books tagged “american fiction” (American Fiction)

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  • American Gods
    by Neil Gaiman
    ISBN 1594970998 (1-59497-099-8)
    Hardcover, Public Square Books

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    Nota: En los titulos y nombres de autores, los marcos ortograficos han sido omitidos para facilitar las busquedas de Internet.

    La vida en la cárcel es dura. Pero siempre queda un rayo de esperanza si sabes que, a la salida, te espera una mujer que te ama, un amigo que te quiere, un trabajo que adoras. . .Todo eso es lo que quiere Sombra, que está a punto de salir de la cárcel. . .Pero un día le comunican que su mujer y su mejor amigo han muerto en un accidente de coche. Entonces, contratado por un extraño anciano experto en timos y estafas que responde al nombre de Wednesday, Sombra empieza un interminable viaje a lo largo y ancho de América, perseguido por el espíritu de su esposa, en el que descubre el límite entre lo humano y los divino, y que las reglas que rigen el mundo de los hombres no son las mismas con las que lose dioses conducen el mundo.

    Neil Gaiman vuelve con American Gods a dar lo major de sí mismo y crea una historia en la que dioses y héroes se dan la mano, en la que el destino de la misma alma de Norteamérica está en juego. Con American Gods, Neil Gaiman se ha consagrado como uno autores de terror más importantes del panorama internacional, se ha colocado en los primeros puestos de las listas de los más vendidos de todo el mundo y ha ganado el premio Hugo a Mejor Novela de Ciencia Ficción y el premio Stoker a Mejor Novela de Terror.

    Amazon.com's Best of 2001 American Gods is Neil Gaiman's best and most ambitious novel yet, a scary, strange, and hallucinogenic road-trip story wrapped around a deep examination of the American spirit. Gaiman tackles everything from the onslaught of the information age to the meaning of death, but he doesn't sacrifice the razor-sharp plotting and narrative style he's been delivering since his Sandman days.

    Shadow gets out of prison early when his wife is killed in a car crash. At a loss, he takes up with a mysterious character called Wednesday, who is much more than he appears. In fact, Wednesday is an old god, once known as Odin the All-father, who is roaming America rounding up his forgotten fellows in preparation for an epic battle against the upstart deities of the Internet, credit cards, television, and all that is wired. Shadow agrees to help Wednesday, and they whirl through a psycho-spiritual storm that becomes all too real in its manifestations. For instance, Shadow's dead wife Laura keeps showing up, and not just as a ghost--the difficulty of their continuing relationship is by turns grim and darkly funny, just like the rest of the book.

    Armed only with some coin tricks and a sense of purpose, Shadow travels through, around, and underneath the visible surface of things, digging up all the powerful myths Americans brought with them in their journeys to this land as well as the ones that were already here. Shadow's road story is the heart of the novel, and it's here that Gaiman offers up the details that make this such a cinematic book--the distinctly American foods and diversions, the bizarre roadside attractions, the decrepit gods reduced to shell games and prostitution. "This is a bad land for Gods," says Shadow.

    More than a tourist in America, but not a native, Neil Gaiman offers an outside-in and inside-out perspective on the soul and spirituality of the country--our obsessions with money and power, our jumbled religious heritage and its societal outcomes, and the millennial decisions we face about what's real and what's not. --Therese Littleton --This text refers to the Hardcover edition. [via]

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  • Animal Dreams
    by Barbara Kingsolver
    ISBN 0060921145 (0-06-092114-5)
    Softcover, Harpercollins

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    From the acclaimed author of The Bean Trees and Homeland, comes a powerful story of love and courage in an exotc southwestern landscape. Blending flashbacks, dreams, and Native American myths, thisis a suspenseful love story and a moving exploration of life's greatest commitments. [via]

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  • Kingsolver, Barbara: The Bean Trees
    The Bean Trees
    by Barbara Kingsolver
    ISBN 0060915544 (0-06-091554-4)
    Softcover, Harpercollins

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    STANDARD GOOD USED CONDITION WITH ANY FLAWS NOTED. [via]

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  • The Beautiful and Damned
    by F. Scott Fitzgerald
    ISBN 0020199708 (0-02-019970-8)
    Softcover, Collier Books

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    F. Scott Fitzgerald's second novel, first published in 1922. It chronicles the relationship of Anthony Patch, Harvard-educated, aspiring aesthete, and his beautiful wife, Gloria, as they await to inherit his grandfather's fortune. A devastating satire of the nouveaux riches and New York's nightlife of reckless ambition and squandered talent, it is also a shattering portrait of a marriage fueled by alcohol and wasted by wealth. (from back cover) [via]

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  • Bel Canto
    by Ann Patchett
    ISBN 0060838728 (0-06-083872-8)
    Softcover, Perennial

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    In an unnamed South American country, a world-renowned soprano sings at a birthday party in honor of a visiting Japanese industrial titan. His hosts hope that Mr. Hosokawa can be persuaded to build a factory in their Third World backwater. Alas, in the opening sequence, just as the accompanist kisses the soprano, a ragtag band of 18 terrorists enters the vice-presidential mansion through the air conditioning ducts. Their quarry is the president, who has unfortunately stayed home to watch a favorite soap opera. And thus, from the beginning, things go awry.

    Among the hostages are not only Hosokawa and Roxane Coss, the American soprano, but an assortment of Russian, Italian, and French diplomatic types. Reuben Iglesias, the diminutive and gracious vice president, quickly gets sideways of the kidnappers, who have no interest in him whatsoever. Meanwhile, a Swiss Red Cross negotiator named Joachim Messner is roped into service while vacationing. He comes and goes, wrangling over terms and demands, and the days stretch into weeks, the weeks into months.

    With the omniscience of magic realism, Ann Patchett flits in and out of the hearts and psyches of hostage and terrorist alike, and in doing so reveals a profound, shared humanity. Her voice is suitably lyrical, melodic, full of warmth and compassion. Hearing opera sung live for the first time, a young priest reflects:

    Never had he thought, never once, that such a woman existed, one who stood so close to God that God's own voice poured from her. How far she must have gone inside herself to call up that voice. It was as if the voice came from the center part of the earth and by the sheer effort and diligence of her will she had pulled it up through the dirt and rock and through the floorboards of the house, up into her feet, where it pulled through her, reaching, lifting, warmed by her, and then out of the white lily of her throat and straight to God in heaven.
    Joined by no common language except music, the 58 international hostages and their captors forge unexpected bonds. Time stands still, priorities rearrange themselves. Ultimately, of course, something has to give, even in a novel so imbued with the rich imaginative potential of magic realism. But in a fractious world, Bel Canto remains a gentle reminder of the transcendence of beauty and love. --Victoria Jenkins [via]

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  • Bostonians
    by Henry James
    ISBN 0140024506 (0-14-002450-6)
    Softcover, Penguin Group USA

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    From Boston's social underworld emerges Verena Tarrant, a girl with extraordinary oratorical gifts, which she deploys in tawdry meeting-houses on behalf of "the sisterhood of women." She acquires two admirers of a very different stamp: Olive Chancellor, devotee of radical causes and marked out for tragedy; and Basil Ransom, a veteran of the Civil War who holds rigid views concerning society and women's place therein. Is the lovely, lighthearted Verena made for public movements or private passions? A struggle to possess her, body and soul, develops between Olive and Basil.The exploitation of Verena's unregenerate innocence reflects a society whose moral and cultural values are failing to survive the new dawn of liberalism and democracy. When it was first published in 1886, The Bostonians was not welcomed by Henry James's fellow countrymen, who failed to appreciate its delicacy and wit. But over a century later, this book is widely regarded as James's finest American fiction and perhaps his comic masterpiece.
    [via]

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  • Camara De Gas / the Chamber
    by John Grisham, Enric Tremps
    ISBN 8408039342 (84-08-03934-2)
    Softcover, Planeta Pub Corp

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    Adam Hall lleva apenas un año en uno de los bufetes más prestigiosos de Chicago cuando se presta voluntario para la defensa del caso más difícil que se haya visto en el ramo. Su futuro cliente no quiere ni a Adam ni a su bufete. Es un racista declarado e impenitente, con un historial repleto de violencia. Se encuentra en el corredor de la muerte por el asesinato de dos niños judíos, en un atentado horrible que tuvo lugar en 1967. ¿Por qué iba a querer a un abogado novato como Adam para que le defienda? ¿Y por qué querrá Adam tan desesperadamente llevar este caso? La respuesta está en el pasado, en un secreto que lleva veinte años enterrado en la sinrazón de otra época. «Irresistible... Poderosa... Cámara de gas hará que los lectores reconsideren a conciencia la pena de muerte.» USA Today [via]

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  • Caramelo
    by Sandra Cisneros
    ISBN 8432216836 (84-322-1683-6)
    Softcover, Planeta Pub Corp

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    Caramelo, Sandra Cisneros's first novel since her celebrated The House on Mango Street, weaves a large yet intricate pattern, much like the decorative fringe on a rebozo, the traditional Mexican shawl. Through the eyes of young Celaya, or Lala, the Reyes family saga twists and turns over three generations of truths, half-truths, and outright lies. And, like Celaya's grandmother's prized caramelo (striped) rebozo, so is "the universe a cloth, and all humanity interwoven.... Pull one string and the whole thing comes undone." The Reyes clan, from Awful Grandmother Soledad and her favorite son Inocencio to Celaya, follow their destinies from Mexico City to the U.S. armed forces, jobs upholstering furniture, and to Chicago and San Antonio. Celaya gathers and retells, in over 80 chapters, the stories that reinforce her family's, and subsequently her own, identity as they travel between the U.S.-Mexican border and within the United States. Rich with sensory descriptions and animated conversations and peppered with Mexican cultural and historical details, this novel can hardly contain itself. Also an acclaimed poet, Cisneros writes fiercely and thoroughly, and her characters enter and exit the page with uncommon humanity. Although the book is long--over 400 pages plus a relevant U.S.-Mexico chronology--in many ways it's not long enough. The world of the 20th-century Mexican family, and of the Reyeses in particular, is as complicated, timeless, and satisfying as our own family stories. --Emily Russin [via]

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  • King, Stephen: Carrie
    Carrie
    by Stephen King
    ISBN 8401491029 (84-01-49102-9)
    Softcover, Distribooks Inc

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  • King, Stephen: Christine
    Christine
    by Stephen King
    ISBN 8484505987 (84-8450-598-7)
    Softcover, Debolsillo

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  • The Complete Illustrated Works of Edgar Allan Poe
    by Edgar Allan Poe
    ISBN 1851526307 (1-85152-630-7)
    Hardcover, Chancellor Press

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    Famous for his horror stories and brooding poetry, Poe is often considered to be the inventor of the modern detective story, as well. Now, this one marvelously illustrated and popularly priced volume makes it possible to appreciate the full genius of this master of the mysterious and brilliant literary talent. Images, reproduced from a variety of sources (including Aubrey Beardsley, Edouard Manet, and Arthur Rackham) enhance the mood of such favorites as The Pit and the Pendulum, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Cask of Amontillado, The Tell-Tale Heart, The Purloined Letter, A Descent into the Maelström and The Masque of the Red Death. In addition to those "Tales of Mystery and Imagination"--70 chronicles of terror and fantasy that established Poe as the supreme craftsman of the short story--there is The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, Poe's only full-length work and a masterful blending of science and romance. Finally, a section devoted to "The Raven and Other Poems" reflects Poe's obsession with the macabre.
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  • Daisy Miller
    by Henry James
    ISBN 1840025980 (1-84002-598-0)
    Softcover, Theatre Communications Group

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    Adapted from the novel by Henry James
    [via]

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  • Daisy Miller And Washington Square
    by Henry James
    ISBN 1593081057 (1-59308-105-7)
    Softcover, Sterling Pub Co Inc

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    Daisy Miller and Washington Square, by Henry James, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:
    All editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences—biographical, historical, and literary—to enrich each reader's understanding of these enduring works.

     

    Strikingly modern in its psychological insight, social observation and stylistic innovation, Henry Jamess fiction continues to attract and intrigue readers a century after its initial appearance. This volume offers two of his most popular and critically admired novellas: Daisy Miller and Washington Square.

    In Daisy Miller, James paints a vivid portrait of a vibrant young American girl visiting Europe for the first time. Lovely, flirtatious, eager for experience, Daisy meets a wealthy American, Mr. Winterbourne, and a penniless but passionate Italian. Her complex encounters with them and others allow James to explore one of his favorite themes, the effect of Americans and Europeans on each other.

    Washington Squares Catherine Sloper is Daisy Millers opposite. Neither pretty nor charming, she lives with her wealthy, widowed, tyrannical father, Dr. Austin Sloper, who can barely conceal his disdain for his shy, awkward daughter. When a handsome suitor, Morris Townsend, comes calling, Catherines father refuses to believe he is anything other than a heartless fortune hunter and sets out to destroy her romance.

    Jennie A. Kassanoff is Assistant Professor of English at Barnard College. Her articles have appeared in Arizona Quarterly and PMLA. Her book, Edith Wharton and the Politics of Race, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.

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  • Death Comes for the Archbishop
    by Willa Cather, A. S. Byatt
    ISBN 1844083721 (1-84408-372-1)
    Softcover, Virago Pr

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    In 1851 Bishop Latour and his friend Father Valliant are despatched to New Mexico to reawaken its slumbering Catholicism. Moving along the endless prairies, Latour spreads his faith the only way he knowsgently, although he must contend with the unforgiving landscape, derelict and sometimes openly rebellious priests, and his own loneliness. Over nearly 40 years, they leave converts and enemies, crosses, and occasionally ecstasy in their wake. But it takes a death for them to make their mark on the landscape forever.
    [via]

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  • The Deerslayer
    by James Fenimore Cooper, Bruce L. R. Smith
    ISBN 1593082118 (1-59308-211-8)
    Softcover, Barnes & Noble

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    With a new Introduction by Cedric Watts, M.A., Ph.D., Research Professor of English, University of Sussex. The Deerslayer is the culmination of James Fenimore Cooper s Leather-Stocking novels, featuring Natty Bumppo (the deer-slaying young frontiersman) and the Mohican chief, Chingachgook. Cooper portrays the hubris of the conquest of a vast territory. The action takes place during the American wars of the 1740s. Natty and his friend Harry attempt to save a trapper and two young women, whose floating fort on Lake Glimmerglass is besieged by the ruthless Iroquois. The tension steadily increases to the point at which a cruel outcome seems inevitable. The exciting action, the romantic potentialities and the knowledgeable evocation of frontier life (with its moral and racial conflicts) have made this novel a perennial favourite. The courageous Natty, with his problematic values, has set the precedent for countless American heroes. Culturally, The Deerslayer has proved to be a powerfully influential work. [via]

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  • El Jurado
    by John Grisham, MERCE LOPEZ
    ISBN 8466617124 (84-666-1712-4)
    Softcover, Ediciones B

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    Twelve men and women who have been investigated, watched, and manipulated by high priced lawyers are at the center of a multimillion dollar legal hurricane in this captivating thriller. The jury must make a decision in the most explosive trial of the century, a precedent-setting lawsuit against a giant tobacco company who will stop at nothing to secure their verdict. But a handful of dangerous people know the truth that this jury has a leader, and the verdict belongs to him.
    [via]

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  • Fountainhead
    by Ayn Rand
    ISBN 0026009102 (0-02-600910-2)
    Hardcover, Simon & Schuster

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    The Fountainhead has become an enduring piece of literature, more popular now than when published in 1943. On the surface, it is a story of one man, Howard Roark, and his struggles as an architect in the face of a successful rival, Peter Keating, and a newspaper columnist, Ellsworth Toohey. But the book addresses a number of universal themes: the strength of the individual, the tug between good and evil, the threat of fascism. The confrontation of those themes, along with the amazing stroke of Rand's writing, combine to give this book its enduring influence. [via]

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  • The Golden Bowl
    by Henry James
    ISBN 1853262498 (1-85326-249-8)
    Softcover, Lb May & Assoc Inc

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    This work is Henry James's last novel and is a symbolically complex story of two flawed marriages. The gilded crystal bowl with its largely concealed flaw, "the Golden Bowl", is the symbolic vehicle used to reveal past misdemeanours and make the characters face the flaws in their lives. [via]

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  • Gravity's Rainbow
    by Thomas Pynchon
    ISBN 0140106618 (0-14-010661-8)
    Softcover, Penguin USA

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    Tyrone Slothrop, a GI in London in 1944, has a big problem. Whenever he gets an erection, a Blitz bomb hits. Slothrop gets excited, and then (as Thomas Pynchon puts it in his sinister, insinuatingly sibilant opening sentence), "a screaming comes across the sky," heralding an angel of death, a V-2 rocket. The novel's title, Gravity's Rainbow, refers to the rocket's vapor arc, a cruel dark parody of what God sent Noah to symbolize his promise never to destroy humanity again. History has been a big trick: the plan is to switch from floods to obliterating fire from the sky.

    Slothrop's father was an unwitting part of the cosmic doublecross. To provide for the boy's future Harvard education, he took cash from the mad German scientist Laszlo Jamf, who performed Pavlovian experiments on the infant Tyrone. Laszlo invented Imipolex G, a new plastic useful in rocket insulation, and conditioned Tyrone's privates to respond to its presence. Now the grown-up Tyrone helplessly senses the Imipolex G in incoming V-2s, and his military superiors are investigating him. Soon he is on the run from legions of bizarre enemies through the phantasmagoric horrors of Germany.

    That's just the Imipolex G tip of the shrieking vehicle that is Pynchon's book. It's pretty much impossible to follow a standard plot; one must have faith that each manic episode is connected with the great plot to blow up the world with the ultimate rocket. There is not one story, but a proliferation of characters (Pirate Prentice, Teddy Bloat, Tantivy Mucker-Maffick, Saure Bummer, and more) and events that tantalize the reader with suggestions of vast patterns only just past our comprehension. You will enjoy Pynchon's cartoon inferno far more if you consult Steven Weisenburger's brief companion to the novel, which sorts out Pynchon's blizzard of references to science, history, high culture, and the lowest of jokes. Rest easy: there really is a simple reason why Kekulé von Stradonitz's dream about a serpent biting its tail (which solved the structure of the benzene molecule) belongs in the same novel as the comic-book-hero Plastic Man.

    Pynchon doesn't want you to rest easy with solved mysteries, though. Gravity's Rainbow uses beautiful prose to induce an altered state of consciousness, a buzz. It's a trip, and it will last. --Tim Appelo [via]

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  • Hannibal
    by Thomas Harris
    ISBN 8425399831 (84-253-9983-1)
    Hardcover, Grijalbo Mondadori

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    Siete aos han pasado desde que Clarice Starling, agente del FBI, se entrevistara con el doctor Hannibal Lecter en un hospital de maxima seguridad. Su ayuda fue decisiva para que ella capturara al asesino en serie Buffalo Bill. Y siete aos han transcurrido desde que Hannibal el Canibal burlara la vigilancia y desapareciera dejando una sangrienta estela de victimas a su paso. Desde entonces el doctor Lecter ha podido dedicarse a disfrutar libremente de sus truculentos gustos. Sin embargo, cuando Clarice cae en desgracia en el FBI, el doctor Lecter sale de las sombras para ponerse en contacto con ella. Asi el reaviva la caza de la presa mas codiciada, y perversa mente del psiquiatra, es encargada del caso. Desde su lujosa mansion, el millonario Mason Verger, unica victima superviviente de El Canibal, se mantiene vivo, conectado a un respirador, con el unico objetivo de cobrarse una cruel venganza. Para ello debe conseguir lo que mas gusta a Hannibal, el cebo mas exquisito e inocente... Una de las novelas mas esperadas de la decada, HANNIBAL nos introduce en los meandros del pensamiento de este personaje hipnotico, ambiguo, capaz de las mas inimaginables vilezas y de los gestos mas sublimes, un ser que nos arrastra, aun a pesar nuestro, a los abismos del terror.

    "UNA DE LAS NOVELAS MAS ATERRADORAS DE NUESTRO TIEMPO" [via]

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  • Wharton, Edith: The House of Mirth
    The House of Mirth
    by Edith Wharton
    ISBN 0020554303 (0-02-055430-3)
    Softcover, Simon & Schuster

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  • James Baldwin
    by James Baldwin, Toni Morrison
    ISBN 1883011515 (1-883011-51-5)
    Hardcover, Penguin Group USA

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    A novelist, essayist, playwright, and public intellectual, James Baldwin's writings on the subject of race in America undeniably made him one of the greatest African American writers of the 20th century. As the civil rights movement gained momentum in the two decades following World War II, Baldwin landed squarely in the public eye, and his prose communicated the hope and frustration of the fight for racial equality. In James Baldwin: Early Novels and Stories, editor Toni Morrison draws heavily on Baldwin's early work, including his first novel Go Tell It on the Mountain, as well as Giovanni's Room, which was praised by the New York Times for its "unusual candor ... and intensity." As pertinent today as it was some 30 years ago, the fiction found in this collection is powerful, eloquent, and a fitting tribute to a consummate writer. [via]

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  • Juan Salvador Gaviota
    by Richard Bach
    ISBN 846661639X (84-666-1639-X)
    Softcover, Ediciones B

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    Una de las mas bellas fábulas escritas por estos tiempos ha sido Juan Salvador Gaviota. Richard Bach ha vendido mas de 30 millones de copias de esta producción. El valor de la libertad, de la amistad, el despego de lo material; tales son los elementos que forman esta fábula. [via]

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  • La Perla / The Pearl
    by John Steinbeck, David Shannon
    ISBN 8431634790 (84-316-3479-0)
    Softcover, Vicens-Vives Editorial S.A.

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  • Keillor, Garrison: Lake Wobegon Days
    Lake Wobegon Days
    by Garrison Keillor
    ISBN 0140131612 (0-14-013161-2)
    Softcover, Penguin Group USA

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  • Little Women
    by Louisa May Alcott, Kevin McIntyre
    ISBN 0020412401 (0-02-041240-1)
    Softcover, Simon & Schuster

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    The girls gave their hearts into their mother's keeping, their souls into their father's; and to both parents ... they gave a love that grew with their growth, and bound them tenderly together by the sweetest tie which blesses life and outlives death.

    Pretty Meg, tomboy Jo, shy Beth, and vain Amy, the four March sisters, are as different as sisters can be, but more devoted and loyal sisters you'll never find. For though the March girls fight, tease, nag, and scold as all sisters do, they do so with the knowledge that nothing is as precious as a sister's love. Discover the magic of family in the first part of this classic novel cherished by young girls everywhere.

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  • A Lost Lady
    by Willa Cather
    ISBN 184408373X (1-84408-373-X)
    Softcover, Virago Pr

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    Marian Forrester is the symbolic flower of the Old American West. She draws her strength from that solid foundation, bringing delight and beauty to her elderly husband, to the small town of Sweet Water where they live, to the prairie land itself, and to the young narrator of her story, Neil Herbert. All are bewitched by her brilliance and grace, and all are ultimately betrayed. For Marian longs for "life on any terms," and in fulfilling herself, she loses all she loved and all who loved her. This, Willa Cather's most perfect novel, is not only a portrait of a troubling beauty, but also a haunting evocation of a noble age slipping irrevocably into the past.
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  • Maggie
    by Stephen Crane, Robert Tine
    ISBN 1593082487 (1-59308-248-7)
    Softcover, Sterling Pub Co Inc

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    With a new Introduction by Cedric Watts, M.A., Ph.D.,

    Research Professor of English, University of Sussex.

    During his tragically short life, Stephen Crane gained fame as a vividly distinctive writer. His stories of evolving American society are unflinchingly realistic and shrewdly ironic. Maggie: A Girl of the Streets tells of Maggies seduction and downfall into prostitution amid the harsh world of the Bronx, where life is a battlefield.

                The other tales offer a diversity of insights into social hypocrisy, child psychology, and the wild violence of the frontiersmen. Such violence is ruthlessly depicted in The Blue Hotel. This collection of stories is replete with lively dialogue, ominous atmospheres, dry humour and graphic incidents.

                Praised by Joseph Conrad and Ernest Hemingway, Stephen Cranes memorable tales have become enduringly influential.

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  • Lewis, Sinclair: Main Street
    Main Street
    by Sinclair Lewis, Brooke Allen
    ISBN 1593080360 (1-59308-036-0)
    Softcover, Barnes & Noble

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  • More Tales of the City
    by Armistead Maupin
    ISBN 0060929383 (0-06-092938-3)
    Softcover, Harpercollins

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    Book summary:

    The tenants of 28 Barbary Lane have fled their cozy nest for adventures for afield. Mary Ann Singleton finds love at sea with a forgetful stranger, Mona Ramsey discovers her doppleganger in a desert whore-house, and Michael Tolliver bumps into a certain gynecologist in a seedy Mexican Bar. Meanwhile, their venerable landlady takes the biggest journey of all'without ever leaving home. A new, full color 16-page insert makes this seamless work complete.

    "Maupin has always been a humane storyteller, and an accessible one. His life-is-good-but-sloppy soap operas are marked by solid craft, superb dialogue, and what used to be called heart."
    --Entertainment Weekly

    "Maupin writes with warmth, acuity and tremendous wit about ordinary people learning to live with themselves and one another. Read him."
    --Harpers & Queen

    "Sparkling entertainments...lit by a glowing humanity that brings each character to vivid, poignant life."
    --Publishers Weekly

    Don't miss the much anticipated continuation of the classic miniseries "Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City" premiering June 1998 and airing all summer on SHOWTIME. Check your local listings for times.

    Visit the Tales of the City website at www.talesofthecity.com [via]

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  • My Antonia
    by Willa Cather
    ISBN 1593080247 (1-59308-024-7)
    Softcover, Sterling Pub Co Inc

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    Book summary:

    It seems almost sacrilege to infringe upon a book as soulful and rich as Willa Cather's My Ántonia by offering comment. First published in 1918, and set in Nebraska in the late 19th century, this tale of the spirited daughter of a Bohemian immigrant family planning to farm on the untamed land ("not a country at all but the material out of which countries are made") comes to us through the romantic eyes of Jim Burden. He is, at the time of their meeting, newly orphaned and arriving at his grandparents' neighboring farm on the same night her family strikes out to make good in their new country. Jim chooses the opening words of his recollections deliberately: "I first heard of Ántonia on what seemed to be an interminable journey across the great midland plain of North America," and it seems almost certain that readers of Cather's masterpiece will just as easily pinpoint the first time they heard of Ántonia and her world. It seems equally certain that they, too, will remember that moment as one of great light in an otherwise unremarkable trip through the world.

    Ántonia, who, even as a grown woman somewhat downtrodden by circumstance and hard work, "had not lost the fire of life," lies at the center of almost every human condition that Cather's novel effortlessly untangles. She represents immigrant struggles with a foreign land and tongue, the restraints on women of the time (with which Cather was very much concerned), the more general desires for love, family, and companionship, and the great capacity for forbearance that marked the earliest settlers on the frontier.

    As if all this humanity weren't enough, Cather paints her descriptions of the vastness of nature--the high, red grass, the road that "ran about like a wild thing," the endless wind on the plains--with strokes so vivid as to make us feel in our bones that we've just come in from a walk on that very terrain ourselves. As the story progresses, Jim goes off to the University in Lincoln to study Latin (later moving on to Harvard and eventually staying put on the East Coast in another neat encompassing of a stage in America's development) and learns Virgil's phrase "Optima dies ... prima fugit" that Cather uses as the novel's epigraph. "The best days are the first to flee"--this could be said equally of childhood and the earliest hours of this country in which the open land, much like My Ántonia, was nothing short of a rhapsody in prairie sky blue. --Melanie Rehak [via]

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  • The Natural
    by Bernard Malamud
    ISBN 0060958294 (0-06-095829-4)
    Softcover, Perennial

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    Book summary:

    Considered by many to be the greatest baseball novel ever written, this classic morality tale features one of the most memorable characters in all of literature, Roy Hobbs -- a talented athlete whose promising career is derailed by a youthful indiscretion.  When Roy makes a comeback as an aging player, his struggle to achieve greatness in the midst of recreant temptations becomes the subject of an epic story about our national need for heroes and our simultaneous desire to see them fail. [via]

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  • Novels, 1942-1952
    by John Steinbeck, Robert Demott
    ISBN 1931082073 (1-931082-07-3)
    Hardcover, Penguin Group USA

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    Book summary:

    This third volume in The Library of America's authoritative edition of John Steinbeck's writings shows one of America's most enduring popular writers continuing restlessly to explore new subject matter and new approaches to storytelling.

    The Moon Is Down (1942), set in an unnamed Scandinavian country under German occupation, dramatizes the transformation of ordinary life under totalitarian rule and the underground struggle against the Nazi invaders. In Cannery Row (1945) Steinbeck paid tribute to his closest friend, the marine biologist Ed Ricketts, in the central character of Doc, proprietor of the Western Biological Laboratory and spiritual and financial mainstay of a cast of philosophical drifters and hangers-on. The comic and bawdy evocation of the main street of Monterey's sardine-canning district has made this one of the most popular of all Steinbeck's novels. Steinbeck's long involvement with Mexican culture is distilled in The Pearl (1947). Expanding on an anecdote he had heard about a boy who found a pearl of unusual size, Steinbeck turned it into an allegory of the corrupting influence of sudden wealth. The Pearl appears here with the original illustrations by José Clemente Orozco.

    Ambitious in scale and original in structure, East of Eden (1952) recounts the violent and emotionally turbulent history of a Salinas Valley family through several generations. Drawing on Biblical parallels, East of Eden is an epic that explores the writer's deepest and most anguished concerns within a landscape that for him had mythic resonance.
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  • Poisonwood Bible
    by Barbara Kingsolver
    ISBN 0060512822 (0-06-051282-2)
    Softcover, HarperCollins Canada, Limited

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    Book summary:

    Oprah Book Club® Selection, June 2000: As any reader of The Mosquito Coast knows, men who drag their families to far-off climes in pursuit of an Idea seldom come to any good, while those familiar with At Play in the Fields of the Lord or Kalimantaan understand that the minute a missionary sets foot on the fictional stage, all hell is about to break loose. So when Barbara Kingsolver sends missionary Nathan Price along with his wife and four daughters off to Africa in The Poisonwood Bible, you can be sure that salvation is the one thing they're not likely to find. The year is 1959 and the place is the Belgian Congo. Nathan, a Baptist preacher, has come to spread the Word in a remote village reachable only by airplane. To say that he and his family are woefully unprepared would be an understatement: "We came from Bethlehem, Georgia, bearing Betty Crocker cake mixes into the jungle," says Leah, one of Nathan's daughters. But of course it isn't long before they discover that the tremendous humidity has rendered the mixes unusable, their clothes are unsuitable, and they've arrived in the middle of political upheaval as the Congolese seek to wrest independence from Belgium. In addition to poisonous snakes, dangerous animals, and the hostility of the villagers to Nathan's fiery take-no-prisoners brand of Christianity, there are also rebels in the jungle and the threat of war in the air. Could things get any worse?

    In fact they can and they do. The first part of The Poisonwood Bible revolves around Nathan's intransigent, bullying personality and his effect on both his family and the village they have come to. As political instability grows in the Congo, so does the local witch doctor's animus toward the Prices, and both seem to converge with tragic consequences about halfway through the novel. From that point on, the family is dispersed and the novel follows each member's fortune across a span of more than 30 years.

    The Poisonwood Bible is arguably Barbara Kingsolver's most ambitious work, and it reveals both her great strengths and her weaknesses. As Nathan Price's wife and daughters tell their stories in alternating chapters, Kingsolver does a good job of differentiating the voices. But at times they can grate--teenage Rachel's tendency towards precious malapropisms is particularly annoying (students practice their "French congregations"; Nathan's refusal to take his family home is a "tapestry of justice"). More problematic is Kingsolver's tendency to wear her politics on her sleeve; this is particularly evident in the second half of the novel, in which she uses her characters as mouthpieces to explicate the complicated and tragic history of the Belgian Congo.

    Despite these weaknesses, Kingsolver's fully realized, three-dimensional characters make The Poisonwood Bible compelling, especially in the first half, when Nathan Price is still at the center of the action. And in her treatment of Africa and the Africans she is at her best, exhibiting the acute perception, moral engagement, and lyrical prose that have made her previous novels so successful. --Alix Wilber [via]

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  • The Prince and the Pauper
    by Mark Twain, William Hatherell, Robert Tine
    ISBN 1593082185 (1-59308-218-5)
    Softcover, Sterling Pub Co Inc

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    Rich with surprise and hilarious adventure, "The Prince And The Pauper" is a delight satire of England's romantic past and a joyful boyhood romp filled with the same tongue-in-cheek irony that sparked the best of Mark Twain's tall tales. Two boys, one an urchin from London's filthy lanes, the other a prince born in a lavish palace, unwittingly trade identities. Thus a bedraggled "Prince of Poverty" discovers that his private dreams have all the come true -- while a pampered Prince of Wales finds himself tossed into a rough-and-tumble world of squalid beggars and villainous thieves. Originally written as a story for children, "The Prince And The Pauper" is a classic novel for adults as well -- through its stinging attack on the ageless human folly of attempting to measure true worth by outer appearances. [via]

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  • The Prince and the Pauper: A Tale for Young People of All Ages
    by Mark Twain
    ISBN 159818444X (1-59818-444-X)
    Hardcover, Alan Rodgers Books

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    Book summary:

    Twain's story has been adapted and, er, borrowed from so often and so freely that you're probably familiar with it even if you've never read of it: a prince of sixteenth-century England meets his double in the slums of London. The two swap clothes -- and lives. Complications ensue. Tom Canty, the urchin, learns how luxury and power can become the death of a man, while his doppleganger roams his kingdom, learning first hand of the cruelty of the Tudor monarchy. . . .

    "Twain was . . . enough of a genius to build his morality into his books, with humor and wit and -- in the case of The Prince and the Pauper -- wonderful plotting."

    -- E.L. Doctorow [via]

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  • Cather, Willa: The Professor's House
    The Professor's House
    by Willa Cather
    ISBN 1844083764 (1-84408-376-4)
    Softcover, Virago Pr

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  • Twain, Mark: Pudd'nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins
    Pudd'nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins
    by Mark Twain, Darryl Pinckney
    ISBN 159308255X (1-59308-255-X)
    Softcover, Barnes & Noble

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  • The Recognitions
    by William Gaddis
    ISBN 0140077685 (0-14-007768-5)
    Softcover, Penguin Books

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    Book summary:

    Wyatt Gwyon's desire to forge is not driven by larceny but from love. Exactingly faithful to the spirit and letter of the Flemish masters, he produces uncannily accurate 'originals' - pictures the painters themselves might have envied. In an age of counterfeit emotion and taste, the real and fake have become indistinguishable; yet Gwyon's forgeries reflect a truth that others cannot touch - cannot even recognize. Contemporary life collapses the distinction between the 'real' and the 'virtual' world, and Gaddis' novel pre-empts our common obsessions by almost half a century. This novel tackles the blurring of perceptual boundaries, The Matrix and Bladerunner pale in comparison to this epic novel. [via]

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  • The Rules of Attraction
    by Bret Easton Ellis
    ISBN 0140112286 (0-14-011228-6)
    Softcover, Penguin Group (Canada)

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    The author of Less Than Zero delivers a startling novel about three students entangled in a loveless sexual triangle. Wealthy upperclass students, they indulge in a routine of happy hours, parties, late night drinking bouts, drug abuse, and casual sex fueled by a desperate desire for love. [via]

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  • Proulx, Annie: The Shipping News
    The Shipping News
    by Annie Proulx
    ISBN 0020360789 (0-02-036078-9)
    Softcover, Collier Books

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  • Tales of the City
    by Armistead Maupin
    ISBN 0060964049 (0-06-096404-9)
    Softcover, Harpercollins

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    Since 1976, Maupin's Tales of the City has etched itself upon the hearts and minds of its readers, both straight and gay. From a groundbreaking newspaper serial in the San Francisco Chronicle to a bestselling novel to a critically acclaimed PBS series, Tales (all six of them) contains the universe--if not in a grain of sand, then in one apartment house. [via]

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  • Tropico De Cancer/tropic of Cancer
    by Henry Miller
    ISBN 8437607388 (84-376-0738-8)
    Softcover, Catedra Ediciones

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  • U. S. A.
    by John DOS Passos, Daniel Aaron, Townsend Ludington
    ISBN 1883011140 (1-883011-14-0)
    Hardcover, Penguin Group USA

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    Unique for its epic scale and panoramic social sweep, Dos Passos' masterpiece comprises three novels--"The 42nd Parallel," "1919," and "The Big Money"--which create an unforgettable collective portrait of modern America. This one-volume edition includes detailed notes and a chronicle of the world events which serve as a backdrop. [via]

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  • Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
    by Robert M. Pirsig
    ISBN 0060589469 (0-06-058946-9)
    Softcover, Harpercollins

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    In his now classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig brings us a literary chautauqua, a novel that is meant to both entertain and edify. It scores high on both counts.

    Phaedrus, our narrator, takes a present-tense cross-country motorcycle trip with his son during which the maintenance of the motorcycle becomes an illustration of how we can unify the cold, rational realm of technology with the warm, imaginative realm of artistry. As in Zen, the trick is to become one with the activity, to engage in it fully, to see and appreciate all details--be it hiking in the woods, penning an essay, or tightening the chain on a motorcycle.

    In his autobiographical first novel, Pirsig wrestles both with the ghost of his past and with the most important philosophical questions of the 20th century--why has technology alienated us from our world? what are the limits of rational analysis? if we can't define the good, how can we live it? Unfortunately, while exploring the defects of our philosophical heritage from Socrates and the Sophists to Hume and Kant, Pirsig inexplicably stops at the middle of the 19th century. With the exception of Poincaré, he ignores the more recent philosophers who have tackled his most urgent questions, thinkers such as Peirce, Nietzsche (to whom Phaedrus bears a passing resemblance), Heidegger, Whitehead, Dewey, Sartre, Wittgenstein, and Kuhn. In the end, the narrator's claims to originality turn out to be overstated, his reasoning questionable, and his understanding of the history of Western thought sketchy. His solution to a synthesis of the rational and creative by elevating Quality to a metaphysical level simply repeats the mistakes of the premodern philosophers. But in contrast to most other philosophers, Pirsig writes a compelling story. And he is a true innovator in his attempt to popularize a reconciliation of Eastern mindfulness and nonrationalism with Western subject/object dualism. The magic of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance turns out to lie not in the answers it gives, but in the questions it raises and the way it raises them. Like a cross between The Razor's Edge and Sophie's World, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance takes us into "the high country of the mind" and opens our eyes to vistas of possibility. --Brian Bruya [via]

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  • Kovtun, George J.: Zprava Z Lisabonu
    Zprava Z Lisabonu
    by George J. Kovtun
    ISBN 8086202593 (80-86202-59-3)
    Hardcover, Hynek

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  • Die göttlichen Geheimnisse der Ya-Ya-Schwestern
    by Rebecca Wells
    ISBN 3442448824 (3-442-44882-4)
    Softcover

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    Book summary:

    Die vier Mädchen hatten noch Bänder im Haar und Söckchen an, als sie miteinander in Louisiana davon träumten die letzten Überlebenden eines aussterbenden Stammes zu sein -- die Ya-Yas.

    Zusammen nahmen sie am Shirley-Temple-Nachwuchs-Wettbewerb teil und brachten nicht nur die Jury mit ihrem ungewöhnlichen Benehmen in Verlegenheit, sie waren auch bei der Welturaufführung ihres späteren Lieblingsfilms Vom Winde verweht anwesend. Mitunter wurde ihr Club zu einem Quartett der Peinlichkeiten, doch die vier standen, was auch kommen mochte, felsenfest zusammen.

    Gesammelt hat Vivi ihre Erlebnisse in einem Album, das sie Die göttlichen Geheimnisse der Ya-Ya-Schwestern nannte. Und als sie es, viele Jahre später, ihrer Tochter Sidda zum Lesen gibt, ist ihr Mutter-Tochter-Verhältnis gerade zum Bersten gespannt, denn immerhin hat Sidda in der New York Times bei einem Interview zu ihrem neuen Theaterstück ihre Mutter als "eine Step tanzende, prügelnde Rabenmutter" bezeichnet. Sidda begibt sich auf die schmerzliche Suche nach der Wahrheit, und oft erzählen ihr die fehlenden Personen auf den Fotos mehr als die Bilder selbst.

    Rebecca Wells, die selbst auf einer Plantage in Louisiana aufwuchs, schuf mit den Ya-Yas und ihren Kindern ungeheuer quirlige und phantasievolle Frauen, die die größten Sorgen mit einem lauten Lachen und einem Glas Whiskey in der Hand aus der Welt wischen. Und wenn sie sich dann doch nicht ganz beseitigen lassen, sind immer noch drei Ya-Yas da, die sofort als Feuerwehr zur Stelle sind. --Manuela Haselberger [via]

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