Passion and betrayal, violent desperation, ambivalent love that hinges on hatred, and the quest for acceptance by those who stand on the edge of society-these are the hard-hitting themes of a stunningly crafted first collection of stories by the bestselling author of House of Sand and Fog*.
*A vigilant young man working in a halfway house finds himself unable to defend against the rage of one of the inmates in the title story. In "White Trees, Hammer Moon," a man soon to leave home for prison finds himself as unprepared for a family camping trip in the mountains of New Hampshire as he has been for most things in his life. And in the award-winning "Forky," an ex-con is haunted by the punishment he receives just as he is being released into the world. With an incisive ability to inhabit the lives of his characters, Dubus travels deep into the heart of the elusive American dream. Views: 994
The essential philosophical writings of one of the twentieth century’s most influential writers are now gathered into a single volume with an introduction and afterword by the celebrated writer and publisher Roberto Calasso.
Illness set him free to write a series of philosophical fragments: some narratives, some single images, some parables. These “aphorisms” appeared, sometimes with a few words changed, in other writings–some of them as posthumous fragments published only after Kafka’s death in 1924. While working on K., his major book on Kafka, in the Bodleian Library, Roberto Calasso realized that the Zürau aphorisms, each written on a separate slip of very thin paper, numbered but unbound, represented something unique in Kafka’s opus–a work whose form he had created simultaneously with its content.
The notebooks, freshly translated and laid out as Kafka had intended, are a distillation of Kafka at his most powerful and enigmatic. This lost jewel provides the reader with a fresh perspective on the collective work of a genius. Views: 994
As spring comes to Scotland and the hills burst into life, a dance is planned for September. The invitations summon home the group of people Violet Aird has cared for most in her long life. The oldest, strongest and wisest of them all, she sees Alexa, her vulnerable granddaughter, find love for the first time, while the decision to send her little grandson away to school is driving parents Edmund and Virginia even further apart. Far from them all is Pandora, the glamorous, exciting girl who ran away twenty years before. All will converge on Scotland this September. Views: 993
*Forensic detective Lincoln Rhyme and his partner Amelia Sachs return in this short story from *New York Times* bestselling author Jeffery Deaver*
**THE DELIVERYMAN**
*A Lincoln Rhyme Short Story*
A man is murdered in a back alley. Renowned forensic detective Lincoln Rhyme and his partner Amelia Sachs are left with a veritable mountain of evidence collected from the trash-filled alley, and their only lead is a young eyewitness: the man's eight-year-old son, who was riding along on his father's delivery route.
But the murder victim may have been more than just a simple deliveryman. Rhyme and Sachs uncover clues that he might have been delivering a highly illegal, contraband shipment--which is now missing. And someone wants it back... Views: 993
In 1919, the same year Demian was published, seven of these stories appeared as a book entitled Märchen (lit. Fairy Tales). This 1st edition in English has followed the arrangement Hesse made for the final collected edition of his works, where he added an 8th story, "Flute Dream".
The new note so clear in Demian was 1st sounded, Hesse believed, in some of these tales written during 1913-18, the period that brought him into conflict with supporters of the war, with his country & its government, with conventional intellectual life, with every form of orthodoxy both in the world & in himself. Unlike his earlier work, from Peter Carmenzind thru Knulp, the stories in Strange News from Another Star don't allow for an essentially realistic interpretaion. They are concerned with dream worlds, the subconscious, magical thinking & the numinous experience of the soul. Their subject is the distilling of wisdom. The stories are "Augustus", "The Poet", "Flute Dream", "Strange News from Another Star", "The Hard Passage", "A Dream Sequence", "Faldum" &--perhaps the masterpiece of the collection--"Iris". Views: 993
Maeve Binchy is back with a tale of joy, heartbreak and hope, about a motherless girl collectively raised by a close-knit Dublin community.
When Noel learns that his terminally ill former flame is pregnant with his child, he agrees to take guardianship of the baby girl once she’s born. But as a single father battling demons of his own, Noel can’t do it alone.
Fortunately, he has a competent, caring network of friends, family and neighbors: Lisa, his unlucky-in-love classmate, who moves in with him to help him care for little Frankie around the clock; his American cousin, Emily, always there with a pep talk; the newly retired Dr. Hat, with more time on his hands than he knows what to do with; Dr. Declan and Fiona and their baby son, Frankie’s first friend; and many eager babysitters, including old friends Signora and Aidan and Frankie’s doting grandparents, Josie and Charles.
But not everyone is pleased with the unconventional arrangement, especially a nosy social worker, Moira, who is convinced that Frankie would be better off in a foster home. Now it’s up to Noel to persuade her that everyone in town has something special to offer when it comes to minding Frankie. Views: 993
Shelley Frakes didn't intend to spend her morning sweeping up broken glass and investigating an open basement door, but the real estate business had taken such a hit in the last year these were the least of her concerns. The real problem would be getting the secluded property to sell. Unless...someone has already moved in.As if being the firm's junior realtor wasn't difficult enough, Shelley is in charge of the worst listing in the county; a quickly-deteriorating house just remote enough to be a pain in the ass. Shelley has a chance to unload it on a buyer who's meeting her in the morning--but that broken window in the den won't be much of a selling point. Shelley will have to at least clean up the glass if she wants a sale, and worry about what caused it later. Then again; there's no time like the present. Views: 992
The wildly popular series by K.A. Applegate is back! The first six books of Animorphs return, with striking new lenticular covers that morph. It all started with the dreams. But Cassie didn't pay much attention to them. She and her friends have been having nightmares ever since they acquired the power to morph. But when Cassie discovers that Tobias has been having dreams too -- the exact same dreams -- about the ocean, and a voice that's calling to them for help, she decides it's time to start listening. Now she and the others have to figure out if the dreams are a message, or a trap. Views: 992
In 2012, Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend introduced readers to the unforgettable Elena and Lila, whose lifelong friendship provides the backbone for the Neapolitan Novels. The Story of a New Name is the second book in this series. With these books, which the New Yorker's James Wood described as "large, captivating, amiably peopled ... a beautiful and delicate tale of confluence and reversal," Ferrante proves herself to be one of Italy's most accomplished storytellers. She writes vividly about a specific neighborhood of Naples from the late-1950s through to the current day and about two remarkable young women who are very much the products of that place and time. Yet in doing so she has created a world in which readers will recognize themselves and has drawn a marvelously nuanced portrait of friendship.
In The Story of a New Name, Lila has recently married and made her entrée into the family business; Elena, meanwhile, continues her studies and her exploration of the world beyond the neighborhood that she so often finds stifling. Love, jealousy, family, freedom, commitment, and above all friendship: these are signs under which both women live out this phase in their stories. Marriage appears to have imprisoned Lila, and the pressure to excel is at times too much for Elena. Yet the two young women share a complex and evolving bond that is central to their emotional lives and is a source of strength in the face of life's challenges. In these Neapolitan Novels, Elena Ferrante, the acclaimed author of The Days of Abandonment, gives readers a poignant and universal story about friendship and belonging. Views: 991
The storm of the century is beginning, and Charlotte is ready to wait it out by herself. But once the snow starts falling, and the lights go out, she begins to realize she's not alone. Strange creatures are prowling around her house, and as the snow piles up, Charlotte must find a way out. Before they find a way in.There is a stranger among us. Journeying from a distant world as an emissary-explorer, has come to earth to access it's suitability for colonization. Able to assume any form, he quietly blends into unobtrusive George Town; a small mining community, and begins his survey. The working class inhabitants of the town are simple folk, easily fooled by his facades and disguises. Far from home, drunk on his own power, the stranger soon trades the mission's purpose, for the pursuit of his own twisted perversions. At first he takes pleasure in manipulating people for his own amusement. As his appetite for evil grows, so does the danger, as the malignant depth of his personality becomes fully manifest. Soon no one is safe from an unknown renegade terror unleashed within the world. The stranger is able to hide his identity, even from the police. No-one knows who he is-no-one except Liz. She alone stands up to him, while others die around her. Intrigued by her, the stranger doesn’t kill her, but rather sets out to toy with her, by killing those she loves and placing the blame on her. Tried and convicted for the murder of her parents, she is sent away to a home for the criminally insane. By shear force of will, and with the help of her confident Ditter, she struggles back from a catatonic state to full sanity. Her big chance comes when she's accepted as a candidate for a sleep study, aboard the starship “Golden Goose”, bound on a survey mission to a newly discovered world. Despite being hunted by his own kind for forsaking the mission, the stranger's obsession for Liz compels him to pursue her to the new world. Through time, from the depths of space, and against the back drop of an intergalactic war, the stranger is up to his old tricks again, chasing and tormenting a helpless quarry. What the stranger doesn't know is that Liz has learned a few tricks of her own. Find out what happens when the hunter becomes the hunted, and the weak learn that they can be strong. Views: 991
From the acclaimed John Barth, "one of the greatest novelists of our time" (Washington Post Book World) and "a master of language" (Chicago Sun-Times), comes a lively triad of tales that delight in the many possibilities of language and its users.
The first novella, "Tell Me," explores a callow undergraduate's initiation into the mysteries of sex, death, and the Heroic Cycle. The second novella, "I've Been Told," traces no less than the history of storytelling and examines innocence and modernity, ignorance and self-consciousness. And the three elderly sisters of the third novella, "As I Was Saying . . . ," record an oral history of their youthful muse-like services to (and servicings of) a subsequently notorious and now mysteriously vanished novelist.
Sexy, humorous, and brimming with Barth's deep intelligence and playful irreverence, Where Three Roads Meet will surely delight loyal fans and draw new ones.
John Barth is the author of numerous works of fiction, including The Sot-Weed Factor, The Tidewater Tales, Lost in the Funhouse, The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor, the National Book Award winner Chimera, and most recently The Book of Ten Nights and a Night. He taught for many years in the writing program at Johns Hopkins University.
"Teller, tale, torrid . . . inspiration: Barth's seventeenth book brings these three narrative 'roads' together inimitably, and thrice. [Where Three Roads Meet] employs all of his familiar devices -- alliteration, shifts in diction and time, puns -- to tease and titillate, while at the same time articulate -- obliquely, sadly, angrily, gloriously -- a farewell to language and its objects: us." -- Publishers Weekly, starred review Views: 991
The Story of the Stone (c. 1760), also known as The Dream of the Red Chamber, is one of the greatest novels of Chinese literature. The fifth part of Cao Xueqin's magnificent saga, The Dreamer Awakes, was carefully edited and completed by Gao E some decades later. It continues the story of the changing fortunes of the Jia dynasty, focussing on Bao-yu, now married to Bao-chai, after the tragic death of his beloved Dai-yu. Against such worldly elements as death, financial ruin, marriage, decadence and corruption, his karmic journey unfolds. Like a sleepwalker through life, Bao-yu is finally awakened by a vision, which reveals to him that life itself is merely a dream, 'as moonlight mirrored in the water'. Views: 990
In this, the second book in the series, the heart-stopping adventures of the Black Stallion continue as Alec discovers that two men are after the Black. One claims to be the Black’s rightful owner and one is trying to kill the beautiful steed. An Arab chieftain proves his ownership of the Black and takes him away, but Alec is determined to find his horse again. Following the pair to Arabia, Alec encounters great evil and intrigue, as only a horse as spectacular as the Black could inspire. Views: 990
