Bonaventure shelter. Inseparable at the time, they lose touch as they grow older, only to find each other later at a diner, then at a grocery store, and again at a protest. Seemingly at opposite ends of every problem, and in disagreement each time they meet, the two women still cannot deny the deep bond their shared experience has forged between them.Written in 1980 and anthologized in a number of collections, this is the first time Recitatif is being published as a stand-alone hardcover. In the story, Twyla's and Roberta's races remain ambiguous. We know that one is white and one is black, but which is which? And who is right about the race of the woman the girls tormented at the orphanage?Morrison herself described this story as "an experiment in the removal of all racial codes from a narrative about two characters of different races for whom racial identity is crucial." Recitatif is a remarkable look into what keeps us together and what keeps us apart, and about how perceptions are made tangible by reality.

    Combining mysticism, history, and humor, the stories in this collection span more than two decades, illuminating the development of Marquez's prose and exhibiting the themes of family, poverty, and death that resound throughout his fiction.

    Set on a Louisiana sugarcane plantation in the 1970s, A Gathering of Old Men is a powerful depiction of racial tensions arising over the death of a Cajun farmer at the hands of a black man.

    Agnes falls in love with this man, a local stonecutter, but the hero is also a betrayer, the apex of a triangle that eventually leads Agnes to commit murder.

    A boy must learn to care for his younger brother when their mother leaves the family. A young woman who has never lacked lovers despairs of ever finding love itself, and then makes an accidental discovery that brings her real joy. Culled from Dubus’s treasured collections Selected Stories and Dancing After Hours, these beautiful stories of people at pivotal moments in their lives are some of the most bewitching and profound in American fiction.

    Set in the bleak Fen Country of East Anglia, and spanning some 240 years in the lives of its haunted narrator and his ancestors, Waterland is a book that takes in eels and incest, ale-making and madness, the heartless sweep of history and a family romance as tormented as any in Greek tragedy.

    These two novels show Lessing returning to an earlier narrative style with fresh power.

    He is simply seeking knowledge; 'it is only after you have come to know the surface of things that you can venture to seek what is underneath'. Whether contemplating a fine cheese, a hungry gecko, a woman sunbathing topless or a flight of migrant starlings, Mr Palomar's observations render the world afresh.

    A lonely art historian absorbed in her research seizes the opportunity to share in the joys and pleasures of the lives of a glittering couple, only to find her hopes of companionship and happiness shattered.

    In this award-winning novel, an informer’s body is found on the estate of a wealthy Irish family shortly after the First World War, and an appalling cycle of revenge is set in motion. Led by a zealous sergeant, the Black and Tans set fire to the family home, and only young Willie and his mother escape alive. Fatherless, Willie grows into manhood while his alcoholic mother’s bitter resentment festers. And though he finds love, Willie is unable to leave the terrible injuries of the past behind.First time in Penguin ClassicsWinner of the Whitbread Novel of the Year Award

    A highpoint of the collection is Thomas's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, a vivid collage of memories from his Swansea childhood that combines the lyricism of his poetry with the sparkle and sly humor of Under Milk Wood. Also here is the fiction from Quite Early One Morning, a collection planned by Thomas shortly before his death.Altogether there are more than forty stories, providing a rich and varied literary feast and showing Dylan Thomas in all his intriguing variety-somber fantasist, joyous word-spinner, comedian of smalltown Wales. The book includes an entertaining, informative reflection on Thomas by another Welsh poet and storyteller, Leslie Norris, as well as a brief listing of publication details by Professor Walford Davies, editor of Dylan Thomas: Early Prose Works.After the fair --Tree --True story --Enemies --Dress --Visitors --Vest --Burning baby --Orchards --End of the river --Lemon --Horse's ha --School for witches --Mouse and the woman --Prospect of the sea --Holy six --Prologue to an adventure --Map of love --In the direction of the beginning --Adventure from a work in progress --Portrait of the artist as a young dog: Peaches --Visit to Grandpa's --Patricia, Edith and Arnold --Fight --Extraordinary little cough --Just like little dogs --Where Tawe flows --Who do you wish was with us? --Old Garbo --One warm Saturday --Adventures in the skin trade: Fine beginning --Plenty of furniture --Four lost souls --Quite early one morning --Child's Christmas in Wales --Holiday memory --Crumbs of one man's year --Return journey --Followers --Story --Appendix: early stories: Brember --Jarley's --In the garden --Gaspar, Melchior, Balthsar --List of sources

    . . may be the most compelling and suspenseful work of fiction [Dubus] has written."--Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Times Book ReviewStories of men and women attempting to live together, to tell the truth as they see it (or don't see it), and to survive the crises, and sometimes the violence, of domestic life. Now included in Andre Dubus's Collected Short Stories & Novellas ) this original edition includes A Father's Story, as well as the novella The Pretty Girl. Upon its publication in 1991, Tobias Wolff wrote, "'It is a world of secrets, ' says the narrator of A Father's Story. Andre Dubus's fine new collection is made of those secrets, observed with an art that is luminous with honesty and generosity. Dubus is interested in essential things--in the shadowy powers that circle our lives and the slender resources of faith and love with which we try to keep them at bay."

    In this long-awaited reissue, readers can again warm to this acutely absorbing story. According to Lydia Rowe’s friend George, a philosophizing psychotherapist, a "disturbance in the field" is anything that keeps us from realizing our needs. In the field of daily experiences, anything can stand in the way of our fulfillment, he explains—an interrupting phone call, an unanswered cry. But over time we adjust and new needs arise. But what if there’s a disturbance you can’t get past? In this look at a girl’s, then a wife and mother’s, coming of age, Schwartz explores the questions faced by all whose visions of a harmonious existence are jolted into disarray. The result is a novel of captivating realism and lasting grace.

    On the way there she dies, leaving him alone in an anarchic world of brutal roving armies. Imprisoned, Michael is unable to bear confinement and escapes, determined to live with dignity. Life and Times of Michael K goes to the centre of human experience—the need for an interior, spiritual life, for some connections to the world in which we live, and for purity of vision.

    The novel that set the stage for his modern classic, The Satanic Verses, Shame is Salman Rushdie’s phantasmagoric epic of an unnamed country that is “not quite Pakistan.” In this dazzling tale of an ongoing duel between the families of two men–one a celebrated wager of war, the other a debauched lover of pleasure–Rushdie brilliantly portrays a world caught between honor and humiliation–“shamelessness, shame: the roots of violence.” Shame is an astonishing story that grows more timely by the day.

    Alone on the cobblestones, he cries out to Israel, to the Lord his God, to Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. He is answered instead by Jesus Christ.

    She describes a love between two women in its totality, experienced as both a physical presence, and a sense of infinity. The result is a stunning example of Pecriture feminine that won praise when first published in France in 1983. Its translation into English by Betsy Wing will extend the influence of a writer already famous for her novels and contributions to feminist theory. In her introduction Betsy Wing notes the contemporary emphasis on "fictions of presence." Cixous, in The Book of Promethea, works to "repair the separation between fiction and presence, trying to chronicle a very-present love without destroying it in the writing."

    Born into poverty, saddled with a born loser and parrot-strangler for a dad, short sighted and ungainly, young Henry Pratt doesn't exactly have a head start in life.But in David Nobbs's brilliantly funny evocation of a Yorkshire boyhood, unathletic and over-imaginative little Pratt proves he can stick up for himself with the stoic good nature of the great British underdog

    Squeaky, off on an increasingly fantastic series of encounters and incidents in a dreary Boston...

    Nobody, that is, except an Anglican priest who happened to witness the whole thing. And when George’s former teacher, the charismatic philosopher Rozanov, returns to town, George’s life begins to spin wildly out of control.   Set in the English spa town of Ennistone, The Philosopher’s Pupil is a darkly comic story of love, redemption, and the complex nature of the human condition.

    It was an ironic moment; the book had been turned down by more than a dozen mainstream houses, and the outpouring of rave reviews validated the book's artistic and social importance. Shocking, brutal, and unrepentantly literary, Saul's Book tells the story of Sinbad, a teenage hustler, and Saul, his older, criminal lover. A cross between Last Exit to Brooklyn and City of Night, Saul's Book is an honest, unsparing and frightening look not only at life on the streets, but at how salvation of any sort comes at an enormous price. Out of print for almost a decade, the reissue of Saul's Book is an important literary event.

    

    There were no roads, no cars and no telephones. The tiny village that nestled among the rocky hills of Newfoundland's desolate southern coast had existed for generations with ancient customs and patterns of speech that still endured-while the modern world waited impatiently in the wings. Drawing on a wealth of first-hand experience-the Mowats lived in the outport community for five years-Claire Mowat has written a fictional memoir that beautifully recreates an almost vanished world. A world where life revolved tightly around the home and neighbours watched over one another. A world where one's kitchen was open to anyone who might drop in, day or night. A world that Claire Mowat grew to love.

    The result is a thought-provoking puzzle box of sex, philosophy, and theology, reminiscent of Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco.

    Almost.' --Santa Cruz

    As campuses burn amidst the unrest of the Sixties and his own generation rebels, the son is drawn to his father’s circle of wartime friends in search of clues to the past. Finally discovering that his brooding father has been haunted for years by his role in the murder of a brutal SS officer just after the war, young Tamiroff learns that the Nazi is still alive. Haunting, poetic, and very contemporary, The Fifth Son builds to an unforgettable climax as the son sets out to complete his father’s act of revenge.

    "An absorbing...fascinating world is created...not only is it an exploration of racism, it is a powerful and moving testament..."--New York Times Book Review

      Leon Hubbard makes other men nervous, talking to himself or anyone who will listen about the things he’s cut with his straight razor. So when he crosses the wrong guy on a South Philly construction site and winds up with his head caved in, everyone is content to bury the bad news with the body. Everyone, that is, except Leon’s mother—and a local newspaper columnist hoping the story will resurrect his career. Only a mother could love a man like Leon. But only an outsider could expect to change anything in God’s Pocket.

    Ten essential plays by one of the greatest American playwrights of the last century.©2012 L A Theatre Works

    Set in the tobacco country of North Carolina in 1937, the story is told through the voice of Roxy Walston, the 20-year-old daughter of the town undertaker, wife of a struggling tobacco farmer, and mother of a two-year-old. When Jack Ruffin, a wanderer looking for work, is sent out to the farm to help Roxy's husband, things are set in place that change Roxy's life forever.

    Employing the unmatched lyrical inventiveness and range that have made him recognized as Spain's most distinguished poet, Gimferrer has composed a paean to vanished artistic grandeur, suggesting the fragility of the line dividing the real from imagined: Whatever the eye can see dissolves into a tapestry of prose woven of light and shadow.

    Who were the best young British novelists ten years ago? And who among them have emerged as the important writers of today? This classic issue of Granta (reprinted six times) collects new fiction from the twenty writers, judged in 1983, to be the best of their generation.

    of Das Märchen? 1795)30 • Fair-Haired Eckbert • novelette by Ludwig Tieck (trans. of Der blonde Eckbert 1797)47 • A Wondrous Oriental Fairy Tale of a Naked Saint • short fiction by Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder (trans. of Ein wunderbares morgenländisches Märchen von einem nackten Heiligen? 1797)52 • Klingsohr's Tale • short fiction by Novalis (trans. of Klingsohrs Märchen 1802)77 • Hyacinth and Rosebud • short story by Novalis (trans. of Hyazinth und Rosenblüthe? 1802)81 • The Runenberg • novelette by Ludwig Tieck (trans. of Der Runenberg 1804)102 • The New Melusina • novelette by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (trans. of Die neue Melusine 1816)121 • The History of Krakatuk • (1833) • short story by E. T. A. Hoffmann (trans. of Das Märchen von der harten Nuß 1816)133 • The Marble Statue • short fiction by Joseph von Eichendorff (trans. of Das Marmorbild 1819) [as by Joseph, Freiherr von Eichendorff]172 • The Tale of the Myrtle-Girl • short fiction by Clemens Brentano (trans. of Das Märchen von dem Myrtenfräulein 1826)184 • The Cold Heart • [Das kalte Herz / The Cold Heart] • novella by Wilhelm Hauff (trans. of Das kalte Herz 1827)221 • The Story of Beautiful Lau • short fiction by Eduard Mörike? (trans. of Die Historie von der schönen Lau 1853)241 • Hinzelmeier: A Thoughtful Story • novelette by Theodor Storm (trans. of Hinzelmeier: Eine nachdenkliche Geschichte 1850)264 • Bulemann's House • novelette by Theodor Storm (trans. of Bulemanns Haus 1864)282 • The Tale of the 672nd Night • short story by Hugo von Hofmannsthal (trans. of Das Märchen der 672. Nacht? 1895)298 • Jackals and Arabs • (1948) • short story by Franz Kafka (trans. of Schakale und Araber 1917)303 • Biographical Notes (German Literary Fairy Tales) • essay by Frank G. Ryder