Service Alert
Website maintenance April 24 10pm ET
On Wednesday April 24 at 10pm ET the CELA website will be unavailable for about 15 minutes for planned maintenance.
On Wednesday April 24 at 10pm ET the CELA website will be unavailable for about 15 minutes for planned maintenance.
Showing 141 - 160 of 16231 items
By Shirley Jackson. 1948
Reminiscent of her classic story 'The Lottery', Jackson's disturbing and darkly funny first novel exposes the underside of American suburban…
life. 'Her books penetrate keenly to the terrible truths which sometimes hide behind comfortable fictions, to the treachery beneath cheery neighborhood faces and the plain manners of country folk; to the threat that sparkles at the rainbow's edge of the sprinkler spray on even the greenest lawns, on the sunniest of midsummer mornings' Donna TarttIn Pepper Street, an attractive suburban neighbourhood filled with bullies and egotistical bigots, the feelings of the inhabitants are shallow and selfish: what can a neighbour gain from another neighbour, what may be won from a friend? One child stands alone in her goodness: little Caroline Desmond, kind, sweet and gentle, and the pride of her family. But the malice and self-absorption of the people of Pepper Street lead to a terrible event that will destroy the community of which they are so proud. Exposing the murderous cruelty of children, and the blindness and selfishness of adults, Shirley Jackson reveals the ugly truth behind a 'perfect' world. Shirley Jackson's chilling tales have the power to unsettle and terrify unlike any other. She was born in California in 1916. When her short story The Lottery was first published in The New Yorker in 1948, readers were so horrified they sent her hate mail; it has since become one of the greatest American stories of all time. Her first novel, The Road Through the Wall, was published in the same year and was followed by five more: Hangsaman, The Bird's Nest, The Sundial, The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, widely seen as her masterpiece. Shirley Jackson died in her sleep at the age of 48. 'An amazing writer' Neil Gaiman'Shirley Jackson is one of those highly idiosyncratic, inimitable writers . . . whose work exerts an enduring spell' Joyce Carol Oates'An unburnished exercise in the sinister' The New York TimesBy Wilkie Collins.
By Bruce Jay Friedman. 2008
Three Balconies brings together 17 new stories by the celebrated humorist, vintage Friedman all. In sumptuously simple language, the language…
of the street, the bar, the store, the office, Friedman gives us a collection of moral fables that explores friendship and faith and failure unswervingly, yet with compassion and, as always, tremendous humour.By Robert Louis Stevenson.
By Thomas Hardy.
By Dale Peck. 2015
Dale Peck's second novel offers a searing, nuanced portrait of a marriage across the decades. Beatrice and Henry--the parents of…
the protagonist of Peck's debut novel, Martin and John--are first drawn together when the teenaged Henry is battling a brain tumor that he believes will soon claim his life. But forty years later they're still a couple, in a story that moves from Long Island to the Finger Lakes of upstate New York, and from love to hate and back again. Peck bisects the story of Henry and Beatrice's marriage with a stunning 50-page memoir about his own father, mother, and three stepmothers, which combines with the primary narrative to build an unforgettable and deeply moving book about the ways that family both creates and destroys us.The Law of Enclosures is the second volume of Gospel Harmonies, a series of seven stand-alone books (four have been written) that follow the character of John in various guises as he attempts to navigate the uneasy relationship between the self and the postmodern world.From the Trade Paperback edition.By Honore De Balzac, Ellen Marriage.
By Henry James.
By Jane Mendelsohn. 2000
An electrifying follow-up to her bestselling I Was Amelia Earhart, Jane Mendelsohn's Innocence is a modern gothic coming-of-age story, a…
devastating X-ray of American culture, and a piercing exploration of a teenage girl growing up in New York City. Narrated with incisive wit by fourteen-year-old Becket, the novel traces her relationship with her widowed father, her encounters with the intimidating Beautiful Girls at school, her attraction to the mysterious and dangerous school nurse, her attachment to the raffish Tobey, and a series of devastating nightmares that threaten Becket's life as she moves from girl to woman. Mendelsohn has written an allegory about the precarious state of the American teenager in a culture that sucks the life force out of its young, who are nurtured by the movies and fantasy and narcissism rather than by values such as honesty and love. This is a world as startingly original and hauntingly familiar as our dreams, where the line between fantasy and reality, between sanity and insanity, is razor-thin. Playful, frightening, profound, and gripping, Innocence is the rare thing - a page turner with the depth of poetry and the immediacy of cinema.By Shirley Jackson. 2014
'Ever since Betsy had been a prisoner she had watched while Elizabeth slept . . . seeing the dim figures…
of Elizabeth's world when Elizabeth's eyes were open, and the screaming phantoms of Elizabeth's nightmares. 'Elizabeth Richmond is almost too quiet to be believed, with no friends, no parents, and a job that leaves her strangely unnoticed. But soon she starts to behave in ways she can neither control nor understand, to the increasing horror of her doctor, and the humiliation of her self-centred aunt. As a tormented Elizabeth becomes two people, then three, then four, each wilder and more wicked than the last, a battle of wills threatens to destroy the girl and all who surround her. the Bird's Nest is a macabre journey into who we are, and how close we sometimes come to the brink of madness. With a Foreword by Kevin WilsonBy Honore De Balzac, Katharine Prescott Wormeley.
By Wilkie Collins.
By Ann Packer. 2002
A riveting novel about loyalty and self-knowledge, and the conflict between who we want to be to others and who…
we must be for ourselves. Carrie Bell has lived in Wisconsin all her life. She’s had the same best friend, the same good relationship with her mother, the same boyfriend, Mike, now her fiancé, for as long as anyone can remember. It’s with real surprise she finds that, at age twenty-three, her life has begun to feel suffocating. She longs for a change, an upheaval, for a chance to begin again. That chance is granted to her, terribly, when Mike is injured in an accident. Now Carrie has to question everything she thought she knew about herself and the meaning of home. She must ask: How much do we owe the people we love? Is it a sign of strength or of weakness to walk away from someone in need? The Dive from Clausen’s Pier reminds us how precarious our lives are and how quickly they can be divided into before and after, whether by random accident or by the force of our own desires. It begins with a disaster that could happen, out of the blue, in anybody’s life, and it forces us to ask how we would bear up in the face of tragedy and what we know, or think we know, about our deepest allegiances. Elegantly written and ferociously paced, emotionally nuanced and morally complex, The Dive from Clausen’s Pier marks the emergence of a prodigiously gifted new novelist.By Lewis Carroll.
By E. M. Forster.
By Richard Harding Davis.
By Wilkie Collins.
By Gustave Flaubert.
By Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, Anna Summers. 2013
Love stories, with a twist: the eagerly awaited follow-up to the great Russian writer's New York Times bestselling scary fairy…
talesBy turns sly and sweet, burlesque and heartbreaking, these realist fables of women looking for love are the stories that Ludmilla Petrushevskaya--who has been compared to Chekhov, Tolstoy, Beckett, Poe, Angela Carter, and even Stephen King--is best known for in Russia.Here are attempts at human connection, both depraved and sublime, by people across the life span: one-night stands in communal apartments, poignantly awkward couplings, office trysts, schoolgirl crushes, elopements, tentative courtships, and rampant infidelity, shot through with lurid violence, romantic illusion, and surprising tenderness. With the satirical eye of Cindy Sherman, Petrushevskaya blends macabre spectacle with transformative moments of grace and shows just why she is Russia's preeminent contemporary fiction writer.By Charles Dickens.