There was a time when the family Künstler lived in the fairy-tale city of Vienna. Circumstances transformed that fairy tale into a nightmare, and in 1939 the Künstlers found their way out of Vienna and into a new fairy tale: Los Angeles, California, United States of America.
For years Mamie Künstler, ninety-three-years-old, as clever and glamorous as ever, has lived happily in her bungalow in Venice, California with her inscrutable

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"From the author compared to Norah Ephron and Nancy Mitford, not to mention Jane Austen, comes a new novel celebrating the beauty, mischief, and occasional treachery of language. The Grammarians are Laurel and Daphne Wolfe, identical, inseparable redheaded twins who share an obsession with words. They speak a secret "twin" tongue of their own as toddlers; as adults making their way in 1980s Manhattan, their verbal infatuation continues, but this love,...

In this "witty novel about family, friendship, and survival of the fittest,"* Cathleen Schine, one of our most astute social observers, examines the origin of species alongside the origins of who we come to be. In some mysterious family feud or unintended slight, Jane Barlow Schwartz lost a friend, her cousin and soul mate, Martha. But years later, surrounded by the exotic wildlife of the Galapagos, Jane and Martha meet again. There, amid the antics...

In Cathleen Schine's comic novel To the Birdhouse, newlywed Alice Brody appears to have the perfect life. The one fly in the ointment is her mother's detestable boyfriend, Louie Scifo: champion of incredibly bad taste and a bona fide stalker. After Alice's mother cuts him loose, Louie's determination to win back her love casts Alice's whole family into disarray. So Alice embarks on a mission to rid her mother of Louie once and for all, in this rambunctious...

From the author of The Three Weissmanns of Westport, a wise, clever story of New York in the '60s It's 1964. Eleven-year-old Fin and his glamorous, worldly, older half sister, Lady, have just been orphaned, and Lady, whom Fin hasn't seen in six years, is now his legal guardian and his only hope. That means Fin is uprooted from a small dairy farm in rural Connecticut to Greenwich Village, smack in the middle of the swinging '60s. He soon learns that...