysteriously died, the two realize that Gone With the Wind may be involved. At the same time, they find themselves falling in love.

Gaby Stanton is fired from her professor job, and then hired as a salesperson by an outfit called Gone With the Wind, which supplies fantasy funerals for the rich. When she meets a man whose son has mysteriously died, the two realize that Gone With the Wind may be involved. At the same time, they find themselves falling in love.

Nominated for the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction, this novel tells the story of a wounded Civil War soldier who falls in love with the young woman who cares for him at the field hospital. The horror of battle and its aftermath is vividly portrayed. A "New York Times" Notable Book for 1998.

A Civil War veteran named Gawain Harper returns to Mississippi to claim his beloved, Morgan Rhea, and return to his job as a schoolteacher. His hot-headed new father-in-law, however, insists that he kill a local white supremacist who is also a murderer responsible for the deaths of Morgan's sister and her husband. A New York Times Notable Book for the year 2000.

Private detective Sam Turner agrees to help Terry Deacon, a fellow 12-stepper who wants to have his wife followed. By the time Sam figures out that what Deacon really wants is a cheap bodyguard for her, Deacon is already dead and Sam is in the middle of a bizarre plot to kill all the former housemates of a famous New Zealand poet.

Paradise Alley is a slum in New York City, and in 1863 it is the site of the riots that occurred when working-class men who were too poor to avoid military service through bribes were drafted into the army. The story is told from the viewpoint of a New York Tribune reporter, and supplemented by the tales of a large cast of characters, including Ruth Dove, a survivor of the Irish Potato Famine, her black husband Billy, and the evil Johnny Dolan, a murderous ex-con who is stalking Ruth. A New York Times Notable Book for 2002.

Nicholson Baker's novel about phone sex, told mostly in dialogue, was made notorious by the Monica Lewinsky scandal. It features Abby and Jim, who talk endlessly on the phone coast-to-coast--about sex, of course, but also about life's trivia, Baker's greatest subject. As always, his real theme is language, and his greatest gift as a writer is his eccentric examination of it as part of a close observation of the human condition.

Baker writes amusingly and insightfully about his obsession with John Updike, telling us in the process a great deal about himself. Updike himself, in a review, calls Baker's book "a close and self-pitiless examination of his relationship with a mental figment derived from a fractional perusal and a few personal glimpses of the author John Updike," and comments, "[O]ut of the books of others we sift a book of our own, wherein we read the lessons we want to hear."

Nicholson Baker's novel about phone sex, told mostly in dialogue, was made notorious by the Monica Lewinsky scandal. It features Abby and Jim, who talk endlessly on the phone coast-to-coast--about sex, of course, but also about life's trivia, Baker's greatest subject. As always, his real theme is language, and his greatest gift as a writer is his eccentric examination of it as part of a close observation of the human condition.

Someone is killing Supreme Court law clerks who knew too much. But what did they know? The only man who seems to be able to answer that question is Rufus Harms, who just escaped from a military prison where he was wrongfully imprisoned for 25 years. On the run from army officers who want him dead or alive, Harms must unravel the conspiracy to save his life and clear his name.

In the 1890s, Eva Hansen, a European woman living under an assumed name in Hawaii, finds a dead boy on the beach--a body that goes missing as soon as it is reported to the police. As a suspect herself, Eva becomes involved in Hawaiian power politics in which annexation by the U.S. has become an option and the once lush island paradise is threatened on all sides.