The Permanent Press: 217 books

At twenty-four, Philip Halsey has too much of everything. His stock market investments have replicated like breeding hamsters, and his recent real estate venture seems sure to score big in the Reagan boomtime eighties. Philip’s discovery that he’s not the scion of old New England wealth, but rather...

A young American couple is touring Germany with their two children. During an Alpine hike, the parents, eager to hunt mushrooms down the slope, settle their drowsy children to nap in the glade. When the kids awake, the sun has set and they are alone, their world changed. They are found eventually by strangers and returned to an America they might have never known.

“An extremely readable and ultimately moving novel” based on the true story of a boatful of Jewish refugees refused entry to Palestine (The New York Times). In October 1940, as the storm clouds of World War II gathered, the SS Atlantic set sail for Palestine. A condemned and overcrowded...

A young development worker gets entangled in the politics of relinquishing his authority to locals when his contract is finished, and sees his two-year project destroyed. A simple-minded black handyman worries himself into committing murder as he tries to find his white master’s stolen trousers....

Poet and lyricist Fran Landesman occupies the ironic territory between Dorothy Parker and Edna St. Vincent Millay. Landesman’s work combines pathos and humor and glows with the tough wisdom gleaned from a lifetime of riding in fast convertibles and hanging out in smoky bars. This ebook contains...

A compendium of the highlights and lowlights from the careers of our 43 chief executives—from George Washington to George Bush Jr.—told with wit and accuracy, clearly reminding us that presidents are also people. Under the mutton-chop whiskers, behind the bulging waistcoats, presidents were actually human.

“Brought back into print after 14 years and published in paperback for the first time, this leisurely meditation on the art of acting and on the author’s life in that art demonstrates a good-natured sense of humor and an engaging style. In a series of essays, Broun gently knocks the theatrical...

A “marvelous” autobiographical novel of a Jewish girl emerging from hiding in Poland after the defeat of the Nazis, and rediscovering freedom and hope (Publishers Weekly).   By the time I was five years old I had spent half my life hidden away in a barn loft. I had vague memories of the world...

Written with the drama and suspense of a detective story, KAL Flight 007: The Hidden Story takes the reader through the process of piecing together the evidence surrounding the unexplained flight of a Korean airliner over Soviet strategic territories on September 1, 1983—a flight brought to a tragic end when a Soviet interceptor shot down the airliner, killing all 269 people aboard.

A white man has been lynched two months before twenty-three-year-old Donald Gambell returns to his New Jersey hometown. As the first black member of the police force, Gambell learns the routines of his new work—the traffic stops and domestic quarrels, the bullying and bragging—from his partner...

“Erskine Childers, one of the unsung heroes of Ireland’s struggle for independence, was born in England, spent his boyhood in Ireland, then went to Cambridge University. He fought for England in the Boer War and as an aviator in World War I, publishing his widely praised novel The Riddle of the...

Director of media relations Bert Swain is called in to solve a murder at the Krinsky Research Center’s sister hospital A man has been poisoned on the premises, and as far as Westside General Hospital is concerned, bad publicity is not better than no publicity. When the law enforcement can’t...

From the contemporary angst of Ghost Images (1979), Minot now turns to a neat blend of allegory and Biblical revisionism. Ham, Noah’s third and youngest son, is the narrator and there are elements, he wants us to know, that the Official Version of the story has left out. The scorn, for instance, with which Noah’s idea for the ark was met from within the family.

In this small gem of a novel, a thoughtful boy on the lip of adolescence struggles to make sense of the evil that resides in his small town. Told with brilliant, lyric push, this tale reveals the unconscious rush that childhood is, that nagging dream that still persists because it means something...