The Permanent Press Ord: 139 books

It’s hard enough to have your mate die suddenly, but even harder to discover that he had a second life, which included a mistress, and that their estate was largely depleted because of his gifts to his paramour.  Peg must put herself back together again and do it rapidly. With beautifully worded...

Lost and Found is a story of the struggle to survive and transcend murder, secrets, and abandonment. It is the story of a family captured by its own bloody history, and ultimately a triumphant tale of Babette’s step-by-step passage from an ill-starred and dark destiny to selfhood, freedom, and a transported life.

In The Return of Count Electric & Other Stories, William Browning Spencer demonstrates a wildly imaginative, non-stop narrative skill in the tradition of Roald Dahl and John Collier.

This subtle and powerful novel is the story of a haunted, wealthy family whose mysteries Jerry tries to solve with his precocious imagination. Why does his father miss so many trains home from his New York office? Why does his mother hide in the bedroom behind a locked door? There’s love somewhere...

In My Father’s Fighter, Vincent Rosen, a 35-year-old Manhattan English teacher, inherits the management of a prizefighter from his father. The fighter is Mickey Davis, a white light-heavyweight contender with a doomed air, a reputation for dirty fighting, and plenty of neuroses and sexual obsessions....

New York, the 1970s: Frannie D’Amato, activist, young artist, and unashamed truth teller, wants to awaken her disabled mother, Vera, from her 1950s housewife slumber and rescue her from physical neglect; to call to account Anthony, her arrogant physician father; and to convince indifferent onlookers about the urgency of her struggle and, if possible, to save her own neck.

Hesper Dance, live-in caretaker of Peregrine’s Rest, a graveyard founded in 1848, is a manic-depressive, introverted ex-librarian who seeks refuge from life’s disappointments by communing with the dead. Her lifelong ambition is to see a ghost. Inadvertently aiding her in this quest is her new...

It’s a hot summer night in a small town in North Carolina. A pretty girl named Anna Shockley has arrived in the emergency room after a drug overdose. And so, David Livingston—emergency room orderly, fledgling artist, and incorrigible romantic—meets the obsession of a lifetime. When David...

The Nihilesthete is a novel with great intensity that depicts the relations between artists and their enemies.

Following a serious automobile accident, seventeen-year-old Branda Raggan wakes up at the hospital a stranger in her own skin. Therapy for her injuries has little effect, so the doctors send her home with her mother, Margaret, a hard-drinking, tough-talking former country-and-western singer who runs the local tavern, The Bloody Mary, above which she and Branda make their home.

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.

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....