Spanning forty years, this is the story of turbulent Tom Wingo, his gifted and troubled twin sister Savannah, and their struggle to triumph over the dark and tragic legacy of the extraordinary family into which they were born.Filled with the vanishing beauty of the South Carolina low country as well as the dusty glitter of New York City, The Prince of Tides is PAT CONROY at his very best.

    Extinction, his last novel, takes the form of the autobiographical testimony of Franz-Josef Murau. The intellectual black sheep of a powerful Austrian land-owning family, Murau lives in self-exile in Rome. Obsessed and angry with his identity as an Austrian, he resolves never to return to the family estate of Wolfsegg. But when news comes of his parents' deaths, he finds himself master of Wolfsegg and must decide its fate.Written in Bernhard's seamless style, Extinction is the ultimate proof of his extraordinary literary genius.

    These spare and unsentimental stories display how two very different people -- a tough-minded and tenderhearted woman and an urbane, old-fashioned older man -- fall in love despite their differences, get married, and give birth to a child.8 stories: Frank and Billy French Movie A Little Something Another Marvelous Thing A Country Wedding A Couple of Old Flames [originally titled Old Flames] Swan Song My Mistress

    Disillusioned and loveless, a chain-smoking art history professor who spends her spare time singing in nightclubs and tending to her young daughter finds herself pursued by an erratic, would-be librettist.

    In a voice at once elegiac and life-affirming, MacLeod describes a vital present inhabited by the unquiet spirits of a Highland past, invoking memory and myth to celebrate the continuity of the generations even in the midst of unremitting change.His second collection, As Birds Bring Forth the Sun and Other Stories confirms MacLeod’s international reputation as a storyteller of rare talent and inspiration.From the Trade Paperback edition.

    It is a protest at institutions that isolate, and a way of life that denies respect and responsibility for the weak.

    But it is more: Peter Nadas has given us a superb contemporary psychological novel that comes to terms with the ghosts, corpses, and repressed nightmares of Europe's recent past. "A Book of Memories" is made up of three first-person narratives: the first that of a young Hungarian writer and his fated love for a German poet; we also learn of the narrator's adolescence in Budapest, when he experiences the downfall of his once-upper-class but now pro-Communist family and of his beloved but repudiated father, a state prosecutor who commits suicide after the 1956 uprising. A second memoir, alternating with the first, is a novel the narrator is composing about a refined Belle Epoque aesthete, whose anti-bourgeois transgressions seem like emotionally overcharged versions of the narrator's own experiences. A third voice is that of a childhood friend who, after the narrator's return to his homeland, offers an apparently more objective account of their friendship. Together these brilliantly colored lives are integrated in a powerful work of tragic intensity.

    Ranging over three generations—and clustered mainly in two clans, the Grouses and the Gaffneys—these remarkably various lives share only the common human dilemmas and the awesome physical and emotional presence of Mohawk itself.For this is a town like Winesburg, Ohio or Our Town, in our time, that encompasses a plethora of characters, events and mysteries. At once honestly tragic and sharply, genuinely funny, Mohawk captures life, then affirms it.

    Pearson's second novel, "Off for the Sweet Hereafter, " fulfilled the promise of his first, "A Short History of a Small Place," returning once more to the mythic environs of Neely, North Carolina, and to the madcap antics of its odd but endearing inhabitants. If "A Short History" delved deeply and hilariously into the burdens of family legacy in a small Southern town where sanity is a scarce community, "Off for the Sweet Hereafter" is a rollicking adventure, a modern-day Bonnie and Clyde story about two passionate but star-crossed lovers, Raeford Benton Lynch and Jane Elizabeth Firesheets. Together they cut a wide swath of mayhem and murder before their number comes up in a bloody blaze of glory.

    We meet Kate at a crucial moment in middle age when she begins to yearn to see the son she abandoned when she was seventeen. But if she decides to seek him, will he understand her? Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, Kate Vaiden is a penetrating psychological portrait of an ordinary woman in extraordinary circumstances, a story as joyous, tragic, comic and compelling as life itself.

    

    Kinsella's trademark combination of "sweet-natured prose and a richly imagined world" (Philadelphia Inquirer), The Iowa Baseball Confederacy tells the story of Gideon Clark, a man on a quest. He is out to prove to the world that the indomitable Chicago Cubs traveled to Iowa in the summer of 1908 for an exhibition game against an amateur league, the Iowa Baseball Confederacy. But a simple game somehow turned into a titanic battle of more than two thousand innings, and Gideon Clark struggles to set the record straight on this infamous game that no one else believes ever happened.

    Eighty-one masterpieces by the world's best writers a surprising, irresistible collection of short stories from around the world."

    Brought together one sweltering afternoon to stand guard over an ammunition dump threatened by a forest fire, they discover in each other an unexpected capacity for recklessness and violence. Far from being alarmed by this discovery, they are exhilarated by it; they emerge from their common danger full of confidence in their own manhood and in the bond of friendship they have formed.This confidence is shaken when a series of thefts occur. The author embraces the perspectives of both the betrayer and the betrayed, forcing us to participate in lives that we might otherwise condemn, and to recognize the kinship of those lives to our own.

    Swept away by happiness and passion, Anna feels she has everything she's ever wanted. Then come the shocking charges that would threaten her new love, her new "family" ... that force her to prove she is a good mother.

    The novel tells the story of the bizarre and destructive customs of a nameless town—burying the dead in trees after filling their mouths with cement to prevent their soul from escaping, or sending a man to swim in the river that courses underneath the town to discover if they will be washed away by a flood—through the eyes of a fourteen-year-old boy who must come to terms with the rhyme and reason of this ritual violence, and with his wild, child-like, and teenaged stepmother, who becomes his playmate. It is through these rituals, and the developing relationships between the boy and the townspeople, that Rodoreda portrays a fully-articulated, though quite disturbing, society. The horrific rituals, however, stand in stark contrast to the novel’s stunningly poetic language and lush descriptions. Written over a period of twenty years—after Rodoreda was forced into exile following the Spanish Civi War—Death in Spring is musical and rhythmic, and truly the work of a writer at the height of her powers.

    Includes her highly acclaimed Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, Morgan's Passing, The Tin Can Tree, and If Morning Ever Comes.

    Whether she writes about a widow on a visit to Russia, a small boy's consignment to boarding school, or an agoraphobic housewife, Penelope Lively takes the reader past the closed curtains, through the locked door, into a world that seems at first mundane and then at second glance, proves to be uniquely memorable.

    Come home when you can.” He returns to discover a place both wholly familiar and barely recognizable and is cast into the center of an interracial land dispute with the exigencies of war.   Widely acclaimed when first published in the eighties, the timeless novel Red Earth, White Earth showcases Will Weaver’s rough ease with language and storytelling, frankly depicting life’s uneven terrain and crooked paths.

    Roger Wing is pledging his martial skills to the service of the Lord, but it isn't helping him win over the prettiest girl in the Youth for Christ Mission.

    Short Stories by Ann Beattie, Ethan Canin, Joy Williams, Richard Ford, Tobias Wolff, Alice Munro, Thomas McGuane, Lord Tweedsmuir, Donald Barthelme, Raymond Carver, and many others.

    It begins in the Venice of the twenties, just as the Fascists are taking over the government and ends in war-torn Amsterdam, desperate and destitute after the Allied victory.

    The mothers of the young couple had been childhood friends, but the differences in outlook of the children are exacerbated by the political polarisation that has come over France at the time. We are in the 1930s with Communists and fascists fighting in the streets. The marriage does not last and France goes to war. Bertrand, now a Prefect, is refused permission to join the army; but after France’s defeat and the armistice with the Germans, he decides that he cannot serve under Marshal Petain. He escapes over the Pyrenees and eventually reaches London where he places himself at the disposal of General de Gaulle. Bertrand’s life in France has introduced the reader to spies, priests, academics, criminals, politicians, prostitutes, policemen and refugees from the Spanish Civil War. In London, he becomes involved with the English and, when sent back to France by de Gaulle, with the different factions in the French Resistance. Bertrand becomes enmeshed in political infighting and mired in moral paradox as the story proceeds to a dramatic denouement. Awarded the Enid McLeod Literary Prize by the Franco-British Society

    

    This friendship is the genesis of Carpelan's fictional diary of Axel's dual obsession with music and with a man who, unlike him, had enough confidence in his creativity to compose his own.In Carpelan's novel, set during Finland's struggle to escape Russian colonization, young Axel's life is full of melancholic introspection communicated only to his diary. The diary is filled with short entries from adolescence describing antagonism toward the healthier and more joyous children around him, and his embarrassment at his futile attempts to coax beauty from his violin. His unrelenting disappointment and self-effacement give way after actually meeting his hero Sibelius, as Axel's search for meaning and an aesthetic ideal become forever linked to the unfolding of the composer's musical genius.Reminiscent of Musil's The Man Without Qualities and Svevo's Confessions of Zeno, and packed with the same densely poetic language found in Kafka's Diaries, Carpelan's Axel explores the spiritual awakening of a young man in the context of the awakening an entire nation.

    Families, homes, lovers, marriages -- the safe havens they have been taught to depend on no longer guarantee shelter or stability.ONE WAY OR ANOTHER introduces Peter Cameron as an extraordinary writer, one distinguished not only by his prose, which is always abundantly witty and pitch-perfect, but also by a rare generosity of heart.Included in this book are two stories that were selected for the O. HENRY PRIZE STORIES: "Homework," first published in The New Yorker, and "Excerpts from Swan Lake," first published in The Kenyon Review.

    Though initially appalled by the act. Livesey finds himself recalling it later when he learns a friend is dying of cancer, when his affair with a younger woman ends in disillusionment, and when, during an extended visit to his son and his family in Oregon, he realizes his daughter-in-law's unborn baby does not belong to her husband. Coming to admire the calm directness with which the man took matters of life and death into his own hands, Livesey begins to reconsider what he values and what he will protect."--BOOK JACKET.

    Instead, he put his work in the service of the imperialist movement that led Japan into World War II. Now, as the mature Ono struggles through the aftermath of that war, his memories of his youth and of the “floating world”—the nocturnal world of pleasure, entertainment, and drink—offer him both escape and redemption, even as they punish him for betraying his early promise. Indicted by society for its defeat and reviled for his past aesthetics, he relives the passage through his personal history that makes him both a hero and a coward but, above all, a human being.

    Absolutely wonderful", when it was first published in 1985. And The New Yorker described it as "a wild, poetic exhalation that sparkles and hoots and flies". Strange things and mysterious events are happening to the seashore rustics in the Dorset fishing town of Rams Horn, whose lives are dominated by lust and other dark forces they can't quite comprehend.

    The four novellas that followed, including "The Virgin and The Gypsy" and "The Princess", achieve a far greater beauty and vitality, and in "St Mawr", set in New Mexico, and "The Escaped Cock" an extraordinary reworking of the story of Christ's resurrection, Lawrence brings to the short novel the richness and resonance of myth.

    . . called up the flavors of an elaborate and bold cuisine, bent on making the flavors’ highest notes vibrate, juxtaposing them in modulations, in chords, and especially in dissonances that would assert themselves as an incomparable experience.” — From Under the Jaguar Sun   These intoxicating stories delve down to the core of our senses. Taste, hearing, and smell. Amid the flavors of Mexico’s fiery chilies and spices, a couple on holiday discovers dark truths about the maturing of desire in the title story, “Under the Jaguar Sun.” In “A King Listens,” a gripping portrait of a frenzied mind, the menacing echoes in a huge palace spur a tyrant’s thoughts to the heights of paranoid intensity. “The Name, the Nose” drives to a startling conclusion as men across time and space pursue the women whose aromas have enchanted them. Mordant and deliciously offbeat, this trio of tales is a treat from a master of short fiction. “[Calvino is] a learned, daring, ingeniously gifted magus . . . Under the Jaguar Sun . . . fuses fable with neuron . . . The reader is likely to salivate.” — Cynthia Ozick, New York Times Book Review