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 A YOUNG MAN finds his own father inconveniently ordinary, can he choose another? Jonathan Jaimison, the engagingly amoral hero, comes to New York from Silver City, Ohio for exactly such a purpose. Combing through his mother's diaries and the bars and cafes of Greenwich Village, Jonathan seeks out the writer or painter whose youthful indiscretion he believes he might have been, all the while committing numerous indiscretions of his own. By the end of the novel, Jonathan has figured out not only his paternity, but his maternity, and best of all, himself. Published in 1962, "The Golden Spur" was Dawn Powell's last novel.

     "The Ugliest Pilgrim" takes you into the adventures and into the heart of a disfigured young woman who has run away from her life in search of a better one. This award-winning story is the basis for the musical Violet, which won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. In "Hitchhiker," a wary secretary hitches a ride in a boat with a man hell-bent on saving fish; instead he saves her from the river -- and herself. And in the title story, Betts brilliantly captures the inner life of a teacher and writer struggling to control her classroom, her household, and her life.

    We see him on his travels to Russia, to Bulgaria, and in the beds of his various mistresses. This is a funny, witty book about the world of writers and the quest for success.

    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.

    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).

    After being impregnated in a fertility ritual of ancient ofigin, she leaves Mexico to work in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas as a housemaid for Mrs. Eddie Hatch, a woman with a strong will and a narrow worldview. Their complex relationship-by turns mystical and pragmnatic, serious and comic-reveals the many ways human beings can wound one another, the nautre of love and sacrifice, and the possibility of forgiveness.The River Beyond the World is a 1996 National Book Award Finalist for Fiction.

    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.

    Idiots FirstBlack is My Favorite ColorStill LifeThe Death of MeA Choice of ProfessionLife is Better than DeathThe JewbirdNaked NudeThe Cost of LivingThe Maid's ShoesSuppose a WeddingThe German Refugee

    But in Guy's case, the legend is one of betrayal and infamy. For the scandal of his embezzlement brought down the delicately balanced structure of the Stock Exchange. The long-honored system of self-government by mutual trust among gentlemen came to an end with the default of one of its brightest stars.The story of Guy's fall is told by the three persons most intimately concerned: Guy himself, Rex Geer, his closest friend, and Angelica, his wife. We see him first through his own eyes — embittered, oddly proud of his peculiar distinction, and entirely unrepentant — the golden boy, the Wall Street manipulator, and finally the old man determined to justify himself to the grandchildren he will never see.Rex and Angelica in turn pick up the same threads of the story, but the threads change color subtly as they pass through different hands. In the end, the reader must decide for himself which is the real Guy Prime.Louis Auchincloss brings to the financial world the same authority and understanding he brought to the worlds of the law (Powers of Attorney), the private school (The Rector of Justin), and the old families of New York (Portrait in Brownstone). Virgilia Peterson, writing in the New York Times Book Review, called The Rector of Justin "not only a passionately interesting, but a spiritually important study of the American character of, and for our time." Her words hold true for The Embezzler.

    In Shiloh, Bobbie Ann Mason introduces us to her western Kentucky people and the lives they forge for themselves amid the ups and downs of contemporary American life, and she poignantly captures the growing pains of the New South in the lives of her characters as they come to terms with feminism, R-rated movies, and video games. "Bobbie Ann Mason is one of those rare writers who, by concentrating their attention on a few square miles of native turf, are able to open up new and surprisingly wide worlds for the delighted reader," said Robert Towers in The New York Review of Books.

    Stunned by these encounters, they nevertheless survive. A worn-out poet finds peace in his heart as he lays his Lermontov medal at the foot of the sacred angel; a prosperous suburbanite contemplates his predicament when his wife joins the cast of a nude show; a guileless and romantic well digger, anxious for a bride, visits Russia, falls in love and returns home "singing the unreality blues"; and a miserably married man fantasizes a beautiful lover who comes to him for strength, love and counsel while he tends the charcoal grill in the backyard.

    Narrated in the first person by the protagonist and Crocadile member Duke, The Cool World recounts the story of Duke and his gang's adventures and travails as they deal with street life in the ghetto and a rival gang called the Wolves. Drug dealing, fights, prostitution, guns, and gambling are rampant throughout this engaging, slim novel that rarely has a dull moment. Written entirely in African-American street vernacular of the time, Miller—a caucasian academic—accomplished a great, and mostly unnoticed, linguistic and narrative feat with this novel.