Now in paperback- The New York Times bestsellingnovel of rock 'n roll, super fandom, and love, by the belovedauthor of About a Boy and High Fidelity . Nick Hornby returns to his roots-music and messy relationships-inthis funny and touching new novel which thoughtfully andsympathetically looks at how lives can be wasted but how they arenever beyond redemption. Annie lives in a dull town on England'sbleak east coast and is in a relationship with Duncan which mirrorsthe place; Tucker was once a brilliant songwriter and performer,who's gone into seclusion in rural America-or at least that's whathis fans think. Duncan is obsessed with Tucker's work, to the pointof derangement, and when Annie dares to go public on her dislike ofhis latest album, there are quite unexpected, life-changingconsequences for all three. Nick Hornby uses this intriguing canvas to explore why it is we sooften let the early promise of relationships, ambition and indeedlife evaporate. And he comes to some surprisingly optimisticconclu
First published to critical acclaim by Houghton Mifflin, TimO'Brien's celebrated classic In the Lake of the Woods now returnsto the house in a gorgeous new Mariner paperback edition. Thisriveting novel of love and mystery from the author of The ThingsThey Carried examines the lasting impact of the twentieth century'slegacy of violence and warfare, both at home and abroad. Whenlong-hidden secrets about the atrocities he committed in Vietnamcome to light, a candidate for the U.S. Senate retreats with hiswife to a lakeside cabin in northern Minnesota. Within days oftheir arrival, his wife mysteriously vanishes into the waterywilderness.
A teenage gang comes of age in the 1960s Bronx. Written whenthe author was twenty-four, this story was the basis for a majorfeature film.
Julie Powell thought cooking her way through Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking was the craziest thingshe'd ever do--until she embarked on the voyage recounted in hernew memoir, CLEAVING.Her marriage challenged by an insane,irresistible love affair, Julie decides to leave town and immerseherself in a new obsession: butchery. She finds her way toFleischer's, a butcher shop where she buries herself in the detailsof food. She learns how to break down a side of beef and French arack of ribs--tough, physical work that only sometimes distractsher from thoughts of afternoon trysts. The camaraderie at Fleischer's leads Julie to search out fellowbutchers around the world--from South America to Europe to Africa.At the end of her odyssey, she has learned a new art and perhapseven mastered her unruly heart.
When Abigail Thomass husband, Rich, was hit by a car, his skullwas shattered, his brain severely damaged. Subject to rages,terrors, and hallucinations and with no memory of what he did thehour, the day, the year before he was sent to live in a nursingfacility that specializes in treating traumatic brain injuries.This tragedy is the ground on which Abigail had to build a newlife. How she built that life is a story of great courage andchange, of moving to a small country town, of a new family composedof three dogs, knitting, and friendship, of facing down guilt anddiscovering gratitude. It is also about her relationship with Rich,a man who lived in the eternal present, and the eerie poetry of hisoften uncanny perceptions. Hailed by Stephen King as "the bestmemoir I have ever read," this wise, plainspoken, beautiful bookenacts the truth Abigail has discovered since the accident: Youmight not find meaning in disaster, but you might, with effort,make something useful of it.
First published in 1939, these three short novels secured theauthor's reputation as a master of short fiction.
The imaginative breadth and the intellectual depth of The WildAss's Skin make it one of the greatest of Balzac's 'Etudesphilosophiques'. With its central symbol of the magic piece ofshagreen, it expresses the peculiarly Balzacian idea of the humanwill and dramatises with startling urgency the choice betweenruthless self- gratification and asceticism, between vice andvirtue, between dissipation and restraint. The symbolism ispowerful but not overpowering: shrewd psychology, superblychiselled dialogue and the sheer energy of the de*ive passages-- the gambling den, the orgy, the devastating finale--give TheWild Ass's Skin a compelling and forceful realism.
Tim O'Brien's modern classic that reset our understanding offiction, nonfiction, and the way they can work together, as well asour understanding of the Vietnam war and its consequences, TheThings They Carried now has well over a million copies inprint.
Porter's reputation as one of americanca's most distinguishedwriters rests chiefly on her superb short stories. This volumeincludes the collections Flowering Judas; Pale Horse, Pale Rider;and The Leaning Tower as well as four stories not availableelsewhere in book form. Winner of the National Book Award and thePulitzer Prize.
From the Booker Prize-winning author of The Remains of theDay comes a devastating new novel of innocence, knowledge, andloss. As children Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy were students at Hailsham,an exclusive boarding school secluded in the English countryside.It was a place of mercurial cliques and mysterious rules whereteachers were constantly reminding their charges of how specialthey were. Now, years later, Kathy is a young woman. Ruth and Tommy havereentered her life. And for the first time she is beginning to lookback at their shared past and understand just what it is that makesthem special–and how that gift will shape the rest of their timetogether. Suspenseful, moving, beautifully atmospheric, NeverLet Me Go is another classic by the author of The Remains ofthe Day
What would you do if out of the blue, you received a letterfrom your first love? Si?n Richards sees no reason why she can'twrite back to Charles Callahan. After all, it's been thirty yearsand they are both married with families. But when they decide tomeet again, an innocent correspondence becomes a dangerousintimacy. Swept up in the past and consumed by an obsessive love,Charles and Si?n risk everything to be together. A heart-wrenching,suspenseful story with an unforgettable conclusion, Where or Whenis also a 'thoughtful, beautifully written contemporary romance'(The Washington Post).
One of Americas foremost novelists and critics, Cynthia Ozickhas won praise and provoked debate for taking on challengingliterary, historical, and moral issues. Her new collection ofspirited essays focuses on the essential joys of great literature.With razor-sharp wit and an inspiring joie de vivre, sheinvestigates unexpected byways in the works of Leo Tolstoy, SaulBellow, Helen Keller, Isaac Babel, Sylvia Plath, Susan Sontag,Henry James, and others. In "Highbrow Blues" and in reflections onher own early fiction, she writes intimately of "the din in ourheads, that relentless inner hum," and the curative power ofliterary imagination.
In "Swann's Way," the themes of Proust's masterpiece areintroduced, and the narrator's childhood in Paris and Combray isrecalled, most memorably in the evocation of the famous maternalgood-night kiss. The recollection of the narrator's love forSwann's daughter Gilberte leads to an account of Swann's passionfor Odette and the rise of the nouveaux riches Verdurins. For thisauthoritative English-language edition, D. J. Enright has revisedthe late Terence Kilmartin's acclaimed reworking of C. K. ScottMoncrieff's translation to take into account the new definitiveFrench editions of "A la recherche du temps perdu" (the finalvolume of these new editions was published by the Bibliotheque dela Pleiade in 1989).
Taking his title from the wounded cry of the once great MaxBialystock in The Producers -- "Look at me now Look at me now I'mwearing a cardboard belt " -- the charming essayist Joseph Epsteingives us his largest and most adventurous collection to date. Withhis signature gifts of sparkling humor and penetratingintelligence, he issues forth as a memoirist, polemicist, literarycritic, and amused observer of contemporary culture. In deeplyconsidered examinations of writers from Paul Valery to TrumanCapote, in incisive take-downs of such cultural pooh-bahs as HaroldBloom and George Steiner, and in personally revealing essays abouthis father and about his years as a teacher, this remarkablecollection from one of America's best essayists is a book to besavored.
