Here are urban upheavals reimagined as frontier myth; travelogues through countries that might have been created by Kafka; cryptic dialogues that bore down to the bedrock of our longings, dreams, and angsts. Like all of Donald's work, the sixty stories collected in this volume are triumphs of language and perception, at once unsettling and irresistible.

    Only Mr. Davies, author of Fifth Business, The Manticore, and World of Wonders, could have woven together their destinies with such wit, humour-and wisdom.

    Greeted by fireworks displays, cheering crowds, and Prime Minister Nehru himself, Saleem grows up to learn the ominous consequences of this coincidence. His every act is mirrored and magnified in events that sway the course of national affairs; his health and well-being are inextricably bound to those of his nation; his life is inseparable, at times indistinguishable, from the history of his country. Perhaps most remarkable are the telepathic powers linking him with India’s 1,000 other “midnight’s children,” all born in that initial hour and endowed with magical gifts. This novel is at once a fascinating family saga and an astonishing evocation of a vast land and its people–a brilliant incarnation of the universal human comedy. Twenty-five years after its publication, Midnight’ s Children stands apart as both an epochal work of fiction and a brilliant performance by one of the great literary voices of our time.

    Presents thirteen short stories peopled by such characters as Rhoda, a precocious nine-year-old; Nora Jane, an expectant mother of twins; and Crystal, an outrageous Southern belle.

    In these stories, the reader moves among young men and women: pianists, historians, book illustrators, architects; women who are composed and inimitably sassy; and men who are magnetic, adventurous in love, or fiendishly elusive. They are people who are experiencing, often for the first time, the starting, enriching, and maddening complications of adult life.

    Jadine Childs is a black fashion model with a white patron, a white boyfriend, and a coat made out of ninety perfect sealskins. Son is a black fugitive who embodies everything she loathes and desires. As Morrison follows their affair, which plays out from the Caribbean to Manhattan and the deep South, she charts all the nuances of obligation and betrayal between blacks and whites, masters and servants, and men and women.

    From “Guests of the Nation” to “The Mad Lomasneys” to “First Confession” to “My Oedipus Complex,” these tales of Ireland have touched generations of readers the world over and placed O'Connor alongside W. B. Yeats and James Joyce as the greatest of Irish authors.Analyzing a Robert Browning poem, O'Connor once wrote: “Since a whole lifetime must be crowded into a few minutes, those minutes must be carefully chosen indeed and lit by an unearthly glow.” Each of the sixty-seven stories gathered here achieves the same incredible feat of the imagination, laying bare entire lives and histories within the space of a few pages. Dublin schoolteacher Ned Keating waves good-bye to a charming girl and to any thoughts of returning to his village home in the lyrical and melancholy “Uprooted.” A boy on an important mission is waylaid by a green-eyed temptress and seeks forgiveness in his mother’s loving arms in “The Man of the House,” a tale that draws on O'Connor’s own difficult childhood. A series of awkward encounters and humorous misunderstandings perfectly encapsulates the complicated legacy of Irish immigration in “Ghosts,” the bittersweet account of an American family’s pilgrimage to the land of their forefathers.As a writer, critic, and teacher, O'Connor elevated the short story to astonishing new heights. This career-spanning anthology, epic in scope yet brimming with the small moments and intimate details that earned him a reputation as Ireland’s Chekhov, is a testament to Frank O’Connor's magnificent storytelling and a true pleasure to read from first page to last.

    Far from wealthy they are still reasonably content with their life until one night when their teenage daughter helps a wealthy and lonely Wall Street lawyer. Out of gratitude the lawyer showers the family with gifts and money. The Strands find their lives altered and not necessarily for the best.

    The satire is broad, and uses southern culture cliches but is often very funny. Some of the names of the girls at the school, for example, are Mimsy Borogoves, Barbara Celarent, and Pengwynn Custiss.The story is said to be based on Theroux's years of teaching at Longwood University, and places described in the book are easily recognized buildings on the campus.[citation needed]

    Hoteliers, pet-bear owners, friends of Freud (the animal trainer and vaudevillian, that is), and playthings of mad fate, they “dream on” in a funny, sad, outrageous, and moving novel by the remarkable author of A Prayer for Owen Meany and Last Night in Twisted River.

    Officers of the liberating army discover his frozen, disfigured corpse and his astonishing testament - the sordid truth that he alone possessed. Fascinated but horrified, they learn of a dazzling array of characters caught up in a scandal and political corruption.Famous Last Words is part-thriller, part-horror story; it is also a meditation on history and the human soul and it is Findley's fine achievement that he has combined these elements into a web that constantly surprises and astounds the reader.

    . . By his compassion, clarity of insight, and crystal-bright prose, [Updike] makes Rabbit's sorrow his and out own.The Washington Post"Precise, graceful, stunning, he is an athlete of words and images. He is also an impeccable observer of thoughts and feelings."The Village VoiceRABBIT REDUX"Great in love, in art, boldness, freedom, wisdom, kindness, exceedingly rich in intelligence, wit, imagination, and feeling -- a great and beautiful thing . . . these hyperboles (quoted from a letter written long ago by Thomas Mann) come to mind after reading John Updike's Rabbit Redux.The New York Times Book Review "Updike owns a rare verbal genius, a gifted intelligence and a sense of tragedy made bearable by wit. . . . A masterpiece.Time

    This is the story of John's relationship with his family, the town, and the woman he loves; and also between the past and the present, between oppression and guilt, hate and violence, love and acceptance.

    Winner of the Prix de Rome and the National Jewish Book Award, these ten stories and the title novella, "Ellis Island," exhibit tremendous range and versatility of style and technique, yet are closely unified in their beauty and in their concern with enduring and universal questions.

    He sees hope in the study of Kabbalah, the Jewish bok of mysticism and visions, truth and light. But to Gershon's friend, Arthur, light means something else, the Atom bomb, his father helped create. Both men seek different a refuge in a foreign place, hoping for the same thing....

    It is also a tale of mothers and daughters, their mutual rebellion and unconscious mimicry. Rose grew up with an emotionally crippled, narcissistic mother while her father, a veteran gambler, spent his waking hours in the garden cut off from his wife's harangues. Now an adult, Rose works her way through a string of unhealthy love(less) affairs. After a brief, unhappy marriage, she slips more deeply and dangerously into the lair of a parasitic, cocaine-fed artist whose sensual and manipulative ways she grows addicted to in the bohemian squalor of Venice.

    From the wild and uninhibited 1920s to the narcotized 1970s, "he establishes a mythological and symbolic link between character and landscape, language and plot, that in the hands of a less visionary writer might be little more than stale sociology" (New York Times Book Review).

    It is a horrifying yet restrained narrative of the Holocaust. It is a searing vision of the wounds of our century, and an attempt to heal them. Interweaving poetry and case history, fantasy and historical truth-telling, The White Hotel is a modern classic of enduring emotional power that attempts nothing less than to reconcile the notion of individual destiny with that of historical fate.

    From the book's inception, readers will be seized by the dangers and nightmare suspense of life lived on the rim of a political volcano.

    Fleeing from an America he sees as mired in materialism and conformity, he hopes to rediscover a purer life. But his utopian experiment takes a dark turn when his obsessions lead the family toward unimaginable danger.

    Eclogues is a delight, and Guy Davenport proves a companionable and witty guide.

    His work is often compared to that of Graham Greene, who himself considered Endo one of the century's finest writers. A historical novel set in the turbulent period between the fall of the shogunate and the Meiji Restoration, "Kiku's Prayer" embodies themes central to Endo's work, including religion, modernization, and the endurance of the human spirit. In Japan, the book is considered one of his late masterpieces and has never before been translated into English.Endo's novel is told through the eyes of Kiku, self-assured young woman from a rural village who falls in love with Seikichi, a devoted Catholic man. Practicing a faith still banned by the government, Seikichi is imprisoned and forced to recant under torture. Kiku's efforts to reconcile her feelings for Seikichi and the sacrifices she makes to free him mirror the painful, conflicting choices Japan faced as a result of exposure to modernity and the West. Endo's nuanced view of history is very much on display in this novel: Seikichi's persecution exemplifies Japan's insecurities toward the West, and Kiku's tortured yet determined spirit represents the nation's resilient soul. Yet "Kiku's Prayer" is much more than a historical allegory. It acutely renders one woman's troubled encounter with passion and spirituality at a transitional time in her life and in the life of her people.

    Joline B. Newhouse, who writes a "fortnightly" newspaper column called "Between the Lines." Georgia Rose, the girl whose life is more like a soap opera than the TV serial she's addicted to. Martha Rasnick, the young housewife in "Dear Phil Donahue" who writes all her troubles to the TV personality. Florrie, the cake lady in "Cakewalk" who causes her prissy sister no end of embarrassment by "wearing running shoes, at her age, and wooly white athletic socks that fall in crinkles down around her ankles." "From the Paperback edition."

    screenplay

    Tommy didn't kill him, but the police will shoot first and ask questions later. Mother Bess is kin, but she is a crazy, mean old lady hiding out high about the Homewood streets--streets that have taken away everything she ever loved. Together, Tommy and Mother Bess are hiding, in anger and fear. Will they find the courage to come out of hiding?

    Ranging in time and place from small-town Quebec during the Depression, to Geneva and Paris in the 1950s, to contemporary Vancouver Island, these stories explore the remorseless cruelty of children, the tensions that affect all families, the dangerous but endearing naïveté of young girls in love with Europe, and the terrible distances that divide people who love each other. And in the celebrated “Linnet Muir” stories, Gallant draws on her own experiences to portray a sensitive and alarmingly perceptive young girl growing up in Montreal in the 1930s and 1940s. Incisive, darkly humorous, and compassionate, Home Truths is a vibrant collection of stories from one of our finest writers.

    Norman Mailer hailed Don Carpenter's last novel, A Couple of Comedians, as "the best novel I've ever read about contemporary show biz." Lyn Tornabene called it "marvelous, exotic, and unforgettable." The same qualities that have won this author such high praise in the past are again present in his new novel, which Kirkus Reviews calls a "a standout." In it, Carpenter takes us inside the motion-picture industry--and into the ambitious, obsessive lives of its producers, writers, actors, and deal makers.At its center are Jerry Rexford, a talented but naive, shy young man struggling to break into The Business as a writer; Rick Heidelberg, a "young Turk" with one big success behind him, desperate to prove that he's more than a "one-picture wonder boy"; and, topping this group, Alexander Hellstrom, a middle-aged mogul who, in the midst of the most passionate affair of his life, begins to wonder if it all really matters....What happens to them--and the people who surround them--unfolds in a novel about Hollywood written with wit, pace, and, above all, the authenticity that have become Don Carpenter's trademarks.(from front jacket flap)

    The many people of Alexandra Township are the characters in this book in which readers can discover the links in a chain of extended families, friendships, street gangs and political groups.

    

    He is dying from multiple sclerosis and his best friend, Chris MacKensie, has fallen in love with Larry's wife, Rachel. The love for the dying and passion for the living form an uneasy bond, as the three of them face the truth of life together....