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Henry and his wife, Frances, live an idyllic life as two of the Caribbean's most charming ex-pats (and professional assassins). But when Donnie, a powerful capo, is relocated to the island the scene is set for an Elmore Leonard-style mix of low life and high comedy. Views: 979
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
The story of Maya Angelou’s extraordinary life has been chronicled in her multiple bestselling autobiographies. But now, at last, the legendary author shares the deepest personal story of her life: her relationship with her mother.
For the first time, Angelou reveals the triumphs and struggles of being the daughter of Vivian Baxter, an indomitable spirit whose petite size belied her larger-than-life presence—a presence absent during much of Angelou’s early life. When her marriage began to crumble, Vivian famously sent three-year-old Maya and her older brother away from their California home to live with their grandmother in Stamps, Arkansas. The subsequent feelings of abandonment stayed with Angelou for years, but their reunion, a decade later, began a story that has never before been told. In Mom & Me & Mom, Angelou dramatizes her years reconciling with the mother she preferred to simply call “Lady,” revealing the profound moments that shifted the balance of love and respect between them.
Delving into one of her life’s most rich, rewarding, and fraught relationships, Mom & Me & Mom explores the healing and love that evolved between the two women over the course of their lives, the love that fostered Maya Angelou’s rise from immeasurable depths to reach impossible heights. Views: 973
The moving, uplifting true story of an unlikely friendship between a man on the streets and the ginger cat who adopts him and helps him heal his life. Views: 971
Only in the world of the theater can Nat Field find an escape from the tragedies that have shadowed his young life. So he is thrilled when he is chosen to join an American drama troupe traveling to London to perform A Midsummer Night's Dream in a new replica of the famous Globe theater. Shortly after arriving in England, Nat goes to bed ill and awakens transported back in time four hundred years -- to another London, and another production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Amid the bustle and excitement of an Elizabethan theatrical production, Nat finds the warm, nurturing father figure missing from his life -- in none other than William Shakespeare himself. Does Nat have to remain trapped in the past forever, or give up the friendship he's so longed for in his own time? Views: 971
Ten turning points in history, vividly sketched by the great Stefan Zweig, in a new translation by the award-winning Anthea Bell
One of the twentieth century's great humanists and a hugely popular fiction writer, Stefan Zweig's historical works bring the past to life in brilliant Technicolor. This collection contains ten typically breathless and erudite dramatizations of some of the most pivotal episodes in human history.
From General Grouchy's failure to intervene at Waterloo, to the miraculous resurrection of George Frideric Handel, Zweig's selection is idiosyncratic, fascinating and as always hugely readable. Views: 966
From Jeannette Walls, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Glass Castle, now a major motion picture, comes an incisive study of our obsession with gossip.
"A fascinating, dishy story." -*Booklist*
Gossip. It's more than just hearsay, society columns, and supermarket tabloids. It has, like it or not, become a mainstay of American pop culture. In Dish, industry insider Jeannette Walls gives this provocative subject its due, offering a comprehensive, serious exploration of gossip and its social, historical, and political significance. Examining the topic from the inside out, Walls looks at the players; the origins of gossip, from birth of People magazine to the death of Lady Di; and how technology including the Internet will continue to change the face gossip. As compelling and seductive as its subject matter, Dish brilliantly reveals the fascinating inner workings of a phenomenon that is definitely here to stay. Views: 965
As a child during the Depression and World War II, Pete Hamill learned early that drinking was an essential part of being a man, inseparable from the rituals of celebration, mourning, friendship, romance, and religion. Only later did he discover its ability to destroy any writer's most valuable tools: clarity, consciousness, memory. In A Drinking Life, Hamill explains how alcohol slowly became a part of his life, and how he ultimately left it behind. Along the way, he summons the mood of an America that is gone forever, with the bittersweet fondness of a lifelong New Yorker.
Views: 964
EYE TO EYE WITH DEATH: THE WOLF PROJECT
Hordes of bloodthirsty wolves are slaughtering the arctic caribou, and the government's Wildlife Service assigns naturalist Farley Mowat to investigate. Mowat is dropped alone onto the frozen tundra, where he begins his mission to live among the howling wolf packs and study their ways. Contact with his quarry comes quickly, and Mowat discovers not a den of marauding killers but a courageous family of skillful providers and devoted protectors of their young. As Mowat comes closer to the wolf world, he comes to fear with them the onslaught of bounty hunters and government exterminators out to erase the noble wolf community from the Arctic. Never Cry Wolf is one of the brilliant narratives on the myth and magic of wild wolves and man's true place among the creatures of nature.
"We have doomed the wolf not for what it is, but for what we deliberately and mistakenly perceive it to be — the mythologized epitome of a savage, ruthless killer — which is, in reality, no more than the reflected image of ourself." — From the new Preface
From the Trade Paperback edition. Views: 959
“These exuberant stories, so startlingly fresh, so vigorous, and so wildly inventive, are a delight…”—Alastair Reid
“Gombrowicz is one of the most original and gifted writers of the twentieth century: he belongs at the very summit, at the side of his kindred spirits, Kafka and Céline.”—Louis Begley
“One of the greatest novelists of our century.”—Milan Kundera
Stunningly original in both style and content, these stories are hilarious yet have an undercurrent of profound moral disquiet and horror when the respectable turns slowly but inexorably into the outrageous, conveying both the horrors of upper-class life and the deepest anguish of the human condition. Views: 956
A collection of stories about time, space, and the evolution of the universe in which the author blends mathematics with poetic imagination. “Calvino does what very few other writers can do: he describes imaginary worlds with the most extraordinary precision and beauty” (Gore Vidal, New York Review of Books). Translated by William Weaver. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book Views: 955
With the startling emotional immediacy of a fractured family photo album, Jennifer Lauck's incandescent memoir is the story of an ordinary girl growing up at the turn of the 1970s and the truly extraordinary circumstances of a childhood lost. Wrenching and unforgettable, Blackbird will carry your heart away.
To young Jenny, the house on Mary Street was home -- the place where she was loved, a blue-sky world of Barbies, *Bewitched, * and the Beatles. Even her mother's pain from her mysterious illness could be patted away with powder and a kiss on the cheek. But when everything that Jenny had come to rely on begins to crumble, an odyssey of loss, loneliness, and a child's will to survive takes flight.... Views: 954
Crossing the Water and Winter Trees contain the poems written during the exceptionally creative period of the last years of Sylvia Plath’s life. Published posthumously in 1971, they add a startling counterpoint to Ariel, the volume that made her reputation. Readers will recognise some of her most celebrated poems – ‘Childless Woman’, ‘Mirror’, ‘Insomniac’ – while discovering those still overlooked, including her radio play Three Women. These two extraordinary volumes find their place alongside The Colossus and Ariel in the oeuvre of a singular talent. Views: 953
Gerald Durrell helped establish a model zoo on the Isle of Jersey, an experience that caused him to reconsider the whole question of wild animals in human hands.
"On one level, the book is about zoos. More profoundly, however, THE STATIONARY ARK is about the misuse of wild animals in captivity. Durrell's material reveals a fascinating blind spot in modern zoological thought, namely that we are almost completely ignorant about the important facts of many wild animals' lives." (Saturday Review) Views: 952
In this sequel to Lhind the Thief, Lhind has gone from castoffs to silks, back alleys to palace halls—and is not having an easy time of it. That’s before she’s snatched by an angry prince she’d robbed twice, who is determined to turn her over to the enemy who frightens her most, the sinister Emperor Jardis Dhes-Andis.
When her own dear Hlanan comes to rescue her, it’s Lhind who has to do the rescuing, setting off a wild chase to fend off mercenaries and then to confront an entire army intent on invasion.
Lhind and Hlanan try to negotiate the perilous waters of a relationship while on the run—straight into a trap.
Just when Lhind is beginning to figure out where she might fit into the world, she finds herself alone again, surrounded by enemies, in one of the most dangerous courts in the world.
And she begins to find out who she really is. Views: 950
**James Jones’s saga of life in the American Midwest, newly revised five decades after it was first published
After the blockbuster international success of From Here to Eternity, James Jones retreated from public life, making his home at the Handy Writers’ Colony in Illinois. His goal was to write something larger than a war novel, and the result, six years in the making, was Some Came Running, a stirring portrait of small-town life in the American Midwest at a time when our country and its people were striving to find their place in the new postwar world. Five decades later, it has been revised and reedited under the direction of the Jones estate to allow for a leaner, tighter read. The result is the masterpiece Jones intended: a tale whose brutal honesty is as shocking now as on the day it was first published. This ebook features an illustrated biography of James Jones including rare photos from the author’s estate. Views: 949
