Admirers of The Color Purple will find in these stories more evidence
of Walker's power to depict black women--women who vary
greatly in background yet are bound together by what they share in
common.Taken as a whole, their stories form an enlightening,
disturbing view of life in the South. Views: 1 006
Damian Tate. One look into his sad green eyes and I was hooked. I wanted to be the one to make him laugh, to make him smile. I hadn't expected him to be the one to make me blush, to make me hot...to make me fall in love. He was my first kiss, my first love, my first everything. I wanted forever with him, but life got in the way.
He enlisted, I went to college, and for years we were never in the same place long enough to pick up where we left off.
Thirteen years after he left, tragedy brings him home. The stoic boy I fell in love with grew into a quiet, dangerous and wildly sexy man. He still tugs on all the right strings for me, but he seems determined to keep me at arm's-length.
However, when trouble comes knocking at my door, he is the one to put himself between that trouble and me.
Spending time with him might drive me insane, or it might be our second chance at first love. Views: 1 006
A woman is forced to question her own identity in this riveting and emotionally charged thriller by the blockbuster bestselling author of The Good Girl, Mary Kubica
Jessie Sloane is on the path to rebuilding her life after years of caring for her ailing mother. She rents a new apartment and applies for college. But when the college informs her that her social security number has raised a red flag, Jessie discovers a shocking detail that causes her to doubt everything she’s ever known.
Finding herself suddenly at the center of a bizarre mystery, Jessie tumbles down a rabbit hole, which is only exacerbated by grief and a relentless lack of sleep. As days pass and the insomnia worsens, it plays with Jessie’s mind. Her judgment is blurred, her thoughts are hampered by fatigue. Jessie begins to see things until she can no longer tell the difference between what’s real and what she’s only imagined.
Meanwhile, twenty years earlier and two hundred and fifty miles away, another woman’s split-second decision may hold the key to Jessie’s secret past. Has Jessie’s whole life been a lie or have her delusions gotten the best of her? Views: 1 006
Yukio Mishima’s The Temple of Dawn is the third novel in his masterful tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility. Here, Shigekuni Honda continues his pursuit of the successive reincarnations of Kiyoaki Matsugae, his childhood friend.
Travelling in Thailand in the early 1940s, Shigekuni Honda, now a brilliant lawyer, is granted an audience with a young Thai princess—an encounter that radically alters the course of his life. In spite of all reason, he is convinced she is the reincarnated spirit of his friend Kiyoaki. As Honda goes to great lengths to discover for certain if his theory is correct, The Temple of Dawn becomes the story of one man’s obsessive pursuit of a beautiful woman and his equally passionate search for enlightenment. Views: 1 005
The Newcomes is Thackeray's most essentially 'Victorian' novel, generous in its proportions, sharp in its criticism of the moral convolutions of the age, and encyclopaedic in its reference. Set in the 1830s and 1840s, a period of rapid change and of political and economic development, the novel considers the fortunes and misfortunes of a 'most respectable' extended middle-class family. The action moves from London to Brighton, from England to France, from the political ambitions of an older generation in the industrial North to the painterly pretensions of a younger generation in Italy. At its centre is Thomas Newcome, a retired Colonel in the Indian Army who finds the snobberies and hypocrisies of early Victorian England disconcerting. In a world of men on the make, of social mobility, and of the buying and selling of women in an aristocratic marriage market, it is the Colonel's distinctive but old-fashioned gentlemanliness that stands out from a self-seeking society. The most observant and witty among Thackeray's studies of his culture, The Newcomes is also among his most complex and allusive novels, and this edition provides particularly detailed notes which clarify his many references. Views: 1 004
Ben Okri's new novel, continuing the adventures of Azaro, the spirit-child in the perplexing world of the living Views: 1 004
April 1986. The Cold War is nearly over.
Or is it?
Wealthy business mogul Tobias Keane is dead in an apparent suicide. Ethan Tannor, a detective on the scene and nephew of Keane, suspects something else. In his effort to prove his uncle was murdered, Ethan discovers there was more to Tobias’s past than he initially thought.
All roads point to an impending hostile takeover of the United States as Ethan finds himself in the center of something he can’t explain. Political agendas headed by a shadowy leader, and an evil force tipping the balance of power bring him face to face with things beyond the realm of belief and possibility.
When the lines of reality and fiction become blurred, Ethan embarks on the near impossible task of reshaping the world. If he fails, the battleground will be America, with new territory lines carved across the map as the victor stakes their claim.
But Ethan is determined to end it where it all began: April 1986.
*Language and violence *
About AND THE TIDE TURNS
And the Tide Turns is Timothy Dalton’s debut novel – an action-packed thriller that will leave readers guessing as they journey with Ethan Tannor in his quest to figure out the secret behind his uncle’s death … a quest that brings him to places he never imagined, and the discovery of his uncle’s strange connection to the unsolved mystery of The Somerton Man. Artwork by Matthew Dalton.
Be sure to stay tuned for Timothy’s upcoming new novel, On the Hitlist (Working Title), which should be released in the coming months. Views: 1 004
The groundbreaking trans-genre work of Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) has been insinuating itself into the structure, stance, and very breath of world literature for well over half a century. Multi-layered, self-referential, elusive, and allusive writing is now frequently labeled Borgesian. Umberto Eco's international bestseller, The Name of the Rose, is, on one level, an elaborate improvisation on Borges' fiction "The Library," which American readers first encountered in the original 1962 New Directions publication of Labyrinths.
This new edition of Labyrinths, the classic representative selection of Borges' writing edited by Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby (in translations by themselves and others), includes the text of the original edition (as augmented in 1964) as well as Irby's biographical and critical essay, a poignant tribute by André Maurois, and a chronology of the author's life. Borges enthusiast William Gibson has contributed a new introduction bringing Borges' influence and importance into the twenty-first century. Views: 1 004
An acclaimed Turkish novelist's personal account of balancing a writer's life with a mother's life.
After the birth of her first child in 2006, Turkish writer Elif Shafek suffered from postpartum depression that triggered a profound personal crisis. Infused with guilt, anxiety, and bewilderment about whether she could ever be a good mother, Shafak stopped writing and lost her faith in words altogether. In this elegantly written memoir, she retraces her journey from free-spirited, nomadic artist to dedicated by emotionally wrought mother. Identifying a constantly bickering harem of women who live inside of her, each with her own characteristics--the cynical intellectual, the goal-oriented go-getter, the practical-rational, the spiritual, the maternal, and the lustful--she craves harmony, or at least a unifying identity. As she intersperses her own experience with the lives of prominent authors such as Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Alice Walker, Ayn Rand, and Zelda Fitzgerald, Shafak looks for a solution to the inherent conflict between artistic creation and responsible parenting.
With searing emotional honesty and an incisive examination of cultural mores within patriarchal societies, Shafak has rendered an important work about literature, motherhood, and spiritual well-being. Views: 1 003
George Bowling, the hero of this comic novel, is a middle-aged insurance salesman who lives in an average English suburban row house with a wife and two children. One day, after winning some money from a bet, he goes back to the village where he grew up, to fish for carp in a pool he remembers from thirty years before. The pool, alas, is gone, the village has changed beyond recognition, and the principal event of his holiday is an accidental bombing by the RAF. Views: 1 003
Romantic love and its power to shake a woman's life at any age is the subject of this new novel by Marilyn French. At the center, Hermione Beldame, in her sixties, a writer of romance novels (eighty-seven of them, an average of two a year for forty years). She is rich, sophisticated, self-made, often di-vorced, long widowed, and long finished with the notion of romantic love as a part of her life. Until, one day, at a party - she sees across the room an attractive man who finds his way to her. What begins as a charming conversation between two strangers develops into much more (and much less) as the novel charts the course of a brief encounter that disrupts the equilibrium - the hard-won serenity - of its heroine, seizing her heart and her life during her summer with George. Views: 1 003
In a city where a girl can go missing for years, a retired New York cop investigates a gruesome crime.
Tank is a retired New York City cop coping with two teenaged problems: one is his recently-orphaned nephew, and the other is a girl whose decomposed body was found in a cooler off the Henry Hudson Parkway. Determined to bring the girl's killer to justice, Tank hits the streets of upper Manhattan, chasing leads and searching for clues about her tragically short life.
"Tin Badges" by Lorenzo Carcaterra is one of 20 short stories within Mulholland Books's Strand Originals series, featuring thrilling stories by the biggest names in mystery from the Strand Magazine archives. View the full series list at mulhollandbooks.com and listen to them all! Views: 1 002
Mark Haddon, author of the international bestselling novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and A Spot of Bother, returns with a collection of unsparing short stories
In the prize-winning story "The Gun," a man's life is marked by a single afternoon and a rusty .45; in "The Island," a mythical princess is abandoned on an island in the midst of war; in "The Boys Who Left Home to Learn Fear," a cadre of sheltered artistocrats sets out to find adventure in a foreign land and finds the gravest dangers among themselves. These are but some of the men and women who fill this searingly imaginative and emotionally taut collection of short stories by Mark Haddon, that weaves through time and space to showcase the author's incredible versatility.
Yet the collection achieves a sum that is greater than its parts, proving itself a meditation not only on isolation and loneliness but also on the tenuous and unseen connections that link individuals to each other, often despite themselves. In its titular story, the narrator describes with fluid precision a catastrophe that will collectively define its victims as much as it will disperse them—and brilliantly lays bare the reader's appetite for spectacle alongside its characters'. Cut with lean prose and drawing inventively from history, myth, fairy tales, and, above all, the deep well of empathy that made his three novels so compelling, The Pier Falls reveals a previously unseen side of the celebrated author. Views: 1 002
Mary is a gripping tale of youth, first love, and nostalgia—Nabokov's first novel. In a Berlin rooming house filled with an assortment of seriocomic Russian émigrés, Lev Ganin, a vigorous young officer poised between his past and his future, relives his first love affair. His memories of Mary are suffused with the freshness of youth and the idyllic ambience of pre-revolutionary Russia. In stark contrast is the decidedly unappealing boarder living in the room next to Ganin's, who, he discovers, is Mary's husband, temporarily separated from her by the Revolution but expecting her imminent arrival from Russia. Views: 1 001
This collection of original stories by today’s finest women writers takes inspiration from the famous line in Charlotte Brontë’s most beloved novel, Jane Eyre.
A fixture in the literary canon, Charlotte Brontë is revered by readers all over the world. Her books featuring unforgettable, strong heroines still resonate with millions today. And who could forget one of literatures’ best-known lines: “Reader, I married him” from her classic novel Jane Eyre?
Part of a remarkable family that produced three acclaimed female writers at a time in 19th-century Britain when few women wrote, and fewer were published, Brontë has become a great source of inspiration to writers, especially women, ever since. Now in Reader, I Married Him, twenty of today’s most celebrated women authors have spun original stories, using the famous line from Jane Eyre as a springboard for their own flights of imagination.
Reader, I Married Him will feature stories by:
Tracy Chevalier
Tessa Hadley
Sarah Hall
Helen Dunmore
Kirsty Gunn
Joanna Briscoe
Jane Gardam
Emma Donoghue
Susan Hill
Francine Prose
Elif Shafak
Evie Wyld
Patricia Park
Salley Vickers
Nadifa Mohamed
Esther Freud
Linda Grant
Lionel Shriver
Audrey Niffenegger
Namwali Serpell
Elizabeth McCracken
Unique, inventive, and poignant, the stories in Reader, I Married Him pay homage to the literary genius of Charlotte Brontë, and demonstrate once again that her extraordinary vision continues to inspire readers and writers. Views: 1 001
