In Holy the Firm she writes about a moth consumed in a candle flame, about a seven-year-old girl burned in an airplane accident, about a baptism on a cold beach. But behind the moving curtain of what she calls "the hard things -- rock mountain and salt sea," she sees, sometimes far off and sometimes as close by as a veil or air, the power play of holy fire.This is a profound book about the natural world -- both its beauty and its cruelty -- the Pulitzer Prize-winning Dillard knows so well.

    

    Her story of the moment involves a madman known as the Holy Ghost, a deranged serial killer who disfigures his victims. When Susan Trevett lives to tell about her encounter with the Holy Ghost, she picks a young farmboy out of a police lineup. But then Susan does a dramatic turnaround: she insists that the boy is innocent, and that she disfigured herself to repent for past sins. The jury delivers a not guilty verdict, and Garner is left with an ending to her book she fears might not tell the whole story. To compensate, Garner plunges headlong into another case. A media firestorm has erupted around celebrated sculptor Dane Blackmoor. Body parts have been found in his lifelike sculptures, and Garner, who has tangled with the enigmatic artist in the past, thinks she knows the villain's identity. As she becomes increasingly involved in the Blackmoor story, she realizes she's being stalked by a cold-blooded killer who knows her like a book. Garner suddenly understands that there's a small space between the words true and crime: make one mistake in judgment, and it may come back to haunt you - with a vengeance.

    Now, back home in the Yorkshire moors, duty-bound to a blind father and an alcoholic brother, an ambitious Charlotte refuses to sink into hopelessness. With her sisters, Emily and Anne, Charlotte conceives a plan to earn money and pursue a dream: The Brontës will publish. In childhood the Brontë children created fantastical imaginary worlds; now the sisters craft novels quite unlike anything written before. Transforming her loneliness and personal sorrow into a triumph of literary art, Charlotte pens her 1847 masterpiece, Jane Eyre.Charlotte’s novel becomes an overwhelming literary success, catapulting the shy and awkward young woman into the spotlight of London’s fashionable literary scene—and into the arms of her new publisher, George Smith, an irresistibly handsome young man whose interest in his fiercely intelligent and spirited new author seems to go beyond professional duty. But just as life begins to hold new promise, unspeakable tragedy descends on the Brontë household, throwing London and George into the background and leaving Charlotte to fear that the only romance she will ever find is at the tip of her pen. But another man waits in the Brontës’ Haworth parsonage—the quiet but determined curate Arthur Nicholls. After secretly pining for Charlotte since he first came to work for her father, Arthur suddenly reveals his heart to her.Romancing Miss Brontë is a fascinating portrayal of an extraordinary woman whose life and work articulated our deepest human longing: to love and be loved in return.

    Severely injured, he does not know if he will survive the night. Reflecting on the evening's dreadful events, wondering if he could have done anything to alter them, his thoughts begin to drift. He begins to contemplate his remarkable life, his dysfunctional family, and the unfortunate prospect that he may have to soon answer for his life to God. While vividly recalling the most amusing, distressing, bizarre, and disturbing events of his life, he soon comes to realize "the monster you know is far easier to deal with than the monster you don't!" Will he get the miracle he needs to make it through the night? If so, will he finally find peace? Author's Note: This book deals with sensitive topics, and is intended for mature audiences only.

    But when Greg is diagnosed with a rare and aggressive form of cancer, the sense of certainty they once knew evaporates. Throughout their town, friends and neighbors face the most difficult of life’s challenges and are figuring out how to survive thanks to love, grace, and hope. “A quietly powerful portrait of small-town life…told with wisdom and tenderness” (Mary Beth Keane, author of Ask Again, Yes) A Little Hope is a deeply resonant debut that immerses the reader in a community and celebrates the importance of small moments of connection.

    

    This collection, taken from the work of more that twenty years, explores an enviable range of scholarly interests: archaeology, myth, language, education, philosophy, the spiritual quest, mental health, literature, music and film.The book also serves as a poetic autobiography of one of England's best-loved but least public writers. He hears himself declared dead at the age of six; he draws on the deep vein of a rural working-class childhood in a family of craftsmen who instilled the passion for excellence and for innovation and humour. The disciplines he learnt as a Classicist give a shape and clarity to that passion in this richly various book that would have fascinated his forebears, whose work and lives are also celebrated here.This most unusual, most candid, most vivid picture of an English family and its home, its country's history, is also a devastating revelation of a writer's own life. Alan Garner's account of his mental illness will become a classic, and each strand of the book will be a source of fascination to anyone who has ever fallen under the spell of an Alan Garner story, as also to all who concern themselves with the craft of writing.

    

    

    FYODOR MIKHAILOVICH DOSTOYEVSKY [1821-1881] was a Russian writer of novels and short stories .In 1841, he graduated from Saint Petersburg Academy of Military Engineering. In 1845, he published his first novel Poor Folk in the magazine Sovremennik. The poet Nikolai Nekrasov, editor of the magazine, said of Dostoyevsky, "a new Gogol has arisen!" In 1846, he published The Double. It was received with dissaponting reaction. In 1849, he was arrested and sentenced to death for being a member of the Petrashevsky Circle. The sentence was reduced to four years hard labor at a prison camp in Omsk, Siberia. Of the experience he wrote, "In summer, intolerable closeness; in winter, unendurable cold. All the floors were rotten. Filth on the floors an inch thick; one could slip and fall... We were packed like herrings in a barrel...There was no room to turn around. From dusk to dawn it was impossible not to behave like pigs... Fleas, lice, and black beetles by the bushel..." In 1854, and was required to serve five years in the Russian army at Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan. In 1866, he published Crime and Punishment which made him one of Russia's most popular authors. In 1867, he published The Gambler. He had become a frequent visitor to casinos and wrote the book to pay debts. From 1873 to 1881, he published the Writer's Diary, a magazine of short stories and articles on current events.Many leading authors have been influenced by him including Proust, Faulkner, Camus, Kafka, Kerouac, and Salinger. Hemingway cited his influence in A Moveable Feast. James Joyce said of him, "...he is the man more than any other who has created modern prose ..."

    . . A street preacher decked out in denim robes and running shoes, Julius is a source of inspiration for a community that knows nothing of his scandalous origins. But when a nearby mental hospital releases its patients to run amok in his neighborhood, his trusted if bedraggled flock turns expectantly to Julius to find out what’s going on. Amid the descending chaos, Julius encounters a hospital escapee who babbles prophecies of doom, and the growing palpable sense of impending danger intensifies. . . as does the feeling that everyone may be relying on a street preacher just a little too much. Still, Julius decides he must confront the forces that threaten his congregation—including the peculiar followers of a religious cult, the mysterious men and women dressed all in red seen fleetingly amid the bedlam, and an enigmatic smoking figure who seems to know what’s going to happen just before it does. In the end, The Revisionaries is a wildly imaginative, masterfully rendered, and suspenseful tale that conjures the bold outlandishness stylishness of Thomas Pynchon, Margaret Atwood, and Alan Moore—while being unlike anything that’s come before.

    To be published on the first anniversary of Kurt Vonnegut's death, Armageddon in Retrospect is a collection of twelve new and unpublished writings on war and peace, imbued with Vonnegut's trademark rueful humor.

    About a guy and his punk band. Who start out shitty, but persevere, and eventually become pretty popular. If I mentioned that Ben Foster is better known as Ben Weasel from Screeching Weasel, you'll get a much more nuanced idea about what this book is about, and certainly, what this novel MIGHT be based upon. Regardless, it's a great, rollicking read. Whether or not it's entirely true, or entirely false, anyone with any knowledge of 90s punk in America will recognise large chunks of this. And anyone with any interest in, appreciation of, or experience of being in a band, breaking up with a girl, or punk rock, will thoroughly enjoy. It's that good. Though why he had to kill off his guitarist and best friend at the end I'll leave to his shrink to fathom...

    Man's longing for paradise.