Arkansas

Three "sly, self-knowing, and hilarious" novellas from the highly acclaimed author of The Lost Language of Cranes ( The New York Times). Here are three novellas of escape and exile, touching and funny and at times calculatedly outrageous. In "Saturn Street," a disaffected LA screenwriter delivers lunches to homebound AIDS patients, only to find himself falling in love with one of them. In "The Wooden Anniversary," Nathan and Celia—familiar characters from Leavitt's story collections—reunite after a five-year separation. And in "The Term-Paper Artist," a writer named David Leavitt, hiding out at his father's house in the aftermath of a publishing scandal, experiences literary rejuvenation when he agrees to write term papers for UCLA undergraduates in exchange for sex. "Confessional, audacious and outrageous . . . This is classic Leavitt—writing with subtlety, maturity and compassion about the complexity and fragility of human relationships." — Los Angeles Times Book Review