Things aren't going well for Joseph Geist. He's broke. His graduate school advisor won't talk to him. His girlfriend has kicked him out of her apartment, leaving him homeless and alone. It's a tough spot for a philosopher to be in, and he's ready to give up when an ad in the local paper catches his eye. Conversationalist wanted, it reads. Which sounds perfect to Joseph. After all, he's never done anything in his life except play with words. And the...

"A novel of rare emotional power that excavates the social intricacies of a late-summer weekend -- and a lifetime of buried pain. Almost everything about Wallace, an introverted African-American transplant from Alabama, is at odds with the lakeside Midwestern university town where he is working toward a bio-chem degree. For reasons of self-preservation, Wallace has enforced a wary distance even within his own circle of friends -- some dating each...

"Zachary Ezra Rawlins is a graduate student in Vermont when he discovers a rare book hidden in the stacks. As he turns the pages, entranced by tales of lovelorn prisoners, key collectors, and nameless acolytes, he reads something strange: a story from his own childhood. Bewildered by this inexplicable book and desperate to make sense of how his own life came to be recorded, Zachary uncovers a series of clues -- a bee, a key, and a sword -- that lead...

"Seven graduate students are recruited by a microbiology start-up and dispatched to a mysterious lab in Hawaii. There they are promised access to tools that will open a whole new scientific frontier. But once in the Oahu rain forest, the scientists are thrust into a hostile wilderness where they find themselves prey to a technology of radical and unbridled power. To survive, they must harness the inherent forces of nature itself"--Publisher's description....

Eve Wilson's face was once scarred by a vicious assault. Terrified and ashamed, she escaped to the online realm, where she could choose the face she allowed people to see. Years later, her outer scars faded and inner scars buried, Eve has fought her way back to the real world and is determined to help others do the same. Now a graduate student moonlighting as a bartender, Eve researches the addictive powers of online communities. When her test subjects...

An English grad student struggling with her dissertation about the intellectual history of inspiration desperately searches for a perfect case study to anchor her thesis, only to find it in the unlikeliest of places.

The stories of two women separated by more than a century are brought together by a series of visions that are related to the tarot and a small church, known as a Sepulchre in the grounds of the Domaine de la Cade.

"In the shared and private spaces of Iowa City, a social circle of lovers and friends navigate tangled webs of connection as they try to figure out what they want, and who they are"--

"Turns out that reading nothing but true crime isn't exactly conducive to modern dating-and one woman is going to have to learn how to give love a chance when she's used to suspecting the worst. PhD candidate Phoebe Walsh has always been obsessed with true crime. She's even analyzing the genre in her dissertation-if she can manage to finish writing it. It's hard to find the time while she spends the summer in Florida, cleaning out her childhood home,...

"In the third book in the Beautiful Bastard series, an agreement between a venture capitalist and a bookish woman quickly becomes a very NSFW version of My Fair Lady. When Hanna "Ziggy" Bergstrom moves to New York City for graduate school, Will Sumner thinks his responsibilities to his best friend's nerdy little sister will be limited to the occasional dinner and check-in. Little does he know that Ziggy is ready to break out of her bookworm academic...