Academia

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 scholar’s 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 stymied; his wife and daughter turn coldly away from him; a transforming experience of new love ends under threat of scandal. Driven ever deeper within himself, Stoner rediscovers the stoic silence of his forebears and confronts an essential solitude. John Williams’s luminous and deeply moving novel is a work of quiet perfection. William Stoner emerges from it not only as an archetypal American, but as an unlikely existential hero, standing, like a figure in a painting by Edward Hopper, in stark relief against an unforgiving world.

“They’re… chaos,” Remus said firmly. “And chaos is—” “Rock and roll.” He looked at Sirius sharply, and for once, matched his grin. “Yeah.” “Maybe that’s my excuse then,” Sirius said. “I cause a bit of chaos now, and maybe one day, it’ll turn into rock and roll.” After losing his mother at age eleven, Remus has spent the better part of the last four years bouncing from school to school or else running around London and pretending as though he wasn't the kind of well-bred boy his father brought him up to be. Now, with his chances all run out, Remus is sent to Hawkings Independent School as a last-ditch effort to clean up his act. There he meets the very people who will set up the rest of his life, and is forced to confront the pieces of himself he'd long thought had been lost.

Jason Fitger may be the last faculty member the dean wants for the job, but he’s the only professor available to chaperone Payne University’s annual “ Abroad” (he has long been on the record objecting to the absurd and gratuitous colon between the words) occurring during the three weeks of winter term. Among his charges are a claustrophobe with a juvenile detention record, a student who erroneously believes he is headed for the Caribbean, a pair of unreconciled lovers, a set of undifferentiated twins, and one young woman who has never been away from her cat before. Through a sea of troubles—personal, institutional, and international—the gimlet-eyed, acid-tongued Fitger strives to navigate safe passage for all concerned, revealing much about the essential need for human connection and the sometimes surprising places in which it is found.

From USA Today bestselling author Rina Kent comes a new STANDALONE MM college romance. I’m not attracted to men. Or so I thought before I slammed into Nikolai Sokolov. A mafia heir, a notorious bastard, and a violent monster. An ill-fated meeting puts me in his path. And just like that, he has his sights set on me. A quiet artist, a golden boy, and his enemy’s twin brother. He doesn’t seem to care that the odds are stacked against us. In fact, he sets out to break my steel-like control and blur my limits. I thought my biggest worry was being noticed by Nikolai. I’m learning the hard way that being wanted by this beautiful nightmare is much worse. This book can be read on its own, but for a better understanding of the world, you might want to start with God of Malice.