"David can eat an entire sixteen-inch pepperoni pizza in four minutes and thirty-six seconds. Not bad. But he knows he can do better. In fact, he'll have to do better. He's going to compete in the Super Pigorino Bowl pizza-eating contest, and he has to win it because he borrowed his mom's credit card and accidentally put two thousand dollars on it. So he really needs that pizza money. Like, yesterday. And as if training to be a competitive eater weren't...

Doug and Andy are unlikely best friends--one a loner obsessed by his model trains, the other a popular student involved in football and theater--who grew up together and share a bond that nothing can sever.

Desperate for cash, small town cop Joe Crow takes a security job that could cost him his life Joe Crow celebrates his thirty-third birthday in his patrol car, watching for speeders and sniffing fat lines of cocaine. A depressed cop with a faltering marriage, a rotten stomach, and an increasingly expensive drug habit, Crow is just looking for a drink and a poker game when he steps into Birdy's. Instead, he meets a man who might be able to save his...

Lita is the writer. Adam is the entrepreneur. They are Just Friends.So Adam would never sell copies of a self-help book before he'd even written it. And Lita would never try to break up Adam's relationship with Blair, the skankiest girl at school. They'd never sabotage their friends Emily and Dennis. Lita would never date a guy related to a girl she can't stand. They'd never steal each other's blog posts. And Adam would never end up in a fist fight...

After losing a poker hand to a sleazy stockbroker, an ex-cop must work to pay off his debt Before cocaine, Joe Crow had a wife and a job with the Big River Police Department. Now he has neither-and he's left behind coke, too. Sober, quiet, and reflective, his only vice is poker. One night he gets into trouble, and winds up in debt to the drug-addled slimeball Dickie Wicky. As repayment, Crow agrees to do Dickie a favor.   Dickie thinks his wife,...

Jen and Wes do not "meet cute." They do not fall in love at first sight. They do not swoon with scorching desire. They do not believe that they are instant soul mates destined to be together forever. This is not that kind of love story. Instead, they just hang around in each other's orbits...until eventually they collide. And even after that happens, they're still not sure where it will go. Especially when Jen starts to pity-date one of Wes's friends,...

In a future society that has decided it would "rather be safe than free," sixteen-year-old Bo's anger control problems land him in a tundra jail where he survives with the help of his running skills and an artificial intelligence program named Bork.

For Annie's tenth birthday, her papa gives her a pad of paper, some colored pencils, and the Klimas family secret. It's called the nuodeema burna, or eater of sins. Every time Annie does something wrong, she writes it down and sticks the paper in a hidden hole in the floor of their house. But Annie is quick to discover that her inheritance has a dark side. With each paper fed to the burna, Annie feels less guilty about the mean things she says and...

When sixteen-year-old Jason Bock and his friends create their own religion to worship the town's water tower, what started out as a joke begins to take on a power of its own.

In a far distant future, Tucker Feye and the inscrutable Lia find themselves atop a crumbling pyramid in an abandoned city. In present-day Hopewell, Tucker's uncle Kosh faces armed resistance and painful memories as he attempts to help a terrorized woman named Emma, who is being held captive by a violent man. And on a train platform in 1997, a seventeen-year-old Kosh is given an instruction that will change his life, and the lives of others, forever....