A Polar wind blows through it, and birds of prey hover over it." So Melville wrote of his masterpiece, one of the greatest works of imagination in literary history. In part, Moby-Dick is the story of an eerily compelling madman pursuing an unholy war against a creature as vast and dangerous and unknowable as the sea itself. But more than just a novel of adventure, more than an encyclopaedia of whaling lore and legend, the book can be seen as part of its author's lifelong meditation on America. Written with wonderfully redemptive humour, Moby-Dick is also a profound inquiry into character, faith, and the nature of perception.This edition of Moby-Dick, which reproduces the definitive text of the novel, includes invaluable explanatory notes, along with maps, illustrations, and a glossary of nautical terms.

    When her firm becomes embroiled in what could be an international scandal around a key client and Brad begins asking questions about her past, an overwhelmed Mimi begins to sink into emotional chaos. One glance at herself in an old mirror leads her to dig into her past and courageously relive the traumas of her childhood. Thus begins the heart of Uyen Nicole Duong’s Mimi and Her Mirror, a poetic, passionate, and sometimes chilling novel about Vietnam and a girl known as Mimi Suong Giang, whose youth was destroyed as she attempted to escape during the fall of Saigon. Readers share young Mimi's hopes, dreams and courage as she valiantly struggles to find her way into the light.

    Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, it traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into a nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving.

    Three years later he completed the greatest novel to emerge from "the good fight," For Whom the Bell Tolls. The story of Robert Jordan, a young American in the International Brigades attached to an antifascist guerilla unit in the mountains of Spain, it tells of loyalty and courage, love and defeat, and the tragic death of an ideal. In his portrayal of Jordan's love for the beautiful Maria and his superb account of El Sordo's last stand, in his brilliant travesty of La Pasionaria and his unwillingness to believe in blind faith, Hemingway surpasses his achievement in The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms to create a work at once rare and beautiful, strong and brutal, compassionate, moving and wise. "If the function of a writer is to reveal reality," Maxwell Perkins wrote to Hemingway after reading the manuscript, "no one ever so completely performed it." Greater in power, broader in scope, and more intensely emotional than any of the author's previous works, it stands as one of the best war novels of all time.

    Yes, she is old. Yes, she sometimes forgets where she put her glasses, or her heart medication. But doesn't everyone? That doesn't give workers--paid to assist her, mind you--the right to rifle through her personal belongings, or "accidentally" forget something of hers in their pocket. It definitely does not give them the right to embezzle thousands of dollars from her family trust.Just when she is most desperate, a young neighbor takes her by surprise. Bonding over their shared love of soap operas, Jo and Toby engage in old-school reconnaissance to find answers. Together, they brave roller skates, walks along uneven ground, and even downtown parking on what may be Jo's most exciting adventure in forty years."Yes, And" is a feel-good story that explores the hearts of two misunderstood, kindred spirits, connected just when they need each other most.

    Selected novels by Newbery Award winner Sharon Creech -- "Walk Two Moons, Absolutely Normal Chaos," and "Chasing Redbird" -- now in a boxed set.

    Johann Fausten dem wietbeschreyen Zauberer und Schwartzkunstler, or History of Dr John Faust the notorious Magician and Necromancer, as written by his familiar servant and disciple Christopher wagner, now for the first time Englished from the Low German.

    Through their compelling story looms a sense of a whole nation's tragedy during the Great Depression.Reviews of The Bones of Plenty: "It is possible . . .that literary historians of the future will decide that The Bones of Plenty was the farm novel of the Great Drought of the 1920s and 1930s and the Great Depression. Better than any other novel of the period with which I am familiar, Lois Phillips Hudson's story presents, with intelligence and rare understanding, the frightful disaster that closed thousands of rural banks and drove farmers off their farms, the hopes and savings of a lifetime in ruins about them."--New York Times Book Review"Hudson does a superb job of revealing the physical texture of farm life on the prairie--its sounds, smells, colors, sensations. Then she goes further, examining the spiritual texture as well. Her characters are bound to each other and to their land in a kind of harsh intimacy from which there is no relief. Weather, poverty, anger, and pride are the forces that drive them and ultimately wear them down. . . Like the best books of any era, it convinces us of its characters' enduring humanity, and surprises us, again and again, with the depth of emotion it makes us feel."--Minneapolis Star Tribune"At her best, Lois Phillips Hudson can make the American Ordeal of the 1930s so real that you can all but feel the gritty dust in your teeth."--Omaha World-Herald

    Among them is Zoyd Wheeler who is preparing for his annual act of televised insanity (for which he receives a government stipend) when an unwelcome face appears from out of his past.An old nemesis, federal prosecutor Brock Vond, storms into Vineland at the head of a heavily armed strike force. Soon Zoyd and his daughter, Prairie, go into hiding while Vond begins a relationship with Zoyd's ex-wife and uses Prairie as a pawn against the mother she never knew she had.Part daytime drama, part political thriller, Vineland is a strange evocation of a twentieth-century America headed for a less than harmonic future.

    Best known for his controversial plays and films, his short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker and Playboy. Seductive and provocative, each potent and pithy tale in Seconds of Pleasure finds men and women exploiting -- or at the mercy of -- the hidden fault lines that separate them: In “Time Share,” a woman leaves her family at their vacation home after discovering her husband in a compromising situation; a middle-aged man obsesses over a scab on the calf of a pretty young girl in “Boo-Boo”; and a vain Hollywood actor gets his comeuppance in “Soft Target.” LaBute infuses Seconds of Pleasure with his trademark wit and black humor, and unleashes his imagination in stories that offer unflinching insight into our very human shortcomings and impure urges with shocking candor.

    Set in an addicts' halfway house and a tennis academy, and featuring the most endearingly screwed-up family to come along in recent fiction, Infinite Jest explores essential questions about what entertainment is and why it has come to so dominate our lives; about how our desire for entertainment affects our need to connect with other people; and about what the pleasures we choose say about who we are. Equal parts philosophical quest and screwball comedy, Infinite Jest bends every rule of fiction without sacrificing for a moment its own entertainment value. It is an exuberant, uniquely American exploration of the passions that make us human—and one of those rare books that renew the idea of what a novel can do.

    Shortly before the story opens he has endured a ridiculously humiliating incident that put him off his instrument—as part of a string quartet, he was sent unaware by the Musicians’ Union to “open” for a reunion tour of over-the-hill Hessian metal-gods Volstagg (based on Meat Loaf), who threw the classical musicians offstage. Biding his time until he can afford to leave Philth Town (a tweaked Philadelphia), he now works in a deli run by a despotic Dutchman and lives in a boarding house (The Desmon), among whose other residents are Armless Rob (self-explanatory), Yancey Fishnet (dominatrix), Emmylou Mattressback (basically what you’d expect), and others. Including Tinsel Greetz, an ill-informed anarchist prone to disaster, and Charlie's best friend.As the story opens, Tinsel has founded a “barter system” economy for the various misfits in the Desmon and its affiliated businesses (The Grain Shack, the dive bar Maxine’s, a veterinary office) which results in the destruction of the Shack, a huge pack of dogs being left at the Desmon for Tinsel to deal with, threats of lawsuits and bodily harm, and Tinsel hiding out with his inexplicably understanding girlfriend Zelda. Charlie has been supplementing his deli paycheck via the “Willard Rounds,” the illegal method Philth Town’s Sanitation Department has evolved to deal with its out-of-control sewer rat problem: paying “slag-hands” to go down into the sewers armed with pipes and duffel bags and pays them a fee per quantity of dead rats (“Willard,” above, and “Ben,” as the rats are collectively called, are references to the movies Willard [1971, recently remade starring Crispin Glover] and Ben [1972] in which rats avenge the wrongs done to their human guardians). Tinsel is persona non grata and has lost his gig playing guitar at a bar, so Charlie initiates him into life as a slag-hand, ending in a ridiculously generous haul. To celebrate, Charlie and Tinsel get drunk and—unfortunately—trash Zelda's apartment just as a foreign investor is about to come buy some of her photographs for a French media conglomerate. Furious, Zelda throws them out whereupon they are beaten up by skinheads and end up waking up the next morning worse for wear in a hotel room in one of the poshest hotels in the city, with Louise (the “investor,” who's actually a French journalist). Charlie is instantly, stupidly in love with Louise, reduced to stammering incoherence and suddenly relating to the lyrics of “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” And strange as it might seem, it appears to be mutual.Over the next forty-eight hours, Charlie is on a hellbent journey from disaffected, self-destructive, downwardly mobile slacker to redeeming his former creativity and maturity, as Tinsel and Louise vie for his loyalties. Along the way there are hilarious scenes where the two cleaned-up slag-hands attempt to navigate the stressful environment of a nice restaurant (complete with compulsive table-crumbers and a schmaltzy table-side troubadour who receives his comeuppance when Charlie takes his violin and bears down with classical fury, getting a standing ovation); the three play a vicious game of Death Match culminating in watching a Felix Trinidad-Hector Camacho fight at Maxine’s; and a final denouement in which fallen cinematic genius Delvin Corollo is shooting a vapid costume drama outside the hotel (based on Martin Scorsese and The Age of Innocence) and Tinsel and Charlie conspire to destroy the shoot.Brewing under the surface, Charlie is being forced to confront the “hate” part of his “love-hate” relationship with his extremely trying friend. Louise has offered to take him with her when she leaves town—to cover an uprising in New Guinea, and whatever comes next. Tinsel shows no sign of abandoning his hare-brained schemes—he’s planning to rob a bank now—and Charlie has become disgusted with himself for putting up with Tinsel’s behavior, which includes not only a lack of hygiene and normalcy, but more seriously a streak of casual misogyny and xenophobia that Charlie has always assumed was a joke, but now is not so sure. In a final scene both hilarious and poignant, Charlie takes his revenge on the evil Dutchman who persecuted him at the deli and gives Tinsel the means to attempt the bank job—in other words, enough rope to hang himself.

    A former resident of St. Louis, where he founded the Observable Poetry reading series, he now lives in Hillsborough, North Carolina.

    Now, a year after Sarah's death, Bendrix seeks to exorcise the persistence of his passion by retracing its course from obsessive love to love-hate. At first, he believes he hates Sarah and her husband, Henry. Yet as he delves deeper into his emotional outlook, Bendrix's hatred shifts to the God he feels has broken his life, but whose existence at last comes to recognize.

    A. riots of the 1990s.Straight's brilliant story of the effects of violence in America on three generations of a family is told through the lives of the Thompsons, a large clan who live in Treetown, above downtown Rio Seco, California, and operate a car towing and repair business. Patriarch Hosea is a proud man, and a hardened one, whose father was killed in the violence that erupted in Tulsa many years earlier. All Hosea's memories come flooding black with ferocious force when the bodies of two white women are found engulfed in flames in an abandoned car on his property. These are the first signs that someone wants Hosea off his land; it is up to his son Marcus, the only one of the six children of Hosea and his half-Mexican wife who can negotiate with the white world, to help the family hold on to their home and their livelihood.But it is only when Marcus' nephew Motrice-a young man infatuated with guns and the power that they bring- comes back to Rio Seco from gang-ridden Los Angeles that the real secrets of the bodies found on Thompson land are revealed, as Rio Seco erupts in the same wave of trashing and looting that has engulfed the nearby metropolis.The Gettin Place is a powerful portrait of a family struggling to defend its turf in a changing world, to hold on to the gettin place, the source from which they derive the tools for survival.