By the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Thousand Acres', this is a novel which skewers both academia and agribusiness. Set in the late 1980s, in a Midwestern agricultural college called Moo University, the story concerns technological foolishness, campus rivalry, sex and intrigue.

Lin Kong, a devoted and ambitious doctor, is in love with an educated, modern woman, Mannu Wu. But, his family chose a wife for him when he was young. Tracing these lives through their summer of decision, this work conjures the texture of daily life in a place where the demands of human longing must contend with the weight of centuries of wisdom.

In 1995, Adam Gopnik, his wife, and their infant son left the familiar comforts of New York for the urbane glamour of Paris. In the grand tradition of Stein and Hemingway, Gopnik planned to walk the paths of the Tuilleries, to lead the fabled life of an American in Paris. This is a memoir of his five years as an American family man in Paris.

Miles Roby, a gentle, funny loser, runs the Empire Grill and hopes one day to own it. Meantime, though, his wife has run off with his worst customer, he's anxious about his adored teenage daughter and his one-handed brother, and his incorrigible father sponges off everyone.

Vladimir is a young Russian-American immigrant whose capitalist dreams and desire for a girlfriend lead him off the straight and narrow into uncharted territory.

Piano tuner Edgar Drake receives a strange request from the War Office: he must leave his wife and his life in London, to travel to the jungles of Burma to tune a piano. So begins the journey of Edgar across Europe, the Red Sea, India, Burma and at last into the remoteness of the Shan States.