National Network for Equitable Library Service

In 1890s South Dakota, Amy and Joshua escape from their mean aunt Vootch. They plan to find their grandparents in New York and manage to team up with a traveling magician, Mortimer Wintergreen, who owns a magic hat with a temperamental, mischievous mind of its own.

Meet Dahlia Moss. Unemployed, broke, and on her last bowl of ramen, she's not living her best life. But that's all about to change. Before Dahlia can make her life any messier on her own, she's offered a job that will lead her to a murder, an MMORPG, and possibly a fella (or two?).

When Inspector Peter Glebsky arrives at a remote ski chalet on vacation, the last thing he intends to do is get involved in any police work. But he hadn't counted on the discovery of a corpse. Glebsky's vacation is over, and he's embarked on the most unusual investigation of his career.

All Francis Falbo has left is his childhood home, whose remaining rooms he rents to a cast of eccentric tenants. He becomes increasingly entangled in their lives, with results that are disastrous, hysterical, and ultimately healing.

Finding a rare zucchini-colored crayon leads twelve-year-old River Monroe and his friends on an adventure with their eccentric neighbor to save Earth from invading interstellar storm troopers.

Hannah Sugarman seems to have it all. She works for an influential think tank in Washington, DC, lives in a great apartment with her high-achieving boyfriend, and is poised for graduate school and an academic career just like her famous parents. The only problem is that Hannah doesn't want any of it. What she wants is much simpler: to cook. When her relationship implodes, Hannah seizes the chance to do what she's always loved and starts an underground supper club out of her new landlord's townhouse.

After surviving sixth grade, Rafe expects seventh grade to be a fun zone because he has been accepted to art school in the big city, but when he discovers it is more competitive than he expected, he sets out to turn his boring life into the inspiration for a work of art.

These early stories are fine vintage Wodehouse: the rivalry between the ugly policeman and Alf, the Romeo milkman; the plight of a "man with two left feet" who fell in love with a dance hostess; and the first appearance of Jeeves.

From the eerily "real," almost holographic evocations of historical figures like Lyndon Johnson, over-televised game show hosts, and late-night comedians, to the title story, where terminal punk nihilism meets Young Republicanism, Wallace renders the incredible comprehensible, the bizarre normal, the absurd hilarious, and the familiar strange.

The adventures of two boys growing up in rural Vermont in the 1920's.