Cairo Modern

In Naguib Mahfouz's suspenseful novel a bitter and ambitious nihilist, a beautiful and impoverished student, and a corrupt official engage in a doomed ménage à trois. Cairo of the 1930s is a place of vast social and economic inequities. It is also a time of change, when the universities have just opened to women and heady new philosophies imported from Europe are stirring up debates among the young. Mahgub is a fiercely proud student who is determined to keep both his poverty and his lack of principles secret from his idealistic friends. When he finds that there are no jobs for those without connections, out of desperation he agrees to participate in an elaborate deception. But what begins as a mere strategy for survival soon becomes much more for both Mahgub and his partner in crime, an equally desperate young woman named Ihsan. As they make their way through Cairo's lavish high society their precarious charade begins to unravel and the terrible price of Mahgub's Faustian bargain becomes clear. Translated by William M. Hutchins From the Trade Paperback edition.
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Island Home

'I grew up on the world’s largest island.' This apparently simple fact is the starting point for Tim Winton’s beautiful, evocative and sometimes provocative memoir of how Australia's unique landscape has shaped him and his writing. Wise, rhapsodic, exalted – Island Home is not just a brilliant, moving insight into the life and art of one of our finest writers, but a compelling investigation into the way our country shapes us.
Views: 1 113

Lovecraft's Fiction Volume II, 1926-1928

Fan-compiled eBook collection of (almost) all Lovecraft stories.
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Vets Might Fly

A few months of married bliss, a lovers' nest in Darrowby and the wonders of home cooking are rudely interrupted for James Herriot by the Second World War. James Herriot's fifth volume of memoirs relocates him to a training camp somewhere in England. And in between square pounding and digging for victory, he dreams of the people and livestock he left behind him. 'There are funny cases, sad cases, farm animals and pets, downright farmers, ladies of refinement, hard-bitten NCOs and of course, the immortal Siegfried and Tristan' The "Sunday Times" 'Another winner... as always hilariously funny' The "Sunday Telegraph" 'It is a pleasure to be in James Herriot's company' "Observer"
Views: 1 112

The Boy Who Followed Ripley

The Boy Who Followed Ripley, the fourth novel in the Ripley series, is one of Patricia Highsmith's darkest and most twisted creations. Tom Ripley meets a young American runaway who has a dark secret that he is desperate to hide. Soon this unlikely pair is drawn into the seamy underworld of Berlin and a shocking kidnapping. In this masterful thriller, Highsmith shatters our perceptions of her most famous creation by letting us glimpse a more compassionate side of this amoral charmer. "Ripley is an unmistakable descendant of Gatsby, that 'penniless young man without a past' who will stop at nothing." —Frank Rich, New York Times Magazine
Views: 1 105

The Doll-Master and Other Tales of Terror

Bold and haunting, The Doll-Master and Other Tales is a collection of six psychologically daring stories from Joyce Carol Oates. In the title story, a boy becomes obsessed with his cousin’s doll after she tragically passes away, and as he grows older, he begins to collect “found dolls” from surrounding neighborhoods. But just what kind of dolls are they? In “Gun Accident,” a teenage girl is delighted to house-sit for her favorite teacher, until an intruder forces his way inside the old Colonial—changing more than one life forever. The Doll-Master closes with a taut bibliomystery, about the owner of a middling chain of mystery bookstores whose plan to take over a rare bookshop in scenic New Hampshire derails into a game of verbal cat-and-mouse that threatens to have real-life consequences. Throughout the collection, Oates evokes “the fascination of the abomination” that is at the core of the most profound, the most unsettling, and the most memorable of dark mystery fiction.
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The Complete Short Stories of W. Somerset Maugham: East and West (Vol. 1 of 2))

30 stories Rain -- Fall of Edward Barnard -- Mackintosh -- Red -- Honolulu -- Pool -- Letter -- Before the party -- Force of circumstance -- Outstation -- Yellow streak -- P & O -- Jane -- Round dozen -- Creative impulse -- Miss King -- Hairless Mexican -- Giulia Lazzari -- Traitor -- His Excellency -- Mr. Harrington's washing -- Footprints in the jungle -- Human element -- virtue -- Alien corn -- Book-bag -- Vessel of wrath -- Door of opportunity -- Back of beyond -- Neil MacAdam.
Views: 1 102

Wild Nights!: Stories About the Last Days of Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James, and Hemingway

Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, Samuel Clemens ("Mark Twain"), Henry James, Ernest Hemingway--Joyce Carol Oates evokes each of these American literary icons in her newest work of prose fiction, poignantly and audaciously reinventing the climactic events of their lives. In subtly nuanced language suggestive of each of these writers, Oates explores the mysterious regions of the unknowable self that is "genius." Darkly hilarious, brilliant, and brazen, "Wild Nights " is Joyce Carol Oates's most original and haunting work of the imagination.
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The Doubt Factory

A YA thriller about a teenage girl who discovers that her father is at the helm of an organization providing dangerous false messaging to society about global warming and other issues.
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The Garden of Forking Paths

"The Garden of Forking Paths" (original Spanish title: "El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan") is the title story in the collection El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan (1941), which was republished in its entirety in Ficciones (Fictions) in 1944. It was the first of Borges's works to be translated into English by Anthony Boucher when it appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine in August 1948.
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A Special Providence

Bobby is eighteen and lost on the battlefields of Europe, stumbling his way through World War II. He has turned out to be the heroic soldier he imagined and his experience of battle principally involves fear and confusion. Back home, his mother Alice puts all her hopes in her son, and dreams of his return and starting a new life for them both. Richard Yates's novel is both tender and ironic as he follows Bobby's adventures and disasters and reflects on the intense but complicated bond between mother and son.
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Tales of the Jazz Age (Classic Reprint)

A TABLE OF CONTENTS MY LAST FLAPPERS THE JELLY-BEAN Page 3 This is a Southern story, with the scene laid in the small city of Tarleton, Georgia. I have a profound affection for Tarlelon, but somehow whenever I write a story about it I receive letters from all over the South denouncing me in no uncertain terms. "The Jelly-Bean," published in "The Metropolitan," drew its full share of these admonitory notes. It was written under strange circumstances shortly after my first novel was published, and, moreover, it was the first story in which I had a collaborator. For, finding that I was unable to manage the crap-shooting episode, I turned it over to my wife, who, as a Southern girl, was presumably an expert on the technique and terminology of that great sectional pastime. I suppose tluil of all the stories I have ever written this one cost me the least travail and perhaps gave me the most amuse-ment. As to tlte labor involved, it was written during one day in the city of New Orle About the Publisher Forgotten Books is a publisher of historical writings, such as: Philosophy, Classics, Science, Religion, History, Folklore and Mythology. Forgotten Books' Classic Reprint Series utilizes the latest technology to regenerate facsimiles of historically important writings. Careful attention has been made to accurately preserve the original format of each page whilst digitally enhancing the difficult to read text. Read books online for free at
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Windup Stories

Contains two stories from the world of The Windup Girl: 1) “The Calorie Man” (2005) - Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, October/November 2005. 2) “Yellow Card Man” (2006) - Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, December 2006.
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Brief Interviews With Hideous Men: Stories

David Foster Wallace made an art of taking readers into places no other writer even gets near. The series of stories from which this exuberantly acclaimed book takes its title is a sequence of imagined interviews with men on the subject of their relations with women. These portraits of men at their most self-justifying, loquacious, and benighted explore poignantly and hilariously the agonies of sexual connections.
Views: 1 085