Fire Bell in the Night - A Novel

New Cardiff, Vermont, may be an infinitesimal blot on the rural American landscape, but to Colin it's the ideal place to mend his broken heart. The townsfolk are a quirky, endearing lot, and they welcome the migrating artist into their fold. Colin does his part by capturing his adopted countrymen and women in charcoal and ink. He even discovers love again -- with Mandy, an attendant at the Shining Shores nursing home. When Colin's ex arrives to woo him back to her and his native land, he has to choose between his new love and the woman he's known for years.

But roommate resentment doesn't have to become a pattern. A comprehensive and sassy guide to roommate living for post-college women, Room for Improvement explains how a little cooperation can lead to smoother cohabitation. Harnessing her own and others' experiences, Amy Zalneraitis delivers essential roommate dos and don'ts, hilarious (and often horrifying) anecdotes, and invaluable tips from experts, and covers such sanity-saving topics as:

• Checks and Imbalances: Keeping Financial Friction at Bay
• Idiosyncrasies or Idiosyncrazies? There's Eccentric, and Then There's Psychotic
• Dust Bunnies Are Not Real Pets: What to Do with a Filthy Roommate
• Is That My Underwear You're Wearing? Sharing Clothes Without Exchanging Blows

...and much, much more. Candid and laugh-out-loud funny, Room for Improvement will help you iron out existing roommate problems, prevent future ones, and, just as important, spot and address bad roommate behavior in yourself.

For over twenty-five years, nationally syndicated columnist Ellen Goodman has been training her lens on contemporary American life. A marvelously direct writer with keen insight into what makes the average American tick, laugh and occasionally boil with rage, Goodman takes her measure of the national psyche in a voice that is at once perceptive, witty and deeply humane.

Paper Trail, her first collection in more than ten years, journeys through an era that has been golden in its advances and bleak in its disappointments. In a voice both reasoned and impassioned, she makes sense of the cultural debates that have captured our attention and sometimes become national obsessions. She wrestles with the close-to-the-bone issues of abortion, working mothers and gay marriage, the struggles for civil liberties and equal rights, and the moral complexity of assisted suicide and biotech babies. As she wends through the era of the Clinton scandals and the "amBushing" of America, the dot-com boom and bust, the horrors of September 11 and the War on Terrorism, Goodman pauses to celebrate some of our lost icons, including Jackie Onassis, Princess Diana and Doctor Spock. She reminds us as well of the fleeting fame of such instant celebrities as Elian Gonzalez and Lorena Bobbitt.

The lines that separate public and private life dissolve under Goodman's scrutiny as she shows us how Washington politics, Silicon Valley technology and the national media culture infiltrate our jobs, relationships and minds. With the trademark clarity that readers count on, she walks us through the dilemmas posed by new technologies that range from cloning to cell phones and makes us laugh at the vagaries of Viagra and Botox and unreality TV. And in a world that sometimes seems to be stuck on fast forward, she holds on to values as timeless as a family Thanksgiving and a summer porch in Maine.