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By Jack Kerouac Edited by Todd Tietchen. 2014
In late 1944, under rather mysterious circumstances, aspiring writer Jack Kerouac lost a novella-length manuscript titled The Haunted Life. …
Set in Galloway, a fictionalized version of Kerouac's hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts, the coming-of-age story of Peter Martin--a character based on the author's recently departed friend Sebastian Sampas--tackles the pressing issues of the day. At home in the working-class town the summer before his sophomore year at Boston College, Peter finds himself conflicted. Like many Americans, Peter is unsure, suspended between the economic crisis of the previous decade and the impending US entry into World War II. In The Haunted Life, Peter struggles to define what he believes to be intellectually true and worthy of his life and talents. Skillfully edited by Todd F. Tietchen, assistant professor of English at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell,The Haunted Life is rounded out by sketches, notes, and reflections Kerouac kept during the novella's composition as well as a revealing selection of correspondence with his father, Leo.By Ann Purser. 2011
Cantankerous spinster Ivy Beasley has quickly learned that spending her golden years in the quaint village of Barrington won't be…
as quiet as she thought. Ivy hasn't been in assisted living at Springfields for long, but she's already found new friends, formed a detective agency, and solved a murder. And as autumn falls, Ivy and her team are asked to investigate a mysterious death in the village of Measby-in between card games, of course.By Ann Purser. 2010
A new series and a new sleuth from Ann Purser-author of the Lois Meade mysteries! Ivy Beasley, the beloved cantankerous…
spinster from the Lois Meade mysteries, has found a silver lining in her golden years as an amateur sleuth. She teams up with Gus, a mysterious newcomer to the small English village of Barrington who can't resist a little excitement even as he strives to keep his past a secret, and her own cousin, a widow with time on her hands and money in her purse. Together they're determined to solve the murder of Gus's elderly neighbor.By Chantal Bilodeau, Patrice Martin. 2013
Multiple plot lines interweave with twentieth-century literary allusions as hapless bureaucrat P. attempts to secure delivery of a valuable cultural…
relic. Patrice Martin's ticklish tip of the hat to the writing of Franz Kafka also evokes the literary techniques of Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, and Paul Auster.Polymath Patrice Martin is a writer, musician, and politician who is a former clerk in Canada's House of Commons, and currently is a Gatineau city councilor. He confesses his working life in government bureaucracy helped shape this, his first novel.Chantal Bilodeau is a New York-based playwright and translator originally from Montreal, Quebec.By Rein Raud, Adam Cullen. 2008
The Brother is a spaghetti western told in poetic prose, simultaneously paying tribute to both Clint Eastwood and Alessandro Baricco.…
It opens with a mysterious stranger arriving in a small town controlled by a group of men-men who recently cheated the stranger's supposed sister out of her inheritance. Following his arrival, fortunes change dramatically, enraging this group of powerful men.By F. Scott Fitzgerald. 1925
"Reading F. Scott Fitzgerald's Trimalchio, an early and complete version of The Great Gatsby, is like listening to a familiar…
musical composition played in a different key and with an alternate bridge passage... There is a tradition in Fitzgerald studies that The Great Gatsby became a masterpiece in revision. This judgment is correct. Fitzgerald improved the novel in galleys; The Great Gatsby is a better novel than Trimalchilo. But Trimalchilo is a remarkable achievement, and different enough from Gatsby to merit consideration on its own. Trimalchilois a direct and straightforward narration of the story of Jay Gatsby, NIck Carraway, Jordan Baker, Tom and Daisy Buchanan, and Myrtle and George Wilson. The handling of plot details is sure-handed; the writing is graceful and confident. Trimalchilowill provide readers with new understanding of F. Scott Fitzgerald's working methods, fresh insight into his characters, and renewed appreciation of his genius." From the introduction.By Helen Dewitt. 2016
Called "remarkable" (The Wall Street Journal) and "an ambitious, colossal debut novel" (Publishers Weekly), Helen DeWitt's The Last Samurai is…
back in print at last Helen DeWitt's 2000 debut, The Last Samurai, was "destined to become a cult classic" (Miramax). The enterprising publisher sold the rights in twenty countries, so "Why not just, 'destined to become a classic?'" (Garth Risk Hallberg) And why must cultists tell the uninitiated it has nothing to do with Tom Cruise? Sibylla, an American-at-Oxford turned loose on London, finds herself trapped as a single mother after a misguided one-night stand. High-minded principles of child-rearing work disastrously well. J. S. Mill (taught Greek at three) and Yo Yo Ma (Bach at two) claimed the methods would work with any child; when these succeed with the boy Ludo, he causes havoc at school and is home again in a month. (Is he a prodigy, a genius? Readers looking over Ludo's shoulder find themselves easily reading Greek and more.) Lacking male role models for a fatherless boy, Sibylla turns to endless replays of Kurosawa's masterpiece Seven Samurai. But Ludo is obsessed with the one thing he wants and doesn't know: his father's name. At eleven, inspired by his own take on the classic film, he sets out on a secret quest for the father he never knew. He'll be punched, sliced, and threatened with retribution. He may not live to see twelve. Or he may find a real samurai and save a mother who thinks boredom a fate worse than death.By Marcel Proust, William C. Carter. 2015
Edited and annotated by leading Proust scholar William Carter, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower is the second…
volume of one of the twentieth century's great literary triumphs.  It was this volume that won the Prix Goncourt in 1919, affirming Proust as a major literary figure and dramatically increasing his fame. Here the narrator whose childhood was reflected in Swann's Way moves further through childhood and into adolescence, as the author brilliantly examines themes of love and youth, in settings in Paris and by the sea in Normandy. The reader again encounters Swann, now married to his former mistress and largely fallen from high society, and meets for the first time several of Proust's most memorable characters: the handsome, dashing Robert de Saint-Loup, who will become the narrator's best friend; the enigmatic Albertine, leader of the "little band" of adolescent girls; the profoundly artistic Elstir, believed to be Proust's composite of Whistler, Monet, and other leading painters; and, making his unforgettable entrance near the end of the volume, the intense, indelible Baron de Charlus.  Permeated by the "bloom of youth" and its resonances in memories of love and friendship, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower takes readers into the heart of Proust's comic and poetic genius. As with Swann's Way, Carter uses C. K. Scott Moncrieff's beloved translation as the basis for this annotated and fully revised edition. Carter corrects long-standing errors in Scott Moncrieff's otherwise superlative translation, bringing it closer than ever to the spirit and style of Proust's original text--and reaching English readers in a way that the Pléiade annotations cannot. Insightful and accessible, Carter's edition of Marcel Proust's masterwork will be the go-to text for generations of readers seeking to understand Proust's remarkable bygone world.By Velma Wallis. 1993
Based on an Athabascan Indian legend passed along for many generations from mothers to daughters of the upper Yukon River…
Valley in Alaska, this is the suspenseful, shocking, ultimately inspirational tale of two old women abandoned by their tribe during a brutal winter famine. Though these women have been known to complain more than contribute, they now must either survive on their own or die trying. In simple but vivid detail, Velma Wallis depicts a landscape and way of life that are at once merciless and starkly beautiful. In her old women, she has created two heroines of steely determination whose story of betrayal, friendship, community, and forgiveness "speaks straight to the heart with clarity, sweetness, and wisdom" (Ursula K. Le Guin).By Janice A. Radway. 1967
Deftly melding ethnography, cultural history, literary criticism, and autobiographical reflection, A Feeling for Books is at once an engaging study…
of the Book-of-the-Month Club's influential role as a cultural institution and a profoundly personal meditation about the experience of reading. Janice Radway traces the history of the famous mail-order book club from its controversial founding in 1926 through its evolution into an enterprise uniquely successful in blending commerce and culture. Framing her historical narrative with writing of a more personal sort, Radway reflects on the contemporary role of the Book-of-the-Month Club in American cultural history and in her own life. Her detailed account of the standards and practices employed by the club's in-house editors is also an absorbing story of her interactions with those editors. Examining her experiences as a fourteen-year-old reader of the club's selections and, later, as a professor of literature, she offers a series of rigorously analytical yet deeply personal readings of such beloved novels as Marjorie Morningstar and To Kill a Mockingbird. Rich and rewarding, this book will captivate and delight anyone who is interested in the history of books and in the personal and transformative experience of reading.By Suzette Haden Elgin, Susan Squier. 1984
Called "fascinating" by the New York Times upon its first publication in 1984, Native Tongue won wide critical praise and…
cult status, and has often been compared to the futurist fiction of Margaret Atwood. Set in the twenty-second century, the novel tells of a world where women are once again property, denied civil rights and banned from public life. Earth's wealth depends on interplanetary commerce with alien races, and linguists ---a small, clannish group of families ---have become the ruling elite by controlling all interplanetary communication. Their women are used to breed perfect translators for all the galaxies' languages.Nazareth Chornyak, the most talented linguist of the family, is exhausted by her constant work translating for trade organizations, supervising the children's language education, running the compound, and caring for the elderly men. She longs to retire to the Barren House, where women past childbearing age knit, chat, and wait to die. What Nazareth comes to discover is that a slow revolution is going on in the Barren Houses: there, word by word, women are creating a language of their own to free them from men's control."Native Tongue brings to life not only the possibility of a women's language, but a rationale for one,"--Village Voice"Elgin takes up more than linguistics, of course--everything from religion to sex...the story is absolutely compelling."--Women's Review of BooksSuzette Haden Elgin is author of twelve science fiction novels and is widely know for her best-selling series The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense and for The Grandmother Principles. She is director of the Ozark Center for Language Studies and is professor emerita of linguistics at San Diego State University.Susan Squier is Julia Brill professor of English and Women's Studies at Pennsylvania State University.By Kathy Page. 2014
"Simply an epiphany."-Kirkus, starred reviewSimon Austen has the names people have called him tattooed all over his body. Waste of…
Space. Bastard. A Threat to Women. Murderer. Facing a lifetime behind bars and subjected to new therapies for sexual reprogramming, Simon finds himself plunged into a terrifying process of self-reconstruction. But how much, in the end, can a man really change? Darkly compelling and deeply moving, Alphabet is a psychological exploration of one man's uncertain and often-harrowing journey towards rehabilitation."Intense, revealing, challenging and above all riveting ... I kept saying to myself, how could she know this?"-Erwin James, convicted murderer, author of A Life Inside: A Prisoner's Notebook"Sometimes novelists go too far-and sometimes they manage to demonstrate that too far is the place they needed to go."-Time Out UKPraise for Kathy Page"Her unforgettable prose is moody, shape-shifting, provocative and always as compelling as a strong light at the end of a road you hesitate to walk down...but will."- Amy Bloom, author of Where the God of Love Hangs Out"Marvellously well-crafted ... I can't remember the last time I was so compelled, impressed and unsettled by the emotional world of a novel."- Sarah Waters, author of Tipping the VelvetBy Antonia Lloyd-Jones, Zygmunt Miloszewski. 2007
Praise for Entanglement:"An exquisite contemporary crime story. Polish literature boasts a real master."--Jerzy Pilch, author of The Mighty Angel"A tightly…
plotted mystery novel, dark humor and contemporary Warsaw perfectly rendered."--Przekrój MagazineThe morning after a group psychotherapy session in a Warsaw monastery, Henry Talek is found dead, a roasting spit stuck in one eye.Public prosecutor Teodor Szacki, world-weary, suffering from bureaucratic exhaustion and marital ennui, feels that life has passed him by. But this case changes everything. Because of it he meets Monika Grzelka, a young journalist whose charms prove difficult to resist, and he discovers the frightening power of certain esoteric therapeutic methods. The shocking videos of the sessions lead him to an array of possible scenarios. Could one of the patients have become so absorbed by his therapy role-playing that he murdered Telak? Szacki's investigation leads him to an earlier murder, before the fall of Communism.And why is the Secret Police suddenly taking an interest in all this? As Szacki uncovers each piece of the puzzle, facts emerge that he'd be better off not knowing, for his own safety.Zygmunt Miloszewski, born in Warsaw in 1975, is an editor currently working for Newsweek. His first novel, The Intercom, was published in 2005 to high acclaim. Entanglement followed in 2007, and the author is now working on screenplays based on The Intercom and Entanglement as well as on a sequel to the latter, also featuring Teodor Szacki.By Lawrence Block, Max Allan Collins, Ed Gorman, Jeremiah Healy, S. J. Rozan, Otto Penzler, Dennis Lehane, Brendan Dubois, Ace Atkins, Parnell Hall, Lyndsay Faye, Reed Farrel Coleman, Gary Phillips, Matthew Clemens, Loren D Estleman. 2012
When Robert B. Parker passed in early 2010, the world lost two great men: Parker himself, iconic American crime writer…
whose books have sold more than 6 million copies worldwide, and his best-known creation, Spenser. Parker's Spenser series not only influenced the work of countless of today's writers, but is also credited with reviving and forever changing the genre.In Pursuit of Spenser offers a look at Parker and to Spenser through the eyes of the writers he influenced. Editor Otto Penzler-- proprietor of one of the oldest and largest mystery specialist bookstores in the country, New York's The Mysterious Bookshop, and renowned mystery fiction editor whose credits include series editor for the Best American Crime Writing and Best American Mystery Stories, among many others (and about whom Parker himself once wrote, "Otto Penzler knows more about crime fiction than most people know about anything")-- collects some of today's bestselling mystery authors to discuss Parker, his characters, the series, and their impact on the world.From Hawk to Susan Silverman to Jesse Stone and Sunny Randall, from the series' Boston milieu to Parker's own take on his character, In Pursuit of Spenser pays tribute to Spenser, and Parker, with affection, humor, and a deep appreciation for what both have left behind.By Alexander Pushkin, Robert Chandler, Elizabeth Chandler. 1957
Famous for his enormously influential poetry and plays, Alexander Pushkin is also beloved for his short stories. This collection showcases…
his tremendous range, which enabled him to portray the Russian people through romance, drama, and satire. The sparkling humor of the five "Tales of Belkin" contrasts with a dark fable of gambling and obsessive greed in "The Queen of Spades" and the masterful historical novella, "The Captain's Daughter," a story of love and betrayal set during a rebellion in the time of Catherine the Great.By Howard Scott, Madeleine Gagnon, Phyllis Aronoff. 2012
Is an artist born, or rather, created by experience? From the moment in childhood when he is forced to take…
drastic action to defend his adoptive mother from a violent assault - the only maternal figure that he has ever known - it is evident that the life of Joseph Sully-Jacques is to be no ordinary life, and one marked by sorrow and adversity.Unable to cope with or even recognize the residual effects of his trauma in adolescence, Joseph retreats into an increasingly abstract world, one in which he must confront what he calls his "visions." And when he hears of the death of his natural mother, this brings to the surface memories he had hoped were buried deep within him, and precipitates the form of various crises to come, particularly as he discovers and makes use of the artistic abilities revealed to his family during his psychiatric evaluation.After many more hardships, the young man does find meaning to the absurdities of life, ironically in the asylum, where he meets a virtuoso pianist whose condition prevents her from continuing to exercise her talents. They heal together through their mutual love, which will soon subsist upon nothing but memory and absence. During mournful years of raising his son alone, in his extensive adversaria, Joseph sets out to reconcile the contradictory themes in his life, including abandonment, madness, love, and death.In spare, lucid prose, and in a style reminiscent of André Gide, Madeleine Gagnon invites the reader to experience the creation and development of an artist "in his own words" - Joseph's gelid journal entries that are to become emphatic poetic laments - in a novel that chronicles the extreme destitution of Quebec in the years before World War Two and in abstract developing forms of artistic expression after years of uncertainty and loss.By Michael Henry Heim, Bohumil Hrabal, Adam Thirlwell. 1964
Rake, drunkard, aesthete, gossip, raconteur extraordinaire: the narrator of Bohumil Hrabal's rambling, rambunctious masterpiece Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in…
Age is all these and more. Speaking to a group of sunbathing women who remind him of lovers past, this elderly roué tells the story of his life--or at least unburdens himself of a lifetime's worth of stories. Thus we learn of amatory conquests (and humiliations), of scandals both private and public, of military adventures and domestic feuds, of what things were like "in the days of the monarchy" and how they've changed since. As the book tumbles restlessly forward, and the comic tone takes on darker shadings, we realize we are listening to a man talking as much out of desperation as from exuberance. Hrabal, one of the great Czech writers of the twentieth century, as well as an inveterate haunter of Prague's pubs and football stadiums, developed a unique method which he termed "palavering," whereby characters gab and soliloquize with abandon. Part drunken boast, part soul-rending confession, part metaphysical poem on the nature of love and time, this astonishing novel (which unfolds in a single monumental sentence) shows why he has earned the admiration of such writers as Milan Kundera, John Banville, and Louise Erdrich.By Arthur Miller, Gerald Weales. 1977
The Pulitzer Prize-winning tragedy of a salesman's deferred American dream Ever since it was first performed in 1949, Death of…
a Salesman has been recognized as a milestone of the American theater. In the person of Willy Loman, the aging, failing salesman who makes his living riding on a smile and a shoeshine, Arthur Miller redefined the tragic hero as a man whose dreams are at once insupportably vast and dangerously insubstantial. He has given us a figure whose name has become a symbol for a kind of majestic grandiosity--and a play that compresses epic extremes of humor and anguish, promise and loss, between the four walls of an American living room."By common consent, this is one of the finest dramas in the whole range of the American theater." --Brooks Atkinson, The New York Times"So simple, central, and terrible that the run of playwrights would neither care nor dare to attempt it." --TimeBy Ann Purser. 2012
In a brand-new mystery from the author of The Measby Murder Enquiry, the cantankerous golden years gumshoe Ivy Beasley keeps…
her mental faculties sharp with a strict regimen of crime detection. Apart from the unwelcome noise made by the morning cleaning crew, life has been quiet at Springfields Home for the Elderly. Too quiet, in fact. Ivy and her team of sleuths, Enquire Within, have resorted to finding lost cats, and Gus is even threatening to return to his memoirs. But no sooner does he attempt to put a winning phrase together than he receives a call from his ex-wife, Katherine, who is in desperate needs of a place to hide. Though Gus has a difficult time getting a straight answer from Kath--just as it was in their many years of marriage--something is most certainly afoot, and soon Enquire Within is back in business. This time they have their hands full, not only with missing pets, but missing jewels, and evidence of foul play uncomfortably close to their too quiet home...By Rodrigo Rey Rosa, Chris Andrews. 2014
“Right from the start I picked her for a thief, although that day she didn’t take anything. . . .…
I knew she’d be back,” the narrator/bookseller of Severina recalls in this novel’s opening pages. Imagine a dark-haired book thief as alluring as she is dangerous. Imagine the mesmerized bookseller secretly tracking the volumes she steals, hoping for insight into her character, her motives, her love life. In Rodrigo Rey Rosa’s hands, this tale of obsessive love is told with almost breathless precision and economy. The bookstore owner is soon entangled in Severina’s mystery: seductive and peripatetic, of uncertain nationality, she steals books to actually read them and to share with her purported grandfather, Señor Blanco. In this unsettling exploration of the alienating and simultaneously liberating power of love, the bookseller’s monotonous existence is rocked by the enigmatic Severina. As in a dream, the disoriented man finds that the thin border between rational and irrational is no longer reliable. Severina confirms Rey Rosa’s privileged place in contemporary world literature.