College students, recent graduates, and their parents work at Denny's, volunteer at a public library in suburban Florida, attend satanic ska/punk concerts, eat Chinese food with the homeless of New York City, and go to the same Japanese restaurant in Manhattan three times in two sleepless days, all while yearning constantly for love, a better kind of love, or something better than love, things which-much like the Loch Ness Monster-they know probably do not exist, but are rumored to exist and therefore "good enough."

Taken captive by Ottoman pirates, Lady India Lindley finds herself falling in love with the man who now owns her, Caynan Reis, ruler of the Barbary state of El Sinut

Alex and Susan Wendt are the perfect couple in search of the perfect brownstone-and they find their dream house in the heart of Brooklyn Heights. Sure, the landlady is a little eccentric, and the handyman drops some cryptic remarks about the previous tenants. But the rent is so low, it's too good to pass up! Big mistake: Susan soon discovers that the brownstone is crawling with bedbugs... Or is it? She awakens every morning with fresh bites, but neither Alex nor their daughter Emma has a single welt. Exterminators search the property and turn up nothing. Neighbors insist the building is clean. Susan fears that she's going mad-but as the mysteries deepen, a more sinister explanation presents itself: She may literally be confronting the bedbug problem from hell. An understated horror story filled with loving references to Rosemary's Baby and other classic tales of urban paranoia, Bedbugs will keep your skin crawling into the wee hours of the night. Ben H. Winters is the New York Times best-selling author of Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters (Quirk, 2009). His most recent book, the YA novel The Secret Life of Ms. Finkleman (HarperCollins, 2010), was nominated for an Edgar Award

Lil Dartley's life is upside down. Her previously steadfast and predictable sister is marrying an influential billionaire and needs help planning the wedding of the century in less than a month. Years of middle class rebellion have not prepared Lil for handling diplomats or paparazzi. Jake Walton knows a train wreck when he sees one. Lil was trouble from the first day he met her, but since her sister is marrying his best friend, he has no choice but to help her or this wedding will be in the news for all the wrong reasons. Teaching Lil how to fit into high society would be a whole lot easier if she didn't drive him insane both in and out of the bedroom

These stories, set in both real and unreal locales, arouse more faraway yearnings. All sooner or later come round to the subject of love, but none finds it anywhere we might ordinarily have expected. Bedlam lurks everywhere, from the streets to the afterlife,and every point of view is nagged by glimpses of every other. Thank god for a resilient lyricism, a hint of better music playing not too far off. This electronic edition includes two published pieces that didn't appear in the original edition and a new introduction by the author

It started as a routine tail — shadowing an oily hustler who’d been courting a well-healed matron. But the assignment soon led Donald Lam to a sleazy hotel room with a sexy barfly. And now she’s left him high and dry with a pair of corpses dumped in his lap. Suddenly he’s the cops’ prime suspect. And it’ll take some fancy footwork to sidestep the law — and the real killer, who intends to leave Bertha Cool partnerless

Lovely night-club thrush Laura Lynn hires a man with a ready gun, so that when you next see her name in a column, it won’t be under — obituaries!

Amy Yamada is one of the most prominent—and controversial—novelists in Japan today. She burst onto the scene in 1985 with her short novel “Bedtime Eyes,” which for critics embodied the spirit of the ‘shinjinru’—i.e. Generation X—in much the same way that Less Than Zero, Bright Lights, Big City, and Douglas Coupland did in the U.S. Bedtime Eyes is the first English-language publication of three of Yamada’s novellas/short novels: “Bedtime Eyes,” “The Piano Player’s Fingers” and “Jesse.” While all are centered around the relationship between a Japanese woman and a black American man, each explores love, sex, and the vast gulf between from different and equally revealing viewpoints. Starkly imagined and sharply observed, Bedtime Eyes introduces to the English language some of Yamada’s best known and most influential work