But nine years, many affairs, and thousands of drinks later, the reality of her shadow life is made clear when she is fired from her job as a freelance illustrator. That same day, she hears that her beloved Uncle Ambrose, an unsuccessful writer, has shot himself.As Violet collects the shattered pieces of her uncle's life, she is forced to face herself and her own tattered dreams. And what she discovers is that she has just been going through the motions of living. She's not even sure she can do anything else. But she's in her mid-thirties and knows she still has time to try again. If she succeeds, she will have broken from her family of dreamers forever and can deservedly claim both the rich rewards and frustrating adversities of the artist's life....

    With wisdom and sympathy and spare eloquence, she writes of their inarticulate longings for communion and grace.Yet even the saddest situations are imbued with Thompson¹s characteristic humor and a wry glimmer of hope. With Who Do You Love, readers will discover a writer with rare insight into the resiliency of the human spirit and the complexities of love.

    If one half of the characters live their secret, interior lives apart from society, then the other half are looking for their own ways out: drugs, murder, revolution, betrayal, and infidelity.

    

    Catherine, an American expatriate becomes unwittingly embroiled in an internecine war between rival factions of the government. Into this potentially explosive scene enters a woman once loved and lost, but who remains a powerful temptation-one that proves impossible to resist.In the opening pages of Shacochis's first novel, Mitchell Wilson, an American who works for the Ministry of Agriculture on the Caribbean island of St. Catherine, is heading downhill. His lost love, Joanna, has decided to drop into his life again, and he's on his way to the airport to meet her, riding in a dilapidated car whose brakes--dependent on coconut oil for braking fluid--have failed. Wilson's harrowing ride is a perfect metaphor for life on St. Catherine's, an island both beautiful and corrupt, and for the turn his own life is about to take. Joanna may have come to St. Catherine simply to escape trouble, but Wilson still bristles when a government official tells him to stay clear of her. He should have listened. There's a mystery to crack at the heart of this richly detailed novel, but in fact Shacochis offers a chilling evocation of the misunderstandings that arise between feckless Americans and struggling islanders for whom St. Catherine's is no paradise.At once an enchanting love story and a superbly sophisticated political novel about the fruits of imperialism in the twentieth century, Swimming in the Volcano is as brutally seductive a novel as the world it evokes.

    Combining interrelated novels, stories, and novellas, Dixon's multilayered and frequently hilarious family epic—the story of Howard Tetch, his ancestors, his parents, his children, and the generations that follow—"reassures us that whatever is precious can never be completely lost" (The Baltimore Sun).

    Though the stories stand alone, a minor element in one becomes major in the next. In "My Shape", a woman is taunted by her dance coach, who later suffers his own heartache. A Venetian poet of the 1500s, another storyteller, is introduced to a modern traveler reading Rilke. His story precedes a mesmerizing narrative of missionaries in China. In the final story, Giles, born to a priesthood family, leans toward Buddhism after a grievous loss, and in time falls in love with the dancer of the first story. So deft and subtle is Joan Silber with these various perspectives that we come full circle surprised and enchanted by her myriad worlds. National Book Award finalist. Reading group guide included.

    The Washington Post described this novel as "a fascinating if ultimately painful fairy tale, complete with a family curse. The decline of the Behls represents the decline of Washington from the bright dawn of the American century into the gathering shadows of an alien new millennium."

    Twelve years later, with a pair of silver barrettes her only tangible memory of Elvia, Serafina begins a harrowing journey back across the border to find her daughter. At the same time Elvia, now fifteen and pregnant, resolves to track her mother down. They travel a landscape populated by desperately poor migrants moving from harvest to harvest, truckers living hand-to-mouth in seedy motels, and lost children in foster homes. But the memory of love inspires hope, and out of these women’s losses–and their determination–Straight has crafted a deeply moving tale of the meaning of home and family.

    Henley weaves her clear and powerful prose with an unforgettable story of a human heart unbinding itself in the most unjust of worlds.

    He was born in New York City to Jewish parents; his father was born in Poland. He went to college and earned his B.A. from New York University and went on to acquire an M.A. as well as a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Michigan, before spending most of his adult life in Berkeley, California.Going Places, his first book of short stories, made his reputation as one of the most brilliant of that era's fiction writers; the stories are urban, funny, and written in a private, hectic diction that gives them a remarkable edge. The follow-up, coming six years later (Michaels was perhaps not prolific enough to build a widely popular career), was I Would Have Saved Them If I Could, a collection as strong as the first.

    Who has it. Who doesn’t. How you get it. How you don’t.In Refund, Bender creates an award-winning collection of stories that deeply explore the ways in which money and the estimation of value affect the lives of her characters. The stories in Refund reflect our contemporary world—swindlers, reality show creators, desperate artists, siblings, parents — who try to answer the question: What is the real definition of worth?In “Theft,” an eighty-year-old swindler, accustomed to tricking people for their money, boards a cruise ship to see if she can find something of true value—a human connection. In “Anything for Money,” the creator of a reality show is thrown into the real world when his estranged granddaughter reenters his life in need of a new heart; and in the title story, young artist parents in downtown Manhattan escape the attack on 9/11 only to face a battle over their subletted apartment with a stranger who might have lost more than only her deposit.Set in contemporary America, these stories herald a work of singular literary merit by an important writer at the height of her power.

    When she wasn't stalking the streets of Greenwich Village wearing a brassiere made from tomato cans, she was enthusiastically declaiming her poems to sailors in beer halls or posing nude for Man Ray or Marcel Duchamp. In an era of brutal war, technological innovation, and cataclysmic change, the Baroness had resolved to create her own destiny -- taking the center of the Dadaist circle, breaking every bond of female propriety . . . and transforming herself into a living, breathing work of art.

    Its central character is Edward Cavan, a brilliant English professor, who commits suicide. His death sets off a shock wave among Cavan's friends -- and changes things for some of them forever."It is impossible not to be interested in (Sarton's characters) and concerned with what concerns them". -- The New Yorker

    Randall, a bankruptcy lawyer, is the warlord of his world, a shark in a fishbowl, exercising power with mad, relentless, hilarious glee; Boone, an American innocent abroad, journeys to the African bush, protected by the twin charms of the passport and the almighty dollar. In seeking Michael, both men find much more than they bargain for.A satire, steeped in irony, chronicles the misadventures of Boone Westfall, who wanders through West Africa encountering witches, angry ancestors, and bad medicine in search of his missing friend Michael Killigan, whose high-powered banker father is conducting his own search.