Wayside Courtships

Hamlin Garland was a popular 20th century American writer best known for writing about hardscrabble life on the Plains and the frontier. His stories resonated in an era known for the Depression and the Dust Bowl.
Views: 962

Handwriting

"Tumultuous, vibrant, tragic and over too soon." --Newsday Handwriting is Michael Ondaatje's first new book of poetry since The Cinnamon Peeler. The exquisite poems collected here draw on history, mythology, landscape, and personal memories to weave a rich tapestry of images that reveal the longing for--and expose the anguish over--lost loves, homes, and language, as the poet contemplates scents and gestures and evokes a time when "handwriting occurred on waves, / on leaves, the scripts of smoke" and remembers a woman's "laughter with its / intake of breath. Uhh huh." Crafted with lyrical delicacy and seductive power, Handwriting reminds us of Michael Ondaatje's stature as one of the finest poets writing today. From the Trade Paperback edition.
Views: 960

The Captain Is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship

A book length collaboration between two underground legends, Charles Bukowski and Robert Crumb. Bukowski's last journals candidly and humorously reveal the events in the writer's life as death draws inexorably nearer, thereby illuminating our own lives and natures, and to give new meaning to what was once only familiar. Crumb has illustrated the text with 12 full-page drawings and a portrait of Bukowski.
Views: 959

House of Orphans

Finland, 1902, and the Russian Empire enforces a brutal policy to destroy Finland's freedom and force its people into submission. Eeva, orphaned daughter of a failed revolutionary, also battles to find her independence and identity. Destitute when her father dies, she is sent away to a country orphanage, and then employed as servant to a widowed doctor, Thomas Eklund. Slowly, Thomas falls in love with Eeva ... but she has committed herself long ago to a boy from her childhood, Lauri, who is now caught up in Helsinki's turmoil of resistance to Russian rule.
Views: 956

Captives: Kingdoms Rule Hearts

Normandy. 1067. England has been brought to its knees by the invasion of William the Conqueror and his Norman troops. Lady Catheryn, an Anglo-Saxon noblewoman, is taken against her will to Normandy after the invasion. She arrives, a prisoner, at the castle of Lord Geffrei, a ruthless invader who hopes to gain a ransom for her. Her husband Selwyn is dead, slain in the Conquest, and her daughter Annis has been left behind in England at the mercy of the invaders. Catheryn is treated like an animal, and left in a cell until she begins to despair. When Queen Matilda, William the Conqueror’s wife, sees her plight, she takes pity on her. Catheryn is sent to the castle of the noble FitzOsberns – but will her new captivity be any better than the cruelty she faced at Geffrei’s hands? She finds her hostess cold and embittered, but when her husband William FitzOsbern returns from the Conquest, Catheryn’s heart is torn by unwanted emotions. She becomes entangled in the quarrels and heartbreaks of her jailers even as she tries to remember her place among them. Is she falling in love with the man who helped to destroy her homeland? Can Catheryn betray her Anglo-Saxon roots, and her late husband? Or will she break free, and find her way back to Annis? ‘Captives’ is a moving historical story of love and loss, and the strength of one woman even in the most dangerous of times. It is the sequel to ‘Conquests’. 'An enthalling saga.' - Robert Foster, best-selling author of 'The Lunar Code'. Emily Murdoch is a medieval historian and novelist. She lives in York. She is also the author of ‘Conquests’ and ‘Love Letters’ in the same series. Endeavour Press is the UK’s leading independent publisher of digital books.
Views: 955

Go Tell It on the Mountain

“Mountain,” Baldwin said, “is the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything else.” Go Tell It On The Mountain, first published in 1953, is Baldwin's first major work, a novel that has established itself as an American classic. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy’s discovery of the terms of his identity as the stepson of the minister of a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one Saturday in March of 1935. Baldwin’s rendering of his protagonist’s spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle of self-invention opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understand themselves.
Views: 954

Woes of the True Policeman

Begun in the 1980s and worked on until the author’s death in 2003, Woes of the True Policeman is Roberto Bolaño’s last, unfinished novel. The novel follows Óscar Amalfitano—an exiled Chilean university professor and widower—through the maze of his revolutionary past, his relationship with his teenage daughter, Rosa, his passion for a former student, and his retreat from scandal in Barcelona. Forced to leave Barcelona for Santa Teresa, a Mexican city close to the U.S. border where women are being killed in unprecedented numbers, Amalfitano soon begins an affair with Castillo, a young forger of Larry Rivers paintings. Meanwhile, Rosa, Amalfitano’s daughter, engages in her own epistolary romance with a basketball player from Barcelona, while still trying to cope with her mother’s early death and her father’s secrets. After finding Castillo in bed with her father, Rosa is forced to confront her own crisis. What follows is an intimate police investigation of Amalfitano that involves a series of dark twists, culminating in a finale full of euphoria and heartbreak. Featuring characters and stories from his other books, Woes of the True Policeman invites the reader more than ever into the world of Roberto Bolaño. It is an exciting, kaleidoscopic novel, lyrical and intense, yet darkly humorous. Exploring the roots of memory and the limits of art, Woes of the True Policeman marks the culmination of one of the great careers of world literature.
Views: 954

Crossing the Water

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

Narcissus and Goldmund

*Narcissus and Goldmund* tells the story of two medieval men whose characters are diametrically opposite: Narcissus, an ascetic monk firm in his religious commitment, and Goldmund, a romantic youth hungry for knowledge and worldly experience. First published in 1930, the novel remains a moving and pointed exploration of the conflict between the life of the spirit and the life of the flesh. It is a theme that transcends all time.
Views: 952

Poems by Emily Dickinson First Series

Dickinson’s poetry is remarkable for its tightly controlled emotional and intellectual energy. The longest poem covers less than two pages. Yet in theme and tone her writing reaches for the sublime as it charts the landscape of the human soul. A true innovator, Dickinson experimented freely with conventional rhythm and meter, and often used dashes, off rhymes, and unusual metaphors—techniques that strongly influenced modern poetry. Dickinson’s idiosyncratic style, along with her deep resonance of thought and her observations about life and death, love and nature, and solitude and society, have firmly established her as one of America’s true poetic geniuses.
Views: 951

Come on In!

Bukowski's unmistakable charisma - an ex-down-and-outer who wrote of booze and loneliness in maverick, confident free verse - made him one of the world's most popular poets long before he died in 1994. More than a decade later, death has not slowed his production. This collection is selected from an archive of verse that the author left to be published after his death. It includes poems of love and sex, advice to so-called losers (as he once was) to have confidence in themselves (as he did), gambling laments and humbling poems accepting his own imminent ultimate full stop.
Views: 949

Swamp Victim

The scene is the Salkehatchie Swamp in South Carolina. Cyndi Cooper, a young GeeChee girl, tending Jeff Ireland’s Alzheimer stricken wife lets her escape into the swamp to die. Jeff tells Oats Schonfeld he wants revenge. Oats, head of the local Cobb Club and former KKK leader kills Cyndi. Deputy Sheriff Caley Givens, investigates and uncovers Oats' murder of two 1968 civil rights workers also.The scene is the Salkehatchie Swamp in South Carolina, where Cyndi Cooper, a young GeeChee girl, who is tending Jeff Ireland’s Alzheimer stricken wife lets her escape into the swamp where she dies. Jeff tells Oats Schoenfelt he wants revenge on Cyndi. Oats, head of the local Cobb Club and former KKK leader kills Cyndi. Deputy Sheriff Caley Givens, investigates the crime and also uncovers a cold case murder of two 1968 civil rights workers by Oats. Bubba Vandi, a SLED Special Agent comes in to assist Caley in the investigation, only to become a victim of attempted murder and is dumped into the swamp himself. The light hearted adventures of the Cobb Club members such as Big Al, Skeeter, and Honey Boy will entertain you through the book. Written from the point of view of bigotry and prejudices, this book is a must read.
Views: 949

Mercier and Camier

One of the most accessible examples of Samuel Beckett’s dark humor, Mercier and Camier is the hilarious chronicle of its two heroes’ epic journey. While their travels are fraught with complications and intrigue, Mercier and Camier at least “did not remove from home, they had that good fortune.”
Views: 948