Published in 1967, the novel was an instant success, running to hundreds of editions, winning four international prizes and being translated into 27 languages. In 1982, its author received the Nobel Prize for Literature. Michael Wood places the novel in the context of modern Colombia's violent history, and helps the reader to explore the rich and complex vision of the world which Garcia Marquez presents in it. Close reference is made to the text itself (in English translation), and there is a guide to further reading.

    In this wise, beguiling, beautiful novel set in the era of the Civil War, an award-winning playwright and author paints a haunting portrait of a woman named Always, born a slave, and four generations of her African-American family.

    Omnibus edition with 5 titles in one book.

    On the way, Hans Thomas receives a mysterious miniature book—the fantastic memoir of a sailor shipwrecked in 1842 on a strange island where a deck of cards come to life.Structured as a deck of cards—each chapter is one in the deck—"The Solitaire Mystery" weaves together fantasy and reality, fairy tales and family history. Full of questions about the meaning of life, it will spur its listeners to reexamine their own.

    It is one of those great unclassifiable masterpieces that appear once every twenty years or so.'It will make you cleverer, maybe even a better lover. Not many novels can do that.' Nicholas Lezard, GQ

    The invitations summon home the group of people Violet Aird has cared for most in her long life. The oldest, strongest and wisest of them all, she sees Alexa, her vulnerable granddaughter, find love for the first time, while the decision to send her little grandson away to school is driving parents Edmund and Virginia even further apart. Far from them all is Pandora, the glamorous, exciting girl who ran away twenty years before. All will converge on Scotland this September.

    That day comes suddenly when his grandfather dies leaving him the floundering business. With the help of Becky Salmon, an enterprising young woman, Charlie sets out to make a name for himself as "The Honest Trader". But the brutal onset of World War I takes Charlie far from home and into the path of a dangerous enemy whose legacy of evil follows Charlie and his family for generations.Encompassing three continents and spanning over sixty years, As the Crow Flies brings to life a magnificent tale of one man's rise from rags to riches set against the backdrop of a changing century.

    Nance In the control tower at Kansas City International Airport, all the radar displays are red. But for the experienced pilots of North America Airlines, the thunderstorms aren’t the problem: NAA has been cutting costs to stave off bankruptcy, and will do anything to keep their planes in the air. Unfortunately, no matter what they do, one is on its way down.   After the aircraft collides with another plane on the Kansas City runway, in one of the worst aviation disasters of the decade, National Transportation Safety Board investigator Joe Wallingford arrives on the scene. As he studies the wreckage and pieces together the events that led to the tragedy, he realizes there’s far more at play than pilot error or equipment malfunction. Wallingford will have to risk his career—and perhaps even his life—to solve the puzzle of the crash.

    If you want sweet dreams, you've got to live a sweet life." So says Loyd Peregrina, a handsome Apache trainman and latter-day philosopher. But when Codi Noline returns to her hometown, Loyd's advice is painfully out of her reach. Dreamless and at the end of her rope, Codi comes back to Grace, Arizona to confront her past and face her ailing, distant father. What she finds is a town threatened by a silent environmental catastrophe, some startling clues to her own identity, and a man whose view of the world could change the course of her life. Blending flashbacks, dreams, and Native American legends, Animal Dreams is a suspenseful love story and a moving exploration of life's largest commitments. With this work, the acclaimed author of The Bean Trees and Homeland and Other Stories sustains her familiar voice while giving readers her most remarkable book yet.

    Their one thought is to get to Dublin, to university and to freedom...On their first day at University College, Dublin, the inseparable pair are thrown together with fellow students Nan Mahon, beautiful but selfish, and handsome Jack Foley. But trouble is brewing for Benny and Eve's new circle of friends, and before long, they find passion, tragedy - and the independence they yearned for.

    This is a gutsy, fun-loving, and provocative novel in which a bean can philosophises, a dessert spoon mystifies, a young waitress takes on the New York art world, and a rowdy redneck welder discovers the lost god of Palestine.

    An assortment of sages sharpen Daniel's wide-eyed outlook until he has the concentration of a card shark Zeta master, via apprenticeships in meditation, safecracking, poker, and the art of walking through walls. Wizards are made, not born, and this unconventional education sets Daniel on the trail of mysteries ancient and modern.A strange, six-pound diamond sphere held by the U.S. government in a New Mexico vault, rumored to be the Philosopher's Stone or the Holy Grail, becomes the AMO's obsession. In time, Daniel perfects his powers and heads off to steal the magic stone, and what happens changes his life forever.Stone Junction is a bravura act of storytelling, both a free-spirited adventure and a parable about the powers within all of us.

    When the haughty Dona Constanza decides to divert a river to fill her swimming pool, the consequences are at once tragic, heroic, and outrageously funny.

    They explore the tragic and comic aspects of a South haunted by its past and uncertain of its future.In the intricate, spellbinding masterpiece Absalom, Absalom! (1936), Quentin Compson descends into a vortex of images, voices, passions, and doomed desires as he and his Harvard roommate re-create the story of Thomas Sutpen and the insane ambitions, romantic hopes, and distortions of honor and conscience that trap Sutpen and those around him, until their grief and pride and fate become the inescapable and unbearable legacy of a past that is not dead and not even past.In seven episodes, The Unvanquished (1938) recounts the ordeals and triumphs of the Sartoris family during and after the Civil War as seen through the maturing consciousness of young Bayard Sartoris. The indomitable Granny Millard, the honor-driven patriarch Colonel Sartoris, the quick-witted and inventive Ringo, the ferociously heroic Drusilla, and the scheming, mendacious Ab Snopes embody the inheritance that Bayard must reconcile with a new, but diminished, South.If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem (published in 1939 as The Wild Palms) tells of desperate lovers fleeing convention and of a convict escaping the chaos of passion. In “The Wild Palms,” an emotional and geographic odyssey ends in a Mississippi coastal town. In counterpoint, “Old Man” recounts the adventures of an inarticulate “tall convict” swept to freedom by a raging Mississippi flood, but who then fights to return to his simple prison life.In The Hamlet (1940), the first book of the great Snopes family trilogy, the outrageous scheming energy of Flem Snopes and his relatives is vividly and hilariously juxtaposed with the fragile communal customs of Frenchman’s Bend. Here are Ike Snopes, in love with a cow, the sexual adventures of Eula Varner Snopes, and the wild saturnalia of the spotted horses auction, a comic masterpiece.The Library of America edition of Faulkner’s work publishes for the first time new, corrected texts of The Unvanquished, If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem, and The Hamlet. (The corrected text of Absalom, Absalom! was published by Random House in 1986.) Manuscripts, typescripts, galleys, and published editions have been collated to produce versions that are faithful to Faulkner’s intentions and free of the changes introduced by subsequent editors.

    In this captivating work of fantasy from the author of Midnight’s Children and The Enchantress of Florence, Haroun sets out on an adventure to restore the poisoned source of the sea of stories. On the way, he encounters many foes, all intent on draining the sea of all its storytelling powers.

    G. Sebald's first novel, never before translated into English, is perhaps his most amazing and certainly his most alarming. Sebald—the acknowledged master of memory's uncanniness—takes the painful pleasures of unknowability to new intensities in Vertigo. Here in their first flowering are the signature elements of Sebald's hugely acclaimed novels The Emigrants and The Rings of Saturn. An unnamed narrator, beset by nervous ailments, is again our guide on a hair-raising journey through the past and across Europe, amid restless literary ghosts—Kafka, Stendhal, Casanova. In four dizzying sections, the narrator plunges the reader into vertigo, into that "swimming of the head," as Webster's defines it: in other words, into that state so unsettling, so fascinating, and so "stunning and strange," as The New York Times Book Review declared about The Emigrants, that it is "like a dream you want to last forever."

    Caroline, the novel's protagonist, returns to New York after the death of her father ostensibly to wrap things up and take care of necessary "business" where her memory and imagination conspire to lay before her all her griefs and joys in a rebellious progression. In different voices, employing a collage-like fragmentation, Maso gently unfolds The Art Lover in much the same way the fragile and prehistoric fiddlehead fern unfolds throughout the novel, bringing with subtle grace the ever-entangled feelings of grief and love into full and tender view. Various illustrations throughout.

    

    The night of their high-school drama group's cast party starts out as fun for sisters Amy and Erin.Their lives come crashing down when Amy takes the car to get more food and has a horrible accident. Erin and her family pray for Amy to awaken from her coma. But as the monitor bleeps and the respirator hisses, Amy lies somewhere between life and death.Erin and her parents must find the courage to accept the fact that Amy's life-support system will never bring her back. When she dies, can the family give some meaning to her senseless death? Can Amy's dying become the hope for someone else's living?From the Paperback edition.

    Written by an unknown author, Seven Taoist Masters is the story of six men and one woman who overcome tremendous hardships on the journey to self-mastery. These characters and their teacher, Wang Ch'ung-yang, are all historical figures who lived in the Southern Sung (1127–1279) and Yuan (1271–1368) dynasties. Wang is regarded as the greatest patriarch of the Complete Reality school, a highly purified branch of Taoism having a strong affinity with Zen Buddhism. The novel brings to life the essentials of Taoist philosophy and practice, both through the instructions offered by Wang—on topics such as the cultivation of mind and body, meditation techniques, and overcoming the obstacles to enlightenment—and through the experiences of the characters.

    Tobias Wolff is the author of In Pharoah's Army and This Boy's Life.

    This tender tale by award-winning author, Ken Gire, reminds kids that all life is a gift from God, and that we should be kind and compassionate to those who are somehow different from us.

    Sera, a prostitute, and Ben, an alcoholic, stumble together and discover in each other a respite from their unforgiving lives. A testimony to the raw talent of its young author, Leaving Las Vegas is a compelling story of unconditional love between two disenfranchised and lost souls—an overlooked American classic.

    Local stockmen were staking claims to grazing areas throughout the West. Spearman had no quarrel with that, but he wasn't about to let anyone intimidate him or attack his men without putting up a fight. So when Denton Baxter's threats turned to murder, Spearman knew he had to get justice—any way he could.The basis for the movie Open Range, starring Robert Duvall, Kevin Costner, and Annette Bening!

    By all appearances they were a close and loving family. Yet across the happy facade lay a shadow that had lengthened and darkened with the passing years. For the father and mother were not husband and wife, which meant that, to the narrow and bigoted minds of the Victorian rural community, the offspring of Nathaniel Martell and Maria Dagshaw were base-born gillyvors - in country parlance, bastards.Anna, the elder daughter, was entering womanhood resolved to face the legacy of her birth and the challenges it must continue to bring her. Her journey through life would not be an easy one and only her inborn courage and zest for life would sustain her quest for fulfilment and happiness.

    So when he chases a deadbeat client out to Hollywood, Chili figures he might like to stay. This town, with its dream-makers, glitter, hucksters, and liars—plus gorgeous, partially clad would-be starlets everywhere you look—seems ideal for an enterprising criminal with a taste for the cinematic. Besides, Chili’s got an idea for a killer movie, though it could very possibly kill him to get it made.

    Full of fun! From the #1 New York Times bestselling author Janet Evanovich comes the Full Series #1 boxed set, containing one copy each of Full House, Full Tilt, and Full Speed.

    After a high-priced hooker is killed and one of the world's biggest diamonds is stolen, Joe Speaker, a strip-joint barker and dope addict, stumbles onto the missing jewel, is hunted down and put away for the murder. In prison, he finds that his troubles are just beginning.

    English master-gunner John Hawkwood uproots his family from their native land and journeys to this fabled city.With the city under threat by the Ottoman Turks, the Byzantine emperor is in desperate need of men like Hawkwood and the knowledge of cannon and gunpowder he brings. For a time, the Hawkwoods enjoy status and privilege in return for John’s superior abilities as an artillerist. But all good things must come to an end. When tragedy strikes, even the close relationship John shares with the emperor cannot absolve the family of their sins, and with little more than the clothes on their backs, the Hawkwoods flee Constantinople. Captured by the savage Turks, John Hawkwood swiftly changes his allegiance, and once more applies his considerable skills…this time serving the conquerors in their victorious surge across eastern Europe and Mediterranean shores.No man lives forever, but the Hawkwood line never dies. For five generations, the Hawkwood men serve their Turkish leaders faithfully as military leaders and envoys. Although showered with wealth and privilege and accorded honours commensurate with their rank, their fates lie in the often capricious hands of the Ottoman empire’s cruel leaders. Over a span of nearly one hundred and fifty years, the Hawkwoods must employ every ounce of political cunning they possess to survive the swirling intrigues and bloody massacres that dominate the world in which they live. For their wives and concubines, the uncertainties and dangers of life are no less severe: the punishment meted out to a Hawkwood man who fails his duty likewise falls upon his family.Beyond the gleaming wealth and the veneer of power lie grim spectres of betrayal and sudden death, the threat of ravishment and torture lurking behind the gilded pillars of their palaces and harems. And when the time comes to choose between Ottoman and Hawkwood, no one can say what the future might bring…Christopher Nicole was born and brought up in British Guyana and the West Indies. His output of books has been prolific and many of his novels are historical with a Caribbean background. This book was previously published under the pseudonym Alan Savage.Endeavour Press is the UK's leading independent digital publisher. For more information on our titles please sign up to our newsletter at www.endeavourpress.com. Each week you will receive updates on free and discounted ebooks. Follow us on Twitter: @EndeavourPress and on Facebook via http://on.fb.me/1HweQV7. We are always interested in hearing from our readers. Endeavour Press believes that the future is now.

    Astronomically so. He and his wife lead the kind of charity-giving, art-filled, high-society life for which each has been carefully groomed. Until Jules falls in love with Flo March, a beautiful actress/waitress. What Flo discovers about the superrich is not a pretty sight. And in the end, she wants no more than what she was promised. But when Flo begins to share the true story of her life among the Mendelsons, not everyone is in a listening mood. And some cold shoulders have very sharp edges...

    At the centre of events is the beautiful and dangerous Constance, who casts a spell - which may be a curse - on all the sons of the family.

    In prose that is both raw and compelling, it tells the story of Beth Heke, a Maori woman struggling to keep her family from falling apart, despite the squalor and violence of the housing projects in which they live. Conveying both the rich textures of Maori tradition and the wounds left by its absence, Once Were Warriors is a masterpiece of unblinking realism, irresistible energy, and great sorrow.

    Few writers possess Hailey's ability to combine careful, accurate research with a profound sense of human drama. (Doubleday)

    Brimming with unforgettable characters and set in exotic locales, his fiction transports readers to a world that is at once fanciful, haunting, and real. Leaf Storm, Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez's first novella, introduces the mythical village of Macondo, a desolate town beset by torrents of rain, where a man must fulfill a promise made years earlier. No One Writes to the Colonel is a novella of life in a decaying tropical town in Colombia with an unforgettable central character. Chronicle of a Death Foretold is a dark and profound story of three people joined together in a fatal act of violence.Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez was born in Colombia in 1927. His many books include the novels One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982.

    . .Young, alone, and far from her family in Britain, Hope Clearwater contemplates the extraordinary events that left her washed up like driftwood on Brazzaville Beach. It is here, on the distant, lonely outskirts of Africa, where she must come to terms with the perplexing and troubling circumstances of her recent past. For Hope is a survivor of the devastating cruelities of apes and humans alike. And to move forward, she must first grasp some hard and elusive truths: about marriage and madness, about the greed and savagery of charlatan science . . . and about what compels seemingly benign creatures to kill for pleasure alone.

    

    It's clearly a case of self-defense, but the dead man’s father, Ben Russel, doesn't see it that way. Russel wants to extract Old Testament-style justice: an eye-for-an-eye, a son-for-a-son. Straightforward menace takes a 90-degree turn, though, when certain unexpected truths come to light, and soon Dane and Russel find themselves working together for a common cause. Their investigation puts them at odds with the cops, the Feds, and the Dixie Mafia, but they’re determined to find the answers that lie at the end of a very dark and twisting path.

    Now, in old age, living out in the country, Moran is still fighting - with his family, his friends, even himself - in a poignant struggle to come to terms with the past.

    Includes The Story Girl and The Golden Road, both featuring the charming Sara Stanley and Kilmeny of the Orchard, one of Montgomery's most romantic and emotional works. Black-and-white illustrations. 6" x 9".

    But she was murdered by the greed of white men, and the Graycloud family, who cared for her daughter, began dying mysteriously. Letters sent to Washington, D.C. begging for help went unanswered, until at last a Native American government official, Stace Red Hawk, traveled west to investigate. What he found has been documented by history: rampant fraud, intimidation, and murder. But he also found something truly extraordinary--his deepest self and abiding love for his people, and their brave past.

    Rather than returning Soraya's dowry, as custom required before taking a second wife, he plotted with four friends and a counterfeit mullah to dispose of her. Together, they accused Soraya of adultery. Her only crime was cooking for a friend's widowed husband. Exhausted by a lifetime of abuse and hardship, Soraya said nothing, and the makeshift tribunal took her silence as a confession of guilt. They sentenced her to death by stoning: a punishment prohibited by Islam but widely practiced. Day by day sometimes minute by minute Sahebjam deftly recounts these horrendous events, tracing Soraya's life with searing immediacy, from her arranged marriage and the births of her nine children to her husband's increasing cruelty and her horrifying execution, where, by tradition, her father, husband, and sons hurled the first stones. This is one woman's story, but it stands for the stories of thousands of women who suffered and continue to suffer the same fate. It is a story that must be told.

    But when he fails to make the grade as a college footballer, and takes a job with the local farmers' co-operative, it seems he has finally settled into the rhythm and routine of everyday life. Outward appearances can be deceptive, however, as Jack proves: returning from a weekend conference with a new wife in tow, then leaving her behind and skipping town with a bundle of other folk's money.Nearly a decade later, no one has forgiven or forgotten, and when Jack reappears, resentment runs high. Once again though, it is Jack whose presence - even more than his eight-year absence - proves the most devastating.

    The newcomers are a proud and bloody-minded people whose kings once changed themselves into wolves. The Norse have advanced as implacably as a glacier from Iceland to the wastes of Greenland and from there to the place they call Vinland the Good. The natives are a bronze-skinned race who have not yet discovered iron and still see themselves as part of nature. As William T. Vollmann tells the converging stories of these two peoples and of the Norsewomen Freydis and Gudrid, whose venomous rivalry brings frost into paradise he creates a tour-de-force of speculative history, a vivid amalgam of Icelandic saga, Inuit creation myth, and contemporary travel writing that yields a new an utterly original vision of our continent and its past.--back cover

    A classic for young readers as first told in The Maiden's Bequest.

    An increasingly decrepit God and a merely ill-tempered Satan are reconciled and attempt a mission to Earth, where their misadventures point up the comedy and tragedy of modern life.

    In New York after college, Bobby moves in with Jonathan and his roommate, Clare, a veteran of the city's erotic wars. Bobby and Clare fall in love, scuttling the plans of Jonathan, who is gay, to father Clare's child. Then, when Clare and Bobby have a baby, the three move to a small house upstate to raise "their" child together and, with an odd friend, Alice, create a new kind of family. A Home at the End of the World masterfully depicts the charged, fragile relationships of urban life today.

    This omnibus brings together the first three Reginald Perrin novels containing a lifetime's outrageous and hilarious adventures.When we first meet Reggie, he is sick to death with selling exotic ices at Sunshine Desserts. Driven to desperation by the rat race and the unpunctuality of Britain's trains, Reggie's small eccentricites escalate to the extreme, until finally he leaves the unacceptable face of capitalism behind by driving off in a stolen motorised jelly. In his pursuit of the unconventional, he devotes himself to faking his own death, opening a shop devoted to selling completely useless goods, and setting up a commune strictly for the middle-class and middle-aged.Join Reggie, who didn't get where he is today without some help from some memorable supporting characters, in one man's quest to avoid an everyday existence.

    His wife, the detective novel–loving Ruya, has disappeared. Could she have left him for her ex-husband or Celâl, a popular newspaper columnist? But Celâl, too, seems to have vanished. As Galip investigates, he finds himself assuming the enviable Celâl's identity, wearing his clothes, answering his phone calls, even writing his columns. Galip pursues every conceivable clue, but the nature of the mystery keeps changing, and when he receives a death threat, he begins to fear the worst.With its cascade of beguiling stories about Istanbul, The Black Book is a brilliantly unconventional mystery, and a provocative meditation on identity. For Turkish literary readers it is the cherished cult novel in which Orhan Pamuk found his original voice, but it has largely been neglected by English-language readers. Now, in Maureen Freely’s beautiful new translation, they, too, may encounter all its riches.

    Their formal perfection and expansiveness of feeling are an expression of Cather’s dedication both to art and to the open spaces of America.A Lost Lady (1923) exemplifies her principle of conciseness. It concerns a woman of uncommon loveliness and grace who lends an aura of sophistication to a frontier town, and explores the hidden passions and desires that confine those who idealize her. The recurrent conflict in Cather’s work between frontier culture and an encroaching commercialism is nowhere more powerfully articulated.The Professor’s House (1925) encapsulates a story within a story. In the framing narrative, Professor St. Peter, a prizewinning historian of the early Spanish explorers, finds himself disillusioned with family, career, even the house that reflects his success. Within this story is another, of St. Peter’s friend Tom Outland, whose brief but adventurous life still shadows those he loved.Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) tells the story of the first bishop of New Mexico in a series of tableaux modeled on the medieval lives of the saints. Cather affectionately portrays the refined French Bishop Latour and his more earthy assistant within the harsh and beautiful landscape of the Southwest and among the Mexicans, Indians, and settlers they were sent to serve.Shadows on the Rock (1931), though its setting and subject are unusual for Cather, expresses her fascination with the “curious endurance of a kind of culture, narrow but definite.” It is a re-creation of 17th-century Québec as it appears to the apothecary Auclaire and his daughter Cécile: the town’s narrow streets, the supply ships on its great river, its merchants, profligates, explorers, missionaries, and towering personalities like Frontenac and Laval, all parts of a colony struggling to survive.Lucy Gayheart (1935) returns to the themes of Cather’s earlier writings, in a more somber key. Talented, spontaneous, and eager to explore the possibilities of life, Lucy leaves her prairie home to pursue a career in music. After a happy interval, her life takes an increasingly disastrous turn.Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940) marks a triumphant conclusion to Cather’s career as a novelist. Set in Virginia five years before the Civil War, the story shows the effects of slaveholding on Sapphira Colbert, a woman of spirit and common sense who is frighteningly capricious in dealing with people she “owns,” and on her husband, who hates slavery even while he conforms to the social order that permits it. When through kindness he refuses to sell a slave, Sapphira’s jealous reaction precipitates a sequence of events that registers a conflict of cultural as well as personal values.

    Even the approach of Christmas, 1913, fails to excite the restless Agnes Conway, the twenty-two-year-old manager of her feckless father's adjoining sweet and tobacconist shops.  There are dark secrets in Arthur Conway's past, and these come tragically to light when Agnes's younger sister becomes pregnant by one of the notorious Felton brothers.  And Agnes herself has a secret, which she knows she must keep from her father:  an attachment to Charles Farrier, son of a local landowner, who outrages his own pious family by proposing marriage...But Charles is not the only man who shapes Agnes's future, for his brother Reginald makes no secret of his admiration for her; although she could not have foreseen how significant a part he was to play in her destiny...

    After a colony spacecraft from Earth is mysteriously destroyed, America prepares for the first time to engage extraterrestrial life in combat. William Mandella is one of a small, elite force trained and sent across millions of miles of space to attack an enemy base. The author vividly recreates the tedium, stupidity, terror and destruction of combat. The soldiers' first encounter turns into a bloody massacre of unarmed aliens, an act which leaves Mandella "horrified at the prospect of living with myself for sixty more years," and which sets the stage for the beginning of a war with no end in sight. Marvano and Marchand combine their talents to create a complex technological environment and an alien planet battleground, both represented with distinctive spare line work and a limited but rich palette. Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

    For Jim Nashe, it all started when he came into a small inheritance and left Boston in pusuit of "a life of freedom." Careening back and forth across the United States, waiting for the money to run out, Nashe met Jack Pozzi, a young man with a temper and a plan. With Nashe's last funds, they entered a poker game against two rich eccentrics, "risking everything on the single turn of a card." In Paul Auster's world of fiendish bargains and punitive whims, where chance is a shifting and powerful force, there is redemption, nonetheless, in Nashe's resolute quest for justice and his capacity for love.

    When twelve-year-old Edward Yeoman discovers a strange board game in his uncle's house, he and his cousin play the creepy game, with sinister results.

    This box set contains the following: The Baby-Sitters' Winter Vacation, Snowbound, Baby-sitters At Shadow Lake

    Dick's VALIS trilogy. VALIS What is VALIS? This question is at the heart of Philip K. Dick’s groundbreaking novel, the first book in his defining trilogy. When a beam of pink light begins giving a schizophrenic man named Horselover Fat (who just might also be known as Philip K. Dick) visions of an alternate Earth where the Roman Empire still reigns, he must decide whether he is crazy, or whether a godlike entity is showing him the true nature of the world. The Divine Invasion God is not dead, he has merely been exiled to an extraterrestrial planet. And it is on this planet that God meets Herb Asher and convinces him to help retake Earth from the demonic Belial. As the middlie novel of Dick's VALIS trilogy, The Divine Invasion plays a pivotal role in answering the questions raised by the first novel, expanding that world while exploring just how much anyone can really know -- even God himself. The Transmigration of Timothy Archer The final book in the VALIS trilogy, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer brings the author’s search for the identity and nature of God to a close. The novel follows Bishop Timothy Archer as he travels to Israel, ostensibly to examine ancient scrolls bearing the words of Christ. But, more importantly, this leads him to examine the decisions he made during his life and how they may have contributed to the suicide of his mistress and son.

    What's more, the face appeared to have been shaved after death. The police assumed that the victim was a prominent financier, but Lord Peter Wimsey, who dabbled in mystery detection as a hobby, knew better. In this, his first murder case, Lord Peter untangles the ghastly mystery of the corpse in the bath. "Murder Must Advertise"--When advertising executive Victor Dean dies from a fall down the stairs at Pym's Publicity, Lord Peter Wimsey is asked to investigate. It seems that, before he died, Dean had begun a letter to Mr. Pym suggesting some very unethical dealings at the posh London ad agency. Wimsey goes undercover and discovers that Dean was part of the fast crowd at Pym's, a group taken to partying and doing drugs. Wimsey and his brother-in-law, Chief-Inspector Parker, rush to discover who is running London's cocaine trade and how Pym's fits into the picture--all before Wimsey's cover is blown. "Gaudy Night"--When Harriet Vane attends her Oxford reunion, known as the "Gaudy," the prim academic setting is haunted by a rash of bizarre pranks: scrawled obsentities, burnt effigies and poison-pen letters -- including one that says, "Ask your boyfriend with the title if he likes arsenic in his soup."Some of the notes threaten murder; all are perfectly ghastly; yet in spite of their scurrilous nature, all are perfectly worded. And Harriet finds herself ensnared in a nightmare of romance and terror, with only the tiniest shreds of clues to challenge her powers of detection, and those of her paramour, Lord Peter Wimsey.

    The exciting years she spends as a Shakette are a mixed blessing, however, because when she ultimately submits to a conventional life of marriage and children, she finds herself stuck in bittersweet recollections of life on the road. As she grudgingly searches for a path toward happiness that doesn't involve a Day-Glo neon minidress, readers will be enchanted by Geraldine’s attempts to grow up, even though she’s already an adult.Employing her usual dry wit and candor, Goodbye Without Leaving is a classic novel from Laurie Colwin.This edition features cover art by Olivia McGiff.

    This is his sixth novel, and it is great.” —Detroit Free Press Master storyteller Jon Hassler draws us into the vividly rendered, emotionally charged world of Father Frank Healy, a priest hoping to reawaken a vocation that he fears is leaking away. Working at a mission on an Ojibway reservation in Northern Minnesota, Frank unexpectedly encounters his old high school girlfriend, Libby, and is swept up in a gripping drama of temptation, crime, and love that shows him how wounded hearts are healed. This absorbing novel, among Hassler’s finest, is a beautifully told tale of blighted spirits restored by the power of hope.

    By the end of this hilarious tale, they each have risen to the heights of wealth and fame, before arriving at disasters - both personal and ecological - that destroy the rain forest and all the birds of Brazil.

    Translated by Joan Tate.

    - Naughty Amelia Jane- Amelia Jane is Naughty Again- Amelia Jane Gets Into Trouble

    He would return a different man.

    

    Mr.dolatabadi spent 15 years of his life to write this book.it's surprising that he wrote some little novels while writing this!a well-designed story with detailed information for each character either minor characters that let you good contact with them...

    But despite warnings from friends, Andy is soon deeply immersed in Tom's life and his world . . . a world he will do anything to protect. When Tom declares war on the enemy poisoning his woods, it becomes clear that Andy must choose between her life with Tom and the one she left behind . . . if Pemberton society will take her back.

    Disfigured and demoralized, he deserts from France's famed Lafayette Escadrille, only to be captured, convicted, and sentenced to twenty years in the Foreigh Legion. He serves in Africa, where, along with a motley group of convicts and outcasts, Halifax is forced to fly illegal arms shipments to the very tribesmen they have been sent to fight. But a dream keeps Halifax alive even as his companions fall to harm or misery-the relentless determination to become the first pilot to fly nonstop from Paris to New York.

    Like all of Cixous's profoundly original works, it seductively leads the reader into a new way of thinking by disrupting fixed ideas of psychic identity, subjectivity, and language.

    

    He is a figure of almost mythical power--an enigma to all who know him. But when his world is suddenly shattered, Maxim must make peace with his turbulent past and begin to understand the remarkable women who have loved and protected him.From the streets of London to the suites of New York, from the rise of Nazi Germany to the fall of the Berlin Wall, THE WOMEN IN HIS LIFE takes us on an unforgettable journey of survival, secrets, love and redemption that mesmerizes from first page to last.

    The three novels in this volume all display her characteristic wit, intellectual breadth and narrative brilliance, applied to the different traditional forms into which she breathed new life. The Bookshop is a contemporary comedy of manners, set in a provincial town. In The Gate of Angels romance is combined with the novel of ideas; while The Blue Flower revitalizes historical drama in a study of the eighteenth-century German writer Novalis. Fitzgerald being the genius of the relevant detail and the deftly sketched conceptual context, each book conjures up a different world in a few vivid pages which remain etched on the memory.

    The adventures and pranks of a mischievous boy growing up in a Mississippi River town in the early nineteenth century.Troll Illustrated Classics

    Susanna -- A young schoolteacher with a will as fierce as her snapping green eyes. The Civil War had stolen everything but her spitfire spirit. Now she vowed to find a new life in an untamed land...Ase -- The most powerful man in Mason-Dixon. With looks and charm to match his money, he could have any woman in Kansas. But the one he wanted wouldn't say yes... Matt -- A handsome doctor as bitter as he was mysterious. His crippled hand would not let him practice medicine -- and a secret agony would him love... No Roof But Heaven -- Their lives were bound together by fortune and friendship. They would suffer and survive the heartaches of a harsh land -- and learn to love with hearts made bold by the taste of frontier freedom....

    Perkins’ insider’s view leads him to crisis of conscience--to the realization that he must devote himself to work which will foster a world-wide awareness of the sanctity of indigenous peoples, their cultures, and their environments. Perkins’ books demonstrate how the age-old shamanic techniques of some of the world’s most primitive peoples have sparked a revolution in modern concepts about healing, the subconscious, and the powers each of us has to alter individual and communal reality.This groundbreaking book is John Perkins’s firsthand account of his experiences with the shamanic technique of psychonavigation--a method of traveling outside the body by means of visions and dream wanderings--and his encounters with the Shuar of the Amazon, the Quechua of the Andes, and the Bugis of Indonesia. Shuar shamans psychonavigate for the purposes of hunting and healing, while the Bugis, among the most renowned sailors of the world, use these techniques to navigate without the aid of charts and compasses. Perkins explains how these techniques work and how the people of these indigenous cultures psychonavigate to both distant physical destinations and sources of inner wisdom. Throughout history, psychonavigation has been practiced by highly creative minds such as Beethoven, Jung, and Einstein. Perkins’s riveting narrative takes us on a journey of personal discovery as he learns the great value of these techniques and their relevance not only to individual well-being, but to the health of the environment and of the world at large. He reveals how by attuning to the positive forces in nature and communicating with our inner guides we all can become psychonavigators, finding our way to wise decisions and developing innovative approaches to the challenges we face as individuals and a world community.

    Jackson Brown writes. "They began when I was an eight-year old camper away from home for the first time. When I opened Mom's letter, I would always read the P.S. first. I just couldn't wait to discover what revelations, humor, observations, admonitions, and encouragement she wanted to share with me.""No matter how hard you hug your money, it never hugs you back," says one P.S. "Middle age is when you have two choices and you choose the one that gets you home earlier, " says another.Jack Brown's mother shared valuable advice with him about the issues of wisdom, hope, humor, and faith. "Although some were written more than thirty years ago," Brown says, "they still run with truth and insight."

    But most remarkable was that her identical twin had been on display at Fawn and Laura's antique shop for years. Well, the dolls were almost identical. There was something about the smile of this one, and her eyes... they seemed so real... The accidents began the day the twin doll was discovered. People were maimed, killed, and always the doll was found nearby. Then Fawn noticed an old photograph of a great aunt she never knew; the face was hauntingly familiar. And when she rummaged through her grandfather's books, she unearthed a dark family secret, a heinous crime best left forgotten. Suddenly, all the accidents began to make a certain horrifying sense...

    A secretary has found a new life as a champion bodybuilding contender, but her turns things upside down with their redneck antics.

    At the heart of the story are two people, Iris Courtney, who is white, and handsome Jinx Fairchild, the black basketball player who, in protecting Iris, kills a white man.Iris is the only witness to the crime.The two of them are growing up in the early 1950s in a New York industrial town where racial boundaries keep people apart - or bring them together in explosive scenes of fear or desire. The secret link between Iris and Jinx is not only their attraction to each other, but a murder...and a bond of passion and guilt is formed between them. How this one irrevocable, tragic act shapes their lives and alters their destinies becomes Joyce Carol Oate's finest, emotion-packed novel - a work the critics are calling a masterpiece, the best work of America's best writer of contemporary realism.

    Maria St. Just was for 30 years Williams' closest friend, confidant, and reader and the inspiration for Maggie in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. 75 photographs.

    But Julie Katz, the half-sister of Jesus, has been born to a celibate father. Soon poor Julie is tempted by the Devil and challenged by neo-Christian zealots-and that’s just the beginning of her fantastic odyssey through Hell, a seceded New Jersey, and her own confused soul. Winner of a 1991 World Fantasy Award.

    Readers are introduced to a secret history of the twentieth century, shown that behind the well-known wars and political revolutions of the period numerous secret organizations vied for supremacy through the control of books, knowledge, and dreams. With appearances by Sigmund Freud, Salvador Dali, the Marquis de Sade, Karl Marx, and Josef Stalin, among many others, Basara s novel presents a singularly playful, imaginative portrait of modernity and of the human condition.

    It is the tale of a pair of young scholars researching the lives of two Victorian poets. As they uncover their letters, journals, and poems, and track their movements from London to Yorkshire—from spiritualist séances to the fairy-haunted far west of Brittany—what emerges is an extraordinary counterpoint of passions and ideas.Man Booker Prize Winner (1990)

    Easy is drinking in a friend's bar, wondering how he'll meet his mortgage, when a white man in a linen suit walks in, offering good money if Easy will simply locate Miss Daphne Monet, a blonde beauty known to frequent black jazz clubs.

    The novels share neither characters nor events; instead, they approach the problem of knowing people—of mutual understanding—in a variety of ways. Detectives faced with a murder reconstruct the crime, but not the character of the man who was murdered. Three people tell stories about a dying pilot they know almost nothing about; each story is as full of truth as it is devoid of facts. And one man looks back on his life and discovers all the people he might have been. Together, these three short novels form a readable philosophical novel unique in world literature.

    Their rhymes and insistent rhythms are part of their appeal, but so too is their disturbing mixture of comedy, innocence and cruelty. As Marina Warner writes in her introduction, ‘marvels mix with the everyday and banality meets mystery in the nursery rhyme’.No one captures this eerie combination of magic and menace better than the acclaimed painter Dame Paula Rego. Her first solo show with the prestigious Marlborough Galleries in 1989 was a series of etchings inspired by nursery rhymes. We were delighted when she agreed to create five additional etchings for a special Folio Society book of rhymes based on the renowned anthology by Peter and Iona Opie, and published in 1994. We are pleased to announce that this very collectible book is being republished, giving more Folio Society members the chance to own a copy.The illustrations are a superb evocation of the wondrous and mysterious world of classic rhymes, from ‘Little Bo Peep’ to ‘Three Blind Mice’. Sometimes Rego’s children tower over adults, elsewhere they lie like dolls, while dreamlike, beautiful scenes swirl about them. With an illustration for every rhyme and illustrations printed on the front and back boards, this is a magnificent edition that underscores the creative power of the humble nursery rhyme.

    Here, National Book Award winner Paul Monette depicts three men of various economic and social backgrounds, all with one thing in common: They are widowers, in a way, and all of their lovers died of AIDS in an LA hospital within a week of one another.Steven, Sonny, and Dell meet weekly to discuss how to go on with their lives despite the hanging sword of being HIV positive. One tries to find a semblance of normalcy; one rebels openly against the disease, choosing to treat his body as a temple that he can consecrate and desecrate at will; and one throws himself into fierce political activism. No matter what path each one takes, they are all searching for one thing: a way to live and love again.Afterlife finds Paul Monette at his most autobiographical, portraying men in a situation that he himself experienced, and one that he described to critical acclaim in the award-winning Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir.

    From that point, he quickly made his mark on the Czech literary scene; by his death he was ranked with Jaroslav Hašek, Karel Capek, and Milan Kundera as among the nation’s greatest twentieth-century writers. Known for writing about political questions with humor and vivid expressiveness, Hrabal also was given to experimentation—his early novel Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age, for example, consists of a single extended sentence.Pirouettes on a Postage Stamp carried Hrabal’s experimentation to the field of autobiography. On its surface a verbatim record of an oral interview conducted by Hungarian journalist László Szigeti, the book confuses and confounds with false starts, digressions, and philosophical asides. Yet despite all the games and distractions, Hrabal’s personality shines through, compelling and unforgettable, making Pirouette on a Postage Stamp an unexpected treat for any lover of Czech literature.

    In the letters, a writer sets forth his plans for a book about two children who were separated from their families during a war. He plans to invent a narration that will fully reveal their experiences during that war, experiences that are at the base of their reality, and the memory of which will also retrieve them from their present, supernumerary lives.The two children, it develops, escaped the roundups of Jews in a city much like Paris during World War II. The book contains the story of their ambiguous survival, which may or may not be that of the author. Now, fifty years later, the two have re-established contact and plan a reunion in Israel.In the last scene of the book two figures, their features obscured by the long shadows of evening, lean toward one another as they speak from the confidence of their hearts. Also there, listening, is the writer of the letters that form the book. The novel ends mysteriously, and so continues to vibrate in our imagination. To Whom it May Concern will join that short list of books we treasure most deeply, those few statements that remind us of who we are, and of what we are capable.

    Susan, working for a distinctly dubious bookseller is in love with the elusive Neale, but still obsessed with the memory of Cynthia, a rangy beauty from her schooldays. Their fumbling detective work reveals that Cynthia is due in Venice for a film festival and, in a richly comic odyssey, they journey there as couriers. Cynthia is found and they also meet the famous singer, Helena Buchan. The ensuing shifts of love and loyalty recall the Mozart operas for which Helena is renowned, and whose music hauntingly threads the latter part of the novel. Here is love, poverty, friendship, betrayal and enlightenment. Even a breath of tragedy serves only to underline the laconic wit and optimism of this vivid and intelligent novel.

    Set mainly in 1914-1916 and told in diary-like entries interspersed with 36 brooding illustrations by the author, the story follows the boys as they become lovers, ultimately separated by college and a tragic accident. Together they explore California's woods, beaches and mountains, and search for evidence of the earthquake that brought them together. Their excavations as well as Max's reading of Ruskin and Cicero, point to this sensitive novel's motif: how memory accretes into character and shapes perception.

    Vicious black-furred beasts that fought in the pit with the raw fury and savage ferocity of Satan himself. For their owners, they were a lucrative investment. For the people of Sulphur Springs, Texas, they were the best entertainment they’d had in a long while.For Bowie Kane, they were his worst nightmare come true. He alone recognized the dark and ravenous evil that his Apache ancestors had foretold. But Bowie Kane was an outsider in Sulphur Springs. No one would listen to his warnings. And now it was too late to avert the rampage of carnage and terror unleashed on an unsuspecting town.

    But the Varkela are nothing like their hideous cousins who made Transylvania famous. They earn the blood they need to survive by trading traditional healing skills with others. But unless something changes, the Varkelans will soon become extinct.

    Dee hates leaving her familiar surroundings for the quaint inn her aunt runs on a New England island, but Winnifred's easygoing manner hastens the adjustment. Getting acclimated to the 13-year-old ghost in Dee's room is another matter, yet Louisa Lockwood, who died in a fire 100 years ago, soon becomes a good friend.

    In the tradition of Native oratory, these stories are layered with unresolved human dilemmas; Maracle writes with love and humor about the pain and triumphs, and the spirit of resistance.

    Aeneas' Trip to the Underworld - Circe and Odysseus - Creation of the Titans and Gods - Cupid and Psyche - The Follies of Midas - Jason and the Golden Fleece - Prometheus - The Twelve Labors of Heracles

    The minor notoriety of Oscar's covers for the New York based Lowdown magazine sends master and dog into exile in the South of France, where Oscar hopes to improve his primitive social skills - and to do what he can to develop Elizabeth's budding artistic talent. Oscar finds romance in Val d'Argent; Elizabeth paints a series of masterpieces.

    The list of his crimes include witchcraft, heresy, sacrilege, sorcery, the evocations of demons and the practice of unnatural crime against children, ending with their murder for his delight.

    The Gender of Modernism... will be nothing less than an absolutely necessary text for Modernist studies." --Shari Benstock"Scott and her contributing editors... effectively brings together the issues of gender and modernism into a volume recommended for reference and classroom use." --James Joyce Literary Supplement..". a treasure trove for anyone interested in the literature and history of modern times." --Susan GubarAuthors included are: Djuna Barnes, Willa Cather, Nancy Cunard, H.D., T.S. Eliot, Jessie Redmond Fauset, Zora Neale Hurston, James Joyce, Nella Larsen, D.H. Lawrence, Mina Loy, Rose Macaulay, Hugh MacDiarmid, Katherine Mansfield, Charlotte Mew, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, Jean Rhys, Dorothy Richardson, May Sinclair, Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Rebecca West, Antonia White, Anna Wickham, and Virginia Woolf

    When somebody finally moves into the old, dark, musty house next door, two boys make an unusual friend.

    Contains:Handmaid's TaleLife Before ManSurfacing

    It offers precise step-by-step instructions on how to work with each of the 15 classic bonsai styles.