Twenty years after ruling the halls of her suburban Chicago high school, Lissy Ryder doesn't understand why her glory days ended. Back then, she was worshipped-- beloved-- feared. Present day, not so much. She's been pink-slipped from her high-paying job, dumped by her husband and kicked out of her condo. Now, at thirty-seven, she's struggling to start a business out of her parents' garage and sleeping under the hair-band posters in her old bedroom....

"For decades the suburbs have been where art happens "despite": despite the conformity, the emptiness, the sameness. The familiar story is one of gems formed under pressure, creative transcendence fueled by suburban resentment. But what if the suburb has actually been an incubator for distinctly American art, as positively and as surely as in any other cultural hothouse? Mixing personal experience, cultural reportage, and history while rejecting clichés...

"Martha Hale is an affable wife and mother who lives in an affluent neighborhood of well-tended lawns and high expectations. If only her clumsiness at penetrating the social circles of her neighbors weren't making Martha so lonely. That's why she's thrilled when the glamorous Minnie Foster, a former high school classmate, moves in next door. Despite Martha's determination, picking up where they left off is trickier than anticipated--especially when...

An amusing portrait of a working-class family in a suburb just north of London, an irrepressible mum and dad and their night-and-day twins, a bookish good girl and a sneering lay about. A vivid, lived-in story of ordinary existence, in which even modest dreams (such as the father's desire to open a food truck) carry enormous weight. Perched on the line between humor and melancholy.

"Welcome to small town Connecticut, a place whose inhabitants seem to have it all-the status, the homes, the money, and the ennui. There's Tripp and Virginia, beloved hosts whom the community idolizes, and whose basement hides among other things a secret stash of guns and a drastic plan to survive the end times. There's Gunter and Rachel, recent transplants who left New York City to raise their children, only to feel imprisoned by the banality of...

Describes the humorous struggles of an author of Amish-zombie-teen romance novels and her husband as they navigate the process of buying their first home in the Chicago suburbs.

From the perspective of those who live in Herot Hall, the suburb is a paradise. Picket fences divide buildings--high and gabled--and the community is entirely self-sustaining. Each house has its own fireplace, each fireplace is fitted with a container of lighter fluid, and outside--in lawns and on playgrounds--wildflowers seed themselves in neat rows. But for those who live surreptitiously along Herot Hall's periphery, the subdivision is a fortress...

In the heart of the 1970s, amid a flurry of feathered hair and flared jeans, Gru (Oscar nominee Steve Carell) is growing up in the suburbs. A fanboy of a supervillain supergroup known as the Vicious 6, Gru hatches a plan to become evil enough to join them. Luckily, he gets some mayhem-making backup from his loyal followers, the Minions. Together, Kevin, Stuart, Bob, and Otto, a new Minion sporting braces and a desperate need to please, deploy their...

"Powerful and important . . . an instant classic."
—The Washington Post Book World
The award-winning look at an ugly aspect of American racism by the bestselling author of Lies My Teacher Told Me, reissued with a new preface by the author

In this groundbreaking work, sociologist James W. Loewen, author of the classic bestseller Lies My Teacher Told Me, brings to light decades of hidden racial exclusion in America. In a provocative,

...

"Celebrated by the Boston Globe as "a brilliant anthropologist of the suburbs," the seductively weird and darkly offbeat Lauren Acampora returns to the lush world that got us all hooked on the NPR Best Book of the Year The Wonder Garden, drawing us into the secret lives of a polished Connecticut haven and jolting us with the sparks that fly when those lives collide. Formerly a model and photographer trying to make it in New York, Louisa Rader is back...