It will then be about them only. It will be all about the one they loved like thunder, about the one they struggled hard to keep, about the one who had left them in the middle of their 'forever', about their world shattering into pieces, about them gluing together every piece, and about them falling in love one more time.And if you still think it is about you and me, you haven't loved someone like thunder, yet.

    Returning to the Paris hotel where he spent his honeymoon six years earlier, he decides to take what seems like the only way out - suicide. But a chance encounter with a Russian in a similar predicament leaves Nick with an unlikely obligation to fulfil, one that will take him to Italy, and offer him a chance at something like redemption. www.kevinwignall.com

    Navigate easily to any poem from Table of Contents or search for the words or phrases. Author's biography and free stories in the trial version. Features Navigate from Table of Contents or search for words or phrases Make bookmarks, notes, highlights Access the e-book anytime, anywhere - at home, on the train, in the subway. Table of Contents List of Works by GenreList of Works in Alphabetical Order List of Works in Chronological OrderF. Scott Fitzgerald Biography NovelsThe Beautiful and DamnedThe Great Gatsby This Side of Paradise Tender Is the Night Short Story CollectionsFlappers and Philosophers Tales of the Jazz Age The Pat Hobby Stories Short StoriesAbsolution Afternoon of an Author An Alcoholic CaseAt Your Age The Baby PartyBabylon Revisited Basil: The Freshest Boy Basil and Cleopatra Benediction Bernice Bobs Her Hair "Boil Some Water--Lots of It" The Bowl The Bridal Party The Camel's Back The Captured Shadow Crazy Sunday The Curious Case of Benjamin Button The Cut-Glass Bowl Dalyrimple Goes Wrong Design in Plaster The Diamond as Big as the Ritz Dice, Brassknuckles & Guitar Emotional Bankruptcy Family in the Wind The FiendFinancing Finnegan First Blood Forging Ahead The Four Fists A Freeze-OutFun in an Artist's Studio Gretchen's Forty WinksHe Thinks He's WonderfulHead and Shoulders The Homes of the Stars The Hotel Child"I Didn't Get Over" The Ice Palace Jacob's Ladder The Jelly-Bean Jemina Josephine: A Woman with a Past The Last of the BellesThe Lees of Happiness The Lost DecadeLove in the Night Magnetism MajestyA Man in the Way May Day Mightier than the Sword More Than Just a HouseMr. Icky A New Leaf News of Paris--Fifteen Years AgoA Nice Quiet Place The Night at Chancellorsville A Night at the Fair No Harm Trying The Offshore Pirate "Oh Russet Witch!" On the Trail of Pat Hobby One InterneOne Trip AbroadOutside the Cabinet-Maker's Pat Hobby Does His Bit Pat Hobby and Orson Welles Pat Hobby's Christmas Wish Pat Hobby's College Days Pat Hobby's Preview Pat Hobby, Putative Father Pat Hobby's Secret A Patriotic Short The Perfect Life Porcelain And Pink Rags Martin-Jones and The Prince Of WalesThe Rich BoyThe Rough Crossing The Scandal Detectives "The Sensible Thing"A Short Trip Home Six of OneTeamed with Genius The Swimmers Tarquin of Cheapside Three Hours Between Planes Two Old-Timers Two Wrongs What a Handsome Pair!Winter Dreams

    Do NOT get stuck in the comments section of life today. Make, do, create the things. Let others tussle it out. Vamos!Before he inspired the world with Hamilton and was catapulted to international fame, Lin-Manuel Miranda was inspiring his Twitter followers with words of encouragement at the beginning and end of each day. He wrote these original sayings, aphorisms, and poetry for himself as much as for others. But as Miranda's audience grew, these messages took on a life on their own. Now Miranda has gathered the best of his daily greetings into a beautiful collection illustrated by acclaimed artist (and fellow Twitter favorite) Jonny Sun.Full of comfort and motivation, Gmorning, Gnight! is a touchstone for anyone who needs a quick lift.

    Sir Gawain is a romance, a fairy-tale for adults, full of life and colour; but it is also much more than this, being at the same time a powerful moral tale which examines religious and social values.Pearl is apparently an elegy on the death of a child, a poem pervaded with a sense of great personal loss: but, like Gawain it is also a sophisticated and moving debate on much less tangible matters.Sir Orfeo is a slighter romance, belonging to an earlier and different tradition. It was a special favourite of Tolkien's. The three translations represent the complete rhyme and alliterative schemes of the originals.

    The Knight, the Miller, the Friar, the Squire, the Prioress, the Wife of Bath, and others who make up the cast of characters -- including Chaucer himself -- are real people, with human emotions and weaknesses. When it is remembered that Chaucer wrote in English at a time when Latin was the standard literary language across western Europe, the magnitude of his achievement is even more remarkable. But Chaucer's genius needs no historical introduction; it bursts forth from every page of The Canterbury Tales.If we trust the General Prologue, Chaucer intended that each pilgrim should tell two tales on the way to Canterbury and two tales on the way back. He never finished his enormous project and even the completed tales were not finally revised. Scholars are uncertain about the order of the tales. As the printing press had yet to be invented when Chaucer wrote his works, The Canterbury Tales has been passed down in several handwritten manuscripts.

    The good wit of bad manners, elegantly spiced with irony and deftly controlled malice, has made Saki stories small, perfect gems of the English language. Here for the first time, are the collected writings of Saki--including all of his short stories ("Reginald", "Reginald in Russia", "The Chronicles of Clovis", "Beasts and Super-Beasts" "The Toys of Peace", and "The Square Egg"), his three novels (THE UNBEARABLE BASSINGTON, WHEN WILLIAM CAME and THE WESTMINSTER ALICE), and three plays (THE DEATHTRAP, KARL-LUDWIG'S WINDOW and THE WATCHED POT. You are invited to meet once again Clovis, Reginald, the Unbearable Bassington, and the other memorable characters etched so superbly by the pen of H.H. Munro. "In all literature, he was the first to employ successfully a wildly outrageous premise in order to make a serious point. I love that. And today the best of his stories are still better than the best of just about every other writer around."--Roald Dahl. Introduction by Noel Coward.(less)

    This work is light, deft, dangerous. There are perfect poems here, such as “The End”, which enacts a simple, startling twist on the hoary injunction to “Walk towards the light.” See, everything you know is wrong. You really have to read this book. -Rae AmrantroutI've always found Kendal Frey's poems fascinating to the point of transfix—they make compelling reading: I've never started one I didn't finish, something I can say of very few other poets' work. Her first full-length collection surely places her among the most brilliant of today's young poets. The Grief Performance commands and rewards the mind's richest attendance.--Bill KnottEmily Kendal Frey’s The Grief Performance is a book that condenses a journey of finding and re-finding loss into beautiful packages. The packages are the poems and they sit shiny and new on every page of this fabulous and generous book. I want to go into the world that these poems create, just so that I can be given these terrifying presents again and again. I know you will, too. See you there.--Dorothea LaskyEmily Kendal Frey's poems are made of words that can fake out death, trick abandonment into a bed, turn love into hands. They are rich with sound, brave with secrets, funny (tragic), and open ( ). She will twist up your heart into your next heart. Settle in. There are three dead people in her.--Zachary Schomburg

    Follow him as he attempts to go to his last day of work. Follow him through the subway as he considers stealing chips from a dancing baby. Find him being threatened by a homeless man holding board games. Take his hand as he considers building a hydraulic cocoon for his cat out of a complimentary duffel bag. Walk the streets of Uptown as a cop-killer takes hostages to the roof of an apartment building. Meet his friends. Just kidding! Follow him to his neighbor’s apartment where he gets paid in pumpkin pie to watch a baby. Follow him through through the dull pains of never quite becoming an adult. Sit back, laugh, smile, hold your breath, because not even he knows how it ends.“Funny as hell, searingly honest, and urgently real, Sam Pink’s Rontel puts to shame most modern fiction. His writing perfectly captures the bizarre parade that is Chicago, with all its gloriously odd and wonderful people. This book possesses both the nerve of Nelson Algren and the existential comedy of Albert Camus.” – Joe Meno

    Across the yard of a Victorian poorhouse, a man is too ashamed to acknowledge the son he gave away. In a 19th-century French village, an old servant understands - suddenly and with awe - the meaning of the Bible story her master is reading to her. On a summer evening in the Catskills in 1971, a skinny girl steps out of a Chevy with a guitar and with a song that will send shivers through her listeners' skulls. A few years from now, in Italy, a gifted scientist discovers links between time and the human brain and between her lover's novel and his life. Throughout the five masterpieces of fiction that make up A Possible Life, exquisitely drawn and unforgettable characters risk their bodies, hearts and minds in pursuit of the manna of human connection. Between soldier and lover, parent and child, servant and master, and artist and muse, important pleasures and pains are born of love, separations and missed opportunities. These interactions - whether successful or not - also affect the long trajectories of characters' lives. Provocative and profound, Sebastian Faulks's dazzling new novel journeys across continents and centuries not only to entertain with superb old-fashioned storytelling but to show that occasions of understanding between humans are the one thing that defines us - and that those moments, however fluid, are the one thing that endures.

    Amy Hempel is the writer who makes me feel most affiliated with other humans; we are all living this way—hiding, alone, obsessed—and that’s ok.” —Miranda July From legendary writer Amy Hempel, one of the most celebrated and original voices in American short fiction: a ravishing, sometimes heartbreaking new story collection—her first in over a decade.Amy Hempel is a master of the short story. A multiple award winner, Hempel is highly regarded among writers, reviewers, and readers of contemporary fiction. This new collection, her first since her Collected Stories published more than a decade ago, is a literary event. These fifteen exquisitely honed stories reveal Hempel at her most compassionate and spirited, as she introduces characters, lonely and adrift, searching for connection. In “A Full-Service Shelter,” a volunteer at a dog shelter tirelessly, devotedly cares for dogs on a list to be euthanized. In “Greed,” a spurned wife examines her husband’s affair with a glamorous, older married woman. And in “Cloudland,” the longest story in the collection, a woman reckons with the choice she made as a teenager to give up her newborn infant. Quietly dazzling, these stories are replete with moments of revelation and transcendence and with Hempel’s singular, startling, inimitable sentences.

    In this distinct selection of stories marked by struggle and compassion, Pieces Like Pottery is a powerful examination of the sorrows of life, the strength of character, the steadfast of courage, and the resiliency of love requisite to find redemption. Filled with graceful insight into the human condition, each linked story presents a tale of loss and love mirroring themes from each of the five Sorrowful Mysteries. In Expect Dragons, James Hinri learns that his old high school teacher is dying. Wanting to tell Mr. Smith one last time how much his teaching impacted him, James drives across the country revisiting past encounters with his father's rejection and the pain of his youth. Disillusioned and losing hope, little did James know that Mr. Smith had one final lesson for him. In The Gravesite, Lisa and Mike's marriage hangs in the balance after the disappearance of their only son while backpacking in Thailand. Mike thinks the authorities are right--that Chris fell to his death in a hiking accident--but Lisa has her doubts. Her son was too strong to die this young, and no one can explain to her why new posts continue to appear on her son's blog. Twenty-Two looks in on the lives of a dock worker suffering from the guilt of a life not lived and a bartender making the best of each day, even though he can see clearly how his life should have been different. The two find their worlds collide when a past tragedy shockingly connects them. A collection of nine stories, each exquisitely written and charged with merciful insight into the trials of life, Pieces Like Pottery reminds us of the sorrows we all encounter in life and the kindness we receive, oftentimes from the unlikeliest of places.

    With a different die-cut on every page, Tree of Codes explores previously unchartered literary territory. Initially deemed impossible to make, the book is a first — as much a sculptural object as it is a work of masterful storytelling. Tree of Codes is the story of an enormous last day of life — as one character's life is chased to extinction, Foer multi-layers the story with immense, anxious, at times disorientating imagery, crossing both a sense of time and place, making the story of one person’s last day everyone’s story. Inspired to exhume a new story from an existing text, Jonathan Safran Foer has taken his "favorite" book, The Street of Crocodiles by Polish-Jewish writer Bruno Schulz, and used it as a canvas, cutting into and out of the pages, to arrive at an original new story told in Jonathan Safran Foer's own acclaimed voice.

    The veterinarian voyeur of "Now You See Her" harbors erotic illusions about the beautiful woman next door - desires shared by his teenaged son. "Poker" acknowledges the power of card games and canines to mend a broken heart, while "Sleeping with My Dog" finds the humor and pathos in the unspoken boundaries between men and women. And in "Tenant, " an orphaned German shepherd leads a man to ponder his landlady's legacy. By turns unpredictable and wise, sorrowful and triumphant, Dogfight and Other Stories reveals the transformative power of life's small struggles.

    Fans are going to love it, and newcomers will be pleased and startled by his intensity and originality. The images are vivid and the voice is honest and powerful.”—Stephen King, author of Duma Key“Ryan Adams writes with equal parts precision and recklessness; the blood he draws from the text is easily as unnerving as its unapologetic tenderness. He is proof that poetry will find its writer.”—Mary-Louise Parker, actress“Infinity Blues is Ryan Adams at his personal, unforgettable best. Strong and beautiful and funny and pure. Like all his work, it’s soul poetry of the highest order.”—Cameron Crowe, filmmaker“This is much better than reading a friend’s journal. It’s more like watching somebody you love in the bathtub talking to himself. You’re like, wow, he’s even good at taking a bath. After reading Infinity Blues (which I think is a great title), I give Ryan Adams the best compliment I ever got—and the only reason for reading anyone’s poetry. Ryan, I really like your mind.”—Eileen Myles, author of Cool for YouRyan Adams may be known primarily for acclaimed albums such as Cardinology, Heartbreaker, Gold (which includes the popular hit songs “When the Stars Go Blue” and “New York, New York”), Love Is Hell, Cold Roses, Jacksonville City Nights, and Easy Tiger, but the world renowned singer/songwriter has always been a poet and fiction writer at heart. With the release of Infinity Blues, his nonmusical writing is for the first time ever unveiled in book form. Mr. Adams’s work rings of an emotional authenticity that provides perhaps an even deeper insight into the man than is revealed through the songs that have resonated with his hundreds of thousands of fans the world over.RYAN ADAMS is usually performing in some city on the globe at any given moment with his longtime band the Cardinals. Adams is known for his prolific nature, which in the last ten years has produced various international hit albums. Adams has also produced Willie Nelson’s Songbird album and contributed to records by Toots and the Maytals, Beth Orton, the Wallflowers, Counting Crows, and Cowboy Junkies; additionally, he has appeared on CMT’s Crossroads with Elton John. He was a longtime Manhattan resident before relocating to France in 2009, and he listens to A LOT of heavy metal.