Legendary figures of Mississippi’s past-flatboatman Mike Fink and the dreaded Harp brothers-mingle with characters from Eudora Welty’s own imagination in an exuberant fantasy set along the Natchez Tra
In the middle of tending to the everyday business at her vintage-clothing shop and sidestepping her married boyfriend's attempts at commitment, Iris Lockhart receives a stunning phone call: Her great
The year is 3149, and a vast paper destroying blight-papyralysis-has obliterated much of the planet's written history. However, these rare memoirs, preserved for centuries in a volcanic rock, record
The first scholarly examination in any language of the historical development and traditional method of koan study in Zen Buddhism. Foreword by Ruth Fuller Sasaki; Index; ink drawings by Hakuin Ekaku.
James Jesus Angleton was the master - a legend in the time of spies, the founder of U.S. counterintelligence, and a ruthless hunter of America's enemies. Spytime is a fictional account of Angleton's
A woman’s mysterious disappearance off the coast of Finland threatens the career-and marriage-of a distinguished New York diplomat in this “restrained, mature love story” (People) w
In this classic satire of small-town America, beautiful young Carol Kennicott comes to Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, with dreams of transforming the provincial old town into a place of beauty and cultur
A couple, long married, are spending an unaccustomed week apart. Ya'ari, an engineer, is busy juggling the day-to-day needs of his elderly father, his children, and his grandchildren. His wife, Danie
**DEBUT FICTION**Pete Ferry, our narrator, teaches high school English in the wealthy suburb of Lake Forest outside of Chicago, and moonlights as a travel writer. On his way home after work one
It is mid-October, 1997, harvest time in the Columbia Basin of central Washington state, a rich apple- and pear-growing region. Ben Givens, recently widowed, is a retired heart surgeon, once admired
The Diary of Virginia Woolf has been acclaimed as a masterpiece. Anne Olivier Bell edited the five-volume original, and she has now abridged the Diary in this splendidly readable single volume editio
In 1896, three survivors from a whaling misadventure are nursed back to health by Eskimo villagers who share their food, women, and way of life with the strangers. In return, the foreigners introduce
In this concluding volume of The Myth of the Machine, Mumford brings to a head his radical revisions of the stale popular conceptions of human and technological progress. Far from being an attack on
"Roger Angell has been writing about baseball for more than forty years . . . and for my money he's the best there is at it," says novelist Richard Ford in his introduction to Game Time. Angell's fam
A Simple Tale is the touching story of Maria Poniatowski. Born in the Ukraine between the two world wars and taken by the Germans for slave labor, Maria finds herself relocated as a displaced person
We all know the story of Jesus' life, his death, his resurrection, and the persecution of his early followers. Less well known is the struggle the early Christians had in deciding whether Jesus was G
A hacker cracks Vatican security and sends an urgent plea directly to the Pope: Save Our Lady of the Tears. The crumbling Baroque church, located in the heart of Seville, is slated for demolition, an
A vivid and charming portrait of a large southern family, the Fairchilds, who live on a plantation in the Mississippi delta. The story, set in 1923, is exquisitely woven from the ordinary events of f
Italo Calvino imagines a novel capable of endless mutations in this intricately crafted story about writing and readers. ? If on a Winter's Night a Traveler turns out to be not one novel but ten, each
Among the greatest novels of the twentieth century and the basis for director David Lean’s Academy Award-winning film, A Passage to India tells of the clash of cultures in British India after t
Who was the real Robinson Crusoe? And what did he really experience during his solitary stay on a desert island? Souhami's revelatory account of piracy, betrayal, and raw survival in the eighteenth century leads us to the answers to both these questions.
As a critic, George Orwell cast a wide net. Equally at home discussing Charles Dickens and Charlie Chaplin, he moved back and forth across the porous borders between essay and journalism, high art and
Three senses-taste, hearing, and smell-dominate the lives of the characters in these witty, fantastical stories. But the senses, promising the fulfillment of desire and an exit from the self, only lea
Marcovaldo is an unskilled worker in a drab industrial city in northern Italy. He is an irrepressible dreamer and an inveterate schemer. Much to the puzzlement of his wife, his children, his boss, and
Two novellas: the first, a parody of medieval knighthood told by a nun; the second, a fantasy about a nobleman bisected into his good and evil halves. “Bravura pieces... executed with brilliance and b
“We need others physically, emotionally, intellectually; we need them if we are to know anything, even ourselves.” We hear often that love is patient and kind, not envious or prideful. We hear that
Cosimo, a young eighteenth-century Italian nobleman, rebels by climbing into the trees to remain there for the rest of his life. He adapts efficiently to an arboreal existence and even has love affair
A billingual collection showing the range of Brecht's poetry, from the early Manual of Piety to the late Songs, Poems, and Choruses, including songs from his theater works. Translated and introduced b
A novel that vividly brings to life the inherently adversarial nature of the mother-daughter relationship and its yearnings. "This strong, thoughtful first novel...develops with quiet momentum" (Publ
An extraordinary debut by a Scottish mystery writer, this cult classic of crime fiction presents Detective Jack Laidlaw, a policeman as complex and self-critical as you'll ever meet. Laidlaw follows
