The time is 1975. The place is an unnamed city by the sea. The government has just declared a State of Emergency, in whose upheavals four strangers--a spirited widow, a young student uprooted from his idyllic hill station, and two tailors who have fled the caste violence of their native village--will be thrust together, forced to share one cramped apartment and an uncertain future. As the characters move from distrust to friendship and from friendship to love, A Fine Balance creates an enduring panorama of the human spirit in an inhuman state.

    From the publication of his first collections, A Boy’s Will (1913) and North of Boston (1914), Frost was recognized as a poet of unique power and formal skill, and the enduring significance of his work has been acknowledged by each subsequent generation. His poetry ranges from deceptively simply pastoral lyrics and genial, vernacular genre pieces to darker meditations, complex and ironic.Here, based on extensive research into his manuscripts and published work, is the first authoritative and truly comprehensive collection of his writings. Brought together for the first time in a Library of America single volume is all the major poetry, a generous selection of uncollected poems, all of Frost’s dramatic writing, and the most extensive gathering of his prose writings ever published, several of which are printed here for the first time.The core of this collection is the 1949 Complete Poems of Robert Frost, the last collection supervised by Frost himself. This version of the poems is free of unauthorized editorial changes introduced into subsequent editions. Also included is In the Clearing (1962), Frost’s final volume of poetry. Verse drawn from letters, articles, pamphlets, and journals makes up the largest selection of uncollected poems ever assembled, including nearly two dozen beautiful early works printed for the first time. Also gathered here are all the dramatic works: three plays and two verse masques.The unprecedented prose section includes more than three times as many items as any other collection available. It is rich and diverse, presenting many newly discovered or rediscovered pieces. Especially unusual items include Frost’s contribution to John F. Kennedy’s inauguration and two fascinating 1959 essays on “The Future of Man.” Several manuscript items are published here for the first time, including the essays “‘Caveat Poeta’” and “The Way There,” Frost’s remarks on being appointed poetry consultant to the Library of Congress in 1958, the preface to a proposed new edition of North of Boston, and many others. A selection of letters represents all of Frost’s important comments about prosody, poetics, style, and his theory of “sentence sounds.”

    Written between the 1920s and 1950s, these sixty-five tales—eleven of which have been translated into English for the first time—display all the shades of Nabokov's imagination. They range from sprightly fables to bittersweet tales of loss, from claustrophobic exercises in horror to a connoisseur's samplings of the table of human folly. Read as a whole, The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov offers an intoxicating draft of the master's genius, his devious wit, and his ability to turn language into an instrument of ecstasy.The Wood-SpriteRussian Spoken HereSoundsWingstrokeGodsA Matter of ChanceThe SeaportRevengeBeneficenceDetails of A SunsetThe ThunderstormLa VenezianaBachmannThe DragonChristmasA Letter That Never Reached RussiaThe FightThe Return of ChorbA Guide to BerlinA Nursery TaleTerrorRazorThe PassengerThe DoorbellAn Affair of HonorThe Christmas StoryThe Potato ElfThe AurelianA Dashing FellowA Bad DayThe Visit to the MuseumA Busy ManTerra IncognitaThe ReunionLips to LipsOracheMusicPerfectionThe Admiralty SpireThe LeonardoIn Memory of L.I. ShigaevThe CircleA Russian BeautyBreaking the NewsTorpid SmokeRecruitingA Slice of LifeSpring in FialtaCloud, Castle, LakeTyrants DestroyedLikMademoiselle OVasiliy ShishkovUltima ThuleSolus RexThe Assistant ProducerThat in Aleppo OnceA Forgotten PoetTime and EbbConversation Piece, 1945Signs and SymbolsFirst LoveScenes From the Life of A Double MonsterThe Vane SistersLance

    Told and retold for hundreds of years, this young-reader's version of these folktales retains the original humor and wisdom, com- plemented by spirited, full-color illustrations by Don Daily.

    Andersen created intriguing and unique characters -- a tin soldier with only one leg but a big heart, a beetle nestled deep in a horse's mane but harboring high aspirations. Each one of us at some time, has been touched by one of Andersen's Fairy Tales. Here you'll find his classic tales such as: "The Mermaid, Thumbelina, The Steadfast Tin Soldier, "and "The Ugly Duckling," 38 of your favorite tales in all. This deluxe Children's Classic edition is produced with high-quality, leatherlike binding with gold stamping, full-color covers, colored endpapers with a book nameplate. Some of the other titles in this series include: Anne of Green Gables, Black Beauty, Heidi, King Arthur and His Knights and The Secret Garden.

    A few of the things which cross the path and mind of its narrator (who both is and is not Sebald) are lonely eccentrics, Sir Thomas Browne's skull, a matchstick model of the Temple of Jerusalem, recession-hit seaside towns, wooded hills, Joseph Conrad, Rembrandt's "Anatomy Lesson," the natural history of the herring, the massive bombings of WWII, the dowager empress Tzu Hsi, and the silk industry in Norwich.

    In the process, he transformed both crime writing and the American language.Written during the war, The Lady in the Lake (1943) takes Philip Marlowe out of the seamy L.A. streets to the deceptive tranquility of the surrounding mountains, as the search for a businessman’s missing wife expands into an elegy of loneliness and loss. The darker tone typical of Chandler’s later fiction is evident in The Little Sister (1949), in which an ambitious starlet, a blackmailer, and a seemingly naïve young woman from Manhattan, Kansas, are the key players in a plot that provides fuel for a bitter indictment of Hollywood and Chandler’s most savage portrayal of his adopted city.The Long Goodbye (1953), his most ambitious and self-revealing novel, uncovers a more anguished resonance in the Marlowe character, in a plot that hinges on the betrayal of friendship and the compromises of middle age. Playback (1958), written originally as a screenplay, is Chandler’s seventh and last novel.A special feature of this volume is Chandler’s long-unavailable screenplay for the film noir classic, Double Indemnity (1944), adapted from James M. Cain’s novel. Written with director Billy Wilder, it is one of the best screenplays in American cinema, masterful in construction and dialogue. Supplementing the volume, and providing a more personal glimpse of Chandler’s personality, is a selection of letters and essays—including “The Simple Art of Murder,” in which Chandler muses on his pulp roots and on the special qualities of his hero and style.

    But it is in her short stories that her extraordinary talents—as a fabulist, feminist, social critic, and weaver of tales—are most penetratingly evident. This volume presents Carter's considerable legacy of short fiction gathered from published books, and includes early and previously unpublished stories. From reflections on jazz and Japan, through vigorous refashionings of classic folklore and fairy tales, to stunning snapshots of modern life in all its tawdry glory, we are able to chart the evolution of Carter's marvelous, magical vision.

    This Modern Library edition presents Stephen Mitchell’s acclaimed translations of Rilke, which have won praise for their re-creation of the poet’s rich formal music and depth of thought. “If Rilke had written in English,” Denis Donoghue wrote in The New York Times Book Review, “he would have written in this English.” Ahead of All Parting is an abundant selection of Rilke’s lifework. It contains representative poems from his early collections The Book of Hours and The Book of Pictures; many selections from the revolutionary New Poems, which drew inspiration from Rodin and Cezanne; the hitherto little-known “Requiem for a Friend”; and a generous selection of the late uncollected poems, which constitute some of his finest work. Included too are passages from Rilke’s influential novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, and nine of his brilliant uncollected prose pieces. Finally, the book presents the poet’s two greatest masterpieces in their entirety: the Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus. “Rilke’s voice, with its extraordinary combination of formality, power, speed and lightness, can be heard in Mr. Mitchell’s versions more clearly than in any others,” said W. S. Merwin. “His work is masterful.”

    Authorities confine the blind to an empty mental hospital, but there the criminal element holds everyone captive, stealing food rations and assaulting women. There is one eyewitness to this nightmare who guides her charges—among them a boy with no mother, a girl with dark glasses, a dog of tears—through the barren streets, and their procession becomes as uncanny as the surroundings are harrowing. As Blindness reclaims the age-old story of a plague, it evokes the vivid and trembling horrors of the twentieth century, leaving readers with a powerful vision of the human spirit that's bound both by weakness and exhilarating strength.

    Authorities confine the blind to an empty mental hospital, but there the criminal element holds everyone captive, stealing food rations, and assaulting women. There is one eyewitness to this nightmare who guides her charges—among them a boy with no mother, a girl with dark glasses, a dog of tears—through the barren streets, and their procession becomes as uncanny as the surroundings are harrowing. As Blindness reclaims the age-old story of a plague, it evokes the vivid and trembling horrors of the twentieth century, leaving readers with a powerful vision of the human spirit that's bound both by weakness and exhilarating strength.

    A tremendously influential poet and dramatist, Beckett spoke of his prose fiction as the "important writing", the medium in which his ideas were most powerfully distilled. Here, for the first time, his short prose is gathered in a definitive, complete volume, by leading Beckett scholar S.E. Gontarski.

    A young woman visits her father following his nervous breakdown, and a devoted sister is profoundly unsettled by the sermon her brother insists on reciting. Whether in childhood or Vietnam, in memory or the eternal present, these people are revealed in the extenuating, sometimes extreme circumstances of everyday life, and in the complex consequences of their decisions—that, for instance, can bring together an innocent inner-city youth and a little girl attacked, months earlier, by a dog in a wintry park. Yet each story, however crucial, is marked by Mr. Wolff’s compassionate understanding and humor.In short, fiction of dazzling emotional range and absolute authority.

    The vitality of his writings and the unsettling power of his example continue to influence us more than a hundred years after his death. Now Robert D. Richardson Jr. brings to life an Emerson very different from the old stereotype of the passionless Sage of Concord. Drawing on a vast amount of new material, including correspondence among the Emerson brothers, Richardson gives us a rewarding intellectual biography that is also a portrait of the whole man.These pages present a young suitor, a grief-stricken widower, an affectionate father, and a man with an abiding genius for friendship. The great spokesman for individualism and self-reliance turns out to have been a good neighbor, an activist citizen, a loyal brother. Here is an Emerson who knew how to laugh, who was self-doubting as well as self-reliant, and who became the greatest intellectual adventurer of his age.Richardson has, as much as possible, let Emerson speak for himself through his published works, his many journals and notebooks, his letters, his reported conversations. This is not merely a study of Emerson's writing and his influence on others; it is Emerson's life as he experienced it. We see the failed minister, the struggling writer, the political reformer, the poetic liberator.The Emerson of this book not only influenced Thoreau, Fuller, Whitman, Dickinson, and Frost, he also inspired Nietzsche, William James, Baudelaire, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and Jorge Luis Borges. Emerson's timeliness is persistent and striking: his insistence that literature and science are not separate cultures, his emphasis on the worth of every individual, his respect for nature.Richardson gives careful attention to the enormous range of Emerson's readings—from Persian poets to George Sand—and to his many friendships and personal encounters—from Mary Moody Emerson to the Cherokee chiefs in Boston—evoking both the man and the times in which he lived. Throughout this book, Emerson's unquenchable vitality reaches across the decades, and his hold on us endures.

    Presenting three endearing favorites in classic children's literature, a Burnett anthology follows the stories of the contrary and curious Mary, the wise and brave Sarah, and the lovable young Lord Fauntleroy.

    The bestselling novels from the foremost philosopher of the modern age, this set includes Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead.

    Today her groundbreaking works, suffused with the culture and traditions of African-Americans and the poetry of black speech, have won her recognition as one of the most significant African-American writers. This volume, with its companion, Zora Neale Hurston: Folklore, Memoirs & Other Writings brings together for the first time all of Hurston's best writings in one authoritative set. "Folklore is the arts of the people," Hurston wrote, "before they find out that there is any such thing as art."

    A landmark gathering of short fiction, spanning the career of Zora Neale Hurston, author of Their Eyes Were Watching God, and "one of the greatest writers of our time."--Toni Morrison

    Whether he was profiling the rich and famous or creating indelible word-pictures of events and places near and far, Capote's eye for detail and dazzling style made his reportage and commentary undeniable triumphs of the form. "Portraits and Observations" is the first volume devoted solely to all the essays ever published by this most beloved of writers. From his travel sketches of Brooklyn, New Orleans, and Hollywood, written when he was twenty-two, to meditations about fame, fortune, and the writer's art at the peak of his career, to the brief works penned during the isolated denouement of his life, these essays provide an essential window into mid-twentieth-century America as offered by one of its canniest observers. Included are such celebrated masterpieces of narrative nonfiction as "The Muses Are Heard" and the short nonfiction novel "Handcarved Coffins," as well as many long-out-of-print essays, including portraits of Isak Dinesen, Mae West, Marcel Duchamp, Humphrey Bogart, and Marilyn Monroe. Among the highlights are "Ghosts in Sunlight: The Filming of In Cold Blood, "Preface to Music for Chameleons, in which Capote candidly recounts the highs and lows of his long career, and a playful self-portrait in the form of an imaginary self-interview. The book concludes with the author's last written words, composed the day before his death in 1984, the recently discovered"Remembering Willa Cather," Capote's touching recollection of his encounter with the author when he was a young man at the dawn of his career. "Portraits and Observations" puts on display the full spectrum of Truman Capote's brilliance. Certainly, Capote was, as Somerset Maugham famously called him, "a stylist of the first quality." But as the pieces gathered here remind us, he was also an artist of remarkable substance.

    His visits become lethally frequent as he struggles to provide for his wife and three sons at the height of the Cultural Revolution. Shattered to discover that his favorite son was actually born of a liaison between his wife and a neighbor, he suffers his greatest indignity, while his wife is publicly scorned as a prostitute. Although the poverty and betrayals of Mao's regime have drained him, Xu Sanguan ultimately finds strength in the blood ties of his family. With rare emotional intensity, grippingly raw descriptions of place and time, and clear-eyed compassion, Yu Hua gives us a stunning tapestry of human life in the grave particulars of one man's days.

    The Best Of Bob Marley & The Wailers 14 of his most memorable songs, including: Could You Be Loved * Exodus * Get Up Stand Up * I Shot The Sheriff * People Get Ready * and more. Includes lots of photos.

    The Bible According to Mark Twain is vintage Twain and is sure to surprise, delight, and perhaps shock modern readers.Description from back cover

    Diaz's work is unflinching and strong, and these stories crackle with an electric sense of discovery. Diaz evokes a world in which fathers are gone, mothers fight with grim determination for their families and themselves, and the next generation inherits the casual cruelty, devastating ambivalence, and knowing humor of lives circumscribed by poverty and uncertainty. In Drown, Diaz has harnessed the rhythms of anger and release, frustration and joy, to indelible effect.

    They have the power--the power of the word--to create a world of thoughts and emotions other can share. We only have to learn to listen." In a series of fascinating conversations with thirty-four American poets, "The Language Of Life" celebrates language in its "most exalted, wrenching, delighted, and concentrated form," and its unique power to re-create the human experience: falling in love, facing death, leaving home, playing basketball, losing faith, finding God. Listening to Linda McCarriston's award-winning poems about a child trapped in a violent home, or to Jimmy Santiago Baca explaining how words changed his life in prison, or to David Mura describing his Japanese American grandfather's experience in relocation camps, or to Sekou Sundiata stitching the magic of his childhood church in Harlem to the African tradition of storytelling, or to Gary Snyder invoking the natural wonder of mountains and rivers, or to Adrienne Rich calling for honesty in human relations, all testify to the necessity and clarity of the poet's voice, and all give hope that from such a wide variety of racial, ethnic, and religious threads we might yet weave a new American fabric."'Listen, ' said the storytellers of old, 'listen and you shall "hear," '" explains Bill Moyers. "The Language Of Life" is a joyous, life-affirming invitation to listen, learn, and experience the exhilarating power of the spoken word."From the Trade Paperback edition.

    Nozipo Maraire evokes the moving story of a mother reaching out to her daughter to share the lessons life has taught her and bring the two closer than ever before. Interweaving history and memories, disappointments and dreams, Zenzele tells the tales of Zimbabwe's struggle for independence and the men and women who shaped it: Zenzele's father, an outspoken activist lawyer; her aunt, a schoolteacher by day and secret guerrilla fighter by night; and her cousin, a maid and a spy.Rich with insight, history, and philosophy, Zenzele is a powerful and compelling story that is both revolutionary and revelatory--the story of one life that poignantly speaks of all lives.

     In 1950, Constantine Stassos, a Greek immigrant laborer, marries Mary Cuccio, an Italian-American girl, and together they produce three children: Susan, an ambitious beauty, Billy, a brilliant homosexual, and Zoe, a wild child. Over the years, a web of tangled longings, love, inadequacies and unfulfilled dreams unfolds as Mary and Constantine's marriage fails and Susan, Billy, and Zoe leave to make families of their own. Zoe raises a child with the help of a transvestite, Billy makes a life with another man, and Susan raises a son conceived in secret, each extending the meaning of family and love. With the power of a Greek tragedy, the story builds to a heartbreaking crescendo, allowing a glimpse into contemporary life which will echo in one's heart for years to come.

    Olivia Laguni is half-Chinese, but typically American in her uneasiness with her patchwork family. And no one in Olivia's family is more embarrassing to her than her half-sister, Kwan Li. For Kwan speaks mangled English, is cheerfully deaf to Olivia's sarcasm, and sees the dead with her "yin eyes."Even as Olivia details the particulars of her decades-long grudge against her sister (who, among other things, is a source of infuriatingly good advice), Kwan Li is telling her own story, one that sweeps us into the splendor, squalor, and violence of Manchu China. And out of the friction between her narrators, Amy Tan creates a work that illuminates both the present and the past sweetly, sadly, hilariously, with searing and vivid prose.

    "The Portable Jack Kerouac" is an essential introduction to one of this country's most important modern writers.

    Non-fiction.

    This is a novel by the author of Hold Tight.

    Among his best-loved works are "The Raven" with its hypnotic chant of "nevermore, " and the sensuous and lyrical "Annabel Lee." This collection includes all of Poe's most popular rhymes.

    The Lost Scrapbook is a novel that passionately captures the contradictory richness of our historical slot, a time when feelings of belonging and exclusion can do bitter battle. Conjuring an unforgettable variety of voices, the book delves into lives touched by this tension, before it culminates in a confrontation between a trusting city and the local manufacturing company that both sustains and betrays it. Through the use of a prismatic storytelling form, The Lost Scrapbook finds a contemporary answer to the 19th century novel, evoking an entire world in all its richness and diversity. But by embodying the sense that we can best understand our world through witnessing the interworkings of whole communities, it is also something altogether new: The Lost Scrapbook may be the first "holistic" novel.

    Inspired by this gift, Thomas forms Coyote Springs, an all-Indian Catholic band who find themselves on a magical tour that leads from reservation bars to Seattle and New York--and deep within their own souls.

    Callahan, this Modern Library Paperback Classic includes posthumously discovered reviews, criticism, and interviews, as well as the essay collections Shadow and Act (1964), hailed by Robert Penn Warren as “a body of cogent and subtle commentary on the questions that focus on race,” and Going to the Territory (1986), an exploration of literature and folklore, jazz and culture, and the nature and quality of lives that black Americans lead. “Ralph Ellison,” wrote Stanley Crouch, “reached across race, religion, class and sex to make us all Americans.”

    Together, they make up what William Maxwell calls "a Natural History of home."Whether he is writing about a small town in turn-of-the-century Illinois or a precariously balanced enclave of the good life on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, Maxwell has the power to immerse us completely in his fictional worlds and to elicit our allegiance to his characters. The paper boy plying his route (and anxiously contemplating his awakening sexuality) under the all-seeing eye of God; the couple who come home one Christmas Day to find their home ransacked by burglars; the American tourist traveling through a France that has changed irreparably since his last visit --- as told by William Maxwell, their stories become our own, at once fresh and familiar, unsettling and deeply comforting. ~ from back cover of softcover edition

    Unrelenting and empathetic, casting light into the darker caverns of our collective psyche, Savage Art is an exemplary homage to an American original. A National Book Critics Circle Award winner. 57 photos.

    An English teacher at the naval academy, he is married to a woman young enough to be his daughter and has a little son whom he loves. He sits in a mountain garden in Niterói, overlooking the ocean.As he reminisces and writes, placing the pages carefully in his antproof case, we learn that he was a World War II ace who was shot down twice, an investment banker who met with popes and presidents, and a man who was never not in love. He was the thief of the century, a murderer, and a protector of the innocent. And all his life he waged a valiant, losing, one-man battle against the world’s most insidious enslaver: coffee.Mark Helprin combines adventure, satire, flights of transcendence, and high comedy in this "memoir" of a man whose life reads like the song of the twentieth century.

    There he meets the world-wise Lord Henry Wotton, whose hedonistic and cynical view of life is dramatically different from that of the more earnest Hallward. The two men spar in a witty war of words, and Dorian feels inexorably drawn to Wotton's philosophy of youthful pleasure and amorality. As Hallward completes his portrait, Dorian wishes that he could always remain youthful-and that the painting could bear the burdens of the advancing years. Wilde's tale takes the reader into a world in which such things are possible. We meet the unaging Dorian Gray at his leisure, taking advantage of his ability to charm all those around him, and taking his pleasures without heed of the consequences. But one day, after a rash act of cruelty to the woman who loves him, Dorian notices that something in his portrait has changed--a cruel smile has twisted its once-perfect lips. Adding touches of the gothic and the supernatural to his satiric depiction of upper-class British life, Wilde creates a classic modern myth: the handsome young aristocrat, who remains beautiful while his portrait, the mirror of his soul, withers.Also included in this volume are "Lord Arthur Savile's Crime," "The Canterville Ghost," "The Sphinx Without a Secret," and "The Model Millionaire," which together comprise the most important of Wilde's short fiction.

    A shock wave breaks over the Oval as its longtime members grapple with the changing face of its community.With elegant, luminous prose, Dorothy West crowns her literary career by illustrating one family's struggle to break the shackles of race and class.

    Mara is an angry and intelligent young woman who undertakes a theology degree to explore her unresolved relationship with her vicar father and deceased sister, who died mysteriously in an extreme religious community.

    This heartbreaking novel from award-winning Mississippi writer Lewis Nordan is a meditation upon guns and love, all kinds of love -between fathers and sons, husbands and wives, gay lovers, friends.

    As the book cinematically moves from one character's perspective to another, events and characters move toward the convergence of the wedding--and a haunting dance of love and death.

    The story of a middle aged professor who, upon completion of his massive historical study, Guilt and Innocence in Hitler's Germany, finds himself writing a novel about his own life instead of the introduction to his magnum opus. The Tunnel meditates on history, hatred, unhappiness, and, above all, language.

    district attorney’s office finds a second home at Swanson’s Bar and Grille. Since his resignation from the D.A’s office, he’d done his best with small-time criminal cases. So, finding a place to drown his sorrows seemed appropriate. Lead dancer, Sally Sutton, kept the Mustang Club ahead of its competition. Fully packed until the lights went out, the Mustang Club was popular amongst business men and general party-animals. But ‘Mustang Sally’ hadn’t always lived her life in the limelight. Coming from a small Nebraska farm, her career aspirations had taken her along several small-time roles, before she was noticed. Sally was tight with some of the local police. Particularly Jim Rowinski, a SWAT team specialist who was gearing himself to becoming a homicide detective. Hot-headed and rash, he would do anything to get his way. When Joe Richards, a fifteen-year veteran is shot dead outside the Mustang Club, in Sally’s presence, Juan Javahn Thomas, notorious for his gang-banging lifestyle, is arrested. Homicide Lieutenant Tom Gallagher, Rowinski and Mary Delgado, the only female member of the arrest team, are present at the time of the arrest. To Solomon’s surprise, Judge Burton Lawler and D.A. Simon Lasker appoint him as the public defender in the case of Richards’s murder. Worse still, he was to go up against the prosecutor, Howard Ainsworth, the man who had taken his place as chief deputy, his arch-nemesis! In a bid to redeem himself, Solomon takes on the case. Ignoring all the insecurities that engulf him, he launches himself into the electrifying thrill of the courtroom. Working with his ally, Jimmy Johnson and going up against his former lover, Mary, Solomon’s task is taken up a notch. In the courtroom, as the trial unfolds, Solomon races against his opponent. Determination driving him, the details that unfold point to Sally knowing more than she originally let on. Bringing Sally back in under the heat of scrutiny, she breaks. It is all Solomon needs, yet the outcome is one no one was expecting…Prejudicial Error is a legal thriller filled with suspense that will keep you gripped until the very end. Bill Blum is an experienced attorney. Familiar with the ins and outs, and the pitfalls of criminal procedures, he presents a riveting, hard-hitting and authentic legal thriller, one that offers a fascinating insider’s look at the shifting political dynamics within the criminal justice system. Bill Blum has also written for a wide array of publications, including the Los Angeles Times, ABA Journal, The Nation and California Lawyer , hosted a radio talk show, and lectured widely. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and family.

    They are marked by coincidence and surprise endings as well as the compassion and high humour that have made O Henry's stories popular for the last century.

    You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.

    It brings together selections from Böll's earlier collections and some previously unpublished work. The chronological organization represents the entire span of Böll's career, from the stories of the early postwar period, to the masterfully satirical tales of his later years.

    The story told is of an expedition to the South Pole, led by a young, ardent American woman, Morgan Lamont - an expedition inspired and haunted by the tragic journey, eighty years before, of the British explorer Robert Falcon Scott. For Morgan, Scott's life, his dream, his death, and the very concept of Antarctic navigation are obsessive emblems of the search for integrity in a morally precarious age. Freed by her mother's quixotic and frightening sacrifice and the generosity of a hitherto estranged grandfather, she sets out to fulfil her own dream - to vindicate Scott by recreating his historic polar expedition.

    In his first novel since The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Chabon presents a hilarious and heartbreaking work—the story of the friendship between the "wonder boys"—Grady, an aging writer who has lost his way, and Crabtree, whose relentless debauchery is capsizing his career.

    Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina (1992) and Two Or Three Things I Know For Sure (1995) under one cover.

    Twenty-five years later, Theo Richmond set out to find what he could about that vanished world. He traveled across the United States, Europe, and Israel, tracing survivors and sifting through archives and the stories of those he interviewed. A project he thought would take six months took seven years. Finally he confronted the Konin of today. Interweaving past and present, Konin tells the story of one community--how it began, how it flourished, and how it ended--and in the process re-creates the precariousness, anguish and necessity of human memory."A fascinating memorial to a lost community and the people who lived there."--The New York Times Book Review"One reads [it] sometimes with a smile...always on the edge of tears--as if it were the most gripping adventure story."--Elie Wiesel, New York Newsday

    Semi-autobiographical novel from the Rudimentary Peni leading light plunging into the worlds of madness, suicide and anarchist punk. And it's a good read.

    Clayton was renamed "Tarzan" by the apes, and grew up in the wild without knowledge of his humanity. Both novels are classic examples of American pulp fiction, portraying Tarzan as the quintessential strong, wild, able-bodied hero.This elegantly designed clothbound edition features an elastic closure and a new introduction.

    Guðmundsson brings together past and present in this tragic story of the historic journey to Nýja Ísland, the world's largest Icelandic community outside of Iceland.

    Notable for their magnificent, jewel-like color illustrations by Bilibin, these traditional tales include "The Frog Princess," "Vassilissa the Beautiful," and "The White Duck." Though Russian Fairy Tales in the Pantheon Folklore Library is a book for adults, it has sold over 30,000 copies.

    Including: -- Interviews with key transgressive film-makers, including Richard Kern, Nick Zedd, Casandra Stark, Beth B, Tommy Turner, Tessa Hughes-Freeland, plus collaborators Lydia Lunch, Joe Coleman and David Wojnarowicz-- Studies of more recent film-makers including Jeri Cain Rossie, Richard Baylor, Todd Phillips.-- A brief history of underground/trash cinema: Any Warhol, Jack Smith, George & Mike Kuchar, John Waters.-- Notes and essays on the philosophy and aesthetics of transgression; extensive film analysis; index and bibliography.Heavily illustrated with rare and often disturbing photographs, Deathtripping is a unique document, the definitive guide to the roots, philosophy and development of a style of film-making whose influence and impact can no longer be ignored.

    These four took the nihilism of the movement to its ultimate conclusion, their works are remnants of lives lived to the limit and then cast aside with nonchalance and abandon: Vache died of a drug overdose, Rigaut shot himself, Cravan and Torma simply vanished, their fates still a mystery. Yet their fragmentary works - to which they attached so little importance - still exert a powerful allure and were a vital inspiration for the literary movements that followed them. Vache's bitter humour, Cravan's energetic invective, Rigaut's dandyfied introspection, and Torma's imperturbable asperity: all had their influence. This collection contains biographical introductions to each author as well as personal recollections by their contemporaries.

    Gustav Uyterhoeven left the chess garden that he and his wife, Sonja, had created together in Dayton, Ohio, and journeyed to South Africa to serve as a doctor in the British concentration camps of the Boer War. Over the next ten months he sent twelve chess pieces and twelve letters back to Sonja. She set out her husband's gifts as they arrived and welcomed all the most faithful guests of the garden to come and hear what he had written - letters which told nothing of his experience of the camps but described an imagined land called the Antipodes, where all the game pieces that cluttered the sets and drawers of the garden collection came to life to guide the doctor through his fateful and wondrous last adventure. Brooks Hansen offers a tale of spiritual progress disguised in the most exotic visions of the imagination. And yet The Chess Garden encompasses a very real world, too. Alongside the doctor's visions of the Antipodes, the story of his life gradually unfolds as well. History and allegory are expertly woven until finally both lead back to the chess garden itself, a place where ideas give way to vision, reason meets faith, and fact and figment are finally reconciled.

    Lily is a woman pursued by her own demons, "making off with the matches just when the fires caught hold," "a beautiful, mad genius, first introduced to us singing in her mother's belly." It is also the tale of people who dream in songs, two Irish immigrant families facing a new and uncertain future in turn-of-the-century Toronto. Finally, it is a richly detailed tribute to a golden epoch in our history and of a generation striking the last, haunting chord of innocence.The Piano Man's Daughter is a symphony of wonderful storytelling, unforgettable characters, and a lilting, lingering melody that plays on long after the last page has been turned.

    The author explores the imagination's twilit terrain in which love, lust and loss reside.

    He is also a compulsive storyteller and an exile. As he travels a route that takes him from India to Spain, he leaves behind a labyrinthine tale of mad passions and volcanic family hatreds, of titanic matriarchs and their mesmerised offspring, of premature deaths and curses that strike beyond the grave. The Moor's Last Sigh is a spectacularly ambitious, funny, satirical and compassionate novel. It is a love song to a vanishing world, but also its last hurrah.~from the back cover

    

    But who was this woman whose peccadilloes led to relationships of bigamy and incest, who freely offered her body and her husband's money to some of the most brilliant men of her era - including Henry Miller and Edmund Wilson and Otto Rank - whose desperate cravings for love, recognition, and approval from the intellectual elite remained unsatisfied until the end of her life?Deirdre Bair, who had exclusive access to Nin's complete, original diary and the full cooperation of her surviving husband, family, and friends, offers an enthralling portrait of a complex, perplexing writer whose most compelling subject was, unfailingly, herself.

    Displaying Snyders playful and subtle intellect, these pieces challenge commonly held attitudes toward the environment and local communities, and call for action to give moral standing to all beings.

    incl THE IRONY OF THE LEASH, SAPPHO'S BOAT et al

    In this new edition Joseph S. M. Lau and Howard Goldblatt have selected fresh works from familiar authors and have augmented the collection with poetry, stories from the colonial period in Taiwan, literature by Tibetan authors, samplings from the People's Republic of China during the Cultural Revolution, stories by post-Mao authors Wang Anyi and Gao Xingjian, literature with a homosexual theme, and examples from the modern "cruel youth" movement. Lau and Goldblatt have also updated their notes and their biographies of featured writers and poets. Now fully up to date, this critical resource more than ever provides readers with a thorough introduction to Chinese society and culture.

    Today, reading is largely a consumer activity, done for information that may fuel ambitions or careers -- and the faster the better. Take and Read represents Eugene H. Peterson's attempt to rekindle the activity of spiritual reading, reading that considers any book that comes to hand in a spiritual way, tuned to the Spirit, alert to intimations of God.Take and Read provides an annotated list of the books that have stood the test of time and that, for Peterson, are spiritually formative in the Christian life. The books on this list range from standard spiritual classics to novels, poems, and mysteries, and include an equally broad spectrum of authors -- from Augustine and C. S. Lewis to William Faulkner and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Annotations following each entry offer Peterson's own significant insights into the power of each work.

    

    Carrie Mullins a Kentucky bluegrass fiddler, falls for a heartbreaking man, loses her daughter in a senseless accident, and learns the healing power of music and daily routine from two caring, older women living on a drought-struck farm.

    Some 25 years after the poems were written Harp collaborated with clay artist Stephen Freedman to make the written poems visual in the form of sculpted, metaphorical clay vessels. This book is a catalogue which traveled with that exhibition.

    These dramatic readings and revealing analysis are quintessential work of literature of the 20th century.

    Set in the turbulent Three Kingdoms Period, the novel relates the clever political manoeuvres and brilliant battle strategies used by the ambitious rulers as they fought one another for supremacy.

    Identifies authors and works of world literature, defines literary terms, and offers brief discussusions of topics in literature.

    

    

    Twain speaks his mind on a variety of public issues and is especially passionate in his anti-imperialist stance. According to Twain's views on the human condition, the best to be hoped for is that we can be persuaded to rise above our selfish nature and work for the betterment of the community at large.

    This charming story is retold for beginning readers with full-color illustrations throughout.

    Here is the green and carefree world of a boy who delights in the possibilities of each day, of a child who wrings from every moment a feeling as intensely magical as it is profoundly innocent.

    His works are one of the greatest achievements of the human mind and spirit. And yet, for many of us they remain a closed book. Why? Too often, we were force-fed Shakespeare as adolescents-when our own dramas were all-consuming. The language of Shakespeare is 400 years old: even as adults, reading or seeing a play may seem like listening to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and missing half the notes.The crowds that filled the Globe to witness his plays in Elizabethan times enjoyed his words easily. Perhaps we've forgotten how to listen to his language, and we approach his works unaware of the larger cultural, political, and spiritual context that give them their full, rich meaning. Professor Peter Saccio is well suited to bring you back into Shakespeare's world, and tune you into what he calls "Shakespeare's wavelength." The Teacher and His PlanTeaching both as a lecturer and as a trained actor and director, and assisted by two Shakespearean actors, Professor Saccio brings the Bard's sonnets and plays to life with astute and passionate performances. As you hear him effortlessly deliver Elizabethan language with the proper meter, emphasis, intonation, and emotion, you'll experience the pleasure that comes with true mastery.Professor Saccio also prepares you to read or watch the plays by orienting you to Shakespeare's use of multiple plots, lines of action, and the sometimes outmoded forms of human behavior-such as courtship in Elizabethan England-that arise in the plays.Pure Language, Pure Feeling Professor Saccio devotes two of his lectures to Shakespeare's sonnets, fusing an understanding of their technical elements (meter, rhyme, alliteration, pacing) with an appreciation for the torrent of variegated feeling that underlies them.The sonnets are often misunderstood to be an autobiographical narrative of Shakespeare's personal life. Actually, they are something much greater than that. John Keats praised Shakespeare for his "negative capability," his capacity to inhabit and explore multiple moods, emotions, and perspectives, without committing to one. Only someone of his level of sensitivity and imagination could write on one occasion: Kind is my love today, tomorrow kind, Still constant in a wondrous excellence ... and then fume in another sonnet: Th'expense of spirit in a waste of shame Is lust in action; and till action, lust Is perjur'd, murd'rous, bloody, full of blame. Love's LanguageShakespeare had much more to say about love than could be contained in the space of a sonnet. Professor Saccio shows how he used comedies, romances, and even tragedies to reflect on love's every facet: In A Midsummer Night's Dream, the characters' speeches reveal love as absurd, irrational, changeable, wonderful, and dangerous. The characters woo in a distant forest, away from society, lest their foibles undo the conventions of society. Amid piquant barbs on sexual politics, we find farcical spectacle, as the goddess Titania pledges undying love to the peasant Bottom, who is transformed into a donkey! The Winter's Tale explores the dark side of our passions, as irrational affection becomes unreasoning jealousy and rage. King Leontes destroys his family with rash accusations of infidelity. Repentant, he must seek the love that expresses itself in forgiveness, and that contains a touch of magic. As You Like It is a study of lovers themselves, and the different kinds that make the world go round. You'll meet the earthy Touchstone and Audrey, the witty and erotically charged Celia and Oliver, the Petrarchan formalists Phebe and Silvius, and our heroes Rosalind and Orlando, who know love is madness, but embrace the sweet nonsense nonetheless. Action and the Meaning of HistoryShakespeare was acutely aware of the importance of history, and not just of events but of ideas. His tragedies and histories are meditations on the changing world around him, and of the eternal issues of character and human nature. Professor Saccio closely examines this world where actions and ideas intersect, and raises profound and unexpected questions: Richard III is a classic villain, but somewhat disturbingly, also a Renaissance figure. Schooled in Machiavellian tactics of self-promotion, deception, and betrayal, he is a cautionary example of what it means to be a "self-made" man. Yet he says he is "determinate" to be a villain. Is this a Calvinist nod to the limits of free will and responsibility? Henry V is often seen as the anti-Hamlet, a man of action and a military leader. But is he, or any king, really capable of making his own history? The son of a usurper, he is oppressed by the weight of history, of expectation, and by his own overwhelming sense of responsibility. In a famous scene he tries on the crown of his dying father-but is this ambition or an attempt to wrestle with his own inexorable fate? Can a man be a hero without a cause or a country? In Coriolanus, Shakespeare takes the great ideal of the action hero-and complicates it. Spurned by Rome, Coriolanus turns against it, then comes to realize that there is no victory for a man outside his polis. He yields to his mother's plea to spare Rome, knowing that its enemies will punish his weakness. "O my mother," he cries, "You have won a happy victory to Rome; But for your son-believe it, O, believe it, Most dangerously you have with him prevail'd." Of His Time, Ahead of His TimeOne of the great rewards of reading Shakespeare is the discovery of his relevance to our times. Throughout the course, Professor Saccio offers startling and novel analyses of the plays, in addition to explicating more traditional views.For example, The Tempest is widely remembered as Shakespeare's curtain call, a last display of his poetic magic before leaving the stage, with the wizard Prospero acting as Shakespeare's double. But the play also wrestled with many contemporary issues. It was written at the height of the Age of Exploration, and Shakespeare made use of reports from the Island of Bermuda and the Virginia Colony. It can be seen as a critique of colonization and European rapacity, of modern man's capacity to alter and exploit nature. Prospero's effort to tutor the native Caliban strongly echoes the civilizing mission of many European colonizers.To read Shakespeare is to take a daunting journey into a perpetually undiscovered country that reinvents itself with every visit. But with Professor Saccio as your guide, it will become a familiar pleasure. To quote Caliban: Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises, Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not. Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments Will hum about mine ears ... The clouds methought would open and show riches Ready to drop upon me that, when I waked, I cried to dream again.

    Wandering away into the night, with no memory, she can only utter the words, "I am". She ultimately arrives at the home of a couple whose only daughter has disappeared, setting in motion a tale of loss and redemption.

    TEN AUDIO CASSETTES (PARTS 1 NAD 2) OF DRAMA

    All of Marguerite Duras's writings are suffused with the certitude that absolute love is both necessary (sex) ... and impossible to achieve (death). But no book of hers embodies this idea so powerfully, so excessively, as No More (C'est Tout), the book she composed during the last year of her life until just days before her death. No More is literature shorn of all its niceties, a shout from the depths of Duras's being, celebrating life in defiance of the death she knew had already entered her immediate future. In part, it is also Duras' raucous salutation welcoming death. No More is a collection of words as pure as poetry and as full-throated as a fish-wife's call to market her wares, a disturbing and lasting challenge to any reader.

    It offers a collection spanning 35 centuries, featuring poets from around the world including Sappho, Ovid, Rumi, Shakespeare, Whitman and Neruda.

    In Between Friends, a complete record of their epistolary dialogue which lasted a remarkable 25 years, the two intellectual celebrities trade ideas about politics, literature, and morality, and share gossip and intimate domestic details.

    Chickamauga is also a virtuoso exploration of the power of concision in lyric poetry--a testament to the flexible music of the long line Wright has made his own. As a reviewer in Library Journal noted: "Wright is one of those rare and gifted poets who can turn thought into music. Following his self-prescribed regimen of purgatio, illuminato, and contemplatio, Wright spins one lovely lyric after another on such elemental subjects as sky, trees, birds, months, and seasons. But the real subject is the thinking process itself and the mysterious alchemy of language: 'The world is a language we never quite understand.'"

    

    In this critical anthology, the first of its kind, editors Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris show magical realism to be an international movement with a wide-ranging history and a significant influence among the literatures of the world. In essays on texts by writers as diverse as Toni Morrison, Günter Grass, Salman Rushdie, Derek Walcott, Abe Kobo, Gabriel García Márquez, and many others, magical realism is examined as a worldwide phenomenon.Presenting the first English translation of Franz Roh’s 1925 essay in which the term magical realism was coined, as well as Alejo Carpentier’s classic 1949 essay that introduced the concept of lo real maravilloso to the Americas, this anthology begins by tracing the foundations of magical realism from its origins in the art world to its current literary contexts. It offers a broad range of critical perspectives and theoretical approaches to this movement, as well as intensive analyses of various cultural traditions and individual texts from Eastern Europe, Asia, North America, Africa, the Caribbean, and Australia, in addition to those from Latin America. In situating magical realism within the expanse of literary and cultural history, this collection describes a mode of writing that has been a catalyst in the development of new regional literatures and a revitalizing force for more established narrative traditions—writing particularly alive in postcolonial contexts and a major component of postmodernist fiction.

    He learns the ways of the jungle from the wise old bear, Baloo, and the great black panther, Bagheera. He is befriended by the faithful wolf, Gray Brother, and is carried off by the crafty Monkey-People -- only to be rescued by the mighty python, Kaa. And through it all, Mowgli knows that he must someday face his sworn enemy: the ferocious man-hating tiger, Shere Khan.Presented here in the author's preferred order are all of Kipling's thrilling Mowgli stories, as well as the beloved tale of the brave mongoose, Rikki-tikki-tavi. Brilliantly captured in eighteen lush watercolors by Caldecott Honor artist Jerry Pinkney, this handsome centenary edition will be treasured by readers of all ages.

    Includes The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle; Sir Gawain and the Carle of Carlisle; The Avowyng of Arthur; The Awntyrs off Arthur; The Knightly Tale of Gologras and Gawain; The Greene Knight; The Turke and Sir Gawain; The Marriage of Sir Gawain; The Carle of Carlisle; The Jeaste of Sir Gawain; and King Arthur and King Cornwall.

    The poems are gathered from Odas elementales (Elemental Odes), 1954; Nuevas odas elementals (New Elemental Odes), 1956; Tercer libro de odas, (Third Book of Odes), 1957; and Navegaciones y regresos (Voyages and Homecomings), 1959. This anthology is the most complete selection of Neruda's work to appear in English, in an excellent bilingual format featuring translations by Maria Jacketti, an expert of Pablo Neruda's work.

    Parker was a famed wit, writer and member of the Algonquin Round Table, the group of New York critics in the heyday of the 1920s.

    The Green Sea of Heaven is regarded as the finest English translation of his poetry. Elizabeth Gray’s translations are informed by her thorough knowledge of Persian and the Persian poetic tradition. This bilingual edition also includes two brilliant studies of Hafiz by Gray and Daryush Shayegan, plus helpful notes to the translation.

    This memoir, written dispassionately in the third person, is a lively account of the literary and political controversies of more than half a century. This book is as much a chronicle of the confusion and perplexities of the twentieth century as it is an autobiography. Philosophical insights and religious observations abound. Its portraits of Henry Ford, the Earl of Crawford, Flannery O'Connor, the Archduke Otto von Habsburg, T. S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, Donald Davidson, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and other notables are unparalleled.

    In Virginia Woolf A-Z, the author's works and autobiographical writings are set in the context of her infamous social milieu. Eight family trees map out the complicated relationships and living arrangements of the Bloomsbury Group, and a chronology gives a quick overview of the major events of Woolf's life. With over 1,300 entries and fifty illustrations, this desktop companion is the ideal antidote to those afraid of Virginia Woolf, and valuable beyond measure to those already familiar with her work.

    This bilingual edition includes an introduction by Heine scholar Jeffrey L. Sammons. The author aims to capture the meaning of the original, but preserve the poems' rhyme schemes as well as their moods.

    Poems: Donne contains Songs and Sonnets, Letters to the Countess of Bedford, The First Anniversary, Holy Sonnets, Divine Poems, excerpts from Paradoxes and Problems, Ignatius His Conclave, The Sermons, Essays and Devotions, and an index of first lines.

    Comprehensive and scholarly, this well-designed and class-tested text presents Greek and Roman myths in a lively and easy-to-read manner. It features fresh translations, numerous illustrations (ancient and modern) of classical myths and legends, and commentary that emphasizes the anthropological, historical, religious, sociological, and economic contexts in which the myths were told. It also provides a cultural context so that students can see how mythology has influenced the world and how it continues to influence society today.

    But in Agustn Rejas he has an indefatigable pursuer. From secluded city streets to the paths of a mountain village the policeman persists, tracking and anticipating Ezequiel's every move. Rejas' only reprieve is his love for his daughter's beautiful dance teacher--until he begins to pick up unmistakable signals that her circles--and Ezequiel's--intersect.Based on the extraordinary manhunt for the leader of Peru's notorious guerilla organization, The Shining Path, The Dancer Upstairs is a story reminiscent of Graham Greene and John LeCarr--tense, intricate, and heartbreaking.

    The book draws from the fields of seismology and structural engineering to present a broad, interdiciplinary view of the fundamental concepts in seismology, geotechnical engineering, and structural engineering.

    Named to the College de France in 1981 to fill the chair left vacant by the death of Roland Barthes, Bonnefoy was the first poet honored in this way since Paul Valery. Winner of many awards, including the Prix Goncourt in 1987 and the Hudson Review's Bennett Award in 1988, he is the author of six critically acclaimed books of poetry.Spanning four decades and drawing on all of Bonnefoy's major collections, this selection provides a comprehensive overview of and an ideal introduction to his work. The elegant translations, many of them new, are presented in this dual-language edition alongside the original French. Several significant works appear here in English for the first time, among them, in its entirety, Bonnefoy's 1991 book of verse, The Beginning and the End of the Snow, the 1988 prose poem Where the Arrow Falls, and an important long poem from 1993, "Wind and Smoke." Together with poems from such classic volumes as "In the Lure of the Threshold", these new works shed light on the growth as well as the continuity of Bonnefoy's work. John Naughton's detailed introduction looks at the evolution of Bonnefoy's poetry from the 1953 publication of "On the Motion and Immobility of Douve", which immediately established his reputation as one of France's leading poets, through the 1993 publication of The Wandering Life and its centerpiece "Wind and Smoke.""This is a comprehensive selection that contains examples of work spanning [Bonnefoy's] full career of forty years, from the ground-breaking "Du Mouvement et de l'Immobilité de Douve" through the celebratory "Pierre Ecrite" to the magical winter landscapes of America's East Coast and an unsettling reworking of myth in the recent "La Vie Errante" . . . The translations, which are the work of a variety of hands, including Galway Kinnell, Emily Grosholz and Anthony Rudolf, nevertheless fit well together and all are sensitive to the register and subtleties of both languages, while the introductory essay by John Naughton expertly explains Bonnefoy's importance as a poet and the influences which have shaped him. This is definitely a volume worth having, for layman and French specialist alike."—Hilary Davies, Times Literary Supplement"Anyone not familiar with Bonnefoy's work will benefit from the background information and explanations given by John Naughton in his excellent introduction . . . . The book as a whole provides an excellent introduction to Bonnefoy's poetry and to his concerns of a lifetime."—Don Rodgers, Poetry Wales