Adam Langer: 6 books

To his friends, Seymour Langer was one of the brightest kids to emerge from Chicago’s Depression-era Jewish West Side. To his family, he was a driven and dedicated physician, a devoted father and husband. But to his Adam, youngest son, Seymour was also an enigma: a somewhat distant figure to whom...

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, tells...

Signez, vous ne risquez rien, ou presque... Journaliste désabusé, Adam Langer retrouve un jour une vieille connaissance : Conner Joyce, auteur de thrillers en perte de vitesse en pleine promotion de son dernier roman. Ce dernier lui confie avoir reçu une offre ahurissante : un homme d'affaires...

The famously false memoirs of James Frey may be yesterday’s news, but as this funny riff reminds us, literary fakes are as old as literature itself. Ian Minot is an aspiring writer who labors over short stories that seem destined to remain unread. His beautiful Romanian girlfriend, Anya Petrescu,...

Clarinetist Ike Morphy, his dog Herbie Mann, and a pair of pigeons who roost on his air conditioner are about to be evicted from their apartment on West 106th Street, also known as Duke Ellington Boulevard. Ike has never had a lease, just a handshake agreement with the recently deceased landlord;...

Crossing California is a cinematic and unforgettable look at the end of an era, the turning point when the idealism of the sixties gave way to the pragmatism of the eighties. California Avenue, in Chicago’s West Rogers Park neighborhood, separates the upper-middle-class Jewish families on...