Literature - Singer's second collection of stories, eleven in all, including the title story, "A Tale of Two Liars", and "The Destruction of Kreshev."

    Though the stories stand alone, a minor element in one becomes major in the next. In "My Shape", a woman is taunted by her dance coach, who later suffers his own heartache. A Venetian poet of the 1500s, another storyteller, is introduced to a modern traveler reading Rilke. His story precedes a mesmerizing narrative of missionaries in China. In the final story, Giles, born to a priesthood family, leans toward Buddhism after a grievous loss, and in time falls in love with the dancer of the first story. So deft and subtle is Joan Silber with these various perspectives that we come full circle surprised and enchanted by her myriad worlds. National Book Award finalist. Reading group guide included.

    Her range is extraordinary; there is seemingly nothing she can't do. Her stories contain passages of intense lyricism and brilliant, hilarious, uncontainable inventiveness.

    The Washington Post described this novel as "a fascinating if ultimately painful fairy tale, complete with a family curse. The decline of the Behls represents the decline of Washington from the bright dawn of the American century into the gathering shadows of an alien new millennium."

    The novel fully confirmed Mailer's stature as one of the most important figures in contemporary American literature. Now, a new edition of this exceptional work serves as further affirmation of its timeless quality.Narrated by Ranald ("D.J.") Jethroe, Texas's most precocious teenager, on the eve of his departure to fight in Vietnam, this story of a hunting trip in Alaska is both brilliantly entertaining and profoundly thoughtful.

    Winner of the Prix de Rome and the National Jewish Book Award, these ten stories and the title novella, "Ellis Island," exhibit tremendous range and versatility of style and technique, yet are closely unified in their beauty and in their concern with enduring and universal questions.

    The author's characters are unforgettable, while their predicaments are funny, improbably logical, and almost affecting as Africa itself.

    When she wasn't stalking the streets of Greenwich Village wearing a brassiere made from tomato cans, she was enthusiastically declaiming her poems to sailors in beer halls or posing nude for Man Ray or Marcel Duchamp. In an era of brutal war, technological innovation, and cataclysmic change, the Baroness had resolved to create her own destiny -- taking the center of the Dadaist circle, breaking every bond of female propriety . . . and transforming herself into a living, breathing work of art.

    What is the truth, what is propaganda, and what is faith? And what is it to be an alien or a friend, a saint or an apostate, in the criss-crossing lines of shared ethnic identity, civil war, and western ideologically-driven nation building?

    But anyway he (Thurber, that is) here continues the study, fooling no one by putting it in the form of fables. People who already know everything there is to know about people shouldn't bother reading this book. Others need it badly.

    Roiling with love and torment, lunacy and desire, hilarity and tenderness, Geronimo Rex is the bildungsroman of an unlikely hero. Reared in gloomy Dream of Pines, Louisiana, whose pines have long since yielded to paper mills, Harry Monroe is ready to take on the world. Inspired by the great Geronimo's heroic rampage through the Old West, Harry puts on knee boots and a scarf and voyages out into the swamp of adolescence in the South of the 1950s and '60s. Along the way he is attacked by an unruly peacock; discovers women, rock 'n' roll, and jazz; and stalks a pervert white supremacist who fancies himself the next Henry Miller.

    But the beauty of this novel is the gradual revelation of the bond that develops as this unlikely couple experiences courtship and marriage, the birth of a son, isolation, forgiveness, work, and death in a small Catskill community in the 1950s. The plot turns on tragic events—they might be accidents or they might be acts of will—involving a cast of rural eccentrics that includes a lonely amputee veteran, a religious hysteric (thought by some to be the devil himself) and an itinerant "Goat Lady." Questions of guilt, innocence, and even murder are eclipsed by deeds of compassion, humility, and redemption, and ultimately by Henry Soames' quiet discovery of grace.Novelist William H. Gass, a friend and colleague of the author, has written an introduction that shines new light on the work and career of the much praised but often misunderstood John Gardner.

    Resourcefully, doggedly, Jacky nurtures his spirit of independence, his capacity to love, and his faith in a nation's dream in a journey that takes him from Wichita to Corpus Christi and from poverty to possibility.

    His son has died in a POW camp in Korea. It is August 15, 1953, the day of a tumultuous street carnival in Elephant Park, an Italian immigrant enclave in Ohio. The man is Rocco LaGrassa, and his many years of dogged labor, paternal devotion, and steadfast Christian faith are about to come to a crashing end. He is the first of many exquisitely drawn characters we meet that day, each of whom will come to their own conclusion.The End by Salvatore Scibona follows an elderly abortionist, an enigmatic drapery seamstress, a teenage boy, a jeweler—dramatically into the heart of a crime that will twist all their lives. Against a background of immigration, broken loyalties, and racial hostility, we at last return to August 15, 1953, and see everything Rocco saw—and vastly more—through the eyes of various characters in the crowds.The End is the unforgettable debut of a singular new American novelist.

    Twelve years later, with a pair of silver barrettes her only tangible memory of Elvia, Serafina begins a harrowing journey back across the border to find her daughter. At the same time Elvia, now fifteen and pregnant, resolves to track her mother down. They travel a landscape populated by desperately poor migrants moving from harvest to harvest, truckers living hand-to-mouth in seedy motels, and lost children in foster homes. But the memory of love inspires hope, and out of these women’s losses–and their determination–Straight has crafted a deeply moving tale of the meaning of home and family.