The speaker is David Kepesh, white-haired and over sixty, an eminent TV culture critic and star lecturer at a New York college - as well as an articulate propagandist of the sexual revolution. For years he has made a practice of sleeping with adventurous female students while maintaining an aesthete's critical distance. But now that distance has been annihilated.The agency of Kepesh's undoing is Consuela Castillo, the decorous, humblingly beautiful twenty-four-year-old daughter of Cuban exiles. When he becomes involved with her, Kepesh finds himself dragged helplessly into the quagmire of sexual jealousy and loss. In chronicling the themes of eros and mortality, licence and repression, freedom and sacrifice. The Dying Animal is a burning coal of a book, filled with intellectual heat and not a little danger.

    Fated to play out the mistakes of their parents, Evan and Rachel quickly discover the betrayal behind the dream, and desperately try every avenue of escape, only to find that all paths lead back to the small Long Island coastal town of Cold Spring Harbor, and to each other. But if there is no better chronicler than Yates of the quiet tragedy of thwarted suburban lives, Cold Spring Harbor is a testament to the absolute necessity of dreaming; for Yates's protagonists, hope may be all there is.

    It tells of the advent and the rise of the Snopes family in Frenchman's Bend, a small town built on the ruins of a once-stately plantation. Flem Snopes -- wily, energetic, a man of shady origins -- quickly comes to dominate the town and its people with his cunning and guile.

    Trying not to miss his girlfriend (away studying in Mexico), the nameless writer steadily crafts his literary effort--until strange things begin happening around him.Starting with a series of peculiar phone calls, the writer then finds clumps of seaweed on his doorstep. But as the incidents escalate, his friends fall victim to a series of mysterious "accidents"--some of them fatal. Aided by Elmo Crumley, a savvy, street-smart detective, and a reclusive actress of yesteryear with an intense hunger for life, the wordsmith sets out to find the connection between the bizarre events, and in doing so, uncovers the truth about his own creative abilities.

    Suddenly left abandoned and penniless in Morocco by her lover, Sira Quiroga forges a new identity. Against all odds she becomes the most sought-after couture designer for the socialite wives of German Nazi officers. But she is soon embroiled in a dangerous political conspiracy as she passes information to the British Secret Service through a code stitched into the hems of her dresses.

    Gradually, he discovers he was brought back by his true love, Isabelle, because she is pregnant with their child—a child who, if raised correctly, will play a crucial role in saving the universe. But to be brought up right, the child must learn what Vincent learned on the other side—if only Vincent can remember it. On a father’s love and struggle may depend the future of everything that is.By turns quirky, romantic, awesome, and irresistible, White Apples is a tale of love, fatherhood, death, and life that will leave you seeing the world with new eyes.

    In the most deadly and secret struggle of the new cold war, the Russians set their sights on the US President and attempt to manipulate fanatical Islamic terrorists to play a role in their ambitious scheme. Only one man can stop them and avert a tragedy of terrifying proportions - CIA officer Art Bennington.FROM New York Daily News, by Bill BellPay attention, class, for this is a thriller about magnetoencephalography, which is (A) a Wales train stop or (B) the science of recording magnetic fields of the brain.B, you say?Ah, then you are ready to pick up "MAZE," a most complicated brain science thriller by Larry Collins (Simon & Schuster, $19.95), whose previous works, as co-auther, landed him on the best-seller lists with "O Jerusalem," ''Or I'll Dress You in Mourning" and "Is Paris Burning?"This one has scraps and bits of everything - Soviet sleepers in Washington, terrorists in Beirut, plotters at the Kremlin, uprisings by Russian ethnics and extrasensory perception. Plus, above all, a plot to provoke the U.S. president into doing something so rash that it would shift the balance of world power.To drive the president bonkers, the Kremlin baddies need access to the data recorded on a - here we go again - magnetoencephalograph used when he took his physical at Bethesda Naval Hospital.The president flies into a rage (bad political news while he is undergoing the exam) and a clever Russian female scientist has discovered a way to provoke his rage on command - with an electromagnetic signal.Soon a hotshot Soviet agent has sneaked into Washington to steal a computer disc containing the data. He does, with the help of a long-time sleeper who has, incidentally, just slept with our CIA hero.Now, the bad Russkies can bombard the White House with the electromagnetic signals that release the chemicals that trigger the chief executive's rage. OK so far? Plus, they organize a terrorist bombing of a high school dance at a West German military base, cleverly arranged to look like the work of the ayatollah.The president orders a White House crisis meeting to deal with the attack, and zap! just like that, the president goes ape. Soon, he is ordering a nuclear strike on the ayatollah.Now our hero, who has a background in psychic studies, solves the mystery and before you can say magnetoencephalography, foils the plot.It's all very lively and exotic. It and a tube of sunblock should make for a nice weekend at the beach.From Publishers Weekly"...uncanny command of the inner workings of the international intelligence apparatus.... The action begins with the KGB's murder of a New York psychic with a flair for locating the coordinates of Soviet submarines. She had been helpful in CIA mind experiments, but the Russians are onto something even better: a device that uses electromagnetic waves to trigger responses in the brains of unsuspecting people at a distance. The KGB intends to use this magneto-encephalogram to zap the U.S. president during a crisis. First, Arab terrorists controlled by Moscow blow up a U.S. Army-run high school in Germany, killing many teenagers. Then the zapping of the president begins, and our enraged, mentally unhinged Chief Executive gives the order to nuke Iran in retaliation. A subplot involving rebellious Moslem nationalists within the U.S.S.R.

    The speaker is Auxilio Lacouture, a Uruguayan woman who moved to Mexico in the 1960s, becoming the "Mother of Mexican Poetry," hanging out with the young poets in the cafes and bars of the University. She's tall, thin,brand blonde, and her favorite young poet in the 1970s is none other than Arturo Belano (Bolano's fictional stand-in throughout his books). As well as her young poets, Auxilio recalls three remarkable women; the melancholic young philosopher Elena, the exiled Catalan painter Remedios Varo, and Lilian Serpas, a poet who once slept with Che Guevara.brAnd in the course of her imaginary visit to the house of Remedios Varo,brAuxilio sees an uncanny landscape, a kind of chasm. This chasm reappears in a vision at the end of the book; an army of children is marching toward it, singing as they go. The children are the idealistic young Latin Americans who came to maturity in the 70s, and the last words of the novel are; "And that song is our amulet."

    With Fever and Spear, Volume One of his unfolding novel Your Face Tomorrow, he returns us to the rarified world of Oxford (the delightful setting of All Souls and Dark Back of Time), while introducing us to territory entirely new--espionage. Our hero, Jaime Deza, separated from his wife in Madrid, is a bit adrift in London until his old friend Sir Peter Wheeler retired Oxford don and semi-retired master spy recruits him for a new career in British Intelligence. Deza possesses a rare gift for seeing behind the masks people wear. He is soon observing interviews conducted by Her Majesty's secret service: variously shady international businessmen one day, would-be coup leaders the next. Seductively, this metaphysical thriller explores past, present, and future in the ever-more-perilous 21st century. This compelling and enigmatic tour de force from one of Europe's greatest writers continues with Volume Two, Dance and Dream."

    Comprising eleven stories, most of them never before published in English, The City of Mist offers the reader compelling characters, unique situations, and a gothic atmosphere reminiscent of his beloved Cemetery of Forgotten Books quartet.The stories are mysterious, imbued with a sense of menace, and told with the warmth, wit, and humor of Zafón's inimitable voice. A boy decides to become a writer when he discovers that his creative gifts capture the attentions of an aloof young beauty who has stolen his heart. A labyrinth maker flees Constantinople to a plague-ridden Barcelona, with plans for building a library impervious to the destruction of time. A strange gentleman tempts Cervantes to write a book like no other, each page of which could prolong the life of the woman he loves. And a brilliant Catalan architect named Antoni Gaudí reluctantly agrees to cross the ocean to New York, a voyage that will determine the fate of an unfinished masterpiece.Imaginative and beguiling, these and other stories in The City of Mist summon up the mesmerizing magic of their brilliant creator and invite us to come dream along with him.

    Bestselling author Andrew Greeley writes a powerful and wonderfully funny novel about an irascible Chicago newspaperman who, after a brush with death, rediscovers human decency, his faith and his wife.

    Through imaginary letters and documents, Wilder brings to life a dramatic period of world history and one of its magnetic personalities.In this novel, the Caesar of history becomes Caesar the human being as he appeared to his family, his legions, his Rome, and his empire in the months just before his death. In Wilder’s inventive narrative, all Rome comes crowding through his pages. Romans of the slums, of the villas, of the palaces, brawling youths and noble ladies and prostitutes, and the spies and assassins stalking Caesar in his Rome.

    But his true vocation is far more interesting and lucrative: He is a peerless international assassin. His music and fame give him entrée to complete his assignments all over the world without fail. He believes himself truly untouchable—until he makes one fatal mistake.Col. Asa Morgan is a military man to the bone. A veteran of wars both declared and undeclared, he’s one of the most respected and lethal members of the British SAS, and utterly devoted to his country. But when his daughter is run down and killed by an unknown assassin making his escape, his sworn duty no longer matters. Now, his only mission is to find the killer before the authorities do—and make him suffer as long as possible before death.Morgan and Mikali will stalk each other across continents, from bloody back alleys to gilded halls in a deadly game in which each man is both the hunter and the hunted. And only the winner walks away.

    The radioactivity acts as a catalyst for the bug spray, causing his body to shrink at a rate of approximately 1/7 of an inch per day. A few weeks later, Carey can no longer deny the truth: not only is he losing weight, he is also shorter than he was and deduces, to his dismay, that his body will continue to shrink.

    Instead, he’s surfing the real estate listings, searching for a sanctuary—a nice farmhouse in Kansas, perhaps. Although James lives in twenty-first-century Manhattan, he’s more at home in the faraway worlds of Eric Rohmer or Anthony Trollope—or his favorite writer, the obscure and tragic Denton Welch. James’s sense of dislocation is exacerbated by his willfully self-absorbed parents, a disdainful sister, his Teutonically cryptic shrink, and an increasingly vague, D-list celebrity grandmother. Compounding matters is James’s growing infatuation with a handsome male colleague at the art gallery his mother owns, where James supposedly works at his summer job but where he actually plots his escape to the prairie.