(This letter is an excerpt from the new memoir Public Apology, out today!)

Sorry for choosing Hannah and Her Sisters when you asked me to go out and rent some movies for our family to watch to get our minds off the fact that Dad had been diagnosed with cancer.

You remember, I'm sure, that this was just a couple weeks before I graduated from high school. It must have been a weekend, because we were all at home in the afternoon. Dad walked in to the TV room with his friend David Landy. You could tell that David Landy had been crying.

"The doctor just hit me [...]

An excerpt from David Rees' newest book How To Sharpen Pencils, out today from Melville House. The book's official launch happens at Barnes & Noble Union Square tomorrow night at 7 p.m., at an event featuring Eugene Mirman, Stacy London and Sam Anderson.

Every aspect of pencil sharpening includes its own suite of pleasures and anxieties. The pleasures should be familiar to you; we turn now to the anxieties.

Although sharpening a pencil is usually a psychologically rewarding experience, resulting in feelings of accomplishment and serenity, it also entails psychological risks. It is your professional and personal responsibility to be aware of these risks, and to actively discourage [...]

Miles Klee's debut novel, Ivyland, takes place in a crumbling, violent, post-urban New Jersey. Published by OR Books, the novel's been getting praise for its dark vision of a burned-out world where drug companies rule, nature is reclaiming what it can, and locals like Hecuba—the bus driver in this excerpt—can only look on in weary disbelief as the past disappears.

One hangover-blasted Wednesday, Hecuba dreamt she was asleep at the wheel, lead-foot subconscious running her route. Eventually she admitted to herself this was no dream and hooked an instinctual right to avoid entering at 60 mph a drive-through ATM tube that would’ve shaved the top [...]