There’s no guessing where a Beattie story will lead. And while one might intuit its catalyst––a “snake’s shoes,” a man who lost an arm, a vintage car, a wisteria pushing through a skylight, a crumbling stone wall around an old graveyard, a beautifully carved decoy––it feels as though Beattie herself is taken by surprise as each adroitly unsettling tale uncoils. Beattie made her mark as an audaciously understated yet resoundingly on-the-mark writer in the 1970s in the New Yorker, and it is testimony both to her unceasing artistic growth and the magazine’s unshakable commitment to exceptional short stories that the final works in this grand retrospective collection are as provocative as the first. Forty-eight Beattie stories appeared in the New Yorker between 1974 and 2006, and until now nearly half remained uncollected. This scintillating volume showcases Beattie’s stunning insights into the eternal isolation of individuals and each decade’s signature longings and conflicts. An incisive dramatist of family strife, marital discord, unconventional alliances, and the aftershocks of violence and death, Beattie portrays characters “numbed out,” wistful, or furious. Laced with ambivalence and irony and punctuated with unexpected reprieves, Beattie’s brilliantly structured stories are mordantly funny, haunting, and wise, making for a glorious collection. --Donna SeamanReview"As much as anyone in the past fifty years--you give me your Mavis Gallant, I'll give you my Frank O'Connor--Ann Beattie's slow-forming monument of a lifework defines what the short story can do, the extent of human life it can encompass."--Jonathan Lethem “It is a testament to [Beattie’s] unceasing artistic growth ... that the final works in this grand retrospective are as provocative as the first... This scintillating volume showcases Beattie’s stunning insights into the eternal isolation of individuals and each decade’s signature longing and conflicts. ... Laced with ambivalence and irony and punctuated with unexpected reprieves, Beattie’s brilliantly structured stories are mordantly funny, haunting, wise, making for a glorious collection.”—Donna Seaman, Booklist Views: 25
The remarkable story of Roald Dahl's early years at school and with his family. Like his stories, Dahl's childhood tales are unmissable. This edition has a great new Quentin Blake cover and a new end section of facts about Roald Dahl. Views: 25
Erotica/Romance. 15931 words long. Views: 25
At the time of its publication, 1932, this was the longest mystery ever written. Would you believe, 313,000 words — many of them in a strange Hispano-German dialect. It's a simple story about world war in 1942 between an alliance between Germany, Japan, and Mexico against the US and the rest of the world. 3D TV figures prominently, as well as a cactus that proves to be the world's most perfect food source. A remarkable novel, far ahead of its time! Views: 25
The protagonist of this Explorer Corps adventure is Ugly Screaming Stink-Girl. The name is supposed to bring her luck, but since she is quickly contaminated by a red fungus known as the Balrog, one has to wonder. Then she, Admiral Festina Ramos, and a slightly mad fellow named Tut are assigned to a rescue mission on the planet Muta. There, an entire expedition from the unit has been turned into gas clouds that give out electromagnetic pulses, and it looks as if this is the result of a deadly defense mechanism left behind by an alien race. It takes ingenuity and suffering to discover the mystery behind the pulses. The sheer complexity of Gardner’s characters and inventions will make the book daunting to a good many, but his ingenuity and wit will keep a good many others reading voraciously. Views: 25
An epic masterwork about the trials of a man of "science" in a Kafkaesque realm of persecution and paranoia from a World Fantasy Award–winning author. The Well-Built City is a hellish place of unrelenting nightmare, ruled with cruelty, oppression, and terror by the inscrutable madman Drachton Below. In his multiple-award-winning, New York Times Notable trilogy, Jeffrey Ford creates a dystopia that chronicles the hubris, downfall, and damnation of a highly placed functionary responsible for determining who will live or die according to their facial structure. The Physiognomy: With his unimpeachable authority to condemn and destroy, the pompous, drug-addicted Cley is one of the most feared civil servants in Drachton Below's Well-Built City. But when the Master himself dispatches him to a remote mining town to recover a stolen object of unimaginable power, events will cause the physiognomist to doubt his science and the reality of his... Views: 25
A nineteenth-century appeal to maintain a decent standard of food for sailors, to care for the sick, and to prevent the frequency of flogging in the United States Navy. Views: 25
This further collection of Roald Dahi's adult short stories, from his world-famous books, again includes many seen in the television series, TALES OF THE UNEXPECTED. Through the stories runs a vein of macabre malevolence, springing from slight, almost inconsequential everyday things. These bizarre plots—spiced with vibrant characters and subtle twists and turns—are utterly addictive. Views: 25
MM, Paranormal, HistoricalThe Fitzwarren Inheritance containing:
The Psychic's Tale by Quinton, ChrisThe Soldier's Tale by Scott, RJThe Lord's Tale by Brown, Sue“I curse you, and your children’s children, that you shall all live out your allotted years, and that those years shall be filled with grief and loss and betrayal, even as you have betrayed and bereaved me.”Four hundred years ago in rural England, a mob burned two men to death, but not before one of them, Jonathan Curtess, hurled a dreadful curse at the mob's leader, Sir Belvedere Fitzwarren. The curse has followed the family through the centuries, bringing grief and loss to each generation.Corporal Daniel Francis has returned to his childhood home in England to heal; the only one of his unit that survived a roadside bomb. His reasons for skipping medication are based on a stubborn refusal to become an addict, and he is overwhelmed with survivor's guilt.Phil Fitzwarren is surrounded by death and tragedy as a result of the curse imposed on his family by Jonathan Curtess. The estate is riddled with debt, his parents and brother killed and his young nephew and much-wanted heir to what is left of the Fitzwarren estate fights for his life after being born prematurely. Views: 25
Palace of Desire is the second novel in Nobel Prize-winner Naguib Mahfouz’s magnificent Cairo Trilogy, an epic family saga of colonial Egypt that is considered his masterwork. The novels of the Cairo Trilogy trace three generations of the family of tyrannical patriarch al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad, who rules his household with a strict hand while living a secret life of self-indulgence. In Palace of Desire , his rebellious children struggle to move beyond his domination, as the world around them opens to the currents of modernity and political and domestic turmoil brought by the 1920s. Views: 25
