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Leo Tolstoy embodies the most extraordinary contradictions. He was a wealthy aristocrat who preached the virtues of poverty and the peasant life, a misogynist who wrote Anna Karenina, and a supreme w

The Minus Man, adapted and directed by Hampton Fancher is being released as a film in fall 1999 starring Owen Wilson, Janeane Garofalo, Mercedes Ruehl, Dwight Yoakam, and Sheryl Crow. Lew McCreary's

A NEW YORK TIMES AND NEW YORKER TOP 10 BOOK OF THE YEAR “Beautiful, literary, and devastating.”—New York Times Book Review • “Revelatory.”—Entertainment W

Edward Lear made the form popular for children, and Anon wrote the great dirty limericks, and Garrison Keillor does both while pushing the limerick envelope. E.g.Here is a yawp for old WaltWhitman, wh

Running in Place is a stunning evocation of Provencal culture and history. An acclaimed novelist and essayist, Nicholas Delbanco provides a vivid portrait of a paradise still pure but not immune to pr

This completely new and updated edition of the 1985 classic Mastering Wine, winner of the Cliquot Prize for best wine book of the year, provides a complete course in tasting and understanding the virt

In this bracing book, the second Secretary of Homeland Security makes clear that personal data has become one of the most valuable assets of the modern age--and yet our laws and policies surrounding t

The final volume in a trilogy beginning with Umbrella and followed by Shark, Phone tells the story of two men: Zack Busner and Jonathan De’Ath. Busner is a psychiatrist who has made his name through h

“It’s maddening, the way Billingham keeps us in suspense . . . but we wouldn’t want it any other way.”—Marilyn Stasio, New York Times Book ReviewIn the standalone novel Rush of Blood, internationally bestselling author Mark Billingham puts a sinister twist on a deceptively innocent topic: the beach vacation.Three British couples meet around the pool on their Florida holiday and become fast friends. But on Easter Sunday, the last day of their vacation, tragedy strikes: the fourteen-year-old daughter of an American vacationer goes missing, and her body is later found floating in the mangroves. When the shocked couples return home to the U.K., they remain in contact, and over the course of three increasingly fraught dinner parties they come to know one another better. But they don’t always like what they find. Buried beneath these apparently normal exteriors are some unusual kinks and unpleasant vices. Then, a second girl goes missing, in Kent?not far from where any of the couples lives.

The Silent Cry follows two brothers who return to their ancestral home, a village in densely forested Western Japan. After decades of separation, the reunited men are each preoccupied by their own personal crises. One brother grapples with the recent suicide of his dearest friend, the birth of his disabled son, and his wife's increasing alcoholism. The other brother sets out to incite an uprising among the local youth against the disintegration of the community's culture and economy due to the imposing franchise of a Korean businessman nicknamed the "Emperor of the Supermarkets". Both brothers live in the shadow of the mysteries surrounding the untimely deaths of their older brother and younger sister, as well as their great-grandfather's political heroism. When long-kept family secrets are revealed, the brothers' strained bond is pushed to its breaking-point and their lives are irrevocably changed. Considered Oe's most essential work by the Nobel Prize committee,The Silent Cry is as p

With their signature wit, sly plotting, and gloriously offbeat characters, Martha Grimes’s New York Times bestselling Richard Jury mysteries are “utterly unlike anyone else’s detective novels” (Washin

A distinguished psychiatrist from Martinique who took part in the Algerian Nationalist Movement, Frantz Fanon was one of the most important theorists of revolutionary struggle, colonialism, and racia

From “one of the most consistently entertaining, insightful crime writers working today” (Gillian Flynn), The Killing Habit again brings together favorite wild-card detective Tom Thorne and straight-l

Pascal Mercier’s Night Train to Lisbon mesmerized readers around the world, and went on to become an international bestseller, establishing Mercier as a breakthrough European literary talent. Now, in

Winner of the prestigious International Prize and praised for its "gleefully bitter prose" (Los Angeles Times), All That Counts is a sardonic, fast-paced urban thriller whose hardcover publication mar

Plays included in this volume are: Dasvedanya Mama, Ethyl Eichelberger; The Theory of Total Blame, Karen Finley; The Mysteries and What’s So Funny?, David Gordon; The American Plan, Richard Greenberg;

Over the last decade, Yan Lianke has been continually heralded as one of the “best contemporary Chinese writers” (The Independent) and “one of the country’s fiercest satirists” (The Guardian). Among m

When it first appeared in 1971, Larry Clark's groundbreaking book Tulsa sparked immediate controversy across the nation. Its graphic depictions of sex, violence, and drug abuse in the youth culture o

Following The Rise of Germany, the acclaimed first volume in his War in the West trilogy, James Holland has crafted a masterful and gripping narrative of the events that ultimately determined the outc

From internationally bestselling icon Jeanette Winterson comes her most highly anticipated new book since Why Be Happy When You Could be Normal?, about the bodies we live in and the bodies we desire S

A seminal work of twentieth century drama, Waiting for Godot was Samuel Beckett's first professionally produced play. It opened in Paris in 1953 at the tiny Left Bank Theatre de Babylone, and has sinc

Mamet discusses the real theme of Chekhov's play and presents his own version of the story in which a Russian aristocratic family is forced to sell its estate to the son of a peasant

For more than twenty years, Bill Heavey has staked a claim as one of America’s best writers and most passionate—if not necessarily most skilled—outdoorsmen. In his new collection, Should the Tent Be B

Forget Faludi--Cynthia Heimel has been telling her readers about the "backlash" for years, and about its pernicious effects not only on the psyches of women but also on the lives of men, children, cat

Like Pinter's earlier plays. Pinter deals with bare essentials. There are only three characters -- a man named Deeley, his wife, Kate, and Anna, a friend of Kate's whom they have not seen in 20 years.

In 1977, twenty years after the publication of his landmark poem “Howl,” and Jack Kerouac’s seminal book On the Road, Allen Ginsberg decided it was time to teach a course on the literary history of th

In the immediate aftermath of World War I, Hugh Thurne, a British diplomat involved in the peace negotiations, decides to flee to his second home in Venice rather than return to his wife and the chara

This now classic book of erotica is, alongside Story of O, the most famous French underground novel of the late twentieth century and a work of seductive literary merit. Written by the wife of a dipl

The first Westerner to meet Mao Tse-tung and the Chinese Communist leaders in 1936, Edgar Snow came away with the first authorized account of Mao’s life, as well as a history of the famous Long March

It's the "great American teenage movie" about real kids, quoted by Amy Taubin of "The Village Voice" as a "masterpiece" and "the kind of

Fifty-six million years ago, the proto-horse was a “twelve-pound runt” that balanced on feet with four toes. The first glimpse we have of what he looked like and how he was evolving are images found p

The eighth of Aharon Appelfeld's brilliantly original novels to be published in English, The Healer is a remarkable story about faith and faithlessness among European Jews on the eve of World War II.

The publication of the King James version of the Bible, translated between 1603 and 1611, coincided with an extraordinary flowering of English literature and is universally acknowledged as the greates