As Algren admitted, it wasn't written until long after it had been walked... I found my way to the streets on the other side of the Southern Pacific station, where the big jukes were singing something called "Walking the Wild Side of Life." I've stayed pretty much on that side of the curb ever since".Perhaps his own words describe the book best: The book asks why lost people sometimes develop into greater human beings than those who have never been lost in their whole lives. Why men who have suffered at the hands of other men are the natural believers in humanity, while those whose part has been simply to acquire, to take all and give nothing, are the most contemptuous of mankind.Cover Photograph: Jason Fulford

    The decadent 1920s and 1930s in New York were a time of great experiment and daring for women. For the rich, life seemed a continual party, but the excesses took their emotional toll. In the bitingly witty poems and stories collected here, along with her articles and reviews, she brilliantly captures the spirit of the decadent Jazz Age in New York, exposing both the dazzle and the darkness. But beneath the sharp perceptions and acidic humour, much of her work poignantly expresses the deep vulnerability of a troubled, self-destructive woman who, in the words of philosopher Irwin Edman, was 'a Sappho who could combine a heartbreak with a wisecrack'.Dorothy Parker (1893-1967) was born in West End, New Jersey, and grew up in New York. In 1916 she sold some of her poetry to the editor of Vogue, and was subsequently given an editorial position on the magazine. She then became drama critic of Vanity Fair and the central figure of the celebrated Algonquin Round Table, whose members included George S. Kaufman and Harpo Marx. Her collections of poems included Enough Rope (1926) and Not So Deep as a Well (1936), and her collections of stories included Here Lies (1939); in addition, she collaborated on and wrote screenplays including the Oscar-winning A Star is Born (1937), and Alfred Hitchcock's Saboteur (1942).If you enjoyed The Collected Dorothy Parker, you might like Truman Capote's The Complete Stories, also available in Penguin Modern Classics.'She managed to express her real feelings in stanzas which snap and glitter like a Chanel handbag'Peter Ackroyd, The Times

    Since publication of The Outsider and Others in 1939, his work has been published in many parts of the world, widely anthologised, and filmed. His books include The Survivor and Others, The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath, The Doom That Came to Sarnath, Fungi from Yuggoth and Other Poems, The Tomb and Other Tales, At the Mountains of Madness, The Lurker at the Threshold (Lovecraft and Derleth) and The Lurking Fear. Lovecrat was born and lived most of his life in Providence, Rhode Island.1."Foreword", by August Derleth2."Providence"3."On a Grecian Colonnade in a Park"4."Old Christmas"5."New England Fallen"6."On a New England Village Seen by Moonlight"7."Astrophobos"8."Sunset"9."To Pan"10."A Summer Sunset and Evening"11."To Mistress Sophia Simple, Queen of the Cinema"12."A Year Off"13."Sir Thomas Tryout"14."Phaeton"15."August"16."Death"17."To a Youth"18."My Favorite Character"19."To Templeton and Mount Monadnock"20."The Poe-et's Nightmare"21."Lament for the Vanished Spider"22."Regnar Lodbrug's Epicedium"23."Little Sam Perkins"24."Drinking Song from the Tomb"25."The Ancient Track"26."The Eidolon"27."The Nightmare Lake"28."The Outpost"29."The Rutted Road"30."The Wood"31."The House"32."The City"33."Hallowe'en in a Suburb"34."Primavera"35."October"36."To a Dreamer"37."Despair"38."Nemesis"39."Yule Horror"40."To Mr. Finlay, Upon His Drawing for Mr. Bloch's Tale, 'The Faceless God'"41."Where Once Poe Walked"42."Christmas Greetings to Mrs. Phillips Gamwell—1925"43."Brick Row"44."The Messenger"45."To Klarkash-ton, Lord of Averoigne"46."Psychopompos"47."The Book"48."Pursuit"49."The Key"50."Recognition"51."Homecoming"52."The Lamp"53."Zaman's Hill"54."The Port"55."The Courtyard"56."The Pigeon-Flyers"57."The Well"58."The Howler"59."Hesperia"60."Star Winds"61."Antarkos"62."The Window"63."A Memory"64."The Gardens of Yin"65."The Bells"66."Night Gaunts"67."Nyarlathotep"68."Azathoth"69."Mirage"70."The Canal"71."St. Toad's"72."The Familiars"73."The Elder Pharos"74."Expectancy"75."Nostalgia"76."Background"77."The Dweller"78."Alienation"79."Harbour Whistles"80."Recapture"81."Evening Star"82. "Continuity"Cover Illustration: Gervasio Gallardo

    in the epic tale of your life, you are the most important character while everyone is but a forgotten footnote. even the prince.

    The late John Betjeman observed that 'this tenderly observant poet writes clearly, rhythmically, and thoughtfully about what all of us can understand'. Behind this modest description lies a poet who made greatness look, in Milton's prescription, 'simple, sensuous and passionate'.This collection, first published in 1967, contains many of his best-loved poems, including The Whitsun Weddings, An Arundel Tomb, Days, Mr Bleaney and MCMXIV.

    Trapped in a small, poverty-ridden town in 1933, under pressure from his father to go into the family business, seventeen-year-old Dominic Molise yearns to fulfill his own dreams.

    On the twenty-fourth morning after the decampment of his wife, Patty Lareine, he awakens with a hangover, considerable sexual excitement, and, on his upper arm, a red tattoo bearing a name from the past. Of the night before, he remembers practically nothing. What he soon learns is that the front passenger seat of his Porsche is soaked with blood and that in a secluded corner of his marijuana stash in a nearby woods rests a blonde head, severed at the throat.Is Madden therefore a murderer? He has no way of knowing. As in many novels of crime, the narrative centers on violence--physical, sexual, and emotional--but these elements move in their orbits through a rich constellation of character as Madden tries to reconstruct the missing hours of a terrible evening. In the course of this in-quiry a bizarre and vividly etched gallery of characters reappears to him as in a dream--ex-prizefighters, sexual junkies, mediums, former cons, a police chief, a world-weary former girl friend, and Mad-den's father, old now but still a Herculean figure, a practitioner of the sternest backroom ethics."Tough Guys Don't Dance" represents Mailer at the peak of his powers with a stunningly conceived novel that soon transcends its origins as a mystery to become a relentless search into the recesses and buried virtues of the modern American male. Rarely, as many readers will discern, have the paradoxes ofmachismo and homosexuality been so well explored.

    . . . No one is writing better or more needed verse than this."--Boston Evening Globe

    This edition brings together, in a form he himself sanctioned, his Collected Poems of 1928, the unexpurgated version of Pansies, and Nettles, adding to these volumes the contents of the two notebooks in which he was still writing poetry when he died in 1930.It therefore allows the reader to trace the development of Lawrence as a poet and appreciate the remarkable originality and distinctiveness of his achievement. Not all the poems reprinted here are masterpieces but there is more than enough quality to confirm Lawrence's status as one of the greatest English writers of the twentieth century.

    Ireland's most influential poet, Yeats's poems express both powerful personal feelings and something of the whole human dilemma of the 20th century.

    They tell of Tom's encounters with Goldberry, with Old Man Willow, who tries to trap Tom inside his trunk, with the Badger-folk, and with the ghostly Barrow-wight, as well as with a princess, trolls, dwarves and legendary beasts.

    The first half of this posthumously published novel describes George's evolution from small-town southern boy to struggling New York novelist and attempts to answer the brooding protagonist's question, "What is it that a young man wants?" The second half is devoted to his tempestuous affair with a sophisticated married woman. Ultimately, George, repulsed by the frivolous lifestyle of his wealthy mistress and her circle, retreats to Europe. But, once again, his idealism is shattered as Hitler rises to power in Germany. Disillusioned, George dreams of returning to the South of his childhood but realizes that "you can't go home again."

    We all are broken and broken is its own kind of beautiful.

    Carson envisions a present-day interview with a seventh-century BC poet, and offers miniature lectures on topics as varied as orchids and Ovid. She imagines the muse of a fifteenth-century painter attending a phenomenology conference in Italy. She constructs verbal photographs of a series of mysterious towns, and takes us on a pilgrimage in pursuit of the elusive and intimate anthropology of water. Blending the rhythm and vivid metaphor of poetry with the discursive nature of the essay, the writings in Plainwater dazzle us with their invention and enlighten us with their erudition.

    Written in what DeLillo calls "super-omniscience" the sentences sweep from young Cotter Martin as he jumps the gate to the press box, soars over the radio waves, runs out to the diamond, slides in on a fast ball, pops into the stands where J. Edgar Hoover is sitting with a drunken Jackie Gleason and a splenetic Frank Sinatra, and learns of the Soviet Union's second detonation of a nuclear bomb. It's an absolutely thrilling literary moment. When Bobby Thomson hits Branca's pitch into the outstretched hand of Cotter—the "shot heard around the world"—and Jackie Gleason pukes on Sinatra's shoes, the events of the next few decades are set in motion, all threaded together by the baseball as it passes from hand to hand."It's all falling indelibly into the past," writes DeLillo, a past that he carefully recalls and reconstructs with acute grace. Jump from Giants Stadium to the Nevada desert in 1992, where Nick Shay, who now owns the baseball, reunites with the artist Kara Sax. They had been brief and unlikely lovers 40 years before, and it is largely through the events, spinoffs, and coincidental encounters of their pasts that DeLillo filters the Cold War experience. He believes that "global events may alter how we live in the smallest ways," and as the book steps back in time to 1951, over the following 800-odd pages, we see just how those events alter lives. This reverse narrative allows the author to strip away the detritus of history and pop culture until we get to the story's pure elements: the bomb, the baseball, and the Bronx. In an epilogue as breathless and stunning as the prologue, DeLillo fast-forwards to a near future in which ruthless capitalism, the Internet, and a new, hushed faith have replaced the Cold War's blend of dread and euphoria.Through fragments and interlaced stories—including those of highway killers, artists, celebrities, conspiracists, gangsters, nuns, and sundry others—DeLillo creates a fragile web of connected experience, a communal Zeitgeist that encompasses the messy whole of five decades of American life, wonderfully distilled.