Three teens who meet at Reno, Nevada's Aspen Springs mental hospital after each has attempted suicide connect with each other in a way they never have with their parents or anyone else in their lives.

Joe Allston, the retired literary agent of Stegner's National Book Award-winning novel, The Spectator Bird, returns in this disquieting and keenly observed novel. Scarred by the senseless death of their son and baffled by the engulfing chaos of the 1960s, Allston and his wife, Ruth, have left the coast for a California retreat. And although their new home looks like Eden, it also has serpents: Jim Peck, a messianic exponent of drugs, yoga, and sex;...

Jay Erlich's nephew has been found at the bottom of a cliff at Morrow Bay. It's all just a tragic suicide, until secrets from the past begin to rear up again. Did a notorious killer, jailed for many decades, have his hand in this? Years ago, Jay Erlich's older brother, Charlie, a wayward child of the sixties, set out for California, where he fell under the sway of a charismatic but deeply disturbed cultlike figure. Tragedy ensued and lives were destroyed,...

On a winter morning in 1991, Joan Wickersham's father shot himself. Dark, funny, sad, & gripping, at once a philosophical & a deeply personal exploration, this is a daughrer's anguished, loving elegy to her father.

"Felix Pink is a retired widower leading a boring life and hoping to die a boring death. He volunteers as an Exiteer-someone who sits with terminally ill people as they die by suicide, assisting with logistics and lending moral support, then removing the evidence to take the burden off their loved ones. When Felix lets himself in to Number 3 Black Lane, he's there to perform an act of kindness and charity: to keep a dying man company as he takes his...

Jude Coyne, a collector of the macabre, becomes the owner of a dead man's suit which is delivered in a black heart-shaped box; suddenly the suit's previous owner is everywhere: behind the bedroom door, seated in Jude's restored Mustang, and staring out from Jude's widescreen television.

In an attempt to understand why her best friend committed suicide, eighteen-year-old Cody Reynolds retraces her dead friend's footsteps and makes some startling discoveries.

Brimming with sarcasm, fifteen-year-old Jeff describes his stay in a psychiatric ward after attempting to commit suicide.

Emily Hunt went missing from her affluent liberal arts school on graduation weekend. Her body was found floating in a river, and a quiet loner who most people on campus really didn’t know committed suicide. A tenuous link—-one text-—bound the two dead students together and was enough for law enforcement to close the case. But they got it wrong and now someone is determined to set it right. Twelve years later, college friends gather to celebrate...

Suicide would appear to be the last taboo. Even incest is now discussed freely in popular media, but the suicide of a loved one is still an act most people are unable to talk about--or even admit to their closest family or friends. This is just one of the many painful and paralyzing truths author Carla Fine discovered when her husband, a successful young physician, took his own life December 1989. Being unable to speak openly and honestly about the...