About a young woman resisting the savagery of adulthood in a community of the elderly rejecting the promise of youth.

A young Indian university student and his bachelor uncle spend the day wandering through London, as they cope with their own alienation, loneliness, and the difficulties of daily life.

"Shoji Morimoto was constantly being told that he was a 'do-nothing' because he lacked initiative. Dispirited and unemployed, it occurred to him that if he was so good at doing nothing, perhaps he could turn it into a business. And with one tweet, he began his business of renting himself out to do nothing. Morimoto, aka Rental Person, provides a fascinating service to the lonely and socially anxious. Sitting with a client undergoing surgery, accompanying...

A splendid original tale, Alfred Buber is warm, smart, romantic, but his life is as barren as an ice floe, an embarrassing collage of successes and humiliations that add up to... nothing. He lives as if he has landed in a strange country, nowhere he recognizes. Can an-oh-so respectable Boston lawyer, out of options, out of hope, lonely beyond measure, stray way outside the lines and find love? Can he step into the tawdry dark, and back into the wholesome...

"As the Great War rages, an independent young woman struggles to sustain love-and life-through the power of words. It's 1917 and America is on the brink of World War I. After Hensley Dench's father is forced to resign from the New York Times for his anti-war writings, she finds herself expelled from the life she loves and the future she thought she would have. Instead, Hensley is transplanted to New Mexico, where her father has taken a job overseeing...

When Liling moves from her home in the mountains of China to the big city, her parents cannot afford to send her to school, and she spends her days with her mother, wishing she had a friend--until she sees a girl in a yellow coat, who lives in the next building, comes from a different mountain, and is happy to be Liling's friend.

"Kara hoped to spend the summer re-enacting episodes of her favorite TV show, Shinpi Rider, with her best friend Alice. But when Alice moves to a new home two towns over, everything changes. Alice mysteriously stops answering Kara's phone calls and letters. In order to reignite their friendship, Kara hatches a brave plan to bike over to Alice's new school all on her own. After all, A rider never leaves a friend behind! Kara's bravery on the journey...

What makes us who we are? And why do we lead one life and not another? Asle, an aging painter and widower who lives alone on the southwest coast of Norway, is reminiscing about his life. His only friends are his neighbor, Åsleik, a traditional fisherman-farmer, and Beyer, a gallerist who lives in the city. There, in Bjørgvin, lives another Asle, also a painter but lonely and consumed by alcohol. Asle and Asle are doppelgängers--two versions of...

"A masterful collection of stories that plumb the depths of everyday life to reveal the shifting tides and hidden undercurrents of ordinary relationships. In each of these twelve stories, small events have huge consequences."--

An unabridged republication of nineteenth-century essayist Henry David Thoreau's reflections on the natural world, written during a two year period when he lived alone in a cabin on the shores of Walden Pond.