Ruby Sisson Library

"Samantha Heather Mackey couldn't be more of an outsider in her small, highly selective MFA program at New England's Warren University. A scholarship student who prefers the company of her dark imagination to that of most people, she is utterly repelled by the rest of her fiction writing cohort--a clique of unbearably twee rich girls who call each other "Bunny," and are often found entangled in a group hug so tight they become one. But everything...

"Lucy has been writing her dissertation on Sappho for nine years when she and her boyfriend break up in a dramatic flameout. After she bottoms out in Phoenix, her sister in Los Angeles insists Lucy dog-sit for the summer ... but Lucy can find little relief from her anxiety ... Everything changes when Lucy becomes entranced by an eerily attractive swimmer while sitting alone on the beach rocks one night. But when Lucy learns the truth about his identity,...

A failed old writer is visited by a pretty young student who wants to make him the subject of her thesis. The woman's adulation--she tells him his books changed her life--goes to the writer's head and he falls in love. Observing this with a jaundiced eye is his daughter, herself a struggling writer.

Summer Sullivan, the youngest founding member of Elm Creek Quilts, has spent the last two years pursuing a master's degree in history at the University of Chicago. Her unexpected return home to the celebrated quilter's retreat is met with delight but also concern from her mother, Gwen; her best friend, Sarah; master quilter Sylvia; and her other colleagues--and rightly so. Stymied by writer's block, Summer hasn't finished her thesis, and she can't...

"There is a great deal that goes into making a video blog. Lizzie Bennet should know, having become a YouTube sensation over the course of her year-long video diary project. The Lizzie Bennet Diaries chronicled Lizzie's life as a twenty-four-year-old grad student, struggling under a mountain of student loans and living at home with her two sisters--beautiful Jane and reckless Lydia. What may have started as her grad student thesis grew into so much...

Known in local chatrooms as GourmetGirl, Chloe Carter, a food connoisseur and expert in failed romances, continues her quest to find the perfect man, but a blind date with a fellow food lover goes horribly wrong when he is stabbed to death.

"When graduate student Jenny Worley needed a fast way to earn more money, she found herself at the door of the Lusty Lady Theater in San Francisco, auditioning on a stage surrounded by mirrors, in platform heels, and not much else. So began Jenny's career as a stripper strutting the peepshow stage as her alter-ego "Polly" alongside women called Octopussy and Amnesia. But this wasn't your run-of-the-mill strip club--it was a peepshow populated by free-thinking...

On the same day as her mother's death, biology PhD candidate Marie Skov learns that her mentor Kristian Storm has been found hanged in his office. Although the death is widely regarded as a suicide, Skov is skeptical. Skov joins forces with former police detective Søren Marhauge, who shares her suspicions about Storm's death. Together, they learn that Storm's on-site work in Guinea-Bissau was marred by intimidation, sabotaged data, and the suspicious...

A young New York woman exchanges her corporate job for a year of books, blokes, and new friends in graduate school in England. Alexandra Brennan is fed up with her dead end New York City job--and even more fed up with running into her smug ex-boyfriend. So when he crosses the line by telling her that shell never get into graduate school in the United Kingdom, thats precisely what she does. Armed with imported cigarettes and extra-strength coffee,...

A funny novel about a graduate student who decides to follow her disgraced mentor to a university that gives safe harbor to scholars of ill repute, igniting a crisis of work and a test of her conscience (and marriage).