Excerpt from Your Face in Mine by Jess Row, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Keeping my head straight, our eyes level, in this Vulcan- mind- meld game he seems to want to play, I conduct the briefest possible mental inventory of my life: an empty apartment; an enormous, shockingly expensive storage unit out in Towson, filled with boxes I'll never open; a job, if you can call it a job; a few friends, widely spaced; a 500- page manuscript on two dead poets, gathering dust in its library binding up in Cambridge; a wall of books in five languages I never want to read again.

Yes, I say, yes, I'll have lunch with you, Martin. See you then. He pulls his hood back up, hunches his shoulders, and disappears through the door, back into the tepid weather, the diffident sunshine, the blank, anonymous world that seems almost to have created him.

Excerpted from Your Face in Mine by Jess Row. Copyright © 2014 by Jess Row. Excerpted by permission of Riverhead Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.