The Permanent Press: 217 books

An Edgar Award finalist in the year it was published, the reputation of this novel has only increased over the years, and it is now regarded by many as one of the best sports mysteries ever written, and one of the best books about baseball.   It tells the story of Frank Lofton, an itinerant reporter...

Domenic Stansberry’s award-winning novel tells the story of Niccolo Jones, a broken-down man plagued by his obsession with his brother Joe’s ex-wife Marie. Set in the old Italian neighborhood of North Beach in San Francisco, the novel flashes back and forth between their childhood days in the...

**From the author of A Slight Trick of the Mind: A “hybrid of Stephen King and Jim Thompson” that follows the thoughts of a troubled Texas lawman **(Booklist). Branches is a novel at once cautionary and starkly provocative, set in the “gnarled hide of West Texas” near the end of the...

Set on the Mediterranean island of Ibiza, but ranging afield to a small college town in North Carolina, to the streets of Manhattan, and to the barrio chino of Barcelona, Writer-in-Residence tells the story of a successful American painter named David Bloom, who, to the horror of his family, his friends,...

This is the last thing Helen, a young, impetuous Californian, wants to hear from her Sikh lover, Tej, whom she is determined to marry against all opposition. After the initial shock, however, Helen’s innate optimism reasserts itself and she carries on with her preparations to follow Tej back to...

Small-town man Cyrus Stapleton thinks he’s done everything right—married early, fathered two precocious kids, and partnered in his Seattle law firm—but his wife, Jude, wants to break out. Cyrus is comfortable in the middle of the pack but she yearns for something more. Envisioning Cyrus as all...

A most unusual novel is Manoucher Parvin’s Dardedel: Rumi, Hafez, and Love**in New York. For starters, it’s written in free verse. For another, it contrasts the world of thirteenth and fourteenth century Persia with that of present day New York, by bringing back to life the famed Persian poets...

For several years, Robert Kelley lived a primitive and contented life in a fishing village in the mangrove swamps of Sierra Leone. There, he developed and managed a project that built a cooperative fisheries station to support remote coastal villages. His development work done, he reluctantly turns...

Darling Clementine is the story of Samantha, a poetess determined to transform her sex life into a meditation: a pathway to enlightenment. Along for the ride is her brand new husband, Arthur Clementine, a wealthy, calm, but crypto-zany assistant district attorney for New York County. The novel begins...

Whompyjawed: 1. Askew, out of place 2. Off-center or crooked 3. (informal) a person of eccentric or questionable character; odd. Football is Willy Keeler’s ticket out of West Texas, but only if he can keep the explosive combination of his intellect and hormones from destroying his high-school...

From acclaimed author Mitch Cullin, whose previous books have been described by The New York Times as “brilliant and beautiful . . . rhythmic and telling,” comes Undersurface, a chilling page-turner that recalls Alfred Hitchcock and novelist Kobo Abe at his most existential. Probing the complex...

The Violent Child portrays the life of a tenacious woman who struggled to make a home for her son, to nurture the disabled daughter of her lover, and to embrace the gift of an unexpected, unconventional love. It is the story of a son who finds himself, at the end of his mother’s life, with a final opportunity for reconciliation.

Manipulation of time is a recurring theme in Stephen Minot’s second collection of stories. The first four stories, subheaded “Time and Memory,” deal with characters whose perception of the world is skewed. Kraft, a social historian, becomes so drawn to a woman from a simpler era that he almost...

Hired as director of media relations for New York’s famous Krinsky Research Center, ex-reporter Bert Swain is thrust into the role of detective when a member of the staff drops out of sight and a laboratory chief becomes the victim of a violent death. The great medical complex to which Krinsky belongs...