. . . It was no ordinary murder. Though the torture and abuse that killed him were real, Andy Gage's death wasn't. Only his soul actually died, and when it died, it broke in pieces. Then the pieces became souls in their own right, coinheritors of Andy Gage's life. . . .While Andy deals with the outside world, more than a hundred other souls share an imaginary house inside Andy's head, struggling to maintain an orderly coexistence: Aaron, the father figure; Adam, the mischievous teenager; Jake, the frightened little boy; Aunt Sam, the artist; Seferis, the defender; and Gideon, who wants to get rid of Andy and the others and run things on his own.Andy's new coworker, Penny Driver, is also a multiple personality, a fact that Penny is only partially aware of. When several of Penny's other souls ask Andy for help, Andy reluctantly agrees, setting in motion a chain of events that threatens to destroy the stability of the house. Now Andy and Penny must work together to uncover a terrible secret that Andy has been keeping . . . from himself.

    They live in a beautiful house, with a caring family, and attend an exclusive missionary school. They're completely shielded from the troubles of the world. Yet, as Kambili reveals in her tender-voiced account, things are less perfect than they appear. Although her Papa is generous and well respected, he is fanatically religious and tyrannical at home—a home that is silent and suffocating. As the country begins to fall apart under a military coup, Kambili and Jaja are sent to their aunt, a university professor outside the city, where they discover a life beyond the confines of their father’s authority. Books cram the shelves, curry and nutmeg permeate the air, and their cousins’ laughter rings throughout the house. When they return home, tensions within the family escalate, and Kambili must find the strength to keep her loved ones together.Purple Hibiscus is an exquisite novel about the emotional turmoil of adolescence, the powerful bonds of family, and the bright promise of freedom.

    With a suitcase full of sausages and a master butcher's precious knife set, Fidelis sets out for America. In Argus, North Dakota, he builds a business, a home for his family—which includes Eva and four sons—and a singing club consisting of the best voices in town. When the Old World meets the New—in the person of Delphine Watzka—the great adventure of Fidelis's life begins. Delphine meets Eva and is enchanted. She meets Fidelis, and the ground trembles. These momentous encounters will determine the course of Delphine's life, and the trajectory of this brilliant novel.

    She is an astute young Housekeeper, with a ten-year-old son, who is hired to care for him. And every morning, as the Professor and the Housekeeper are introduced to each other anew, a strange and beautiful relationship blossoms between them. Though he cannot hold memories for long (his brain is like a tape that begins to erase itself every eighty minutes), the Professor’s mind is still alive with elegant equations from the past. And the numbers, in all of their articulate order, reveal a sheltering and poetic world to both the Housekeeper and her young son. The Professor is capable of discovering connections between the simplest of quantities--like the Housekeeper’s shoe size--and the universe at large, drawing their lives ever closer and more profoundly together, even as his memory slips away. The Housekeeper and the Professor is an enchanting story about what it means to live in the present, and about the curious equations that can create a family.

    Her stories are one of the very few debut works -- and only a handful of collections -- to have won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Among the many other awards and honors it received were the New Yorker Debut of the Year award, the PEN/Hemingway Award, and the highest critical praise for its grace, acuity, and compassion in detailing lives transported from India to America.In The Namesake, Lahiri enriches the themes that made her collection an international bestseller: the immigrant experience, the clash of cultures, the conflicts of assimilation, and, most poignantly, the tangled ties between generations. Here again Lahiri displays her deft touch for the perfect detail — the fleeting moment, the turn of phrase — that opens whole worlds of emotion.The Namesake takes the Ganguli family from their tradition-bound life in Calcutta through their fraught transformation into Americans. On the heels of their arranged wedding, Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli settle together in Cambridge, Massachusetts. An engineer by training, Ashoke adapts far less warily than his wife, who resists all things American and pines for her family. When their son is born, the task of naming him betrays the vexed results of bringing old ways to the new world. Named for a Russian writer by his Indian parents in memory of a catastrophe years before, Gogol Ganguli knows only that he suffers the burden of his heritage as well as his odd, antic name. Lahiri brings great empathy to Gogol as he stumbles along the first-generation path, strewn with conflicting loyalties, comic detours, and wrenching love affairs. With penetrating insight, she reveals not only the defining power of the names and expectations bestowed upon us by our parents, but also the means by which we slowly, sometimes painfully, come to define ourselves.

    In the years between the two world wars, the future held more promise than peril, but there was evidence of things unseen that would transfigure our unquestioned trust in a safe future. Fos has returned to Tennessee from the trenches of France. Intrigued with electricity, bioluminescence, and especially x-rays, he believes in science and the future of technology. On a trip to the Outer Banks to study the Perseid meteor shower, he falls in love with Opal, whose father is a glassblower who can spin color out of light.Fos brings his new wife back to Knoxville where he runs a photography studio with his former Army buddy Flash. A witty rogue and a staunch disbeliever in Prohibition, Flash brings tragedy to the couple when his appetite for pleasure runs up against both the law and the Ku Klux Klan. Fos and Opal are forced to move to Opal's mother's farm on the Clinch River, and soon they have a son, Lightfoot. But when the New Deal claims their farm for the TVA, Fos seeks work at the Oak Ridge Laboratory -- Site X in the government's race to build the bomb. And it is there, when Opal falls ill with radiation poisoning, that Fos's great faith in science deserts him. Their lives have traveled with touching inevitability from their innocence and fascination with "things that glow" to the new world of manmade suns. Hypnotic and powerful, Evidence of Things Unseen constructs a heartbreaking arc through twentieth-century American life and belief.

    In Munro’s hands, the people she writes about–women of all ages and circumstances, and their friends, lovers, parents, and children–become as vivid as our own neighbors. It is her miraculous gift to make these stories as real and unforgettable as our own. (back cover)RunawayChanceSoonSilencePassionTrespassesTricksPowers

    1928, Latin-American novelist from Columbia.

    A 2004 PEN/Malamud Award winner, this collection celebrates the work of American artist Richard Bausch -- a writer the New York Times calls "a master of the short story." By turns tender, raw, heartbreaking, and riotously funny, the many voices of this definitive forty-two-story collection (seven of which appear here for the first time) defy expectation, attest to Bausch's remarkable range and versatility, and affirm his place alongside such acclaimed story writers as John Cheever, Flannery O'Connor, Raymond Carver, and Grace Paley.

    They have grown up together and become top climbers, but have since become estranged. Rob is nevertheless grief-stricken when he hears of Jamie's death after a fall on a relatively easy Welsh rockface. The past, though, hides the secret clues behind the tragedy.

    Spanning four decades and many worlds, from the horrors of the Second World War to the wild abandon of New York in the eighties, Dancer is peopled by a large cast of characters, obscure and famous: doormen and shoemakers, nurses and translators, Margot Fonteyn, Eric Bruhn and John Lennon. And at the heart of the spectacle stands the artist himself, willful, lustful, and driven by a never-to-be-met need for perfection.

    The story of a murderous battle for control, and a wise, compassionate investigation into the bonds of love and family and of what sustains people through loss.

    A homeless man recognizing in a pawn shop window the fancy-dance regalia that was stolen fifty years earlier from his late grandmother.

    For each volume, a series editor reads pieces from hundreds of periodicals, then selects between fifty and a hundred outstanding works. That selection is pared down to twenty or so very best pieces by a guest editor who is widely recognized as a leading writer in his or her field. This unique system has helped make the Best American series the most respected -- and most popular -- of its kind. Lending a fresh perspective to a perennial favorite, Walter Mosley has chosen unforgettable short stories by both renowned writers and exciting newcomers. The Best American Short Stories 2003 features poignant tales that explore the nuances of family life and love, birth and death. Here are stories that will, as Mosley writes in his introduction, "live with the reader long after the words have been translated into ideas and dreams. That's because a good short story crosses the borders of our nations and our prejudices and our beliefs."Dorothy Allison Edwidge Danticat E. L. Doctorow Louise Erdrich Adam Haslett ZZ Packer Mona Simpson Mary Yukari Waters

    They live in Brooklyn and are friends and neighbours; but since Dylan is white and Mingus is black, their friendship is not simple.This is the story of 1970s America, a time when the simplest decisions - what music you listen to, whether to speak to the kid in the seat next to you, whether to give up your lunch money - are laden with potential political, social and racial disaster. This is also the story of 1990s America, when nobody cared anymore.This is the story of what would happen if two teenaged boys obsessed with comic book heroes actually had superpowers: they would screw up their lives.

    The irreducible complexity of the very idea of home is especially at issue in the stories Gallant has written about Montreal, where she was born, although she had lived in Paris for more than half a century.Varieties of Exile, Russell Banks's extensive new selection from Gallant's work, demonstrates anew the remarkable reach of this writer's singular art. Among its contents are three previously uncollected stories, as well as the celebrated semi-autobiographical sequence about Linnet Muir—stories that are wise, funny, and full of insight into the perils and promise of growing up and breaking loose.

    Now, with War Against the Animals, he returns with his richest, most accomplished, and most compelling work yet.Living in small town in upstate New York, middle-aged Cameron Barnes has, after almost dying, recently recovered a measure of health and is trying to find a way to reenter the world outside. As part of this, Cameron hires two local brothers in their early twenties, Jesse and Kyle, to renovate a barn on his property. Kyle sees an opportunity in Cameron, pushing his brother Jesse to befriend him and take advantage of Cameron's boredom and directionlessness. Caught between the opposing worlds embodied by Cameron and Kyle, Jesse is torn by the demands of his brother, the expectations of his family and community, and his own mix of volatile, contradictory emotions.

    His mind is full of soul music and girls and the lyric novel he is writing. But his roommate is brutally attacked by soldiers; his first love is forced to marry a wealthy old man; and his neighbors on Poverty Street are planning a demonstration that is bound to incite riot and arrests. Lomba can no longer bury his head in the sand.Helon Habila's vivid, exciting, and heart-wrenching debut opens a window onto a world in some ways familiar-with its sensuously depicted streets, student life, and vibrant local characters-yet ruled by one of the world's most corrupt and oppressive regimes, a scandal that ultimately drives Lomba to take a risk in the name of something greater than himself. Habila captures the energy, sensitivity, despair, and stubborn hope of a new African generation with a combination of gritty realism and poetic beauty. Winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing 2001. Reading group guide included.

    Jones.The Known World tells the story of Henry Townsend, a black farmer and former slave who falls under the tutelage of William Robbins, the most powerful man in Manchester County, Virginia. Making certain he never circumvents the law, Townsend runs his affairs with unusual discipline. But when death takes him unexpectedly, his widow, Caldonia, can't uphold the estate's order, and chaos ensues. Jones has woven a footnote of history into an epic that takes an unflinching look at slavery in all its moral complexities.

    Three Novels by Paulo Coelho published by arrangement with HarperCollins Publishers

    Standard procedure. You pick it up the first time a white friend leads you across a room just to stand you up by another Indian, arrange you like furniture, like you should have something to say to each other. As one character after another tells it in these stories, much that happens to them does so because "I'm an Indian." And, as Stephen Graham Jones tells it in one remarkable story after another, the life of an Indian in modern America is as rich in irony as it is in tradition. A noted Blackfeet writer, Jones offers a nuanced and often biting look at the lives of Native peoples from the inside. A young Indian mans journey to discover America results in an unsettling understanding of relations between whites and Natives in the twenty-first century, a relationship still fueled by mistrust, stereotypes, and almost casual violence. A character waterproofs his boots with transmission fluid; another steals into Glacier National Park to hunt. One man uses watermelon to draw flies off poached deer; another, in a modern twist on the captivity narrative, kidnaps a white girl in a pickup truck; and a son bleeds into the father carrying him home. Rife with arresting and poignant images, fleeting and daring in presentation, weighty and provocative in their messages, these stories demonstrate the power of one of the most compelling writers in Native North America today.

    From the Deep South to the simmering streets of Harlem, his characters embark on surreal and mythic quests armed only with wit, words, and wisdom. Championed by Toni Morrison, Walter Mosley, and Quincy Troupe, -Dumas’s books have long been out of print. All of his short fiction is collected here, for the first time, and includes several previously unpublished stories. Henry Dumas was born in Sweet Home, Arkansas, moved to Harlem, joined the Air Force, attended Rutgers, worked for IBM, and taught at Hiram College in Ohio and Southern Illinois University. In 1968, at the age of thirty-three, he was shot and killed by a New York Transit Authority -policeman.

    The unexpected twists of their lives—rendered with expert humor and pathos in Knight’s dark-light style—test the limits of the personalities they have known as their own.In “Birdland,” published in The New Yorker, a beautiful Northerner visits a small Alabama town to research the bizarre migration habits of a flock of African parrots from Rhode Island. “Feeling Lucky” finds a desperate man kidnapping his own daughter. In the most daring and haunting of these stories, “Killing Stonewall Jackson,” which was published in Story, a hardened band of Confederate soldiers resorts to surprising measures to survive on the battlefield. “The End of Everything,” published in GQ, weaves together a tender love story and an edge-of-your-seat urban legend, while “The Mesmerist,” published in Esquire, is an eerie fairy tale about a man who hypnotizes a stranger and makes her his wife. In “Keeper of Secrets, Teller of Lies,” published in Virginia Quarterly Review, a man causes more havoc the harder he tries to help a young mother and her son. In “Mitchell’s Girls,” a stay-at-home dad battles the disrespect of youth and a paralyzing bad back. “Ellen’s Book” hilariously describes the yearning a man feels for his estranged wife. In “Blackout,” a suburban neighborhood’s pent-up jealousies and fears explode under the cover of darkness.Knight’s sensibility is potent and unique, stirring tenderness in equal parts with violence. While the settings, chronologies, and characters vary widely throughout the collection, they remain bound by Knight’s simple, elegant prose, his graceful sense of humor, and an unfailing empathy with the self-destructed.

    Four novels: The Virgin in the Garden; Still Life; Babel Tower; A Whistling Woman.

    There were also various private press adventures in poetry with his stepson Lloyd Osbourne, and the posthumous Songs of Travel (1895), and New Poems (1918). This new edition contains these collections and also some of Stevenson's printed and manuscript poems that have never been published in any collection. The edition also identifies and restores various poems assembled by Stevenson in his Notebooks, many of which were mutilated by members of The Boston Bibliophile Society.The editor, Roger Lewis, has carefully studied Stevenson's manuscripts and letters, identifying many variants in individual poems and in orders of his collections, as well as in the editorial procedures of a succession of RLS's literary associates who claimed to be fulfilling his intentions or acting on his authority.The ordering of this edition will follow Stevenson's own final arrangement over unauthorised editorial rearrangments or strict considerations of chronology. Complete and accurate dates of composition and publication of individual poems and of collections are given wherever possible.Appendices include bibliographical description and location for manuscript and printed sources of all poems in the edition; 'poems in process' – how Stevenson sketched and revised during composition; notebooks – bibliographical history and significance; chronology and ordonnance of poetic units. There are also explanatory and textual notes. Scots poems are glossed and annotated using The Concise Scots Dictionary and web resources of the SNDA.

    It is September 18, 1982, and for the next nine days Orr will live under the spell of this blank book, trapped inside a world of eerie premonitions and bewildering events that threaten to destroy his marriage and undermine his faith in reality.Paul Auster's mesmerizing eleventh novel reads like an old-fashioned ghost story. But there are no ghosts in this book - only flesh-and-blood human beings, wandering through the haunted realms of everyday life. Oracle Night is a narrative tour de force that confirms Auster's reputation as one of the boldest, most original writers at work in America today.

    Usually depicted as the lush and green world of rural quiet and tranquility, the Valley becomes the backdrop for the difficulties these characters confront as they try to maintain hope and independence in the face of isolation. In the title story, a teenage boy learns the consequences of succumbing to the lure of a town outsider; in "Campo," a young farm worker frantically attempts to hide his supervision of a huddle of children from the town police, only to have another young man come to his unexpected rescue; in "The Unimportant Lila Parr," a father must expose his own secrets after his son is found murdered in a highway motel. From conflicts of family and sexuality to the pain of loss and memory, the characters in Zigzagger seek to reconcile themselves with the rural towns of their upbringing—a place that, by nature, is bordered by loneliness.

    In Scoop, it is journalism’s turn to be drawn and quartered. The Loved One (which became a famously hilarious film) sends up the California mortuary business. And The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold is a burst of fictionalized autobiography in which Pinfold goes mad, more or less, on board an ocean liner.Here in four short–very different–novels are the mordant wit, inspired farce, snapping dialogue, and amazing characters that are the essence of everything Waugh ever wrote.

    But Jesus knew how to say it-in a parable. With the drawings of Robert Doares depicting the setting, The Prodigal's Sister poetically and imaginatively retells the parable of the prodigal son with a startling twist.In the poem the younger sister of the prodigal sets out to reclaim her brother's life. The new life the prodigal finds in his father's love is mirrored in the mercy the legalistic elder brother finds when he learns that his slave-like labor is useless in winning his father's love. The Prodigal's Sister, which the author reads on the accompanying CD, rejoices over the incomparable grace of God. For anyone who has ever felt beyond the hope of joy, this poem opens a way home to the Father.

    Twenty-five years later, the prodigal daughter returns to confront her dying parents, her best friend, and her conflicted past, and finds herself caught up in an altogether new drama. The post-millennial farming community has been invaded by Agribusiness forces at war with a posse of activists, the Seeds of Resistance, who travel the country in a camping car, “The Spudnick,” biofueled by pilfered McDonald’s french-fry oil. Following her widely hailed, award-winning debut novel, My Year of Meats, Ruth Ozeki returns here to deliver a quirky cast of characters and a wickedly humorous appreciation of the foibles of corporate life, globalization, political resistance, youth culture, and aging baby boomers. All Over Creation tells a celebratory tale of the beauty of seeds, roots, and growth—and the capacity for renewal that resides within us all.

    "Fallmerayer the Stationmaster" and "The Bust of the Emperor" are Roth's most acclaimed works of shorter fiction.

    The reading guide includes a number of recipes to share with friends and family!An Arab-American novel as delicious as Like Water for Chocolate.Praised by critics from The New Yorker to USA Today for her first novel, Arabian Jazz ("an oracular tale that unfurls like gossamer"), Diana Abu-Jaber weaves with spellbinding magic a multidimensional love story set in the Arab-American community of Los Angeles. Thirty-nine-year-old Sirine, never married, lives with a devoted Iraqi-immigrant uncle and an adoring dog named King Babar. She works as a chef in a Lebanese restaurant, her passions aroused only by the preparation of food—until an unbearably handsome Arabic literature professor starts dropping by for a little home cooking. Falling in love brings Sirene's whole heart to a boil—stirring up memories of her parents and questions about her identity as an Arab American. Written in a lush, lyrical style reminiscent of The God of Small Things, infused with the flavors and scents of Middle Eastern food, and spiced with history and fable, Crescent is a sensuous love story and a gripping tale of risk and commitment.

    S. Byatt knows that fairy tales are for grownups. And in this ravishing collection she breathes new life into the form.Little Black Book of Stories offers shivers along with magical thrills. Leaves rustle underfoot in a dark wood: two middle-aged women, childhood friends reunited by chance, venture into a dark forest where once, many years before, they saw–or thought they saw–something unspeakable. Another woman, recently bereaved, finds herself slowly but surely turning into stone. A coolly rational ob-gyn has his world pushed off-axis by a waiflike art student with her own ideas about the uses of the body. Spellbinding, witty, lovely, terrifying, the Little Black Book of Stories is Byatt at the height of her craft.

    

    That was what he said, standing at the door to the cabin where I was spending the summer with my father. I was fifteen. It was 1948 and one of the first days of July.Trond’s friend Jon often appeared at his doorstep with an adventure in mind for the two of them. But this morning would turn out to be different. What began as a joy ride on “borrowed” horses ends with Jon falling into a strange trance of grief. Trond soon learns what befell Jon earlier that day—an incident that marks the beginning of a series of vital losses for both boys. Set in the easternmost region of Norway, Out Stealing Horses begins with an ending. Sixty-seven-year-old Trond has settled into a rustic cabin in an isolated area to live the rest of his life with a quiet deliberation. A meeting with his only neighbor, however, forces him to reflect on that fateful summer.

    Everything was rolling along smoothly for Robert Elgin. He and his wife, Laura, had a loving marriage, and had taken enough "me" time before having kids – one girl, one boy. After doing the hippie, idealistic thing for awhile, he finally allowed his father in law to get him a job in labour negotiations where he could still fuel his power to the people energies by fighting on the common man's behalf.When Robert becomes too good at his job and is recruited by the County Executive's office to conspire in some dirty negotiations that would allow for a run at Governor, the perfect life begins to crumble. And to make matters much, much worse, Robert learns his five year–old daughter has been molested by the local 12 year–old neighbour, and the crumbling becomes a full–scale slide.While his wife becomes obsessed with grief counsellors, rape specialists, being saved by Jesus, and putting the twelve year old behind bars, Robert finds himself losing touch with his family and losing his grip on reality. When he learns of a secret, dirty fund the labour office has been skimming off the public, he takes the money and runs. And so begins Robert's life as a dead man.Told from the end to the beginning, this Memento–style literary noir about one man's undoing is a fresh new style of fiction. Safe in Heaven Dead is a stunning book by a new voice in contemporary literature.

    Carol Shields' first novels, "Small Ceremonies" and "The Box Garden," each told from the viewpoint of a sister, published as one.

    The tales of Arthur Schnitzler--especially as rendered in Margret Schaefer's clear, uncluttered translations--are many suggestive, allusive, and dreamlike things. But they are most certainly not the work of a period writer. --Chris Lehmann, Washington Post Book World

    It is set in the harsh dead of winter, just as the soldiers set up camp in a forest in Galicia near the Romanian front line. Due to a lull in fighting, their days are taken up with the mundane tasks of trying to scratch together what food and comforts they can find, all the time while talking, smoking, and waiting. Waiting specifically for spring to come. Waiting for their battalion to move on. Waiting for the inevitable resumption of violence.Recalling great works like Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry, Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, and Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, Four Soldiers is a timeless and tender story of young male friendships and the small, idyllic moments of happiness that can illuminate the darkness of war.

    military troops. Distraught at being returned, Abigail views her redemption as yet another captivity with freedom still agonizingly out of reach. Ultimately, she remains a captive on many levels?in the shackles of otherness, language, physical confinement, womanhood, and motherhood. Blue Horse Dreaming is also the story of Major Robert Cutter, the man into whose hands Abigail is delivered. Through his tormented eyes, we see a vividly compelling portrayal of life on a far-flung military outpost in the aftermath of the Civil War where troops and civilians suffered from crushing poverty, famine, and illness, just beyond the traces of an emigrant trail whose way is marked by gravesites. This is a novel of hauntings and of the haunted, in which the ghosts of the past, both beloved and despised, raise their heads to compete for the souls of the living left behind. ?Melanie Wallace has given a remarkable and utterly original turn...The originality of Wallace's novel lies not in her plot but in the powerful and often beautiful language with which she conveys Abigail's sensibility and the major's sorrow. She renders their unreal, nightmarish surroundings, for example, with a kind of tranced Faulknerian precision?Time and again, Wallace finds the one right word to lift an otherwise ordinary sentence into art?? ?The New York Times Book Review

    Twenty astounding stories by Karen Joy Fowler, Glen Hirshberg, Samantha Hunt, Shelley Jackson, Rosalind Palermo Stevenson, Greer Gilman, and more.

    As Kramer begins to play Weissova's music, however, some of her forgotten emotions resurface. Upon reading the dead woman's journals, which begin in 1945 after Weissova is released from a concentration camp, decades-old secrets that Kramer and her family have kept buried are uncovered.Dissonance . . . is bold in its scale, placing us at different eras in the concentration camp at Theresienstadt and in the scientific world of Los Alamos, New Mexico. . . . Few contemporary novels challenge the reader's conscience as Dissonance does, and fewer still inspire love so profoundly.--Kevin McIlvoy, author of HyssopA fine, clear, spare novel about music, the mysteries of the past, and the struggle to make meaning out of our present lives. In language that is always melodious, [Lisa] Lenard-Cook writes luminously of Europe and New Mexico, of the years of the last century that were its most brutal and the years at its close that were its most perplexing. Dissonance is a work of beauty.--Russell Martin, author of Picasso's WarDissonance has been selected for 2004 Durango-La Plata Reads! by the Durango, Colorado, Public Library.

    Far below him in the gaping crowd stands his wife, Anna, to whom he has made a solemn promise: This wire walk will end his career. In this daring moment, Steven Galloway opens his riveting novel about Salvo Ursari, whose life begins in 1919 amid a Transylvanian boyhood inhabited by gypsy folklore and inspired by the bravery of his persecuted people. Salvo's story moves irresistibly from a tragic fire that envelops his family, to street life in Budapest, where he learns the skills of a wire walker, to the carnivals of Europe and the competitive world of the American circus. Most fulfilled when living with paradox, Salvo feels safest while performing startling feats of balance on a wire high above the dangerous world; and most endangered if performing above a net. With compassion, warmth, and blazing originality, Ascension combines jaw-dropping storytelling, and fantastical symbolism with mesmerizing detail of Romany and circus culture, and an unforgettable walk with the amazing Salvo Ursari.

    "Right Off the Bat" is a monologue by a 12-year old girl whose lesbian mothers have been gay-bashed. "Eggs McMenopause" tells the story of how a sleep-deprived butch finds a unique solution to the trials and tribulations of menopause. In "The Babka Sisters," a women's studies student interviews a nursing home resident and hears a tale the woman has never told anyone: the story of the girl she fell in love with in high school. And in "Mothers of Invention," a couple tests their relationship when one woman decides she wants to have a baby and the other woman does not. Newman's stories covers a dazzling array of themes pertaining to contem-porary lesbian life, including long-term relationships, one-night stands, family-of-origin angst, motherhood, friendships with gay men, AIDS, breast cancer, aging, loss and bisexuality. Many of these stories explore Jewish identity as well. Each story in this collection is told with Newman's trademark wit, honesty, talent and compassion.LeslA(c)a Newman's literary awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the -Massachusetts Artists Foundation. Six of her books have been Lambda Literary Award finalists. A native New Yorker, she currently lives in western Massachusetts.

    Yet it has a history of great interest, crowded with important events and famous characters, from Julius Caesar at Brentford to Winston Churchill at Harrow. Its history also includes minor curiosities of the past—the devil of Edmonton, the witch of Finchley, the miser of Harrow Weald, the highwaymen of Hounslow Heath—amid the varied incidents of local life in places that are now London dormitories. First published in 1953, at the time this book was the most comprehensive history and description of an English county ever attempted in a single volume. Its first part describes the county's natural situation and its earliest history and surveys its economic life, in particular its almost vanished agriculture and its modern industrial development. There are chapters on particular aspects of Middlesex's history, inhabitants, and buildings.  The second part—virtually a book in itself—is a lively gazetteer of the places in contemporary Middlesex, from Acton to Yiewsley. The whole work is fully indexed and referenced, and includes tables of population and a detailed bibliography (both updated for this edition), line maps, diagrams, and 48 pages of superb photographs. Michael Robbins had a lifelong love of the county of his birth, and tramped many miles along Middlesex roads while researching and writing this book; he believed there was no other way of getting to know the county. It remains the standard work on the local history of the county—a book for all who know and love Middlesex.

    Compulsively readable and always accessible, each story takes the reader into the mind and heart of its central character, whether a young boy suffering from Lawrence Welk damage and teetering precariously on the edge of puberty ("The Music of Your Life") or a not-so-young-anymore man for whom fantasy and reality have become a terrifying blur and who finds himself slipping over the edge toward total meltdown ("Wildlife of Coastal Carolina"). Nostalgia plays a part in these stories as a somewhat jaded New York film critic looks back on his life and the movies that shaped him ("Spectators in Love"), and an aging flower-shop owner ruefully assesses the love he found and lost when, as an eighteen-year-old, he embarked on a Hollywood career that never soared but did include one particularly memorable appearance on the I Love Lucy television show ("Who Loves You?") These stories all create entire worlds within which the characters live and struggle to find their way. Funny, touching, serious, and tender, the tales within The Music of Your Life are sure to appeal to anyone who has ever known the awkwardness of being "different," and while life is often harsh for the stories' characters, the bold determination with which they persevere offers inspiration to all.

    Best known for the now-classic 1934 novel Appointment in Samarra and such blockbuster bestsellers as Ten North Frederick and Butterfield 8, in a career spanning four decades John O'Hara also published numerous story collections. Among his finest work, they highlight qualities that sold more than 15 million copies of his books in the course of his career: the snappy dialogue, the telling detail, the ironic narrative twist. Like the novels, and like the much-praised collection of John O'Hara's Gibbsville stories, also edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli, the selections in John O'Hara's Hollywood, many originally appearing in the New Yorker or the Saturday Evening Post, explore the materialist aspirations and sexual exploits of flawed, prodigally human characters for whom arrangements consitute a deal and compromises pass for love.

    This is the question that hums beneath "The Wrestling Party," whether Bett is exploring the youth-worshiping tendencies of a riot grrrl music -festival or telling the tale of a disabled boy's passion for Tara Lapinsky or giving advice to "stalker chicks." Bett's life becomes unhinged in an attempt to finally get it right when she has a crush on Anikka, a nightclub regular with a Swiss/German accent who is sexually submissive (as in "TheVillage Voice" personals-submissive). Bett's crush lands her half naked and covered in oil while wrestling a dozen women in her garage. Still unable to win over Anikka, she enlists the help of David, an obnoxious Scottish writer who assists in bringing the relationship with Anikka to its hilarious and startling finale."The Wrestling Party" is a raucous mixture of cultural criticism, erotic tell-all, and in-the-field journalism that reads like a novel you can't put down. In an era marked by social isolation and paint-by-numbers politics, Bett's stories offer us a glimpse of who we are beyond the constraints of cool correctness. Like wrestling, conflict in Bett's -nimble hands is transformed into beauty and violence, into something altogether more complicated and tender.Bett Williams is the author of "Girl Walking Backwards." Her writing has appeared in "Out" and extensively on LesbiaNation.com.

    That kiss brings with it the awareness of mortality, pleasure and pain. It is a gift from her father, Mautu Tuifolau, the local pastor, the man she adores. Love is never simple, though, and in this story of the struggles and passions of Pele and her family, it must adapt to the growing world that stretches out from village life in Samoa to the cities of Europe, America and New Zealand. It must accommodate the conflicts of a gifted family and the attraction of extraordinary outsiders, from a famous English writer to an American anthropologist, missionaries and the trader Barker, with his quest for gold and epic tales of an adventurous past. And it must encompass the family's links to the ancient gods of pre-missionary times and move through the turn of the nineteenth century, the First World War, the terrible Spanish Influenza Epidemic and beyond.

    In death his hold on them may be even stronger. Wife, daughter, granddaughter, employee, mistress: As Morrison’s protagonists stake their furious claim on Cosey’s memory and estate, using everything from intrigue to outright violence, she creates a work that is shrewd, funny, erotic, and heartwrenching.

    A young woman with no delusions about her place in this world of privilege, she quickly adapts to her role as an obedient servant expected to remain silent and unobtrusive while catering to her employers' wishes. Surrounded by a wealth she never imagined, she strives to remain invisible, until she is assigned the task of caring for the family's tragically scarred, emotionally shattered young scion, Woody March.A veteran who lost a leg in the Pacific conflict, Woody is haunted by his injuries and battlefield experiences -- and by the loss of the older brother he emulated -- and now desires only relief from his twin agonies of pain and memory. He recognizes a kindred spirit in this gentle and mysterious child-woman who is so unlike anyone he has ever known yet who understands the depths of human suffering. In Rachel's eyes, Woody is a noble, tortured prince, and her fervent wish to help ease his torment soon metamorphoses into more intense and irrevocable feelings of love and need.But if Rachel is a young woman with no future, Woody's has already been mapped out in intricate detail: as the last surviving March son, he is to run a successful banking business, marry the well-bred Elizabeth, and raise a family who will carry on the March name with distinction. Yet the obligations he never questioned prior to the war are becoming increasingly odious to him -- especially now, as he feels himself becoming irresistibly drawn to Rachel in ways no one else in his world would understand or tolerate. As the relationship between two lost and damaged souls intensifies, they move toward the one pivotal event that will alter their lives in ways both heartbreaking and profound.An unsparing portrayal of the conflicts of race, culture, and class that lays bare the complex passions and deepest yearnings of the human heart, Terry Gamble's The Water Dancers possesses a lyrical, strong, and assured artistry and heralds the arrival of a major new American novelist.

    In the questioning room, Gracey vividly recounts her story, from the childhood abuse she suffered at the hands of her father to the adult addiction that almost destroyed her. Two officers, one young and naive, the other jaded and surly, become her de facto audience. Meanwhile, Deneeka Jones, a cross-dresser who turns tricks and deals drugs for Sonny, is fighting for survival in the get-off houses and male strip joints of Atlanta's seediest neighborhoods. She is also selling dope to Frazier Sky and Audrey Sullivan, teenaged children of Atlanta's ultrarich who get high to soothe the estrangement in their home lives. Frazier's father and Audrey's mother, once extramarital lovers, are struggling to overcome lost love and find a way to reconnect with their children. As Gracey's harrowing story unfolds, the cops close in on Sonny and a batch of bad heroin circulates through Atlanta, putting Frazier and Audrey in danger.In this gritty and unflinching chronicle of twenty-four hours of life on the street, Suzanne Kingsbury reveals the dark world of drug addiction and poverty that lies beneath the prosperous New South surface of modern-day Atlanta. "The Gospel According to Gracey" is a gripping, often surprising, and deeply haunting novel from a daring and original young writer.

    6," "A Woman's Kingdom," "Three Years," "My Life," "Peasants," and "In the Ravine," as well as a biographical introduction and a chronology.

    Sisters Julia and Margaret Wood are struggling to rise above devastating poverty, while the threat of war looms large over their community. Angry feelings about foreigners have reached boiling point; their German-Jewish father's search for work proves hopeless, leaving entrepreneurial Julia to keep the family afloat by hawking homemade pies on the streets of Leeds.Her beautiful elder sister Margaret, an apprentice milliner and new member of the suffragette set, seeks a faster way out of the daily grind, pinning her hopes on a rich suffragette's journalist son, Thomas. But as the war rages on, it is left to Julia to discover the true meaning of courage and family, as she learns to look forward to the start of the new day - and the promise of a better life ahead.Additional Info: Sisters on Bread Street originally published as by Frances McNeil. It is based on stories told to Frances by her mother, Julia. The first, limited, edition came out shortly after Julia's hundredth birthday. The revised and expanded version was published as Somewhere Behind the Morning, which won the HarperCollins Elizabeth Elgin Award.

    Set free into the chilly air of a noisy spring day in the city, slamming around, screaming crazy with guys on the block, Bruiser thinks of home and realizes it's time to change his life. So begins the journey of a nine-year-old boy with a rich visual imagination who is trying to make sense of the world. This is Bruiser's account in his own words, captured by first-time novelist Ian Chorao with uncanny precision and an ear for the staccato rhythms of childhood consciousness. A novel refreshingly free of sentimentality, "Bruiser" confronts the darkness and violence of life even as it illuminates its wonder and sweetness.With a remarkably original narrative style, Bruiser spirits readers back to the Upper West Side of Manhattan in the late 1970s. From here, we follow Bruiser on his unlikely search for meaning, solace, and eventually the seeds of a tentative, hard-won maturity. Overwhelmed by the pain and confusion of a troubled home life -- his father is remote and given to irrational rages, his mother is undone by stifled artistic aspirations -- Bruiser takes to the open road with Darla, a ten-year-old kindred spirit who lives across the alleyway. Their flight from the mounting tensions of home, an adventure dotted with frightening episodes and surprising revelations, is a journey in search of liberation and emotional truth, and with potentially tragic consequences.Ian Chorao inhabits a child's particular frame of mind with acute sensitivity and startling immediacy. In the disjunction between the limitations of a young boy's awareness andour adult understanding of the circumstances lies a special poetry that is its own powerful truth, and a reminder of the often uncertain, yet painfully acute impressions that adults can make on the hearts and minds of children. In language that is both spare and potently sincere, Chorao has created a character in Bruiser that we won't soon forget.

    It forms part of Faber's "Threebies" series, which offers different sets of three titles, each set written by a best-selling author.

    patterns') of fathers and mothers passing into the lives of their offspring. experience, complicating and enriching our choices. failures by family members who, finally, find ways to realise they can't live without each other.

    . . richly drawn characters. . . an innovative, powerfully motivational novel.” —Dr. Michael J. Hurd, psychologist and nationally syndicated talk show host What happens when your work and your love clash with your deepest values? Leon Skillman is a rich and renowned American sculptor. Cynical, smart, handsome, and glib, he’s the darling of socialites, the press, art critics, and gossip columnists. But when he meets Tara Niforous, a beautiful, highly intelligent and highly challenging Greek-American archeologist, his smug and sensational existence is shattered—and conflicts long buried in his soul boil to the surface. Born in New York City of immigrant parents and living in Greece as an adult, Tara is an idealist who lives for her ancient bronze and marble “gods.” But she falls irresistibly in love with Leon, who looks and acts like one in the flesh. Meanwhile, Dimitrios Kokonas—Tara’s older employer at the Athens museum where she works—has for years been secretly in love with his independent but feminine protégé. Intensely romantic, yet painfully shy, Dimitrios vows at last to reveal his passion to Tara. . . but now he must challenge a young god for the woman he adores. Set in Manhattan’s fast-paced, glamorous and controversial art world with exotic forays to Greece, Turkey, and Palm Beach, CROSSPOINTS is unlike any other romantic suspense novel. It explores not only the tangled conflicts of the human heart but also the clashing values that lie at their core. It’s an unforgettable love story that simultaneously unveils the hidden worlds of art, archeology, family, religion, and high society—worlds where the rare quest for noble ideals must overcome the raw pull of sex, drugs, money, fame…and sometimes, of love itself. CROSSPOINTS is a story about Choice—not only the choices faced by three strong-willed people ensnared in a mind-and-heart-gripping romantic triangle but also other conflicts between and within many secondary characters called upon to determine their separate fates at the same time. Choices: the very kind of choices we all face in real life…and their profound consequences for our own personal and professional lives.

    After Ikotsali saves Tatsea and her father following a huntingaccident, Tatsea is obliged to marry their strange-looking rescuer. One day when Ikotsali is away from camp, raiders arrive and kill everyone. The only lives spared are those of Tatsea, who is captured, and their infant daughter, whom she has hidden. When Ikotsali returns to find the carnage, the story of their struggle to survive and be reunited begins."Tatsea brings back the years when our grandparents lived their lives."--Mike Nitsiza, counsellor, Mezi Community School, Wha Ti, Northwets Territories