Here is the story of Jerry Weintraub: the self-made,Brooklyn-born, Bronx-raised impresario, Hollywood producer,legendary deal maker, and friend of politicians and stars. Nomatter where nature has placed him--the club rooms of Brooklyn, theMafia dives of New York's Lower East Side, the wilds of Alaska, orthe hills of Hollywood--he has found a way to put on a show andsell tickets at the door. "All life was a theater and I wanted toput it up on a stage," he writes. "I wanted to set the world undera marquee that read: 'Jerry Weintraub Presents.'" In WHEN I STOP TALKING, YOU'LL KNOW I'M DEAD, we follow Weintraubfrom his first great success at age twenty-six with Elvis Presley,whom he took on the road; to the immortal days with Sinatra and RatPack glory; to his crowning hits as a movie producer, starting withRobert Altman and Nashville , continuing with Oh,God! , The Karate Kid movies, and Diner ,among others, and summiting with Steven Soderbergh and Ocean'sEleven , Twelve , and Thirteen . Along the way,

Peach Blossom Pavilion is the story about the last Chinesepoet-musician courtesan, or Geisha. Chinese geisha culture existed2500 years ago and reached its fullest development about fourhundred years ago. (While the geisha tradition continues in Japan,the remarkable Chinese courtesan culture has passed into history.)Peach Blossom Pavilion is about these elegant, artistic courtesansand the fascinating culture that they represented. The protagonist,Precious Orchid, had many adventures both inside and outside theprostitution house, Peach Blossom pavilion. After her father wasexecuted for a crime he did not commit, Precious Orchid's mother istricked into leaving her in a high-class house of prostitutionwhere she has a traumatic initiation in the ways of her malecustomers. Yet Precious Orchid is able to find ways to mitigate hermisery through art and music, taught by her "sister" Pearl. Through all this she plots her escape, only to find herself inthe "bitter sea." Her adventures include practing sex magic with a

TheCircus has already suffered a bad defeat, and the result was twobullets in a man's back. But a bigger threat still exists. And thelegendary George Smiley is recruited to root out a high-level moleof thirty years' standing - though to find him means spying on thespies. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is brilliant and ceaselesslycompelling, pitting Smiley against his Cold War rival, Karla, inone of the greatest struggles in all fiction.

Anyone who has read J.D. Salinger's New Yorkerstories—particularly A Perfect Day for Bananafish, Uncle Wiggily inConnecticut, The Laughing Man, and For Esme—With Love and Squalor,will not be surprised by the fact that his first novel is fully ofchildren. The hero-narrator of THE CATCHER IN THE RYE is an ancientchild of sixteen, a native New Yorker named Holden Caulfield.Through circumstances that tend to preclude adult, secondhandde*ion, he leaves his prep school in Pennsylvania and goesunderground in New York City for three days. The boy himself is atonce too simple and too complex for us to make any final commentabout him or his story. Perhaps the safest thing we can say about Holden is that he wasborn in the world not just strongly attracted to beauty but,almost, hopelessly impaled on it. There are many voices in thisnovel: children's voices, adult voices, underground voices-butHolden's voice is the most eloquent of all. Transcending his ownvernacular, yet remaining marvelously faithful to it, he iss

"The third and fourth novel in John Updike's acclaimed quartetof Rabbit books-now in one marvelous volume."RABBIT IS RICHWinnerof the American Book Award andthe National Book Critics CircleAward "Dazzlingly reaffirms Updike's place as master chronicler ofthe spiritual maladies and very earthly pleasure of theMiddle-American male."-"Vogue ""A splendid achievement "-"The NewYork Times "RABBIT AT RESTWinner of the Pulitzer Prize andtheNational Book Critics Circle Award "Brilliant . . . It must beread. It is the best novel about America to come out of America fora very, very long time."-"The Washington Post Book World" "Powerful. . . John Updike with his precision's prose and his intimatelyattentive yet cold eye is a master."-"The New York Times BookReview"

The surprise New York Times bestseller, from an author who delivers American storytelling at its best. The story of marriage, family, and forgiveness that has become not just a bestseller but an instant classic Their story begins with one letter on their wedding night, a letter from the groom, promising to write his bride every week for as long they both shall live. Thirty-nine years later, Jack and Laurel Cooper die in each others arms. And when their grown children return to the family B&B to arrange the funeral, they discover thousands of letters. The letters they read tell of surprising joys and sorrows. They also hint at a shocking family secret and ultimately force the children to confront a life-changing moment of truth

Sixteen-year-old Katya Spivak is out for a walk on thegracious streets of Bayhead Harbor with her two summer babysittingcharges when she's approached by silver-haired, elegant MarcusKidder. At first his interest in her seems harmless, even pleasant;like his name, a sort of gentle joke. His beautiful home, thechildren's books he's written, his classical music, the marvelousart in his study, his lavish presents to her -- Mr. Kidder's lifecouldn't be more different from Katya's drab working-classexistence back home in South Jersey, or more enticing. But bydegrees, almost imperceptibly, something changes, and posing forMr. Kidder's new painting isn't the lighthearted endeavor it oncewas. What does he really want from her? And how far will he go toget it? In the tradition of Oates's classic story "Where Are YouGoing, Where Have You Been?" "A Fair Maiden "is an unsettling,ambiguous tale of desire and control.

Despondent over the futility of life in the South, black tenantfarmer Grange Copeland leaves his wife and son in Georgia to headNorth. After meeting an equally humiliating existence there, hereturns to Georgia, years later, to find his son, Brownfield,imprisoned for the murder of his wife. As the guardian of thecouple's youngest daughter, Grange Copeland is looking at his third-- and final -- chance to free himself from spiritual and socialenslavement.

Drawing from decades of work, travel, and research in Russia,Robert Alexander re-creates the tragic, perennially fascinatingstory of the final days of Russian monarchs Nicholas and Alexandraas seen through the eyes of the Romanov's young kitchen boy,Leonka.

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).

'Bein' an idiot is no box of chocolates' Laugh, cry, stand up and cheer: Forrest Gump is everyman's story, everyman's dream. A wonderfully warm, savagely barbed, and hilariously funny 'tale told by an idiot', from the razor-sharp pen of a contemporary wizard. No one is spared and everyone is included. If you've ever felt lacking, left out, put upon - or just wanted to have a rollicking good time this book is for you. At 6'6", 240 pounds, Forrest Gump is a difficult man to ignore, so follow Forrest from the football dynasties of Bear Bryant to the Vietnam War, from encounters with Presidents Johnson and Nixon to powwows with Chairman Mao. Go with Forrest to Harvard University, to a Hollywood movie set, on a professional wrestling tour, and into space on the oddest NASA mission ever. Forrest Gump lives! Thank heavens! 'A superbly controlled satire' 'FORREST GUMP is line bred out of Voltaire and Huck Finn; its humour is wild and coarse, a satire right on the money. It is not the less honest f

**DEBUT FICTION** Mary Todd Lincoln is one of history's mostmisunderstood and enigmatic women. The first president's wife to becalled First Lady, she was a political strategist, a supporter ofemancipation, and a mother who survived the loss of three childrenand the assassination of her beloved husband. Yet she also ran herfamily into debt, held seances in the White House, and wascommitted to an insane asylum. In Janis Cooke Newman's debut novel,Mary Todd Lincoln shares the story of her life in her own words.Writing from Bellevue Place asylum, she takes readers from hertempestuous childhood in a slaveholding Southern family through theyears after her husband's death. A dramatic tale filled withpassion and depression, poverty and ridicule, infidelity andredemption, Mary allows us entry into the inner, intimate world ofthis brave and fascinating woman.

The inspiration for the major motion picture starring BradPitt and Cate Blanchettaplus eighteen other stories by the belovedauthor of "The Great Gatsby" IN THE TITLE STORY, a baby born in1860 begins life as an old man and proceeds to age backward. F.Scott Fizgerald hinted at this kind of inversion when he called hisera aa generation grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought,all faiths in man shaken.a Perhaps nowhere in American fiction hasthis aLost Generationa been more vividly preserved than inFitzgeraldas short fiction. Spanning the early twentieth-centuryAmerican landscape, this original collection captures, withFitzgeraldas signature blend of enchantment and disillusionment,America during the Jazz Age.

From the early Soviet period, the impassioned short fictionof the great Russian-Jewish writer One of the most powerful short-story writers of the twentiethcentury, Isaac Babel expressed his sense of inner conflict throughdisturbing tales that explored the contradictions of Russiansociety. Whether reflecting on anti-Semitism in stories such as“Story of My Dovecote” and “First Love,” or depicting Jewishgangsters in his native Odessa, Babel’s eye for the comical laidbare the ironies of history. His masterpiece, “Red Cavalry,” set inthe Soviet-Polish war, is one of the classics of modern fiction. Byturns flamboyant and restrained, this collection of Babel’sbest-known stories vividly expresses the horrors of his age. “Amazing not only as literature but as biography.” —RichardBernstein, The New York Times “Marvelously subtle, tragic, and often comic.” —James Wood, The New Republic

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.

Upon its original publication in 1951, this PulitzerPrize-winning novel was immediately embraced as one of the firstserious works of fiction to help readers grapple with the humanconsequences of World War II. In the intervening half-century,Herman Wouk's boldly dramatic, brilliantly entertaining story oflife-and mutiny-on a Navy warship in the Pacific theater hasachieved the status of a modern classic

A delightfully pointed m?lange of fictional pieces from one ofthe world’s most acclaimed and incisive authors, The Tent isa sparkling addition to Margaret Atwood’s always masterfulwork.Here Atwood pushes form once again, with meditations onwarlords, pet heaven, and aging homemakers. She gives a sly peptalk to the ambitious young; writes about the disconcertingexperience of looking at old photos of ourselves; and examines theboons and banes of orphanhood. Accompanied by her own playfulillustrations, Atwood’s droll humor and keen insight make eachpiece full of clarity and grace. Prescient and personal, delectableand tart, The Tent reflects one of our wittiest authors ather best.