Vicki Forman gave birth to Evan and Ellie, weighing just a poundat birth, at twenty-three weeks gestation. During the delivery shebegged the doctors to "let her babies go" she knew all too wellthat at twenty-three weeks they could very well die and, if theysurvived, they would face a high risk of permanent disabilities.However, California law demanded resuscitation. Her daughter diedjust four days later; her son survived and was indeed multiplydisabled: blind, nonverbal, and dependent on a feeding tube. ThisLovely Life tells, with brilliant intensity, of what became of theForman family after the birth of the twins the harrowing medicalinterventions and ethical considerations involving the sanctity oflife and death. In the end, the longdelayed first steps of afive-year-old child will seem like the fist-pumping stuff of atriumph narrative. Formans intelligent voice gives a sensitive,nuanced rendering of her guilt, her anger, and her eventualacceptance in this portrait of a mothers fierce love for herchildren.

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.

Set in Cairo around the end of World War I, as Egypt, a Britishprotectorate, clamors for independence, 1988 Nobel Prize-winnerMahfouz's epic family drama explores deep fissures in thepatriarchal structure of one household. Prosperous merchant AhmadAbd al-Jawad, a tyrant at home, roams Cairo's tawdry entertainmentdistrict by night seeking illicit pleasures. His submissive wifeAmina is chained to the house; he throws her out on the streetafter she commits the sin of going outdoors for a walk. His twodaughters constantly bicker, and his three sons are beyond hiscontrol: Yasin commits sexual assaults on servants; Fahmy becomesan activist in the nationalist movement, while Kamal befriendsBritish soldiers. The first volume in Mahfouz's Cairo Trilogy(1956-57), this dense novel charts an Egypt lurching into themodern age. Mahfouz is a master at building up dramatic scenes andat portraying complex characters in depth. Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This textrefers to an out of print or unavailable

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.

Whether you are working on the novel that's been in the back ofyour mind for years or simply facing an increasing demand to writewell at work or school, the fact remains: more and more of us arewriting more often these days-reports, e-mails, faxes, andnewsletters. But despite the increase in written communication,something has been lost-the fundamentals of good writing. Grammarmaven Patricia T. O'Conner comes to the rescue with the mostpainless, practical, and funny writing book ever written. In short,snappy chapters filled with crystal-clear examples, amusingcomparisons, and humorous allegories that cover everything from"Pronoun Pileups" and "Verbs That Zing" to "What to Do When You'reStuck," O'Conner provides simple, straightforward tips to help yousort your thoughts and make sentences that make sense. Push asidethose stuffy old-fashioned rule books, because O'Conner has writtenthe most accessible and enjoyable book yet for today's writer.

The Fortress of Solitude is the story of Dylan Ebdus growingup white and motherless in downtown Brooklyn in the 1970s. It's aneighborhood where the entertainments include muggings along withgames of stoopball. In that world, Dylan has one friend, a blackteenager, also motherless, named Mingus Rude. As Lethem follows theknitting and unraveling of their friendship, he creates anoverwhelmingly rich and emotionally gripping canvas of race andclass, superheros, gentrification, funk, hip-hop, graffiti tagging,loyalty, and memory. The Fortress of Solitude" "is the first greaturban coming of age novel to appear in years.

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 his introduction to the The BestAmerican Noir of the Century , James Ellroywrites, “noir is the most scrutinized offshoot of thehard-boiled school of fiction. It’s the long drop off theshort pier and the wrong man and the wrong woman in perfectmisalliance. It’s the nightmare of flawed souls with bigdreams and the precise how and why of the all-time sure thing thatgoes bad.” Offering the best examples of literary surethings gone bad, this collection ensuresthat nowhere else can readers find a darker, morethorough distillation of American noir fiction.

The Spartans is a compelling narrative that explores theculture and civilization of the most famous "warrior people": theSpartans of ancient Greece, by the world's leading expert in thefield. Sparta has often been described as the original Utopia--aremarkably evolved society whose warrior heroes were forbidden anyother trade, profession, or business. As a people, the Spartanswere the living exemplars of such core values as duty, discipline,the nobility of arms in a cause worth dying for, sacrificing theindividual for the greater good of the community (illustrated bytheir role in the battle of Thermopylae), and the triumph of willover seemingly insuperable obstacles--qualities that today arefrequently believed to signify the ultimate heroism. Paul Cartledgeis the distinguished scholar and historian who has long been seenas the leading international authority on ancient Sparta. He tracesthe evolution of Spartan society--the culture and the people, aswell as the tremendous influence they had on their worl

For fifty years, Anna Schlemmer has refused to talk about herlife in Germany during World War II. Her daughter, Trudy, was onlythree when she and her mother were liberated by an American soldierand went to live with him in Minnesota. Trudy's sole evidence ofthe past is an old photograph: a family portrait showing Anna,Trudy, and a Nazi officer, the Obersturmfuhrer of Buchenwald. Driven by the guilt of her heritage, Trudy, now a professor ofGerman history, begins investigating the past and finally unearthsthe dramatic and heartbreaking truth of her mother's life. Combining a passionate, doomed love story, a vivid evocation oflife during the war, and a poignant mother/daughter drama, ThoseWho Save Us is a profound exploration of what we endure tosurvive and the legacy of shame.

You love the boy body and soul, plainly, directly, as he lovesyou ...'. Lucy has her rigid, middle-class life mapped out for heruntil she visits Florence with her uptight cousin Charlotte, andfinds her neatly ordered existence thrown off balance. Her eyes areopened by the unconventional characters she meets at the PensionBertolini: flamboyant romantic novelist Eleanor Lavish, the CockneySignora, curious Mr Emerson and, most of all, his passionate sonGeorge. Lucy finds herself torn between the intensity of life inItaly and the repressed morals of Edwardian England, personified inher terminally dull fiance Cecil Vyse. Will she ever learn tofollow her own heart? "A Room with a View" is a sunny, brilliantlywitty comedy of manners.

Karen Wynn Fonstad's THE ATLAS OF MIDDLE-EARTH is an essentialvolume that will enchant all Tolkien fans. Here is the definitiveguide to the geography of Middle-earth, from its founding in theElder Days through the Third Age, including the journeys of Bilbo,Frodo, and the Fellowship of the Ring. Authentic and updated --nearly one third of the maps are new, and the text is fully revised-- the atlas illuminates the enchanted world created in THESILMARILLION, THE HOBBIT, and THE LORD OF THE RINGS. Hundreds oftwo-color maps and diagrams survey the journeys of the principalcharacters day by day -- including all the battles and keylocations of the First, Second, and Third Ages. Plans andde*ions of castles, buildings, and distinctive landforms aregiven, along with thematic maps describing the climate, vegetation,languages, and population distribution of Middle-earth throughoutits history. An extensive appendix and an index help readerscorrelate the maps with Tolkien's novels.

Jill Taylor was a 37-year-old Harvard-trained brain scientistwhen a blood vessel exploded in her brain. Through the eyes of acurious scientist, she watched her mind deteriorate whereby shecould not walk, talk, read, write, or recall any of her life.Because of her understanding of the brain, her respect for thecells in her body, and an amazing mother, Jill completelyrecovered. In My Stroke of Insight, she shares her recommendationsfor recovery and the insight she gained into the unique functionsof the two halves of her brain. When she lost the skills of herleft brain, her consciousness shifted away from normal realitywhere she felt "at one with the universe." Taylor helps others notonly rebuild their brains from trauma, but helps those of us withnormal brains better understand how we can consciously influencethe neural circuitry underlying what we think, how we feel and howwe react to life's circumstances.

Many people among them Henry James) have considered Balzac tobe the greatest of all novelists. Eugenie Grandet, his spare,classical story of a girl whose life is blighted by her father'shysterical greed, goes a long way to justifying that opinion. Oneof the most magnificent of his tales of early nineteenth-centuryFrench provincial life, this novel is the work of a writer on whomnothing was lost, and who represents most fully the ability of thehuman animal to understand and illuminate its own condition. Translated By Ellen Marriage With An Introduction By Fredric R.Jameson Fredric R. Jameson is William A. Lane, Jr. Professor ofComparative Literature at Duke University in North Carolina. Hispublications include Sartre: The Origins of a Style, Signatures ofthe Visible, and Post-modernism, or, The Cultural Logic of LateCapitalism, with Aesthetics of the Geopolitical forthcoming. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Today, an entomologist in a laboratory can gaze at a butterflypupa with a microscope so powerful that the swirling cells on thepupas skin look like a galaxy. She can activate a single gene orknock it out. What she cant do is discover how the insect behavesin its natural habitatwhich means she doesnt know what steps totake to preserve it from extinction, nor how any particular genemay interact with the environment. Four hundred years ago, afifty-year-old Dutch woman set sail on a solo scientific expeditionto study insect metamorphosis. She could not have imagined theroutine magic that scientists perform todaybut her absoluteinsistence on studying insects in their natural habitats was so farahead of its time that it is only now coming back into favor.Chrysalis restores Maria Sibylla Merian to her rightful place inthe history of science, taking us from golden-age Amsterdam to theSurinam tropics to modern laboratories where Merians insights fuelnew approaches to both ecology and genetics.

Meet Sugar, a nineteen-year-old prostitute innineteenth-century London who yearns for escape to a better life.From the brothel of the terrifying Mrs. Castaway, she begins herascent through society, meeting a host of lovable, maddening,unforgettable characters on the way. They begin with WilliamRackham, an egotistical perfume magnate whose empire is fueled byhis lust for Sugar; his unhinged, child-like wife Agnes; hismysteriously hidden-away daughter, Sophie; and his pious brotherHenry, foiled in his devotional calling by a persistentlyless-than-chaste love for the Widow Fox. All this is overseen byassorted preening socialites, drunken journalists, untrustworthyservants, vile guttersnipes, and whores of all stripes andpersuasions. Teeming with life, this is a big, juicy must-read of a novel thathas enthralled hundreds of thousands of readers-and will continueto do so for years to come.

THE ANIMAL DIALOGUES tells of Craig Childs' own chillingexperiences among the grizzlies of the Arctic, sharks off the coastof British Columbia and in the turquoise waters of Central America,jaguars in the bush of northern Mexico, mountain lions, elk,Bighorn Sheep, and others. More than chilling, however, thesestories are lyrical, enchanting, and reach beyond what one commonlyassumes an "animal story" is or should be. THE ANIMAL DIALOGUES isa book about another world that exists alongside our own, an entirerealm of languages and interactions that humans rarely get thechance to witness.

"The Tin Drum," one of the great novels of the twentiethcentury, was published in Ralph Manheim's outstanding translationin 1959. It became a runaway bestseller and catapulted its youngauthor to the forefront of world literature.To mark the fiftiethanniversary of the original publication, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt,along with Grass's publishers all over the world, is bringing out anew translation of this classic novel. Breon Mitchell, an acclaimedtranslator and scholar, has drawn from many sources: a wealth ofdetailed scholarship, a wide range of newly available referenceworks, and the author himself. The result is a translation that ismore faithful to Grass's style and rhythm, restores omissions, andreflects more fully the complexity of the original work.After fiftyyears, "The Tin Drum" has, if anything, gained in power andrelevance. All of Grass's amazing evocations are still there, andstill amazing: Oskar Matzerath, the indomitable drummer; hisgrandmother, Anna Koljaiczek; his mother, Agnes; Alfred M

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.