Tracing the lives, loves, and aspirations of two couples who move between Vermont and Wisconsin, it is a work of quiet majesty, deep compassion, and powerful insight into the alchemy of friendship and marriage.

    Barthelme spotlights the idiosyncratic, haughty, sometimes downright ludicrous behavior of human beings, but it is style rather than content which takes precedence.

    The housekeeper's reputation is one built on dependable efficiency, though she is something of an oddity. Stubborn, foul-mouthed and with a flagrant disregard for her employer's opinions she may even be crazy. She allows no-one to set foot inside her house; she masks herself with a veil and is equally guarded about her personal life. And yet Emerence is revered as much as she is feared. As the story progresses her energy and passion to help becomes clear, extinguishing any doubts arising out of her bizarre behaviour. A stylishly told tale which recounts a strange relationship built up over 20 years between a writer and her housekeeper. After an unpromising and caustic start benign feelings develop and ultimately the writer benefits from what becomes an inseparable relationship. Simultaneously we learn Emerence's tragic past which is revealed in snapshots throughout the book.

    Rock Springs is a masterpiece of taut narration, cleanly chiseled prose, and empathy so generous that it feels like a kind of grace.

    When Carlos Ruweda's wife is suddenly taken from him, he discovers a magical gift: In waking dreams, he had clear visions of the fates of "the disappeared." But he cannot "imagine" what has happened to his own wife. Driven to near madness, his mind cannot be taken away: imagination, stories, and the mystical secrets of the human spirit.

    THE WORLD AS I FOUND IT centers around Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the most powerfully magnetic philosophers of our time--brilliant, tortured, mercurial, forging his own solitary path while leaving a permanent mark on all around him.

    The insects are vying for world domination; the inventors of electricity stand in evil opposition. Bug , a young man, rebels against his own kind and joins forces with the insects. Wayne, a thug, allies himself with the malevolent forces of electricity and vows to assassinate the preying mantis who tends bar in Oregon. A brusque La Pasionara with the sprightly name of Millie leads an intrepid band of revolutionaries. You Bright and Risen Angels is the work of an extraordinary imagination. In this free-wheeling novel of epic proportions, William T. Vollmann has crafted a biting, hilarious satire of history, technology, politics, and misguided love.

    He’s drawn into the streets of New York, onto an elusive case that’s more puzzling and more deeply-layered than anything he might have written himself. In Ghosts, Blue, a mentee of Brown, is hired by White to spy on Black from a window on Orange Street. Once Blue starts stalking Black, he finds his subject on a similar mission, as well. In The Locked Room, Fanshawe has disappeared, leaving behind his wife and baby and nothing but a cache of novels, plays, and poems.This Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition includes an introduction from author and professor Luc Sante, as well as a pulp novel-inspired cover from Art Spiegelman, Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic artist of Maus and In the Shadow of No Towers.

    Memories of her life still glow in her fading consciousness, but she imagines writing a history of the world. Instead, Moon Tiger is her own history, the life of a strong, independent woman, with its often contentious relations with family and friends. At its center — forever frozen in time, the still point of her turning world — is the cruelly truncated affair with Tom, a British tank commander whom Claudia knew as a reporter in Egypt during World War II.

    The story is a drama about ambition, racism, social class, politics, and greed in 1980s New York City, and centers on three main characters: WASP bond trader Sherman McCoy, Jewish assistant district attorney Larry Kramer, and British expatriate journalist Peter Fallow.The novel was originally conceived as a serial in the style of Charles Dickens' writings: It ran in 27 installments in Rolling Stone starting in 1984. Wolfe heavily revised it before it was published in book form. The novel was a bestseller and a phenomenal success, even in comparison with Wolfe's other books. It has often been called the quintessential novel of the 1980s.

    Starting in the present day and moving backward, the novel is told in the voices of the three women: fifteen-year-old part-black Rayona; her American Indian mother, Christine, consumed by tenderness and resentment toward those she loves; and the fierce and mysterious Ida, mother and grandmother whose haunting secrets, betrayals, and dreams echo through the years, braiding together the strands of the shared past.

    Time passes and opinions change. “Why should we go on supporting a book which we detest?” Rose Curtland asks. “The brotherhood of Western intellectuals versus the book of history,” Jenkin Riderhood suggests. The theft of a wife further embroils the situation. Moral indignation must be separated from political disagreement. Tamar Hernshaw has a different trouble and a terrible secret. Can one die of shame? In another quarter a suicide pact seems the solution. Duncan Cambus thinks that since it is a tragedy, someone must die. Someone dies. Rose, who has gone on loving without hope, at least deserves a reward.

    

    Here for the first time in one volume are her complete stories.

    Patrick Lewis arrives in Toronto in the 1920s and earns his living searching for a vanished millionaire and tunneling beneath Lake Ontario. In the course of his adventures, Patrick's life intersects with those of characters who reappear in Ondaatje's Booker Prize-winning The English Patient. 256 pp.

    What they discover about small town idealism, bigotry, and good old American values will change them and the town forever....

    The last volume in an unforgettable trilogy (with A Short History of a Small Place and Off for the Sweet Hereafter)

    He hears voices. He talks to ghosts. He is spending the summer at the Mountain Clinic, a psychiatric hospital in upstate New York—not as a patient, but as a visiting professional with a secret, personal quest. A professor of literature and a Holocaust survivor, Raphael, having rebuilt his life since the war, sees it on the verge of coming apart once more. He longs to talk to Pedro, the man who rescued him as a fifteen-year-old orphan from postwar Poland and brought him to Paris, becoming his friend, mentor, hero, and savior. But Pedro disappeared inside the prisons of Stalin’s Russia shortly after the war. Where is Pedro now, and how can Raphael discern what is true and what is false without him? A mysterious nighttime caller directs Raphael’s search to the Mountain Clinic, a unique asylum for patients whose delusions spring from the Bible. Amid patients calling themselves Adam, Cain, Abraham, Joseph, Jeremiah, and God, Raphael searches for Pedro’s truth and the meaning of his own survival in a novel that penetrated the mysteries of good, evil, and madness.

    At the center of this outlandishly funny, fiercely intelligent novel is the bewitching heroine, Lenore Stonecipher Beadsman. The year is 1990 and the place is a slightly altered Cleveland, Ohio. Lenore’s great-grandmother has disappeared with twenty-five other inmates of the Shaker Heights Nursing Home. Her beau, and boss, Rick Vigorous, is insanely jealous, and her cockatiel, Vlad the Impaler, has suddenly started spouting a mixture of psycho-babble, Auden, and the King James Bible. Ingenious and entertaining, this debut from one of the most innovative writers of his generation brilliantly explores the paradoxes of language, storytelling, and reality.

    However, characters do reoccur, off center stage as it were, and their stories do follow a sequence."When she was younger, Ellen had seen them all the time, bouncing in the wind like tumbleweeds. She called them the Balloon Men. Now she wonders if they really exist...Reece knows he can see things other people can't, and he's running from a nightmare that menaces people with barracuda teeth...Somewhere between Ellen's doubts and Reece's certainties lies Uncle Dobbin's Parrot Fair. Laced with parables, this Nebula nominated story has much to say about the nature of Magic.Cover illustration by Donna Gordon.

    But Morris is also a chronic alcoholic, heading fast towards self-destruction. Morris is not hoping to meet Ms. Right and acquire the two kids that will straighten everything out. He already has all this and it hasn't kept him off the bottle. Ron Butlin's tale of one man's inner turmoil is haunting, harrowing, yet strangely uplifting; a masterpiece from a neglected Scottish writer.

    His wife is having an affair with his law partner. Add to this scenario Duffy's girlfriend, his son, an overweight blob, and Tump Walker, a black pro athlete, and one has the makings of a "belligerent but ultimately touching" (Chicago Tribune) novel.

    Illustrated with 10 unique illustrations:Alarms and Discursions 1910All Things Considered 1908The Appetite of Tyranny 1915Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens 1911The Ballad of the White Horse 1911The Ball and The Cross 1909The Barbarism of Berlin 1914The Club of Queer Trades 1905The Crimes of England 1915The Defendant 1901Eugenics and Other Evils 1922George Bernard Shaw 1909Heretics 1905The Innocence of Father Brown 1911Lord Kitchener 1917Magic, A Fantastic Comedy 1913Manalive 1912The Man Who Knew Too Much 1922The Man Who Was Thursday 1908A Miscellany of Men 1912The Napoleon of Notting Hill 1904The New Jerusalem 1920Orthodoxy 1908Robert Browning 1903A Short History of England 1917Tremendous Trifles 1909Twelve Types 1902Utopia of Usurers and other Essays 1917Varied Types 1903The Victorian Age in Literature 1913What I Saw in America 1922What's Wrong With The World 1910The Wild Knight and Other Poems 1900The Wisdom of Father Brown 1914

    Master storyteller, William Trevor's tender and moving story is about a mysterious emigrant couple who have come to Ireland during the Second World War, and the sensitive boy who comes under their gentle spell.

    When a woman and her young daughter are deserted at the start of World War II, he offers them a roof over their heads, and a shared, if dubious future.

    William North Jr. inherited his father’s keen political instincts and passion for justice. But the last time Ambassador North saw his son he seemed like a stranger—and a hostile one at that. Now, just as North prepares to take a new post in Germany, reports emerge that Bill Jr. is aligned with a German terrorist organization.   Suddenly, a private conflict between father and son escalates to a matter of national security. North is faced with a terrifying dilemma as loyalty to family and country are directly at odds.  The American Ambassador is at once a riveting tale of suspense and a thoughtful meditation on the fragility of Western values in an age of terrorism.   “Haunting and persuasive . . . Charged with authenticity . . . A splendid book that is both thoughtful and fast-moving.” —The New York Times

    The popular lead singer of the heavy metal band Twisted Sister presents his own down-to-earth yet sensitive guide for teenagers that addresses a teenager's relative concerns.

    Read together they make up an elaborate and unforgettable pattern of dreams and reality.'Landscape with Landscape is a work of extraordinary power and vision, one which will surely be an outstanding novel of the decade.' Helen Daniel, Age

    Robert Olmstead's stories transport readers into the raw, uncompromising landscape of rural New Hampshire, where simple survival is always complicated by desperate acts or murderous accidents: boys drowning a bagful of puppies, men buried alive under a mountain of corn silage, suicide on a foreclosed farm.

    Living with his family in a poverty-stricken seaport village, the hero, Hassan Omar, is surrounded by a self-perpetuating cycle of violence and despair. His own sense of hopelessness is nurtured by the stunted lives around him: his drunken, tyrannical, libertine father; a sister, who escapes the blind-alley of their lives into headlong promiscuity; a dissolute older brother, who succumbs to the squalor and eventually dies in a freakish accident; and finally, his mother, who has fatalistically resigned herself to being brutalized by her husband. Eventually, Hassan leaves his family to stay with an uncle in Nairobi, and there he discovers a larger world, which contains its share of cruelty as well but also hope and redemptiona way out of his old life and his immobilizing self-hatred. Hassan's rite of passage eventually comes to stand for something larger, although Gurnah, who was born in Tanzania and now teaches in an English university, merely suggests this message: the hero's aspirations and dilemmas reflect the struggles of Third World Africa to shed its colonial skin, with its tradition of poverty and oppression, and to construct a new identity for itself. This is a short book, but dense, often hair-raising in its dramatic scenes of degradation and compelling in its rendering of Hassan's evolving consciousness.

    In 3D Sound.

    In “Long Distance,” a man finds himself relieved of the obligation to continue an affair that is no longer compelling to him, only to be waylaid by the guilt he feels at his easy escape. And in the incandescently wise and moving title novella, a dentist, aware that his wife has fallen in love with someone else, must comfort her when she is spurned, while maintaining the secret of his own complicated sorrow. Beautifully written, with a wry intelligence and a lively comic touch, The Age of Grief captures moments of great intimacy with grace, clarity, and indelible emotional power.

    Richard Bausch "has created an enduring work of art".--Washington Post.

    Powerful and businesslike, the mother is determined to put the blind horse down; her daughter is determined to save him.

    I would figure out this or that way and run it down through my head until it got easy." So begins the tale of Ellen Foster, the brave and engaging heroine of Kay Gibbons's first novel, which won the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Institute of Arts and Letters. Wise, funny, affectionate, and true, Ellen Foster is, as Walker Percy called it, "The real thing. Which is to say, a lovely, sometimes heartwrenching novel. . . . [Ellen Foster] is as much a part of the backwoods South as a Faulkner character—and a good deal more endearing."

    Interweaves the fate of a cast of passionate--and lunatic--idealists of the Depression Era Left, and the rise and fall of a poet, womanizer, actor, union sympathizer and All-American football star known as Gloomy Gus.

    Blaine moves from her home in Wicklow to a slum in Dublin with her alcoholic husband and struggles to raise her children there

    comes under suspicion for murder. Police don't believe that L.D.'s home-care attendant would commit suicide by jumping from a second-floor window -- but Olive, who has heard her uncle demonstrate his excellent memory by reciting important dates in history over and over, thinks he would. Before justice can be done, half the staff of City Hall, a home ec teacher, an uninspired dentist, the principal of a disreputable private school, and several adulterous housewives are implicated in James Wilcox's spectacular plot. His third Tula Springs novel, Miss Undine's Living Room is not only a masterful comedy, exuberant and irreverent, but also a deeply felt examination of the education of the mind and the spirit.

    As Toni Morrison has said, "All of Forrest's novels explore the complex legacy of Afro-Americans. Like an insistent tide this history . . . swells and recalls America's past. . . . Brooding, hilarious, acerbic and profoundly valued life has no more astute observer than Leon Forrest." All of that is on display here in a novel that give readers a breathtaking view of the human experience, filled with humor and pathos.

    Set in a turn-of-the-century Hindu community in the Eastern Caribbean, the novel describes the perilous existence of a poor rice-growing family during the August rainy season. Their struggles to cope with illness, a drunken and unpredictable father, and the violence of the elements end in unbearable loss. Through vivid, vertiginous prose, and with brilliant economy and originality, Ladoo creates a fearful world of violation and grief, in the face of which even the most despairing efforts to endure stand out as acts of raw courage.