Back Bay Books imprint: 137 books

Rob Ross is driving home when he hears that his childhood friend Jim Matthewson has fallen to his death in a climbing accident. Rob's decision to turn his car around and make the journey to comfort Jim's widow is the beginning of a journey into the past, back to Rob's youth before he made the pivotal...

Finally back in print--David Foster Wallace and Mark Costello's exuberant exploration of rap music and culture. Living together in Cambridge in 1989, David Foster Wallace and longtime friend Mark Costello discovered that they shared "an uncomfortable, somewhat furtive, and distinctively...

After his father's heart attack in 1984, Peter Godwin began a series of pilgrimages back to Zimbabwe, the land of his birth, from Manhattan, where he now lives. On these frequent visits to check on his elderly parents, he bore witness to Zimbabwe's dramatic spiral downwards into the jaws of violent...

"The lineage from Faulkner to Woodrell runs as deep and true as an Ozark stream in this book...his most profound and haunting yet." -- Los Angeles Times Book Review Ree Dolly's father has skipped bail on charges that he ran a crystal meth lab, and the Dollys will lose their house if he doesn't...

Jennifer Traig's memoir Devil in the Details paints a portrait of a well-meaning Jewish girl and her good-natured parents, and takes a very funny, very sharp look back at growing up with obsessive-compulsive disorder. Recalling the agony of growing up an obsessive-compulsive religious fanatic, Traig...

When 5-year old Sharla Cody is dumped on the doorstep of Addy Shadd, a 70-year old woman living in a trailer park, Addy does not know how completely her life is about to change. She's hardly used to company and the troubled Sharla is not the sweet, beautiful angel she had envisioned. Over time, Addy...

Out of sight, out of mind ... Into our trash cans go dead batteries, dirty diapers, bygone burritos, broken toys, tattered socks, eight-track cassettes, scratched CDs, banana peels.... But where do these things go next? In a country that consumes and then casts off more and more, what actually happens...

Who most deeply affects our lives? Sometimes it is those who touch us briefly, even unexpectedly. For May Nilsson, these include the lover she takes in her forties; the handsome, troubled young rebel she is determined to rescue; the police officer who inadvertently plays a major role in her greatest...

"The Sheep Queen" is a Western epic in miniature, the story of Emma Russell Sweringen, known as the Sheep Queen of Idaho ("surely one of the most fascinating characters in current fiction" -- Publishers Weekly); the daughter who disappointed her; the grandson who adored her; and...

Every July, a fresh crop of college graduates clad in spiffy new suits fills the offices of investment banking firms, each newly minted analyst longing for big money while sacrificing anything that resembles a normal life. In this enormously entertaining first novel, a lovable, stressed-out...

A gargantuan, mind-altering comedy about the Pursuit of Happiness in America set in an addicts' halfway house and a tennis academy, and featuring the most endearingly screwed-up family to come along in recent fiction, Infinite Jest explores essential questions about what entertainment is and why it...

Rick Moody's novels have earned him a reputation as a "breathtaking" writer (The New York Times) and "a writer of immense gifts" (The San Francisco Examiner). His remarkable short stories have led both the New Yorker and Harpers to single him out as one of the most original and...

A masterful and comprehensive chronicle of World War II, by internationally bestselling historian Antony Beevor. Over the past two decades, Antony Beevor has established himself as one of the world's premier historians of WWII. His multi-award winning books have included Stalingrad and The...

- The Year of the Blues reaches fever pitch in fall 2003 with the theatrical release (and airing on PBS) of seven documentary films, each by a noted feature director (Martin Scorsese, Wim Wenders, Charles Burnett, Mike Figgis, and Clint Eastwood among them) and the release on CD of several major new...