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Romanzi by E.M. Forster


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The Man Without Qualities


Robert Musil - 1930
    This new translation—published in two elegant volumes—is the first to present Musil's complete text, including material that remained unpublished during his lifetime.

An Air That Kills


Margaret Millar - 1957
     On a Saturday night in April, Ron Galloway's friends have all arrived at his Ontario lakeside vacation lodge for a boys' weekend without their wives. But as the night wears on and the host himself doesn't arrive, the party turns sour. Then Ron Galloway's suspicious wife, convinced he is having an affair and trying to track him down, arrives on the scene, followed by the police. It is clear something is very wrong.In the hours and days that follow Ron Galloway's disappearance, the secret of an ugly infidelity comes to light, tearing apart Galloway's circle of friends and destroying two marriages. Did Ron Galloway commit suicide to escape his own unforgivable betrayals? What sinister set of circumstances brought him to his desperate end, and how will his survivors cope with the truth without tearing one another apart?

The Pocket Emily Dickinson


Emily Dickinson - 1995
    Well-known for her reclusive personal life in Amherst, Massachusetts, her distinctively short lines, and eccentric approach to punctuation and capitalization, she completed over seventeen hundred poems in her short life. Though fewer than a dozen of her poems were actually published during her lifetime, she is still one of the most widely read poets in the English language. Over one hundred of her best poems are collected here.

The Master and Margarita


Mikhail Bulgakov - 1967
    The novel's vision of Soviet life in the 1930s is so ferociously accurate that it could not be published during its author's lifetime and appeared only in a censored edition in the 1960s. Its truths are so enduring that its language has become part of the common Russian speech.One hot spring, the devil arrives in Moscow, accompanied by a retinue that includes a beautiful naked witch and an immense talking black cat with a fondness for chess and vodka. The visitors quickly wreak havoc in a city that refuses to believe in either God or Satan. But they also bring peace to two unhappy Muscovites: one is the Master, a writer pilloried for daring to write a novel about Christ and Pontius Pilate; the other is Margarita, who loves the Master so deeply that she is willing literally to go to hell for him. What ensues is a novel of inexhaustible energy, humor, and philosophical depth, a work whose nuances emerge for the first time in Diana Burgin's and Katherine Tiernan O'Connor's splendid English version.

My Life in Baseball: The True Record


Ty Cobb - 1961
    Introduction by Charles C. Alexander.

No Longer Human


Osamu Dazai - 1948
    In consequence, he feels himself "disqualified from being human" (a literal translation of the Japanese title).Donald Keene, who translated this and Dazai's first novel, The Setting Sun, has said of the author's work: "His world … suggests Chekhov or possibly postwar France, … but there is a Japanese sensibility in the choice and presentation of the material. A Dazai novel is at once immediately intelligible in Western terms and quite unlike any Western book." His writing is in some ways reminiscent of Rimbaud, while he himself has often been called a forerunner of Yukio Mishima.Cover painting by Noe Nojechowiz, from the collection of John and Barbara Duncan; design by Gertrude Huston

Young Once


Patrick Modiano - 1981
    It was his breakthrough novel, in which he stripped away the difficulties of his earlier work and found a clear, mysteriously moving voice for his haunting stories of love, nostalgia, and grief. It has also been called “the most gripping Modiano book of all” (Der Spiegel).   Odile and Louis are leading a happy, bucolic life with their two children in the French countryside near the Swiss mountains. It is Odile’s thirty-fifth birthday, and Louis’s thirty-fifth birthday is a few weeks away. Then the story shifts back to their early years: Louis, just freed from his military service and at loose ends, taken up by a shady character who brings him to Paris to do some work for a friend who manages a garage; Odile, an aspiring singer, at the mercy of the kindness and unkindness of strangers. They move through a Paris saturated with the crimes and secrets of the past but breathing hopes for the future; they find each other and struggle together to create what, looking back, will have been their youth.

Untouchable Spring


G. Kalyana Rao - 2010
    Using the oral story-telling tradition, Rao has brought to the fore not just the social and cultural life of generations of Dalits, but their art forms. Through the stories of successive generations, we are taken on a journey to their heart from those who were exploited to those who discover their humanity through defiance. The reminiscences of Ruth take us to her husband Reuben's family in Yennela Dinni, to the boy Yellanna, his being chased away by his caste superiors , his music, his son Sivaiah's escape from the drought along with his wife, the latter's conversion to Christianity, the brutality against him and other Dalit Christians, the birth of Reuben when things seem to fall apart and he is later left in an orphanage, and then to Reuben's search for his roots. This faithful translation from the Telugu, arousing pity for all that is pitiable and rage at what man has done to man, points to the growing awareness of people's rights and how they are driven to armed struggle.

The Quick and the Dead


Joy Williams - 2000
    Misfit and motherless, they share an American desert summer of darkly illuminating signs and portents. In locales as mirrored strange as a nursing home where the living dead are preserved, to a wildlife museum where the dead are presented as living, the girls attend to their future. A remarkable attendant cast of characters, including a stroke survivor whose soulmate is a vivisected monkey, an aging big-game hunter who finds spiritual renewal in his infatuation with an eight-year-old–the formidable Emily Bliss Pickles–and a widower whose wife continues to harangue him, populate this gloriously funny and wonderfully serious novel where the dead are forever infusing the living, and all creatures strive to participate in eternity.

The Girl at Central


Geraldine Bonner - 1914
    

The Minds of Billy Milligan


Daniel Keyes - 1981
    . . except himself. Out of control of his actions, Billy Milligan was a man tormented by twenty-four distinct personalities battling for supremacy over his body—a battle that culminated when he awoke in jail, arrested for the kidnap and rape of three women. In a landmark trial, Billy was acquitted of his crimes by reason of insanity caused by multiple personality—the first such court decision in history—bringing to public light the most remarkable and harrowing case of multiple personality ever recorded.Twenty-four people live inside Billy Milligan. Philip, a petty criminal; Kevin, who dealt drugs and masterminded a drugstore robbery; April, whose only ambition was to kill Billy's stepfather; Adalana, the shy, lonely, affection-starved lesbian who “used” Billy's body in the rapes that led to his arrest; David, the eight-year-old “keeper of pain”; and all of the others, including men, women, several children, both boys and girls, and the Teacher, the only one who can put them all together. You will meet each in this often shocking true story. And you will be drawn deeply into the mind of this tortured young man and his splintered, terrifying world.

The Masala Murder


Madhumita Bhattacharyya - 2012
    When the deceit gets too much, she finds a welcome distraction – and a means to pay the bills – by becoming a food critic for a magazine. And since she once dreamed of becoming a pastry chef, she doesn’t mind much, does she? But what really turns her on is solving a juicy mystery. Her worlds collide when a gourmet provisions supplier she had once profiled ends up dead under suspicious circumstances. She might be rusty, but her food-obscured nose can still sniff out a murder, and she decides to launch her own investigation. Then her ex-boyfriend shows up at her doorstep when he finds himself being treated as prime suspect in the kidnapping of his own wife! Suddenly, Reema is handling not one but two cases. With no access to official evidence, she relies on the meddling group of do-gooders she has dubbed the Calcutta Crime-Fighter’s Club. If all this wasn’t trouble enough, the alluring Shayak Gupta turns up around every corner, and while she can’t seem to resist him, she doesn’t believe a word he says either.This first Reema Ray mystery follows a comical ride through Calcutta – as Reema comes to terms with her feelings about the men in her life while whipping up delicious meals and being beset by criminals and the police alike!

On Pills and Needles


Rick Van Warner - 2018
    In the years of pain and heartache that followed as he tried to save his son from opioid addiction, Van Warner discovered what the American public is just now becoming aware of: opioids prescribed for even minor pain relief are so addictive that even a few days of use can create dependency. On Pills and Needles is a memoir that also serves as a wake-up call and crash course in opioid addiction. Through his harrowing personal story, Van Warner exposes the common causes of opioid addiction, effective and ineffective ways it has been treated, and how families can walk alongside loved ones who are dealing with the daily realities of addiction.

From a View to a Death


Anthony Powell - 1933
    A genius of social satire delivered with a very dry wit, Powell builds his comedies on the foibles of British high society between the wars, delving into subjects as various as psychoanalysis, the film industry, publishing, and (of course) sex. More explorations of relationships and vanity than plot-driven narratives, these slim novels reveal the early stirrings of the unequaled style, ear for dialogue, and eye for irony that would reach their caustic peak in Powell’s epic A Dance to the Music of Time.  From a View to a Death takes us to a dilapidated country estate where an ambitious artist of questionable talent, a family of landed aristocrats wondering where the money has gone, and a secretly cross-dressing squire all commingle among the ruins.   Written from a vantage point both high and necessarily narrow, Powell’s early novels nevertheless deal in the universal themes that would become a substantial part of his oeuvre: pride, greed, and what makes people behave as they do. Filled with eccentric characters and piercing insights, Powell’s work is achingly hilarious, human, and true.

The Hills Beyond


Thomas Wolfe - 1941
    The unfinished novel from which this collection of sketches, stories, and novellas takes its title was Wolfe's final effort. It tells the story of the Joyner family, George Webber's maternal ancestors, in pre-Civil War North Carolina and illustrates Wolfe's fine sense of family traits rooted in a traceable past. "Chickamauga" is the superb Civil War tale that Wolfe received from his great-uncle; "The Lost Boy" renders a second, more tender, treatment of the death of young Grover Gant; and "The Return of the Prodigal" describes Eugene Gant's imagined and then actual revisit to Altamont when he is a famous author. Together the eleven pieces of The Hills Beyond confirm the passion, energy, and sensitivity that made Wolfe the most promising American writer of his generation.