The protagonist of Tobias Wolff’s shrewdly—and at times devastatingly—observed first novel is a boy at an elite prep school in 1960. He is an outsider who has learned to mimic the negligent manner of
In these three novellas - two of which form the basis of the award-winning film We Don't Live Here Anymore - literary master Andre Dubus traces the lives of two couples who married too young, and who
Since Columbus arrived in 1492 and called Cuba “the most beautiful country that human eyes have ever seen,” few places on earth have evoked such passion. The thirty-one writers in Cuba in Mind offer a
Set in England and Hong Kong in the 1920s, The Painted Veil is the story of the beautiful but love-starved Kitty Fane. When her husband discovers her adulterous affair, he forces her to accompany him
It wasn’t anyone’s idea of a glamorous first assignment at a white show law firm. George Cary, former WWII bomber pilot and newly minted lawyer, was given the ignoble task of going through the tons o
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1965, The Keepers of the House is Shirley Ann Grau’s masterwork, a many-layered indictment of racism and rage that is as terrifying as it is wise.Entrenched on the same
In 1886 a shy, middle-aged piano tuner named Edgar Drake receives an unusual commission from the British War Office: to travel to the remote jungles of northeast Burma and there repair a rare piano be
In 1792, when he was forty-seven, the Spanish painter Francisco de Goya contracted an illness that left him stone deaf. Yet he continued to interact with the world and to create, spending the next thi
In this tender loving memoir, Valerie Steiker evokes a magical childhood on the Upper East side of New York with a woman whose own losses led her to delight in family, beauty and life itself. Valerie
A New York Times Notable BookWinner of the Great Lakes Book Award and the 21st Century Award from the Chicago Public LibraryRaised in an affluent suburb on the North Shore of Chicago, Rich Cohen had a
In a West Virginia forest in 1963, a group of children at summer camp enter a foreboding Eden and experience an unexpected rite of passage. Shelter is an astonishing portrayal of an American loss of i
"The Man Who Japed" is Dick's mesmerizing and terrifying tale of a society so eager for order that it will sacrifice anything, including its freedom. Allen Purcell is one of the few people who has the
Anna and Claire are two bantering, scheming "women of fashion" who have long lived together on the fringes of upper-class society. Anna has just become the mistress of a wealthy man, from whom she has
Given that the suns of Draco stretch almost sixteen light years from end to end, it stands to reason that the cost of transportation is the most important factor of the 32nd century. And since Illyrio
According to his obituary, Wesley Sultan died at the age of 63, leaving behind three children, a wife, an ex-wife, a brother, a sister, and a life-long business career. According to his obituary, Wesl
The novelist Beverly Lowry was mourning her son’s death in a hit-and-run accident when she came across a newspaper story about Karla Faye Tucker, the infamous Houston murderer who was then on death ro
Aurelio Zen—cynical and tough, yet worn down from years of law enforcement—has just been given the worst assignment he could imagine. He has been sent to the heart of hostile territory: Sicily, the an
In this masterful debut, Martin Clark proves to be the heir apparent of great Southern raconteurs and the envy of more seasoned novelists as he takes us on a frantic tour of the modern south.Hung over
It is a situation we all fear and none of us can imagine: a life-threatening diagnosis. But what if the person receiving the diagnosis--young, physically fit, poised for a bright future--is himself a
Martin Urban is a quiet bachelor with a comfortable life, free of worry and distractions. When he unexpectedly comes into a small fortune, he decides to use his newfound wealth to help out those in ne
Jayne Anne Phillips has always been a master of portraiture, both in her widely acclaimed novels and in her short fiction.??The stories in Fast Lanes demonstrated the breadth of her talent in a tour d
Intrepid journalist Patrick Symmes sets off on his BMW R80 G/S in search of the people and places in Ernesto "Che" Guevara's classic Motorcycle Diaries, seeking out his own adventure as well as the le
Our supreme fabulist of the ordinary now turns his attention on a 9-year-old American girl and produces a novel as enchantingly idiosyncratic as any he has written. Nory Winslow wants to be a dentist
With a new Preface by the noted writer Madeleine L'Engle, author of nearly fifty books of fiction and non-fiction, including A Wrinkle in Time. St. Francis of Assisi's ecstatic embrace of a life of po
Mal de amores is a novel about the decisions and sacrifices one woman makes to embrace life on her own terms. In the case of Emilia Sauri, an independent woman reaching adulthood during the Mexican Re
The bestsellling author of A Year in Provence and Hotel Pastis now surveys his territory from a differnt vantage point: the all-fours perspective of his dog, Boy--"a dog whose personality is made up o
A fiendishly innovative young writer ups the ante on his cult classics Et Tu, Babe and My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist with a book so funny that it ought to be a controlled substance. "With
Andrew Vachss's implacable private eye has a new client, Strega. She wants Burke to find an obscene photograph—and that search will take him into the ocean that flows just beneath the city, an ocean w
Before Julie Callahan came to the house at 9 Highland Road in Glen Cove, New York, she had spent a good part of her young life in mental hospitals, her mental and emotional coherence nearly destroyed
Attempting to demythologize the process of dying, Nuland explores how we shall die, each of us in a way that will be unique. Through particular stories of dying--of patients, and of his own family--he
Floyd Jones is sullen, ungainly, and quite possibly mad, but in a very short time he will rise from telling fortunes at a mutant carnival to convulsing an entire planet. For although Jones has the pow
Outer Dark is a novel at once fabular and starkly evocative, set is an unspecified place in Appalachia, sometime around the turn of the century.??A woman bears her brother's child, a boy; he leaves th
"Don't you think there is a certain resemblance between the mystery of the Mass and what I am trying to do?...To give people some kind of intellectual pleasure or spiritual enjoyment by conve
The place is a frontier boom town where the graft gets collected more regularly than the trash. The hero is Bugs McKenna, slow-witted, hot-tempered man with manslaughter in his past and much worse in
Only the author of Flaubert's Parrot could give us a novel that is at once a note-perfect rendition of the angsts and attitudes of English adolescence, a giddy comedy of sexual awakening in the 1960s,
Mr. Pipes writes trenchantly, and at times superbly....No single volume known to me even begins to cater so adequately to those who want to discover what really happened to Russia....Nor do I know any
Why do some places—the concourse of Grand Central Terminal or a small farm or even the corner of a skyscraper—affect us so mysteriously and yet so forcefully? What tiny changes in our everyday environ
The Gift is the last of the novels Nabokov wrote in his native Russian and the crowning achievement of that period in his literary career.??It is also his ode to Russian literature, evoking the works
Between 1927 and his death in 1973, W. H. Auden endowed poetry in the English language with a new face.??Or rather, with several faces, since his work ranged from the political to the religious, from
London Fields is Amis's murder story for the end of the millennium. The murderee is Nicola Six, a "black hole" of sex and self-loathing intent on orchestrating her own extinction. Th
