Bøger af Susan Coll

Susan Coll uses her experience as both an author and bookstore employee to deliver a big-hearted and dramatic comedy about myths, real life, and the overlap between them.

A perfect storm of comedic proportions erupts in a DC bookstore over the course of one soggy summer week, punctuated by political turmoil, a celestial event, and a perpetually broken vacuum cleaner.

Ah, Beach Week: a time-honored tradition in which the D.C. suburbs' high school grads flock to Chelsea Beach for seven whole days of debauchery. In this dark comedy, ten teenage girls plan an unhinged blowout the likes of which their young lives have never seen. They smuggle vodka in water bottles and horde prescription drugs by the dozen. Meanwhile, their misguided, affluent parents are too busy worrying about legal liabilities to fret over some missing pills or random hookups.With the wit of Nora Ephron and the insight of Tom Perrotta, Susan Coll satirizes a teenage rite of passage, in the process dissecting the lives of families in transition.

Acceptance is a satire of America's overachievers, a novel set over one year in the college application process, when students and parents surrender their evenings, their weekends, and their sanity to the race for admission. Maya, Taylor, and "AP" Harry (so named for all the advanced placement courses under his belt) are high school students in a Washington, D.C. suburb called Verona, each gunning for admission to the most prestigious colleges. Olivia is an overworked admissions officer, under siege from applications and every kind of desperate appeal. The application process threatens to overrun all of their lives, and Acceptance follows each character's struggle for their sanity against the relentless pressure of competition.

Jane Kramer never imagined a life selling discount furniture and commuting between grocery stores and soccer fields via minivan. But when her father-in-law has a heart attack, she and her husband, Leon, trade in their glamorous New York life for a stint running the family business on Rockville Pike, a tributary of the suburban sprawl line extending outward from Washington, D.C. Kramer's Discount Furniture Depot sits away from several lanes of traffic, near the tombstone of Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald. It is here that Jane escapes each day at lunchtime to ponder her confusing turn in life.At age forty-one, she has a teenage Goth son, her husband is increasingly overweight and quick-tempered, and their business is in a state of crisis, both financially and legally. Jane finds herself wishing for something more. First, add to the mix Delia, a mysterious and strangely predatory patio-furniture saleswoman who seems to have her sights set on Leon, and then an attack on the store expansion plans by historic preservationists. When potentially disturbing findings about Delia's past come to light, Jane finds herself learning that, despite life's reversals, it is possible to reinvent herself by tapping into talents and desires she didn't realize she still had.Rockville Pike is a smart, witty, and funny read that revels in the joy of discovering what life has in store.