Some Books Aren't for Reading

Mitchell Fourchette is on a mission to retrieve his priceless, first-edition copy of The Old Man and the Sea, inscribed on the flyleaf by Papa Hemingway himself. He unearthed it at the bottom of a bin of castoffs at a thrift store in Anaheim, and then Helmet-Head, Mitchell’s moped-driving book-scout competitor and nemesis, filched it. How, after an auspicious start at Hotchkiss and Yale, then a great job in advertising and a loving young family did Mitchell manage to lose it all and fall so...