Open Road Distribution: 425 books

Monday evening comn’ down—the dreariest day of the week anywhere, but especially in the ghettos (yea, y’all, they still there) where people have taken their hangovers and other symptoms of a fast weekend to their individual plantations around town (if they’re lucky enough to have one) return...

Evelyn Harbinger is a heck of a lot older than she looks. At 149 years of age, Eve can still iron out the wrinkles on a Saturday night, turning heads and taking more than phone numbers as the foxy, dark-haired girl she used to be. She and her sisters have spent the better part of their lives using...

Selected as one of The**New York Times Book Review’s Best Books of the Year and honored worldwide, Lisa, Bright and Dark was an immediate sensation when it was first published. Detailing how mental illness affects friends and family of the ill, Lisa, Bright and Dark has been in print for more than...

An enchanting intro to a collection of unforgettable characters—Elizabeth, “Queen of the Projects”; the girl “Billie” who sings like Lady Day; young Randolph who, to his family’s embarrassment, grows a second head for a while; Dean Dale Jackson, talented writer, sculptor, auto mechanic,...

Chicago, the center of America’s heartland, from its founding in the late 1700s by Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, a French-educated black man, to the modern day Gypsies who live on Maxwell Street. It’s a city steeped in Black History. This is the story of a city where a unique African American...

The author of The Devil’s Candy and Wendy and the Lost Boys—herself the daughter of Holocaust survivors—shares her family’s stories, which take them from the Carpathian Mountains of Eastern Europe to the small Appalachian town where she was raised.

Twenty-five hundred years ago, Pythagoras taught that the simple counting numbers are the basic building blocks of reality. A century and a half later, Plato argued that the world we live in is but a poor copy of the world of ideas. Neither realized that their numbers and ideas might also be the most...

The world of this novel moves back in time as the layers are peeled away to reveal the truth about a long-ago family tragedy that impacts the characters’ lives for years after. Beginning with a young college student haunted by her own choices and ending with the surprisingly serene image of an aging...

A chance encounter on a train leads painter Christine Ward to wonder whether Orin Pierce, her beloved college friend, believed dead for two decades, may actually be alive. As she begins to track down the man she believes he might be, she finds herself in the grip of a troubling past she thought she...

Betsy Ruscoe, a single university professor in her mid-30s, is pregnant, and the man she thought she loved is not interested in fatherhood. At the same time, her dying mother begs Betsy to find the woman who gave her up for adoption at birth fifty years ago and then disappeared. Betsy struggles to...

Emily Lime and her equally palindromic dog, Otto, live in Williamsburg, Brooklyn (zip code 11211), in a warm community of friends and fellow artists. Her life becomes more complicated when she falls in love with Marcus, a dog-walker and fellow Scrabble nut, whose father is Emily’s shady ex-husband...

Cordelia Miller, an endearing young misfit in a scholarly, cultured family, loves junk food, TV, and the son of the local grocer. Her attempt to escape her stifling background and find her way in the world takes her on a classic journey from innocence to experience. She encounters a varied cast of characters—some comic, some calamitous—and, in the end, discovers her true vocation.

Dorrie Gilbert, a potter who lives alone, is completely unprepared for motherhood when her oddball, overweight, and orphaned nephew, Hugo, comes to live with her, demanding to know the truth about his parents and horrified that she doesn’t own a television so he can watch the soap opera he’s devoted...

“Discovering the midlife progress novel, Gullette finds in recent fiction a pervasive tension between decline and a new ideology of aging. Appropriately, she invites the reader to join the writers in their therapeutic discourse.” —Rosemary Franklin, American Literature.   “[This] book certainly...