The character sketches in this collection are not only tales in the old mould, but also have the magical quality that touches upon the very essence of Life. The characters are genuinely Marathi in nature, and they have been drawn with the ease with which dawn turns into day or a bud blossoms into a flower. With innocence, Vyankatesh Madgulkar tells us about the poverty-stricken lives of the people of Mandesh and their saga of never-ending sorrows. Their tragedy is moving. The mind is filled with the thought that while men seek some happiness, their lives were never scripted to find it. This essential tragic fact is told by Madgulkar with the detachment of an artist. This renders his characters unforgettable. Our mind is disturbed every time we think of them.

    The story tells why some were spared and some were not... The germ of the idea for The Feast - Margaret Kennedy's ninth novel and perhaps her most ingenious, first published in 1950 - came to the author in 1937 when she and a social gathering of literary friends were discussing the Medieval Masque of the Seven Deadly Sins. The talk turned excitedly to the notion that a collection of stories might be fashioned from seven different authors, each re-imagining one of the Sins through the medium of a modern-day character. That notion fell away, but something more considerable stayed in Margaret Kennedy's mind over the next ten years, and so she conceived of a story that would gather the Sins all under the roof of a Cornish seaside hotel managed by the unhappy wife of Sloth.Among The Feast's entertaining cast of characters are a clergyman, a gaggle of adolescents and children, a quarter of lovers, and a clutch of frustrated husbands & wives - all serving Kennedy's dark and witty moral fable, which bears out the Biblical adage that many are called but only a very few chosen.

    Anxious that she will remain encased in her solitary life as a school secretary, Camilla steps into an unlikely liaison with Richard Elton, a handsome, assured - and dangerous - liar.

    The House of Breath eschews traditional conventions of plot and character presentation. The book is written as an ethereal address to the people and places the narrator remembers from his childhood in a small Texas town. More than a story, it is a meditation on the nature of identity, origins, and memory.

    While waiting for the fateful decision, Gray returns to the small Massachusetts town where he grew up, to try to find out how he has reached this point, and to decide which way to go.

    It is also a story of violent human emotions—love and hate, hope and despair—and of the perpetual conflict between good and evil."The reason why The Track of the Cat is a novel of the first rank is that its author says something of universal significance. The black panther has always been there since the beginning of man's existence in the world. It will always be there, looming over man and always to be hunted though never killed." —San Francisco Chronicle"Mr. Clark knows his Nevada, as The Oxbow Incident proved, and he knows how to tell a good hunting story." —The New Yorker"This is the real beauty of Walter Clark's masterful prose—its wonderful capacity to evoke from the homeliest circumstances the quality of grief and loneliness that exists deep in or under every human effort." —The New York Times"Clark's story is continuously and wonderfully exciting. He is able to bring before the reader with extraordinary vividness the clash of stubborn wills in the snowbound ranch house, the unpopulated mountain landscape, the snow and cold, and above all, the hunt itself." —Yale Review