HOT SWEDISH YOUNG ADULT NOVEL!

The Stronger is a touching, thrilling and suspenseful novel about two cousins newly arrived in Sweden, and about how hard it sometimes can be to fit in, to know where to lay your loyalties, and to stand up for what you think is right. Even if it means being bullied around with.

Jak and Aster arrive in Sweden on a truck. The summer night is bright and the refugee camp where they arrive, they are given food and new clothes. But to become a part of everyday life in the new country is not easy. The large family’s life in the small apartment on Bergsgatan is difficult and crowded. At school the teacher’s nagging them about the importance of quickly learning Swedish well. But it is not how they live or what happens at school that hoovers like a black cloud over Jak and Aster. It is Keller and his gang - the stronger. The ones who persecute and violate, the ones that make life to a living hell for Jak and Aster. One day Jak stands up for his cause, against Keller - something that will prove to have terrible consequences…

Inger Frimansson won the Swedish Crime Writer Academy's prize Spårhunden, Best Youth Detective Novel of the Year (2009) for this title. She has received many awards, but this one she was extra proud of. The fact that she manages to reach out to youngsters is important to her.

Who cares if he’s just not that into you? You’ve got a gaggle.

It’s easy to feel like your love life is nonexistent. You know you’re great, so why haven’t you been on a classic dinner-and-a-movie date since . . . well, forever? Because as it turns out, you are now living in a post-dating world, where the old rules for sex and relationships no longer apply. Suddenly, everything and nothing is a date. But this means that you have much more going on in your love life than you realize.

Think about all the ambiguous interactions you have with guys: from a brainstorming session with a coworker, to a drink with an old friend, to a late night Skype session with an ex who’s still in your life. Once you open your eyes, you’ll see that you’re already exploring all sorts of connections with the men in your life via these non-dates. And who are all these guys you’re non-dating?

Say hello to your gaggle.

The gaggle is the group of guys in your life who play different roles, fulfill different needs, and help you figure out who you are, what you want, and what kind of relationship you ultimately desire. Though no two gaggles are alike, there are ten types of men a gaggle might include, such as the Ego Booster, the Hot Sex Prospect, and the Boyfriend Prospect. Romance, excitement, self-discovery, love . . . all this will be yours, once you stop stressing about dates, labels, and expectations and start thinking of each man you know and meet as a potential guy in your gaggle.

In this clever and groundbreaking debut Jessica Massa reveals the ways in which the potential for love is all around you. The Gaggle is the ultimate guide to figuring out what you want—and finding your match—in a world that has left traditional dating behind.

An exuberant modern-day picaresque about the cost of love-struck obsession and the inevitable monsters of every human heart.

Memoirist of mediocre fame, Charles Homar has a problem: his bride-to-be, Gillian Lee, has nixed their nuptials and fled to the high seas in search of a legendary giant squid, unleashing an unholy heart wreck upon him. In a hell-bent effort to prove his mettle as an American male and win back Gillian's affections, Charlie crisscrosses the nation seeking counsel, confronting creatures both mythic and real—Bigfoot on the Canadian border, space aliens in Seattle, a professional bodybuilder with Asiatic sex slaves in suburban New Jersey, the demons dancing a rumba inside his own heart—and then writing about his travails every week for a popular slick magazine. Echoing a narrative tradition that includes Don Quixote and Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions, William Giraldi's debut novel is a love story of linguistic bravado that explores American excess, the diaphanous line between fiction and fact, and what desperate men and women will do to one another.

“Take the amped-up lyrical braggadocio of the American South and join it to a sly, at times Nabokovian celebration of psychological obsession. Add a pinch of O'Connor, a dash of Hannah, heat with an imagination reared in both the canon and its rock & roll antipodes. Busy Monsters is an unforgettable achievement by one of our most important young chroniclers of anguish and bliss.” (Sven Birkerts)

It is as raw and blazing an account of a descent into hell and return that you will ever read.

It's a vampire story of a kind, but with none of that silliness.  It's about mortality, and how people feed on each other, and what is immortal.  The story puts Nick himself at its center: a writer nearing the end of his life, alcoholic, dejected, his powers ebbing, who learns accidentally that a taste of blood restores him.  He begins looking for women who want this exchange as part of sex.  The danger of these encounters is enormous, in ways both mundane--he is nearly arrested when he accidentally cuts a partner's femoral artery and has to take her to the emergency room--and spiritual.  He loses his mind and one day wakes from a suicidal stupor to find the devil sitting at the end of his couch.

Nick Tosches is like the leopard in the novel's pages and on its cover, one of the last wild things in our over-cultured and over-safe world.  He uses everything from his life--his history as a writer and a drinker, his love of downtown New York City, his friendship with Keith Richards and Johnny Depp, his New Jersey childhood, his rages and prejudices, his love of food (some of the meals described here will leave you slavering)--in the service of his story.  He uses all the forbidden words.  It will certainly offend some readers.  We think he has set out to capture all of life, from its darkest, vilest desires to its most sublime quests for beauty and wisdom, to show that it is all one thing, and to capture the things that truly last.