In a body of work as emotionally powerful, formally innovative, and philosophically profound as Clarice Lispector’s, Água Viva stands out as a particular triumph.

    The way she tackles this task leads to her being thrown into the grim prison of Chengfu, where she meets Nicholas Sabine - a man about to die.He asks her a cryptic riddle, the mystery of which echoes through all that befalls her in the months that follow...She is brought to England and tries to make a new life with the Gresham family, but she is constantly in disgrace and is soon involved in the bitter feud between the Greshams and a neighbouring family.There is danger, romance and heartache for Lucy as strange events build to a point where she begins to doubt her own senses.How could she see a man, long dead, walking in the misty darkness of the valley? And who carried her, unconscious, into the labyrinth of Chiselhurst Caves and left her to die?It is not until she returns to China that Lucy finds, amid high adventure, the answer to all that has baffled her.

    The she met Chink and discovered love and affection...and rape and murder!

    A teenage boy makes the mistake of falling in love with the much-protected daughter of his uncle, mischievously nicknamed after his hero Napoleon Bonaparte, the curmudgeonly self-appointed patriarch of a large and extended Iranian family in 1940s Tehran.

    With their entire livelihood pegged on the chance of a wet year or a dry year, drought has the ability to crush their whole enterprise, to determine who stands and who falls, and to take food out of the mouths of the workers and their families. To Charlie Flagg, an honest, decent, and cantankerous rancher, the drought of the early 1950s is a foe that he must fight on his own grounds. Refusing the questionable "help" of federal aid programs, Charlie and his family struggle to make the ranch survive until the time it rains again-if it ever rains again.

    What follows is murderously funny satire, as Vonnegut looks at war, sex, racism, success, politics, and pollution in America and reminds us how to see the truth.

    With their broad canvas and large cast of fictional and historical characters, the novels in this series present a panorama of the American political and imperial experience as interpreted by one of its most worldly, knowing, and ironic observers. Burr is a portrait of perhaps the most complex and misunderstood of the Founding Fathers. In 1804, while serving as vice president, Aaron Burr fought a duel with his political nemesis, Alexander Hamilton, and killed him. In 1807, he was arrested, tried, and acquitted of treason. In 1833, Burr is newly married, an aging statesman considered a monster by many. Burr retains much of his political influence if not the respect of all. And he is determined to tell his own story. As his amanuensis, he chooses Charles Schermerhorn Schuyler, a young New York City journalist, and together they explore both Burr's past and the continuing political intrigues of the still young United States.

    By the author of Fragments and The Healers.

    BEULAH LAND....where the old South as it really was is brought to intense life, in all its outward splendor and secret shame.

    Sula Peace has rejected the life Nel has embraced, escaping to college, and submerging herself in city life. When she returns to her roots, it is as a rebel and a wanton seductress. Eventually, both women must face the consequences of their choices. Together, they create an unforgettable portrait of what it means and costs to be a black woman in America.

    Its sprawling, encyclopedic narrative, and penetrating analysis of the impact of technology on society make it an intellectual tour de force.

    His job in a bank puts him next to, but not in possession of, money. As a clerk he learns the principles of Double-Entry Bookkeeping and adapts them in his own dramatic fashion to settle his personal account with society.Under the column headed 'Aggravation' for offences received from society (unpleasantness of Bank Manager; general diminution of life caused by advertising), debit Christie; under 'Recompense' for offences given back to society (general removal of items of stationery; Pork Pie Purveyors Ltd. bomb hoax), credit Christie. All accounts are to be settled in full, and they are - in the most alarming way.B.S. Johnson was one of Britain's most original writers and Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry is his funniest book.

    It is the story of Kate, despised by her mother, bound to her father by ties stronger and darker than blood. It is the story of her attempted escapes−in detached sexual encounters, at a Southern college populated by spoiled and perverse beauties, and in a doomed marriage to a man who cannot understand what she is running from. Witty, erotic, searing acute, STATE OF GRACE bears the inimitable stamp of one of our fines and most provocative writers.

    They wanted sex and new seat covers, money and confessions, a little bit of love and a lot of answers. That's why George liked his hawk. All it asked of him was an opportunity to kill.

    Setting out to see the world in the summer of 1926, Theophilus North gets as far as Newport, Rhode Island, before his car breaks down. To support himself, Theophilus takes jobs in the elegant mansions along Ocean Drive, just as Wilder himself did in the same decade. Soon the young man finds himself playing the roles of tutor, spy, confidant, lover, friend, and enemy as he becomes entangled in the intrigues of both upstairs and downstairs in a glittering society dominated by leisure.Narrated by the elderly North from a distance of fifty years, Theophilus North is a fascinating commentary on youth and education from the vantage point of age, and deftly displays Wilder's trademark wit juxtaposed with his lively and timeless ruminations on what really matters about life, love, and work at the end of the day—even after a visit to Newport.

    The Union Army slaughtered his family and lured his friends into a death trap under the guise of a white flag. The war may be over, but he refuses to surrender. No matter how far he has to ride, no matter how high the price on his head, no matter how much he hurts or hungers - he will get his vengeance.

    Paris...Washington...a peaceful Midwestern campus...a fabulous villa in Greece...all part of a terrifying web of intrigue and treachery as a ruthless trio of human beings - an incredibly beautiful film star, a legendary Greek tycoon, a womanizing international adventurer- use an innocent American girl as a bewildered, horror-stricken pawn in a desperate game of vengeance and betrayal, love and lust, life and death...

    computer who obtains consciousness, moving towards personal technological singularity with growing intelligence.

    This collection of seventeen Caribbean short studies is compiled for use in secondary schools, and embraces both the old and the new of West Indian writing from the 1930s to the present day.The stories contained in the collection are: "Backfire" by Shirley Tappin; "Paradise Lost" by Ida Ramesar; "Chung Lee" by Undine Guiseppi; "Give and Take" by Robert Henry; "The Kite" by Barnabus J Ramon-Fortuna; "Horace's Luck" by Neville Guiseppi; "Mama's Theme Song" by Joy Moore; "The Teddy Bear" by C Arnold Thomasos; "De Trip" by Joy Clarke; "The Hustlers" by Flora Spencer; "Journey by Night" by Undine Guiseppi; "The New Teacher" by Ninnie Seereeram; "Up the Wind Laka Notoo-Boy" by Ian Robertson; "After the Game" by Barnabus J Ramon-Fortuna; "Ramgoat Salvation" by Ida Ramesar; "Tantie Gertrude" by Oliver Flax; and "The Cousins" by Joy Moore.

    In 1973 this book was banned by the Apartheid South African Government.Looking On Darkness tells the story of black actor Joseph Malan as he awaits execution for the murder of his white lover.

    Poetry - The poems are drums. And drums are the tools of magicians...Piertri is a very social poet. There are no love poems here, except that every line breathes his love for his people. And his focus is on the misery that his people are force to suffer in a dying, racist/imperialist world..Pietri's strength is outrage...his rage is carefully controlled, and the more threatening for that reason. Pietri, like David Henderson and Allen Ginsberg, effortlessly telescopes vast social problems inot effective image-clusters. The degradation of the oppressed has never been more acidly funny..." Lorenzo Thomas, University Review.

    A "novel of the counterculture," Gurney Norman's DIVINE RIGHT'S TRIP elicited comparison to Salinger and Kerouac upon its publication in 1971. "DIVINE RIGHT'S TRIP shows itself to be a subtly written and morally passionate epic of the counterculture, a fictional explication of the hopeful new consciousness come to birth.Divine Right is bigger than life, and in giving the story thus far of a segment of his generation, in prose nicely threaded between the vernacular and the symbolic, Gurney Norman has shown a noble reach and a healthy grasp." - John Updike

    Bradley hopes to retire to the country, but predatory friends and relations dash his hopes of a peaceful retirement. He is tormented by his melancholic sister, who has decided to come live with him; his ex-wife, who has infuriating hopes of redeeming the past; her delinquent brother, who wants money and emotional confrontations; and Bradley's friend and rival, Arnold Baffin, a younger, deplorably more successful author of commercial fiction. The ever-mounting action includes marital cross-purposes, seduction, suicide, abduction, romantic idylls, murder, and due process of law. Bradley tries to escape from it all but fails, leading to a violent climax, and a coda that casts shifting perspectives on all that has preceded.

    Bawdy and moving, the ultimate word-of-mouth bestseller, Rubyfruit Jungle is about growing up a lesbian in America--and living happily ever after.

    This novel is part epistolary: his mother writes letters to him, nagging him; his sister Angelica writes, missing him; so does Mara, his former lover, telling him about the birth of her son who may be his own. Left to clean up Michele’s mess, his family and friends complain, commiserate, tease, and grieve, struggling valiantly with the small and large calamities of their interconnected lives.Natalia Ginzburg’s most beloved book in Italy and one of her finest achievements, Happiness, as Such is an original, wise, raw, comic novel that cuts to the bone.

    As We Are Now tells the story of Caroline Spencer, a 76-year-old retired schoolteacher, mentally strong but physically frail, who has been moved by relatives into a "home." Subjected to subtle humiliations and petty cruelties, sustained for too short a time by the love of another person, she fights back with all she has, and in a powerful climax wins a terrible victory.

    Translated by Marc E. Heine. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book

    Carrie and Nick are billeted in Wales with old Mr Evans, who is so mean and cold, and his timid mouse of a sister, Lou, who suddenly starts having secrets. Their friend Albert is luckier, living in Druid's Bottom with warm-hearted Hepzibah Green and the strange Mister Johnny, who can talk to animals but not to human beings. Carrie and Nick visit him there whenever they can for Hepzibah makes life exciting and enticing with her stories and delicious cooking. Gradually they begin to feel more at ease in their war-time home, but then, in trying to heal the rift between Mr Evans and his estranged sister, and save Druid's Bottom, Carrie does a terrible thing which is to haunt her for years to come. Carrie revisits Wales as an adult and tells the story to her own children.

    In the ruins of a palace at Nineveh, his son Boaz-Jachin finds the wall-carving of a great lion dying on the spear of an ancient king.

    Even the hardened Vikings who were at the fateful meeting in 1116 turned away in horror at the brutality of what took place.

    The novel starts with computer engineer from chennai being kidnapped to dream island. The island is controlled by a person through technology. The island has all basic needs for people satisfied, compromising on individuality, feelings, relationships and independence.Owing to some issues in computer there are some mishaps and to rectify it the hero is being called for. The hero comes to know about a fringe group who would want to free people from such state. What happens does the hero able to help the group and people come out of this or does he just rectifies the issue and make the island mishap free is explained in sujatha's way of story telling

    Forever Island is widely recognized as the classic novel of the Everglades.Allapattah is the story of a young Seminole in despair in the white man's world.

    Abiola IreleWinner of the Grand Prix Litteraire de l'Afrique Noire"I think this is perhaps the best African novel on colonialism and it draws very richly on various modes of oral literature." --Ralph Austen, University of Chicago"It is a wonderful introduction to colonial rule as experienced by Africans, and in particular, to the rule of African middlemen." --Martin A. Klein, University of Toronto"The Fortunes of Wangrin is not only a wonderful novel by one of Africa's most renowned intellectuals, it is also literally filled with information about French colonization and its impact on traditional African societies, African resistance and collaboration to colonization, the impact of French education in Africa, and a host of other subjects of interest." --Francois Manchuelle, New York UniversityWangrin is a rogue and an operator, hustling both the colonial French and his own people. He is funny, outrageous, corrupt, traditional, and memorable. Ba's book bridges the chasm between oral and written literature. The stories about Wangrin are drawn from oral sources, but in the hands of this gifted writer these materials become transformed through the power of artistic imagination and license.The Fortunes of Wangrin is a classic in Franchophone African literature.Amadou Hampate Ba was a distinguished Malian poet and scholar of African oral tradition and precolonial history.Aina Pavolini Taylor is an independent translator with wide experience of Africa, now living and working in Italy.F. Abiola Irele is a professor in the Department of Black Studies at Ohio State University.

    Their plans were conceived in a drunken excitement and resulted in more horror than any of them could have imagined.  There was the poet able to retreat into beatific reveries of superb fishing in cold, fast streams; the Vietnam vet consumed by uppers, downers and violence; and the girl who loved only one of them -- at first.  With their ideals ostensibly in order, they set out from Florida to save the Grand Canyon from a dam they believed was being built.  Along with the tapedeck for the car, the liquor and the drugs, there was also a case of dynamite.

    On her summer vacation on the Scottish island of Karasay, Romilly falls in love with the ghost of the earlier Romilly's beau Jocelyn Parsons and is haunted by the long-dead Rodger, until she finds his skeleton in the cave where he practiced black magic and completes the exorcism with the help of eccentric old Miss Minnie.

    Higgins masterpiece about Jerry Doherty and his trip to Vegas that puts him eighteen grand in the hole. Jerry "Digger" Doherty is an ex-con and proprietor of a workingman's Boston bar, who supplements his income with the occasional "odd job," like stealing live checks or picking up hot goods. His brother's a priest, his wife's a nag, and  he has a deadly appetite for martinis and gambling. On a trip to Vegas, the Digger finds himself in the sights of a loan shark known as “the Greek.” Luckily--if you call it luck--the Digger has been let in on a little job that can turn his gambling debt into a profit, if only he can pull it off without getting himself killed.

    Boox who devotes himself to helping animals in trouble.

    This book is a fictional account of eight harrowing days in the life of a professional football player.

    The legendary, epic novel tells the story of four generations of the Washo in Nevada and Eastern California--a story of dreams, dying, the loss of power, death and apotheosis.

    She’s been staying out till all hours of the night and grows more disagreeable by the day. Should Lucio have Diana committed to the Psychiatric Institute, as her friend the dog trainer suggests? Before Lucio can even make up his mind, Diana is carted away by the mysterious head of the institute. Never mind, Diana’s sister, who looks just like Diana—and yet is nothing like her—has moved in. And on the recommendation of the dog trainer, Lucio acquires an adoring German shepherd, also named Diana. Then one glorious day, Diana returns, affectionate and pleasant. She’s been cured!—but have the doctors at the institute gone too far?Asleep in the Sun is the great work of the Argentine master Adolfo Bioy Casares's later years. Like his legendary Invention of Morel, it is an intoxicating mixture of fantasy, sly humor, and menace. Whether read as a fable of modern politics, a meditation on the elusive parameters of the self, or a most unusual love story, Bioy's book is an almost scarily perfect comic turn, as well as a pure delight.

    As Toni Morrison has said, "All of Forrest's novels explore the complex legacy of Afro-Americans. Like an insistent tide this history . . . swells and recalls America's past. . . . Brooding, hilarious, acerbic and profoundly valued life has no more astute observer than Leon Forrest." All of that is on display here in two novels that give readers a breathtaking view of the human experience, filled with humor and pathos.

    

    His spiritual odyssey is narrated by his mentor, a professor at the divinity school - who is actually a humanist who believes neither in God nor in an afterlife. Although Peter never abandons his theism or his admiration for Jesus, he reaches a point where he feels it would be hypocritical to remain within the church and to become the evangelist he had hoped to be.The counterpoint between Peter and the narrator reflects the eternal conflict between theism and atheism. In following the changes of Peter's beliefs, almost every aspect of Protestant theology and ethics is explored. The evolution of Peter's faith parallels the evolution of Christian theology, from the day of Pentecost to contemporary liberal theology.

    Brief flashes of daily experience from childhood, adolescence, and youth are described in what is defined as "nighttime language"—a heightened, decorative prose that frees these events from their gloomy associations.The novel suggests we have all spoken this dialect in childhood and in our dreams, but these thoughts can only be sharpened or decoded by contemplation in the dark. Revealing that side of life which is never seen by the waking eye but which dreams and drugs can suddenly emphasize, this startling discovery illustrates how these nighttime illuminations reveal the narrator's joy for the living world.

    The work examines hundreds of related myths and a wide range of Indian texts--Vedic, Puranic, classical, modern, and tribal--centering on the stories of the great ascetic, Siva, and his erotic alter ego, Kama.

    Part political allegory, the novel explores the nature of good and evil in a provincial port in northeastern Brazil during World War II––all the ills of the repressive dictatorship then in power are reflected in the corrupt and violent society of Maceió. As Ivo says: “During a dictatorship, all narratives are poorly told, since a dictatorship is the Kingdom of Lies and cannot tolerate the truth.” But to focus solely on the allegory would deny the richness of the book’s many layers, the considerable skill with which the characters emerge from the narrator’s false starts, the subtle and pervasive wit that skewers pomposity and pretension, the suspense created by the narrator’s very unreliability, and the poetry with which the exotic setting is evoked. The last word in describing such a heady mixture belongs to the author, who calls it, “a story of terror and violence that is, surely, a sunny nightmare.” Although Ledo Ivo is well known in his own country as a journalist and poetic spokesman of the “Generation of 1945,” this edition of Snakes’ Nest marks his first book-length appearance in English. Originally published in 1973 under the title Ninho de Cobras, Snakes’ Nest won the prestigious Brazilian Walmap Prize for that year. The novel has been translated by Kern Krapohl who, for several years, lived in Brazil and worked closely with the author. Jon M. Tolman of the University of New Mexico has contributed an informative introduction which clearly places the story both historically and geographically.

    Founded on the tenets of Alcoholics Anonymous, a bachelor can turn to other members of the circle whenever the urge to take a woman out to dinner surfaces.

    Each chapter serves as an opportunity for the author to expand on thoughts and images suggested by a letter of the alphabet, as well as to reflect upon the workings of the imagination, particularly in the art of William Carlos Williams and Arthur Rimbaud. Reminiscent of the philosophical treatise/poem "On Being Blue" by William H. Glass, "Splendide-Hotel" is a Grand Hotel of the mind, splendidly conceived.

    At sea, three thousand yards off the blacked-out coast of Occupied Norway two ditched Luftwaffe air crew toss in a yellow dinghy. One is dead, his companion close to death. As their rubber coffin roller-coasters crazily to the crest of yet another curling sea a river of lightning illuminates the scene - and inexplicably, almost impossibly, reveals "a line of ships … long, low, silent ships. Ships stealing predatorily eastwards along the jagged silhouette of the black horizon." Then the light fades, the ghost ships vanish, the incredulous airman ceases to breathe … "But he was still the first German to have seen the coming to Norway of Number 22 Commando, Special Service Brigade".This is the story of an Allied raid on the little Norwegian fishing port of Alvik: of the Commando and of the naval and air detachments which supported it, and of the German garrison which resisted them. Alvik is imaginary, there was no Number 22 Commando - but there were similar events, and the very essence of those battles lies distilled in the following pages.There are no good guys or bad guys, no 'ours' and 'theirs'; only human beings - some cowardly, some brutal, some pitifully vulnerable; some who joke in the face of death, others who cower terrified before it. With staggering vividness Brian Callison sketches in his protagonists so that they become creatures of flesh and blood who carry the reader with them in this hectic clash of arms. All the nobility of war is here; all the squalor; all the humour and all the horror. To read THE DAWN ATTACK is to know what it was really like. It is to have fought in Combined Operations.Heart-stopping suspense. New York Times.

    For the most part ironic in tone, these stories are, as Bernice Slote observes, bound by the geometrics of urban life—streets and offices, workers and firms, the business world of New York and Pittsburgh, the cities which by 1929 Willa Cather had known well for over thirty years." In her introduction, Slote discusses their biographical elements, connections with earlier and later work, and the intricate patterns that lie below the lucid, shimmering surface of Willa Cather's prose.

    The Tafoyas include a physician philosopher, a radical daughter with a degree from Bryn Mawr, a clumsy, stupid son, and a governor of New Mexico. From these elements Bradford creates a story as funny and tender as RED SKY AT MORNING, also set in New Mexico, also well worth reading.

      Inspired by historical events, The Siege of Krishnapur is the mesmerizing tale of a British outpost, under siege during the Indian Mutiny of 1857, whose residents find their smug assumptions of moral and military superiority and their rigid class barriers under fire—literally and figuratively. The hero of Troubles, having survived the battles of World War I, makes his way to Ireland in 1919, in search of his once-wealthy fiancée. What he finds is her family's enormous seaside hotel in a spectacular state of decline, overgrown and overrun by herds of cats and pigs and the few remaining guests. From this strange perch, moving from room to room as the hotel falls down around him, he witnesses the distant tottering of the Empire in the East and the rise of the violent "Troubles" in Ireland.

    

    

    Realistically narrated in the first person by a fair-skinned black Manhattanite named Charles Stevenson, the novel dramatizes the isolation and alienation of persons who fall prey to America's social, economic, and racial caste systems. Stevenson, a New York City messenger, constantly finds himself on the edges of power, yet is utterly devoid of any. A man perceived as neither black nor white, “a minority within a minority,” he is cast adrift in the naturalistic city of New York, where victory and defeat are accepted “with the same marvelous indifference.”The Messenger brought Wright recognition and modest commercial success, but initially his 1966 novel The Wig was not well-received. Today, however, many people would agree with Ishmael Reed's 1973 assertion that The Wig is “one of the most underrated novels by a black person in this century” (John O'Brien, Interviews with Black Writers, 1973).Wright's use of fantasy and hyperbole distinguishes The Wig from most African American fiction of the mid-1960s.Set” in an America of tomorrow,” the novel depicts the desperately failed efforts of a twenty-one-year-old black Harlemite named Lester Jefferson to live the American dream. The book ends with his literal (and willed) emasculation, after Jefferson learns that the money he has earned parading around the streets in New York in an electrified chicken suit will prove useless to his successfully courting the black prostitute he has idealized as his “all-American girl.”The years between 1966 and 1973 found Wright in various foreign and domestic locales. But his literary psyche remained firmly planted in New York City, the setting of the nonfictional pieces he began writing for the Village Voice, Collected, amended, and supplemented, these columns came to comprise Absolutely Nothing to Get Alarmed About (1973), a book filled with the same drug users, male and female prostitutes, abusive policemen, and underinquisitive detectives one finds in his novels. These, plus America's unstinting racism, have rid Wright of his optimism as surely as Mr. Fishback rids Lester Jefferson of his masculinity at the end of The Wig.In 1993, Wright's novels were collected in a publication again titled Absolutely Nothing to Get Alarmed About: Complete Novels. Reading this collection makes it clear that Charles Wright is an innovator who in breaking with traditional fictional modes during the 1960s helped to negotiate space for Ishmael Reed, Clarence Major, and other African American avantgardists.

    A humorous and activist depiction of Lesbian life in 1960s Norway.

    Jerome and Julia Frank (who are father and daughter) contend that these therapies share common elements that improve the "morale"of sufferers. And in combating the "demoralizing meaning"that people attach to their experiences, the authors argue, many therapies are surprisingly similar to rhetoric (the art of persuasion) and to hermeneutics (the study of meanings).Highly acclaimed in previous editions, Persuasion and Healing has been completely revised and expanded. In addition to a broadened exploration of the role of demoralization in illness, this latest edition offers updated information on topics including self-help, family therapy, psychopharmacology, psychotherapy for the mentally ill, and techniques such as primal therapy and bioenergetics. As they explore the power of "healing rhetoric"in these activities, the authors strengthen the ties among the various healing profession.

    There, where the water flowed west to the far Pacific, the more prudent emigrants swung north through present-day Idaho, though that was the longer way west. One group, the Donner Party, braver or more foolhardy than the rest, chose an untried route that would shorten the distance. It did. It also subjected them to obstacles so formidable that it cost many of them their lives. Yet it preserved their names and the story of their travail down through history-crowded years. No work of fiction has rendered this remarkable epic of ordeal with more vividness and power than Richard Rhodes's novel of the Donner Party, The Ungodly.Upon its initial printing in 1973, Rhodes's masterful tale was praised for its realistic and gripping depiction of the struggles faced by that ill-fated group of men, women, and children. Now, more than thirty years later, Stanford University Press has reissued this harrowing and haunting novel. The Ungodly is an unforgettable story of terrible hardship and awesome courage—a story that increases our understanding of what kind of people made this nation and what a full and immeasurable price they paid.

    He knows that something else must have happened in California to cause the death of Chris, who loved life too much to take his own. He also knows that he must go West to find out what did happen. In California he discovers corruption, immorality and pain that shocks him to the very core of his being but he also discovers exhilaration and pleasure that changes him forever. First published in 1973, To Die in California was the first novel to reveal what lies behind West Coast bright lights and glitz.

    Not just because he was despicably rich, nor because he owned all their farms, or sired the wild young men who tore up the roads with their galloping horses—it was because they could not pronounce the word magnate, which Mr. Skegg assuredly was. Lady Bythewaite, his common-law wife, had a devouring love that filled her entire existence, but never affected her iron will and the implacable destiny that led from it. Only Clarence of the three sons could claim the Skegg name, and at the first opportunity he ran off to New York to change it. When he came back, it was with a new name, silent picture fame, and a deadly vengeance to act out. Owen Hawkins was the "acknowledged" son who lived with Lady Bythewaite. A delicate lad, his world included each of his family, with a devotion that was frightening. Aiken Cusworth was the bastard. A great hulking horse-tamer with the smell of the fields and animals on him, he had a single bent that yanked man and beast to the line of his terrible whim. Together, they lived in the house of the solitary maggot.

    "SNAKEHUNTER is an excellent novel about a West Virginia childhood. Kinder has, to begin with, a good sense of his region: he has rested his story on the firmest possible bases, namely character and place. His dialogue, particularly that of his female characters, is first rate.... One would like to secure for this excellently crafted book all the readers one can."--Larry McMurty, The Washington Post

    After six years in the army, civilian life is not as easy as it looks. In short order, Beau Jim gets conned by a shoe-shine boy, buys a Studebaker with bad brakes, and spends nearly every cent of the $400 he won in a crap game the night before. But Beau Jim is a man who can roll with the punches, and the drive into his hometown is as exhilarating as he thought it would be. His brother’s farm, however, is a different story. Older by fifteen years, Dan Early has given up his apartment and gone into debt to buy a barren piece of land that his wife, Charlene, calls a “wore out patch of misery.” Sheila, their seven-year-old daughter, is unnaturally slow and shy and has been held back in school—a source of great shame. As Beau Jim hustles pool with Claire, a former high school classmate whose secret life is not as safe as he believes it to be, and makes time with Yancey, a voluptuous redhead finally looking to settle down, Dan’s frustration and pity for himself mount. When Charlene sparks his rage, he commits an act so shocking and horrific it brings the whole county to its knees. A spellbinding tale of decent people fighting for their lives in a world overrun with poverty and ignorance, The Trapper’s Last Shot is vintage John Yount—forceful, finely crafted, and absolutely unforgettable.

    It quickly develops into a game in which he begins to predict what will happen based on their behavior patterns,but the game spreads to his wife and then other neighbors and grows more complex, more insidious, and begins to consume them allAnthony Burgess“It is beautifully contrived, ingenious, economical, thoroughly convincing. It is also witty and civilized, and … must earn a kind of astonished applause.”Marshall McLuhan“a parable of high-rise living. By pushing the voyeur to the extreme, the binocular game flips into the audible-tactible world of existence”