When a small gallery exhibits partially nude photographs of Lillian and her daughter Samantha, Lillian is arrested, thrust into the national spotlight, and targeted with an obscenity charge. Mother and daughter’s sudden notoriety changes the course of both of their lives and especially Lillian’s career as she continues a life-long quest for artistic legitimacy and recognition. Narrated by Samantha, Feast Your Eyes reads as a collection of Samantha’s memories, interviews with Lillian’s friends and lovers, and excerpts from Lillian’s journals and letters—a collage of stories and impressions, together amounting to an astounding portrait of a mother and an artist dedicated, above all, to a vision of beauty, truth, and authenticity.ONE OF NPR’S BEST BOOKS OF 2019 2020 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence Finalist

    A writer who surpassed his contemporaries in vision, originality, and literary mastery. A man who wrote like an angel, putting it all so much better than anyone else.Is this Shakespeare? Well, sort of.But it doesn't tell us the whole truth. So much of what we say about Shakespeare is either not true, or just not relevant. Now, Emma Smith - an intellectually, theatrically, and ethically exciting writer - takes us into a world of politicking and copycatting, as we watch Shakespeare emulating the blockbusters of Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Kyd, the Spielberg and Tarantino of their day; flirting with and skirting round the cutthroat issues of succession politics, religious upheaval, and technological change. Smith writes in strikingly modern ways about individual agency, privacy, politics, celebrity, and sex, and the Shakespeare she reveals in this book poses awkward questions rather than offering bland answers, always implicating us in working out what it might mean.

    This book contains the complete novels of Jane Austen in the chronological order of their original publication.- Lady Susan- Sense and Sensibility- Pride and Prejudice- Mansfield Park- Emma- Persuasion- Northanger Abbey- The Watsons- Sanditon

    S. Lewis continues to speak to readers, thanks not only to his intellectual insights on Christianity but also his wondrous creative works and deep reflections on the literature that influenced his life. Beloved for his instructive novels including The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce, and The Chronicles of Narnia as well as his philosophical books that explored theology and Christian life, Lewis was a life-long writer and book lover.Cultivated from his many essays, articles, and letters, as well as his classic works, How to Read provides guidance and reflections on the love and enjoyment of books. Engaging and enlightening, this well-rounded collection includes Lewis’ reflections on science fiction, why children’s literature is for readers of all ages, and why we should read two old books for every new one.A window into the thoughts of one of the greatest public intellectuals of our time, this collection reveals not only why Lewis loved the written word, but what it means to learn through literature from one of our wisest and most enduring teachers.

    Drawing on the little-known American practice of incarcerating adolescent girls for “immorality” in the first half of the twentieth century, O’Connor follows young V from her early work as a nightclub entertainer to her subsequent six-year state school sentence for an unplanned pregnancy. As V struggles to survive within a system only nominally committed to rescue and reform, she endures injustices that will change the course of her life and the lives of her descendants. Inspired by O’Connor’s research on her unknown maternal grandmother and the long-term effects of intergenerational trauma, Evidence of V: A Novel in Fragments, Facts, and Fictions is a poignant excavation of familial and national history that remains disturbingly relevant—a harrowing story of exploitation and erasure, and the infinite ways in which girls, past and present, are punished for crimes they didn’t commit. O’Connor’s collage novel offers an engaging balance between illuminating a shameful and hidden chapter of American history and captivating the reader with the vivid and unforgettable character of V.

    In Essays I, Davis has, for the first time, gathered a selection of essays, commentaries, and lectures composed over the past five decades.In this first of two volumes, her subjects range from her earliest influences to her favorite short stories, from John Ashbery's translation of Rimbaud to Alan Cote's painting, and from the Shepherd's Psalm to early tourist photographs.

    Disregarding their feelings for the price their beauty will fetch on the Marriage Mart, he arranges a match for both. Lady Margaret, however, has her own views on the matter and takes her Fate into her own hands.Returning home after war to assume his responsibilities, Luke, Duke of Waverley, expects a nice, quiet life on his country estate. Within hours of stepping foot in England, though, he stumbles upon a young woman being attacked and no sooner does he rescue her than she runs away. His sense of curiosity is piqued and his sense of honour compels him to help her, leading him on a merry chase…Meg escapes the marriage, only to find herself at the mercy of others. Fortunately, in the soldier she cannot avoid she also finds herself in very capable hands. Only her uncle has a deeper reason for his actions and will stop at nothing to see his plans fulfilled.

    Lynskey delves into how Orwell's harrowing Spanish Civil War experiences shaped his concern with political disinformation by exposing him to the deceptiveness of people he'd once regarded as allies against fascism: the Soviets and their Western apologists.

    And while some of his journalistic writings have been made available over the years, this is the first volume to gather a representative selection from across the first four decades of his career–years during which he worked as a full-time, often muckraking, and controversial journalist, even as he penned the fiction that would bring him the Nobel Prize in 1982. Here are the first pieces he wrote while working for newspapers in the coastal Colombian cities of Cartagena and Barranquilla . . . his longer, more fictionlike reportage from Paris and Rome . . . his monthly columns for Spain’s El País. And while all the work points in style, wit, depth, and passion to his fiction, these fifty pieces are, more than anything, a revelation of the writer working at the profession he believed to be “the best in the world.”

    After her husband admitted to an affair and that a child had been conceived, he left her and their young daughter for his new family. Now, she’s finally ready to put the pieces of her life together. She’s set to launch her own business and even thinks her heart might be open to romance—should the right man come along. But just when everything seems to be lining up, she receives a devastating call: her ex-husband and his wife have been killed in a car accident, and Erin is listed in their will as their daughter’s legal guardian. How can she be a mother to the child—let alone love the child—who broke up her marriage? Does she have the courage to start over yet again and turn this mess into a mosaic of beauty? A single mother’s journey from bitterness to forgiveness.

    Wodehouse was an English author and one of the most widely read humorists of the 20th century. Wodehouse worked extensively on his books, sometimes having two or more in preparation simultaneously. He would take up to two years to build a plot and write a scenario of about thirty thousand words. After the scenario was complete he would write the story. Early in his career he would produce a novel in about three months, but he slowed in old age to around six months. He used a mixture of Edwardian slang, quotations from and allusions to numerous poets, and several literary techniques to produce a prose style that has been compared to comic poetry and musical comedy.

     Real Spanish people don’t speak like your textbook… so it’s no wonder you feel unprepared when it’s your turn to speak! This book fixes that. For the first time, you’ll learn to speak Spanish in the REAL world, with 101 authentic conversations in simple, spoken Spanish, so you can become confident in the words, phrases and expressions you need to communicate like a local. You’ll be transported into a real-world story that unfolds between six Spanish characters, told by the people themselves in 101 authentic conversations. Over 15,000 words of real Spanish, you’ll immerse yourself in a gripping Spanish drama and get an education in natural Spanish in the process. Here’s what you’ll get: 101 conversations in simple Spanish, so you can learn the real Spanish spoken in the street, understand spoken Spanish with ease, and have Spanish roll off your tongue more fluently Over 15,000 words of dialogue - an unparalleled resource that will immerse you in Spanish, at a level you can understand, so you can learn real spoken Spanish without getting lost or overwhelmed Real, daily spoken Spanish throughout - it’s as if we held up a microphone and recorded the exact words coming out of people’s mouths - so you can learn the expressions that real people use on the street (not in textbooks). You’ll sound more authentic when you speak and make Spanish-speaking friends more easily. Situational dialogues from typical daily circumstances, so you’ll prepare yourself to survive realistic Spanish encounters, in shops and cafés, and make meeting people and making arrangements second nature Conversations that are carefully written to be accessible for beginners (A2-B1 on the CEFR), so you can start to learn from real, spoken conversations, even as a beginner, without having to go through the rollercoaster of difficult conversations with strangers Each conversation is limited to around 15 lines of dialogue (150 words), so you can get that crucial sense of achievement and motivation when you finish each conversation, and say “I actually understood all of that!” Word lists with English definitions in every chapter, so you can get instant translations of any difficult words and focus on reading and enjoying the stories rather than wasting time in a dictionary Summaries of each conversation which contextualise each dialogue, so you can easily follow the plot and enjoy the story without getting lost The story is set in Spain and includes expressions that are typical in Castilian Spanish. However, since the conversations use mostly “neutral” Spanish, you’ll have plenty to learn, whether you’re learning the Spanish of Mexico, Colombia, Costa Rica, or even your local Spanish-speaking community! Created by Olly Richards, internationally-renowned language teacher and author, 101 Conversations in Real Spoken Spanish gives you an education in real Spanish that you won’t find anywhere else. You’ll be better prepared for using Spanish in the real world, speak with more confidence, and take a giant leap towards fluency in Spanish! SCROLL UP AND GRAB YOUR COPY NOW

     Both he and his boyfriend of 10 years, Ryan Harkness, assume they are waking up to a regular working day when their alarm beeps at seven a.m. They couldn’t be more wrong. Within minutes, Ryan’s life is at stake after wannabe gangster Darragh Galligan forces his way into their plush apartment. He informs them he will be holding Ryan at gunpoint while Vincent is tasked with carrying out a record-breaking heist. Vincent must visit the vaults of each of the four bank branches he manages to steal eight million euros. If he doesn’t follow orders, Ryan will be killed. He doesn’t have long. He only has until Midday. And the clock is ticking… "Lyons' debut thriller is neatly plotted and has a devastating twist in its tail." - Irish Independent

    Guernsey has been bombed, and is now occupied, by the Germans. A year earlier, young, naïve and recently married Helene, waved goodbye to her husband, who enlisted in the British army. Protected only by her father and Nanna, Helene must carve out a life on the island for the length of the war.Forty years later, her daughter Roz begins a search for the truth about her father's identity and stumbles into the secret history of her mother's life.As Roz discovers, the truth is hard to pin down, and living with the enemy is a messy business.

    She worries about her children, her dead parents, African elephants, the bedroom rituals of “happy couples”, Weapons of Mass Destruction, and how to hatch an abandoned wood pigeon egg. Is there some trick to surviving survivalists? School shootings? Medical debts? Franks ’n’ beans?A scorching indictment of America’s barbarity, past and present, and a lament for the way we are sleepwalking into environmental disaster, Ducks, Newburyport is a heresy, a wonder—and a revolution in the novel.It’s also very, very funny.

    Nelu escapes from his home and finds shelter with other homeless children in the caves beneath Bucharest’s spectacular concert hall. They call it “The Fortress”.Daniel is the son of a well-to-do Jewish family living in the heart of Bucharest. On the eve of WWII, Daniel and his family are forced to flee and take refuge in those caves with the help of the children.Daniel, Nelu and the other homeless children, find themselves united when facing the Nazi threat. For Daniel and his family, some of the children were nothing but a concept prior to the war, but now – no race or socioeconomic differences are relevant. In this reality they are all equal, bound by the need to survive. They must deal with hunger, poverty, and the imminent threat of death.The Nazi threat gets closer every day. Daniel and his family realize they need to flee if they want to stay alive. They all decide to escape, breaking up the group; embarking on a journey that will change so many lives. The fight for survival becomes the fight for their freedom. Some find themselves fighting alongside the ally forces against the Nazis, and some find themselves joining the Romanian forces that collaborated with the Nazi regime.Years later, long after the end of WWII, Lonel - a young child, finds himself alone in Bucharest. He is completely unaware that the fate of the entire group lies in his hands.Destiny is about to make one of its biggest moves. It’s up to Lonel to prevail or the struggle to survive will be forgotten.

    Here is a poet talking to you instead of around himself, while doing absolutely brilliant and outrageous things with language."--Publishers WeeklyStarred Review in Booklist "[C]hoices of poems from each of Harrison's books are passionate and sharp... Of special note is a section from Letters to Yesenin, a book-length poem, and the title poem from The Theory and Practice of Rivers , which contains these echoing lines, 'I forgot where I heard that poems / are designed to waken sleeping gods.' Reading this essential volume, one might imagine that the gods are, indeed, staying up late, reading lights on, turning the pages."Jim Harrison: The Essential Poems is distilled from fourteen volumes--from visionary lyrics and meditative suites to shape-shifting ghazals and prose-poem letters. Teeming throughout these pages are Harrison's legendary passions and appetites, his meditations, rages, and love-songs to the natural world.The New York Times concluded a review from early in Harrison's career with a provocative quote: "This is poetry worth loving, hating, and fighting over, a subjective mirror of our American days and needs." That sentiment still holds true, as Jim Harrison's essential poems continue to call for our fiercest attention.Also included are full-color images of poem drafts--both typescripts and holographs--as well as the letter Denise Levertov sent to publisher W.W. Norton in the early 1960s, advocating for Harrison's debut collection.In his essay "Poetry as Survival," Jim Harrison wrote, "Poetry, at its best, is the language your soul would speak if you could teach your soul to speak." The Essential Poems is proof positive that Jim Harrison taught his soul to speak."In this unforgiving literary moment, we must deal honestly with [Harrison's] life and work, as they are inextricable in a way that is not true of other poets...These poems bear-crawl gorgeously after a genuine connection to being, thrashing in giant leaps through the underbrush to find consolation, purpose, and redemption. In his raw, original keening he ambushes moments of unimaginable beauty, one after another, line after line...The Essential Poems demonstrates perfectly why we should turn to Harrison again. He lived and breathed an American confrontation with the physical earth, married himself to a universe of bodies and stumps and birds, did not try to shuck his grotesque masculinity and stared hard with his one good eye (the left was blinded when he was seven) at the inescapable, beckoning finger of death." --Dean Kuipers, LitHub"The Essential Poems provides a good introduction--or reintroduction--to the work of this singular writer... these pieces illustrate Harrison's range and his ease with various formats, from lyric poems to meditative suites to prose poems. They also spotlight his deep, rugged kinship with rural landscapes and the natural world, where 'the cost of flight is landing.'" --The Washington Post"Jim Harrison's latest collection, The Essential Poems, contains...engaging and enlightening poems [that] should be taught, learned, and loved. Remember this."--New York Journal of Books"Had he been a chef, all the other foodies would have talked about how Jim Harrison dealt with big flavors. In his poems, they're all there -- love and death, remorse and longing, the rocket contrails of living. There's not a lot of small talk in The Essential Poems... this book grabs you by the collar and tells you in eleven hundred ways to wake up."--John Freeman, Executive Editor, "Recommended Reading from Lit Hub Staff""Jim Harrison had an appetite. He devoured the natural world with gusto and wrote about it with wild energy and sweetly caustic wit...Harrison was also a prodigious poet, and this thoughtfully curated collection [The Essential Poems] showcases him at his best. Like his fiction, the poems observe the collision between civilization and the wildness outside our cities; they act like geocaches both harrowing and beautiful... Organized chronologically, the material here becomes a time line distilling Harrison's signature concerns."--Alta"It is hard-boiled poetry, some of the best of its kind, and one is not surprised to know that Harrison has written very tough novels... His poetic vision is at the heart of it all."--Harper's

    Although devastated, Eve is prepared to offer her love and support. But when the grieving mother discloses her theory that her son was secretly bullied to death at school, Eve is conflicted. Not at a prestigious school like Liberty, Eve is certain. Regardless, she agrees to do some underground (and possibly illegal) investigating—even if that means risking her career. After all, the pain of losing a child trumps that of losing a job. Eve isn’t the only one delving into secrets. Her son, Malik Hunter, is a sophomore at Liberty whose perfect life is a perfect lie. Behind his good looks, straight A’s, and the facemask of his football helmet, Malik battles a crippling depression. But someone sees through it all. Someone who reaches out to him on LibertyNet, the school’s online intranet. Someone who seems to know Malik better than he knows himself. Someone evil. Eve believes a cyberbully may be lurking in the dark realms of LibertyNet. Malik knows there is. Unless anybody in this household is willing to reveal their secrets, someone could end up falling over the edge … literally.

    At her family home, she tended both a small glass conservatory and a flower garden.   In Emily Dickinson’s Gardening Life, award-winning author Marta McDowell explores Dickinson’s deep passion for plants and how it inspired and informed her writing. Tracing a year in the garden, the book reveals details few know about Dickinson and adds to our collective understanding of who she was as a person. By weaving together Dickinson’s poems, excerpts from letters, contemporary and historical photography, and botanical art, McDowell offers an enchanting new perspective on one of America’s most celebrated but enigmatic literary figures.

    There's a whole chapter full of fun and games, including activities, jokes, and comics. Practical reference material, including fast facts and maps of every country, has been fully updated. Homework help on key topics is sprinkled throughout the book.

    99 to be exact. bleeding out to the backdrop of this new cartoon. a woodchuck in a tiny witch hat laughs at you, as you lay down, hands over your chest and think, 'perfect.' and a red light atop a powerline blinks in the distance to remind that there is no end, only one long try, deflate at your own pace. don't fight the freefall. 99 poems to cure whatever's wrong with you or create the problems you need. and yes, you need. im your fucking dad, honey. admit it, or we'll never get out of this alive.

    Drawing from the full spectrum of plays and sonnets to mark each day of the year, whether it's a scene from Hamlet to celebrate Christmas or a Sonnet in June to help you enjoy a summer's day. There are also passages to mark important days in the Shakespeare calendar, both from his own life and from his plays: You'll read a pivotal speech from Julius Caesar on the Ides of March and celebrate Valentine's day with a sonnet. Every passage is accompanied by an enlightening note to teach you its significance and help you better appreciate the timelessness and poetry of Shakespeare's words. Shakespeare for Every Day of the Year will give you a thoughtful way reflect on each day, all while giving you a deeper appreciation for the most famous writer in the English language.

    In The Anna Karenina Fix, Groskop mines these and other works, as well as the lives of their celebrated creators and her own experiences as a student of Russian, to answer the question “How should you live your life?” or at least be less miserable. This is a charming and fiercely intelligent book, a love letter to Russian literature.

    Young Thomas Randolph is thrilled to swear fealty to the rightful King of Scots, his uncle, Robert the Bruce and to fight for Scotland's freedom. But when the Scots are defeated at the Battle of Methven, he is taken prisoner, one among many ordered to be executed under the dragon banner. Saved from execution by a friend, he must swear fealty to King Edward or betray the man who saved him. With no choice, Thomas serves the English, but his heart is with Scotland. Now whatever he does, Thomas will be a noble traitor.

    As Whitney French says in her introduction, Black Writing Matters “injects new meaning into the word diversity [and] harbours a sacredness and an everydayness that offers Black people dignity.” An “invitation to read, share, and tell stories of Black narratives that are close to the bone,” this collection feels particular to the Black Canadian experience.

    A girl sins and expects a thunder to strike her. Two grown up souls in the rain. The twist of heart of a heartbreak motel’s founder. A doctor prescribes daily dose of “I love you”s to cure Alzheimer. A boy gets hit by Ugg boots multiple times. A chocolate prince turns to ice. The ocean girl and her secret meetings with the desert boys mother.

    All Day I Dream About Sirens is both an ancient reverie and a screen-induced stupor as these poems reckon with the enduring cultural fascination with siren and mermaid narratives as they span geographies, economies, and generations, chronicling and reconfiguring the male-centered epic and women's bodies and subjectivities.

    His essays on canonical writers (Gustav Flaubert, Herman Melville), recent legends (Don DeLillo, Marilynne Robinson) and significant contemporaries (Zadie Smith, Elena Ferrante) have established a standard for informed and incisive appreciation, composed in a distinctive literary style all their own.Together, Wood's essays, and his bestselling How Fiction Works, share an abiding preoccupation with how fiction tells its own truths, and with the vocation of the writer in a world haunted by the absence of God. In Serious Noticing, Wood collects his best essays from two decades of his career, supplementing earlier work with autobiographical reflections from his book The Nearest Thing to Life and recent essays from The New Yorker on young writers of extraordinary promise. The result is an essential guide to literature in the new millennium.

    In lyric, fragmented essays—full of geological, ornithological and photographic interventions, with landscapes, loss, and longing—Biondolillo travels the terrain of leaving and finding home while keeping her sights fixed firm on the natural world around her. Includes "How to Skin a Bird," winner of the Carter Prize for the Essay, and the Best American Essays 2014 notable, "Phrenology."

    She confronts a dying planet and an emerging sense of self, while men arrive with offers to save her from herself. Lerman refuses easy answers and searches the treacherous depths of desire, pain, and entanglement, asking readers if it is possible for a woman to reclaim her life and set its terms without succumbing to suicide or submission.Told in subtly experimental, sparse prose, and set in the American Southwest of today or ten years from now, I'm From Nowhere is a "breathtakingly honest, subversive" examination of the stories we are told-and the stories we tell ourselves-about identity, permanence, and love.

    From war refugees to corporate expats, migrants constantly reshape their places of origin and arrival. This selection of works collected together for the first time brings together the most compelling literary depictions of migration.Organized in four parts (Departures, Arrivals, Generations, and Returns), The Penguin Book of Migration Literature conveys the intricacy of worldwide migration patterns, the diversity of immigrant experiences, and the commonalities among many of those diverse experiences. Ranging widely across the eighteenth through twenty-first centuries, across every continent of the earth, and across multiple literary genres, the anthology gives readers an understanding of our rapidly changing world, through the eyes of those at the center of that change. With thirty carefully selected poems, short stories, and excerpts spanning three hundred years and twenty-five countries, the collection brings together luminaries, emerging writers, and others who have earned a wide following in their home countries but have been less recognized in the Anglophone world. Editor of the volume Dohra Ahmad provides a contextual introduction, notes, and suggestions for further exploration.

    Now, you can read his long-awaited first book. Harassment Architecture has been described as an almost plotless and violent march against what the author calls the "lowerworld". It's the story of a man, sick on his surrounds, bound by them, but still seeking the way out.

    . . eclectic. . . a feast' TelegraphThis landmark collection brings together forty writers that reflect over a hundred years of Italy's vibrant and diverse short story tradition, from the birth of the modern nation to the end of the twentieth century.Poets, journalists, visual artists, musicians, editors, critics, teachers, scientists, politicians, translators: the writers that inhabit these pages represent a dynamic cross section of Italian society, their powerful voices resonating through regional landscapes, private passions and dramatic political events.This wide-ranging selection curated by Jhumpa Lahiri includes well known authors such as Italo Calvino, Elsa Morante and Luigi Pirandello alongside many captivating new discoveries. More than a third of the stories featured in this volume have been translated into English for the first time, several of them by Lahiri herself.

    Combining his own traumatic experiences with moments of everyday redemption, the chapel will become his masterpiece.When Elsie Munday arrives to take up position as housemaid to the Spencer family, her life quickly becomes entwined with the charming and irascible Stanley, his artist wife Hilda and their tiny daughter Shirin.As the years pass, Elsie does her best to keep the family together even when love, obsession and temptation seem set to tear them apart...

    She marries him to escape. What does love have to do with it? When her father falsely accuses a stranger of dishonoring her, Bethel Eicher finds herself promised in marriage to a man she’s never met. Not exactly a dream come true, but since she has spent several years caring for her handicapped mother, she’s already considered an old maid at twenty-five—and she longs to escape her lonely life as permanent caregiver. When newly-called Amish preacher Gideon Kaiser learns he’s been accused of a dishonorable act, he's horrified. But his wife died in childbirth and his baby needs a mother, so he figures marrying a woman he’s never met could be beneficial. How can Bethel and Gideon possibly make their marriage work—especially when the truth behind the accusations is revealed?

     Orbiting a daisy-chain of fascinations that range from heritage & family to grief, music, & mental illness, these poems want to know what "home" means, even when the answers can seem too blood-bright to bear staring at. Yet do not mistake Melendez for a poet of an uncomplicated sadness: even when he writes of deep loss, there is the possibility of wonder & joy. Drawing from a wellspring of profound bewilderment present in his images as well as how language assumes--or is assumed by--form, Melendez knows poetry, like home, is something we carry with us in our bodies. Every certainty and every wonderment in Gold That Frames the Mirror is come by honestly and with Melendez's unwavering & tender scrutiny. Here is a book haunted by history but never in service of it. Here is a book that wants to know what comes after elegy, when the gods slink back into their heavens, when we are only left with the names of our dead & the good, dark earth. Melendez offers something like a prayer against overlooking the past & to remember where the gold came from. After all, "Anywhere can become you / once you forget / how you got there."

    The authors in this series take a panoramic approach to the topic of each book aimed at a non-specialist but enthusiastic readership. Forthcoming titles planned for this series include: literature, salvation, mercy, history, art, music and philosophy.In Literature: What Every Catholic Should Know, Joseph Pearce provides a survey of literary works of which all Catholics should be aware. Beginning with Homer and Virgil, the book progresses chronologically through the greatest works of all time, including Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Dickens, Chesterton, Eliot, Tolkien and Lewis.

    California Interest. Short Stories. With settings that range from the Cuban Missile Crisis and Soviet-era Perestroika to present-day San Francisco, LIKE WATER AND OTHER STORIES, the first English-language collection from Leningrad-born author Olga Zilberbourg, looks at family and childrearing in ways both unsettling and tender, and characters who grapple with complicated legacies--of state, parentage, displacement, and identity. LIKE WATER is a unique portrayal of motherhood, of immigration and adaptation, and an inside account of life in the Soviet Union and its dissolution. Zilberbourg's stories investigate how motherhood reshapes the sense of self--and in ways that are often bewildering--against an uncharted landscape of American culture. In Dandelion, a child turns into a novel and is shipped off to an agent in New York. In Doctor Sveta, a young Soviet woman finds herself on a ship bound for Cuba at the onset of the Cuban Missile Crisis. In Companionship, a young boy decides to return to his mother's uterus. Anthony Marra calls LIKE WATER A book of succinct abundance, dazzling in its particulars, expansive in its scope, and of these stories, Karen E. Bender says, they cast a clear, illuminating light on topics ranging from motherhood, the workplace, birth, death, ambition, and immigration, all explored through exquisitely wrought characters in Russia and the United States. Olga Zilberbourg is a writer to read right now.

    you were told you won't be accepted because you don't sound like everyone else... you want more choices than your world offers... you love a man you can never have ... you need to reconnect with the land you left behind? That is Margaret's story. Becoming Herself is the tale of a woman's road to self-discovery in the first half of the 20th century. It is as current as today's headlines. On her first day in America, seven-year old Maggie Clancy is placed in an orphanage by her grieving widowed father. She is told that from now on she will be called Margaret. Maggie will no longer exist. She will have to forge her own path in this new world of upstate New York. Her lovely singing voice provides her the needed entry. In an era when she loses the corset and gains the right to vote, Margaret struggles with balancing the roles of wife and mother with her longing to do even more with her life. She's a witness to the prejudices experienced by Irish immigrants and to Americans questioning the patriotism of their German-Americans neighbors during WWI. Despite that, she hopes and believes that man's inhumanity to man will lessen when women make their voices heard. Margaret embraces the changes and challenges of a world that's experiencing airplanes in the skies, radios in the parlor and women beginning to assert their independence inside and outside the home. Margaret yearns to find the Maggie who's been lost by returning to Ireland, the land of her birth. In Becoming Herself, Margaret shares her dreams, conflicts, and never- to- be-told secrets. It is the story of a woman searching to become all she is capable of being.

    A young cop morphs into obsessed lover and lust-crazed avenger. The Dahlia claims him. She is the deus ex machina of a boomtown in extremis. The cop's rogue investigation is a one-way ticket to hell.The Big Nowhere blends the crime novel and the political novel. It is winter, 1950--and the L.A. County Grand Jury is out to slam movieland Reds. It's a reverential shuck--and the three cops assigned to the job are out to grab all the glory they can. A series of brutal sex killings intervenes, and the job goes all-the-way bad.L.A. Confidential is the great novel of Los Angeles in the 1950s. Political corruption. Scandal-rag journalism. Bad racial juju and gangland wars. Six local stiffs slaughtered in an all-night hash house. The glorious and overreaching LAPD on an unprecedented scale.White Jazz gives us the tortured confession of a corrupt cop going down for the count. He's a slumlord, a killer, a parasitic exploiter. He's a pawn in a series of police power plays and starting to see that he's being had. He's just met a woman. Thus, he's determined to claw his way out of the horrifying world he's created--and he's determined to tell us everything.The L.A. Quartet is a groundbreaking work of American popular fiction.

    Throughout her travails, using cunning and shrewdness, Esther relies on her masterful tailoring skills to help mask her Jewish heritage, navigate war-torn Europe, and emigrate to India.Esther’s traveling companion and the novel’s narrator is Ganesha, the elephant-headed Hindu God worshipped by millions for his abilities to destroy obstacles, bestow wishes, and avenge evils. Impressed by Esther’s fortitude and relentless determination, born of her deep―though unconscious―understanding of the meaning and purpose of love, Ganesha, with compassion, insight, and poetry, chooses to highlight her story because he recognizes it is all of our stories―for truth resides at the essence of its telling.Weaving Eastern beliefs and perspectives with Western realities and pragmatism, Guesthouse for Ganesha is a tale of love, loss, and spirit reclaimed.

    In 2011, the award-winning essayist died from a rare form of cancer at age 36, just as his career was beginning to take off. Thanks to the work of students in the creative writing program at DePaul University, his gripping memoir is now published for the first time. The son of an undocumented Mexican immigrant ,Torch struggled with addiction before becoming a teacher at a high school in a largely Latino community on Chicago's Lower West Side. His unflinching memoir focuses on the murder of a star student at that school - a symbol of the overwhelming challenges sons and daughters of immigrants face as they attempt to find a place in the larger society. What does it mean to be an American? And how does a person gain (or fail to gain) that identity? Although Rafael Torch wrote The Garcia Boy 15 years ago, the questions he poses are more important than ever.

    In a search for truth in all its guises, he dispenses with the rules of genre. For him, no form is out of reach: Theology, historiography, reportage, and memoir--among many others--are fused under the pressure of an inimitable combination of passion, curiosity, and intellect that has made Carrère one of our most distinctive and important literary voices today.97,196 Words introduces Carrère's shorter work to an English-language audience. Featuring more than thirty extraordinary texts written over an illustrious twenty-five-year period of Carrère's creative life, the book shows a remarkable mind at work. Spanning continents, histories, and personal relationships, 97,196 Words considers the divides between truth, reality, and our shared humanity, exploring remarkable events and eccentric lives, including Carrère's own.

    Vague memories of road trips, skateboarding, the ocean, and ping-pong are all reconstructed in the shape of a barn and set on fire. We're not even sure they're poems. Maybe they are just: BARN. Go ahead, take off your shoes and drive off a cliff. The barn awaits.

     NoBODY Ruby Wilcox has always known that she has a rare gift for seeing things that others can’t. But she tries to downplay her psychic gift—until she experiences a horrifying nightmare that just won’t stop. Again and again, she dreams that a woman is abducted on the hike-and-bike trail and knows that the victim is in deadly danger. SomeBODY Else Ruby is spending the weekend as a vendor at the annual Mystic Creek Harvest Festival, held at a Hill Country ranch. When she begins to suspect that she knows more than she’s meant to know about a murder, she has to decide how to use this dangerous knowledge. Out of BODY It’s Halloween and Ruby is planning a busy holiday weekend at the Crystal Cave. But her holiday plans are interrupted when Jessica Nelson, crime reporter at the Pecan Springs Enterprise, shows up with a hard-to-believe story about a serial killer targeting the terminally ill. When Detective Ethan Connors gets involved and Jessica herself is threatened, Ruby’s psychic abilities are put to the test in ways she could never have predicted. Ruby Wilcox can see things that others can’t, but that doesn’t guarantee that she knows her own heart. What would her life be like if she honored her psychic gifts and found powers within herself that she had never imagined?

    Gut Text feels fear, pain, and desire. Within, you will follow four distinct personas as they form on the page, each seeking to transcend the limitations of their existence as they speak to you directly. In his newest release, Mike Corrao has created a challenging and unsettling exploration of identity, and the ways we see it manifest in the physical world.Each persona carries with it a similar desire, but a different means of striving towards it. Slowly the text begins to move, begins to change, correct its mistakes, and adjust to its restrictive ontology. Gut Text is not only alive, it is growing and learning. Witness the text creating itself, a parthenogenic conception.

    That love wins the day. That marriage is the rescue to an otherwise unhappy existence. That children are the natural progression of any relationship. But really, is it? Are we actually being honest with ourselves about the expectations we have set for ourselves? Are we able to distinguish between what we really need from life, from everything that we have been conditioned to want? Because the current rhetoric doesn’t prepare you for the reality.   In 2015 Poorna Bell became a widow after her husband Rob took his own life on a winter’s night, having battled depression and addiction. Her situation was unusual when compared to a lot of people, but she was left figuring out exactly the same things. Will she ever be happy? Will she find love again? Who will rescue her from her sadness?   Two years on and Poorna is rebuilding her life. And it is from this place – as she works towards choosing what she does and doesn’t want from society, that she will explore a different conversation around fulfillment and self-worth.Cutting across the landscapes in India, New Zealand and Britain, Poorna Bell explores the things endemic in our society such as sadness and loneliness, to unpick why we seek other people to fix what’s inside of us.In Search of Silence is the recognition of the echo chamber we find ourselves in, in terms of what constitutes a successful, fulfilling life. This is a heartfelt, deeply personal journey which asks us all to define what 'happiness' truly means.    PRAISE FOR CHASE THE RAINBOW:  ‘A candid, warm, sad, surprisingly funny, raw, brave, bittersweet book.’ – MATT HAIG   ‘ Chase the Rainbow is a game-changing book. Poorna Bell’s moving account of the pressures on modern men could be a life-saver. This is a brave and bold work that will inspire us all to talk openly and honestly about depression once and for all. Everyone should read this book.’ – ARIANNA HUFFINGTON ‘I recently devoured this book in a couple of days. It’s so beautifully written, honest and beyond though-provoking. I urge you to delve into its courageously written pages to learn about Poorna Bell’s story.’ – FEARNE COTTON ‘A story of love and loss and a vital contribution to the mental health debate. A great read.’ – ALASTAIR CAMPBELL

    It has everything I want and yet I really can't explain it. It's hurt shit. A laugh that ends with a turned head and a teary eye. Each poem sings for lost unknowns to come home. It's funny, straightforward, absurd, sad, and, ultimately, true in the way that only art can be . . . Say hello to the gay Rodney Dangerfield. Say hello to the Boom Doctor. Say hello to your first real boyfriend. Join me in welcoming this new voice. The Big Bruiser Dope Boy. One of the new wolves. May he forever huff and puff. We will never escape his cartoon."—Sam Pink, author of Person & The Garbage Times/White Ibis

    His never-before-published Stanford lectures on the Russian novelist's major works provide an unparalleled and accessible introduction to some of literature's greatest masterpieces. Presented here for the first time, these illuminating lectures begin with an introduction to Dostoevsky's life and literary influences and go on to explore the breadth of his career--from Poor Folk, The Double, and The House of the Dead to Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and The Brothers Karamazov. Written in a conversational style that combines literary analysis and cultural history, Lectures on Dostoevsky places the novels and their key characters and scenes in a rich context. Bringing Joseph Frank's unmatched knowledge and understanding of Dostoevsky's life and writings to a new generation of readers, this remarkable book will appeal to anyone seeking to understand Dostoevsky and his times.The book also includes Frank's favorite review of his Dostoevsky biography, "Joseph Frank's Dostoevsky" by David Foster Wallace, originally published in the Village Voice.

    

    How come her blissful life got disturbed by all but a gentle sermon?The handsome Piyush had the world at his feet and yet his world was empty!Meera, an IAS officer, was living her dream but why wasn’t she happy?Centuries ago, Ila the Playwright, found happiness in pursuing her passion but why was this a bane to many?What happens when your subconscious tries to pass on a message?Hurt and pain helped Madhav become a millionaire. How would be come to terms when he realizes that it was not him that was wronged but it was he who was wrong.Meera is a budding comedian, but a great tragedy befalls her. Would she be able to hold her own in adverse circumstances? Kapil found liberation in his quest for knowledge, but would his daughter follow his lead ?Explore Greed (via Manifestation of God), Unspoken words (via The Last Confession), Internal Conflict (via The Lost Meera), Self-Belief (via The Mysterious Playwright), Subconscious-self (via Three of Him), Love (via Madhav and Meera), Jealousy (via The Comic’s Tragedy) and Freedom (via Life goes in a circle).

    Mostly set in the rural Irish midlands, on a small family farm not far from the river Shannon. This book tracks the final years of Maleney's grandfather's life, and looks at his experience with Alzheimer's disease, as well as the experiences of the people closest to him. Using his grandfather's memory loss as a spur, the essays ask what it means to call a place home how we establish ourselves in a place, and how we record our experiences of a place. The nature of familial and social bonds, the way a relationship is altered by observing and recording it, the influence of tradition and history, the question of belonging - these are the questions which come up again and again. Using episodes from his own life, and drawing on the works of artists like Pat Collins, Seamus Heaney, John Berger and Brian Eno, Maleney examines how certain ways of listening and looking might bring us closer to each other, or keep us apart. Minor Monuments is a thought provoking and quietly devastating meditation on family, and how even the smallest story is no minor event.

    Reflections on our earliest beginnings and what is yet to come, with characters as diverse as a French speaking elephant and a cyborg warrior.Finding the right number of syllables for a Haiku, Tanka, Etheree or Cinquain focuses the mind; as does 99 word microfiction, bringing a different level of intensity to storytelling. You will find stories about the past, the present and the future told in 17 syllables to 2,000 words, all celebrating life.This book is also recognition of the value to a writer, of being part of a generous and inspiring blogging community, where writing challenges encourage us to explore new styles and genres.

    With good reason. Entire libraries have been written on the subject. Most people, even those familiar with his classic, do not realize that Dante Aligheri’s Divine Comedy, chock-full as it is of history and politics, is a masterpiece of spiritual writing. The most famous of his three volumes is the Inferno, an account of Dante's journey through the underworld, where he sees the horror of sin firsthand. Join Dante and—guided by Oratorian Father Paul Pearson—with him . . . -learn that the sufferings of the souls in hell are the natural consequences of the spiritual disorder of their sinful actions. -develop a profound hatred for sin, not merely because it offends God, but because it will destroy your soul and thwart your happiness, both on earth and for eternity. -observe the horrible punishments of the damned and be shocked into a state of enlightened self-interest. -armed with the knowledge of what sin does to us, resolve to fight against it with all your strength. -realize that this literary journey through hell is intended to lead you to heaven. A reading experience like no other, Spiritual Direction from Dante, will educate and entertain you, but most importantly, will help you avoid the inferno!

    But when an impoverished servant girl she barely knows comes and begs her to bring some justice to the death of a local boy, she is forced to face the suffering of the most vulnerable in Baghdad and the emotional and mystical legacy of her mother, a famed ecstatic whose love for God eclipsed everything. The Lover is a historically sensitive mystery that introduces us to the world of medieval Baghdad and the lives of the great Sufi mystics, washerwomen, Hadith scholars, tavern owners, slaves, corpsewashers, police, and children indentured to serve in the homes of the wealthy. It asks what it means to have family when you have nearly no one left, what it takes to love and be loved by those who have stuck by you, and how one can come to love God and everything He’s done to you.PRAISE FOR THE LOVERThe Lover #1 Amazon Bestseller “Completely engrossing and richly atmospheric. Tenth century Baghdad comes alive through the eyes of a dazzling cast of characters.”— Ausma Zehanat Khan, acclaimed author of The Getty-Khattak Mysteries“Dust and cool water; ascetism and the bonds of love. In 10th century Baghdad, Zaytuna is torn between the mysticism of Sufi practice and her need for connection to the world – and the reality of survival day to day. When a child dies in a fall, she must try to understand why, bringing her into conflict with both powerful people and her own brother, and challenging, too, her own understanding of herself and her faith.”— Marian Thorpe, Author of the Award Winning Empire's Legacy Series“Too often, narratives of women in Islam are told from the vantage point of the privileged, the women of the wealthy classes … this novel turns that narrative on its head.”— Safiyyah Surtee, AltMuslimahDr. Laury Silvers debut novel transports the reader to 10th century Baghdad, during the city's golden age when it was one of the largest and most diverse cities in the world. Her exquisite descriptions of the city and erudite knowledge of its historical denizens render real the people of Baghdad to the reader, whether pious mystics, cynical wine merchants, or frontier soldiers turned detectives. It's a great mystery and its faithful portrayal of Baghdad makes it a compelling read for anyone interested in the history of Islam and the Medieval Middle East.--Sherwan Hindreen Ali, a native Baghdadi and graduate student in the Institute for Islamic Studies, McGill UniversityThis is a novel that will both entertain readers and educate them about a wide range of subjects relating to intellectual, social and cultural history of the period in which it is set. It successfully weaves together fiction with meticulous historical research. --Michael Mumisa, Cambridge Special Livingstone Scholar With an informed, historical view of the spiritual atmosphere in medieval Baghdad, Laury Silvers has written an exciting mystery in lucid, gripping prose, bringing to life complex individuals of the past, moral agents both layered and conflicted. --Cyrus Ali Zargar, Al-Ghazali Distinguished Professor, UCF and Author of The Polished Mirror

    Selected by artist, writer, and musician David Tibet, this widely-sourced collection of supernatural rarities continues the bibliographic archaeology initiated with The Moons At Your Door (Strange Attractor Press, 2016), offering lyrical portals into worlds of strange beauty, elegant unease, and creeping decadence. Authors include Lady Dilke, Edna Underwood, Thomas Ligotti, L. P. Hartley, R. H. Benson, Walter de la Mare, Hugh Walpole, Colette de Curzon, L. A. Lewis, Edith Wharton, and others. The volume also features translations from Coptic, folk songs, and other surprises. Comprehensive biographical and publication histories are provided by noted scholar of bibliographic arcana Mark Valentine. There Is a Graveyard That Dwells in Man offers an unnerving, serpentine tributary to the canon of supernatural literature.

    As part of the deal, he demands custody of his fourteen-year-old granddaughter, Grace, who's survived a string of disastrous foster homes.Nate studied close-up magic during his time in prison. He's good, and despite her wariness Grace joins him for a touring magic show of New England. Nate's actual plan: to spend a few pleasant months with his granddaughter then run alone to Canada in hopes of undermining the case against his brother, who's been falsely accused of trafficking. Pressure comes from that direction, too, from the actual traffickers who have hijacked the family's legitimate, though secretive, connections to Eastern Europe and the Ukrainian village of Kortelisy.Facing certain violence unless he runs, distraught at the pros-pect of wounding Grace unless he stays, Nate must thread a dangerous needle. And Grace, learning to perform some magic herself, must grow up in a hurry if she's to save the only person she has ever trusted.The Kortelisy Escape is a moving, unlikely love story narrated in alternating chapters by Grace and Nate Larson. It's also a coming-of-age story enriched by mounting tension and large questions concerning magic, loyalty and wonder. It's a book for young and old, intergenerational book clubs especially.

    Allyson Clifford is running from her criminal, sadistic husband, Donnie Vossler, who wants to steal their son and teach him to live "just like Dad." When Allyson saves Matt from freezing to death on the doorstep of her restaurant in remote Castle Danger, MN, their lives are changed forever.Romantic sparks between Matt and Allyson prevent him from betraying her after Vossler shows up and sets his evil plan in motion. As a hitman closes in on Matt, he must decide between saving himself or saving Allyson and her son. Cut off from all help because of a blizzard, and racing the clock, can Matt save anyone, including himself?Buy Castle Danger--Book #2 in the Matt Lanier series--today and immerse yourself in a taut page-turner that will keep you reading all night. 2017 B.R.A.G. Medallion 2017 Honorable Mention, Writer's Digest Self-Published Book Awards 2018 Finalist, MN Writes, MN Reads self-published author contest

    Having grown up in a convent in France, Allegra despairs of ever living a normal life. Only finding the magical Sphere of Astarte will break the curse. Until then, her life will always be in danger. Fleeing to Bath, England, she meets the devastatingly handsome Earl of Hawksmoor who presents a different kind of danger to Allegra—one that could break her heart. A deadly deception Sebastian Fox, Earl of Hawksmoor, is an English spy, posing as The Messenger for the Legion of Baal, a nefarious group of men plotting to take over England and Europe through black magic, manipulation, and murder. They also search for the magical Sphere, for it will bring them great power. Sebastian has thwarted them at every turn, but now matters are dangerously spiraling out of control. When Sebastian encounters Allegra in Bath, he is immediately taken with her beauty and charm, but it is her courageous soul that leaves him in awe. Aware of the Auriano curse, Sebastian is determined to keep Allegra safe. But can he protect her from the Legion of Baal and evil Nulkana without revealing his alternate identity? More importantly, can he keep himself from falling in love? For that is a goal for which he is entirely unworthy. From award-winning, historical romance author, Patricia Barletta, comes Moon Bright, the third novel in the lush and compelling Auriano Curse Series.

    While having a pity party with her best friend, Jade, they come up with a daring idea. Together, they construct a Voodoo doll and with the help of several bottles of wine, create a ceremony to bring the same heartbreak to Daniel Winters as he brought to Claire. But do they go too far? You decide!

    She celebrates the experience of walking and sketching along the British coastline, often incorporating pebbles in her limited edition prints and paintings. Many of these feature in the book alongside a series of new images.

    For years, he's been able to meet the increasing demands from his aging immigrant parents, while hiding his crystal meth use every other weekend. One Friday night, as he's passed out from a drug binge, he misses thirty-eight phone calls from his father, detailing first the collapse and eventually the death of his mother. Carson has always been close to his mother; he was the only person she confided in when his father had a one-night affair with her younger sister twenty years ago. For the following two weeks, he throws himself into the preparation of his mother's funeral, juggling between temptations and obligations. Sometimes slipping into relapse, his efforts are thwarted by a stoic father who is impractical and unable to take care of himself, a grandmother suffering dementia, a sister with a failing marriage, and a young niece with unknown trauma that can be triggered by the sound of running water. He tries to find support from his ex, Jeremy. Now clean and sober, Jeremy rebuffs him. As Carson assumes his mother's caregiving role, her secret resurfaces and now haunts him alone. Will this tragedy plunge him deeper into his abuse or finally rouse him from his addiction stupor?

    

    As a memoirist, he opened up an entirely new way to think about the genre. As a novelist, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer. And as a theologian and preacher, he pioneered the art of making theology accessible for a popular audience. Yet for all Buechner's enormous influence, many readers today are unfamiliar with his work, or have read him only in one genre. In this book, Buechner expert Jeff Munroe presents a collection of the true "essentials" from across Buechner's diverse catalog, as well as an overview of Buechner's life and a discussion of the state of his literary legacy today. Here is Buechner in all his complex glory, ready to delight and inspire again.

    After a troubled adolescence and subsequent estrangement from her parents, Shiloh has finally come home. But while Lyle is thrilled to have his whole family reunited, he’s also uneasy: in Shiloh’s absence, she has become deeply involved with an extremist church, and the devout pastor courting her is convinced Isaac has the spiritual ability to heal the sick.While reckoning with his own faith—or lack thereof—Lyle soon finds himself torn between his unease about the church and his desire to keep his daughter and grandson in his life. But when the church’s radical belief system threatens Isaac’s safety, Lyle is forced to make a decision from which the family may not recover.  Set over the course of one year and beautifully evoking the change of seasons, Little Faith is a powerful and deeply affecting intergenerational novel about family and community, the ways in which belief is both formed and shaken, and the lengths we go to protect our own.

    From early notes to his mother, as an impoverished college student; to debates with the most distinguished American writers and thinkers of his time, including Romare Bearden, Saul Bellow, Robert Penn Warren, Richard Wright, and Alfred Kazin, among others; to exchanges with friends and family from his hometown of Oklahoma City, whose influence would always be paramount, these letters communicate the immense importance of Ellison's life and work. They show his metamorphosis from an impressionable youth into a cultured man of the world, from an aspiring composer into a distinguished novelist, and ultimately into a man who confronted America's many complexities through his words.

    Circling themes of intimacy and time, they return to the urgency of conversation: that fragile bridge across the frozen attitudes that divide our world. But at the heart of the collection is a deeper preoccupation, with those blurry places where humans might walk with gods, where the body might touch the beyond, where the enchanted might intersect effortlessly with the everyday. Where one stumbles upon what the poet simply calls ‘love without a story’.

     When the million-dollar stock prediction startup of Lakshya and Naman (two brilliant IIT-grads) tanks; they are taken in by Manav, their college friend who makes a living out of selling drugs. Debt-ridden and homeless, the two decide to help their friend in selling ‘The Holy Grail’, the newest drug in the Indian markets which is sold for margins never heard before, and the three end up making the quickest money they have seen. Lured and intrigued, they decide to sell and make as much as possible in two months before leaving the drug trade for good, and in that time, they expand their drug enterprise under Lakshya’s guidance by applying their startup strategies. Unknown to them though, they cross paths with the five infamous historical gangs of Bombay, who’ve survived and thrived since the British occupation of the city. Artavardiya, the powerful boss of the Parsi gang Surtis, takes interest in Lakshya and his drug enterprise after being charmed by his brilliance and vision. He takes him under his guidance and that is when Lakshya is able to gauge the extent to which the criminal underbelly of Mumbai is spread, spiralling down and knowing in his heart that he’d never be able to escape. In a tale of gang-wars and blood, love and loss, loyalty and betrayal, and mind-numbing revelations spread amidst brutal action and insane twists— explore the crime of the city that never sleeps. Will Lakshya and his friends expand their drug business like a startup? Will they succeed in dealing with mind-games and bullets of the five historical gangs of Mumbai? Will they survive the trials of their personal lives while the demons of their pasts try to catch up with them? And will these brilliant minds fall against the richest crime syndicates of the country? Read the crime-thriller that would keep you on the edge of your seats, about a few brilliant minds who lost their million-dollar startup and turned their skills to create a criminal empire.

    In times like these, when power spends blood like pennies, what chance do these disparate underdogs have to create an independent nation? Chance, no. Intelligence, daring, tactics, and magic, yes. A sweeping slipstream historical epic from Matthew Hughes.

    Though his writings and life-story continue to fascinate readers around the world, Mishima has often been scorned by scholars, who view him as a frivolous figure whose work expresses little more than his own morbid personality.In Mishima, Aesthetic Terrorist, Andrew Rankin sets out to challenge this perception by demonstrating the intelligence and seriousness of Mishima's work and thought. Each chapter of the book examines one of the central ideas that Mishima develops in his writings: life as art, beauty as evil, culture as myth, eroticism as transgression, the artist as tragic hero, narcissism as the death drive. Along with fresh readings of major works of fiction such as The Temple of the Golden Pavilion and "Patriotism," the book introduces less familiar works in different genres. Special prominence is given to Mishima's essays, which contain some of his most brilliant writing. Mishima is concerned with such problems as the loss of certainties and absolute values that characterizes modernity, and the decline of strong identities in a world of increasing uniformity and globalization. In his cultural criticism Mishima makes an impassioned defense of free speech, and he rails against all forms of authoritarianism and censorship.Rankin reads Mishima's artistic project, up to and including his spectacular death, as a single, sustained lyric, an aggressive piece of performance art unfolding in multiple media. For all his rebellious energies, Mishima's work is suffused with a sense of ending--the end of art, the end of eroticism, the end of culture, the end of the world--and it is governed by a decadent aestheticism which holds that beautiful things radiate their most intense beauty on the cusp of their destruction. Erudite and authoritative, yet written in clear, accessible prose, Mishima, Aesthetic Terrorist is essential reading for all those who seek a deeper understanding of this radical and provocative figure.

    Edgy, complicated, and often dark, they reflect a conflicted world, and their astonishing diversity and innovative language earned Chaucer renown as the father of English literature. Marion Turner, however, reveals him as a great European writer and thinker. To understand his accomplishment, she reconstructs in unprecedented detail the cosmopolitan world of Chaucer’s adventurous life, focusing on the places and spaces that fired his imagination.Uncovering important new information about Chaucer’s travels, private life, and the early circulation of his writings, this innovative biography documents a series of vivid episodes, moving from the commercial wharves of London to the frescoed chapels of Florence and the kingdom of Navarre, where Christians, Muslims, and Jews lived side by side. The narrative recounts Chaucer’s experiences as a prisoner of war in France, as a father visiting his daughter’s nunnery, as a member of a chaotic Parliament, and as a diplomat in Milan, where he encountered the writings of Dante and Boccaccio. At the same time, the book offers a comprehensive exploration of Chaucer’s writings, taking the reader to the Troy of Troilus and Criseyde, the gardens of the dream visions, and the peripheries and thresholds of The Canterbury Tales.By exploring the places Chaucer visited, the buildings he inhabited, the books he read, and the art and objects he saw, this landmark biography tells the extraordinary story of how a wine merchant’s son became the poet of The Canterbury Tales.

    This collection will take you by the hands and lead you as you travel through the seasons and into the lives of an assortment of folkloric creatures. Some of the tales you will recognise from childhood fairy tales, others will be unfamiliar, but in all of them you will find magic, nature and a deep-rooted appreciation for our wild landscapes and the creatures, real or fictional, that call those landscapes home. Tales of empowerment, tragedy and peace within nature combine to create a fantastical, vivid reading experience.SEASONS OF MAGIC is written by folklore-obsessed, adventure-loving writer Katy Who.

    It tells the story of William Stoner, who attends the state university to study agronomy, but instead falls in love with English literature and becomes an academic. The novel narrates the many disappointments and struggles in Stoner's academic and personal life, including his estrangement from his wife and daughter, set against the backdrop of the first half of the twentieth century.In his entry in the Bookmarked series, author Steve Almond writes about why Stoner has endured, and the manner in which it speaks to the impoverishment of the inner life in America. Almond will also use the book as a launching pad for an investigation of America’s soul, in the process, writing about his own struggles as a student of writing, as a father and husband, and as a man grappling with his own mortality.

    Ricks (Churchill & Orwell: The Fight for Freedom; The Generals; Fiasco; The Gamble) Kate Germano (Fight Like a Girl: The Truth Behind How Female Marines are Trained) Peter Van Buren (We Meant Well and Hooper’s War) Kori Schake (Safe Passage; Warriors and Citizens) Max Brooks (World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War) Jessica Scott (The Coming Home; Falling; and Homefront romance series) Carmen Gentile (Blindsided by the Taliban: A Journalist's Story of War, Trauma, Love, and Loss) Hugh Martin (In Country; Stick Soldiers; and So, How Was the War?) Robert L.

    In Ecstasy and Terror, Mendelsohn once again casts an eye at literature, film, television, and the personal essay, filtering his insights through his training as a scholar of classical antiquity in illuminating and sometimes surprising ways.Many of these essays look with fresh eyes at our culture’s Greek and Roman models: some find an arresting modernity in canonical works (Bacchae, the Aeneid), while others detect a “Greek DNA” in our responses to national traumas such as the Boston Marathon bombings and the assassination of JFK. There are pieces on contemporary literature, from the “aesthetics of victimhood” in Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life to the uncomfortable mixture of art and autobiography in novels by Henry Roth, Ingmar Bergman, and Karl Ove Knausgård. Mendelsohn considers pop culture, too, in essays on the feminism of Game of Thrones and on recent films about artificial intelligence—a subject, he reminds us, that was already of interest to Homer.This collection also brings together for the first time a number of the award-winning memoirist’s personal essays, including his “critic’s manifesto” and a touching reminiscence of his boyhood correspondence with the historical novelist Mary Renault, who inspired him to study the Classics.

    Think, Write, Speak follows up where that volume left off, with a rich compilation of his uncollected prose and interviews, from a 1921 essay about Cambridge to two final interviews in 1977. The chronological order allows us to watch the Cambridge student and the fledgling Berlin reviewer and poet turn into the acclaimed Paris �migr� novelist whose stature brought him to teach in America, where his international success exploded with Lolita and propelled him back to Europe. Whether his subject is Proust or Pushkin, the sport of boxing or the privileges of democracy, Nabokov's supreme individuality, his keen wit, and his alertness to the details of life illuminate the page.

    something out of its own time," "an urgent read for every person living on the planet," and "a poetic companion piece to Elizabeth Kolbert's The Sixth Extinction."A unique balance of the literary and informative essay, it appeals to anyone who loves classic and 20th century literature or philosophy, or is concerned about the environment and the state of the world.~ ~ ~Please Note: For now the book is only available onTheOrgasticFuture.com~ ~ ~What is The Orgastic Future?Is it a sustained tone-poem? A work of creative nonfiction? A hybrid? Cross-genre? A chimera? A narrative essay? A poetic narrative? A novella of sorts? A sociological treatise? A ‘gnossienne’ in the tradition of Erik Satie?Does it seamlessly blend essay, fiction, philosophy, spirituality, and even touches of poetry and humor?… Is it the first great work of literature of the 21st Century?Yes, yes, yes. No, no, no. It is what it is: what it had to be.Above all, it’s an insightful picture of our dire times—in a sense the literary equivalent of a Bruegel or Bosch painting.In incisive, poetic, and ‘metaphysical’ fashion, it looks at the interconnectedness and depths of consumerism, plastic pollution, climate change, plague, runaway ego, and other threats facing the planet. The excess of our modern world.It alerts the reader of the human-made dangers occurring right now and on the horizon, and the possibilities still left for humanity and the individual for overcoming them.It is the message the author felt compelled to sound to a faltering planet.~ ~ ~The author would like to note that he meticulously researched the science and historical-based parts of the book—particularly the section dealing with Plastic Pollution. Previously he had worked for several years in the Environmental Section of a grant-giving Philanthropic Foundation, where he was exposed to a lot of research in the areas of Environment & Health, which also informed his knowledge.

    It is also the newest classic in the canon of world literature. Lost for centuries to the sands of the Middle East but found again in the 1850s, it tells the story of a great king, his heroism, and his eventual defeat. It is a story of monsters, gods, and cataclysms, and of intimate friendship and love. Acclaimed literary historian Michael Schmidt provides a unique meditation on the rediscovery of Gilgamesh and its profound influence on poets today.Schmidt describes how the poem is a work in progress even now, an undertaking that has drawn on the talents and obsessions of an unlikely cast of characters, from archaeologists and museum curators to tomb raiders and jihadis. Fragments of the poem, incised on clay tablets, were scattered across a huge expanse of desert when it was recovered in the nineteenth century. The poem had to be reassembled, its languages deciphered. The discovery of a pre-Noah flood story was front-page news on both sides of the Atlantic, and the poem's allure only continues to grow as additional cuneiform tablets come to light. Its translation, interpretation, and integration are ongoing.In this illuminating book, Schmidt discusses the special fascination Gilgamesh holds for contemporary poets, arguing that part of its appeal is its captivating otherness. He reflects on the work of leading poets such as Charles Olson, Louis Zukofsky, and Yusef Komunyakaa, whose own encounters with the poem are revelatory, and he reads its many translations and editions to bring it vividly to life for readers.

    From gunpowder to opium, the East India Company uses every weapon to bring an entire sub-continent to its knees. Even Tipu, the fearsome Tiger of Mysore, falls prey to British military might. As a century of deceit and cruelty unfolds - the oppressed thirst for retribution. Delhi is the first to drown in blood, as a violent sepoy uprising engulfs all of Hindustan. The seat of the crumbling Mughal empire emerges as the epicenter of the ghadar. An unforgettable poet laments the destruction of his beloved city and a senile Badshah’s eyes gleam with unreal hope, as both sides of the Laal Qila witness terrifying bloodshed and historical battles. And amidst all the cannon-roars, brutal duels, intoxicated mushairas, ravishing courtesans, haunted treasures and bloody battles – unfolds the immortal story of the magnificent Mastaan & the beautiful Fay. Did one man really change the course of history’s greatest war for freedom? About the Authors Vineet Bajpai is one of India’s most popular and commercially successful authors. Counted among the 75 greatest Indian writers of all time, his books have touched the hearts & lives of millions of readers worldwide. A Nielsen chart-topping author, Vineet has written six books before Mastaan. His business and inspirational books Build From Scratch (2004), The Street to the Highway (2011) and The 30 Something CEO (2016) have been highly acclaimed. Vineet’s fiction novels, the best-selling Harappa Trilogy, sold over 1 lac copies within 12 months of release and are counted among the biggest blockbuster novels in the history of Indian fiction. Film-rights of the Harappa Trilogy have been acquired by one of the largest film production houses in India. A regular speaker at the Jaipur Literature Festival and other international literary events, Vineet’s books have been translated into several languages. Mastaan - The Fallen Patriot of Delhi is Vineet’s seventh book. ‘Vineet Bajpai... undoubtedly India’s new literary superstar’ - Times of India

    In the years (and decades) that followed, Granta established itself as the one of the most prestigious literary publications in the English-speaking world. In that time Granta has published 26 Nobel Prize for Literature winners, defined new literary genres and paved the way for generations of young novelists. To celebrate forty years of brilliant publishing, Granta 147 brings together our best fiction and non-fiction from the last four decades, along with a selection of letters from behind the scenes. This will be a collector's issue and is not to be missed.Featuring...Angela CarterKazuo IshiguroTodd McEwenBruce ChatwinJames FentonPrimo LeviAmitav GhoshRaymond CarverPhilip RothJohn Gregory DunneRyszard KapuscinskiJoy WilliamsJohn BergerGabriel García MárquezBill BufordLindsey HilsumLorrie MooreHilary MantelIan JackEdward SaidDiana AthillEdmund WhiteVed MehtaAdrian LeftwichAlexandra FullerBinyavanga WainainaMary GaitskillLydia DavisJeanette WintersonHerta Müller

    His prose flows. And single words are pregnant. The style he has chosen is concise and vivid.’ -Roberto VitaliThe world has evolved into a bowl of variety. And, Ladakh, in spite of sitting in a little crevice of the grand Himalayas, epitomizes the melting-pot of different cultures, beliefs and personal truths. In this collection, the author attempts to capture this cosmopolitan spirit through six of his short stories. He masterly pits visitors and locals, who seem to be of different species if not complete aliens, and teases them into unique situations and circumstances. Each tale, thus, weaves an interplay of peculiar characters entangled in unique settings giving rise to oddity, comedy and, sometimes, strange solemnity. In doing so, he crafts a varied feel and texture in his writing for the readers to savour, reflect and remember long after putting down the book.In 34 Degree Centigrade an English couple finds themselves in Ladakh when the feudal society was being initiated to modernity. What were their impressions of the hidden and mysterious region suddenly exposed to the world? Drop the pin, I dare sees a pair of aged and provincial brothers having a hard time hosting a young and sleek business consultant from New York City. The Tryst recounts a story of fate and life. An American woman loses her only son to a mountain. She visits the place in an effort to keep his memories alive. Nonetheless, at last, she reunites with her child but in an unsuspecting circumstance. In The Book of Horror a young waiter has an uncanny encounter with a Japanese who visits his café on a lonely autumn evening. Betty’s Butter Tea is about a nineteen-year-old Californian girl who marries a local boy. This unusual nuptial leads brows to either rise in suspicion or entangle in discord. Could she adjust and make the foreign land her home? The World Record redeems a man from Delhi of his actions. How soiling Pangong Lake, a sacred site, brought him to experience the waters once again but in a way beyond his imagination?

    Part song, part grito, part wail, part lullaby, and part hymn, Cuicacalli / House of Song is a multi-vocal exploration of time, place, and history.Song lives within and without the poet's physical and spiritual experience of body, of desire, of art, of loss, and of grief on an individual and communal level.Cuicacalli / House of Song sings survival, sings indigeneity, sings some part of the tattered world back together.

    If you are looking at this book, you probably already know a little of the author’s background, and if you do, this will add context. If you don’t, it isn't necessary. *The initial first press print run of this book was extremely limited, with only 1000 hardcover copies produced, which sold out quickly. A second pressing made available shortly thereafter, of 200 more copies, also quickly sold out.

    O'Donnell wrote with great sensitivity and poetic force, and his best-known poem is among the most beloved of the war. In 1970, during an attempt to rescue fellow soldiers stranded under heavy fire, O'Donnell's helicopter was shot down in the jungles of Cambodia. He remained missing in action for almost three decades.Although he never fired a shot in Vietnam, O'Donnell served in one of the most dangerous roles of the war, all the while using poetry to express his inner feelings and to reflect on the tragedy that was unfolding around him. O'Donnell's life is both a powerful, personal story and a compelling, universal one about how America lost its way in the 1960s, but also how hope can flower in the margins of even the darkest chapters of the American story.

    She celebrates the precision and musicality of Hazzard’s prose and illuminates the humour, humanity and revelatory impact of her work. This jewel of a book is both a wonderful introduction to Hazzard and a treat for her long-time fans.

    Lovecraft Historical Society has produced an audio recording of all of Lovecraft's stories. These are not dramatizations like our Dark Adventure Radio Theatre - rather, this is an audiobook of the original stories, in all-new, never-before-heard recordings made by the HPLHS' own Andrew Leman and Sean Branney exclusively for this collection. Working from texts prepared by Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi, this collection spans his entire career from his earliest surviving works of childhood to stories completed shortly before his death. All tales include original music by HPLHS composer Troy Sterling Nies. This audio bonanza features 74 stories adding up to more than fifty (50!) hours of Lovecraftian listening fun, professionally performed and recorded for your enjoyment.

    Illustrated with Briggs’s inimitable pencil drawings, Time for Lights Out is a collection of short pieces, some funny, some melancholy, some remembering his wife who died young, others about life with his partner Liz, the joy of grandchildren, of walking the dog… He looks back at his schooldays and his time as an evacuee during the war, and remembers his parents and the house in which he grew up. But some, like this one, are about his home in Sussex:Looking round this house,What will they say, The future ghosts?There must have beenSome barmy old bloke here,Long-haired, artsy-fartsy type, Did pictures for kiddy books Or some such tripe.You should have seen the stuff He stuck up in that attic!Snowman this and snowman that,Tons and tons of tat.

    Content : Unhappiness The Judgment Before the Law The Metamorphosis A Report to an Academy Jackals and Arabs A Country Doctor In the Penal Colony A Hunger Artist The Trial The Castle Amerika A Little Fable The Great Wall of China The Hunter Gracchus The Burrow

    Tom McIntyre is a worried man. Debts are piling up, his career is in free-fall, and his family life is under strain. Only his wife, Alison, remains unswerving in her support. Close to rock bottom, he clinches the deal of a lifetime before tragedy strikes, putting everything Tom values at risk. In the aftermath, a toxic mix of grief, substance abuse and blame lead to different paths for the family. Duplicity is a story of lost innocence, unwitting deals with darker forces, and fragile family bonds. Can grief, love, lies and hate be reconciled? And can Tom repair his fractured family and release himself from the pact he has made? What fate does he deserve?

    Then Dr. Finn Connelly arrives on her doorstep with his orphaned nieces—and her biological twin girls! Sophie had vowed never to risk creating another family, but Finn and her adorable little daughters start to melt the ice around her heart…

    What kind of circumstances provoke an obsessive focus on the most minute object or activity? And what causes such mania to blossom into the lethal conviction that everything must be annihilated? There is no turning away from the imperative to study this riddle in all its mystifying complexity and its disturbing contemporary resonance--to trace the obscure passage between a lone state of delirium and the will to world-erasure..A fragmentary catalogue of the thousand-and-one varieties of manic disposition (augomania, dromomania, catoptromania, colossomania...), Omnicide enters the chaotic imaginations of the most significant poetic talents of the Middle East in order to instigate a new discourse on obsession, entrancement, excess, and delirium. Placing these voices into direct conversation, Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh excavates an elaborate network of subterranean ideas and interpretive chambers, byways, and burrows by which mania communicates with fatality. Like secret passages leading from one of the multitudinous details of a bustling Persian miniature to the blank burning immanence of the desert, each is a contorted yet effective channel connecting some attractive universe (of adoration, worship, or astonishment) to the instinct for all-engulfing oblivion (through hatred, envy, indifference, rage, or forgetting).A captivating fractal of conceptual prisms in half-storytelling, half-theoretical prose, a rhythmic, poetic, insidious work that commands submission, Omnicide absorbs the reader into unfamiliar and estranging landscapes whose every subtle euphoric aspect threatens to become an irresistible invitation to the end of all things.

    The first one sees the people fleeing from war and persecution and asks, "Why here? Why my country?" It is a feeling many people share. It is one of fear and suspicion. But when you read the text the opposite way, a new voice emerges. It says, "Why not make them welcome? Why not share the things we have?" The world is undergoing a period of mass human migration. Whether this is caused by war, persecution or economics, the people we see on the news in those camps are waiting—waiting to live their lives. There are two sides to every debate. There are two sides to a wall. This story shows both sides of the issue with skill and the illustrations depict the issue in a magic realism style, powerful but never frightening, and will promote a deeper discussion on this topic with an older child.

    A crime. A secret. What would you do to claim the position in society that has been stolen from you? The ancient Claverton earldom is no more, because Lady Catherine Claverton was born a girl. Banished to the countryside as a child and forgotten, she lives her life alone and angry. However, upon her father's death, she learns that she is the heir to her dead mother's family title--and if she wants to continue her mother's line, she must marry, bear a child, and take her place in society, all things that she has never dared to think possible. Should she marry the kind but secretive Captain Avebury? Or the notorious Sir Lyle, the handsome smuggler? Both men have secrets. Both men deal very differently with honor. And Catherine has a dreadful secret of her own. The Portrait is about a strong woman, foolish decisions, trust, and the definition of honor. Fans of Jane Austen's independent women will recognize in Catherine a voice which will not be silenced.

    Within a single essay she might roam from Flaubert to the “scattering of desire” to the Holocaust; within the body of her essays overall, style is always evolving, subject matter shifting, as her mind pushes beyond the obvious toward ever-original ground.Me & Other Writing is a guidebook to the extraordinary breadth of Duras’s nonfiction. From the stunning one-page “Me” to the sprawling 70-page “Summer 80,” there is not a piece in this collection that can be easily categorized. These are essayistic works written for their times but too virtuosic to be relegated to history, works of commentary or recollection or reportage that are also, unmistakably, works of art.

    Woven throughout the poems is a narrative of his family's exodus from Vietnam that beautifully elucidates the American record of immigration, dislocation, inheritance, and ultimately hope. The poems are persuasively varied in their approach. The past and present, the remembered and imagined, all intersect at shifting angles, providing bold new perspectives. And, in a fresh move, Phan widens the lens, interspersing translations of several other contemporary Vietnamese poems to the mix. This subtle and moving debut is an important addition to the literature of immigration.

    

    It will show you what the Bible says about the One who came into the world—before He came into the world. You’ll  gain a full understanding of God’s story of redemption as you examine Jesus’s character as God, relationship with the Father, appearances in the Old Testament, and more.

    As a young man, Sholokhov’s epic novel, Quiet Don, became an unprecedented overnight success.Stalin’s Scribe is the first biography of a man who was once one of the Soviet Union’s most prominent political figures.  Thanks to the opening of Russia’s archives, Brian Boeck discovers that Sholokhov’s official Soviet biography is actually a tangled web of legends, half-truths, and contradictions. Boeck examines the complex connection between an author and a dictator, revealing how a Stalinist courtier became an ideological acrobat and consummate politician in order to stay in favor and remain relevant after the dictator’s death.Stalin's Scribe is remarkable biography that both reinforces and clashes with our understanding of the Soviet system. It reveals a Sholokhov who is bold, uncompromising, and sympathetic—and reconciles him with the vindictive and mean-spirited man described in so many accounts of late Soviet history.Shockingly, at the height of the terror, which claimed over a million lives, Sholokhov became a member of the most minuscule subset of the Soviet Union’s population—the handful of individuals whom Stalin personally intervened to save.

    RITUALS PERFORMED IN THE ABSENCE OF GANYMEDE takes the text beyond the physical, where the reader and text enter the search for a body that can contain you both. “Rituals Performed in the Absence of Ganymede’ is a book in perpetual motion, forming and informing cognition in and beyond time. A book whose language births the body of the new reader.”— Christina Tudor-Sideri, Author of Under the Sign of the Labyrinth“Mike Corrao has created a text that bubbles from the page and wraps itself around the reader. Upon peeling it from their skin, the paragraphs will continue to grow and morph, easily outgrowing and crushing the microscope that it has been placed under.” — Thomas Moore, Author of Alone

    This first volume includes the whole of Berry’s now classic book The Unsettling of America (1970) and thirty-two essays from eight collections published from 1969 to 1990: The Long-Legged House (1969), The Hidden Wound (1970), A Continuous Harmony (1972), Recollected Essays: 1969–1980 (1981), The Gift of Good Land (1981), Standing by Words (1983), Home Economics (1987), and What Are People For? (1990).In The Unsettling of America, Berry explores how and why, even in our modern global economy, locally adapted farming is essential to the flourishing of culture, to healthy living and stable communities, and ultimately to our survival as a species. In his 1995 Afterword to the Third Edition, included here, Berry notes with mounting urgency that his argument about the long-term ecological and human costs of industrial agriculture has “not had the happy fate of being proved wrong.”Other essays in this volume include his early autobiographical pieces “The Long-Legged House” and “A Native Hill,” the indispensable “Think Little,” “Writer and Region,” “Preserving Wildness,” “The Work of Local Culture,” and the still provocative “Why I am Not Going to Buy a Computer,” in which he posits his standards for embracing a new technology, including: “It should not replace or disrupt anything good that already exists, and this includes family and community relationships.”