But his research reveals even more about his own life than he's willing to admit. What emerges is an enthralling portrait of four generations in the life of an American family.Wallace Stegner's Pultizer Prize-winning novel is a story of discovery—personal, historical, and geographical.

    Plunging toward its riveting finale, Malina brutally lays bare the struggle for love and the limits of discourse between women and men.

    Palfrey arrives at the Claremont Hotel where she will spend her remaining days. Her fellow residents are magnificently eccentric and endlessly curious, living off crumbs of affection and snippets of gossip. Together, upper lips stiffened, they fight off their twin enemies—boredom and the Grim Reaper. Then one day Mrs. Palfrey strikes up an unexpected friendship with Ludo, a handsome young writer, and learns that even the old can fall in love.

    When she begins spending more time in town, she is surrounded by women -- her mother, an agnostic, opinionated woman who sells encyclopedias to local farmers; her mother's boarder, the lusty Fern Dogherty; and her best friend, Naomi, with whom she shares the frustrations and unbridled glee of adolescence.Through these unwitting mentors and in her own encounters with sex, birth, and death, Del explores the dark and bright sides of womanhood. All along she remains a wise, witty observer and recorder of truths in small-town life. The result is a powerful, moving, and humorous demonstration of Alice Munro's unparalleled awareness of the lives of girls and women.

    Victor Serge’s final work, here translated into English for the first time, is at once the most ambitious, bleakest, and most lyrical of this neglected major writer’s works.The novel is arranged into four sections, like the panels of an immense mural or the movements of a symphony. In the first, D, a lifelong revolutionary who has broken with the Communist Party and expects retribution at any moment, flees through the streets of prewar Paris, haunted by the ghosts of his past and his fears for the future. Part two finds D’s friend and fellow revolutionary Daria caught up in the defense of a besieged Leningrad, the horrors and heroism of which Serge brings to terrifying life. The third part is set in Germany. On a dangerous assignment behind the lines, Daria finds herself in a city destroyed by both Allied bombing and Nazism, where the populace now confronts the prospect of total defeat. The novel closes in Mexico, in a remote and prodigiously beautiful part of the New World where D and Daria are reunited, hoping that they may at last have escaped the grim reckonings of their modern era.A visionary novel, a political novel, a novel of adventure, passion, and ideas, of despair and, against all odds, of hope, Unforgiving Years is a rediscovered masterpiece by the author of The Case of Comrade Tulayev.

    After a highly controversial trial, the couple go to the electric chair for treason despite worldwide protests. Decades later their son, Daniel, grown to young manhood, tries to make sense of their lives and deaths - and their legacy to him. Like millions of other Americans, he is attempting to reconcile an America based on the highest human ideals with the tragedy of his parents. This is the framework for E.L. Doctorow's dazzling masterpiece, as he fictionalizes an actual social and political drama to create an intensely moving, searching, and illuminating tale of two decades, two generations, and a troubled legacy of passion and purpose, martyrdom and meaning.

    A thought provoking novel, in which the normal and the abnormal, the ordinary and the extraordinary, illusion and reality, resignation and desire rub shoulders.

    Soon after their arrival at Illyria, the Reniers’ rambling beachside home, Theron is sent on a diplomatic mission, leaving Stella alone with his family. As she tries to settle into her new life, Stella quickly discovers that the Reniers are not what they seem. Trapped in a world unlike anything she’s ever known, vulnerable Stella attempts to uncover her new family’s dangerous secrets—and stirs up a darkness that was meant to stay buried.

    For Jessica she has been told that she is 'beyond all possible doubt', a born writer. With her inability to conform, her absolute compulsion to tell the truth and her dedication to accurately noting her experiences, she knows this anyway. But what she doesn't know is that the experiences that sustain and enrich her burgeoning talent will one day lead to a new- and entirely unexpected- reality.

    A Mass for Arras explores the personal and political consequences of fear, fanaticism, and fascism in the story of Jan, a young member of the intelligentsia. Arrogantly pious and full of revolutionary zeal, Jan wholeheartedly participates in the torments inflicted on the "outsiders" in the name of moral and political righteousness. Yet when faced with escalating violence and, ultimately, his own downfall, he must choose between sincere commitment to the isolated village that adopted him and horror at a society gone mad. A Mass for Arras addresses themes of freedom and responsibility, individualism and conformity, and memory and loss. It is a moving account of a young man's coming-of-age in a time of disease and death, a profound political allegory of life in an emergent totalitarian state, a chilling indictment of government-sponsored repression and societal complicity, and a cautionary tale about the tendency of history to repeat itself, whether in fifteenth-century France, postwar Poland, or somewhere still closer to our own time and place.

    The story is split into parts which first explore the world from the point of view of each of these protagonists. A carefree Kalyanikutty is brought home in the middle of her exams by her widowed mother following the rumours that had been running around the town on her affair with a boy with a bad character, Prabhu. She surprises everyone with her cold attitude towards what they think is taboo in this society, she attain maturity and becomes strong enough to shock the society once again. Subha, her best friend is forced to marry the man whom she despised the most, Prabhu. She finds self-destruction as the only way to take revenge against the people who are trying to subjugate her and as a bad omen to the family it works. Prabhu, the spoilt , charming, womanizing rascal of the town completes the equation. His failure starts with Kalyanikutty, but gets the fatal blow from Subha that turns him around. His reprisal and how he finally realizes the mistakes prompts him to attempt the final act of redemption. In the depths of a canvas of very calm individuals and a modern town life this story runs as a strong undercurrent of tragedies. To all these drama only stars are the witness.

    From the good listener who begins to betray the secrets confided to her, to vignettes of a city storm or the slow halting of spring, these stories are gifts of originality and depth.

    One act play, Drama. Two wanna-be rock stars await their takeout delivery--or is it their rock-n-roll messiah? An early work by "True West" playwright and actor Sam Shepard. Librarian's Note: No separate publication found at this time. Generally published in collections of Shepard works.

    Follow Wanda, the tough 1930s radical, her daughter Scarlet, unmarried, pregnant and frightened, and Scarlet's friends -- born victims, snobs, obsessive lovers -- in their absurd, nightmarish, often hilariously awful liaisons.