**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.
William J. Mann, author of the bestselling Kate: The WomanWho Was Hepburn, has now turned his attention to ElizabethTaylor, the quintessential movie star, and uses her biography toreveal the machinations of stardom and fame, from the studio era ofHollywood through the 1970s. How to Be a Movie Star isa totally fresh, brilliantly researched, and reported portrait ofElizabeth Taylor, as she became our first superstar. It isalso a fascinating revelation of cadre that got her there, from hermother to her managers, publicists, gossip columnists, and earlypaparazzi--and, not least of all, herself. Swathed in mink, sailing aboard her yachts, discarding husbandsnearly as frequently as she changed diamond earrings, Taylordominated the headlines for three glittering decades, rewritingrules, defying conventions, laying down the yardstick by whichcelebrity has been measured ever since. Focusing on the mostglamorous period in Taylor's career, Mann takes us inside herprivileged childhood in England to her schooling
Two classic plays translated by a Pulitzer Prize-winning poetinto English verse. In The Misanthrope, society itself is indictedand the impurity of its critics motives is exposed. In Tartuffe,the bigoted and prudish Orgon falls completely under the power ofthe wily Tartuffe. Introductions by Richard Wilbur.
Originally subtitled "An Adventurous Education, 1935-1946",this book is a key volume in Kerouac's lifework, the series ofautobiographical novels he referred to as The Legend of Duluoz. Awonderfully unassuming look back at the origins of his career--aprehistory of the Beat era, written from the perspective of thepsychedelic '60s.
First published in 1938, The Hobbit is a story that "grew inthe telling," and many characters and events in the published bookare completely different from what Tolkien first wrote to readaloud to his young sons as part of their "fireside reads." For thefirst time, The History of the Hobbit reproduces the originalversion of one of literature's most famous stories, and includesmany little-known illustrations and previously unpublished maps forThe Hobbit created by Tolkien himself. Also featured are extensiveannotations and commentaries on the date of composition, howTolkien's professional and early mythological writings influencedthe story, the imaginary geography he created, and how he came torevise the book in the years after publication to accommodateevents in The Lord of the Rings.
In one of his finest achievements, Nobel Prize winner SaulBellow presents a multifaceted portrait of a modern-day hero, a manstruggling with the complexity of existence and longing forredemption. Introduction by Philip Roth
Dick Young is lent a house in Cornwall by his friendProfessor Magnus Lane. During his stay he agrees to serve as aguinea pig for a new drug that Magnus has discovered in hisbiochemical researches. The effect of this drug is to transportDick from the house at Kilmarth to the Cornwall of the 14thcentury. There, in the manor of Tywardreath, the domain of SirHenry Champernoune, he witnesses intrigue, adultery and murder. Ashis time travelling increases, Dick resents more and more the dayshe must spend in the modern world, longing ever more fervently toget back into his world of centuries before ...
Love blooms in the second novel in Nora Roberts's celebratedBride Quartet series. As little girls MacKensie, Emma, Laurel, andParker spent hours acting out their perfect make believe "I do"moments. Years later their fantasies become reality when they starttheir own wedding planning company to make every woman's dream daycome true. With perfect flowers, delicious desserts, and joyfulmoments captured on film, Nora Roberts's Bride Quartet shares eachwoman's emotionally magical journey to romance. "In Bed of Roses,"florist Emma Grant is finding career success with her friends atVows wedding planning company, and her love life appears to bethriving. Though men swarm around her, she still hasn't found Mr.Right. And the last place she's looking is right under her nose.But that's just where Jack Cooke is. He's so close to the women ofVows that he's practically family, but the architect has begun toadmit to himself that his feelings for Emma have developed intomuch more than friendship. When Emma returns his pa
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
In the "stifling heat of equatorial Newark," a terrifyingepidemic is raging, threatening the children of the New Jersey citywith maiming, paralysis, life-long disability, and even death. Thisis the startling and surprising theme of Roth's wrenching new book:a wartime polio epidemic in the summer of 1944 and the effect ithas on a closely knit, family-oriented Newark community and itschildren. At the center of NEMISIS is a vigorous, dutiful, twenty-threeyear old playground director, Bucky Cantor, a javelin thrower andweightlifter, who is devoted to his charges and disappointed withhimself because his weak eyes have excluded him from serving in thewar alongside his contemporaries. Focusing on Cantor's dilemmas aspolio begins to ravage his playground--and on the everday realitieshe faces--Roth leads us through every inch of emotion such apestilence can breed: the fear, the panic, the anger, thebewilderment, the suffering, and the pain. Moving between the smoldering, malodorous streets of besieg
Perhaps the most famous of Lawrence's novels, the 1928 LadyChatterley's Lover is no longer distinguished for theonce-shockingly explicit treatment of its subject matter--theadulterous affair between a sexually unfulfilled upper-classmarried woman and the game keeper who works for the estate owned byher wheelchaired husband. Now that we're used to reading about sex,and seeing it in the movies, it's apparent that the novel ismemorable for better reasons: namely, that Lawrence was a masterfuland lyrical writer, whose story takes us bodily into the world ofits characters. --This text refers to an alternate Paperbackedition.
Together in one extraordinary boxed set- "Naked in Death,""Glory in Death," and "Immortal in Death"-the first three In Deathnovels featuring New York Police Lieutenant Eve Dallas. Naked inDeath Eve Dallas is a New York police lieutenant using herinstincts to hunt for a ruthless killer. Breaking every rule, Evegets involved with Roarke, an Irish billionaire-and a suspect inEve's murder investigation. But passion and seduction have rulesall their own. Glory in Death Police Lieutenant Eve Dallas has noproblem finding connections between two violent crimes. Bothvictims were beautiful and highly successful women whose intimaterelations with men of great power and wealth provide Eve with along list of suspects-including her own lover, Roarke. Immortal inDeath A top model is dead, the victim of a brutal murder. PoliceLieutenant Eve Dallas puts her professional life on the line totake the case when suspicion falls on her best friend, the otherwoman in a fatal love triangle. And beneath the facade of glamour,Ev
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.
Ruth Anne "Bone" Boatwright, an illegitimate young girl,dreams of escaping her Greenville County, South Carolina, home, hernotorious, hard-living family, and the unwanted attentions of herabusive stepfather, Daddy Glen. A first novel. Reprint. NationalBook Award finalist. NYT.
In eight new stories, a master of the form extends and magnifies her great themes--the vagaries of love, the passion that leads down unexpected paths, the chaos hovering just under the surface of things, and the strange, often comical desires of the human heart. Time stretches out in some of the stories: a man and a woman look back forty years to the summer they met--the summer, as it turns out, that the true nature of their lives was revealed. In others time is telescoped: a young girl finds in the course of an evening that the mother she adores, and whose fluttery sexuality she hopes to emulate, will not sustain her--she must count on herself. Some choices are made--in a will, in a decision to leave home--with irrevocable and surprising consequences. At other times disaster is courted or barely skirted: when a mother has a startling dream about her baby; when a woman, driving her grandchildren to visit the lakeside haunts of her youth, starts a game that could have dangerous consequences.
In Naked, David Sedaris's message is pay attention to me.Whether he's taking to the road with a thieving quadriplegic,sorting out the fancy from the extra-fancy in a bleak fruit-packingfactory, or celebrating Christmas in the company of a recentlyparoled prostitute, this collection of memoirs creates a wickedlyincisive portrait of an all-too-familiar world. It takes Sedarisfrom his humiliating bout with obsessive behavior in 'A Plague ofTics' to the title story, in which he is finally forced to face hisnaked self in the mirrored sunglasses of a lunatic. At this soulfuland moving moment, he picks potato chip crumbs from his pubic hairand wonders what it all means. This remarkable journey into his ownlife follows a path of self-effacement and a lifelong search foridentity, leaving him both under suspicion and overdressed.
Here for the first time, the original, complete Star Warstrilogy in a special 25th anniversary collector's editionhardcover.Twenty-five years after the phenomenon was born, StarWars remains one of the greatest fantasy epics ever told. Here inone collector's edition are the original stories from the firstthree classic films -- Star Wars: A New Hope, Star Wars: The EmpireStrikes Back, and Star Wars: Return of the Jedi -- each a New YorkTimes bestseller with over one million copies in print. Read thesethrilling novels to see where it all began with Luke Skywalker, afarm boy looking for adventure in a galaxy far, far away....
First published in 1939, these three short novels secured theauthor's reputation as a master of short fiction.
Of Galbraith's classic examination of the 1929 financialcollapse, the Atlantic Monthly said: "Economic writings are seldomnotable for their entertainment value, but this book is.Galbraith's prose has grace and wit, and he distills a good deal ofsardonic fun from the whopping errors of the nation's oracles andthe wondrous antics of the financial community." Originallypublished in 1955, Galbraith's book has risen once again asAmericans look for perspective on the current global financialcrisis. This new edition will be published on the 80th anniversaryof the Great Crash with a new introduction by the author's son,economist, James K. Galbraith. He is the author of "The PredatorState: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why LiberalsShould Too."
Bored with their work, three Milanese editors cook up "thePlan," a hoax that connects the medieval Knights Templar with otheroccult groups from ancient to modern times. This produces a mapindicating the geographical point from which all the powers of theearth can be controlled--a point located in Paris, France, atFoucault's Pendulum. But in a fateful turn the joke becomes all tooreal, and when occult groups, including Satanists, get wind of thePlan, they go so far as to kill one of the editors in their questto gain control of the earth. Orchestrating these and other diverse characters into hismultilayered semiotic adventure, Eco has created a superb cerebralentertainment.
A city is hit by an epidemic of "white blindness" which sparesno one. Authorities confine the blind to an empty mental hospital,but there the criminal element holds everyone captive, stealingfood rations and raping women. There is one eyewitness to thisnightmare who guides seven strangers-among them a boy with nomother, a girl with dark glasses, a dog of tears-through the barrenstreets, and the procession becomes as uncanny as the surroundingsare harrowing. A magnificent parable of loss and disorientation anda vivid evocation of the horrors of the twentieth century,Blindness has swept the reading public with its powerful portrayalof man's worst appetites and weaknesses-and man's ultimatelyexhilarating spirit. The stunningly powerful novel of man's will tosurvive against all odds, by the winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize forLiterature
The Restoration Court knows Lady Dona St Columb to be ripe forany folly, any outrage that will alter the tedium of her days. Butthere is another, secret Dona who longs for a life of honest love-- and sweetness, even if it is spiced with danger. It is this Donawho flees the stews of London for remote Navron, looking for peaceof mind in its solitary woods and hidden creeks. She finds therethe passion her spirit craves -- in the love of a daring piratehunted by all Cornwall, a Frenchman who, like Dona, would gamblehis life for a moment's joy.
How is it that we can recognize photos from our high schoolyearbook decades later, but cannot remember what we ate forbreakfast yesterday? And why are we inclined to buy more cans ofsoup if the sign says "LIMIT 12 PER CUSTOMER" rather than "LIMIT 4PER CUSTOMER?" In "Kluge, "Gary Marcus argues convincingly that ourminds are not as elegantly designed as we may believe. Theimperfections result from a haphazard evolutionary process thatoften proceeds by piling new systems on top of old ones--and thosesystems don't always work well together. The end product is a"kluge," a clumsy, cobbled-together contraption. Taking us on atour of the essential areas of human experience--memory, belief,decision making, language, and happiness--Marcus unveils afundamentally new way of looking at the evolution of the human mindand simultaneously sheds light on some of the most mysteriousaspects of human nature.