The acclaimed, award-winning essayist and memoirist returns to fiction with this reflective, bittersweet tale of love, loss, and wonder in the life of the irrepressible aging poet,Thomas MurphyTrying to weasel out of an appointment with the neurologist that his only child, Máire, has cornered him into, the poet Thomas Murphy— exuberant singer of the oldies; friend of the down-and-out; tough, honest, and all-around good guy—contemplates his sunset years.Máire worries that Murph is losing his memory. Murph wonders what to do with the rest of his life. The older mind is at issue—as he belts out, standing in his skivvies in his apartment house courtyard, "What are you doing the rest of your life?" Even as he doubts it, Murph's mind, full of wit, worry, meditation, and plain fun, is a creative traveler, jumping from fact to memory to a whole imagined universe. He conjures the islands that have shaped him: Manhattan, his longtime home, and...

Why is Professor Peace Porterfield trying to save Beet College? His own wife, Livi, hates the place. The Board of Trustees, led by developer Joel Bollovate, has squandered the endowment. Debutante-cum-self-styled-poet Matha Polite, an indis-criminate radical with a four-student following, wants to bring the institution down. Akim Ben Ladin (né Arthur Horowitz), a sweet-tempered terrorist hopeful and the college's only Homeland Security major (who lives in an off-campus cave), wants to blow up the school. Faculty members, when not concocting useless, trendy courses, fly at one another's throats. Not to mention that American higher education is already going down the tubes.So why is Porterfield trying to save Beet?Beats us.

"These cautionary notes and hilarious stories pack the Rosenblatt punch. Anything Can Happen offers a class in ""Tyranny for Beginners,"" warns about the snares and devices of dinner parties, explains the mind-set of barbarians, suggests the perfect gift for Mother—a wildebeest—and tells what happens when his dog's barking drives him to thoughts of murder. Roger Rosenblatt forces us to laugh at the silliness of the world we have created, refocuses our minds on what really matters, and alerts us to the injustice and cruelty that lie just below the skin.

The Washington Post hailed Roger Rosenblatt's Making Toast as "a textbook on what constitutes perfect writing," and People lauded Kayak Morning as "intimate, expansive and profoundly moving." Classic tales of love and grief, the New York Times bestselling memoirs are also original literary works that carve out new territory at the intersection of poetry and prose. Now comes The Boy Detective, a story of the author's childhood in New York City, suffused with the same mixture of acute observation and bracing humor, lyricism and wit.Resisting the deadening silence of his family home in the elegant yet stiflingly safe neighborhood of Gramercy Park, nine-year-old Roger imagines himself a private eye in pursuit of criminals. With the dreamlike mystery of the city before him, he sets off alone, out into the streets of Manhattan, thrilling to a life of unsolved cases.Six decades later,...