A middle-aged Italian man living with his mother in Rome agrees to look after his building manager's mother to erase his debt, but when two other women end up living with them for a few days as well he must put together a meal for the Italian holiday of Ferragosto.

Presents the life story of a highly unreliable 139-year-old con man.

"Lou--a lapsed novelist and UFO enthusiast who has returned to his home state of Mississippi after decades away--drives for a ramshackle taxi company that operates on the outskirts of a college town among the trailer parks and housing projects. With Lou's way of life fast vanishing, an ex-dispatcher resurfaces in town on the lam, triggering a bedlam shift which will test Lou's sanity and perhaps cost him his life. Against this backdrop, Lou has to...

Two loquacious men sit talking on a porch. Funny and profound, daft and cogent, they argue about love and sex, how best to live and die, the merits of Miles Davis and Cadillacs and Hollywood starlets of yore, underused cliches, false truisms, and the meaning of nihilism. Together, they shoot the shit—and then they go on shooting it long after it's dead.

Meet Smithson "Smithy" Ide, an overweight, friendless, chain-smoking, forty-three-year-old drunk who works as a quality control inspector at a toy action-figure factory in Rhode Island. By all accounts, including Smithyś own, heś a loser. But when Smithyś life of quiet desperation is brutally interrupted by tragedy, he stumbles across his old Raleigh bicycle and impulsively sets off on an epic journey that might give him one last chance to become...

Cotton-mill owner Archie Meighan, married to nineteen-year-old "Baby Doll", looks forward to the day his wife turns twenty and will finally allow him to sleep with her. But he has competition in the form of sly business competitor Silva Vacarro, who covets both Archie's cotton mill AND his young and beautiful wife.

Through a series of re-encounters and flashback memories, an aging film director in the middle of a creative crisis looks into his past in search for a path forward.

While driving through Archway in the course of his job as a medical rep, Chris is captivated by a young woman on a street corner. Clumsily, he engages her in conversation, and he secures an invitation to return one day for a coffee. His visits become more frequent and Roza starts to tell him the story of her life, drawing him increasingly into her world -- from her childhood as a daughter of one of Tito's Partisans through her journey to England and...

New York Times best-selling author Ian McEwan's novels have won such prestigious awards as the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for his modern masterpiece, Atonement. Saturday further proves The New Republic's claim that McEwan is "one of the most gifted literary storytellers alive." Neurosurgeon Henry Perowne enjoys life immensely and considers himself fortunate to love the woman he's married to. But on this day, a chance encounter...