Meanwhile, her husband Daniel mourns the demise of his marriage and his life.Full of Dorothy Porter's customary bite and sensuality, Wild Surmise is an engrossing duet between two passionately estranged voices. An intensely moving verse novel of passions and vulnerabilities, love and death.

    Blending allegory with historical realism and subverting expectations in an unflinching comedy of the macabre, these tales manage to be both phantasmagoric and shockingly real. For all the despair and darkness portrayed in these gripping stories—from spotlighting hostage-video makers in Baghdad to following human trafficking in Serbia's forests—what lingers more than the haunting images of war is the spirit of defiance and of indefatigable courage.

    THOMPSON'S WILDLY POPULAR ESPN.COM COLUMNS.Insightful, incendiary, outrageously brilliant, such was the man who galvanized American journalism with his radical ideas and gonzo tactics. For over half a century, Hunter S. Thompson devastated his readers with his acerbic wit and uncanny grasp of politics and history. His reign as "The Unabomber of contemporary letters" (Time) is more legendary than ever with Hey Rube. Fear, greed, and action abound in this hilarious, thought-provoking compilation as Thompson doles out searing indictments and uproarious rants while providing commentary on politics, sex, and sports—at times all in the same column.With an enlightening foreword by ESPN executive editor John Walsh, critics' favorites, and never-before-published columns, Hey Rube follows Thompson through the beginning of the new century, revealing his queasiness over the 2000 election ("rigged and fixed from the start"); his take on professional sports (to improve Major League Baseball "eliminate the pitcher"); and his myriad controversial opinions and brutally honest observations on issues plaguing America―including the Bush administration and the inequities within the American judicial system.Hey Rube gives us a lasting look at the gonzo journalist in his most organic form―unbridled, astute, and irreverent.

    Its teachers offer pupils lessons in violence, abuse and neglect. Lela is old enough to leave but has nowhere else to go. She stays and plans for the children's escape, for the future she hopes to give to Irakli, a young boy in the home. When an American couple visits, offering the prospect of a new life, Lela decides she must do everything she can to give Irakli this chance.

    When Raikes, a conservation expert, tries to restore her, he is swept under the statue's spell and swept under the spell of the seductive Chiara Litsov, a member of the Fornarini family now married to a famous sculptor. Raikes finds himself losing all moral grounding as his love for statue and woman intertwine in lust and murder.

    Set among the teeming streets and desolate wharves of Hogarth's London, then shifting to the powder-keg colony of Massachusetts Bay.Master storyteller Patrick McGrath--author of the critically acclaimed novel Asylum and a finalist for England's prestigious Whitbread Prize for fiction--once again spins a hypnotic tale of psychological suspense and haunting beauty. Set among the teeming streets and desolate wharves of Hogarth's London, then shifting to the powder-keg colony of Massachusetts Bay, Martha Peake envelops the reader in a world on the brink of revolution, and introduces us to a flame-haired heroine who will live in the imagination long after the last page is turned.Settled with our narrator beside a crackling fire, we hear of the poet and smuggler Harry Peake--how Harry lost his wife, Grace, in a tragic fire that left him horribly disfigured; how he made a living displaying his deformed spine in the alehouses of eighteenth-century London; and how his only solace was his devoted daughter, Martha, who inherited all of his fire but none of his passion for cheap gin. As the drink eats away at Harry's soul, it opens ancient wounds; when he commits one final act of unspeakable brutality, Martha, fearing for her life, must flee for the American colonies. Once safely on America's shores, Martha immerses herself in the passions of smoldering rebellion. But even in this land of new beginnings, she is unable to escape the past. Caught up in a web of betrayals, she redeems herself with one final, unforgettable act of courage.Superbly plotted and wholly absorbing, Martha Peake is an edge-of-your-seat shocker that is crafted with the psychological precision Patrick McGrath's fans have come to expect. A writer whose novels The New York Times Book Review has called both "mesmerizing" and "brilliant," McGrath applies his remarkable imaginative powers to a fresh and broad historical canvas. Martha Peake is the poignant, often disturbing tale of a child fighting free of a father's twisted love, and of the colonists' struggle to free themselves from a smothering homeland. It is Patrick McGrath's finest novel yet.

    Instead, we are presented with akaleidoscope of characters and events, signs and emotions, linked by theuncanny repetition of certain details: blossoming almond trees, redberets, bleeding feet, accidents small and large. Michalopoulou’scharacters are both patently fictitious and profoundly real, as theymove through a world in which even the smallest of everyday occurrencescan take on enormous significance. I’d Like offers a touching, utterly unique reading experience from one of Greece’s most innovative young storytellers.

    A preacher bathes his ill and elderly mother, not knowing that she has mistaken him for the long-lost cousin she watched murder his brother in her father’s tobacco field. In six stories that read like novels in miniature, Kyle Minor plumbs the depths of human mystery, where they meet our kindnesses and our cruelties, our generosities and our pettiness.Kyle Minor’s work has appeared widely in magazines and anthologies, among them Best American Mystery Stories 2008, The Southern Review, The Gettysburg Review, Surreal South, and Twentysomething Essays by Twentysomething Writers: The Best New Voices of 2006. His work has been twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Kyle received his MFA from Ohio State University and is currently a visiting professor at the University of Toledo.

    As night falls and she gets lost in the woods, she finds shelter in a burrow in a tree.She dreams then of fairies and other wood folk and then wakes up at her grandparents house. She learns that her mom came to claim her but while arguing with her grandfather she annoyed the bees that stung her in the eye.

    From My Mother's Garden, the parable of an old woman who refuses to accept the consequences of the Chernobyl disaster, to The Young People of Moscow, which describes an extraordinary day in the life of an aging couple selling antiquated Soviet poetry in an underground bazaar, these intricately woven narratives provide unforgettable slices of a Russia that is at once both exotic and disconcertingly familiar.

    Into The Hills, Young Master is a novel about a man who argues online constantly going out into the world on a quest to form the perfect opinion.

    With a mix of traditional, literary prose and bold – some might even say irresponsible – experimentation, Ben Greenman explores the ins and outs of modern romance. Expect tears, nudity, and recrimination.Both familiar in their humanness and wholly original, these imaginative stories take us all over the map in time, place, and circumstance. From the halfhearted summer affair between a part-time bartender and a married doctor in a Miami hotel to the cryptic pseudo-erotic love letters to a friend who is “more than a friend,” we experience the love of pop songs, the love of cohabitation in Chicago, and love that is so transporting it takes us to the moon–literally.

    Nor does he remember where and how they met, their journey to his squalid apartment or what they did after they got there. The young woman is happy to explain, however—indeed, so reassuring is her recollection of the facts that he pleads with her to stay. She promises to return that night. He promises to wait for her.Nine nights are a lifetime to a man and woman brought together under curious circumstances. Bound by a promise and a bottle of wine they travel through a
dream like caged lightening. Together they discover sometimes, all you need to
approach perfection is a saxophone and a broken alarm clock.

    Allied forces liberate Nazi-occupied Brno, Moravia. For Gerta Schnirch, daughter of a Czech mother and a German father aligned with Hitler, it’s not deliverance; it’s a sentence. She has been branded an enemy of the state. Caught in the changing tides of a war that shattered her family—and her innocence—Gerta must obey the official order: she, along with all ethnic Germans, is to be expelled from Czechoslovakia. With nothing but the clothes on her back and an infant daughter, she’s herded among thousands, driven from the only home she’s ever known. But the injustice only makes Gerta stronger, more empowered, and more resolved to seek justice. Her journey is a relentless quest for a seemingly impossible forgiveness. And one day, she will return.Spanning decades and generations, Kateřina Tučková’s breathtaking novel illuminates a long-neglected episode in Czech history. One of exclusion and prejudice, of collective shame versus personal guilt, all through the eyes of a charismatic woman whose courage will affect all the lives she’s touched. Especially that of the daughter she loved, fought for, shielded, and would come to inspire.

    The subject seems inoffensive enough: the life of a German Jewish woman (a close family friend) who arrived in Colombia shortly before the Second World War. So why does his father attack him so viciously? Do the pages of his book unwittingly hide some dangerous secret? As Gabriel sets out to discover what lies behind his father's anger, he finds himself undertaking an examination of the duplicity, guilt and obsession at the heart of Colombian society in World War II, when the introduction of blacklists of German immigrants corrupted and destroyed many lives. Half a century later, in a gripping narrative that unpacks like a set of Russian dolls, one treacherous act perpetrated in those dark days returns with a vengeance, leading the reader towards a literal, moral and metaphorical cliff edge. With a tightly honed plot, deftly crafted situations, and a cast of complex and varied characters, The Informers is a fascinating novel of callous betrayal, complicit secrecy and the long quest for redemption in a secular, cynical world. It heralds the arrival of a major literary talent.(front flap)