Nancy? He's a superstitious Vegas high-roller who wants to gamble at a casino in his lucky shrimp outfit...He's the genius inventor of "Six Day Underwear"...He's a stage actor who only travels while dressed as a stick of butter...He is, in reality, a twisted prankster—a supremely off-kilter alter ego who sends patently ridiculous letters to corporate honchos, entertainment conglomerates, national publications, politicians, celebrities and heads of state. His innocent requests, queries, complaints, demands, and suggestions are so absurd it is amazing they fool anyone—but often the deadpan responses he receives are even more hilarious: "Dear Mr. Nancy, It is not often that we receive such enthusiastic support for the paper bag."  —The Paper Bag Council"On behalf of Greyhound, there should be no problem traveling while in your butter costume." —Greyhound Bus Lines"I look forward to working with you to create a better future for this great nation." —Vice President Al GoreLetters From A Nut is an insanely inspired, truly madcap collection of Nancy correspondence, a wet-yourself-in-a-public place funny aggregation of official—and officially certifiable—requests, complaints, fan mail and questions that could not possibly have been taken seriously...but, amazingly, were.

    Hilariously funny, boldly intimate, startlingly candid, Portnoy’s Complaint was an immediate bestseller upon its publication in 1969, and is perhaps Roth’s best-known book.Portnoy's Complaint n. [after Alexander Portnoy (1933-)] A disorder in which strongly-felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a perverse nature. Spielvogel says: 'Acts of exhibitionism, voyeurism, fetishism, auto-eroticism and oral coitus are plentiful; as a consequence of the patient's "morality," however, neither fantasy nor act issues in genuine sexual gratification, but rather in overriding feelings of shame and the dread of retribution, particularly in the form of castration.' (Spielvogel, O. 'The Puzzled Penis', Internationale Zeitschrift fur Psychoanalyse, Vol. XXIV, p. 909.) it is believed by Spielvogel that many of the symptoms can be traced to the bonds obtaining in the mother-child relationship.

    Ranging from the gothic South to the chic East Coast, from rural children to aging urban sophisticates, all the unforgettable places and people of Capote’s oeuvre are here, in stories as elegant as they are heartfelt, as haunting as they are compassionate. Reading them reminds us of the miraculous gifts of a beloved American original.

    Opposites in many ways, they have grown together and made their relationship work. But when they learn that Daniel's twin brother and sister-in-law have been killed in a bombing in Jerusalem, their lives are suddenly, utterly transformed.In dealing with their families and the need to make a decision about who will raise the deceased couple's two children, both Matthew and Daniel are confronted with challenges that strike at the very heart of their relationship. What is Matthew's place in an extended family that does not completely accept him or the commitment he and Daniel have made? How do Daniel's questions about his identity as a Jewish man affect his life as a gay American? Tensions only intensify when they learn that the deceased parents wanted Matthew and Daniel to adopt the children-six year old Gal, and baby Noam.The impact this instant new family has on Matthew, Daniel, and their relationship is subtle and heartbreaking, yet not without glimmers of hope. They must learn to reinvent and redefine their bond in profound, sometimes painful ways. What kind of parents can these two men really be? How does a family become strong enough to stay together and endure? And are there limits to honesty or commitment-or love?

    Not stories of triumph over adversity, but something completely other. Described in language that is brilliantly sardonic, Woods's characters return repeatedly to places where they don't belong—often the places where they were born. In "Zombie," a coming-of-age story like no other, two young girls find friendship with a mysterious woman in the local cemetery. "Take the Way Home That Leads Back to Sullivan Street" describes a lesbian couple trying to repair their relationship by dropping acid at a Mensa party. In "A New Mohawk," a man in romantic pursuit of a female political activist becomes inadvertently much more familiar with the Palestine/Israel conflict than anyone would have thought possible. And in the title story, Woods brings us into the mind of a queer goth teenager who faces ostracism from her small-town evangelical church.In the background are the endless American wars and occupations and too many early deaths of friends and family. This is fiction that is fresh and of the moment, even as it is timeless.

    These eleven stories continue the adventures of Silas Ermineskin and his sidekick Frank Fencepost, as Kinsella returns to the Cree Indian reserve in Hobbema, Alberta, where his cast of zany characters, last seen in The Fencepost Chronicles and The Miss Hobbema Pageant, is at its wry best.Here Frank Fencepost, true to form as a fast-talking con artist, outwits the Alberta Supreme Court in a hilarious cattle-insemination case in "Bull." In the title story he becomes an evangelizing Robin Hood, turning the government-sponsored K-U-G-H radio show into a scheme to use listeners' donations to fund listeners' wishes (and incidentally line his pockets), and in "Miracle on Manitoba Street" he visits a Montana reserve where he carves a picture of the Virgin Mary on a derelict Frigidaire and convinces the local medicine woman it's a miracle—one worthy of an admission charge.Not all the stories are humorous: "Dream Catcher" grapples with sexual violence when Silas's twelve-year-old sister is assaulted and Mad Etta, the community's four-hundred-pound medicine woman, provides a nightmare "cure" for the would-be rapist; "Ice Man" depicts gender discrimination, as Jason Twelve Trees fights to participate in a cooking competition despite his father's wish for him to become a mechanic; and "The Rain Birds" shows the consequences of the government's computer-driven corporate farms riding roughshod over the human and natural environment in western Canada.

    Her body lies nameless in a hospital morgue. She had apparently worked as a cleaning woman at a bakery, but there is no record of her employment. When a Jerusalem daily accuses the bakery of "gross negligence and inhumanity toward an employee," the bakery's owner, overwhelmed by guilt, entrusts the task of identifying and burying the victim to a human resources man. This man is at first reluctant to take on the job, but as the facts of the woman's life take shape-she was an engineer from the former Soviet Union, a non-Jew on a religious pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and, judging by an early photograph, beautiful-he yields to feelings of regret, atonement, and even love.At once profoundly serious and highly entertaining, A. B. Yehoshua astonishes us with his masterly, often unexpected turns in the story and with his ability to get under the skin and into the soul of Israel today.

    Since her death in 1965, her place in the landscape of twentieth-century fiction has grown only more exalted.As we approach the centenary of her birth comes this astonishing compilation of fifty-six pieces—more than forty of which have never been published before. Two of Jackson’s children co-edited this volume, culling through the vast archives of their mother’s papers at the Library of Congress, selecting only the very best for inclusion.Let Me Tell You brings together the deliciously eerie short stories Jackson is best known for, along with frank, inspiring lectures on writing; comic essays about her large, boisterous family; and whimsical drawings. Jackson’s landscape here is most frequently domestic: dinner parties and bridge, household budgets and homeward-bound commutes, children’s games and neighborly gossip. But this familiar setting is also her most subversive: She wields humor, terror, and the uncanny to explore the real challenges of marriage, parenting, and community—the pressure of social norms, the veins of distrust in love, the constant lack of time and space.For the first time, this collection showcases Shirley Jackson’s radically different modes of writing side by side. Together they show her to be a magnificent storyteller, a sharp, sly humorist, and a powerful feminist.This volume includes a foreword by the celebrated literary critic and Jackson biographer Ruth Franklin.

    From short stories to poems, this has everything the great author has ever written in it.

    Eliot himself wished to preserve than this volume, published two years before his death in 1965.Poet, dramatist, critic, and editor, T. S. Eliot was one of the defining figures of twentieth-century poetry. This edition of Collected Poems 1909-1962 includes his verse from Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) to Four Quartets (1943), and includes such literary landmarks as 'The Waste Land' and 'Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats'.

    VERA & LINUS is a series of short sketches. The book's theme is the love between the two protagonists, Vera and Linus. They are mischief makers and tricksters of the most daring sort, and they are constantly up to no good, but the language holds them with a clear restraint, a restraint born perhaps out of the peculiar nature of their love, a love both for each other and the things of the world. Their mastery, and shifting natures allow them to compel the workaday world as they see it, but not to rule over each other, and so their game begins, as Vera struggles to outwit Linus, and Linus to outwit Vera.

    Each character who inhabits the house has a story to tell: about run-ins with the other residents, the diminishing community of Jews, cross-cultural conflicts, and the difficulty of choosing between India and Israel. Prophet Elijah, whom the Bene Israel Jews of western India believe in, plays an important role in their lives, appearing at critical or amusing moments and wreaking havoc with his mischief, but ensuring that ultimately peace prevails. Bombay Brides - as most Jewish men of Ahmedabad are married to women from Mumbai - is drawn from Jewish homes in Ahmedabad, Mumbai, Kochi, Kolkata and Alibaug. This is a story about home, heritage, rites, rituals, roots and what it means to be one of the last survivng members of a community in a vast multi-cultural country like India.