As a Houston prosecutor he sent sixteen men to death row, and watched seven of them die. But now, in the aftermath of his wife's death, the grief-stricken father packs up his four-year-old daughter, Annie, and returns to his hometown in search of healing. But peace is not what he finds there.Natchez, Mississippi, is the jewel of the antebellum South, a city of old money and older sins, where passion, power, and racial tensions seethe beneath its elegant façade. After twenty years away, Penn is stunned to find his own family trapped in a web of intrigue and danger. Determined to save his father from a ruthless blackmailer, Penn stumbles over a link to the town's darkest secret: the thirty-year-old unsolved murder of a black Korean War veteran. But what drives him to act is the revelation that this haunting mystery is inextricably bound up in his own past.24 HoursRead by Dick Hill (Ruth Bloomquist, Russell Byers)24 Hours begins with the perfect family. On the perfect day. About to become trapped in the perfect crime. Will Jennings is a successful young doctor in Jackson, Mississippi, with his whole life ahead of him. He has a thriving practice, a beautiful wife, and a young daughter he loves beyond measure. But Will and his family are being watched by a con man and psychopath. A man who has crafted the unbeatable crime. A man who has never been caught, and whose victims have never talked to the police. A man whose life's work strikes at the heart of every family's nightmare: the unstoppable kidnapping. But this man has never met Will and Karen Jennings.Dead SleepRead by Susie Breck (Dick Hill)Jordan Glass, a photojournalist on a well-earned vacation, wanders into a Hong Kong art museum and is puzzled to find fellow patrons eying her with curiosity. Minutes later, she stumbles upon a gallery containing a one-artist exhibition called "The Sleeping Women," a mysterious series of paintings that has caused a sensation in the world of modern art. Collectors have come to believe that the canvases depict female nudes not in sleep but in death, and they command millions at auction. When Jordan approaches the last work in the series, she freezes. The face in the painting seems to be her own. This unsettling event hurls her back into a nightmare she has fought desperately to put behind her - for, in fact, the face in the painting belongs not to Jordan but to her twin sister, murdered one year ago. At the urging of the FBI, Jordan becomes both hunter and hunted in a duel with the anonymous artist, a gifted murderer who knows the secret history of Jordan's family, and truths that even she has never had the courage to face.

    Carefully chosen selections from Frye, Benjamin, Lévi-Strauss, Lukács, Bakhtin, and other prominent theorists explore the historical significance of the novel as a genre, from its early beginnings to its modern variations in the postmodern novel and postcolonial novel.Offering a generous selection of key theoretical texts for students and scholars alike, Theory of the Novel also presents a provocative argument for studying the genre. In his introduction to the volume and in headnotes to each section, McKeon argues that genre theory and history provide the best approach to understanding the novel. All the selections in this anthology date from the twentieth century—most from the last forty years—and represent the attempts of different theorists, and different theoretical schools, to describe the historical stages of the genre's formal development.

    In this book, Peter and Barbara tell of their spiritual journey, until now, an untold story. Their walk across America, although an exhilarating adventure, was also an exhausting test that pushed them to the edge of their physical and spiritual endurance. The numerous dramatic circumstances, as well as the more mundane daily challenges to find food, water, and shelter, became a crucible for their faith.

    While Jeremy can’t remember the previous year, he savors the miracle of waking up alongside the woman he loves.The next time he wakes, another year has passed and he finds himself a spectator of his own life. Victoria now carries his child, but the man alongside her is a disturbingly different person—a cruel, egotistical, seemingly unknowable Jeremy. Is it amnesia? Insanity? Or has the God Jeremy defied with his selfish act now cursed him?This strange and beautiful novel tells the tale of a man lost between life and death, but connected by the love—as friend, lover, son, and father—given and taken over the course of a lifetime, a love that simply won’t let go.

    An unforgettable tale about everyday people searching for a history and a heritage that can explain who they are.

    The result is an extraordinary, complex portrait of "white girls," as Als dubs them—an expansive but precise category that encompasses figures as diverse as Truman Capote and Louise Brooks, Malcolm X and Flannery O’Connor. In pieces that hairpin between critique and meditation, fiction and nonfiction, high culture and low, the theoretical and the deeply personal, Als presents a stunning portrait of a writer by way of his subjects, and an invaluable guide to the culture of our time.

    In part it is a memoir of the three "Factories" that influenced his development as a human being and as a writer, yet the events depicted within the book are fictionalized and conveyed with the poetic verve and playfulness of form that have made Shklovsky a major figure in twentieth-century world literature. In addition to its fictional and biographical elements, Third Factory includes anecdotes, rants, social satire, literary theory, and anything else that Shklovsky, with an artist's unerring confidence, chooses to include.

    M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel and Milan Kundera's The Art of the Novel, How Fiction Works is a scintillating study of the magic of fiction--an analysis of its main elements and a celebration of its lasting power. Here one of the most prominent and stylish critics of our time looks into the machinery of storytelling to ask some fundamental questions: What do we mean when we say we "know" a fictional character? What constitutes a telling detail? When is a metaphor successful? Is Realism realistic? Why do some literary conventions become dated while others stay fresh?James Wood ranges widely, from Homer to Make Way for Ducklings, from the Bible to John le Carré, and his book is both a study of the techniques of fiction-making and an alternative history of the novel. Playful and profound, How Fiction Works will be enlightening to writers, readers, and anyone else interested in what happens on the page.

    . . a subtly subversive talent. . . . [Only Alice Munro and Colm Toibin] are so adept at portraying whole lives in a few thousand words. With Married Love, Hadley joins their company as one of the most clear-sighted chroniclers of contemporary emotional journeys." -Edmund Gordon, The GuardianA girl haunts the edges of her parents' party; a film director drops dead, leaving his film unfinished and releasing his wife to a new life; an eighteen-year-old insists on marrying her music professor, then finds herself shut out from his secrets; three friends who were intimate as teenagers meet up again after the death of the women who brought them together. Ranging widely across generations and classes, and evoking a world that expands beyond the pages, these are the stories of Tessa Hadley's astonishing new collection.On full display are the qualities for which Tessa Hadley has long been praised: her unflinching examination of family relationships; her humor, warmth and psychological acuity; her powerful, precise and emotionally dense prose. In this collection there are domestic dramas, generational sagas, wrenching love affairs and epiphanies-captured and distilled to remarkable effect. Married Love is a collection to treasure, a masterful new work from one of today's most accomplished storytellers.

    Each twin consists of two books: a specially designed limited edition of one modern classic title and one established classic work. The books in each pair have been carefully selected to provide a thought-provoking combination.Gulliver's Travels: In the course of his famous travels, Gulliver is captured by miniature people who wage war on each other because of religious disagreement over how to crack eggs, is sexually assaulted by giants, visits a floating island, and decides that the society of horses is better than that of his fellow man. Swift's tough, filthy and incisive satire has much to say about the state of the world today and is presented here in its unexpurgated entirety.Atomised: Half-brothers Michel and Bruno have a mother in common but little else. Michel is a molecular biologist, a thinker and idealist, a man with no erotic life to speak of and little in the way of human society. Bruno, by contrast, is a libertine, though more in theory than in practice, his endless lust is all too rarely reciprocated. Both are symptomatic members of our atomised society, where religion has given way to shallow 'new age' philosophies and love to meaningless sexual connections. A dissection of modern lives and loves, it is by turns funny, acid, infuriating, didactic, touching and visceral.

    Jeremy Shepherd has reached post-ambition, giving up the trappings of his London life (flash job, flash cars, even flashier girlfriends) and moved back to his home town and his parents' house. By day, he is a low-level civil servant, chained to his desk and content to idle away the hours filing and answering emails. There isn't a lot to do in a small town, but the English are very resourceful and Jeremy quickly finds a hobby that delivers lots of fresh air and exercise. By night, he prowls local car parks to indulge in altogether more challenging pursuits - anonymous sex with strangers. This is no ordinary hobby - each encounter is tinged with a definite air of danger, as police stake out each site and the cloak of anonymity brings its own risks. As the scene's night-time liaisons increasingly threaten the sensibilities of the local Daily Mail readers, things take a turn for the worse. Locals take a dislike to the illicit rendezvous and as the police step up surveillance, private pursuits risk becoming very public.

    But by the Winter of 1943, resistance is growing. Among those fighting their brutal Nazi occupiers are two Jewish sisters, Janny and Lien Brilleslijper from Amsterdam. Risking arrest and death, the sisters help save others, sheltering them in a clandestine safehouse in the woods, they called “The High Nest.”This secret refuge would become one of the most important Jewish safehouses in the country, serving as a hiding place and underground center for resistance partisans as well as artists condemned by Hitler. From The High Nest, an underground web of artists arises, giving hope and light to those  living in terror in Holland as they begin to restore the dazzling pre-war life of Amsterdam and The Hague. When the house and its occupants are eventually betrayed, the most terrifying time of the sisters' lives begins. As Allied troops close in, the Brilleslijper family are rushed onto the last train to Auschwitz, along with Anne Frank and her family. The journey will bring Janny and Lien close to Anne and her older sister Margot. The days ahead will test the sisters beyond human imagination as they are stripped of everything but their courage, their resilience, and their love for each other.Based on meticulous research and unprecedented access to the Brilleslijpers’ personal archives of memoirs and photos, Sisters of Auschwitz is a long-overdue homage to two young women’s heroism and moral bravery—and a reminder of the power each of us has to change the world.

    Haunted by illness and obsessed with death, he moves to Mumbai from his village Udali, breaking away from his feudal roots. He encounters young men frustrated by the system but refuses to become one of them. Suddenly, he takes a fancy to education and pursues masters in Arts, without his family knowing about it.Bidhar is the story of a pessimist who struggles to move on in life.

    Annie Proulx’s Accordion Crimes is a masterpiece of storytelling that spans a century and a continent. Proulx brings the immigrant experience in America to life through the eyes of the descendants of Mexicans, Poles, Africans, Irish-Scots, Franco-Canadians and many others, all linked by their successive ownership of a simple green accordion. The music they make is their last link with the past—voice for their fantasies, sorrows and exuberance. Proulx’s prodigious knowledge, unforgettable characters and radiant language make Accordion Crimes a stunning novel, exhilarating in its scope and originality.

    thought-provoking and meditative, Lingis's work is above all touching, and offers a refreshingly idiosyncratic antidote to the idle talk that so often passes for philosophical writing." --Radical Philosophy..". striking for the clarity and singularity of its styles and voices as well as for the compelling measure of genuine philosophic originality which it contributes to questions of community and (its) communication." --Research in PhenomenologyArticulating the author's journeys and personal experiences in the idiom of contemporary continental thought, Alphonso Lingis launches a devastating critique, pointing up the myopia of Western rationalism. Here Lingis raises issues of undeniable urgency.