The Permanent Press: 217 books

Obsessed with H. P. Lovecraft’s “Great Old Ones,” Philip Kenan keeps malign cosmic entities at bay by constantly revising his novel, The Despicable Quest. While Philip’s preoccupied with the monsters lurking behind every cubicle at his dead-end job, his exasperated girlfriend flees—heading straight into the horror that lies at the heart of the corporate world.

Set in eastern Long Island, in an area reminiscent of the Hamptons, it is a tale about a wedding party: the bride and groom each apprehensive, but for different reasons. On the scene are a former lover of the bride’s who makes a sudden appearance and a young swain who is equally taken with the bride-to-be.

When twenty-five-year-old Liz Stillwell arrives at Cool’s Ridge, a communal farm in the Kittatinny Mountains of rural northwest New Jersey, she believes she has found a safe and peaceful place. But despite the country setting, an air of tension that is political, as well as sexual, pervades the...

Rod Gass is accused of being a criminal. He’s failed at careers that people didn’t know existed. Now a custodian at the Van Allen School of Mortuary Science, he is enjoying himself immensely. His niece, Judy, wants to know why. She is the only one ready to unveil this man, and to challenge...

A woman’s obsession drives an affair out of control, violating social contracts and devastating the people in its path. For years, Ann and David shared weekends and holidays with country friends Flora and Edwin, even after womanizing Edwin took Ann away to pick grapes and started a year-long affair....

Mr. Porter and the Brothers Jones is a strange yet entertaining account of an eccentric man’s struggle to reconcile the old-fashioned morals with which he was brought up and his own natural urges.

“Combining fact, folklore, and a shopworn twist of revisionist history, Meltzer’s eccentric debut joins the legion of books about the legendary gunslinger Billy the Kid.” —Publishers Weekly

Growing up in Oklahoma, Darcy endures her parent’s battling, her father’s abandonment, and her mother’s determination to make their way in the world by taking in a succession of boarders. Frank Wilson, an itinerant worker, appears at the dinner table one evening and soon becomes the man she...

In a suburb north of New York City there is a cloistered monastery. The tranquility of the nuns is shattered when Sister Damian of Mary receives a grisly gift: three severed hands and three feet. Put in charge of the investigation is fifty-five-year-old Det. Eliaphus Daniel Janah. A Jew, he has a...

In this first novel, Sofia Shafquat combines the insightful humor of Cathy Guisewite with a fresh new literary voice and a quintessentially California milieu. She speaks to women of the nineties who still remember lifetimes spent waiting for elusive and resistant men. What makes them such shadows? What would it have taken to make them real?

Set in England, Boston, and the Caribbean, this Pinteresque, artfully crafted story describes a relationship between Justine, a young dancer, and Roy, her philosophy teacher at Oxford. It is a story of love and sex, pain and intellect, and ultimate redemption. The story is narrated by Justine, who...

A white man and a black woman discover the depth of their differences, and an unexpected bond, in this urban drama. Edmund, long-divorced and lonely, offers shelter to Careese, who is temporarily homeless. Good intentions on both sides give way to mutual distrust and resentment, but what begins...

John Okas begins a proposed series of novels investigating the ancestry of two nebulous characters, Arthur and Morning Black. Tracing their family tree, Okas takes this Alex Haley theme on a detour through the ribald pageantry of American history and culture. The result is a rich collage of characters...

Mr. Right is a novel that defies categorization, at once scary, erotic and very funny. It is a measure of the book’s spell that at the precise moment it has us on the edge of our seats, it can still make us laugh out loud.