Alone and rudderless in New York, he is taken in by the family of a wealthy friend. He is tormented by an unbearable longing for his mother, and down the years clings to the thing that most reminds him of her: a small, strangely captivating painting that ultimately draws him into the criminal underworld. As he grows up, Theo learns to glide between the drawing rooms of the rich and the dusty antiques store where he works. He is alienated and in love - and his talisman, the painting, places him at the centre of a narrowing, ever more dangerous circle.The Goldfinch is a haunted odyssey through present-day America and a drama of enthralling power. Combining unforgettably vivid characters and thrilling suspense, it is a beautiful, addictive triumph - a sweeping story of loss and obsession, of survival and self-invention, of the deepest mysteries of love, identity and fate.

    This collection ranges over the verse, stories, essays, and journalism of one of the twentieth century's most quotable authors.

    Fleabag: The Scriptures includes new writing from Phoebe Waller-Bridge alongside the filming scripts and the never-before-seen stage directions from the award-winning series.

    Discovering her brother's lie, she sets forth alone to find her son. Both brother and sister wander through a countryside being scourged by three terrifying strangers, toward an apocalyptic resolution.

    Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption--the most satisfying tale of unjust imprisonment and offbeat escape since The Count of Monte Cristo.Apt Pupil--a golden California schoolboy and an old man whose hideous past he uncovers enter into a fateful and chilling mutual parasitism.The Body--four rambunctious young boys venture into the Maine woods and in sunlight and thunder find life, death, and intimations of their own mortality.The Breathing Method--a tale told in a strange club about a woman determined to give birth no matter what.source: stephenking.com

    White's stroll around Manhattan remains the quintessential love letter to the city, written by one of America's foremost literary figures. The New York Times has named Here is New York one of the ten best books ever written about the metropolis, and The New Yorker calls it "the wittiest essay, and one of the most perceptive, ever done on the city.

    Shaw drew not only on Byron's verse satire, but also on Shakespeare, the Victorian comedy fashionable in his early life, and from authors from Conan Doyle to Kipling. In this powerful drama of ideas, Shaw explores the role of the artist, the function of women in society, and his theory of Creative Evolution. As Stanley Weintraub says in his new introduction, this is "the first great twentieth-century English play" and remains a classic exposé of the eternal struggle between the sexes.

    by such theatrical directors as Lee Strasberg, Elizabeth Swados, Peter Sellars and Robert Wilson. Critics have hailed these translations as making Chekhov fully accessible to American audiences. They are also accurate -- Schmidt has been described as "the gold standard in Russian-English translation" by Michael Holquist of the Russian department at Yale University.Swan song --The bear --The proposal --Ivanov --The seagull --A reluctant tragic hero --The wedding reception --The festivities --Uncle Vanya --Three sisters --The dangers of tobacco --The cherry orchard.

    Ten years in the writing (it was the book he retired to Walden to work on) and incorporating essays, passages from his journal, and some of his best poems, it is a superbly crafted achievement, its texture enriched by the idealism of the Transcendentalists, the delighted wordplay of an imaginative linguist, the individualism of a young America, and the earthiness of a lover of nature.Walden is a personal declaration of independence, a social experiment, and a voyage of spiritual discovery, set within the seasonal cycle of a year’s “Life in the Woods.” “Simplify, simplify” is the beat of its “more distant drummer”—to abandon waste and illusion, to get to the bottom of life’s essential needs, and to practice a new economy for humane living. Its witty and pointed rhetoric brings together language and nature, the human and nonhuman in unusual conjunctions that resonate with symbolic meanings. A manual of self-reliance as well as a masterpiece of style, it is one of the most fervently loved classics of American literature.The Maine Woods is an account of three trips taken by boat and canoe in 1846, 1853, and 1857 through an unexplored interior bypassed by westward expansion. It describes the virgin rivers and forests of Maine, the customs of woodsmen and Indian guides, the hunting of moose, and the effects of the timber industry and encroaching settlement. An early and eloquent plea for conservation by a far-sighted naturalist, its close observation of the American wild becomes an examination of “the motives which carry men into the wilderness.”Cape Cod is the bleakest of Thoreau’s works, resembling Melville’s prose in its vision of the titanic indifference of nature. Cape Cod appears as both ocean and desert, a vast expanse of shipwrecks and barren soil, peopled by hardy, weathered inhabitants who seem survivors from the age of the first Pilgrims. Based upon his own visits and upon accounts from the earliest times, it is an unsentimental study of human endurance in the face of hostile elements, historical change, and natural decay.

    Set in 2008, the powerful crux of this new play is knowing the fate of the characters long before it's even in their sights.Based on Nottage's extensive research and interviews with real residents of Reading, Sweat is a topical reflection of the present and poignant outcome of America's economic decline.

    Dowd starts to introduce his imaginary friend Harvey, a six and a half foot rabbit, to guests at a dinner party, his sister, Veta, has seen as much of his eccentric behavior as she can tolerate. She decides to have him committed to a sanitarium to spare her daughter, Myrtle Mae, and their family, from future embarrassment. Problems arise, however, when Veta herself is mistakenly assumed to be on the fringe of lunacy when she explains to doctors that years of living with Elwood's hallucination have caused her to see Harvey also! The doctors commit Veta instead of Elwood, but when the truth comes out, the search is on for Elwood and his invisible companion. When he shows up at the sanitarium looking for his lost friend Harvey it seems that the mild-mannered Elwood's delusion has had a strange influence on more than one of the doctors. Only at the end does Veta realize that maybe Harvey isn't so bad after all.

    Book annotation not available for this title.

    This rich treasury includes Tolkien's most beloved short fiction plus his essay on fantasy. Publisher's Note Tolkien's Magic Ring, by Peter S. Beagle The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm's Son Tree and Leaf On Fairy-Stories Leaf by Niggle Farmer Giles of Ham The Adventures of Tom Bombadil The Adventures of Tom Bombadil Bombadil Goes Boating Errantry Princess Mee The Man in the Moon Stayed Up Too Late The Man in the Moon Came Down Too Soon The Stone Troll Perry-the-Winkle The Mewlips Oliphaunt Fastitocalon Cat Shadow-bride The Hoard The Sea-Bell The Last Ship

    When the woman becomes involved with another man, her husband must choose between forgiving his wife or abandoning the relationship, & Europe, forever.

    In the pages of pulp magazines that were still flourishing in the 1950s—Argosy, Dime Western Magazine, Zane Grey’s Western, and others—he perfected his trademark style, a blend of wiry tautness, sharp characterizations, and jolts of unexpected humor. Now, writer and film critic Terrence Rafferty has gathered the best of Leonard’s Westerns in a single volume, four classic novels and eight outstanding short stories, including the tales that inspired such powerful films as Hombre, Valdez Is Coming, and 3:10 to Yuma.In Last Stand at Saber River (1959), Leonard spins a tight narrative in which a homecoming Confederate veteran must fight to regain the ranch that has been stolen from him. Set, like most of Leonard’s Westerns, against a stark Arizona landscape, the novel is a masterpiece of unbroken tension, as the hero confronts a violent new war for all he holds dear.Chosen as one of the twenty-five greatest Western novels by the Western Writers of America, and the basis for a classic film starring Paul Newman, Hombre (1961) is a stagecoach drama whose hero, a man raised by Apaches, is treated with contempt by the white settlers who will ultimately depend on him for their survival.Valdez Is Coming (1970), Leonard’s favorite among his Westerns, pits Mexican American town constable Bob Valdez against the entrenched power of frontier oligarch Frank Tanner. When Valdez is maneuvered by Tanner into shooting an innocent man, he launches a one-man war for justice for the man’s widow that culminates with a surprising twist.With Forty Lashes Less One (1972) Leonard explores the comic tone that would mark his later books. Set within the harsh confines of Yuma Territorial Prison, the novel recounts the unlikely friendship of two prisoners—one part Apache, the other African American—planning a near-impossible escape.Like the novels, the eight stories included here, are tough, suspenseful, convincing, and beautifully spare in style. They range from Leonard’s first published pulp story, “Trail of the Apache” (1951), to one of his last, the fascinating character study “The Tonto Woman” (1982). Among the others are the twice-filmed “Three-Ten to Yuma” (1953) and “The Captives” (1955), the novella that inspired the acclaimed film The Tall T.