Set during the tumult of World War II, on the lush Malayan island of Penang, The Gift of Rain tells a riveting and poignant tale about a young man caught in the tangle of wartime loyalties and deceits.

    Vikar Jerome steps into the vortex of a cultural transformation: rock ’n’ roll, sex, drugs, and — far more important to him — the decline of the movie studios and the rise of the independent director. Jerome will become a film editor of astonishing vision. Then through encounters with former starlets, burglars, political guerillas, punk musicians, and veteran filmmakers, he discovers the astonishing secret that lies in every movie ever made.

    A man takes up scuba diving in the town reservoir to fight off a killing depression. A grieving mother leads a surveyor into the woods to name once and for all the county where her son was murdered by thieves.In the Appalachia of Ron Rash's stories, the collision of the old and new south, of antique and modern, resonate with the depth and power of ancient myths.

    Now an old woman, she waits to be reunited after sixty-two years with her son, fathered by an S.S. officer and stolen from her by the German authorities during the War as part of Himmler's clandestine 'Lebensborn' project, which strove for a 'racially pure' Germany. Haya's reflection on her Catholicized Jewish family's experiences deals unsparingly with the massacre of Italian Jews in the concentration camps of Trieste. Her obsessive search for her son leads her to photographs, maps and fragments of verse, to testimonies from the Nuremberg trials and interviews with second-generation Jews, as well as witness accounts of atrocities that took place on her doorstep. A broad collage of material is assembled, and the lesser-known horror of Nazi occupation in northern Italy is gradually unveiled. Written in immensely powerful language, and employing a range of astonishing conceptual devices, Trieste is a novel like no other. Dasa Drndic has produced a shattering contribution to the literature of our twentieth-century history.

    His stories have since appeared in The New Yorker and in the Granta Book of the Irish Short Story. His debut novel, City Of Bohane, was published by Jonathan Cape in April 2011. Could easily have been titled These Are Little Masterpieces'. Barry gathers all the bewildered exasperation that Irish playwrights from Tom Murphy to Marina Carr and Enda Walsh have identified, and brings it, most brilliantly, to his dark, blackly hilarious and horrifically realistic narratives.'-Eileen Battersby, The Irish Times

    Christopher's life has so far been rather short of charm - growing up in an unlovely suburb, with unambitious parents and a semi-vagrant brother - and he is captivated by his generous and cultured mentors. However, on the brink of realising his dream, Christopher makes a desperate misjudgement which results in disaster for all involved. Shattered, he withdraws from London and buries himself in rural Yorkshire, embracing a career and a private life marked by mediocrity.Twenty years on a young academic researching into Owen Goddard seeks him out, and Christopher is forced to exhume his past, setting him on a path to a life-changing discovery.

    With brilliant prose, terrific imagination, and dazzling literary skill, Mason creates alternative episodes, fragments, and revisions of Homer’s original that taken together open up this classic Greek myth to endless reverberating interpretations. The Lost Books of the Odyssey is punctuated with great wit, beauty, and playfulness; it is a daring literary page-turner that marks the emergence of an extraordinary new talent.

    From his home in New Jersey, where he lives with his old-world mother and rebellious sister, Oscar dreams of becoming the Dominican J. R. R. Tolkien and, most of all, of finding love. But he may never get what he wants, thanks to the Fukœ—the curse that has haunted the Oscar's family for generations, dooming them to prison, torture, tragic accidents, and, above all, ill-starred love. Oscar, still waiting for his first kiss, is just its most recent victim. Diaz immerses us in the tumultuous life of Oscar and the history of the family at large, rendering with genuine warmth and dazzling energy, humor, and insight the Dominican-American experience, and, ultimately, the endless human capacity to persevere in the face of heartbreak and loss. A true literary triumph, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao confirms Junot Diaz as one of the best and most exciting voices of our time.

    It is the unexpected appearance of Asa’s aunt Hazel, institutionalized since shortly after the mass hangings of thirty-eight Dakota warriors in Mankato in 1862, that reveals to him that the past is as close as his own heartbeat.

    It is a dark world, shot through with flashes of joy and lunacy."I used to be human once. So I'm told. I don't remember it myself, but people who knew me when I was small say I walked on two feet, just like a human being..." Ever since he can remember, Animal has gone on all fours, his back twisted beyond repair by the catastrophic events of "that night" when a burning fog of poison smoke from the local factory blazed out over the town of Khaufpur, and the Apocalypse visited his slums. Now just turned seventeen and well schooled in street work, he lives by his wits, spending his days jamisponding (spying) on town officials and looking after the elderly nun who raised him, Ma Franci. His nights are spent fantasizing about Nisha, the girlfriend of the local resistance leader, and wondering what it must be like to get laid. When Elli Barber, a young American doctor, arrives in Khaufpur to open a free clinic for the still suffering townsfolk -- only to find herself struggling to convince them that she isn't there to do the dirty work of the Kampani -- Animal gets caught up in a web of intrigues, scams, and plots with the unabashed aim of turning events to his own advantage. Profane, piercingly honest, and scathingly funny, Animal's People illuminates a dark world shot through with flashes of joy and lunacy. A stunning tale of an unforgettable character, it is an unflinching look at what it means to be human: the wounds that never heal and a spirit that will not be quenched.

    That's what makes them a challenge to battle--and a challenge to draw! But if you're determined to sketch 'em all, then this book is a great start. It's packed with tips to get you drawing the newest Pokemon characters. So sharpen your pencil and get ready to go!

    One of the children, now grown, is the re-teller of these tales, while his sister, Miruna, seems to possess the gift of second sight. Incorporating elements of fantasy common to the storytelling traditions of the Balkans, historical figures mix with imaginary beings in a landscape to recreate the world of an isolated hamlet that had managed to keep the modern world at bay over a succession of political regimes, but whose idiosyncratic ways might now be irretrievably lost without its story being told.Blending the autobiographical and historical with the marvelous, Miruna, a Tale is a novel whose core is the exploration of the imaginary themes and motives that informed traditional society in the mountainous regions of Romania, a world that was radically transformed into virtual extinction over the course of the 20th century.Described by critics as a “literary jewel whose strange and singular spell holds the reader in its thrall,” and "a kind of meta-fairy tale," Miruna, a Tale received the Bucharest Writers Association Fiction Award in 2007.

    He struggles with the mysterious rituals of 'Englishness', and the fashions and fads of the London scene. We see the road Lev travels through his eyes, and we share his dilemmas.

    Dorothy Whipple's key theme is ‘Live and Let Live’. And what she describes throughout her short stories are people, and particularly parents, who defy this maxim. For this reason her work is timeless, like all great writing. It is irrelevant that Dorothy Whipple’s novels were set in an era when middle-class women expected to have a maid; when fish knives were used for eating fish; when children did what they were told. The moral universe she creates has not changed: there are bullies in every part of society; people try their best but often fail; they would like to be unselfish but sometimes are greedy.

    Ehrhardt’s stories, adultery and impropriety become disquietingly mundane. Mothers expect daughters to be complicit in their love affairs, children seek shelter in families that aren’t their own, fathers court their daughters, a couple enters into a marriage that lasts thirty days a year, and a young girl takes to the road with the simple guy who bags groceries at Piggly Wiggly while her mother imagines her safely at school. Beautifully restrained and shot through with tenderness, Famous Fathers and Other Stories establishes Ehrhardt as both a leading practitioner of the short story and an empathetic interpreter of the lives of wounded people who–instead of asking for what they want–take what is offered.

    She leaves behind an extraordinary and acclaimed body of work - but she also leaves a legacy of secrets and emotional damage that will take months to unravel.

    Her sickly mother is the only person still determined to find the culprit. Chronicling a difficult journey across the suburbs of the city, an old debt and a revealing conversation, Elena Knows unravels the secrets of its characters and the hidden facets of authoritarianism and hypocrisy in our society.

    Operating somewhere between fiction and poetry, biography and theory, the stories in ATTEMPTS AT A LIFE do what lively stories do best, creating worlds of possibility, worlds filled with surprises. Like the "experiments in found movement" one character conducts (in "Everybody's Autobiography"), Dutton's stories find movement wherever they turn, each sentence a small explosion of images and anthems and odd juxtapositions. This is writing in which the imagination (both writer's and reader's) is capable of producing almost anything at any moment, from a shiny penny to an alien metropolis, a burning village to a bright green bird. "Danielle Dutton's stories remind me of those alluring puzzles where the pool is overflowing and emptying at the same time. Dutton's answer? That the self is a rush of the languages of storytelling and moments of helpless intimacy"--Robert Gluck.

    Each night, Sisi, Ama, Efe, and Joyce stand in the windows of Antwerp’s red-light district, promising to make men’s desires come true—if only for half an hour. Pledged to the fierce Madam and a mysterious pimp named Dele, the girls share an apartment but little else—they keep their heads down, knowing that one step out of line could cost them a week’s wages. They open their bodies to strangers but their hearts to no one, each focused on earning enough to get herself free, to send money home or save up for her own future.Then, suddenly, a murder shatters the still surface of their lives. Drawn together by tragedy and the loss of one of their own, the women realize that they must choose between their secrets and their safety. As they begin to tell their stories, their confessions reveal the face in Efe’s hidden photograph, Ama’s lifelong search for a father, Joyce’s true name, and Sisi’s deepest secrets—-and all their tales of fear, displacement, and love, concluding in a chance meeting with a powerful, sinister stranger.On Black Sisters Street marks the U.S. publication debut of Chika Unigwe, a brilliant new writer and a standout voice among contemporary African authors. Raw, vivid, unforgettable, and inspired by a powerful oral storytelling tradition, this novel illuminates the dream of the West—and that dream’s illusion and annihilation—as seen through African eyes. It is a story of courage, unity, and hope, of women’s friendships and of bonds that, once forged, cannot be broken.

    F's working life on London's Skin Lane is one governed by calm, precision and routine. So when he starts to have frightening, recurring nightmares, he does his best to ignore them. The images that appear in his dream are disturbing, Mr. F can't for the life of him think where they have come from. After all, he's a perfectly ordinary middle-aged man. As London's crooked backstreets begin to swelter in the long, hot summer of 1967, Mr. F's nightmare becomes an obsession. A chance encounter adds a face to the body that nightly haunts him, and the torments of his sweat-drenched nights lead him and the reader deeper into a terrifying labyrinth of rage, desire and shame. Part fairy-tale, part compelling evocation of a now-lost London, Neil Bartlett's long-awaited third novel is his fiercest piece of writing yet: cruel, erotic, and tender.

    Short and punchy, these stories show the cumulative effects of heartbreak and simple dreams while keeping a reserve of hope in even the darkest of circumstances.

    Based on the true story of the 1981 lynching of Michael Donald in Mobile, Alabama, the novel follows the lives of Paul and Roy Deacon, teenagers and childhood friends of Michael Donald, as they cope with the aftermath of his hanging. It is Paul Deacon who discovers the body, and the experience leaves him forever changed. The Deacons have operated a funeral home in the city for over 100 years. When the family is asked to conduct the services for Michael, Roy Deacon must examine whether a life in the family tradition is where he belongs.The story explores the vivid history and landscape of the Gulf Coast community and takes readers down the wooden–bricked streets of turn of the century Mobile with its Spanish architecture and its tree–lined avenues that host the annual Mardi Gras parades.Readers experience the complexities of the American South–the beauty of the landscape mixed with the ugliness of its racial history–as the characters cope with a tragic chapter in the unfolding story of the New South.

    His missionary ancestors who came to the islands were financially and culturally progressive—one even married a Hawaiian princess, making Matt a royal descendant and one of the state's largest landowners. But now his luck has changed. His two daughters are out of control—10-year-old Scottie has a smart-ass attitude and a desperate need for attention and 17-year-old Alex, a former model, is a recovering drug addict. His thrill-seeking and high-maintenance wife, Joanie, lies in a coma after a boat racing accident, and will soon be taken off life support. The King family can hardly picture life without their charismatic mother, but as they come to terms with this tragedy, their sadness is mixed with a sense of freedom that shames them—and spurs them into surprising actions.

    As the mine turns the mountains to slag and wastewater, workers struggle with layoffs and children find adventure in the blasted moonscape craters.Strange As This Weather Has Been follows several members of the family, with a particular focus on fifteen-year-old Bant and her mother, Lace. Working at a “scab” motel, Bant becomes involved with a young miner while her mother contemplates joining the fight against the mining companies. As domestic conflicts escalate at home, the children are pushed more and more outside among junk from the floods and felled trees in the hollows— the only nature they have ever known. But Bant has other memories and is as curious and strong-willed as her mother, and ultimately comes to discover the very real threat of destruction that looms as much in the landscape as it does at home.

    Ex-lawyer Jack Gorse walls off his inner life with elaborate rituals and routines. Threatened with eviction from his longtime apartment and caught off-guard by an attraction to a near stranger, he takes steps that lead to the dramatic dissolution of the existence he's known.

    Catherine King's second Yorkshire saga follows the fortunes of two opposing families - a tale of star-crossed love, bitter revenge and sweet retribution, in the mould of Meg Hutchinson and Barbara Taylor Bradford.

    It details the curve of his career, from the early Waste Land-parody “Poem beginning 'The'” (1926) to the dense and tantalizing beauties of his last poems, 80 Flowers(1978), paying special attention to the monumental, complex, and formally various epic poem “A”, on which Zukofsky labored for almost fifty years, and which he called “a poem of a life.” Zukofsky was a protégé of Ezra Pound's, an artistic collaborator and close friend of William Carlos Williams's, and the leader of a whole school of 1930s avant-garde poets, the Objectivists. Later in life he was close friends with such younger writers as Robert Creeley, Paul Metcalf, Robert Duncan, Jonathan Williams, and Guy Davenport. His work spans the divide from modernism to postmodernism, and his later writings have proved an inspiration to whole new generations of innovative poets. Zukofsky's poetry is oblique, condensed, and as fantastically detailed as the late writings of James Joyce, yet it bears at every point the marks of the poet's life and times.

    At fourteen, wearing the coat his mother sewed to ensure his safety—blue on one side, gray on the other— Robey thinks he's off on a great adventure. But not far from home, his horse falters and he realizes the enormity of his task. It takes the gift of a powerful and noble coal black horse to show him how to undertake the most important journey of his life: with boldness, bravery, and self-posession.Coal Black Horse joins the pantheon of great war novels—All Quiet on the Western Front, The Red Badge of Courage, The Naked and the Dead.

    A boy on a seaside vacation realizes that a grown-up woman is pressing dangerously close.In Tessa Hadley's Sunstroke and Other Stories, everyone conspires to hold the loving and stable surface of family life together, as old secrets and new appetites threaten to blow it apart.

    A distinctive new voice, from a distinctive new press.”—Peter Ho Davies, author of The Welsh GirlIncludes “Wait,” a Best American Short Stories 2007 inclusion.

    Trevor's last collection, A Bit on the Side, was named a New York Times Notable Book and hailed as one of the Best Books of the Year by papers from coast to coast, including The Washington Post and San Francisco Chronicle. And his earlier collection, After Rain, published in 1996, was named one of the eight best books of the year by The New York Times. Trevor's precise and unflinching insights into the hearts and lives of ordinary people are evidenced once again in this stunning new collection. From a chance encounter between two childhood friends to the memories of a newly widowed man to a family grappling with the sale of their ancestral land, Trevor examines with grace and skill the tenuous bonds of our relationships, the strengths that hold us together, and the truths that threaten to separate us. Subtle yet powerful, his stories linger with the reader long after the words have been put away. These twelve exquisitely nuanced tales of regret, deception, adultery, aging, and forgiveness confirm Trevor's reputation as a master of the form and one of literature's preeminent chroniclers of the human condition.

    But Hector is not as famous as his best friend, Lenny Snook. And as they are standing in the Tate Gallery one afternoon, Hector's life begins to unravel. For a painter, this existential crisis is the place from which great art is born. If the painter happens to be a forty-three-year-old man with a girlfriend away from home, it is the recipe for disaster. Soon it's all Hector can do to keep it together -- between his therapist who shows up drunk at a party and introduces herself to his parents, an irresistible young female poet with a terrifying taste for S&M, and a deranged stalker with an oil-and-canvas-inspired vendetta, just trying to cope is enough to make a man cry. As the events in his life threaten to drive him toward full-blown dementia, Hector finds himself in a bizarre and murderous pursuit of a man threatening to kill him in return, spiraling into a hysterically surreal Hitchcocklike thriller -- the story of how a man can become desperate enough to shoot his way out of a midlife crisis. At turns warm, witty, and joyfully absurd, David Thewlis's wicked comedy marks the debut of a savagely funny and observant literary talent.

    As the Romany people struggle to survive the changes of the 20th century, the author charts one family's path through persecution and tragedy, asking, can the Romany spirit survive in a century that no longer has space for them?

    There’s Ralph, her fourteen-year old son, and Winnie the young maid, a homely, goodhearted country girl, and the lodgers, of course, a curious but necessary burden. They include blind Alwyne Flyte, communist and cynic, victim of a gas attack in the trenches. When the dreaded telegram arrives at the house, things turn from difficult to desperate for the two young women.Then along comes the butcher, Neville Turk, big handsome ladies’ man, irresistible for his meat, money and brutish confidence, who throws flighty Eithne into a turmoil but has sinister plans of his own. Winnie and the blind lodger, meanwhile, conduct a strange, erotic liaison of their own. And young Ralph, ignored by his mother, looks on, feeling the undercurrents of desire, seeing more than he should. All the strands come together in a shocking denouement that turns a coward into a hero and young Ralph into a man.They’re all in the dark with their dreams, secrets and fantasies, and electric light, new to their world, may be a boon but it reveals both grime and secrets. Life is tough on the home front and they’re all working the system in different ways, sometimes comic sometimes tragic, always human.

    The shepherd, an elderly, mysterious, learned man, escapes the buzzing restlessness of the city to live in the Ozarks. This shepherd is based on Wright himself, who moved to the Ozarks and established a ministry. The Calling of Dan Matthews: In this sequel, Dan Matthews, becomes the new minister of the Midwestern town of Corinth. God and the Groceryman: This last book in the Dan Matthews trilogy is a plea for God's presence in all aspects of life.

    Moving between New Yorks Wall Street and the beauty of Corsica, Berberians novel is a literary rendering of Marxs Capital for the 21st century: where a fund trader makes his profits through the collapse of overseas markets--and ensures it with the aid of a hired assassin.

    This is a hugely original play, both magical and moving, that confirmed Anthony Neilson as one of major voices in contemporary British Theatre. The entire original cast and creative team have been reunited for this keenly anticipated revival.Lisa Jones is on a journey. It's a colourful and exciting off-kilter trip in search of one lost hour that has tipped the balance of her life. The inhabitants of the wonderful world she finds herself in - Dissocia - are a curious blend of the funny, the friendly and the brutal. As Neilson himself put it, 'If you like Alice in Wonderland but there's not enough sex and violence in it, then Dissocia is the show for you'.Realism premiered at the Edinburgh International Festival in 2006. It follows the life of one man during an ordinary day but veers off from the commonplace to become a deliriously surreal trip inside his wayward imagination. It was described by the Guardian as a 'bold and utterly distinctive all-singing, all-dancing show, like nothing else you'll ever see'.

    Living in a small provincial town, he and his wife spend their time planning journeys to faraway places - journeys they never take. Dino's only passion is billiards, and he spends his evenings in the local billiards hall honing his technique. One day, however, Dino's quiet life is interrupted - his wife falls pregnant. This the first in a series of events that shake him from his slumber and force Dino to test himself for the first time. As in his widely praised Fists, Pietro Grossi's stripped-down prose brings out the epic human drama in a tale of everyday life.

    Bartlett put out a book called "Dead Air". That book is now extremely scarce. This volume contains most of the unpublished work from that book, a few dark poems, and stories and fragments that later appeared in "Gateways to Abomination" and "Creeping Waves". It also features magnificently creepy artwork by Yves Tourigny, as well as Tom Breen's original introduction. Witness the early days of dread magus Benjamin Stockton, and of his demonic radio station WXXT, with all its guts, worms, wriggling things, and voices from the dark.

    In this critically-acclaimed debut, Min Jin Lee tells not only Casey's story, but also those of her sheltered mother, scarred father, and friends both Korean and Caucasian, exposing the astonishing layers of a community clinging to its old ways and a city packed with struggling haves and have-nots.

    500 copies. Contents: Introduction, A:B:O., The Moon's Miracle, The Riddle, The Giant, The Quincunx, The Pear-Tree, The Bird of Travel, Seaton's Aunt, The Vats, Promise at Dusk, The Creatures, Miss Jemima, The Looking-Glass, Out of the Deep, Winter, The Green Room, The Scarecrow, Alice's Godmother, Mr Kempe, A Recluse, All Hallows, The Game At Cards, Crewe, The House, 'What Dreams May Come', Strangers and Pilgrims, A Revenant, The Guardian, An Anniversary, Music, Bad Company, Bibliographical Information.'Walter de la Mare's stories have a claim to be the most subtle and strangely powerful depictions of the supernatural in English fiction of the twentieth century.' So says Mark Valentine in his introduction to these thirty-one uncanny tales. Amongst this selection are some of the best known of de la Mare's stories: 'Seaton's Aunt', 'Out of the Deep', 'All Hallows', and also some of the more obscure: 'Miss Jemima', 'A Game at Cards', Alice's Godmother'. All illustrate the writer's enigmatic relationship with alternative layers of existence and a sense of the unknown, conveyed in beautifully restrained prose. There are few overt exterior forces encountered; de la Mare's characters 'do not have to face monstrosities of any sort: but they are haunted nevertheless; by loneliness, by lovelessness, by loss.' This concentration on 'queerness and quiet tragedy' is tempered by the writer's poetic powers of description, particularly his depiction of the English countryside. Strangers and Pilgrims is the definitive collection of de la Mare's supernatural and psychological stories.

    They tell of the mistakes we make along the way, and of how we try to deal with the whole difficult, unpredictable business.

    I Carry A Hammer In My Pocket For Occasions Such As These turns cartwheels, plants daisies, and sings love songs in honor of all that is strange, sad, serious, and sublime about being alive.”—Myla Goldberg, author of Bee SeasonI Carry A Hammer In My Pocket For Occasions Such As These is a collection of fifty-seven pieces that range in length from compressed paragraphs to ten-page stories. Characters, voices, and surreal scenarios are unified in a playful vision of the world sustained by metaphor, memory, cartoon, tragedy, love story, and song.Speed and brevity are a large part of the collection’s design. In a culture where attention spans are shorter and more fractured, the need for a literature for the subway and the waiting room—something to resonate in the smaller gaps of our lives—is emerging. To this end, I Carry A Hammer In My Pocket For Occasions Such As These is quick, colloquial, and comic, yet challenges readers to think. It offers—at a glance—a journey into a fictional world that is poetic and narrative, fantastic and familiar, accessible and adventurous.“The Difference”Although I was never an early riser, my father always counseled me to rise with the sun.“Early bird gets the worm!” he told me.“Sure,” I said, “but the worm who sleeps late, lives.”Anthony Tognazzini lives in New York City, where he makes his living as a teacher and freelance journalist. His awards include an AWP Award, an Academy of American Poets prize, a Greer Artist Foundation Fellowship, and a Hemingway Fellowship.

    But her world is unexpectedly turned upside down when she digs out her birth certificate to apply for a passport. Her parents are not who she believed them to be - even her name is different.Fleeing to the Riviera, Polly finds that the serenity and sunshine brings her art to life as never before. But all is not well in the grand house. Oliver’s father was forced to leave England in a cloud of scandal and his past is about to catch up with him. And Polly’s own future begins to take on a new and fascinating shape…The perfect read for fans of THE VILLA and SUMMER’S CHILD, this is a beguiling and evocative tale that will transport you away to the Riviera itself.

    He has also directed a number of short films that have appeared on HBO, MTV, Comedy Central, Showtime, and the BBC.

    Reeling with grief and thoughts of vengeance, David enlists and sets off for Richmond to join the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia.But once in the cavalry, David's life changes drastically, and his dream of glamorous chivalry becomes nothing but a cold, cruel existence of pain and suffering. He is hurled into one battle after another, and his desire for revenge wanes when he experiences first-hand the catastrophes of war.A haunting look at the human side of one of America's most tragic conflicts, "A Beckoning Hellfire "speaks to the delusion of war's idealism.

    Pashley writes quick, tough dialog that cuts hard and scars, and her stories put you in places and circumstances you have little chance of getting to otherwise. She asks you to pay attention and use your imagination, and then treats you to the real pleasures of fiction, of character, of remarkable people in difficult times. Her work always stuns." - Frederick Barthelme "Jennifer Pashley's 'States' imagines human desire in all its heart-breaking complexity: the mysteries, disguises, aggressions, disappointments, ecstasies. The contemporary narrators of these stories - men and women mostly in their 20s and 30s - are disturbed and disturbing, smart but rarely knowing. They are, as one puts it, 'unraveling with desire.' States is a riveting, accomplished, and immensely satisfying first collection." - David Lloyd, author of Boys, Stories and a Novella "Precise. Blunt. Funny. Scary. Bleak. An inviting and well-carved debut." - Aimee Bender

    After the death of his much-loved wife and his recognition that he will never write the great study of history that was to be his life's crowning work, Max believes his life is all but over. Everything changes, though, when his valedictory lecture is challenged by Professor Vita McLelland, a feisty young Australian Aboriginal academic visiting Germany. Their meeting and growing friendship sets Max on a journey that would have seemed unthinkable just a few short weeks earlier.When, at Vita's invitation, Max travels to Australia, he forms a deep friendship with her uncle, Aboriginal elder Dougald Gnapun. It is a friendship that not only gives new meaning and purpose to Max, but which teaches him the profound importance of truth-telling in reconciliation with his own and his country's past.

    Here is a town, as well as a world, defined by magnificent and nearly devastating contradictions.Louis Charles (“Lucy”) Lynch has spent all his sixty years in upstate Thomaston, New York, married to the same woman, Sarah, for forty of them, their son now a grown man. Like his late, beloved father, Lucy is an optimist, though he’s had plenty of reasons not to be—chief among them his mother, still indomitably alive. Yet it was her shrewdness, combined with that Lynch optimism, that had propelled them years ago to the right side of the tracks and created an “empire” of convenience stores about to be passed on to the next generation. Lucy and Sarah are also preparing for a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Italy, where his oldest friend, a renowned painter, has exiled himself far from anything they’d known in childhood. In fact, the exact nature of their friendship is one of the many mysteries Lucy hopes to untangle in the “history” he’s writing of his hometown and family. And with his story interspersed with that of Noonan, the native son who’d fled so long ago, the destinies building up around both of them (and Sarah, too) are relentless, constantly surprising, and utterly revealing. Bridge of Sighs is classic Russo, coursing with small-town rhythms and the claims of family, yet it is brilliantly enlarged by an expatriate whose motivations and experiences—often contrary, sometimes not—prove every bit as mesmerizing as they resonate through these richly different lives. Here is a town, as well as a world, defined by magnificent and nearly devastating contradictions.

    In this beautifully told novel that crosses borders, cultures, and generations, a young man returns home to care for his aging mother, who suffers from dementia. In his efforts to help her and by turn make amends for their past estrangement from one another, he is compelled to re-imagine his mother’s stories for her before they slip completely into darkness. In delicate, heartbreaking tones, the names for everyday things fade while at the same time a beautiful, haunted life, stained by grief, is slowly revealed.

    

    Claire is on a dangerous mission. His young son is missing, and he is on a self-appointed quest to find the boy, or at least the man he believes is responsible. Fueled by amphetamines and a profound lack of sleep, Colin's road soon dissolves into such an uncontrollable spiral of blurry white lines, of fleeting forms in the night and ghosts of memory as intangible as vapor, that he degenerates into a self-professed Ahab of the interstates. On an equally mad mission to save St. Claire is Robert Heim, a former private investigator who lost his license in the line of duty--and it is a sense of warped duty that still ties him to Colin, though his Penelope of a loving wife and his children beckon him back home.... The answers for both men may lie not with their white whale of a quarry but with a long-suffering farmer's wife, Beverly Sis Pruitt, whose own daughter was claimed by violence years prior. In the shape of a noir thriller, Curnutt fashions a gripping tale of the consequences of unchecked grief, of painful truths hidden as though they were dark secrets, and what salvation remains possible for good people who descend into the darkness and become the very ghosts they find themselves pursuing.

    As they lament their fates in a murky swamp, they are chased by a cynical tabloid journalist and his reluctant photographer, who don't believe any of it until feathers, wings and a tiara are discovered along the way. The play hysterically interweaves a love story, sibling rivalry, tawdry media, race relations and cultural stereotypes as the chase to find the angel builds to a crescendo in the swamp. Ultimately a sweet allegory about redemption, DUCK HUNTER SHOOTS ANGEL has been hailed by audiences as a rare comedy with a surprisingly heartfelt lesson.

    Through their eyes we experience both the depths and heights of humanity: hate and discrimination, sacrifice and redemption. This is the third in Fondation's series of "LA Stories."

    Sabir – petty criminal, drifter, war veteran – is on a prison ship bound for a notorious penal colony in the French tropics. Soon after his arrival in the bagne, as it's known, Sabir is shipped out to a work camp deep in the South American jungle but quickly comes to the realisation that his old life is dead, and return to France an impossibility. Yet, if he's to survive at all, he must escape the brutality of the bagne. Posing as a professional gardener, Sabir wins the confidence and protection of the camp's naïve, idealistic Commandant. With a group of like-minded convicts – including the secretive, enigmatic Edouard, a comrade from the trenches of WW1 – he soon launches his escape bid, across the seas in a stolen boat. Bad weather forces the men ashore, condemning them to a dismal, hallucinatory tramp through the jungle. As hunger and rivalry tear the group apart, Sabir understands he has scant chance of escaping into another life.In Part Two, Manne – deserter, itinerant exile – comes to the Colony in search of his deported friend, the same Edouard from Part One. With a false identity and cover story, Manne installs himself as a guest at the Commandant's house. There, he falls into an affair with his host's wife. Meanwhile, the Commandant is slowly unravelling, growing ever more suspicious of who Manne is and what he's doing in the Colony. Manne ends up trapped like everyone else in the bagne, and realises that he too must escape. The novel's two plot threads begin to merge – boundaries between dream and reality blur, bringing a surreal tinge to the dramatic climax.Both a page-turning adventure story, and a bold novel of ideas, Colony takes an historical background familiar to readers of Henri Charrière's ‘Papillon’, and twists it into a metaphysical journey. Brilliantly evoking an atmosphere of colonial decline in the tropics, the novel explores the shifting natures of identity, memory and reality.

    Through their father's emotional absence and abuse, they come to believe women do not truly exist. One of the boys draws into himself, looking for answers to the confusion in his life, and throughout this descent, he experiences his past as though through a distorted carnival mirror. When he emerges from his inner journey, he is forced to confront a secret that has been buried deep inside for over thirty years.

    Repulsing and fascinating him at the same time, she becomes a mirror in which he not only sees himself but through which he is forced to face his own demons. Not only does she inadvertently supply him with material for his columns, she represents all Eugene considers to be wrong with contemporary America - a garish and dunce-filled Babylon that Theroux scorches with relentless satire.

    After ordination, he finds himself an alien in a world of human need. This fictional account of a young pastor's rise and fall is based on the secret reality faced by the ordinary people who have sensed a "call" to one of the helping professions. Never quite accepted as a local, he navigates the path of conscience through the pitfalls of personal loneliness. McGowan's Call is a collection of short stories and a novella that chronicles Davis' path from the river town of Hatteras, Ohio to the suburbs of Dayton. This work of fiction provides a rare insight to pastoral ministry outside the scandals that regularly make headlines. It is an honest expos� of the real crisis that afflicts those who live in the public eye. Rob Smith is the author of two novels including Night Voices. Ann Joslin of A Sandusky Bay Journal describes Night Voices as "an exciting novel of adventure." In McGowan's Call, this talented writer explores the inner landscape of those who find themselves inserted in the personal crises of others. Rob Smith's short stories have appeared nationally in Writer's Journal and other literary magazines. In 2006, he received the Robert Frost Poetry Award for his poem Catbird. He currently resides on Ohio's north coast and sails the waters of Lake Erie on a sloop that he and his wife are restoring.

    Shin and Krashen report that children who read recreationally over the summer return to the school year with gains in literacy, while children who do not backslide. Independent, voluntary reading will occur--whether skilled or challenged--as long as children are given access to books of quality and interest. An informative but friendly narrative explains the research-based plan for designing successful summer literacy programs. The appendix includes activities, blackline masters, and advice for commonly experienced challenges, such as working with administrators on summer program needs.

    In 'Pangbourne' (not, in this instance, the place, but the name of an ape), a lonely woman allows herself tenderly to fall in love with a gorilla; 'Snap' is about a loveless one-night stand - and its ironic punishment. Two of the stories are ghost stories; and fans of Gardam's most recent novel, the bestselling Old Filth, will be overjoyed to encounter Filth himself and his ancient enemy and sparring partner, Veneering, among the umbrellas at a luncheon party on a soaking wet day.Jane Gardam is a writer at the height of her powers, well-known for her caustic wit, free-wheeling imagination, love of humanity and wicked powers of observation - as well as the hint of the bizarre and the surreal that she brings to her fiction. Her new collection of short stories is a delicious treat.

    But painful memories and ghosts follow Charlotte as she struggles to make a new life in a raw and rugged landscape. This powerful debut novel celebrates the power of storytelling as a way of reassembling the fragments of Charlotte's broken self and move her--and everyone she loves--toward peace.

    Unfortunately, however, during one such conversation, one man spots a gold Rolex watch on a TV soap opera's goatherd. This seemingly small absurdity sets off alarms: strange sensations of deception, distress, and incipient madness. The two men's uneasiness soon becomes a nightmare as the TV adventure advances with a real-life plot -- involving a mutant strain of killer algae -- to take over the world! The Conversations, a reality within a fiction within a parallel reality, is hilariously funny and surprisingly touching.

    Need something for your sister's wedding or your holiday? This work has the suitable gold lame number to suit your needs. It also includes 15 outrageous outfits.