and of the extraordinary people Miller knew there: writers (and writers who didn't write), mystics seeking truth in meditation (and the not-so-saintly looking for sex-cults or celebrity), sophisticated children and adult innocents; geniuses, cranks and the unclassifiable.Henry Miller writes with a buoyancy and brimming energy that are infectious. He has a fine touch for comedy. But this is also a serious book the testament of a free spirit who has broken through the restraints and cliches of modern life to find within himself his own kind of paradise.

    Sheriff Fred Clumly is trying desperately to unravel mysteries surrounding a disorderly, nameless drifter called "The Sunlight Man," who has been jailed for painting the word "LOVE" across two lanes of traffic, and who is later suspected of murder. The men battle over morality, freedom and their opposing notions of justice, leading each to find his own state of grace. Their conflict is mirrored in the community of middlebrow politicians and their church-going wives, Native Americans, working-class immigrants, farmers, soldiers, petty thieves, and even centenarian sisters too stubborn to die. Gardner's alchemy is existential: from the most raw, vulnerable, and conflicting characters in the American melting pot, he transmutes common denominators of human isolation and longing. With unnerving suspense, his acute ear for American speech, and permeated by his deep-rooted belief in morality, this expansive, sprawling, and ambitious novel is John Gardner's masterpiece: "A superb literary achievement," noted The Boston Globe.

    He is a Brazilian anthropologist, in the city on a three-month research grant. They meet by chance in the New York Public Library, fall in love, and move into a tiny apartment together. Tereza has a lover waiting for her in Poland, Jose a wife and child in Sao Paulo. It would seem this could only be the most temporary of affairs. Yet, as Tereza recounts the extraordinary texture of their lives together, a portrait emerges of a relationship conducted at the extreme edge of sensuality - a relationship defying all conventional definitions. Jose and Tereza have no common language, they are exiled from their cultures, and for each of them the body of the other becomes everything: spirituality, sustenance, almost unbearable pleasure. In the tradition of Fatal Attraction, Slavenka Drakulic has written a breathtakingly erotic, profoundly intelligent tale of love based on pure appetite that will thrill readers with its unflinching candor, even as it shocks them with its horrifying conclusion.

    "Nothing more beautiful and moving has been written in years". -- New York Times Book Review

    This sharp, ironic, tightly written thriller takes place during a single night, during which our narrator, editor of a small-city newspaper, shows what stuff journalists were made of then by consuming a truly epic amount of alcohol and unweaving an artfully tangled web.

    In the extraordinary style of writing that is now Metcalf's signature, he collages multiple stories. Metcalf explores incidents in the life of Herman Melville, the influence of Columbus on Melville and Melville's use and conversion of the Columbus myth, the influence of Melville on his own life, and the story of Carl and Michael Mills, whose semi-fictional story provides the central structure of the book. The narrator is Michael Mills, a club-footed unfortunate, who holds an M.D. degree but who refuses to practice. It is to search out the reason for this refusal, and to come to terms with the memory of his monstrous older brother, Carl (whose life was terminated by the state before the novel opens), that Michael retreats to his attic, his books, his studies -- Columbus, Melville and others.

    . . mature and assured. . . . A major American novelist.”— New RepublicSomething is wrong with Eddie Hobson, Sr., father of four, sometime history teacher, quiz master, black humorist, and virtuoso invalid. His recurring fainting spells have worsened, and given his ingrained aversion to doctors, his worried family tries to discover the nature of his sickness.Meanwhile, in private, Eddie puts the finishing touches on a secret project he calls Hobbstown, a place that he promises will save him, the world, and everything that’s in it.A dazzling novel of compassion and imagination, Prisoner’s Dilemma is a story of the power of individual experience.

    On the advice of her doctor, she decides to undertake their education in utero. Nine months later, Celine is born - a daughter whose cleverness and erudition vanish the moment she enters the world. Witnessing the fate of his once-brilliant and now dull-witted sister, the urbane, well-educated, but also conniving Louis rejects birth altogether and embarks on a campaign of prenatal rebellion. His mother tries to starve him out; he retaliates by attacking her internal organs. Guerrilla warfare is thereafter carried out between mother and son, and in the process Louis's fetal crusade becomes a cause celebre - he soon emerges as the first neonate to become both a cult figure and a powerful media icon, eventually demanding, and receiving, an audience with God.

    Disch as a major new force in science fiction. First published in 1965, it was immediately labeled a masterpiece reminiscent of the works of J.G. Ballard and H.G. Wells In this harrowing novel, the world's cities have been reduced to cinder and ash and alien plants have overtaken the earth.  The plants, able to grow the size of maples in only a month and eventually reach six hundred feet, have commandeered the world's soil and are sucking even the Great Lakes dry. In northern Minnesota, Anderson, an aging farmer armed with a Bible in one hand and a gun in the other, desperately leads the reduced citizenry of a small town in a daily struggle for meager existence. Throw into this fray Jeremiah Orville, a marauding outsider bent on a bizarre and private revenge, and the fight to live becomes a daunting task.

    Set in New Mexico in the late 19th century, The Sea of Grass concerns the often violent clashes between the pioneering ranchers, whose cattle range freely through the vast sea of grass, and the farmers, or "nesters," who build fences and turn the sod. Against this background is set the triangle of rancher Colonel Jim Brewton, his unstable Eastern wife Lutie, and the ambitious Brice Chamberlain. Richter casts the story in Homeric terms, with the children caught up in the conflicts of their parents.

    Guy Grand is an eccentric billionaire — the last of the big spenders — determined to create disorder in the material world and willing to spare no expense to do it. Leading a life full of practical jokes and madcap schemes, his ultimate goal is to prove his theory that there is nothing so degrading or so distasteful that someone won't do it for money. In Guy Grand's world, everyone has a price, and he is all too willing to pay it. A satire of America's obsession with bigness, toughness, money, TV, guns, and sex, The Magic Christian is a hilarious and wickedly original novel from a true comic genius.

    Set in seventeenth-century New England in the aftermath of the Pequod War, Hope Leslie not only chronicles the role of women in building the republic but also refocuses the emergent national literature on the lives, domestic mores, and values of American women.

    But he has yet to meet the test of human conflict. In a tale of violent action and superbly sustained suspense, the harsh realities of tribal warfare force him to kill his first foe, then face torture at the stake. Still yet another kind of initiation awaits him when he discovers not only the ruthlessness of "civilized" men, but also the special danger of a woman's will. His reckless spirit transformed into mature courage and moral certainty, the Deerslayer emerges to face life with nobility as pure and proud as the wilderness whose fierce beauty and freedom have claimed his heart.

    Ahead of him at the Polytechnic stretch years of trying to thump literature into the heads of plasterers, joiners, butchers and the like. And things are no better at home where his massive wife, Eva, is given to boundless and unpredictable fits of enthusiasm -for transcendental meditation, yoga or the trampoline. But if Wilt can do nothing about his job, he can do something about his wife, in imagination at least, and his fantasies grow daily more murderous and more concrete. After a peculiarly nasty experience at a party thrown by particularly nasty Americans, Wilt finds himself in several embarrassing positions: Eva stalks out in stratospheric dudgeon, and Wilt, under the inspiration of gin, puts one of his more vindictive fantasies into effect. But suspicions are instantly aroused and Wilt rapidly achieves an unenviable notoriety in the role of The Man Helping Police With Their Enquiries. Or is he exactly helping? Wilt's problem -although he's on the other side of the fence -is the same as Inspector Flint's: where is Eva Wilt? But Wilt begins to flourish in the heat of the investigation, and as the police stoke the flames of circumstantial evidence, Wilt deploys all his powers to show that the Law can't tell a Missing Person from a hole in the ground.

    Powell sets a see-saw in motion when Olliver is swept up by the tasteless publishing tycoon, Tyson Bricker, and his new book makes its way onto to the bestseller lists just as Lyle's Broadway career is coming apart.