Narrative theme: interior life / psychological fiction

Book SynopsisA charming novel following the struggles a naive, sentimental student striving to move beyond family, self, and place in the late 1960’s. Confessions of a Medical Student charts 20-year-old Ben Adler's tragic-comic journey from home to med-school and the world beyond. Callow and impressionable, Ben leaves his over-anxious Russian-Jewish parents in their Toronto drugstore, and Angie, his girlfriend whom he plans to marry against his parents' wishes. In anatomy, Ben dissects his cadaver, 'Clive', with lab-mates. As the first blush of med-school fades, Ben learns of his father's life-threatening illness. Cash-poor, Ben enlists in the Navy to earn room and board, joins Lenny's Underground Railroad for draft-dodgers, jeopardizing studies and provoking his ill father's scorn. The novel chronicles the tumultuous years 1966-1971 through the eyes of a naive, sentimental student striving to move beyond family, self, and place. Ben careens from mistake to mistake over four years, yet at the novel's end he emerges with self-knowledge and a touch of worldly pain and wisdom.

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Book SynopsisThe first mystery novel in the Inspector Canal series. Psychoanalysts make the best detectives! When it comes to divining motives, deciphering ambiguous pronouncements, detecting delusions, and foiling the tricks memory plays, famed French analyst Jacques Lacan - turned self-proclaimed retired Inspector Quesjac Canal - is second to none (apologies to Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot, Edgar Allen Poe's Dupin, and Umberto Eco's William of Baskerville). Reluctantly drawn into helping hapless New York City police detectives with crimes reported by luminaries like Rolland Saalem, music director of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, and involving prominent personages like Tobias Trickler, Mayor of New York City, and Sandra Errand, Vice-President for North American sales at YVEH Distributors of Spirits, Canal solves cases that are anything but what they appear to be and mends tears of the heart and soul at the same time.Table of ContentsTHE CASE OF THE LOST OBJECT THE CASE OF THE PIRATED FORMULA THE CASE OF THE LIQUIDITY SQUEEZE

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Book Synopsis‘Many years ago in Mytherranea, before the stars had names, when daisies were still called days’ eyes, and the moon stayed up all night to keep the darkness company, there lived a race called redbits…’ So begins the tale of Rensal, a small creature trying to make sense of a big world. Running along one day, Rensal bumps into the Tall One, a wise and mysterious redbit who loves to talk. Over tea, toast, and berries, the friends discuss life, love, creation, dreams, death, and everything else that lies under the sun. This is a book that gets to the heart of what it is to be young, of the joys and sorrows and confusions of childhood, and of the questions that continue to be pertinent even when we are full-grown – how we live, how we love, and what – if anything – it all means.

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Book SynopsisA spellbinding story about family and broken promises. What happens when parents find themselves promising and then rescinding what they do not have to give? The Hands of Gravity and Chance opens with the fall of a thirteen-year-old girl down the stairs of the family house, an event that generates fault lines that spread both forward and backward in time, releasing an explosive energy of love and fear, bitterness and remorse.

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Book SynopsisIf Holly Golightly lived in the '80s, how far would she go to make a name for herself as Manhattan's artist du jour? We know all about Warhol, Basquiat, Keith Haring, and their fictional counterparts, but what about the edgy women artists of this time? ;Jodi Plum: smart, talented, ambitious, troubled. Fresh out of her teens, she leaves suburbia for Manhattan's glam and gritty art scene, and almost immediately falls into the clutches of Monika, a beautiful photographer. With the help of her new mentor, Jodi quickly becomes a rising star—but when a skeleton from her past surfaces, her dream life crashes to a halt, and she slips into a world of parties, drugs, and high-class prostitution. ; ;Set in the crime-plagued New York City of the 1980s, Beautiful Garbage parallels an artist's journey with her sexual epiphanies, exploring the notorious milieu of the decade's downtown art scene from the point of view of a young female artist—and offering a satirical and irreverent look at post-'70s sexual politics and the world of elite call girls. ;Trade Review“An alluring story of New York nightlife and its seedy players.” —Cat Marnell, VICE columnist “Equal parts Patti Smith’s Just Kids and The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Beautiful Garbage is a voyeuristic panorama of the vice and vanity of the downtown art scene in the 1980s.” —Ivy Pochoda, author of The Art of Disappearing and Visitation Street “Beautiful Garbage offers up one woman’s tour of duty of a New York City consumed by art, sex, and ambition. By turns passionate, cruel, shocking, and engrossing, this is a novel steeped in the lure of glamour and transformation the Big Apple’s always had to offer.” —Rachel Kramer Bussel, editor of Women in Lust and Fast Girls “Beautiful, yes. Garbage, no. Just a captivating story of art, women, friendship, drugs, and self-destruction set against the glittery backdrop of a vanished Manhattan.” —Elisa Albert, author of The Book of Dahlia “Beautiful Garbage combines the page-turning ease of a beach read with a polished and ambitious literary tone. As challenging and unconventional as its heroine, Jodi Plum, the book falls into a heritage that includes Plath and Edie Sedgwick, and yet is freshly and con dently dependent on neither.” —Ruth Fowler, author of Girl, Undressed “We have all heard the phrase ‘one man's garbage is another's treasure.’ Beautiful Garbage happens to be everyone’s treasure. To read this book is to listen to that gritty voice in your own head that keeps repeating, DO IT.” —Jules Kim, Creator and Owner of Bijules Jewelry

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Book SynopsisWhy is it easier for a woman to be a muse than to have one? Can one be fully creative—in art or life—without the inspiration of erotic love? These are the questions asked in The Geometry of Love, a novel set in New York in the 1980s, then fast-forwarding to Northern California 20 years later. Julia, an aspiring poet, is living with her British boyfriend Ben, a restrained professor at Princeton, when she has a chance meeting with Michael, a long-ago friend. A charismatic composer, Michael was once a catalyzing muse for her, but now returns as a destabilizing influence. Julia longs to become involved with Michael, but hesitates to give up the security of her relationship with Ben. When Michael signals he is too wounded to make a commitment, Julia turns her triangular situation into a square by setting him up with a cousin. In the process she discovers, as Pascal once said, that ""the heart has its reasons which reason does not know."" This deeply psychological tale explores the surprising ways we make romantic choices.Trade Review“Jessica Levine knows relationships. In The Geometry of Love, Levine artfully weaves the story of one woman's desire for passion, art and love and her conflicting needs of comfort, security and stability. A universal tale written by a compassionate writer whose gentle love of her characters shines throughout this book.” —Ann Garvin, author of On Maggie's Watch “Unfulfilled love and attraction can resonate over decades, affecting our choices of who we love, what we create, and ultimately who we are. In this novel of relationships, Jessica Levine offers a strong heroine in Julia, a woman who wants to be honorable even as she wrestles with her wilder side and the undertow of longing. We root for her as she tries to do the right thing, which in the end is best chosen by the heart. The Geometry of Love is a fine literary debut that weaves psychological wisdom into an entertaining love story.” —Virginia Pye, author of River of Dust “[L]yrical and realistic….Julia is a compelling and relatable protagonist . . . .” —Foreword Reviews “Feeling restless in her long-term relationship with her boyfriend, Ben, Julia Field decides to take over her father’s accounting business and move to New York. She’ll still see Ben on the weekends, she rationalizes, and maybe a little distance will inspire him to finally pop the question. She never expected to run into Ben’s former roommate, Michael, an adorably disheveled yet temperamental composer, who once shared a surprisingly passionate kiss with her on the steps of the New York Public Library during their senior year of college. Though Julia confessed to Ben on the night of the kiss, she never expected to feel the same surge of passion after running into Michael so many years later. Does passion outweigh stability? Is pure romance sustainable? The Geometry of Love charts the love triangle between Julia, Ben, and Michael as all three search for the answers to life’s most heartfelt questions. Spanning 1987 to 2004, the novel’s scope and sweeping character arcs will appeal to fans of Meg Wolitzer’s The Interestings (2013). Julia’s emotions, insecurities, and pleasures are laid bare and recall Isadora Wing in Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying (1973). An outstanding first novel.” —Stephanie Turza

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Book Synopsis

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