Unsuited to a quiet life, Alda attempts to orchestrate -- with varying degrees of success -- the love affairs of her neighbours. Her unwilling subjects include an Italian POW, a Communist field-hand, a battery-chicken farmer and her intelligent friend Jean.

    (#11 Nancy Pelosi, #14 Michelle Obama). His new novel "1988: I want to have a talk with the world" traces his road trip on highway 318, redefines "on the road" novel with his opinions in dialogues between his characters on the road. In Chinese. Distributed by Tsai Fong Books, Inc.

    A young girl is determined to succeed as a ballet dancer despite the ambivalent attitudes of her parents and her boyfriend.

    Here is a book that captures the very essence of the 1960s and is at the same time as fresh today as when it was first published in 1965.

    Jane Dacre finds painter Albert Gates irresistible, but the Old Regime is less enraptured, for Albert is an outrageous prankster.

    Buck combines her beloved China and native America in a sensitive drama of human relationships and conflicting emotions in a world of changing attitudes. Malcolm MacNeil, an American diplomat is forced to leave Peking when the Communists take over. He returns home with his White Russian wife, and their two children, to face new problems. Sheltered by an idyllic marriage, Nadya counters hostility and suspicion with warm-hearted candor as her China-born son and daughter strive not to be different from their friends and Malcolm seeks to bring about a closer relationship between East and West.

    Strange forces are pulling together the oddest of couples: a mild-mannered matron and a lascivious avant-garde poet; a sleek headmaster and a shy young curate; a hippie librarian and the wayward daughter of a local tycoon. What's more, mailboxes are being stuffed with shockingly violent hate letters, even as a mysterious ailment takes the lives of perfectly healthy people. Not to mention the strange lights flashing in the depths of the forest? With a sparkling range of characters who hurtle through an intricate and often hilarious journey, Michael Malone offers a sublime joyride in his classic novel.

    Her father, the son of missionaries, leads a charmed and secretive life, though his greatest joy is sharing his beloved city with his only daughter. Yet when Anna and her mother flee Japanese-occupied Shanghai to return to California, he stays behind, believing his connections and a little bit of luck will keep him safe.Through Anna's memories and her father's journals we learn of his fall from charismatic millionaire to tortured prisoner, in a story of betrayal and reconciliation that spans two continents. The Distant Land of My Father, a breathtaking and richly lyrical debut, unfolds to reveal an enduring family love through tragic circumstances.

    Immediately however, an unseen mysterious woman begins giving him warnings during nocturnal visits to leave the house at once. Soon he begins hearing strange ominous sounds emanating from the tiny lake at the back of the house coupled with a permeation of sickly odors. An evil presence then begins to visit him during the witching hours of the late night, challenging him to a battle of wits from which there can be only one victor. Is his mysterious female visitor there to help and encourage him to flee from the house, or is she working in tandem with The Thing From the Lake? A gripping, occasionally frightening tale, Ms. Ingram wastes no time in grabbing the reader into the story and manages to weave a tale that will leave the reader guessing at every turn of events. (Summary by Roger Melin)(from Librivox)

    The August Sleepwalker is an extremely popular book (30,000 copies sold in China in one month) which was quickly banned by the Chinese government. The collection includes all of the poems Bei Dao published between 1970 and 1986. Bei Dao has lived in exile since the Tiananmen Incident. He is widely esteemed as one of contemporary China's most significant writers. His work is experimental, and subjective, while remaining passionately engaged in the individual's response to a disordered world.

    

    Known for his globetrotting; passion for bullfighting, fishing, and hunting; fascination with war; and feuds with rivals like Gertrude Stein, he set the 20th-century template for the artist as an adventurer and man of action. Kirk Curnutt, a professor and member of the board of directors of the Ernest Hemingway Society, and multi-award-winning author John Updike arrange a mesmerizing meeting with this prickly American genius.

    Priestley was especially fond of this novel of his: "I am not one for favourites," he wrote in the introduction to the Everyman edition, "and I have always been irritated by questions about my favourite this, that and the other. But if I have a favourite among my novels, it is Bright Day, which I wrote towards the end of the war."The novel was written towards the end of World War II. JBP disclaimed any autobiographical roots in the work, but it is nontheless resonent with his early youth and coincided with JBP's recoil from the commercial film world. Bright Day was the only serious novel that he wrote in the first person.Gregory Dawson, the novel's hero, is a middle-aged film script writer who goes off to Cornwall to complete a script. At his hotel he spots Lord and Lady Harndean, and realizes that they are the Malcolm and Eleanor Nixey he knew when he worked as a clerk in a Bruddersford wool firm. They represent the beginning of the break-up of the bright day which had preceded the year 1914, and thus the story starts to unfold...Vincent Brome, one of JBP's biographers, wrote: "Bright Day is one of Priestley's two most important and successful novels. The other is Angel Pavement."

    Instead she found terror and murder...Isolated in the Gilmartin ancestral home in Herondale, Deborah and young Carreen were left to face a nameless, unseen danger lurking in the frozen village, where only the flick of a curtain at a window or some random footprints in the snow, showed that it was inhabited at all.Alone in a house that had known violence, Deborah turned to Carreen's cousin Jeremy, as attractive as he was cynical and mysterious. But was he really a friend, or was he the enemy? In spite of Jeremy - or because of him? - Deborah found herself fighting for her life in an affair so bizarre as to shatter the silence of Herondale forever.1973 printing, with the "Ace * First in Gothics" banner at the top of the front cover.

    Put on your newest, spankin'est uniform, shine shoes and buttons, put a pretty little knot in your necktie. Look sharp That's half the secret. The other haof is to ack mis'able. Ain't nothin' attracks a gal like ackin' mis'able. Tell her you're lonesome for the gal back home, so she knows she ain't scratching' after a prize nobody wants. Then tell her you can't stay sad long around her, and begin gettin' frisky and sparklin'. If that don't get her, she ain't worth havin'. Stay Loose. Remember--Man proposes, God disposes."And with these words of wisdom--the U. S. Army almost succeeds in moving Putnam's Landing halfway across Long Island Sound.