Text from the books is combined with charming color drawings for a privileged glimpse of an enchanting world. Full-color illustrations.

    To commemorate the centennial of his birth, Arnold Rampersad has contributed new Afterwords to both volumes of his highly-praised biography of this most extraordinary and prolific American writer. The second volume in this masterful biography finds Hughes rooting himself in Harlem, receiving stimulation from his rich cultural surroundings. Here he rethought his view of art and radicalism, and cultivated relationships with younger, more militant writers such as Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Amiri Bakara. Rampersad's Afterword to volume two looks further into his influence and how it expanded beyond the literary as a result of his love of jazz and blues, his opera and musical theater collaborations, and his participation in radio and television. In addition, Rempersad explores the controversial matter of Hughes's sexuality and the possibility that, despite a lack of clear evidence, Hughes was homosexual. Exhaustively researched in archival collections throughout the country, especially in the Langston Hughes papers at Yale University's Beinecke Library, and featuring fifty illustrations per volume, this anniversary edition will offer a new generation of readers entrance to the life and mind of one of the twentieth century's greatest artists.

    . . Ironweed, William Kennedy is making American literature."--The Washington Post Book WorldLegs inaugurated William Kennedy's celebrated cycle of novels set in Albany, New York. True to both life and myth. Legs evokes the flamboyant career of the legendary gangster Jack "Legs" Diamond, who was finally murdered in Albany, and his showgirl mistress as they blaze a trail across the tabloid pages of the 1920s and 1930s.The second novel in the Albany cycle depicts Billy Phelan, a slightly tarnished poker player, pool hustler, and small-time bookie, as he moves through the lurid nighttime glare of a tough Depression-era town. Full of Irish pluck, he works the fringes of Albany sporting life with his own particular style--until he falls from underworld grace.In the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Ironweed, Francis Phelan, ex-ballplayer, part-time gravedigger, and full-time drunk, has hit bottom. Years ago he left Albany after killing a scab during a workers' strike, and again after he accidentally--and fatally--dropped his infant son. Now, in 1938, Francis is back, roaming familiar streets and trying to make peace with ghosts of the past and present.

    A collection of short stories that were originally published in the 1960s and 1970s in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, and Harper's.

    This biography—the first ever written about her—turns to her works, her family, her friends to answers the question: Who was Shirley Jackson?

    Each of the three novels gathered here vividly and unforgettably conjures up an entire world.The Booker Prize-winning novel Offshore limns the marginal existence of an eccentric assortment of barge dwellers on the Thames in the early 1960s, a group of misfits who are drawn to life on the muddy river in exile from the world of the landlocked. Human Voices takes us behind the scenes at the BBC during World War II, as world-weary directors and nubile young assistants attempt to save Britain’s heritage and keep Britons calm in the face of a feared German invasion. In The Beginning of Spring, a struggling English printer living in Moscow in 1913 is abandoned by his wife and left alone to care for his three young children in the face of the impending revolution. Fitzgerald is a genius of the relevant detail and the deftly sketched context, and these narrative gems are marvels of compassion, wit, and piercing insight.

    There, Luca and his crony pal, Rascal, maneuver their way through a black comedy of murders, mayhem, and an assorted series of misadventures, all the while breathing in the most authentic version of 1930s New York ever portrayed on the comics page

    He’s an advertising copywriter on his way up. To his shock and confusion, he suddenly finds himself in the midst of the affair of his life – an incongruous passion for a lusty, hard-drinking forty-two-year-old White Palace waitress.She’s from the wrong side of town. She’s undereducated. She doesn’t begin to compare to Janey, Max’s lost wife. But Max can’t escape his obsession for the salty, sultry, sensuous Nora. Though the affair begins with their raw carnal attraction, Max discovers, to his horror, that he may be falling in love with this woman from Dogtown.In his first novel, Glenn Savan presents a steamy love dilemma with wit and compassion. In Max and Nora, he creates two unforgettable characters who rival any oddball duo in contemporary literature.