Product Description: A Good Talk is an analysis of and guide to that most exclusively human of all activities - conversation. Drawing on over forty years of experience in American letters, Menaker pinpoints the factors that drive and enliven every good conversation: the vagaries (and joys) of subtext; the deeper structure and meaning of conversational flow; the subliminal signals that guide our disclosures and confessions; and the countless other hurdles we must clear along the way...read more

Jake Singer is heading for a life of emotional paralysis and professional mediocrity, so he turns to psychoanalysis and Dr Ernesto Morales, whose tactics are worthy of the Spanish Inquisition. But when Jake beds a beautiful socialite, it seems that everything is just what the doctor ordered.

Eight stories follow the life of a young teacher at the Columbia School of journalism as he courts his wife, becomes a father, and learns to live with his own flaws