It's the one day of the year when everyone has a shot at finding true love—even a rapacious, over-sexed turtle god. It's a celebration of hobos and heartbreak, Lionel Richie impersonators and banana-brandy-flavored rice wine. It's The Festival of Earthly Delights.Boyd Darrow is a young American living in Puchai, a tiny Southeast Asian country that tourist brochures refer to as "The Kingdom of Winks." In a series of letters written to a mysterious recipient, Boyd tells of the delights, humiliations and brain-bending misadventures he experiences while adjusting to life in the small college town of Mai Mor. He and his somewhat less-than-faithful girlfriend, Ulla, were hoping to start their lives over in Puchai, but Puchai has an agenda all its own.Ulla's been hired to organize the talent show at the town's annual "Festival of Taang," but she seems more interested in the possibilities of cultural exchange with a local revolutionary. Meanwhile, Boyd grapples with a culture in which baby owls are considered a delicacy, turtles are worshipped as deities, and a wink can have one of 379 possible meanings (including "You're fired," "There's something in my eye," and "I want to kiss your lips!"). He's also falling for his boss's daughter, a half-Puchanese girl with a black eye and a troubling past. Lines are crossed, secrets are revealed, and, as Boyd's life inevitably spins out of control, the Festival draws closer with each day...Hilarious and wise and fiercely original, The Festival of Earthly Delights is a no-holds-barred celebration of love, cultural differences, and one man's reluctant embrace of the sensual pleasures of this world, in all their awkward, enigmatic glory.ADVANCE PRAISE"If Puchai were a real country, I'd be a citizen by now, or at least an illegal alien. What a glorious novel!" —Gary Shteyngart, author of Super Sad True Love Story"Matt Dojny's novel is a true delight. I can't think of any writer since Kingsley Amis who's been able to write high-minded comedy that packs such a punch. I've never enjoyed a comic novel more." —John Wray, author of Lowboy"Matt Dojny's narrator Boyd Darrow is as poetically drawn as J.D. Salinger's Holden Caulfield, and as intimately hilarious as C.D. Payne's Nick Twisp. Dojny has created an entire country filled with characters that are so fresh and endearing, you'll find yourself wishing Puchai were a real place. I love this book." —Kristen Schaal (Flight of the Conchords, The Daily Show)"Comic novels can be whimsical, or clever, or delightful, or witty, or canny, or powerful. Rarely are they all of those things. Matt Dojny's large-hearted, bright-minded novel has drawings and letters and love and loss, and now you do, too." —Ben Greenman, author of What He's Poised to Do and Superbad

    The hoard is endless, stacked into every room in the house, teetering in piles along the landing and forming a scree up the stairs. It is all part of Clifford’s waste-not way of thinking in which everything, no matter how broken or obscure, can be re-cycled or re-purposed into something useful or, if kept long enough, will one day be valuable. He had believed in his vision as ardently as any mystic in his holy revelation but now, without the clear projection of his vision to light it up for her as what it would be, it appears to Maisie more grimly than ever as what it is: junk. As Maisie disassembles his stash she is forced to confront the issues which drove her husband to squirrel away other people’s rubbish; after all, she knows virtually nothing about his life before they met. Finally, in the last bastion of his accumulation, she discovers the key to his hoarding and understands – much too late – the man she married. Then, with empty rooms in a house which is too big for her, she must ask herself: what next?

    They responded to the intensely introspective nature of the books, and to their lively narrative styles and biting humor. In The Hour I First Believed, Lamb travels well beyond his earlier work and embodies in his fiction myth, psychology, family history stretching back many generations, and the questions of faith that lie at the heart of everyday life. The result is an extraordinary tour de force, at once a meditation on the human condition and an unflinching yet compassionate evocation of character.When forty-seven-year-old high school teacher Caelum Quirk and his younger wife, Maureen, a school nurse, move to Littleton, Colorado, they both get jobs at Columbine High School. In April 1999, Caelum returns home to Three Rivers, Connecticut, to be with his aunt who has just had a stroke. But Maureen finds herself in the school library at Columbine, cowering in a cabinet and expecting to be killed, as two vengeful students go on a carefully premeditated, murderous rampage. Miraculously she survives, but at a cost: she is unable to recover from the trauma. Caelum and Maureen flee Colorado and return to an illusion of safety at the Quirk family farm in Three Rivers. But the effects of chaos are not so easily put right, and further tragedy ensues. While Maureen fights to regain her sanity, Caelum discovers a cache of old diaries, letters, and newspaper clippings in an upstairs bedroom of his family's house. The colorful and intriguing story they recount spans five generations of Quirk family ancestors, from the Civil War era to Caelum's own troubled childhood. Piece by piece, Caelum reconstructs the lives of the women and men whose legacy he bears. Unimaginable secrets emerge; long-buried fear, anger, guilt, and grief rise to the surface. As Caelum grapples with unexpected and confounding revelations from the past, he also struggles to fashion a future out of the ashes of tragedy. His personal quest for meaning and faith becomes a mythic journey that is at the same time quintessentially contemporary -- and American.The Hour I First Believed is a profound and heart-rending work of fiction. Wally Lamb proves himself a virtuoso storyteller, assembling a variety of voices and an ensemble of characters rich enough to evoke all of humanity.

    Profane, manic, and tipping into the uncanny, it's a story of loneliness, obsession, and the drive to leave a mark.

    Her novels and short stories speak to women and men about their most intense relationships and heartfelt feelings.In this collection of five short stories and a novella, Ms. Godwin is at her best. In the title novella, "Mr. Bedford," a young would-be writer spends time in England under the strange and watchful eye of a rather unusual elderly couple; in "Amanuensis," a charming college student cares for a famous but blocked novelist, with unpredictable results; and in "The Angry Year," a rebellious student is drawn to two different kinds of men until she discovers what she has been running to and from.

    In the breathtaking long story “The Street,” Tóibín imagines a relationship between Pakistani workers in Barcelona—a taboo affair in a community ruled by obedience and silence. In “Two Women,” an eminent and taciturn Irish set designer takes a job in her homeland, and must confront emotions she has long repressed. “Silence” is a brilliant historical set piece about Lady Gregory, who tells the writer Henry James a confessional story at a dinner party.Silence --The empty family --Two women --One minus one --The pearl fishers --Barcelona, 1975 --The new Spain --The colour of shadows --The street

    She and her young brother find shelter in a Massachusetts Shaker community called The City of Hope. It is the Era of Manifestations, when young girls in Shaker enclaves all across the Northeast are experiencing extraordinary mystical visions, earning them the honorific of "Visionist" and bringing renown to their settlements. The City of Hope has not yet been blessed with a Visionist, but that changes when Polly arrives and is unexpectedly exalted. As she struggles to keep her dark secrets concealed in the face of increasing scrutiny, Polly finds herself in a life-changing friendship with a young Shaker sister named Charity, a girl who will stake everything--including her faith--on Polly's honesty and purity.

    With his unflinching attention to emotional detail, Redhill proves once again to be "a writer of considerable humanity and insight" (A.L. Kennedy) .

    But the apparently pleasant town is not all it seems. Sylvia falls in love with an older man - but it's her connection to his precocious young daughter and her neighbours' son which will change her life and put them, the library and her job under threat.How does the library alter the young children's lives and how do the children fare as a result of the books Sylvia introduces them to?

     At the beginning of the first novel, French Legionnaires find one of their fortresses manned by dead men. Who could have done it? A flashback unravels the mystery of the three English Geste brothers. A classic, rip-roaring tale of adventure... This volume also contains 36 short stories of the Foreign Legion, grouped in four well known collection (now in one volume!): STEPSONS OF FRANCE Ten Little Legionaries A la Ninon de L'Enclos An Officer and--a Liar The Deserter Five Minutes "Here are Ladies" The MacSnorrt "Belzébuth" The Quest Moonshine The Coward of the Legion Mahdev Rao The Merry Liars GOOD GESTES What's in a Name A Gentleman of Colour David and His Incredible Jonathan The McSnorrt Reminiscent Buried Treasure If Wishes were Horses The Devil and Digby Geste The Mule Presentiments Dreams Come True PORT O' MISSING MEN The Return of Odo Klemens The Betrayal of Odo Klemens The Life of Odo Klemens Moon-rise Moon-shadows Moon-set FLAWED BLADES No. 187017 Bombs Mastic--and Drastic The Death Post E Tenebris Nemesis The Hunting of Henri

    . . A sprawling tome that combines fact with fiction and covers 900 years in the history of New Forest, a 100,000-acre woodland in southern England . . . Rutherfurd sketches the histories of six fictional families, ranging from aristocrats to peasants, who have lived in the forest for generations. . . . But the real success is in how Rutherfurd paints his picture of the wooded enclave with images of treachery and violence, as well as magic and beauty.”–The New York Post

    As outside forces conspire to steal the palace out from under them, Agnes struggles to save her family and finds bravery, love, and loyalty in the most unexpected places. The Moonlight Palace is a coming-of-age tale rich with historical detail and unforgettable characters set against the backdrop of dazzling 1920s Singapore.

    Restless, insatiably curious, Anna learns to read, and in this ancient city, famous for its libraries, she finds a book, the story of Aethon, who longs to be turned into a bird so that he can fly to a utopian paradise in the sky. This she reads to her ailing sister as the walls of the only place she has known are bombarded in the great siege of Constantinople. Outside the walls is Omeir, a village boy, miles from home, conscripted with his beloved oxen into the invading army. His path and Anna’s will cross.Five hundred years later, in a library in Idaho, octogenarian Zeno, who learned Greek as a prisoner of war, rehearses five children in a play adaptation of Aethon’s story, preserved against all odds through centuries. Tucked among the library shelves is a bomb, planted by a troubled, idealistic teenager, Seymour. This is another siege. And in a not-so-distant future, on the interstellar ship Argos, Konstance is alone in a vault, copying on scraps of sacking the story of Aethon, told to her by her father. She has never set foot on our planet.

    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)

    Kya Clark is barefoot and wild; unfit for polite society. So in late 1969, when the popular Chase Andrews is found dead, locals immediately suspect her.But Kya is not what they say. A born naturalist with just one day of school, she takes life's lessons from the land, learning the real ways of the world from the dishonest signals of fireflies. But while she has the skills to live in solitude forever, the time comes when she yearns to be touched and loved. Drawn to two young men from town, who are each intrigued by her wild beauty, Kya opens herself to a new and startling world—until the unthinkable happens.In Where the Crawdads Sing, Owens juxtaposes an exquisite ode to the natural world against a profound coming of age story and haunting mystery. Thought-provoking, wise, and deeply moving, Owens’s debut novel reminds us that we are forever shaped by the child within us, while also subject to the beautiful and violent secrets that nature keeps.The story asks how isolation influences the behavior of a young woman, who like all of us, has the genetic propensity to belong to a group. The clues to the mystery are brushed into the lush habitat and natural histories of its wild creatures.