Jennifer Egan

"The Candy House opens with the staggeringly brilliant Bix Bouton, whose company, Mandala, is so successful that he is "one of those tech demi-gods with whom we're all on a first name basis." Bix is 40, with four kids, restless, desperate for a new idea, when he stumbles into a conversation group, mostly Columbia professors, one of whom is experimenting with downloading or "externalizing" memory. It's 2010. Within a decade, Bix's new technology, "Own...

Two cousins, irreversibly damaged by a childhood prank, reunite twenty years later to renovate a medieval castle in Eastern Europe, a castle steeped in blood lore and family pride. Built over a secret system of caves and tunnels, the castle and its violent history invoke and subvert all the elements of a gothic past: twins, a pool, an old baroness, a fearsome tower. In an environment of extreme paranoia, cut off from the outside world, the men reenact...

Charlotte Swenson, a top fashion model, finds her life in shambles afte a horrible car accident in which her face is rendered unrecognizable, and her search for a new image leads her to the Internet and into the life of another Charlotte, a plain-looking teenager with whom she share a dangerous connection.

Eleven stories on the vagaries of life. In Why China? a successful stockbroker yearns for the days when he was poor, in Passing the Hat, a wife observing a woman sleep around with men, is shocked to discover her own husband was one of them, while The Watch Trick compares the lives of two army friends, one who settled down, the other who didn't. By the author of The Invisible Circus.

Jennifer Egan, Siri Hustvedt, and Margot Livesey once again convene to discuss Leo Tolstoy's classic Anna Karenina.

Presents twenty of the best works of short fiction of the past year from a variety of acclaimed sources.

Jennifer Egan, Siri Hustvedt, and Margot Livesey once again convene to discuss George Eliot's classic novel, Middlemarch. Hope Davis reads an excerpt from the book.

Flaubert's classic tale, in which the title character turns to spending and a series of affairs to combat the boredom of married life and, heartbroken and crippled by debts, takes drastic action that results in tragedy.