The inimitable John Banville joins the list of distinguished preface writers for Aleksandar Hemon’s series, and A. S. Byatt represents England among a luminous cast of European contributors. Fans of the series will find everything they’ve grown to love, while new readers will discover what they’ve been missing!SLOVAKIA: Balla, Before the BreakupMACEDONIA: Žarko Kujundžiski, When the Glasses Are LostMONTENEGRO: Dragan Radulović, The FaceGEORGIA: Lasha Bugadze, The Sins of the WolfBELGIUM: Paul Emond, Grand FroidARMENIA: Krikor Beledian, The Name under My TongueRUSSIA: Kirill Kobrin, Last Summer in MarienbadMOLDOVA: Vitalie Ciobanu, Orchestra RehearsalIRELAND: Tomás Mac Síomóin, Music in the BoneFINLAND: Tiina Raevaara, My Creator, My CreationHUNGARY: Miklós Vajda, Portrait of a Mother in an American FrameTURKEY: Zehra Çırak, Memory Cultivation SalonPORTUGAL: Dulce Maria Cardoso, Angels on the InsideLATVIA: Gundega Repše, How Important is it to be Ernest?UKRAINE: Tania Malyarchuk, Me and My Sacred CowSPAIN (Castilian): Eloy Tizón, The Mercury in the ThermometersBOSNIA & HERZEGOVINA: Semezdin Mehmedinović, My HeartAUSTRIA: Lydia Mischkulnig, A Protagonist’s NemesisFRANCE: Marie Redonnet, Madame Zabee’s GuesthouseLITHUANIA: Ieva Toleikytė, The Eye of the MaplesBULGARIA: Rumen Balabanov, The RagiadUK, ENGLAND: A.S. Byatt, Dolls’ EyesESTONIA: Kristiina Ehin, The Surrealist’s DaughterPOLAND: Sylwia Chutnik, It’s All Up to YouLIECHTENSTEIN: Daniel Batliner, Malcontent’s MonologueSPAIN (Basque): Bernardo Atxaga, Pirpo and Chanberlan, MurderersSERBIA: Borivoje Adašević, For a Foreign MasterSLOVENIA: Mirana Likar Bajželj, Nada’s TableclothDENMARK: Christina Hesselholdt, Camilla and the HorseROMANIA: Dan Lungu, 7 P.M. WifeSWITZERLAND: Bernard Comment, A SonUK, WALES: Ray French, MigrationIRELAND: Mike McCormack, Of One MindICELAND: Gyrðir Elíasson, The Music ShopNORWAY: Ari Behn, Thunder Snow and When a Dollar Was a Big Deal

    With a fluency of tone that will surprise even his devoted readers, he captures both bewildering horror and heartrending tenderness with an absorbing, compassionate authority.We warm to these newcomers—as to all Russo's characters—almost despite ourselves. A jaded Hollywood moviemaker uncovers a decades-old flame he never knew he'd harbored. A precocious fifth grader puzzles over life, love and baseball as he watches his parents' marriage dissolve. Another child is forced into a harrowing cross-country escape whose actual purpose he learns only after the fact. An elderly couple rediscovers the power, and the misery, of their relationship during a long-awaited retreat to a resort island. And in the title story, a septuagenarian nun invades the narrator's college writing workshop with an incredible saga.

    in 2000. It details a year in the life of Jim Glass, who lives, with his mother and three uncles, in the small fictional town of Aliceville, North Carolina in 1934 during the Great Depression.

    Rucker Blakeslee, elopes with Miss Love Simpson. He is barely three weeks a widower, and she is only half his age and a Yankee to boot. As their marriage inspires a whirlwind of local gossip, fourteen-year-old Will Tweedy suddenly finds himself eyewitness to a family scandal, and that’s where his adventures begin.Cold Sassy Tree is the undeniably entertaining and extraordinarily moving account of small-town Southern life in a bygone era. Brimming with characters who are wise and loony, unimpeachably pious and deliciously irreverent, Olive Ann Burns’s classic bestseller is a timeless, funny, and resplendent treasure.

    Named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, nominated for the 1992 National Book Critics Circle Award, and given the Lambda Award.

    His mother, April, is haunted by her own demons, a secret trauma she has carried for years. Between them is Aiden McCall, loyal to both but unable to hold them together. Connected by bonds of circumstance and duty, friendship and love, these three lives are blown apart when Aiden and Thad witness the accidental death of their drug dealer and a riot of dope and cash drops in their laps. On a meth-fueled journey to nowhere, they will either find the grit to overcome the darkness or be consumed by it.

    Then a rough case on the boards of her 911 operator's job collides with a family conflict at home, and Elizabeth finds herself finally coming apart at the seams. A four-state road trip--trapped in a car with her mother--is the last thing she needs. Their destination may be beautiful Hatteras Island, but the reason for going is anything by pleasant. After one disastrous hurricane, and with a second one working its way up the coast, it's time to convince Aunt Sandy to abandon her little seaside store on North Carolina's Outer Banks and return to the family fold in Michigan. But when the storm sweeps through, the three women will discover that sisterhood and the sea can change hearts, lives, and futures . . . often in the most unpredictable of ways.

    In God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian, Vonnegut skips back and forth between life and the Afterlife as if the difference between them were rather slight. In thirty odd "interviews," Vonnegut trips down "the blue tunnel to the pearly gates" in the guise of a roving reporter for public radio, conducting interviews: with Salvatore Biagini, a retired construction worker who died of a heart attack while rescuing his schnauzer from a pit bull, with John Brown, still smoldering 140 years after his death by hanging, with William Shakespeare, who rubs Vonnegut the wrong way, and with socialist and labor leader Eugene Victor Debs, one of Vonnegut's personal heroes.What began as a series of ninety-second radio interludes for WNYC, New York City's public radio station, evolved into this provocative collection of musings about who and what we live for, and how much it all matters in the end. From the original portrait by his friend Jules Feiffer that graces the cover, to a final entry from Kilgore Trout, God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian remains a joy.

    The stories have been selected and introduced by Haruki Murakami.

    Included here are such classics as REMEMBERING NEEDLEMAN, THE KUGELMASS EPISODE, a new story called CONFESSIONS OF A BUGLAR, and more.

    In Leonard's first original e-book, U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens (featured in Pronto and Riding the Rap) returns to the Eastern Kentucky coal-mining country of his youth. When Boyd Crowder, a mail-order-ordained minister who doesn't believe in paying his income taxes, decides to blow up the IRS building in Cincinnati, Givens is asked by the local marshal to intervene. This sets up an inevitable confrontation between two men on opposite sides of the law who still have a lingering respect for each other. Throw into the mix Boyd's sister-in-law, Ava, who carries a torch for Raylan along with a deer rifle, and you've got a funny, adrenaline-charged novella only Leonard could have written.

    His wife away for the first time, Jack is at home coping with domestic crises and two adolescents while immobilized by self-doubt and questioning his worth as a historian.This is the husband's story now found in Happenstance: Two Novels in One About a Marriage in Transition, originally published on its own in 1980 as Happenstance.

    While in Edinburgh he is sucked into the orbit of a charismatic, self-hating philosopher, Harry Sanderson, and his enigmatic artist wife, Carrie. Edgar has "always worked on the principle that a translator is a guest in somebody else's house"; as he listens to both versions of the breakdown of their marriage, he realises that he is a guest in Harry and Carrie's city, their language and their lives, and begins to wonder why he has never fully occupied his own.

    "The madder she got, the greener everything grew."

    In the first story a young wife and mother receives release from the unbearable pain of losing her three children from a most surprising source. In another, a young woman, in the aftermath of an unusual and humiliating seduction, reacts in a clever if less-than-admirable fashion. Other stories uncover the “deep-holes” in a marriage, the unsuspected cruelty of children, and how a boy’s disfigured face provides both the good things in his life and the bad. And in the long title story, we accompany Sophia Kovalevsky—a late-nineteenth-century Russian émigré and mathematician—on a winter journey that takes her from the Riviera, where she visits her lover, to Paris, Germany, and, Denmark, where she has a fateful meeting with a local doctor, and finally to Sweden, where she teaches at the only university in Europe willing to employ a female mathematician. With clarity and ease, Alice Munro once again renders complex, difficult events and emotions into stories that shed light on the unpredictable ways in which men and women accommodate and often transcend what happens in their lives.Dimensions --Fiction --Wenlock edge --Deep-holes --Free radicals --Face --Some women --Child's play --Wood --Too much happiness