Marlowe befriends a down on his luck war veteran with thescars to prove it. Then he finds out that Terry Lennox has a verywealthy nymphomaniac wife, who he's divorced and re-married and whoends up dead. and now Lennox is on the lam and the cops and a crazygangster are after Marlowe.

Narrated by a fifteen-year-old girl with a ruthless regard fortruth, The Last Life is a beautifully told novel of lies andghosts, love and honor. Set in colonial Algeria, and in the southof France and New England, it is the tale of the LaBasse family,whose quiet integrity is shattered by the shots from agrandfather's rifle. As their world suddenly begins to crumble,long-hidden shame emerges: a son abandoned by the family before hewas even born, a mother whose identity is not what she has claimed,a father whose act of defiance brings Hotel Bellevue-the familybusiness-to its knees. Messud skillfully and inexorably describeshow the stories we tell ourselves, and the lies to which we cling,can turn on us in a moment. It is a work of stunning power from awriter to watch.

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.

Raymond Chandler's fifth novel has Philip Marlowe going toHollywood as he explores the underworld of the glitter capital,trying to find a sweet young thing's missing brother. Along the wayhe uncovers a little blackmail, a lot of drugs, and more thanenough murder.

"You see, even after all these years, I wonder if you reallyloved me."Vanessa and Virginia are sisters, best friends, bitterrivals, and artistic collaborators. As children, they fight for theattention of their overextended mother, their brilliant butdifficult father, and their adored brother, Thoby. As young women,they support each other through a series of devastating deaths,then emerge in bohemian Bloomsbury, bent on creating new lives andgroundbreaking works of art. Through everything--marriage, lovers,loss, madness, children, success and failure--the sisters remainthe closest of co-conspirators. But they also betray each other.Inthis lyrical, impressionistic account, written as a love letter andan elegy from Vanessa to Virginia, Sellers imagines her way intothe heart of the lifelong relationship between the writer VirginiaWoolf and the painter Vanessa Bell. With sensitivity and fidelityto what is known of both lives, Sellers has created a powerfulportrait of sibling rivalry.

Setting out to make his fortune in a far-off country, a youngtraveller discovers the remote and beautiful land of Erewhon, andis given a home among its extraordinarily handsome citizens. Buttheir visitor soon discovers that this seemingly ideal communityhas its faults - here crime is treated indulgently as a malady tobe cured, while illness, poverty and misfortune are cruellypunished, and all machines have been superstitiously destroyedafter a bizarre prophecy. Can he survive in a world where moralityis turned upside down? Inspired by Samuel Butler's years incolonial New Zealand, and by his reading of Darwin's "Origin ofSpecies", Erewhon (1872) is a highly original, irreverent andhumorous satire on conventional virtues, religious hypocrisy andthe unthinking acceptance of beliefs.

Book De*ion Remember when flying was glamorous and sexy, even fun? Whenairline food was gourmet, everyone dressed up for a flight, andstewardesses catered to our every need-at least in ourimaginations? This classic memoir by two audaciously outspokenyoung ladies, who lived and loved the free-spirited stewardesslife, jets you back to those golden days of air travel-from thecaptain who's as subtle as a 747 when he's on the make to thepassenger who mistakes the overhead luggage rack for an upperberth; from the names of celebrities who were a pleasure to serve(and some surprising notables on the "bad guy" list) to the originsof some naughty stereotypes-Spaniards "are" the best lovers, actorsthe most foul-mouthed. This huge bestseller, a First Class jet-agejournal, offers a hilarious gold mine of outrageous anecdotes fromthe high-flying and amorous lives of those busty, lusty,adventuresome young women of the swinging '60s known as"stews." About Author Trudy Baker and Rachel Jones were name

It’s 1988 and Dexter Mayhew and Emma Morley have only just met.But after only one day together, they cannot stop thinking aboutone another. Over twenty years, snapshots of that relationship arerevealed on the same day—July 15th—of each year. Dex and Em facesquabbles and fights, hopes and missed opportunities, laughter andtears. And as the true meaning of this one crucial day is revealed,they must come to grips with the nature of love and lifeitself.

This blood-and-thunder tale, lifelike and thoroughly cynical, certainly carries the ring of authenticity ... a great triumph.' - Independent The exciting thriller that has Westminster buzzing. Here is a political thriller writer with a marvellous inside track knowledge of government.' - Daily Express It has pace, a beguiling authenticity and a cast of Achilles heels.' - Daily Telegraph What a brilliant creation F.U. is.' - Sunday Telegraph

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

Stephen W. Sears has delivered a masterwork in Gettysburg, hissingle-volume history of the Civil War's greatest campaign. Drawingon original source material, from soldiers' letters to the OfficialRecords of the war, Sears offers dramatic and informed accounts ofevery aspect of the campaign, from well-hewn portraits of thebattle's leaders to detailed analyses of their strategies andtactics. Sears depicts General Meade's remarkable performance inhis first week of army command and pinpoints General Lee'sresponsibility in the agonizing failure of the Confederate army.With characteristic style and insight, Sears brings the epic taleof the battle in Pennsylvania vividly to life.

Now a classic of the travel genre, The Great Railway Bazaarchronicles Paul Theroux's adventures by rail from Victoria Stationin London to Tokyo Central, told with his signature wryobservations.

'I am the enfant terrible of literature and science. If Icannot, and I know I cannot, get the literary and scientificbig-wigs to give me a shilling, I can, and I know I can, heavebricks into the middle of them.' With "The Way of All Flesh",Samuel Butler threw a subversive brick at the smug face ofVictorian domesticity. Published in 1903, a year after Butler'sdeath, the novel is a thinly disguised account of his own childhoodand youth 'in the bosom of a Christian family'. With irony, wit andsometimes rancour, he savaged contemporary values and beliefs,turning inside-out the conventional novel of a family's lifethrough several generations.

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 "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).

This superb Pulitzer Prize-winning collection gives voice tofailure with a wry, deft touch from one of this country's mostengaging and uncompromising poets. In "Failure, "Philip Schultzevokes the pleasures of family, marriage, beaches, and dogs; NewYork City in the 1970s; revolutions both interior and exterior; andthe terrors of 9/11 with a compassion that demonstrates he is amaster of the bittersweet and fierce, the wondrous and direct, andthe brilliantly provocative. Filled with poems of "heartbreakingtenderness that go] beyond mere pity" (Gerald Stern), "Failure "isa collection to savor from this major American poet.

Amazon Best of the Month, August 2010: "The awful thing about life is this:" says Octave to the Marquis in Renoir's Rules of the Game. "Everyone has his reasons." That could be a motto for novelists as well, few more so than Jonathan Franzen, who seems less concerned with creating merely likeable characters than ones who are fully alive, in all their self-justifying complexity. Freedom is his fourth novel, and, yes, his first in nine years since The Corrections. Happy to say, it's very much a match for that great book, a wrenching, funny, and forgiving portrait of a Midwestern family (from St. Paul this time, rather than the fictional St. Jude). Patty and Walter Berglund find each other early: a pretty jock, focused on the court and a little lost off it, and a stolid budding lawyer, besotted with her and almost burdened by his integrity. They make a family and a life together, and, over time, slowly lose track of each other. Their stories align at times with Big Issues--among them mountaintop removal, war pro

Marlowe is hired by an influential lawyer he's never herd of totail a gorgeous redhead, but decides he prefers to help out theredhead. She's been acquitted of her alcoholic husband's murder,but her father-in-law prefers not to take the court's word for it.andquot; Chandler wrote like a slumming angel and invested thesun-blinded streets of Los Angeles with a romantic presence:andquot; -- Ross Macdonald

When the last honest citizen of Poisonville was murdered, theContinental Op stayed on to punish the guilty--even if that meanttaking on an entire town. Red Harvest is more than a superb crimenovel: it is a classic exploration of corruption and violence inthe American grain.