If you want sweet dreams, you've got to live a sweet life." So says Loyd Peregrina, a handsome Apache trainman and latter-day philosopher. But when Codi Noline returns to her hometown, Loyd's advice is painfully out of her reach. Dreamless and at the end of her rope, Codi comes back to Grace, Arizona to confront her past and face her ailing, distant father. What she finds is a town threatened by a silent environmental catastrophe, some startling clues to her own identity, and a man whose view of the world could change the course of her life. Blending flashbacks, dreams, and Native American legends, Animal Dreams is a suspenseful love story and a moving exploration of life's largest commitments. With this work, the acclaimed author of The Bean Trees and Homeland and Other Stories sustains her familiar voice while giving readers her most remarkable book yet.

    An adulterous couple stepping over the line where the initial excitement ends and the pain begins. A widow visiting a Scottish village in search of her husband's past - and instead discovering unsettling truths about a total stranger. The ten stories in this collection not only astonish and delight but also convey the unspoken mysteries at the heart of all human experience.

    When the haughty Dona Constanza decides to divert a river to fill her swimming pool, the consequences are at once tragic, heroic, and outrageously funny.

    G. Sebald's first novel, never before translated into English, is perhaps his most amazing and certainly his most alarming. Sebald—the acknowledged master of memory's uncanniness—takes the painful pleasures of unknowability to new intensities in Vertigo. Here in their first flowering are the signature elements of Sebald's hugely acclaimed novels The Emigrants and The Rings of Saturn. An unnamed narrator, beset by nervous ailments, is again our guide on a hair-raising journey through the past and across Europe, amid restless literary ghosts—Kafka, Stendhal, Casanova. In four dizzying sections, the narrator plunges the reader into vertigo, into that "swimming of the head," as Webster's defines it: in other words, into that state so unsettling, so fascinating, and so "stunning and strange," as The New York Times Book Review declared about The Emigrants, that it is "like a dream you want to last forever."

    Across the odd contours of the American landscape -- Jim Harrison's country -- its natives search for the incandescent beneath the ordinary in three novellas: Brown Dog, Sunset Limited, and The Woman Lit by Fireflies.

    Sera, a prostitute, and Ben, an alcoholic, stumble together and discover in each other a respite from their unforgiving lives. A testimony to the raw talent of its young author, Leaving Las Vegas is a compelling story of unconditional love between two disenfranchised and lost souls—an overlooked American classic.

    This first omnibus edition of three full-length novels, all set in the respectable Baltimore streets she has made so particularly her own, encompasses the range of eccentricities and compromises to which they are driven. Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant follows the disintegration and eventual reaffirmation of the Tull family - fierce, embittered Pearl, left by Beck to raise handsome, thrusting Cody, Jenny, the pediatrician losing herself in devotion to others, and docile Ezra, whose attempts to unite them all around a table at his eccentric Homesick Restaurant are the focus of their differences and their bond. In The Accidental Tourist, Macon - a man of habit and routine, who writes guide books for businessmen who hate to leave home - is confronted by chaos in his own family life. Between aching sadness and glorious absurdity, Macon hesitantly emerges from his sage cocoon into the vibrant, unpredictable world of the outrageous Muriel...And Breathing Lessons, which won the Pulitzer Prize, lays bare the anatomy of a marriage. On the round trip to a friend's funeral, Maggie and Ira Moran make detours literal and metaphorical - into the lives of grown children, old friends, total strangers and their own past - and, despite Ira's disappointments and Maggie's optimistic determination to rearrange life as she would like it to be, an old married couple fall in love all over again.

    . .Young, alone, and far from her family in Britain, Hope Clearwater contemplates the extraordinary events that left her washed up like driftwood on Brazzaville Beach. It is here, on the distant, lonely outskirts of Africa, where she must come to terms with the perplexing and troubling circumstances of her recent past. For Hope is a survivor of the devastating cruelities of apes and humans alike. And to move forward, she must first grasp some hard and elusive truths: about marriage and madness, about the greed and savagery of charlatan science . . . and about what compels seemingly benign creatures to kill for pleasure alone.

    Caroline, the novel's protagonist, returns to New York after the death of her father ostensibly to wrap things up and take care of necessary "business" where her memory and imagination conspire to lay before her all her griefs and joys in a rebellious progression. In different voices, employing a collage-like fragmentation, Maso gently unfolds The Art Lover in much the same way the fragile and prehistoric fiddlehead fern unfolds throughout the novel, bringing with subtle grace the ever-entangled feelings of grief and love into full and tender view. Various illustrations throughout.

    But when he fails to make the grade as a college footballer, and takes a job with the local farmers' co-operative, it seems he has finally settled into the rhythm and routine of everyday life. Outward appearances can be deceptive, however, as Jack proves: returning from a weekend conference with a new wife in tow, then leaving her behind and skipping town with a bundle of other folk's money.Nearly a decade later, no one has forgiven or forgotten, and when Jack reappears, resentment runs high. Once again though, it is Jack whose presence - even more than his eight-year absence - proves the most devastating.

    Now, in old age, living out in the country, Moran is still fighting - with his family, his friends, even himself - in a poignant struggle to come to terms with the past.

    For Jim Nashe, it all started when he came into a small inheritance and left Boston in pusuit of "a life of freedom." Careening back and forth across the United States, waiting for the money to run out, Nashe met Jack Pozzi, a young man with a temper and a plan. With Nashe's last funds, they entered a poker game against two rich eccentrics, "risking everything on the single turn of a card." In Paul Auster's world of fiendish bargains and punitive whims, where chance is a shifting and powerful force, there is redemption, nonetheless, in Nashe's resolute quest for justice and his capacity for love.

    Brimming with unforgettable characters and set in exotic locales, his fiction transports readers to a world that is at once fanciful, haunting, and real. Leaf Storm, Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez's first novella, introduces the mythical village of Macondo, a desolate town beset by torrents of rain, where a man must fulfill a promise made years earlier. No One Writes to the Colonel is a novella of life in a decaying tropical town in Colombia with an unforgettable central character. Chronicle of a Death Foretold is a dark and profound story of three people joined together in a fatal act of violence.Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez was born in Colombia in 1927. His many books include the novels One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982.

    It is the tale of a pair of young scholars researching the lives of two Victorian poets. As they uncover their letters, journals, and poems, and track their movements from London to Yorkshire—from spiritualist séances to the fairy-haunted far west of Brittany—what emerges is an extraordinary counterpoint of passions and ideas.Man Booker Prize Winner (1990)

    The newcomers are a proud and bloody-minded people whose kings once changed themselves into wolves. The Norse have advanced as implacably as a glacier from Iceland to the wastes of Greenland and from there to the place they call Vinland the Good. The natives are a bronze-skinned race who have not yet discovered iron and still see themselves as part of nature. As William T. Vollmann tells the converging stories of these two peoples and of the Norsewomen Freydis and Gudrid, whose venomous rivalry brings frost into paradise he creates a tour-de-force of speculative history, a vivid amalgam of Icelandic saga, Inuit creation myth, and contemporary travel writing that yields a new an utterly original vision of our continent and its past.--back cover

    Stories of love and of squalor, they include masterpieces such as 'The Swimmer' and 'Goodbye, My Brother' and date from the time of his honourable discharge from the Army at the end of the Second World War.

    At the heart of the story are two people, Iris Courtney, who is white, and handsome Jinx Fairchild, the black basketball player who, in protecting Iris, kills a white man.Iris is the only witness to the crime.The two of them are growing up in the early 1950s in a New York industrial town where racial boundaries keep people apart - or bring them together in explosive scenes of fear or desire. The secret link between Iris and Jinx is not only their attraction to each other, but a murder...and a bond of passion and guilt is formed between them. How this one irrevocable, tragic act shapes their lives and alters their destinies becomes Joyce Carol Oate's finest, emotion-packed novel - a work the critics are calling a masterpiece, the best work of America's best writer of contemporary realism.

    

    By the end of this hilarious tale, they each have risen to the heights of wealth and fame, before arriving at disasters - both personal and ecological - that destroy the rain forest and all the birds of Brazil.

    This is his sixth novel, and it is great.” —Detroit Free Press Master storyteller Jon Hassler draws us into the vividly rendered, emotionally charged world of Father Frank Healy, a priest hoping to reawaken a vocation that he fears is leaking away. Working at a mission on an Ojibway reservation in Northern Minnesota, Frank unexpectedly encounters his old high school girlfriend, Libby, and is swept up in a gripping drama of temptation, crime, and love that shows him how wounded hearts are healed. This absorbing novel, among Hassler’s finest, is a beautifully told tale of blighted spirits restored by the power of hope.

    A classics professor, Mrs. Curren has been opposed to the lies and brutality of apartheid all her life, but has lived insulated from its true horrors. Now she is suddenly forced to come to terms with the iron-hearted rage that the system has wrought. In an extended letter addressed to her daughter, who has long since fled to America, Mrs. Curren recounts the strange events of her dying days. She witnesses the burning of a nearby black township and discovers the bullet-riddled body of her servant's son. A teenage black activist hiding in her house is killed by security forces. And through it all, her only companion, the only person to whom she can confess her mounting anger and despair, is a homeless man, an alcoholic, who one day appears on her doorstep. Brilliantly crafted and resonant with metaphor, Age of Iron is "a superbly realized novel whose truths cut to the bone." (The New York Times Book Review)

    It is a story of the fight to endure in a world of limitless and waterless wastes, and a parable of the struggle to survive in the most dangerous landscape of all: human society.Rejected by his tribe and hunted by the kin of the man he killed, Ukhayyad and his thoroughbred camel flee across the desolate Tuareg deserts of the Libyan Sahara. Between bloody wars against the Italians in the north and famine raging in the south, Ukhayyad rides for the remote rock caves of Jebel Hasawna. There, he says farewell to the mount who has been his companion through thirst, disease, lust, and loneliness. Alone in the desert, haunted by the prophetic cave paintings of ancient hunting scenes and the cries of jinn in the night, Ukhayyad awaits the arrival of his pursuers and their insatiable hunger for blood and gold.

    . . it has humor, the uneasy, unpredictable humor of a Richard Pryor monologue. With Homesick, Berlin can be judged alonside Raymond Carver, Alice Adams, and Bobbie Anne Mason. She is a remarkable writer, especially on life in the new American West." -Keith AbbottFor this, her first major collection, Lucia Berlin gathered the best of her work from 1960 to 1990, including stories from The Atlantic and Saul Bellow's little magazine The Noble Savage and the immortal "My Jockey," winner of the Jack London Short Prize, 1985."There is nothing tentative about the range of statement in these stories. They are about what can be lost and what can be endured. Berlin's characters are often neglected or abused girls, or women with children who struggle to make ends meet while their husbands, absent or present, provide no help. The strength and endurance of these characters, combined with their daily observations about the pain and drama of life, give them the ability to affirm their existence." -Pat Smith

    There she befriends the locals, acquires an extensive vocabulary of French foul language and encounters the privileged lifestyle of the elegant, middle-class British families holidaying in 1920s France. Introduced for the first time to kindly, civilised and, above all, caring people Flora falls helplessly and hopelessly in love with not one but three young men.Over the next forty years Flora will grow from an awkward schoolgirl into a stunning beauty and explore, consummate and finally resolve each of these affairs.

    Capturing the moment when her unique talent blossomed in a new direction, this new edition of her life-affirming, universal stories will allow her to be read by a another generation of readers. Wallace’s poetry and short stories have been anthologized, and have appeared in periodicals across the country. She won a National Magazine Award, the Pat Lowther Award, the Du Maurier Award for Poetry, and in 1989 she was named Regional Winner of the Commonwealth Poetry Prize in the U.K.

    By the author of "The Snow Leopard", "The Tree Where Man Was Born" and "On the River Styx", this novel is based around the circumstances of the death of a man in Florida 1910, who had terrorized his community and who very possibly had a criminal past.

    What's more, the face appeared to have been shaved after death. The police assumed that the victim was a prominent financier, but Lord Peter Wimsey, who dabbled in mystery detection as a hobby, knew better. In this, his first murder case, Lord Peter untangles the ghastly mystery of the corpse in the bath. "Murder Must Advertise"--When advertising executive Victor Dean dies from a fall down the stairs at Pym's Publicity, Lord Peter Wimsey is asked to investigate. It seems that, before he died, Dean had begun a letter to Mr. Pym suggesting some very unethical dealings at the posh London ad agency. Wimsey goes undercover and discovers that Dean was part of the fast crowd at Pym's, a group taken to partying and doing drugs. Wimsey and his brother-in-law, Chief-Inspector Parker, rush to discover who is running London's cocaine trade and how Pym's fits into the picture--all before Wimsey's cover is blown. "Gaudy Night"--When Harriet Vane attends her Oxford reunion, known as the "Gaudy," the prim academic setting is haunted by a rash of bizarre pranks: scrawled obsentities, burnt effigies and poison-pen letters -- including one that says, "Ask your boyfriend with the title if he likes arsenic in his soup."Some of the notes threaten murder; all are perfectly ghastly; yet in spite of their scurrilous nature, all are perfectly worded. And Harriet finds herself ensnared in a nightmare of romance and terror, with only the tiniest shreds of clues to challenge her powers of detection, and those of her paramour, Lord Peter Wimsey.

    Long a celebrated West Coast cult figure, Kate Braverman now gives voice to Squandering the Blues, a distinctive and uncompromising collection of characters living out urban fairy tales and nightmares in the highly atmospheric landscape of Los Angeles.

    The same has been narrated in the book.

    It is the answer he gave his wife (now ex-wife) years earlier when she told him she wanted one. The loss, longing and regret that haunt the years between those two “no”s give rise to one of the most eloquent meditations ever written on the Holocaust. As Kertesz’s narrator addresses the child he couldn’t bear to bring into the world he ushers readers into the labyrinth of his consciousness, dramatizing the paradoxes attendant on surviving the catastrophe of Auschwitz. Kaddish for the Unborn Child is a work of staggering power, lit by flashes of perverse wit and fueled by the energy of its wholly original voice. Translated by Tim Wilkinson

    

    "An absorbing, heart-rending story told with sensitivity and wisdom.this book deserves a wide readership not only for its artistry but also for its subject matter" -Beaumont Enterprise.

    

    He doesn't count on Harlen Bigbear and his unique brand of community planning. Harlen tries to sell Will on the idea of returning to Medicine River to open shop as the town's only Native photographer. Somehow, that's exactly what happens. Through Will's gentle and humorous narrative, we come to know Medicine River, a small Albertan town bordering a Blackfoot reserve. And we meet its people: the basketball team; Louise Heavyman and her daughter, South Wing; Martha Oldcrow, the marriage doctor; Joe Bigbear, Harlen's world-travelling, storytelling brother; Bertha Morley, who has a short fling with a Calgary dating service; and David Plume, who went to Wounded Knee. At the centre of it all is Harlen, advising and pestering, annoying and entertaining, gossiping and benevolently interfering in the lives of his friends and neighbours.

    Richard Bausch gets deep inside of people's lives. He speaks eloquently for and to all of us about the intricacies of relationships—their fragility and their inherent possibility for explosion. His work has been published in The New Yorker, Esquire, and the Atlantic Monthly; two of the stories in this collection were chosen for Best American Short Stories.

    In its train, it brings gold and slaves but also marvelous, dangerous things-ancient pagan heresies and a scorching, unceasing southern wind. And more. For the first time in desert memory, a caravan has come to settle permanently, to build a city of walls and roofs in a land where men have always lived freely as nomads. Renowned as Ibrahim al-Koni's masterpiece, The Animists is an epic story of the many winds sweeping north and south across the Sahara-of the struggles between devils and humankind, worldly traders and Sufi ascetics, monotheists and animists, nomads and city dwellers, life and death. Al-Koni's depiction of the Saharan crossroads is at its richest in this novel-nowhere else is his portrayal of humanity's spiritual and existential battles so complex and compelling, nowhere else are his unique storytelling skills so evidently displayed.

    Susan, working for a distinctly dubious bookseller is in love with the elusive Neale, but still obsessed with the memory of Cynthia, a rangy beauty from her schooldays. Their fumbling detective work reveals that Cynthia is due in Venice for a film festival and, in a richly comic odyssey, they journey there as couriers. Cynthia is found and they also meet the famous singer, Helena Buchan. The ensuing shifts of love and loyalty recall the Mozart operas for which Helena is renowned, and whose music hauntingly threads the latter part of the novel. Here is love, poverty, friendship, betrayal and enlightenment. Even a breath of tragedy serves only to underline the laconic wit and optimism of this vivid and intelligent novel.

    Both set out to conquer the dazzling world of high fashion --- Edwina as its most successful businesswoman and Billie as its hottest model. But these glittering facades hide darker realities. Edwina, is the target of a powerful designer's bitter rivalry and betrayal, Billie is hunted by an obsessed lover from her past, and both are terrified by the specter of a serial killer stalking Manhattan beauties. When two friends escape to a fabulous Southhampton estate, they face a showdown that sizzles with suspense and blood-racing intrigue --- in a deliciously glamorous novel of love and power ... and sins only the rich can afford.

    Sixty years later, this novel follows the adventures of an immigrant boy and deals with Prohibition, anti-Semitism, racism, sexuality, and the alienation that followed the Great War.

    This book is an anthology of British women's short stories and authors represented include Rebecca West, Jean Rhys, Elizabeth Bowen, Olivia Manning, Elizabeth Taylor, Doris Lessing and Rose Tremain.

    He has chosen 49 stories by a wide array of writers including Alistair MacLeod, Margaret Laurence, Carol Shields, Dionne Brand, Mavis Gallant, Stephen Leacock, Glenn Gould, Alice Munro, Rohinton Mistry, David Adams Richards and many more. Full of diversity and surprise, these writings reveal the geographical, emotional and literary range of the country. Above all, Michael Ondaatje's personal selection offers good reading and great entertainment.

    This collection was widely hailed as a work of genius, in which the voices of ordinary Americans, black and white, male and female, were given their own rhythms and forms of expression. Yonnondio, Olsen's only novel, was begun during the depression and completed in 1974. It tells the story of the Hollbrooks, an itinerant working-class family in middle-America during the thirties. Brutalised by poverty, they struggle to find a space to breathe, to dream and to create a bettter life for their children. Told in compelling, haunting prose, it is a profound and timeless story of the human will to survive.

    Murnane also received the Patrick White Literary Award.

    The narrator is Tim Curtiz, an expatriate American journalist ("a poor man's Gore Vidal") who writes a bi-weekly letter from London for a New York magazine. Prowling about in his shiny new Mercedes, on the look-out for local color and illuminating ironies, Tim encounters a strange - and strangely connected - cavalcade of eccentrics: an over-the-hill East End actor with a bit part in a commercial and an eye on the big chance; a young advertising woman bedeviled by boyfriend troubles and a leaky condo; a decrepit pensioner who once fended off (and killed!) an attacking lion with a pen knife; a cashiered currency trader who falls headfirst into a money-laundering scam; and an aging lion slated to be "euthanized." As we follow the intersecting arcs of these disparate lives, we discover a city that has been brokered, blighted, and betrayed - but which also somehow remains the London town of yore: a city where people still find true love, where cockeyed Cockney dreams come true, and where - at least sometimes - malefactors are fed to the lions. On the British publication of Look at It This Way, the London Sunday Times wrote of this diverting and perceptive novel that it "does for London what Bonfire of the Vanities did for New York." Readers will find the comparison an apt one.

    An evocative portrait of a young girl struggling with the complexities of adolescence and maturity and the unresolved conflicts of her childhood focuses on fifteen-year-old Lisa, the introspective child of divorced parents

    Aware that the officially recorded version he learned in school omits and distorts, he turns to a quimboiseur named Papa Longoué. This old man of the forest, a healer, seer, and storyteller, knows the oral tradition and its relation to the powers of the land and the forces of nature. He tells of the love-hate relationship between the Longoué and Béluse families, whose ancestors were brought as slaves to Martinique. Upon arrival, Longoué immediately escaped and went to live in the hills as a maroon. Béluse remained in slavery. The intense relationship that had formed between the two men in Africa continued and came to encompass the relations between their masters, or, in the case of Longoué, his would-be master, and their descendants. The Fourth Century closes the gap between the families as Papa Longoué, last of his line, conveys the history to Mathieu Béluse, who becomes his heir.

    But Matsoukas's dreams are fixed on an ailing son, for whose cure everything must be sacrificed. A journey to the sacred land of Greece will restore the health of the child and, perhaps too, the dignity of the father.

    The stories in Squabble are as good as fiction gets, so don't waste time reading the outside of the book, open it and try out 'The Story of Art History,' in which people dance on lingerie, or 'Scuff,' or'Yard Lights, Water, and Wink.' These are stories chock-full of nuts, in the absolutely best sense." --Frederick Barthelme

    Mowry captures with moving accuracy and rare insight the bravado, humor, and compassion born in young men struggling for dignity and love. Optioned for a feature film by John Singleton, director of Boyz 'n the Hood.