Bøger af Howard Reiss

At the age of 30, Tess has had three jobs and three significant relationships with two men and one woman - each lasting three years. Drifting through life, confused about her sexuality, Tess decides to live a life of celibacy and to open up a restaurant devoted to soup. Tess has a talent for making soups with strong medicinal and spiritual qualities - something passed down from her great-great grandmother, a descendant of one of the alleged Salem witches. In the second week of the restaurant's opening, an elderly professor of English, Roger Beanstock, comes in at closing time. Beany, haunted by his own past has lived a celibate life devoted to his work. He visits the restaurant every Thursday night for the next year to share soup and wine with Tess, which she calls the Year of Soup, before taking his life. Shortly after Beany's death, Tess meets Jim at the restaurant, a furniture maker with his own reasons for keeping to himself. It is through a series of letters that "Beany" has left for Tess that she learns the truth about the Professor, is able to come to terms with her own sexuality, and discover Jim's own tragic secret that will change both of their lives.

Based on an event from the author's life, this is a story about an unusual mid-life crisis triggered by the discovery of an aunt who was mistreated for mental illness in the 1940's and 1950's. Coming to terms with his own family history leads to a journey of self-discovery that tests not only current relationships, but new ones as well. This novel about secrets and revenge is told with a comic touch and will have you reading until the wee hours of the morning.

When Azu finds her high school sweetheart, Michael . . . the one she was sure she would marry . . . 50 years later on Facebook and shortly thereafter he is found dead, Azu uses her journalistic skills to investigate what happened and in the process is shocked by his life, what he had become and accomplished, and what she didn't know when they were teenagers.

They say you can''t go home again, but sometimes you can''t help trying. When Mitch''s father dies, his New York City law firm collapses, and his marriage to Sandi starts to crack under the strain, he is forced to return to the small, upstate town of Nile to dispose of his old home and to deal with the demons he left behind....including a volatile father, an abused mother, and Carol, his first love. He can''t seem to escape his memories, but when confronted with an odd neighbor, a young hitchhiker, the old abandoned drive-in, and Carol, Mitch finds that sometimes you can find something everlasting, even among the changes.

Mara, a New York City street musician, has had horrible luck with men, including the death of her college boyfriend. Horton, a young fisherman in Truro, is troubled by an incident in his past. Randy, a retired New York City school teacher, has recently lost his partner of 30-plus years, and is haunted by his one big regret in life. Ernie, a retired plumber from the south side of Boston who has been living a lie his entire life, moves to Wellfleet for the oysters, and finds he has a knack for making birdhouses. Serendipitously, they all end up in the summer at the tip of Cape Cod in beautiful, spirited Provincetown, where a gifted and rather unusual street musician, Reed, brings them together and changes their lives forever.

On the 50th anniversary of Nabokov's Lolita, Howard Reiss decides to reverse the story. In the Texture of Love, Molly, a young woman graduating college shows up at the door of Eric, a 65-year old family friend and recent widower. Her obsession, perhaps more acceptable by society's standard than Humbert's in Lolita, still manages to take hold of their lives . . . confirming again the painstaking and pain-giving selfishness of certain kinds of passion.

Howard Reiss has written BUSINESS STRESS RELIEF as a very useful gift for anyone in business. He has combined his real-life management experiences in three different careers with his unusual ability to see them from the humorous side of the desk. He wrote this book after conversations and lectures with many business people about how he used humor to relieve lots of stressful business situations.They often asked if he could organize them into a helpful book they could refer to when their stress levels at work were "way too high". They were not looking for a "joke" book, just funny ideas to relieve tension. They were frustrated because none of them had ever found anything with those qualities in bookstores or on the Internet.Their requests became his inspiration to write this book. His experience is best summarized by what he wrote in the introduction:"Humor must be tailored to each individual; because of the different ways that everyone perceives what is funny. But the principle is the same for all: when you imagine a business situation carried to a funny extreme, the real-life situation you're in always appears much less stressful!"