Orem Library

Jason Fitger is a beleaguered professor of creative writing and literature at Payne University, a small and not very distinguished liberal arts college in the Midwest. His department is facing draconian cuts and squalid quarters; his writing career is in the doldrums; his life is a tale of woe. In a series of letters of recommendation that Fitger is endlessly called upon by his students and colleagues to produce, he creates small masterpieces of high...

"In the wake of family collapse, a writer and her two young sons move to London. The process of upheaval is the catalyst for a number of transitions--personal, moral, artistic, practical--as she endeavors to construct a new reality for herself and her children. In the city she is made to confront aspects of living she has, until now, avoided, and to consider questions of vulnerability and power, death and renewal, in what becomes her struggle to reattach...

William Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to the state university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholars life, so different from the hardscrabble existence he has known. And yet as the years pass, Stoner encounters a succession of disappointments: marriage into a "proper" family estranges him from his parents; his career is...

It's spring in the tiny town of Damariscotta, a tourist haven on the coast of Maine known for its oysters and antiques. Andrew, a high school English teacher recently returned to the area, has brought his family to Ed and Steph Thatch's sprawling riverside estate to attend a reception for the Amherst women's lacrosse team. Back when they were all teenagers, Andrew never could have predicted that Ed, descended from a long line of lobstermen, or Steph,...

At center: Marshall Lockard, who teaches English at a small New England college, and his wife, Sonja, a real estate broker in the college town. As the novel opens, Marshall has become increasingly remote, walling himself off from his students by his ironic tone and from his wife by his air of detachment. The marriage has reached a danger point: Sonja is playing at having an affair with her boss; Marshall is flirting with a student. And they are about...

For Tres Navarre, English professor turned private investigator, business has lately taken a drastic turn south. But if chasing down bail jumpers, adulterous spouses, and workmens comp cases seemed like the dregs of the PI game, it was at least a living. Not as much could be said for tracking down a man like Will "the Ghost" Stirman. The stone-cold killer has just staged a bloody escape from the Floresville State Penitentiary with a gang of...

Teaching American women's literature at New England's prestigious Enfield College has shown Karen Pelletier just how cutthroat the world of academe can be. But nothing in her tenure has prepared her for the perils to come, as this bastion of higher learning throws open its doors to a cleverly calculating killer. A battered copy of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre leads Professor Karen Pelletier to the long-forgotten novels of an obscure writer named...

Professor Karen Pelletier has made a name for herself as one of the leading scholars of literature at exclusive Enfield College. But when an offhand comment sets off a firestorm of controversy, she finds herself embroiled in a scandal that began with a notorious novel from the 1950s and ends with a very real murder.... When a New York Times reporter ends an interview with Karen by asking her to name the best novel of the twentieth century,...

A radio show spin-off in the 1950s, watch Connie Brooks, an opinionated and sometimes satirical English school teacher.

A reclusive English teacher suffering from severe obesity attempts to reconnect with his estranged teenage daughter for one last chance at redemption.