Ranging from Texas to California on a young writer's journey in a car he calls El Chevy, All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers is one of Larry McMurtry's most vital and entertaining novels.
Danny Deck is on the verge of success as an author when he flees Houston and hurtles unexpectedly into the hearts of three women: a girlfriend who makes him happy but who won't stay, a neighbor as generous as she is lusty, and his pal Emma Horton. It's a wild ride toward literary fame and an uncharted country...beyond everyone he deeply loves. All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers is a wonderful display of Larry McMurtry's unique gift: his ability to re-create the subtle textures of feelings, the claims of passing time and familiar place, and the rich interlocking swirl of people's lives. Views: 1 124
A masterwork by Philip K. Dick, this is the final, expanded version of the novellla The Unteleported Man, which Dick worked on shortly before his death. In Lies, Inc., fans of the science fiction legend will immediately recognize his hallmark themes of life in a security state, conspiracy, and the blurring of reality and illusion. This publication marks its first complete appearance in the United States.
In this wry, paranoid vision of the future, overpopulation has turned cities into cramed industrial anthills. For those sick of this dystopian reality, one corporation, Trails of Hoffman, Inc., promises an alternative: Take a teleport to Whale's Mouth, a colonized planet billed as the supreme paradise. The only catch is that you can never comeback. When a neurotic man named Rachmael ben Applebaum discovers that the promotional films of happy crowds cheering their newfound existence on Whale's Mouth are faked, he decides to pilot a scapeship on the eighteen-year journey there to see if anyone wants to return.
From the Trade Paperback edition. Views: 1 124
Although Darkover was a world inhabited by humans as well as semi-humans, it was primarily forbidden ground to the Terran traders. Most of the planet's wild terrain was unexplored...and many of its peoples seclusive and secretive.
But for Andrew Carr there was an attration he could not evade. Darkover drew him, Darkover haunted him--and when his mapping plane crashed in unknown heights, Darkover prepared to destroy him.
Until the planet's magic asserted itself--and his destiny began to unfold along lines predicted only by phantoms and wonder workers of the kind Terran science could never acknowledge.
THE SPELL SWORD is a Darkover novel to stand with the great ones of the series. Views: 1 124
Their friend Marcel Proust had killed himself after the fall in diamond shares, a collapse that annihilated a part of his fortune.
This is the first-ever translation into English of this startling tour-de-force by one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers.
The Lemoine Affair was inspired by the real-life French scandal involving Henri Lemoine, who claimed he could manufacture diamonds from coal and convinced numerous people—including officers of the De Beers diamond mine company and Proust himself—to invest in the scheme. In a series of pastiches—imitations written in the style of other writers—Proust tells the story of the embarrassment rippling across high society Paris in the wake of the scandal, poking fun at himself (in one story, a character declares that Marcel Proust is so embarrassed he’s suicidal) while lampooning some of France’s greatest writers, including Flaubert, Balzac, and Saint-Simon.
Full of sophisticated wit and dazzling wordplay, and rife with allusions to his friend and fictional characters, many Proust scholars see the dead-on mimicry of The Lemoine Affair—written soon after Proust’s rejection of society life—as the work by which he honed his own unique, masterly voice.
**The Art of The Novella Series
**Too short to be a novel, too long to be a short story, the novella is generally unrecognized by academics and publishers. Nonetheless, it is a form beloved and practiced by literature's greatest writers. In the Art Of The Novella series, Melville House celebrates this renegade art form and its practitioners with titles that are, in many instances, presented in book form for the first time. Views: 1 123
In this novel about dissidence and exile, a man is confronted with the decision to either desert his family or let his homeland be ravaged
When Wu I-wan starts taking an interest in revolution, trouble follows: Winding up in prison, he becomes friends with fellow dissident En-lan. Later, his name is put on a death list and he’s shipped off to Japan. Thankfully, his father, a wealthy Shanghai banker, has made arrangements for his exile, putting him in touch with a business associate named Mr. Muraki. Absorbed in his new life, I-wan falls in love with Mr. Muraki’s daughter, and must prove he is worthy of her hand. As news spreads of what the Japanese army is doing back in China, I-wan realizes he must go back and fight for the country that banished him. The Patriot is an engrossing story of revolution, love, and reluctantly divided loyalties.
This ebook features an illustrated biography of Pearl S. Buck including rare images from the author’s estate. Views: 1 123
THE CARDINAL LUSTED AFTER THE YOUNG QUEEN, AND ALL OF FRANCE KNEW IT!
Taylor Caldwell's incomparable talent as a storyteller has never been more brilliantly revealed than in this thrilling novel of France in the time of the infamous Cardinal Richelieu and the struggle for survival between the Catholics and the Huguenots.
The Arm and the Darkness is a rich tapestry of the intrigue, loyalty and treachery that marked one of the most glittering epochs in the history of Europe.
Across the pages of this novel march the great men and women of the time. Woven into the fabric of this sweeping tale is the tender story of the love between Arsène, a dashing young Huguenot, and the beautiful Catholic peasant girl, Cecile.
This is a novel teeming with adventure and passion and stamped with that unmistakable aura of authenticity which has made the stories of Taylor Caldwell world-famous bestsellers. Views: 1 123
This is the second and final work of Bruno Schulz, the acclaimed Polish writer killed by the Nazis during World War II. In the words of Isaac Bashevis Singer, "What he did in his short life was enough to make him one of the most remarkable writers who ever lived." Weaving myth, fantasy, and reality, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, is, to quote Schulz, "an attempt at eliciting the history of a certain family . . . by a search for the mythical sense, the essential core of that history." Views: 1 122
All Doris Lessing's short novels and stories are now collected into two volumes, This Was The Old Chef's Country and The Sun Between Their Feet. This volume contains all the stories from the original book entitled This Was The Old Chief's Country and three of the short novels from Five, the book which won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1954.
'I believe,' writes Doris Lessing, "that the chief gift from Africa to writers, white and black, is the continent itself, its presence which for some people is like a old fever, latent always in their blood; or it like an old wounded throbbing in the bones as the air changes. That is not a place to visit unless one chooses to be an exile ever afterwards from an inexplicable majestic silence lying just over the border of memory or of thought. Africa gives you the knowledge that man is a small creature, among other creatures, in a large landscape.'
In this Edition:
The Old Chief Mshlanga
A Sunrise on the Veld
No Witchcraft for Sale
The Second Hut
The Nuisance
The De Wets Come to Kloof Grange
Little Tembi
Old John's Place
'Leopard' George
Winter in July
A Home for the Highland Cattle
Eldorado
The Antheap
Includes the Preface for the 1964 Collection and a new Preface for the 1973 Collection. All of these stories appeared in African Stories, 1963. Views: 1 122
The novel is set in 1960s Alexandria at the pension Miramar. The novel follows the interactions of the residents of the pension, its Greek mistress Mariana, and her servant, Zohra. As each character in turn fights for Zohra's affections or allegiance tensions and jealousies arise. The story is retold four times from the perspective of a different resident each time, allowing the reader to understand the intricacies of post-revolutionary Egyptian life. Views: 1 121
The White Guard is less famous than Mikhail Bulgakov's comic hit, The Master and Margarita, but it is a lovely book, though completely different in tone. It is set in Kiev during the Russian revolution and tells the story of the Turbin family and the war's effect on the middle-classes (not workers).
The story was not seen as politically correct, and thereby contributed to Bulgakov's lifelong troubles with the Soviet authorities. It was, however, a well-loved book, and the novel was turned into a successful play at the time of its publication in 1967. Views: 1 121
Peter Lundy has two joys in life: the rugged western plains where he has grown up and San Domingo, a Medicine Hat Stallion. The Indians believe such a horse is sacred -- that neither bullet nor arrow can harm its rider. As they explore the prairie together, a bond forms between Peter and San Domingo that can never be broken. But Peter's father, Jethro Lundy, knows only one love: bargaining. He trades San Domingo for a thoroughbred. How can Peter ever forgive his father? His only choice is to leave home forever! Views: 1 121
This is the re-written version of the original story.
To Terran Jeff Kerwin the distant planet he remembered only as a childhood dream was home. But when years of planning finally brought him back to Darkover, ha found that there was no peace for him there--not for someone with both the red hair of a Com'yn lord and the bastard strains of Terrani in his blood; not for someone who carried a Darkovan matrix jewel without knowing where it came from; not for someone who managed to win th trust of the sacred Keepers and the secrets of their Tower, only to be accused of betrating them to his Terran masters... Views: 1 121
Part of the Penguin Classics campaign celebrating 100 years of Albert Camus, A Sea Close By reveals the writer as a sensual witness of landscapes, the sea and sailing. It is a light, summery day-dream.
Accompanying The Sea Close By is the essay Summer in Algiers, a lovesong to his Mediterranean childhood. Views: 1 120
For eighteen-year-old Shannon Lightley, life’s been an endless parade across Europe, following either her actress mother or her renowned journalist father. Paris, Milan, London—Shannon has been everywhere, but somewhere along the way, she realizes she’s really…nowhere.
Having graduated from high school and about to board yet another flight for yet another destination, Shannon is offered an alternative: stay in Portland, Oregon, with her parents’ close friend and help his law firm investigate a group of strangers living near the local university. A will with a substantial inheritance is being contested, and Shannon’s task is to gather information on the unlikely recipients of the money.
Using an assumed name and working as a waitress in a diner, Shannon finds herself entirely on her own for the first time in her life; and as the long summer days go by, she tries to sort out who she really is and what her future holds.
Originally published in 1968 and newly released as part of Nancy Pearl’s Book Crush Rediscoveries, Greensleeves is a smart and timeless tale of how far people must go to find themselves. Views: 1 119
The Good Conscience is Carlos Fuentes's second novel. The scene is Guanajuato, a provincial capital in Central Mexico, once one of the world's richest mining centers. The Ceballos family has been reinstated to power, and adolescent Jaime Ceballos, its only heir, is torn between the practical reality of his family's life and the idealism of his youth and his Catholic education. His father is a good man but weak; his uncle is powerful, yet his actions are inconsistent with his professed beliefs. Jaime's struggle to emerge as a man with a "good conscience" forms the theme of the book: can a rebel correct the evils of an established system and at the same time retain the integrity of his principles? Views: 1 118
