A black jockey with a genius for horses and women ... his white master, a slave to the corrupt needs of his flesh ... an amoral Southern beauty queen, out to seduce and exploit them both.... From this twisted human triangle comes one of the sensational novels of our time—a revelation of passion, perversity and strange hungers."Absorbing and superb!"—Erskine Caldwell“An unforgettable experience!”—Oregon Journal“Macabre and slapstick, howiingly funny and as sad as a zoo, ribald and wry, Naked in Garden Hills lives up to and beyond the shining promise of Mr. Crews' first novel, The Gospel Singer. It is southern Gothic at its best, a Hieronymus Bosch landscape in Dixie.” —Jean Stafford, in The New York Times Book Review “The stage is set with such minute perfection and reality that anyone trying to describe it can only be caught in vague inanities. Garden Hills is a carnival, a freak show that echoes all of life. It is a measure of Mr. Crews’ art that from this world unblemished truth emerges. Ruthless, cruel, blackly beautiful ... as simple and inevitable as sin-brings-punishment and as complicated and intense as human experience ..."—Harper’s“Fine and furious, vibrant and alive ... an important new voice!”—Los Angeles TimesFrom Kirkus ReviewsYou may remember the underground hymn of The Gospel Singer (1968). Mr. Crews again presents an existential freakshow that is delicately crafted and seems to be saying something. . . even if you're never quite sure what it is. He's kind of the Ingmar Bergman of the short novel presenting here Garden Hills, once site of the world's largest phosphate mine, abandoned now to twelve families and the "Fat Man," whose father accidentally became a millionaire. "Fat Man" is a five foot, five hundred pounder when first met consuming crates of Metrecal and still shooting slowly outward. He's taken care of by four feet of perfection, one Jester who was destined to be a jockey but lost his race with fear. "Fat-Man" lives in his castle, benign custodian to the twelve families who are convinced that the phosphate king Jack O'Boylan is going to reactivate the mine so that they can resume their presumably interrupted life pattern. But Dolly, back from New York, knows that O'Boylan isn't coming back and she has plans for turning Garden Hills into the most far out tourist trap ever conjured up by a distorted mind. The plan includes Go Go cages and one particularly sturdy one with trays of steaming food. Mr. Crews has one of the wildest imaginations around. . . you won't be able to put him down. Views: 376
Actually three books in one, this book contains three unrelated stories. The first is about a dog's encounters with a wild dog who has killed the dog's owner. The second is about a wild stallion who is befriended by a boy. The third is about a dog who is believed to be a sheep-killer who is taken in by a boy. —from (A Kid's Review) Two Dogs and a Horse is a wonderful book. It is written so well... the book is great, I rate it a 10 out of 10!! Views: 375
Nevil Shute wrote this prophetic novel just before the start of the Second World War. In it he imagines the devastation that results from an aerial bomb attack on Southampton that destroys the city's infrastructure and leaves the inhabitants at the mercy of cholera and further assaults. Against this dramatic backdrop, Shute grippingly chronicles the trials and tribulations of the Corbett family as they struggle to get to safety. Views: 375
Boyd Cohoon came home to live by the knife or die by the gun. A great novel of the West by the author of the MATT HELM series. ** Views: 375
This new edition combines Tolstoy’s most famous short tale, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, with a less well known but equally brilliant gem, Master and Man, both newly translated by Ann Pasternak Slater. Both stories confront death and the process of dying: In Ivan Ilyich, a bureaucrat looks back over his life, which suddenly seems meaningless and wasteful, while in Master and Man, a landowner and servant must each confront the value of the other as they brave a devastating snowstorm. The quintessential Tolstoyan themes of mortality, spiritual redemption, and life’s meaning are nowhere more movingly and deftly explored than in these two tales.
This unique edition also includes a critical Introduction and extensive notes by Ann Pasternak Slater, a Fellow at St. Anne’s College, Oxford.
From the Hardcover edition. Views: 374
Joe Mondragon, a feisty hustler with a talent for trouble, slammed his battered pickup to a stop, tugged on his gumboots, and marched into the arid patch of ground. Carefully (and also illegally), he tapped into the main irrigation channel. And so began-though few knew it at the time-the Milagro beanfield war. But like everything else in the dirt-poor town of Milagro, it would be a patchwork war, fought more by tactical retreats than by battlefield victories. Gradually, the small farmers and sheepmen begin to rally to Joe's beanfield as the symbol of their lost rights and their lost lands. And downstate in the capital, the Anglo water barons and power brokers huddle in urgent conference, intent on destroying that symbol before it destroys their multimillion-dollar land-development schemes. The tale of Milagro's rising is wildly comic and lovingly ter, a vivid portrayal of a town that, half-stumbling and partly prodded, gropes its way toward its own stubborn salvation. Views: 374
The first volume of Arendt’s celebrated three-part study of the philosophical origins of the totalitarian mind. This volume focuses on the rise of antisemitism in Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Views: 374
Written by celebrated author M. M. Kaye, Death in Zanzibar is a wonderfully evocative mystery ...
Dany Ashton is invited to vacation at her stepfather's house in Zanzibar, but even before her airplane takes off there is a stolen passport, a midnight intruder--and murder. In Zanzibar, the family house is Kivulimi, the mysterious "House of Shade," where Dany and the rest of the guests learn that one of them is a desperate killer. The air of freedom and nonchalance that opened the house party fades into growing terror, as the threat of further violence flowers in the scented air of Zanzibar. Richly evocative, Death in Zanzibar will charm long-time fans and introduce new ones to this celebrated writer. Views: 374
Kirkland Revels loomed high above the wild and eerie Yorkshire moors like a brooding stone fortress. To some there was an atmosphere of evil about the place, but to innocent young bride Catherine Rockwell, the mansion seemed magnificently romantic. She did not know then of the terrible secrets imprisoned behind its massive walls. Or that at the moment she had entered her new home, she had crossed the threshold of terror . . . Views: 374
On October 12, 1972, a plane carrying a team of young rugby players crashed into the remote, snow-peaked Andes. Out of the forty-five original passengers and crew, only sixteen made it off the mountain alive. For ten excruciating weeks they suffered deprivations beyond imagining, confronting nature head-on at its most furious and inhospitable. And to survive, they were forced to do what would have once been unthinkable...
This is their story - one of the most astonishing true adventures of the twentieth century. Views: 374
In this novel, Edgar Rice Burroughs reincarnates the chariot races, the intrigues, the people, the sights and sounds of Imperial Rome. He paints a vivid picture of the life of Britannicus Caligulae Servus, the personal slave of mad emperor Caligula. Views: 374
This sci-fi classic, dating back to before man entered space, is based
on the idea that adults would be unable to adapt to zero gravity
conditions. Because of this, teenagers would be the first explorers of
space, launching to orbiting space stations and the moon.
Views: 374
It is the story of a beautiful, gifted woman who leaves the magic mountains of her native New Mexico for the piratical, opulent, gaslit New York of the 1870s—only to end her search for happiness back in the high, thin air of Santa Fe.
Santa Fe Cameron, named for the place of her birth, was the child of a Spanish mother and a Scotch father and inherited from both a high degree of psychic perceptivity. Natanay, an American Indian, saw this and gave the little orphan a turquoise amulet as a keepsake; this turquoise, the Indian symbol of the spirit, dominates her life.
For Santa Fe Cameron, life is made up of violent contrasts: the rough wagon of the gay young Irish medicine vendor who brings her East and the scented hansom cabs and carriages waiting before her own Fifth Avenue mansion; the glittering world of the Astors and a dreary cell in the Tombs. All the color, excitement, and rich period detail which distinguish Anya Seton’s novels are here, together with one of her most unusual heroines. Views: 374
Henry D. Thoreau traveled to the backwoods of Maine in 1846, 1853, and 1857. Originally published in 1864, and published now with a new introduction by Paul Theroux, this volume is a powerful telling of those journeys through a rugged and largely unspoiled land. It presents Thoreau's fullest account of the wilderness.
The Maine Woods is classic Thoreau: a personal story of exterior and interior discoveries in a natural setting--all conveyed in taut, masterly prose. Thoreau's evocative renderings of the life of the primitive forest--its mountains, waterways, fauna, flora, and inhabitants--are timeless and valuable on their own. But his impassioned protest against the despoilment of nature in the name of commerce and sport, which even by the 1850s threatened to deprive Americans of the "tonic of wildness," makes The Maine Woods an especially vital book for our own time. Views: 374
