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In Praise of the Stepmother: A Novel
By Mario Vargas Llosa. 1998
With meticulous observation and the seductive skill of a great storyteller, Vargas Llosa lures the reader into the shadow of…
perversion that, little by little, darkens the extraordinary happiness and harmony of his characters. The mysterious nature of happiness and above all, the corrupting power of innocence are the themes that underlie these pages, and the author has perfectly met the demands of the erotic novel, never dimming for an instant the fine poetic polish of his writing.Rules for Saying Goodbye: A Novel
By Katherine Taylor. 2007
"Kath is curious," observes her younger brother, Ethan, not without anxiety. She is thirteen; already everyone can see she's got…
her eye on bigger things than provincial Fresno can offer. Years in the glamorous chill of an East Coast prep school will introduce her to a razor-sharp sense of social distinction, cocaine "so good it's pink," and an indispensable best friend—all that she needs to prepare for life in Manhattan. There will be fourteen-dollar cocktails but no money for groceries; unsuitable men of enormous charm, and unsuitable jobs of no charm at all; and a wistful yearning for a transformation from someone of promise into someone of genius.In this deliciously witty and affecting debut novel, fiction winks at real life: Katherine Taylor is its muddled heroine, and also its author. Written in the tradition of Curtis Sittenfeld and Melissa Bank, with the gorgeous hues of a pile of Gatsby's shirts, Rules for Saying Goodbye is a bittersweet yet comic coming-of-age tale that has an unerring feel for the delights and malaises of a generation.Rhythms: A Novel
By Donna Hill. 2001
It all began in 1927, in the small town of Rudell, Mississippi, after the sudden and tragic death of Cora…
Harvey's parents. She has nothing left except her burning desire to become a singer. But her dream will never come true in Rudell, especially if she marries the man she adores, Dr. David Mackey. So when she sets out for Chicago, everyone in the close knit community, including David believes that the next time they see Cora, her name will be in lights. However, it's not long before Cora finds herself back in Rudell and back in David's arms harboring a secret she dare not reveal. . .A secret that will cause her daughter, Emma to flee Rudell with no intention of ever looking back. And even when Emma finds the perfect man and happiness at last, she is determined to do whatever it takes to keep her family's shameful past at bay. Then the dream that began with Cora comes full circle with her beloved granddaughter Parris whose melodic voice fills the dimly lit nightclubs of New York City. Yet, when tragedy strikes, opening a door to the past, Parris discovers the hidden truths that have ripped the family apart---but which may ultimately bind them together at last.From the dusty roads of the Delta to the pulsing metropolis of New York City, Rhythms is a rich, unforgettable tale about loss and healing, redemption and love.Upstate: A Novel
By James Wood. 2018
New Yorker book critic and award-winning author James Wood delivers a novel of a family struggling to connect with one…
another and find meaning in their own lives. In the years since his daughter Vanessa moved to America to become a professor of philosophy, Alan Querry has never been to visit. He has been too busy at home in northern England, holding together his business as a successful property developer. His younger daughter, Helen—a music executive in London—hasn’t gone, either, and the two sisters, close but competitive, have never quite recovered from their parents’ bitter divorce and the early death of their mother. But when Vanessa’s new boyfriend sends word that she has fallen into a severe depression and that he’s worried for her safety, Alan and Helen fly to New York and take the train to Saratoga Springs.Over the course of six wintry days in upstate New York, the Querry family begins to struggle with the questions that animate this profound and searching novel: Why do some people find living so much harder than others? Is happiness a skill that might be learned or a cruel accident of birth? Is reflection conducive to happiness or an obstacle to it? If, as a favorite philosopher of Helen’s puts it, “the only serious enterprise is living,” how should we live? Rich in subtle human insight, full of poignant and often funny portraits, and vivid with a sense of place, James Wood’s Upstate is a powerful, intense, beautiful novel.God's Kingdom: A Novel
By Howard Frank Mosher. 2015
Howard Frank Mosher is one of America's most acclaimed writers. His fiction, set in the world of Vermont's Northeast Kingdom,…
chronicles the intertwining family histories of the natives, wanderers, outcasts, and fugitives-white, Native American, escaped slaves fleeing north, French Canadians, and others-who settled in this remote and beautiful place. God's Kingdom explores the Kinneson family through the coming of age of the heir, Jim, and its rich and complicated history. Earnest and innocent, a bright high school student, Jim grows curious about the unspoken "trouble in the family" that haunts his father, a small-town newspaper editor, and his grandfather, a raconteur who keeps the Kinnesons' secrets to himself. Layer by layer, tale by tale, sorting out fact from deliberately obscured legend, Jim explores the Kinnesons' long relationship with others in the Kingdom, culminating in a discovery that forever changes his life and place in that world. Beginning with a magical Thanksgiving Day hunting trip in the autumn mountains, and ending with Jim on the brink of leaving home to find life-and perhaps love-on the other side of the ridge, God's Kingdom unfolds with the patient delight of a master storyteller.Jana Bibi's Excellent Fortunes: A Novel (Jana Bibi Adventures #1)
By Betsy Woodman. 2012
Meet Jana Bibi, a Scottish woman helping to save the small town in India she has grown to call home…
and the oddball characters she considers familyJanet Laird's life changed the day she inherited her grandfather's house in a faraway Indian hill station. Ignoring her son's arguments to come grow old in their family castle in Scotland, she moves with her chatty parrot, Mr. Ganguly and her loyal housekeeper, Mary, to Hamara Nagar, where local merchants are philosophers, the chief of police is a tyrant, and a bagpipe-playing Gurkha keeps the wild monkeys at bay. Settling in, Jana Bibi (as she comes to be known) meets her colorful local neighbors—Feroze Ali Khan of Royal Tailors, who struggles with his business and family, V.K. Ramachandran, whose Treasure Emporium is bursting at the seams with objects of unknown provenance, and Rambir, editor of the local newspaper, who burns the midnight oil at his printing press. When word gets out that the town is in danger of being drowned by a government dam, Jana is enlisted to help put it on the map. Hoping to attract tourists with promises of good things to come, she stacks her deck of cards, readies her fine-feathered assistant—and Jana Bibi's Excellent Fortunes is born.Rough and Tumble: A Novel
By Mark Bavaro. 2008
A riveting debut novel of a season in the life of a professional football player-written by one of the NFL's…
best tight ends of all time.Dominic Fucillo is a tight end for the surging New York Giants. Rebellious, ferociously angry, deeply religious and fighting injuries and a crumbling love life that would bring the average man to his knees, Dom is a veteran player who is having the toughest season of his career at a time when his team can do nothing wrong--or so it seems.Because behind the big wins, a major scandal is brewing. The team's star linebacker has always lived on the edge and enjoyed the nightlife more than he should. But when he's found beaten nearly to death in the stadium parking lot, it's clear he's gotten himself into more than even he bargained for, and it's something that threatens to tear himself and his team's promising season apart.Inspired by his years shedding blood and sweat playing professional football, ROUGH & TUMBLE is Mark Bavaro's novel about the brutal world of the NFL-and a classic sports story of one man's determination and grit.Break It Down: Stories (Fsg Classics Ser.)
By Lydia Davis. 1986
The thirty-four stories in this seminal collection powerfully display what have become Lydia Davis's trademarks—dexterity, brevity, understatement, and surprise. Although…
the certainty of her prose suggests a world of almost clinical reason and clarity, her characters show us that life, thought, and language are full of disorder. Break It Down is Davis at her best. In the words of Jonathan Franzen, she is "a magician of self-consciousness."Flat Water Tuesday: A Novel
By Ron Irwin. 2013
The son of a working-class cabinet maker, Rob Carrey arrives on the prestigious Fenton School's campus with a scholarship to…
row...and a chip on his shoulder. Generations of austere Fenton men have led the four-man rowing team, commonly known as the God Four, to countless victories—but none more important or renowned than the annual Tuesday afternoon race in April against their rival boarding school, Warwick.Before boats can be launched, Rob must complete months of grueling preparation driven by their captain Connor Payne's vicious competitive nature. Payne is a young man so plagued by family pressure and uwillingness to lose that the lines between dedication and obsession are increasingly blurred. As the Warwick race nears, the stakes steadfastly rise, and tempers and lusts culminate until, finally, no one can prevent the horrible tragedy that ensues.Now, fifteen years later, Rob is an accomplished documentary filmmaker. Returning home from a recent shoot in Africa, he arrives in New York City to clear out his shared apartment and end his heartbreaking relationship with his film editor and girlfriend, Carolyn. But when a phone call from one of the God Four compels him to attend the fifteen-year reunion at Fenton, Rob sees the invitation as an opportunity to confront the past and perhaps even steer his own life in a new direction.Ron Irwin's Flat Water Tuesday shares in the grand tradition of sagas about athletic young men on the brink of greatness, who either embrace their talent or are devastatingly consumed by it. As much about the art of rowing as it is a novel of finding oneself, this is a memorable and deeply moving testament to what it means to train and fight for both love and victory, in sport and in life.Diana: The Goddess Who Hunts Alone
By Carlos Fuentes. 1995
On New Year's Eve in 1969, a novelist in his forties meets the beautiful movie actress Diana Soren at a…
party and is fascinated by her oddly elusive charm. But in this novel from Carlos Fuentes, his infatuation turns into doomed pursuit as the fleeting object of his desire spurns him, and he is forced to reconsider the foundations of his life as a writer.The Weekend: A Novel
By Peter Cameron. 1994
On a midsummer weekend, in a country house in upstate New York, three friends, Lyle, Marian, and John, gather on…
the anniversary of the death of John's brother, who was also Lyle's lover. As Tony's absence haunts each of them in different ways, the reunion is complicated by the presence of Lyle's new lover, a much younger man named Robert, and a faux-Italian dinner guest with a penchant for truth telling. As the seemingly idyllic weekend proceeds, each character is stripped bare, and old memories and new desires create a chemistry that will transform them all.Blackburn: A Novel
By Bradley Denton. 1993
Jimmy Blackburn grows up in the Midwest believing the things that adults tell him. He questions his teachers and they…
lie to him. He questions his parents and his father beats him. He questions the world and it hurts him.And so Jimmy Blackburn becomes a killer.In this novel we meet many of Blackburn's twenty-one victims. They include law enforcers, writers, adulterers, auto mechanics, and other liars.This is an exceptional novel, at once riotously funny and searingly potent: a vision of America through the eyes of the central bogeyman of our culture.The Wild Colonial Boy: A Novel
By James Hynes. 1990
After years of violence, a tense calm pervades Northern Ireland, soon to be broken by Jimmy Coogan, an IRA veteran…
gone renegade. Jimmy has stolen ten pounds of plastic explosive, intending to destroy the parliamentary ambitions of the IRA leadership. Into Jimmy's turbulent world come two young Americans: Brian, vain, ironic, but well-meaning; and Clare, a beautiful, earnest college student. In Ireland on an errand for his Irish Republican family in Detroit, Brian is recruited to Jimmy's bloody mission by his cousin Maire, Coogan's sharp-tongued wife. Soon they are all drawn into the unforgiving labyrinth of modern terrorism, borne toward a horrific and fatal climax in James Hynes's thrilling TheWild Colonial BoySmall Blessings: A Novel
By Martha Woodroof. 2014
From debut novelist Martha Woodroof comes an inspiring tale of a small-town college professor, a remarkable new woman at the…
bookshop, and the ten-year old son he never knew he had. Tom Putnam has resigned himself to a quiet and half-fulfilled life. An English professor in a sleepy college town, he spends his days browsing the Shakespeare shelves at the campus bookstore, managing the oddball faculty in his department and caring, alongside his formidable mother-in-law, for his wife Marjory, a fragile shut-in with unrelenting neuroses, a condition exacerbated by her discovery of Tom's brief and misguided affair with a visiting poetess a decade earlier.Then, one evening at the bookstore, Tom and Marjory meet Rose Callahan, the shop's charming new hire, and Marjory invites Rose to their home for dinner, out of the blue, her first social interaction since her breakdown. Tom wonders if it's a sign that change is on the horizon, a feeling confirmed upon his return home, where he opens a letter from his former paramour, informing him he'd fathered a son who is heading Tom's way on a train. His mind races at the possibility of having a family after so many years of loneliness. And it becomes clear change is coming whether Tom's ready or not.A heartwarming story with a charmingly imperfect cast of characters to cheer for, Small Blessings's wonderfully optimistic heart that reminds us that sometimes, when it feels like life has veered irrevocably off track, the track shifts in ways we never can have imagined.Comedy in a Minor Key: A Novel
By Hans Keilson. 1947
A penetrating study of ordinary people resisting the Nazi occupation—and, true to its title, a dark comedy of wartime manners—Comedy…
in a Minor Key tells the story of Wim and Marie, a Dutch couple who first hide a Jew they know as Nico, then must dispose of his body when he dies of pneumonia. This novella, first published in 1947 and now translated into English for the first time, shows Hans Keilson at his best: deeply ironic, penetrating, sympathetic, and brilliantly modern, an heir to Joseph Roth and Franz Kafka. In 2008, when Keilson received Germany's prestigious Welt Literature Prize, the citation praised his work for exploring "the destructive impulse at work in the twentieth century, down to its deepest psychological and spiritual ramifications." Published to celebrate Keilson's hundredth birthday, Comedy ina Minor Key—and The Death of the Adversary, reissued in paperback—will introduce American readers to a forgotten classic author, a witness to World War II and a sophisticated storyteller whose books remain as fresh as when they first came to light.Risk: A Novel
By Colin Harrison. 2009
An honest lawyer, a Czech hand model, and a box of mysterious Christmas ornaments--each plays a part in Colin Harrison's…
compelling new intrigueGeorge Young never thought of himself as a detective, but that's pretty much his vocation--an attorney at a top insurance firm, it's his job to pin down suspicious claims. But Mrs. Corbett, the rich, eccentric wife of the firm's founder, has it in mind to put George's skills to a peculiar assignment. With only a few months left to live, her one desire is to know the true circumstance of her son Roger's violent death. George's investigation leads him to Roger's mistress, a cagey Czech hand model named Eliska, who can cast a seductive spell simply by removing her gloves. Did Eliska's motives for latching on to Roger get him killed? Or did some of her shadowy and dangerous little friends take care of the job? And why were there boxes and boxes of Christmas ornaments in the dead man's apartment? George will have to take a few chances of his own if he wants to get to the bottom of Roger's death for Mrs. Corbett. Set against a volatile and vividly drawn Manhattan, Risk is prime Colin Harrison.Sex and the Single Sister: Five Novellas
By Maryann Reid. 2001
The African American answer to Sex and the City---a collection of hip, sexy, funny novellas about successful black women in…
their twenties, on the dating scene, making all the wrong moves . . . A fine ambitious sister on the rise to stardom, junior correspondent to NBC News, Farah's, has life on a string. And she's looking for a quick hook-up. But this sister's about to learn what happens when you take the fast track to love . . .Alaya fled the projects, determined not to be anybody's baby-mama, got her degree, and opened her own accounting firm. Everything is perfect. All she needs now is that perfect someone. Only holding out for "Mr. Right" may mean missing out on love altogether . . .Kenya, an almost-thirty successful investment strategist is plotting some strategies of her own to alleviate her "Can't Find a Husband" blues. So when her hot Latin neighbor's dog kicks sand in her face while she's meditating on the beach, she realizes that it not quite the first move she had in mind, but it seems to be fate. That is until an old flame comes strolling back into her life and she has to make a choice...Alexis is fabulously fine and fresh out of a stifling relationship with the "right man." She's got a wild side (to put it mildly) she's been dying to release. Enter Mike, a strong brother with rough edges and enough daring to indulge fantasies Alexis didn't even know she had...Waceera's travels all over the world have taught her one thing: there is no such thing as one good man. The world is her buffet and variety is the spice that keeps life yummy. The last thing on this sister's mind is settling down.Madras on Rainy Days: A Novel
By Samina Ali. 2004
Set against the backdrop of the ancient walled city of Hyderabad and mounting Hindu-Muslim tensions, Madras on Rainy Days lyrically…
evokes the complexities of life behind the chador. A gorgeously written novel by an original new voice in international fiction.Layla is torn among clashing identities--dutiful Muslim daughter and free, independent American woman. When she is nineteen, her parents inform Layla that a marriage has been arranged for her to an Indian man she doesn't know. A stunned Layla submits reluctantly but not before she commits a dangerous, final act of defiance. In the heat and noise of Hyderabad, as her wedding looms, her behavior becomes more and more erratic. Her mother, fearing demonic possession, takes Layla to a Muslim faith-healer, an alim, hoping to exorcise all traces of rebellion. To Layla's surprise, the ancient and elaborate wedding rituals, her groom's physical beauty, and the unexpectedly warm welcome of her new family fill her with a sense of belonging she has never known before. But her honeymoon in Madras soon reveals the full horror of the devil's bargain she has struck.The Dread Line: A Mulligan Novel (Liam Mulligan #5)
By Bruce DeSilva. 2016
The Dread Line: the latest Liam Mulligan novel from award winning author Bruce DeSilva.Since he got fired in spectacular fashion…
from his newspaper job last year, former investigative reporter Liam Mulligan has been piecing together a new life--one that straddles both sides of the law. He's getting some part-time work with his friend McCracken's detective agency. He's picking up beer money by freelancing for a local news website. And he's looking after his semi-retired mobster-friend's bookmaking business. But Mulligan still manages to find trouble. He's feuding with a cat that keeps leaving its kills on his porch. He's obsessed with a baffling jewelry heist. And he's enraged that someone in town is torturing animals. All this keeps distracting him from a big case that needs his full attention. The New England Patriots, shaken by a series of murder charges against a star player, have hired Mulligan and McCracken to investigate the background of a college athlete they're thinking of drafting. At first, the job seems routine, but as soon as they begin asking questions, they get push-back. The player, it seems, has something to hide--and someone is willing to kill to make sure it remains secret.At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.The Autobiography of God: A Novel
By Julius Lester. 2004
Rebecca Nachman is a Rabbi without a synagogue. Having resigned from her dwindling congregation, she now works as a college…
counselor at a small Vermont college advising students about private matters and offering the "Jewish perspective" on issues raised at faculty dinner parties.Deeply lonely and on the edge of losing her faith, she comes into possession of a Torah, the last relic of Czechowa, a village of Polish Jews who were exterminated by the Nazis. With the Torah, the unquiet spirits of the village dead begin to visit Rebecca. On one visit they leave a manuscript written in Hebrew and titled My Life, an autobiography by God who, like any eager author, is seeking a sympathetic reader. No one has ever finished reading the manuscript, including Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, Maimonides, and Augustine. God thinks Rebecca will. Rebecca's life is further complicated when one of her advisees-a troubled young woman who seemed on the verge of confessing something-is found murdered. As the college struggles to comprehend the tragedy and a police investigation is launched, Rebecca begins reading, and so comes to confront the central challenge to her faith in His most troubling and unlikely incarnation.Julius Lester's first adult novel in more than a decade, The Autobiography of God marks the return of an utterly original and provocative voice in American letters, addressing religion with wicked humor and profound reverence.