The "fake" Philip Roth becomes a monstrous nemesis to the "real" Philip Roth, who must take a frightening and mysterious journey through the volatile Middle East. Suspenseful, hilarious, and impassioned, Operation Shylock is at once a spy story, a political thriller, and a confession, pulsing with intelligence and intense narrative energy.

    As a depiction of South Africa, this novel is more revealing than a thousand news dispatches as it tells the story of a young woman cast in the role of a young revolutionary, trying to uphold a heritage handed on by martyred parents while carving out a sense of one's self.

    A failed love affair, the failure to find work as an architect, and the difficulties of substitute teaching cause Albert Angelo to reexamine his life

    Arthur Daane, a documentary film-maker and inveterate globetrotter, has lost his wife and child in a plane crash. In ALL SOULS' DAY we follow Arthur as he wanders the streets of Berlin, a city uniquely shaped by history. Berlin provides the backdrop for Daane's reflections on life as he plans his latest project - a self-funded film that will show the world through Daane's eyes. With a new circle of friends - a philosopher, a sculptor and a physicist - Arthur discusses everything from history to metaphysics, and the cumulative power of remembered images and philosophical musings on the meaning of our contemporary existence comes to permeate the atmosphere of the book. Then one cold, wintry day, Daane meets the young history student Elik Orange and his world is turned upside down. Whenever this mysterious woman beckons, Daane is compelled to follow. ALL SOULS' DAY is, finally, an elegiac love story in which the personal histories of the characters are skilfully interwoven with the history of the countries in which they find themselves. It is also the poignant and affecting tale of a man coming to terms

    It also began Coover's now-trademark riffs on fairy tales and bedtime stories. In these riotously word-drunk fictional romps, two children follow an old man into the woods, trailing bread crumbs behind and edging helplessly toward a sinister end that never comes; a husband walks toward the bed where his wife awaits his caresses, but by the time he arrives she's been dead for three weeks and detectives are pounding down the door; a teenaged babysitter's evening becomes a kaleidoscope of dangerous erotic fantasies-her employer's, her boyfriend's, her own; an aging, humble carpenter marries a beautiful but frigid woman, and after he's waited weeks to consummate their union she announces that God has made her pregnant. Now available in a Grove paperback, Pricksongs & Descants is a cornerstone of Robert Coover's remarkable career and a brilliant work by a major American writer.

    . . . Her head inclined forward without moving, for she was looking fixedly at a young man who lay at her feet. The man was disfigured with wounds, but seemed to rouse himself a little as from a deep sleep, almost of death itself. Pain had clenched his eyes, but the sight of the maiden drew them toward her. He collected his breath, heaved a deep sigh, and murmured faintly. "My sweet," said he, "are you truly safe, or are you too a casualty of the war?"The Romance novel didn't begin with Kathleen Woodiwiss or even with the Bronte sisters. By the time Heliodorus wrote his "Aethiopica"--or "Ethiopian Romance"--in the third century, the genre was already impressively developed. Heliodorus launches his tale of love and the quirks of fate with a bizarre scene of blood, bodies, and booty on an Egyptian beach viewed through the eyes of a band of mystified pirates. The central love-struck characters are Charicles, the beautiful daughter of the Ethiopian queen, and Theagenes, a Thessalian aristocrat. The story unfolds with all the twists and devices any writer would employ today, with the added attractions of dreams, oracles, and exotic locales in the ancient Mediterranean and Africa.Hadas's was the first modern English-language translation of this story, which was first translated into English in 1587 and was a favorite among the Elizabethans. His version of this earliest extant Greek novel remains accessible and appealing." -- back cover.The novel is thought to have originally been written in the 2nd or 3rd century A.D. Nothing is known about the author, Heliodorus.

    So when his friend Maury enlists his help to sort out a problem with an ex-film star, Joe is more than happy to help.

    Written as a diary, Myra Breckinridge, someone determined not to be possessed by any man, recounts her day as she lives it out in the Hollywood of the '60s. Feminism, transsexuality, and a host of cinematic jokes abound.

    After shooting his brother's killer, young Gjorg is entitled to thirty days' grace - not enough to see out the month of April.Then a visiting honeymoon couple cross the path of the fugitive. The bride's heart goes out to Gjorg, and even these 'civilised' strangers from the city risk becoming embroiled in the fatal mechanism of vendetta.

    Stumbling upon converted asylums, industrial and retail parks, ring-fenced government institutions and lost villages, Sinclair discovers a Britain of the fringes, a landscape consumed by developers. London Orbital charts this extraordinary trek and round trip of the soul, revealing the country as you've never seen it before

    Charcot at Salpetriére Hospital outside Paris, and Marie Curie, the Polish physicist and Nobel Prize winner. While the scientist tries to understand the nature of radiation, Blanche, her assistant and, at the time of her death, a triple amputee as a result of exposure to radiation, fills three notebooks with her exploration of a deceptively simple question: What is love? The Book about Blanche and Marie is at once a haunting look at scientific martyrdom and an intimate moving portrait of a friendship between two uniquely brave and talented women.

    When Richard Bone sees a picture of conglomerate tycoon J.J. Wolfe in the newspaper, he's struck by how closely he resembles the man Bone saw dumping the body: could this millionaire redneck be the killer? Bone's close friend Cutter, a crippled Vietnam vet, is convinced that Wolfe is the killer. With nothing much more to lose, the reckless Cutter and handsome gigolo Bone hit the road to the Wolfe headquarters in the Ozarks, totally unprepared for what awaits them. Cutter and Bone are two of the most brilliantly drawn characters in modern American fiction. Cutter and Bone is a brilliant look at the underbelly of post-Vietnam America. Filmed and immortalized as Cutter's Way, this new edition marks the return of one of the greatest American post-war novels.

    A shell-shocked romantic—slow, distant, and dreamy—he begins to have trouble telling Rose's half-sister Nancy apart from Rose herself, now buried in the village churchyard. Coping and failing to cope with the quiet realities of daily life, Charley's delusions elevate his timid courtship of a practical and unremarkable young woman into an amnesiac love story both comic and disturbing. A contemporary of Anthony Powell and Evelyn Waugh, Henry Green was one of the greatest English novelists of the twentieth century, and Back is his most haunting and personal work.

    Before their journey ends, one of them will be hanged, one will vanish, and the others will face a murder trial. Out of the truths and lies that envelop these events, John Fowles has created a novel that is at once a tale of erotic obsession, an exploration of the conflict between reason and superstition, an astonishing act of literary legerdemain, and the story of the birth of a new faith.

    Written in two versions, male and female (both available in Vintage International), which are identical save for seventeen crucial lines, Dictionary is the imaginary book of knowledge of the Khazars, a people who flourished somewhere beyond Transylvania between the seventh and ninth centuries. Eschewing conventional narrative and plot, this lexicon novel combines the dictionaries of the world's three major religions with entries that leap between past and future, featuring three unruly wise men, a book printed in poison ink, suicide by mirrors, a chimerical princess, a sect of priests who can infiltrate one's dreams, romances between the living and the dead, and much more.