A is for Amorous (originally published in Love by the Letters ) and Architect of My Dreams (originally published in No Dukes Allowed .)A is for AmorousAdalicia Beauvais has no use for children, and even less use for most men. Plato wasn’t a bad sort, and Euclid was bright enough, but the modern variety of male holds no appeal for her. To earn ownership of a lovely country estate with a delightfully well stocked library, Ada must raise funds for an orphanage full of noisy, malodorous urchins.As if that isn’t challenge enough, her only ally in this endeavor, is the headmaster, Lord John, who loves children, referees cricket matches, and plucks Ada’s very, very last nerve, even though she knows his devotion to the children is genuine, as is the orphanage’s need for funds. Opposites don’t always attract, but in this case, they must work together for thirty days, or neither Ada’s nor John’s dreams will ever come true.Architect of My DreamsEugenia, Dowager Duchess of Tindale, travels to the Brighton shore for a respite from London’s din and crowding. She is both dismayed and curious to find that Adam Morecambe, the very architect whose building project has rendered her London street unbearably noisy, has also journeyed to Brighton. Adam is traveling on business—he’s always on business—though he’s also pleased to bump into the duchess who has the loveliest smile he’s ever seen.Genie has no intention of ever remarrying—once was bad enough—and Adam would never allow a romantic frolic to interfere with his busy schedule, but then he learns that Genie’s kisses are as sweet as her smiles, and all of his fixed notions about what the future might hold go flying out the nearest bedroom window.

    McCarthy examines how the work undermines traditional concepts of fiction and explores parallels and contrasts between Camus's work and that of Jean-Paul Sartre. Providing students with a useful companion to The Stranger, this second edition features a revised guide to further reading and a new chapter on Camus and the Algerian War. First Edition Hb (1988): 0-521-32958-2 First Edition Pb (1988): 0-521-33851-4

    Short Stories by Ann Beattie, Ethan Canin, Joy Williams, Richard Ford, Tobias Wolff, Alice Munro, Thomas McGuane, Lord Tweedsmuir, Donald Barthelme, Raymond Carver, and many others.

    Edited by the award-winning Peter Gammons, the pieces in this volume embrace the world of sports in all its drama, humanity, and excitement.

    H. Auden assembled, edited, and arranged the best of his prose writing, including the famous lectures he delivered as Oxford Professor of Poetry. The result is less a formal collection of essays than an extended and linked series of observations—on poetry, art, and the observation of life in general.The Dyer's Hand is a surprisingly personal, intimate view of the author's mind, whose central focus is poetry—Shakespearean poetry in particular—but whose province is the author's whole experience of the twentieth century.

    She covered civil rights demonstrations in the 1960s, places where she lived, locations she traveled to, theater she had seen, and murder trials that gripped her. She wrote sketches for various occasions and countless essays about literature, her greatest passion. For Hardwick, the essay was an imaginative endeavor. The continuous attention to language, the structure of observations, the line of interpretation— Hardwick deserves to be read and reread for the clarity of her perceptions and her enduring assessments of literature and society, and simply for the beauty of her writing alone.Edited and with an introduction by Darryl Pinckney, The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick gathers more than fifty essays for a retrospective of this writer or moral courage, as Joan Didion called her. Hardwick’s readings define literature itself.

    Even when you probably should.

    Bush.* the Secrets of the Little Blue Box, the classic story of "Captain Crunch" and the birth of hacker culture.* the "unorthodox" cancer-cure clinics of Tijuana.* the Great Ivy League Nude Posture Photo Scandal.* the unsolved murder of JFK's mistress.* Also including sharp, funny cultural critiques that range from Elvis to Elisabeth KÜbler-Ross, Bill Gates to Oliver Stone, and J.D. Salinger to the Zagat® guide, The Secret Parts of Fortune is a vital record of American culture.

    His Nobel Lecture offers a powerful defense of poetry as "the ship and the anchor" of our spirit within an ocean of violent, divisive world politics.

    . . not for the obliquities and tenuosities of fiction.” Still, the novelist’s shaping hand, his gift for telling detail, can be detected in many of these literary considerations. Books by Edith Wharton, Dawn Powell, John Cheever, and Vladimir Nabokov are incisively treated, as are biographies of Isaac Newton, Abraham Lincoln, Queen Elizabeth II, and Helen Keller. As George Steiner observed, Updike writes with a “solicitous, almost tender intelligence. The critic and the poet in him . . . are at no odds with the novelist; the same sharpness of apprehension bears on the object in each of Updike’s modes.”

    This brief edition of the most widely adopted book of its kind offers all of the editorial features of the longer book with about half the stories and writer commentaries in a shorter, less expensive format.

    Photographs.

    In a series of personal essays they often reveal as much about themselves and their work as they do about the books that they love.

    In this elegant and thought-provoking collection of original essays, Kate Bernheimer brings together twenty-eight leading women writers to discuss how these stories helped shape their imaginations, their craft, and our culture. In poetic narratives, personal histories, and penetrating commentary, the assembled authors bare their soul and challenge received wisdom. Eclectic and wide-ranging, Mirror, Mirror on the Wall is essential reading for anyone who has ever been bewitched by the strange and fanciful realm of fairy tales.Contributors include: Alice Adams, Julia Alvarez, Margaret Atwood, Ann Beattie, Rosellen Brown, A. S. Byatt, Kathryn Davis, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Deborah Eisenberg, Maria Flook, Patricia Foster, Vivian Gornick, Lucy Grealy, bell hooks, Fanny Howe, Fern Kupfer, Ursula K. Le Guin, Carole Maso, Jane Miller, Lydia Millet, Joyce Carol Oates, Connie Porter, Francine Prose, Linda Gray Sexton, Midori Snyder, Fay Weldon, Joy Williams, Terri Windling.