Where clumps of evergreens meet wild ponies, oyster-shell roads, tumble-down houses, unwanted pregnancies, murder, storm-making and dark magic in the marshes. . . Situated off the coast of Virginia's Chesapeake Bay, the group of islands known as the Shore has been home to generations of fierce and resilient women. Sanctuary to some but nightmare to others, it's a place they've inhabited, fled, and returned to for hundreds of years. From a half-Shawnee Indian's bold choice to flee an abusive home only to find herself with a man who will one day try to kill her to a brave young girl's determination to protect her younger sister as methamphetamine ravages their family, to a lesson in summoning storm clouds to help end a drought, these women struggle against domestic violence, savage wilderness, and the corrosive effects of poverty and addiction to secure a sense of well-being for themselves and for those they love.Together their stories form a deeply affecting legacy of two barrier island families, illuminating 150 years of their many freedoms and constraints, heartbreaks, and pleasures. Conjuring a wisdom and beauty all its own, The Shore is a richly unique, stunning novel that will resonate with readers long after turning its final pages, establishing Sara Taylor as a promising new voice in fiction.

    Here was a disgusted man. His name was Svevo Bandini, and he lived three blocks down that street. He was cold and there were holes in his shoes. That morning he had patched the holes on the inside with pieces of cardboard from a macaroni box. The macaroni in that box was not paid for. He had thought of that as he placed the cardboard inside his shoes.

    There he meets Mitko, a charismatic young hustler, and pays him for sex. He returns to Mitko again and again over the next few months, drawn by hunger and loneliness and risk, and finds himself ensnared in a relationship in which lust leads to mutual predation, and tenderness can transform into violence. As he struggles to reconcile his longing with the anguish it creates, he’s forced to grapple with his own fraught history, the world of his southern childhood where to be queer was to be a pariah. There are unnerving similarities between his past and the foreign country he finds himself in, a country whose geography and griefs he discovers as he learns more of Mitko’s own narrative, his private history of illness, exploitation, and disease.What Belongs to You is a stunning debut novel of desire and its consequences. With lyric intensity and startling eroticism, Garth Greenwell has created an indelible story about the ways in which our pasts and cultures, our scars and shames can shape who we are and determine how we love.

    

    A student plagiarizes a paper and holds fast to her alibi until she finds herself complicit in the resurrection of one professor's shadowy past. A dinner party becomes the occasion for the dissolution of more than one marriage. A woman is hired to find a wife for the one true soulmate she's ever found. In all, Rebecca Lee traverses the terrain of infidelity, obligation, sacrifice, jealousy, and yet finally, optimism. Showing people at their most vulnerable, Lee creates characters so wonderfully flawed, so driven by their desire, so compelled to make sense of their human condition, that it's impossible not to feel for them when their fragile belief in romantic love, domestic bliss, or academic seclusion fails to provide them with the sort of force field they'd expected.

    From a harrowingly cheerless childhood in Germany through acne-riddled high school years and his adolescent discoveries of alcohol, women, and the Los Angeles Public Library's collection of D. H. Lawrence, "Ham on Rye" offers a crude, brutal, and savagely funny portrait of an outcast's coming-of-age during the desperate days of the Great Depression.

    Can it? A one night stand, an engagement and a wedding, all within the space between New Year’s and Valentine’s day. Could it be love? If so, is it meant to be?

    A striking and emotionally resonant collection, SUBWAY DANCER AND OTHER STORIES is a compilation of stories originally published in some of the most respected literary magazines in the country, including The Antioch Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Glimmer Train and Ploughshares. In the award-winning story “Bloodlines,” two neighbors of different ethnicities are friends in spite of their differences…until an argument about expensive purebred dogs versus mutts from the pound brings the whole neighborhood’s precarious balance crashing down. “Bloodlines” was reprinted in Bark Magazine’s best-selling anthology Dog is My Co-Pilot and was cited in Best American Short Stories. In Witness to Breath, a woman living a dangerous life working on the streets takes in an elderly dog left behind when his owner is killed in a robbery. Despite never having been a dog person, their brief relationship changes her in ways she never could have expected.In Disappearances, a man not fluent in his own emotions tries unsuccessfully to broadside a train in his pickup truck, then spends the rest of the story figuring out the first clue to why he’d try to do such a thing.Among the other riveting and beautifully crafted stories included in this collection, “Five Singing Gardeners and One Dead Stranger” and “Requiem For a Flamer” were nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and “The Man Who Found You in the Woods” was cited in Best American Short Stories. This collection includes an Author’s Note by Catherine Ryan Hyde.

    Written in what DeLillo calls "super-omniscience" the sentences sweep from young Cotter Martin as he jumps the gate to the press box, soars over the radio waves, runs out to the diamond, slides in on a fast ball, pops into the stands where J. Edgar Hoover is sitting with a drunken Jackie Gleason and a splenetic Frank Sinatra, and learns of the Soviet Union's second detonation of a nuclear bomb. It's an absolutely thrilling literary moment. When Bobby Thomson hits Branca's pitch into the outstretched hand of Cotter—the "shot heard around the world"—and Jackie Gleason pukes on Sinatra's shoes, the events of the next few decades are set in motion, all threaded together by the baseball as it passes from hand to hand."It's all falling indelibly into the past," writes DeLillo, a past that he carefully recalls and reconstructs with acute grace. Jump from Giants Stadium to the Nevada desert in 1992, where Nick Shay, who now owns the baseball, reunites with the artist Kara Sax. They had been brief and unlikely lovers 40 years before, and it is largely through the events, spinoffs, and coincidental encounters of their pasts that DeLillo filters the Cold War experience. He believes that "global events may alter how we live in the smallest ways," and as the book steps back in time to 1951, over the following 800-odd pages, we see just how those events alter lives. This reverse narrative allows the author to strip away the detritus of history and pop culture until we get to the story's pure elements: the bomb, the baseball, and the Bronx. In an epilogue as breathless and stunning as the prologue, DeLillo fast-forwards to a near future in which ruthless capitalism, the Internet, and a new, hushed faith have replaced the Cold War's blend of dread and euphoria.Through fragments and interlaced stories—including those of highway killers, artists, celebrities, conspiracists, gangsters, nuns, and sundry others—DeLillo creates a fragile web of connected experience, a communal Zeitgeist that encompasses the messy whole of five decades of American life, wonderfully distilled.

    Should D'Artagnan keep his promise and protect the headstrong and selfish King Louis or should he do what was right for France and put Philippe on the throne? But will Philippe really be a better King than Louis? Alexander Dumas' thrilling tale of one man's struggle with the conscience take us into 17th century France and examines the lives of people in power and those at their mercy

    But several nights of hookups in Vegas with easygoing businessman James Goings leads Jade to realize he's becoming the one bet she can't resist. Original.

    Henry, Jack London, and Stephen Crane. Includes multiple stories per author, their most famous short works, along with biographical notes.Complete contents:YOUNG GOODMAN BROWN, by Nathaniel HawthorneTHE CELESTIAL RAILROAD, by Nathaniel HawthorneTHE GREAT STONE FACE, by Nathaniel HawthorneETHAN BRAND, by Nathaniel HawthorneRIP VAN WINKLE, by Washington IrvingTHE LEGEND OF SLEEPY HOLLOW, by Washington IrvingAUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A POCKET-HANDKERCHIEF by James Fenimore CooperTHE DAMNED THING, by Ambrose BierceAN OCCURRENCE AT OWL CREEK, by Ambrose BierceTHE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER, by Edgar Allan PoeTHE CASK OF AMONTILLADO, by Edgar Allan PoeTHE PURLOINED LETTER, by Edgar Allan PoeTHE PIT AND THE PENDULUM, by Edgar Allan PoeTHE PREMATURE BURIAL, by Edgar Allan PoeTHE MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE, by Edgar Allan PoeTHE LUCK OF ROARING CAMP, by Bret HarteTHE OUTCASTS OF POKER FLAT, by Bret HartevHANDS, by Sherwood AndersonI’M A FOOL, by Sherwood AndersonTHE MAN THAT CORRUPTED HADLEYBURG, by Mark TwainTHE CELEBRATED JUMPING FROG OF CALAVERAS COUNTY, by Mark TwainTHE GIFT OF THE MAGI, by O. HenryTHE RANSOM OF RED CHIEF, by O. HenryTHE COP AND THE ANTHEM, by O. HenryA RETRIEVED REFORMATION, by O. HenryTHE DUPLICITY OF HARGRAVES, by O. HenryTO BUILD A FIRE, by Jack LondonAN ODYSSEY OF THE NORTH, by Jack LondonLOVE OF LIFE, by Jack LondonTHE HEATHEN, by Jack LondonTHE PEARLS OF PARLAY, by Jack LondonTHE BRIDE COMES TO YELLOW SKY, by Stephen CraneTHE MONSTER, by Stephen CraneTHE BLUE HOTEL, by Stephen CraneAnd don't forget to search your favorite ebook store for Megapack to see the other great entries in this series -- covering science fiction, fantasy, horror, mysteries, westerns, children's literature, and much, much more!

    Mooshum, Evelina's grandfather, is a repository of family and tribal history with an all-too-intimate knowledge of the violent past. And Judge Antone Bazil Coutts, who bears witness, understands the weight of historical injustice better than anyone. Through the distinct and winning voices of three unforgettable narrators, the collective stories of two interwoven communities ultimately come together to reveal a final wrenching truth.

    He had a beautiful wife, three lovely children, a nice house...and all the mistresses he desired. He had it all -- all, that is, but happiness. Slocum was discontent. Inevitably, inexorably, his discontent deteriorated into desolation until...something happened. Something Happened is Joseph Heller's wonderfully inventive and controversial second novel satirizing business life and American culture. The story is told as if the reader was overhearing the patter of Bob Slocum's brain -- recording what is going on at the office, as well as his fantasies and memories that complete the story of his life. The result is a novel as original and memorable as his Catch-22.

    Decades later the bond remains powerful, but so much else has changed. In The Interestings, Wolitzer follows these characters from the height of youth through middle age, as their talents, fortunes, and degrees of satisfaction diverge. The kind of creativity that is rewarded at age fifteen is not always enough to propel someone through life at age thirty; not everyone can sustain, in adulthood, what seemed so special in adolescence. Jules Jacobson, an aspiring comic actress, eventually resigns herself to a more practical occupation and lifestyle. Her friend Jonah, a gifted musician, stops playing the guitar and becomes an engineer. But Ethan and Ash, Jules's now-married best friends, become shockingly successful—true to their initial artistic dreams, with the wealth and access that allow those dreams to keep expanding. The friendships endure and even prosper, but also underscore the differences in their fates, in what their talents have become and the shapes their lives have taken. Wide in scope, ambitious, and populated by complex characters who come together and apart in a changing New York City, The Interestings explores the meaning of talent; the nature of envy; the roles of class, art, money, and power; and how all of it can shift and tilt precipitously over the course of a friendship and a life.