Babbitt turns the spotlight on middle America and strips bare the hypocrisy of business practice, social mores, politics, and religious institutions. In his introduction and notes Gordon Hutner explores the novel's historical and literary contexts, and highlights its rich cultural and social references. --from publisher description.

One ordinary man's quest to become a serious man. Physics professor Larry Gopnik can't believe his life, His wife is leaving him for his best friend, his unemployed brother won't move off the couch, someone is threatening his career, his kids are a mystery and his neighbor is tormenting him by sunbathing nude. Struggling to make sense of it all, Larry consults three different rabbis and their answers lead him on a twisted journey of faith, family,...

Fading charmer Tommy Wilhelm has reached his day of reckoning and is scared. In his forties, he still retains a boyish impetuousness that has brought him to the brink of chaos: he is separated from his wife and children; at odds with his vain, successful father; failed in his acting career (a Hollywood agent once placed him as “the type that loses the girl”); and in a financial mess. In the course of one climactic day he reviews his past mistakes...

The stunning, New York Times bestselling follow-up to The Notebook--a story of an ordinary man who goes to extraordinary lengths to win back the love of his life. After thirty years, Wilson Lewis is forced to face a painful truth: the romance has gone out of his marriage. His wife, Jane, has fallen out of love with him, and it is entirely his fault. Despite the shining example of his in-laws, Noah and Allie Calhoun, and their fifty-year love affair,...

A successful suburbanite commuter Howard Wakefield takes a perverse detour from family life: He vanishes without a trace. Hidden in the attic of his carriage house garage, surviving by scavenging at night, Howard secretly observes the lives of his wife and children and neighbors. Wakefield becomes a fraught meditation on marriage and identity, as Howard slowly realizes that he has not in fact left his family, he has left himself.

Middle aged Kostis is the new doctor of a tiny island, he spends a dreary winter alone. By the time summer arrives, though, the island has turned into a thriving, wild vacation spot with nude beaches and parties. When he meets the beautiful and flirty Anna, he falls hard for her. He is spending nearly all of his time getting drunk, partying hard. What starts as a rediscovery with his lost long youth, slowly turns into an obsession as he is willing...