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books tagged “contemporary”
books tagged “contemporary”
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An Acceptable Timeby Madeleine L'EngleISBN 0374300275 (0-374-30027-5)
Hardcover, Farrar, Straus & Giroux
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› Find signed collectible books: 'An Acceptable Time'Book summary:A flash of lightning, quivering ground, and, instead of her grandparents' farm, Polly sees mist and jagged mountains -- and coming toward her, a group of young men carrying spears.[via]
Why has a time gate opened and dropped Polly into a world that existed 3,000 years ago? Will she be able to get back to the present before the time gate closes -- and leaves her to face a group of people who believe in human sacrifice?More editions of An Acceptable Time:
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Acts of Faithby Philip CaputoISBN 0375725970 (0-375-72597-0)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Acts of Faith'Book summary:Philip Caputos tragic and epically ambitious new novel is set in Sudan, where war is a permanent condition. Into this desolate theater come aid workers, missionaries, and mercenaries of conscience whose courage and idealism sometimes coexist with treacherous moral blindness. Theres the entrepreneurial American pilot who goes from flying food and medicine to smuggling arms, the Kenyan aid worker who cant help seeing the tawdry underside of his enterprise, and the evangelical Christian who comes to Sudan to redeem slaves and falls in love with a charismatic rebel commander.
As their fates intersect and our understanding of their characters deepens, it becomes apparent that Acts of Faith is one of those rare novels that combine high moral seriousness with irresistible narrative wizardry. [via] -
Black and Blueby Anna QuindlenISBN 0375500510 (0-375-50051-0)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Black and Blue'Book summary:Oprah Book Club® Selection, April 1998: "The first time my husband hit me I was nineteen years old," begins Fran Benedetto, the broken heroine of Anna Quindlen's Black and Blue. With one sweeping sentence, the door to an abused and tortured world is swung wide open and the psyche of a crushed and tattered self-image exposed. "Frannie, Frannie, Fran"--as Bobby Benedetto liked to call her before smashing her into kitchen appliances--was a young, energetic nursing student when she met her husband-to-be at a local Brooklyn bar. She was instantly captivated by his dark, brooding looks and magnetic personality, but her fascination soon solidified into a marital prison sentence of incessant abuse and the destruction of her own identity. After an especially horrific beating and rape, Fran realizes that the next attack could be the last. Fearing her son would be left alone with Bobby, she escapes one morning with her child. Fran's salvation comes in the form of Patty Bancroft and Co., a relocation agency for abused women that touts better service than the witness protection program. Armed only with a phone number, a few hundred dollars, and the help of several anonymous volunteers, Fran begins a new life. The agency relocates her to Florida, where she becomes Beth Crenshaw, a recently divorced home-care assistant from Delaware. Fran and her son adapt, meeting challenges with unexpected resilience and resolve until their past returns to haunt them. Quindlen renders the intricacies of spousal abuse with eerie accuracy, taking the reader deep within the realm of dysfunctional human ties. However, her vivid descriptions of abuse, emotional disintegration, and acute loneliness at times numb the reader with their realism. [via]
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Blessingsby Anna QuindlenISBN 0375431845 (0-375-43184-5)
Hardcover, Random House Large Print
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A Certain Justice : An Adam Dalgliesh Mysteryby P. D. JamesISBN 0375401091 (0-375-40109-1)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Certain Justice : An Adam Dalgliesh Mystery'Book summary:It begins, dramatically enough, with a trial for murder. The distinguished criminal lawyer Venetia Aldridge is defending Garry Ashe on charges of having brutally killed his aunt. For Aldridge the trial is mainly a test of her courtroom skills, one more opportunity to succeed--and she does. But now murder is in the air. The next victim will be Aldridge herself, stabbed to death at her desk in her Chambers in the Middle Temple, a bloodstained wig on her head. Enter Commander Adam Dalgliesh and his team, whose struggle to investigate and understand the shocking events cannot halt the spiral into more horrors, more murders...
A Certain Justice is P.D. James at her strongest. In her first foray into the strange closed world of the Law Courts and the London legal community, she has created a fascinating tale of interwoven passion and terror. As each character leaps into unforgettable life, as each scene draws us forward into new complexities of plot, she proves yet again that no other writer can match her skill in combining the excitement of the classic detective story with the richness of a fine novel. In its subtle portrayal of morality and human behavior, A Certain Justice will stand alongside Devices and Desires and A Taste for Death as one of P.D. James's most important, accomplished and entertaining works. [via]More editions of A Certain Justice : An Adam Dalgliesh Mystery:
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Child of My Heartby Alice McDermottISBN 0374121230 (0-374-12123-0)
Hardcover, Farrar, Straus & Giroux
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Child of My Heart'Book summary:Fifteen is a year of clarity; you're still one of the kids, but you're finally beginning to unlock the mysteries of adult behavior. In her luminous novel Child of My Heart, Alice McDermott's narrator is a 15-year-old girl who has two qualities that give her access to the secret lives of adults: she's beautiful, and she looks after their children. Her beauty has already shaped her life. Her parents have moved the family to the east end of Long Island in hopes of finding her a wealthy husband, or at least a fancy crowd to run with. Here she babysits the children of the rich, whose fathers demonstrate their relative decency by making passes at her, or not. The novel spans a dreamy summer as our heroine spends her days with her various charges at the beach, happily leading her crew on home-grown, rather sweet adventures. Among the kids she looks after is a toddler whose father is a famous, aging artist. The narrator's preternatural acuity is apparent in this exchange with a new client: "Mrs. Richardson learned by direct inquiry that I lived in that sweet cottage with the dahlias (interested) and went to the academy (more interested) and babysat for this child of the famous artist (most interested) down the road." Child of My Heart is a pretty straightforward coming-of-age novel, but it's marked throughout by this beautifully honed, wry, knowing tone. McDermott's narrator reminds us that our lost innocence might not have been so innocent after all. --Claire Dederer [via]
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The Closed Circleby Jonathan CoeISBN 0375713956 (0-375-71395-6)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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A Common Life : The Wedding Storyby Jan KaronISBN 0375431047 (0-375-43104-7)
Hardcover, Random House Large Print
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Concrete Islandby J.G. BallardISBN 0374524130 (0-374-52413-0)
Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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The Confessions Of Max Tivoliby Andrew Sean GreerISBN 0374128715 (0-374-12871-5)
Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Confessions Of Max Tivoli'Book summary:Out of the womb in 1871, Max Tivoli looked to all the world like a tiny 70-year-old man. But inside the aged body was an infant. Victim of a rare disease, Max grows physically younger as his mind matures. In Andrew Sean Greer's finely crafted novel, The Confessions of Max Tivoli, Max narrates his life story from the vantage point of his late fifties, though his body is that of a 12-year-old boy. He has known since a young age that he is destined to die at 70, and he wears a golden "1941" as a constant reminder of the year he will finally perish in an infant form. His mother, a Carolina belle concerned over her son's troubling appearance, curses Max with "The Rule": "Be what they think you are." Max fails to keep this Rule only a handful of times in his life, but it is the burden of living by it that wounds him and slowly alienates him from the people he loves.
Over Max's narration of the preceding decades of his life, he offers outsider's snapshots of San Francisco and all of America across the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Throughout, Greer uses the literary device of reverse aging to interrogate the evolution of social conventions, the finitude of a human life, and the decay of memory. Max wants love. But his curse destines him to deception. He loses his wife, Alice, changes his name, and remains hidden from his own son to keep his true identity secret. Only his lifelong friend, Hughie, stands by Max and can see the person inside the anachronistic body. Like the best science fiction and myth, the novel uses its central conceit to reveal human prejudice and explode all assumptions of normalcy to profound effect.
Love is a destructive force in The Confessions of Max Tivoli. But Greer recognizes that in the failure of love is also hope. He artfully captures Max's fragile world with a delicacy that never crosses into sentimentality but also avoids the monumental scale of tragedy. As Max says near the end of the novel, "It is a brave and stupid thing, a beautiful thing to waste ones life for love." A journey with Max, while brave and beautiful, is hardly a waste. --Patrick O'Kelley [via]
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The Counterlifeby Philip RothISBN 0374130264 (0-374-13026-4)
Hardcover, Farrar, Straus & Giroux
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Counterlife'Book summary:The saga of Henry and Nathan Zuckerman continues, 13 years after novelist Nathan Zuckerman first appeared in Roth's 1974 effort, My Life as a Man. In The Counterlife, the dentist Henry suffers an unsettling--and for Roth, a predictable--side effect to his heart medication: impotence, which leads him to undergo an ill-fated operation. The multi-layered plot line travels from New York to London to Israel, while the characters undergo a series of surprising transformations. In the words of Nathan, a change in one's life causes "a counterlife that is one's own anti-myth." It's vintage Roth. [via]
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Death in Holy Ordersby P. D. JamesISBN 0375412557 (0-375-41255-7)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Death in Holy Orders'Book summary:Despite challenges from Ruth Rendell and (more recently) Minette Walters, P.D. James's position as Britain's Queen of Crime remains largely unassailable. Although a certain reaction has set in to her reputation (and there are those who claim her poetry-loving copper Adam Dalgliesh doesn't correspond to any of his counterparts in the real world), her detractors can scarcely deny her astonishing literary gifts. More than any other writer, she has elevated the detective story into the realms of literature, with the psychology of the characters treated in the most complex and authoritative fashion. Her plots, too, are full of intriguing detail and studed with brilliantly observed character studies. Who cares if Dalgliesh belongs more in the pages of a book than poking around a graffiti-scrawled council estate? As a policeman, he is considerably more plausible than Doyle's Holmes, and that's never stopped us loving the Baker Street sleuth. Death in Holy Orders represents something of a challenge from James to her critics, taking on all the contentious elements and rigorously reinvigorating them. She had admitted that she was finding it increasingly difficult to find new plots for Dalgliesh, and the locale here (a theological college on a lonely stretch of the East Anglian coast) turns out to be an inspired choice. We're presented with the enclosed setting so beloved of golden age detective writers, and James is able to incorporate her theological interests seamlessly into the plot (but never in any doctrinaire way; the nonbeliever is never uncomfortable). The body of a student at the college is found on the shore, suffocated by a fall of sand. Dalgliesh is called upon to reexamine the verdict of accidental death (which the student's father would not accept). Having visited the College of St. Anselm in his boyhood, he finds the investigation has a strong nostalgic aspect for him. But that is soon overtaken by the realization that he has encountered the most horrific case of his career, and another visitor to the college dies a horrible death. As an exploration of evil--and as a piece of highly distinctive crime writing--this is James at her nonpareil best. Dalgliesh, too, is rendered with new dimensions of psychological complexity. --Barry Forshaw, Amazon.co.uk [via]
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The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed Americaby Erik LarsonISBN 0375725601 (0-375-72560-1)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America'Book summary:Author Erik Larson imbues the incredible events surrounding the 1893 Chicago World's Fair with such drama that readers may find themselves checking the book's categorization to be sure that The Devil in the White City is not, in fact, a highly imaginative novel. Larson tells the stories of two men: Daniel H. Burnham, the architect responsible for the fair's construction, and H.H. Holmes, a serial killer masquerading as a charming doctor. Burnham's challenge was immense. In a short period of time, he was forced to overcome the death of his partner and numerous other obstacles to construct the famous "White City" around which the fair was built. His efforts to complete the project, and the fair's incredible success, are skillfully related along with entertaining appearances by such notables as Buffalo Bill Cody, Susan B. Anthony, and Thomas Edison. The activities of the sinister Dr. Holmes, who is believed to be responsible for scores of murders around the time of the fair, are equally remarkable. He devised and erected the World's Fair Hotel, complete with crematorium and gas chamber, near the fairgrounds and used the event as well as his own charismatic personality to lure victims. Combining the stories of an architect and a killer in one book, mostly in alternating chapters, seems like an odd choice but it works. The magical appeal and horrifying dark side of 19th-century Chicago are both revealed through Larson's skillful writing. --John Moe [via]
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The Devil to Payby Stephanie JamesISBN 0373806965 (0-373-80696-5)
Softcover, Harlequin Enterprises, Limited
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The Ecstaticby Victor LavalleISBN 037571331X (0-375-71331-X)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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Ellen Fosterby Kaye GibbonsISBN 0375703055 (0-375-70305-5)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Ellen Foster'Book summary:Oprah Book Club® Selection, October 1997: Kaye Gibbons is a writer who brings a short story sensibility to her novels. Rather than take advantage of the novel's longer form to paint her visions in broad, sweeping strokes, Gibbons prefers to concentrate on just one corner of the canvas and only a few colors to produce her small masterpieces. In Gibbons's case, her canvas is the American South and her colors are all the shades of gray.
In Ellen Foster, the title character is an 11-year-old orphan who refers to herself as "old Ellen," an appellation that is disturbingly apt. Ellen is an old woman in a child's body; her frail, unhappy mother dies, her abusive father alternately neglects her and makes advances on her, and she is shuttled from one uncaring relative's home to another before she finally takes matters into her own hands and finds herself a place to belong. There is something almost Dickensian about Ellen's tribulations; like Oliver Twist, David Copperfield or a host of other literary child heroes, Ellen is at the mercy of predatory adults, with only her own wit and courage--and the occasional kindness of others--to help her through. That she does, in fact, survive her childhood and even rise above it is the book's bittersweet victory. [via]
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Eucalyptusby Murray BailISBN 0374148570 (0-374-14857-0)
Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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Eveningby Susan MinotISBN 0375700269 (0-375-70026-9)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Evening'Book summary:As Ann Lord lies on her deathbed, her daughter delivers a balsam pillow from the attic. At first the ailing woman is confused, but suddenly the scent reminds her of the "wild tumult" she experienced 40 years earlier:
Something stole into her as she walked in the dark, a dream she'd had long ago. The air was so black she was unable to see her arms, it was a warm summer night. Above her she could make out the dark line of the tops of spruce trees and a sky lit with stars. She felt the warm tar through the soles of her shoes. The boy beside her took her hand.
In the porous world between conscious and unconscious the protagonist of Evening revisits the great passions of her life, along with its considerable disappointments. The boy in the dark remains the fixed point--not so much because he is the most important man in her life, but because of the untapped possibilities he represents. Meanwhile, friends and relations come to sit by Ann Lord's side as she veers between clarity and feverish recollection.In her third novel, Susan Minot takes some new risks--her narrative spanning seven decades of memory and her style ranging from Stegneresque particularity to the exquisite abstraction Virginia Woolf perfected in To the Lighthouse. Equal parts memory and desire, fiction and poetry, Evening is a seductive story made more so by the measured pace of details emerging, one by one, like stars. --Cristina Del Sesto [via]
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Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Readerby Anne FadimanISBN 0374527229 (0-374-52722-9)
Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader'Book summary:The subtitle of Anne Fadiman's slim collection of essays is Confessions of a Common Reader, but if there is one thing Fadiman is not, it's common. In her previous work of nonfiction, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, she brought both skill and empathy to her balanced exploration of clashing cultures and medical tragedy. The subject matter here is lighter, but imbued with the same fine prose and big heart. Ex Libris is an extended love letter to language and to the wonders it performs. Fadiman is a woman who loves words; in "The Joy of Sesquipedalians" (very long words), she describes an entire family besotted with them: "When I was growing up, not only did my family walk around spouting sesquipedalians, but we viewed all forms of intellectual competition as a sacrament, a kind of holy water as it were, to be slathered on at every opportunity." From very long words it's just a short jump to literature, and Fadiman speaks joyfully of books, book collecting, and book ownership ("In my view, nineteen pounds of old books are at least nineteen times as delicious as one pound of fresh caviar"). In "Marrying Libraries" Fadiman describes the emotionally fraught task of merging her collection with her husband's: "After five years of marriage and a child, George and I finally resolved that we were ready for the more profound intimacy of library consolidation. It was unclear, however, how we were to find a meeting point between his English-garden approach and my French-garden one." Perhaps some marriages could not have stood the strain of such an ordeal, but for this one, the merging of books becomes a metaphor for the solidity of their relationship.
Over the course of 18 charming essays Fadiman ranges from the "odd shelf" ("a small, mysterious corpus of volumes whose subject matter is completely unrelated to the rest of the library, yet which, upon closer inspection reveals a good deal about its owner") to plagiarism ("the more I've read about plagiarism, the more I've come to think that literature is one big recycling bin") to the pleasures of reading aloud ("When you read silently, only the writer performs. When you read aloud, the performance is collaborative"). Fadiman delivers these essays with the expectation that her readers will love and appreciate good books and the power of language as much as she does. Indeed, reading Ex Libris is likely to bring up warm memories of old favorites and a powerful urge to revisit one's own "odd shelf" pronto. --Alix Wilber [via]
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Flesh and Bloodby Jonathan KellermanISBN 0375431292 (0-375-43129-2)
Hardcover, Random House Large Print
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For the Relief of Unbearable Urgesby Nathan EnglanderISBN 0375704434 (0-375-70443-4)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'For the Relief of Unbearable Urges'Book summary:For the Relief of Unbearable Urges is an astonishment. Whether Nathan Englander is creating the last days of 27 condemned Soviet writers or the first in which a Park Avenue lawyer finds religion (in a taxi, no less), his gift is everywhere in evidence. Englander's specialty is the collision of Jewish law and tradition with secular realities, whether in Brooklyn, Tel Aviv, or Stalinist Russia. In one tale, a wigmaker from an ultra-orthodox Brooklyn enclave journeys into Manhattan for supplies and, more importantly, inspiration--frequenting a newsstand where she pays for the right to flip through forbidden fashion magazines. If all Ruchama wants to do is be beautiful again and momentarily free of communal constraints, others ask only to survive. In "The Tumblers," set in World War II Poland (with a metafictional twist), followers of the Mahmir Rebbe get into a train filled with circus performers rather than into a cattle car. Their only chance is to camouflage themselves as part of the troupe:
Their acceptance as acrobats was a stretch, a first-glance guess, a benefit of the doubt granted by circumstance and only as valuable as their debut would prove. It was an absurd undertaking. But then again, Mendel thought, no more unbelievable than the reality from which they'd escaped, no more unfathomable than the magic of disappearing Jews.
Another story, "Reb Kringle," is almost breezy by comparison. Each year, one Brooklynite dreads his holiday job from hell, playing Santa Claus in a Manhattan department store: "There were elves posted on each side of Itzik; one--a humorless, muscular midget--wore a pair of combat boots that gave him the look of elf-at-arms. His companion might have been a twin. He wore black high-tops but had the same vigilant paramilitary demeanor." Itzik can put up with the children's accidents and greed, with his sciatica, and even with a mischief maker's attempt to cut off his beard. But when one boy admits that what he really wants to do is celebrate Hanukkah, "the infamous Reb Santa" loses it. Though this is undoubtedly the collection's lightest piece--proof positive that you have to be a saint to be a Jewish Santa--it is no less piercing an examination of identity and obligation than Englander's more heavyweight entries. --Kerry Fried [via]More editions of For the Relief of Unbearable Urges:
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Forever and Always: Gabe/Jordanby Lori FosterISBN 0373835280 (0-373-83528-0)
Softcover, Harlequin Enterprises, Limited
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Forever and Always: Gabe/Jordan'Book summary:Back by popular request . . . Sawyer, Morgan, Gabe and Jordan. What a family!
GABE
Gabe Kasper, the heartthrob of Buckhorn County, can have any woman he wants. But it's prickly, uptight college woman Elizabeth Parks who gets under his skin. She thinks Gabe's some kind of hero and wants an interview for her thesis. He doesn't consider pulling a couple of kids out of the lake heroic, but he'll answer her questions in exchange for kisses . . . and more.
JORDAN
Jordan Somerville thinks he wants a woman who's a paragon of virtue . . . . But then the gentle veterinarian -- rescuer of strays -- meets Georgia Barnes, exotic dancer. He's surprised at himself for lusting after her, until he discovers she's not what she appears to be. And then his heart gets way too involved. . . [via]
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The Fourth Handby John IrvingISBN 0375506276 (0-375-50627-6)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafeby Fannie FlaggISBN 0375508414 (0-375-50841-4)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe'Book summary:Shes one of Americas fairest and funniest ladies. Actress and screenwriter, director and comedienne, Fannie Flagg is also a most accomplished and high-spirited author. Said Kirkus of her first book, Coming Attractions: Its subtitled A wonderful novel and thats exactly what it is. Here is her second. Get ready, because its going to make you laugh (a lot), cry (a little), and care (forever).
What is it? Its first the story of two women in the 1980s, of gray-headed Mrs. Threadgoode telling her life story to Evelyn, who is in the sad slump of middle age. The tale she tells is also of two womenof the irrepressibly daredevilish tomboy Idgie and her friend Ruthwho back in the thirties ran a little place in Whistle Stop, Alabama, a Southern kind of Cafe Wobegon offering good barbecue and good coffee and all kinds of love and laughter, even an occasional murder.
And as the past unfolds, the presentfor Evelyn and for uswill never quite be the same.
Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe is folksy and fresh, endearing and affecting, with humor and dramaand with an ending that would fill with smiling tears the Whistle Stop Lake...if they only had a lake.... [via]More editions of Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe:
Glamoramaby Bret Easton EllisISBN 0375703845 (0-375-70384-5)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Glamorama'Book summary:Glamorama is a satirical mass-murder opus more ambitious than Bret Easton Ellis's 1990 American Psycho. It starts as a spritz-of-consciousness romp about kid-club entrepreneur Victor Ward, "the It boy of the moment," an actor-model up for Flatliners II. Ellis has perfect pitch for glam-speak, and he gives nightlife the fizz, pace, and shimmer it lacks in drab reality. Anyone could cite the right celeb names and tunes, but like a rock-polishing machine, his prose gives literary sheen to fame-chasing air-kissers. He's coldly funny: when Victor's girl tries to argue him out of a breakup, she angrily snorts six bumps of coke, stops, mutters, "Wrong vial," snorts four corrective doses from whatever she has in her other fist, then objects to a rival at the party wearing the same dress she's wearing.
You had to be there; Ellis makes you feel you are. But such satire is a very smart bomb targeting a very large barn. Models' status anxiety doesn't merit Ellis's Tom Wolfe-esque expertise. Glamorama gets better when Victor gets drafted into a mysterious group of model-terrorists who bomb 747s and the Ritz in Paris, wearing Kevlar-lined Armani suits. Oh, they still behave like shallow snobs, pronouncing "cool" as if it had 12 o's. But now when somebody swills Cristal, it's apt to be poisoned, to horrific effect, which Ellis expertly, affectlessly describes. His enfant-terrible debut, Less Than Zero, aped Joan Didion. Now Ellis has grown into a lesser Don DeLillo--and that's high praise. --Tim Appelo [via]
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Storiesby Alice MunroISBN 0375727434 (0-375-72743-4)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories'Book summary:Readers know what they are going to get when they pick up an unfamiliar Alice Munro collection, and yet almost every page carries a bounty of unexpected action, feeling, language, and detail. Her stories are always unique, blazing an invigorating originality out of her seemingly commonplace subjects. Each collection develops her oeuvre in increments, subtly expanding her range.
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage is, of course, no exception. It is a fairly conservative collection of nine stories, none of which move far beyond Munro's favored settings: the tiny towns and burgeoning cities of southern Ontario and British Columbia. There are glimpses of youth here--in the title story, an epistolary prank by two teenage girls leads to a one-sided cross country elopement and, seemingly, a happy marriage, and in "Nettles," disrupted childhood affection fleetingly returns through a chance meeting--but most of these pieces are stories of aging women and men, confronting the twin travails of death and late love. As is always the case with Munro, their plots are too elegantly elaborate to summarize, and their unsentimental power is a given; baroque praise would be futile. Read these stories--it is the only way to really understand the miracles that Munro so regularly performs. --Jack Illingworth [via]
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A House for Mr. Biswasby V.S. NaipaulISBN 0375707166 (0-375-70716-6)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A House for Mr. Biswas'Book summary:The early masterpiece of V. S. Naipauls brilliant career, A House for Mr. Biswas is an unforgettable story inspired by Naipaul's father that has been hailed as one of the twentieth century's finest novels.
In his forty-six short years, Mr. Mohun Biswas has been fighting against destiny to achieve some semblance of independence, only to face a lifetime of calamity. Shuttled from one residence to another after the drowning death of his father, for which he is inadvertently responsible, Mr. Biswas yearns for a place he can call home. But when he marries into the domineering Tulsi family on whom he indignantly becomes dependent, Mr. Biswas embarks on an arduousand endlessstruggle to weaken their hold over him and purchase a house of his own. A heartrending, dark comedy of manners, A House for Mr. Biswas masterfully evokes a mans quest for autonomy against an emblematic post-colonial canvas. [via]More editions of A House for Mr. Biswas:
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Housekeepingby Marilynne RobinsonISBN 0374173133 (0-374-17313-3)
Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Housekeeping'Book summary:Winner of the Pen/Hemingway AwardA modern classic, Housekeeping is the story of Ruth and her younger sister, Lucille, who grow up haphazardly, first under the care of their competent grandmother, then of two comically bumbling great-aunts, and finally of Sylvie, the eccentric and remote sister of their dead mother. The family house is in the small town of Fingerbone on a glacial lake in the Far West, the same lake where their grandfather died in a spectacular train wreck and their mother drove off a cliff to her death. It is a town "chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather, and chastened again by an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere." Ruth and Lucille's struggle toward adulthood beautifully illuminates the price of loss and survival, and the dangerous and deep undertow of transcience. [via]
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The Invisible Manby Ralph EllisonISBN 0375507914 (0-375-50791-4)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Invisible Man'Book summary:We rely, in this world, on the visual aspects of humanity as a means of learning who we are. This, Ralph Ellison argues convincingly, is a dangerous habit. A classic from the moment it first appeared in 1952, Invisible Man chronicles the travels of its narrator, a young, nameless black man, as he moves through the hellish levels of American intolerance and cultural blindness. Searching for a context in which to know himself, he exists in a very peculiar state. "I am an invisible man," he says in his prologue. "When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination--indeed, everything and anything except me." But this is hard-won self-knowledge, earned over the course of many years.
As the book gets started, the narrator is expelled from his Southern Negro college for inadvertently showing a white trustee the reality of black life in the south, including an incestuous farmer and a rural whorehouse. The college director chastises him: "Why, the dumbest black bastard in the cotton patch knows that the only way to please a white man is to tell him a lie! What kind of an education are you getting around here?" Mystified, the narrator moves north to New York City, where the truth, at least as he perceives it, is dealt another blow when he learns that his former headmaster's recommendation letters are, in fact, letters of condemnation.
What ensues is a search for what truth actually is, which proves to be supremely elusive. The narrator becomes a spokesman for a mixed-race band of social activists called "The Brotherhood" and believes he is fighting for equality. Once again, he realizes he's been duped into believing what he thought was the truth, when in fact it is only another variation. Of the Brothers, he eventually discerns: "They were blind, bat blind, moving only by the echoed sounds of their voices. And because they were blind they would destroy themselves.... Here I thought they accepted me because they felt that color made no difference, when in reality it made no difference because they didn't see either color or men."
Invisible Man is certainly a book about race in America, and sadly enough, few of the problems it chronicles have disappeared even now. But Ellison's first novel transcends such a narrow definition. It's also a book about the human race stumbling down the path to identity, challenged and successful to varying degrees. None of us can ever be sure of the truth beyond ourselves, and possibly not even there. The world is a tricky place, and no one knows this better than the invisible man, who leaves us with these chilling, provocative words: "And it is this which frightens me: Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?" --Melanie Rehak [via]
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Love Song for a Ravenby Elizabeth LowellISBN 0373837097 (0-373-83709-7)
Softcover, Harlequin Books
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Magic Seedsby V.S. NaipaulISBN 0375707271 (0-375-70727-1)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Loveby Óscar HijuelosISBN 0374201250 (0-374-20125-0)
Hardcover, Farrar, Straus & Giroux
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love'Book summary:Inspired by their heroes Xavier Cugat and Desi Arnaz, brothers Cesar and Nestor Castillo come to New York City from Cuba in 1949 with designs on becoming mambo stars. Eventually they do--performing with Arnaz on "I Love Lucy" in 1955 and recording 78s with their own band, the Mambo Kings. In his second novel, Hijuelos traces the lives of the flashy, guitar-strumming Cesar and the timid, lovelorn Nestor as they cruise the East Coast club circuit in a flamingo-pink bus. Enriching the story are the brothers' friends and family members--all driven by their own private dreams. The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love won a Pulitzer Prize in 1990. [via]
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Measuring the Worldby Daniel Kehlmann, Carol Brown JanewayISBN 0375424466 (0-375-42446-6)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Measuring the World'Book summary:The young Austrian writer Daniel Kehlmann conjures a brilliant and gently comic novel from the lives of two geniuses of the Enlightenment.
Toward the end of the eighteenth century, two young Germans set out to measure the world. One of them, the Prussian aristocrat Alexander von Hum-boldt, negotiates savanna and jungle, travels down the Orinoco, tastes poisons, climbs the highest mountain known to man, counts head lice, and explores every hole in the ground. The other, the barely socialized mathematician and astronomer Carl Friedrich Gauss, does not even need to leave his home in Göttingen to prove that space is curved. He can run prime numbers in his head. He cannot imagine a life without women, yet he jumps out of bed on his wedding night to jot down a mathematical formula. Von Humboldt is known to history as the Second Columbus. Gauss is recognized as the greatest mathematical brain since Newton. Terrifyingly famous and more than eccentric in their old age, the two meet in Berlin in 1828. Gauss has hardly climbed out of his carriage before both men are embroiled in the political turmoil sweeping through Germany after Napoleons fall.
Already a huge best seller in Germany, Measuring the World marks the debut of a glorious new talent on the international scene. [via]More editions of Measuring the World:
My Secret Admirerby Anne Stuart, Vicki Lewis Thompson, Marisa CarrolISBN 0373833989 (0-373-83398-9)
Softcover, Harlequin Books
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Night Trainby Martin AmisISBN 0375701141 (0-375-70114-1)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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Old Schoolby Tobias WolffISBN 0375701494 (0-375-70149-4)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Old School'Book summary:Tobias Wolff's Old School is at once a celebration of literature and delicate hymn to a lost innocence of American life and art. Set in a New England prep school in the early 1960s, the novel imagines a final, pastoral moment before the explosion of the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and the suicide of Ernest Hemingway.
The unnamed narrator is one of several boys whose life revolves around the school's English teachers, those polymaths who seemed to know "exactly what was most worth knowing." For the boys, literature is the center of life, and their obsession culminates in a series of literary competitions during their final year. The prize in each is a private audience with a visiting writer who serves as judge for the entries.
At first, the narrator is entirely taken with the battle. As he fails in his effort to catch Robert Frost's attention and then is unable--due to illness--to even compete for his moment with Ayn Rand, he devotes his energies to a masterpiece for his hero, Hemingway. But, confronting the blank page, the narrator discovers his cowardice, his duplicity. He has withheld himself, he realizes, even from his roommate. He has used his fiction to create a patrician gentility, a mask for his middle class home and his Jewish ancestry. Through the competition for Hemingway, fittingly, all of his illusions about literature dissolve.
Old School is a small, neatly made book, spare and clear in its prose. Each chapter is self-contained and free of anything extraneous to the essentials of plot, mood, and character. Near the end of the novel, the narrator, now a respected writer, imagines that he might one day write about his school days. But he is daunted. "Memory," he says, "is a dream to begin with, and what I had was a dream of memory, not to be put to the test." Old School enters this interplay between dreams and the adult interrogation of memory. Risking sentimentality, Wolff confronts a golden age that never was. From the confrontation, he distills a powerful novel of failed expectations and, ultimately, redemptive self-awareness. --Patrick O'Kelley [via]
Once and Again: Sawyer; Morganby Lori FosterISBN 0373835272 (0-373-83527-2)
Softcover, Harlequin Enterprises, Limited
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A Patchwork Planetby Anne TylerISBN 0375702903 (0-375-70290-3)
Softcover, Random House Large Print
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Patchwork Planet'Book summary:Publication Date: April 14, 1998 In this, her fourteenth novel--and one of her most endearing--Anne Tyler tells the story of a lovable loser who's trying to get his life in order. Barnaby Gaitlin has been in trouble ever since adolescence. He had this habit of breaking into other people's houses. It wasn't the big loot he was after, like his teenage cohorts. It was just that he liked to read other people's mail, pore over their family photo albums, and appropriate a few of their precious mementos. But for eleven years now, he's been working steadily for Rent-a-Back, renting his back to old folks and shut-ins who can't move their own porch furniture or bring the Christmas tree down from the attic. At last, his life seems to be on an even keel. Still, the Gaitlins (of "old" Baltimore) cannot forget the price they paid for buying off Barnaby's former victims. And his ex-wife would just as soon he didn't show up ever to visit their little girl, Opal. Even the nice, steady woman (his guardian angel?) who seems to have designs on him doesn't fully trust him, it develops, when the chips are down, and it looks as though his world may fall apart again. There is no one like Anne Tyler, with her sharp, funny, tender perceptions about how human beings navigate on a puzzling planet, and she keeps us enthralled from start to finish in this delicious new novel. [via]
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Pearlby Mary GordonISBN 037542315X (0-375-42315-X)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Pearl'Book summary:Without preamble, Mary Gordon takes the reader straight to the heart of the matter in Pearl. On Christmas night, in 1998, Maria Meyers gets a call from the State Department. Maria, a New York liberal, keeps the illusion of control of her surroundings, and the news she gets is confusing, annoying, and frightening. Confusing because she doesn't understand why Pearl, 20 years old and Maria's only child, has done what she has done, annoying because there has been no forewarning, and frightening because Pearl might die. Maria is definitely not in control here, a condition that makes her vastly uncomfortable. The caller tells Maria that Pearl has chained herself to the flagpole at the American Embassy in Dublin, where she has gone to study the Irish language. Her action is the culmination of six weeks of starvation. She is very ill, dehydrated, and near death. She has left three letters on the sidewalk: one meant for the media, one for her mother, and one for their dearest and oldest family friend, Joseph Kasperman.
The media letter says "...I am giving my life in witness to the death of Stephen Donegan and to the goodness and importance of his life. Second, to show my support, my admiration for the Peace Agreement, and those who have worked toward it. Third, to mark the human will to harm." Pearl believes that, due to a careless remark said in anger, she is responsible for Stephen's death. She has been consorting with members of the Real IRA, those hardliners who will make no accommodation to stop the violence. Pearl breaks with them over an act which places Stephen, a hapless, slow-witted boy, in the hands of the law. Her primary philosophical concern is her conviction that the "human will to harm," is pernicious and pervasive. She wants to opt out of any further possibility of harming anyone.
On this convoluted thread, Mary Gordon marches forward with a stunning exploration of revisited themes, such as Catholic-Jewish heritage, trouble with fathers, and the nature of personal responsibility. A stylistic note: Gordon employs an omniscient narrator to make comments, in the nature of "Gentle Reader" asides. It is sometimes irritating, but a small price to pay for Gordon's careful deconstruction of everyone's thoughts and actions as Maria and Joseph arrive in Dublin, where Maria confronts Mick, the American angel of the Real IRA, Finbar, Pearl's lover, and Pearl's doctors. She is used to directing traffic and is thwarted on all sides by people whose agendas are vastly different from hers. Joseph is a shadowy figure, more acted upon than acting, and when he does decide to stand up he makes a ludicrous error. Gordon has forged an entirely satisfactory and plausible ending for a precarious set of circumstances. The book is thought-provoking, asking and inspiring the reader to take a position on issues as old as time and as new as the headlines. --Valerie Ryan [via]
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The Piano Tunerby Daniel MasonISBN 0375414657 (0-375-41465-7)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Piano Tuner'Book summary:Daniel Mason's debut novel, The Piano Tuner, is the mesmerizing story of Edgar Drake, commissioned by the British War Office in 1886 to travel to hostile Burma to repair a rare Erard grand piano vital to the Crown's strategic interests. Eccentric Surgeon-Major Anthony Carroll has brokered peace with local warlords primarily through music, a free medical clinic, and the "powers" of common scientific instruments, much to the dismay of warmongering officers suspect of such unorthodox methods. Drake is an introspective, well-mannered soul who, once there, falls in love with Burma and stays long past the piano-fixing to aid Carroll's political agenda. Drake's arduous journey to reach the outpost, however, takes far too long (nearly half the book) and the plotting is rather heavy-handed at times (one night, Drake learns of a mysterious "Man with One Story" who rarely speaks, and the very next morning the Man tells all to Drake). The story is ambitious, the language florid and sure to please, but the dialogue and melodrama are sometimes tedious. While out on the town with Carroll's love interest, Khin Myo (who enchants Drake), Mason offers the townspersons' view of Drake:
It is only natural that a guest be treated with hospitality, the quiet man who has come to mend the singing elephant is shy, and walks with the posture of one who is unsure of the world, we too would keep him company to make him feel welcome, but we do not speak English.... They say he is one of the kind of men who has dreams, but tells no one.
Drake's complexity is thin; perhaps the beauty of Burma takes over any real need for introspection. Despite these quibbles, The Piano Tuner is a memorable achievement. --Michael Ferch [via]More editions of The Piano Tuner:
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Platformby Michel Houellebecq, Frank WynneISBN 0375414622 (0-375-41462-2)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Platform'Book summary:Michel Renault is a human void. Following the death of the father he barely knew, he endures his civil ser-
vice job while eking out an existence of prepackaged pleasure, hollow friendships, TV dinners, and pornography. On a group holiday in Thailand, however, he meets the shyly compelling Valérie, who soon pursues an agenda that Michel himself could never have thought possible: his own humanization.
Back in Paris, they plunge into an affair that strays into S&M, public sex, and partner swapping, even as they devise a scheme to save Valéries ailing travel company by capitalizing on the only trade Michel has seen flourish in the Third World. Before long, he quits his job, and their business model for sex tourism is gradually implemented. But when they return to Thailand, where Michels philosophy will be put into practice, he discovers that sex is neither the most consuming nor dangerous of passions . . .
From a suburbanized West crippled by hate crime to an East subsumed by materialism, Michel Houellebecq exploreswith characteristic provocativeness, but also with surprising tendernessthe emotions that seem most resilient to any influence: love and hate. Platform is, as Anita Brookner has written, a brilliant novel, casting a prescient eye on the abuses and inequalities that lead to wider trouble. [via]More editions of Platform:
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Play It As It Laysby Joan DidionISBN 0374529949 (0-374-52994-9)
Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Play It As It Lays'Book summary:A ruthless and unflinching examination of American life in the late 1960s, from the author of The Year of Magical Thinking. Somewhere out beyond Hollywood, hollowed-out actress Maria Wyeth's life plays out in a numbing routine of perpetual freeway driving. Anaesthetized to pain and pleasure, she is seemingly unaffected by her fraught personal history. In her early thirties, divorced from her husband, dislocated from friends, and somehow detached from her past and future, Wyeth epitomises a generation made ill by too much freedom. Set beyond good and evil -- literally in Los Angeles and the barren wastescapes of the Mojave desert, and figuratively in the landscapes of a broken spirit -- Play It As It Lays is an immaculately wrought vision of Californian culture on the cusp of the 1970s. Three decades after its original publication, the novel remains an intense dissection of a very particular time and place. [via]
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The Powerbookby Jeanette WintersonISBN 0375725059 (0-375-72505-9)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Powerbook'Book summary:While many other novels are still nursing hangovers from the 20th century, The PowerBook has risen early to greet the challenge of the new millennium. Set in cyberspace, Jeanette Winterson's seventh novel (or eighth, if you count her disowned Boating for Beginners) travels with ease, casting the net of its love story over Paris, Capri, and London. Its interactive narrator, Ali, is a "language costumier" who will swathe your imagination in the clothes of transformation: all you have to do is decide whom you want to be. Ali--known also as Alix--is a virtual narrator in a networked world of e-writing. You are the reader, invited to inhabit the story--any story--you wish to be told. As in all the best video games, you can choose your location, your character, even the clothes you want to wear. Beware: you can enter and play, but you cannot determine the outcome.
Ali/x is a digital Orlando for the modern age, moving across time and through transmutations of identity, weaving her stories with "long lines of laptop DNA" and shaping herself to the reader's desire. She wants to make love as simple as a song, but even in cyberspace there is no love without pain. Ali/x offers a stranger on the other side of the screen the opportunity of freedom for one night. She falls in love with her beautiful stranger, and finds herself reinvented by her own story.
The PowerBook is rich with historical allegory and literary allusion. Winterson's dialogue crackles with humor, snappy dialogue, and good jokes, several of which are at her own expense. This is a world of disguise, boundary crossing, and emotional diversions that change the navigation of the plot of life. Strangely sprouting tulips are erected in place of the phallus. Husbands and wives are uncoupled. Lovers disappear in the night to escape from themselves. On the hard drive of The PowerBook are stored a variety of stories that the reader can download and open at will, complete stories that loop through the central narrative. The tale of Mallory's third expedition, the disinterring of the Roman Governor of London in Spitalfields Church, or the contemplation of "great and ruinous lovers" are capsules of narrative compression. In Winterson's compacted meaning, language becomes a character in its own right--it is one of the heroes of the novel.
"What I am seeking to do in my work is to make a form that answers to 21st-century needs," Winterson has written. The PowerBook does just that. Her prose has found a metaphor for its linguistic forms of creation that feels almost invented for her, "a web of coordinates that will change the world." There will be a virtual rush of Internet-themed books in the networked naughties. With The PowerBook Winterson has triumphantly gotten there first. --Rachel Holmes [via]
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The Private Eye and Beguiledby Jayne Ann Krentz, Lori FosterISBN 0373834128 (0-373-83412-8)
Softcover, Harlequin Mills & Boon, Limited
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Private Eye and Beguiled'Book summary:Krentz, 12-time bestselling author, leads this special collection with her novel about an innkeeper who's read too many detective novels and a burned-out private eye who thinks a case at Maggie's B&B is going to be a cinch. In Foster's new novel, "Beguilded, " an errant son returns to his family to find the murderer of his twin brother. In the process, he tries to keep from falling in love with his brother's old flame. [via]
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The Private Eye: The Private Eye/Keegan's Bluff/Cop Next Doorby Jayne Ann Krentz, Dani Sinclair, Julie MillerISBN 0373835981 (0-373-83598-1)
Softcover, Harlequin Enterprises, Limited
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The Pursuit of Alice Thriftby Elinor LipmanISBN 0375724591 (0-375-72459-1)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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Raptureby Susan MinotISBN 0375413278 (0-375-41327-8)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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Rebellionby Nora RobertsISBN 0373834284 (0-373-83428-4)
Softcover, Silhouette Books
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Revolutionary Roadby Richard YatesISBN 0375708448 (0-375-70844-8)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Revolutionary Road'Book summary:The rediscovery and rejuvenation of Richard Yates's 1961 novel Revolutionary Road is due in large part to its continuing emotional and moral resonance for an early 21st-century readership. April and Frank Wheeler are a young, ostensibly thriving couple living with their two children in a prosperous Connecticut suburb in the mid-1950s. However, like the characters in John Updike's similarly themed Couples, the self-assured exterior masks a creeping frustration at their inability to feel fulfilled in their relationships or careers. Frank is mired in a well-paying but boring office job and April is a housewife still mourning the demise of her hoped-for acting career. Determined to identify themselves as superior to the mediocre sprawl of suburbanites who surround them, they decide to move to France where they will be better able to develop their true artistic sensibilities, free of the consumerist demands of capitalist America. As their relationship deteriorates into an endless cycle of squabbling, jealousy and recriminations, their trip and their dreams of self-fulfillment are thrown into jeopardy.
Yates's incisive, moving, and often very funny prose weaves a tale that is at once a fascinating period piece and a prescient anticipation of the way we live now. Many of the cultural motifs seem quaintly dated--the early-evening cocktails, Frank's illicit lunch breaks with his secretary, the way Frank isn't averse to knocking April around when she speaks out of turn--and yet the quiet desperation at thwarted dreams reverberates as much now as it did years ago. Like F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, this novel conveys, with brilliant erudition, the exacting cost of chasing the American dream. --Jane Morris, Amazon.co.uk [via]
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A Ring of Endless Light: The Austin Family Chronicles, Book 4by Madeleine L'EngleISBN 0374362998 (0-374-36299-8)
Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Ring of Endless Light: The Austin Family Chronicles, Book 4'Book summary:"This wasn't the first tie that I'd come close to death, but it was the first time I'd been involved in this part of it, this strange, terrible saying goodbye to someone you've loved."
These are Vicky Austin's thoughts as she stands near Commander Rodney's grave while her grandfather, who himself is dying of cancer, recites the funeral service. Watching his condition deteriorate over that long summer is almost more than she can bear. Then, in the midst of her struggle, she finds herself the center of attention for three young men. Leo, Commander Rodney's son, turns to her as an old friend seeki comfort but longing for romance. Zachary, whose attempted suicide inadvertently cauesd Commander Rodney's death, sees her as the one sane and normal person who can give some meaning ot his life. And Adam, a serious young student working at the nearby marine-biology station, discvoers Vicky, his friend's little sister, incipient telepathic powers that can help him with his experiments in dolphin communications. Vicky finds solace and brief moments of peace in her poetry, but life goes on around her, and the strain intensifies as she confromts matters of love and of death, of dependence and of responsibility, universal concerns that we all must face. The inevitable crisis comes and Vicky must rely on openness, sensitivity, and the love of others to overcome her private grief. Once again, Madeleine L'Engle has written a story that reveals in the drama of vividly portrayed characters and events the spiritual and moral dimensions of common human experiences.[via]A Ring of Endless Light is a 1981 Newbery Honor Book.More editions of A Ring of Endless Light: The Austin Family Chronicles, Book 4:
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Rise and Shine : A Novelby Anna QuindlenISBN 0375502246 (0-375-50224-6)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Rise and Shine : A Novel'Book summary:From Anna Quindlen, acclaimed author of Blessings, Black and Blue, and One True Thing, a superb novel about two sisters, the true meaning of success, and the qualities in life that matter most.
Its an otherwise ordinary Monday when Meghan Fitzmaurices perfect life hits a wall. A household name as the host of Rise and Shine, the countrys highest-rated morning talk show, Meghan cuts to a commercial breakbut not before she mutters two forbidden words into her open mike.
In an instant, its the end of an era, not only for Meghan, who is unaccustomed to dealing with adversity, but also for her younger sister, Bridget, a social worker in the Bronx who has always lived in Meghans long shadow. The effect of Meghans on-air truth telling reverberates through both their lives, affecting Meghans son, husband, friends, and fans, as well as Bridgets perception of her sister, their complex childhood, and herself. What follows is a story about how, in very different ways, the Fitzmaurice women adapt, survive, and manage to bring the whole teeming world of New York to heel by dint of their smart mouths, quick wits, and the powerful connection between them that even the worst tragedy cannot shatter. [via]More editions of Rise and Shine : A Novel:
The Romantics: A Novelby Pankaj MishraISBN 0375502742 (0-375-50274-2)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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Senor Vivo and the Coca Lordby Louis De BernieresISBN 0375700145 (0-375-70014-5)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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Shadow Dance : A Novelby Julie GarwoodISBN 0375435263 (0-375-43526-3)
Hardcover, Random House Large Print
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Slow Burnby Julie GarwoodISBN 0375435255 (0-375-43525-5)
Hardcover, Random House Large Print
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The Small Rainby Madeleine L'EngleISBN 0374519129 (0-374-51912-9)
Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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Smilla's Sense of Snowby Peter Hoeg, Tiina NunnallyISBN 0374266441 (0-374-26644-1)
Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Smilla's Sense of Snow'Book summary:In this international bestseller, Peter Høeg successfully combines the pleasures of literary fiction with those of the thriller. Smilla Jaspersen, half Danish, half Greenlander, attempts to understand the death of a small boy who falls from the roof of her apartment building. Her childhood in Greenland gives her an appreciation for the complex structures of snow, and when she notices that the boy's footprints show he ran to his death, she decides to find out who was chasing him. As she attempts to solve the mystery, she uncovers a series of conspiracies and cover-ups and quickly realizes that she can trust nobody. Her investigation takes her from the streets of Copenhagen to an icebound island off the coast of Greenland. What she finds there has implications far beyond the death of a single child. The unusual setting, gripping plot, and compelling central character add up to one of the most fascinating and literate thrillers of recent years. [via]
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The Solitaire Mysteryby Jostein GaarderISBN 0374529434 (0-374-52943-4)
Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Solitaire Mystery'Book summary:Jostein Gaarder had an unlikely international success with Sophie's World, a novelized exploration of western philosophy through the eyes of a young girl. This is an earlier work, translated from the Norwegian by Sarah Jane Hails. This fable-like story dabbles in philosophy too, though more lightly. It tells of a Norwegian boy traveling across Europe with his calm and reflective father in search of his long lost mother. The boy finds a tiny manuscript that reveals the secret of a magic deck of cards that can tell the future. [via]
Somebody's Dadby Judith ArnoldISBN 0373834993 (0-373-83499-3)
Softcover, Harlequin Enterprises, Limited
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Speakby Laurie Halse AndersonISBN 0374371520 (0-374-37152-0)
Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Speak'Book summary:Since the beginning of the school year, high school freshman Melinda has found that it's been getting harder and harder for her to speak out loud: "My throat is always sore, my lips raw.... Every time I try to talk to my parents or a teacher, I sputter or freeze.... It's like I have some kind of spastic laryngitis." What could have caused Melinda to suddenly fall mute? Could it be due to the fact that no one at school is speaking to her because she called the cops and got everyone busted at the seniors' big end-of-summer party? Or maybe it's because her parents' only form of communication is Post-It notes written on their way out the door to their nine-to-whenever jobs. While Melinda is bothered by these things, deep down she knows the real reason why she's been struck mute: Andy Evans. He's a senior at Melinda's high school, and Melinda hasn't been able to speak clearly since he raped her at the senior party last August.
Laurie Halse Anderson's first novel is a stunning and sympathetic tribute to the teenage outcast. The triumphant ending, in which Melinda finds her voice and loudly confronts her rapist, is cause for cheering (while many readers might also shed a tear or two). After reading Speak, it will be hard for any teen to look at the class scapegoat again without a measure of compassion and understanding for that person--who may be screaming beneath the silence. (Ages 13 and older) --Jennifer Hubert [via]
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Specimen Daysby Michael CunninghamISBN 0374299625 (0-374-29962-5)
Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Specimen Days'Book summary:Book Description: In each section of Michael Cunningham's bold new novel, his first since The Hours, we encounter the same group of characters: a young boy, an older man, and a young woman. "In the Machine" is a ghost story that takes place at the height of the industrial revolution, as human beings confront the alienating realities of the new machine age. "The Children's Crusade," set in the early twenty-first century, plays with the conventions of the noir thriller as it tracks the pursuit of a terrorist band that is detonating bombs, seemingly at random, around the city. The third part, "Like Beauty," evokes a New York 150 years into the future, when the city is all but overwhelmed by refugees from the first inhabited planet to be contacted by the people of Earth.
Presiding over each episode of this interrelated whole is the prophetic figure of the poet Walt Whitman, who promised his future readers, "It avails not, neither time or place ... I am with you, and know how it is." Specimen Days is a genre-bending, haunting, and transformative ode to life in our greatest city and a meditation on the direction and meaning of America's destiny. It is a work of surpassing power and beauty by one of the most original and daring writers at work today.
More from Michael Cunningham 
The Hours
A Home at the End of the World
Flesh and BloodWhitman Sampler 
The Portable Walt Whitman
Specimen Days & Collect
Walt Whitman: Poetry and Prose
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A Swiftly Tilting Planetby Madeleine L'EngleISBN 0374373620 (0-374-37362-0)
Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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Tears Of The Giraffeby Alexander McCall SmithISBN 0375423885 (0-375-42388-5)
Hardcover, Pantheon Books
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The Time of Our Singing: A Novelby Richard PowersISBN 0374277826 (0-374-27782-6)
Hardcover, Farrar, Straus & Giroux
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Time of Our Singing: A Novel'Book summary:In some respects, Richard Powers's The Time of Our Singing is just a big, absorbing drama about an American family, with the typical ingredients of an immigrant parent and some social obstacles--in this case, a biracial marriage in the Civil Rights era--to be overcome by the talented children. But Powers's lyrical gifts lift this material far above its familiar subject matter. His descriptions of music alone will transport the reader. The Strom family were raised with this common language: "Our parents' Crazed Quotations game played on the notion that every moment's tune had all history's music box for its counterpoint. On any evening in Hamilton Heights, we could jump from organum to atonality without any hint of all the centuries that had died fiery deaths between them." The central figure of this novel is the dazzling Jonah, who makes a life from singing, and who may be the only person around him who regards his racial heritage as irrelevant to his ambitions. Powers's is such a fertile writer, however, that he can't stay with any single story, but plunges into pages and pages of family and social histories. The result is a rambling, resonant, fearless novel that pulls the reader along in its wake. --Regina Marler [via]
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Timelineby Michael CrichtonISBN 0375704167 (0-375-70416-7)
Softcover, Ballantine Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Timeline'Book summary:When you step into a time machine, fax yourself through a "quantum foam wormhole," and step out in feudal France circa 1357, be very, very afraid. If you aren't strapped back in precisely 37 hours after your visit begins, you'll miss the quantum bus back to 1999 and be stranded in a civil war, caught between crafty abbots, mad lords, and peasant bandits all eager to cut your throat. You'll also have to dodge catapults that hurl sizzling pitch over castle battlements. On the social front, you should avoid provoking "the butcher of Crecy" or Sir Oliver may lop your head off with a swoosh of his broadsword or cage and immerse you in "Milady's Bath," a brackish dungeon pit into which live rats are tossed now and then for prisoners to eat.
This is the plight of the heroes of Timeline, Michael Crichton's thriller. They're historians in 1999 employed by a tech billionaire-genius with more than a few of Bill Gates's most unlovable quirks. Like the entrepreneur in Crichton's Jurassic Park, Doniger plans a theme park featuring artifacts from a lost world revived via cutting-edge science. When the project's chief historian sends a distress call to 1999 from 1357, the boss man doesn't tell the younger historians the risks they'll face trying to save him. At first, the interplay between eras is clever, but Timeline swiftly becomes a swashbuckling old-fashioned adventure, with just a dash of science and time paradox in the mix. Most of the cool facts are about the Middle Ages, and Crichton marvelously brings the past to life without ever letting the pulse-pounding action slow down. At one point, a time-tripper tries to enter the Chapel of Green Death. Unfortunately, its custodian, a crazed giant with terrible teeth and a bad case of lice, soon has her head on a block. "She saw a shadow move across the grass as he raised his ax into the air." I dare you not to turn the page!
Through the narrative can be glimpsed the glowing bones of the movie that may be made from Timeline and the cutting-edge computer game that should hit the market in 2000. Expect many clashing swords and chase scenes through secret castle passages. But the book stands alone, tall and scary as a knight in armor shining with blood. --Tim Appelo [via]
A Traitor to Memoryby Elizabeth GeorgeISBN 0375431136 (0-375-43113-6)
Hardcover, Random House Large Print
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Traitor to Memory'Book summary:Families can be monstrous and their secrets dangerous, as New Scotland Yard detectives Thomas Lynley and Barbara Havers have discovered. The pair are puzzled that the Hampstead police need their help investigating the vehicular murder of a middle-aged divorcée, until they find evidence that one of their own superiors once knew the dead lady very well indeed. But the circumstances of Eugenie Davies's murder appear to center on her children: Gideon, a famous violinist now undergoing psychoanalysis for his sudden inability to play, and the long-dead Sonia, a disabled baby whose drowning death was shrouded in secrecy for her virtuoso brother's sake--at the insistence of their father, Richard--but also trumpeted in the press as the infamous "nanny murder" of its day. The nanny, Katja Wolff, has recently been released from prison, having never spoken of the night Sonia drowned. Lynley, Havers, and their colleague Winston Nkata know that whatever secret Katja Wolff has been hiding must be the cause of Eugenie Davies's death, but before they can find out what it is, another deliberate hit-and-run occurs in their own backyard.
The suspects are many: Wolff; Eugenie's most recent suitor; her ne'er-do-well brother; Gideon's longtime mentor, who kept in contact with Eugenie in the years after she abandoned her husband and son; and a gentleman of many monikers who boarded with the family at the time of the drowning. Even Richard Davies, the dead woman's ex-husband, is under suspicion. But it's violinist Gideon Davies's quest into his family's past, undertaken to save his career, that sets the book's events in motion. His own telling of the story runs parallel to the author's own voice but is time-shifted. Along with the details of the police investigation, this paints a disturbing picture of what happens when the truth is obscured and a child's normal instincts sublimated.
A Traitor to Memory is massive, and it's hard not to spot a few flaws in a plot so complex. The dual narratives force abnormally slow reading, the motive for one murder and two near-murders is inexplicably glossed over, and many doughty Lynley/Havers fans will still wonder by the end what exactly happened in Sonia's bathroom. Yet Elizabeth George orchestrates the family-secrets theme like a maestro, and at least one of the second-chair players--such as Katja Wolff's beautiful, scarred lover Yasmine Edwards--may be a rising star in the series. George's fans will no doubt find this 11th entry in the series worthy of a standing ovation. --Barrie Trinkle [via]
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Troubling a Starby Madeleine L'EngleISBN 0374377839 (0-374-37783-9)
Hardcover, Farrar, Straus & Giroux
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Troubling a Star'Book summary:After a year in New York City and a summer with her grandfather, Vicky Austin returns to the rural connecticut village she grew up in-- and feels totally out of place. then she meets Adam Eddington's Great-aunt serena, who reminds her of her beloved grandfather, and she begins to find a comfortable, if not exciting, routine to her days. At Christmas, Serena gives Vicky a trip to Antarctica, to visit Adam. Vicky can't believe her luck.[via]
But the trip is not what Vicky imagined it would be. First of all, she doesnt know where she stands with Adam. He's pulled back, saying they are just friends. But weren't they more than that, Vicky thinks. And Vicky's fellow passengers are not what they seem or they are more than she knows. Finally, even Aunt Serena's motives are suspect, as Vicky discovers a journal that belonged to Adam's famous uncle who disappeared many years earlier.
As Vicky becomes more and more caught up in a mystery involving drugs, nuclear waste, and international espionage, she discovers that her assumptions about the world are hopelessly naive and that life, hers included, is as fragile as the ecosystem of Antarctica, the world's most remote continent.More editions of Troubling a Star:
True History of the Kelly Gangby Peter CareyISBN 0375724672 (0-375-72467-2)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'True History of the Kelly Gang'Book summary:Out of nineteenth-century Australia rides a hero of his people and a man for all nations, in this masterpiece by the Booker Prize-winning author of Oscar and Lucinda and Jack Maggs. Exhilarating, hilarious, panoramic, and immediately engrossing, it is also-at a distance of many thousand miles and more than a century-a Great American Novel.This is Ned Kelly's true confession, in his own words and written on the run for an infant daughter he has never seen. To the authorities, this son of dirt-poor Irish immigrants was a born thief and, ultimately, a cold-blooded murderer; to most other Australians, he was a scapegoat and patriot persecuted by "English" landlords and their agents.With his brothers and two friends, Kelly eluded a massive police manhunt for twenty months, living by his wits and strong heart, supplementing his bushwhacking skills with ingenious bank robberies while enjoying the support of most everyone not in uniform. He declined to flee overseas when he could, bound to win his jailed mother's freedom by any means possible, including his own surrender. In the end, however, she served out her sentence in the same Melbourne prison where, in 1880, her son was hanged.Still his country's most powerful legend, Ned Kelly is here chiefly a man in full: devoted son, loving husband, fretful father, and loyal friend, now speaking as if from the grave. With this mythic outlaw and the story of his mighty travails and exploits, and with all the force of a classic Western, Peter Carey has breathed life into a historical figure who transcends all borders and embodies tragedy, perseverance, and freedom. [via]
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The Twenty-Seventh City: A Novelby Jonathan FranzenISBN 0374279721 (0-374-27972-1)
Hardcover, Farrar, Straus & Giroux
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The Unburiedby Charles PalliserISBN 0374280355 (0-374-28035-5)
Hardcover, Farrar, Straus & Giroux
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Unburied'Book summary:Though putatively a mystery set (mostly) in the Victorian age, Charles Palliser's The Unburied has more in common with Umberto Eco than Arthur Conan Doyle. Like The Name of the Rose, this novel is set in a scholarly community and features a lost manuscript as the McGuffin of choice. And here, too, the mystery is not really what the book is about at all. Palliser's tale centers on Edward Courtine, a Cambridge don with a bee in his bonnet about Alfred the Great. It doesn't take a great medievalist to figure out that Courtine has allowed emotion to cloud his reason concerning the Saxon monarch: his version of Alfred's life and character is so forgiving as to be downright suspicious.
When it is suggested that a source dear to his heart may in fact be fraudulent, he accuses his critics of cowardice. According to Courtine, those revisionist scoundrels doubt the veracity of his beloved source "because their own self-serving cynicism is reproached by the portrait of the king that Grimbald offers. You see, his account confirms how extraordinarily brave and resourceful and learned Alfred was, and what a generous and much-loved man." Now Courtine has come to the cathedral town of Thurcester because he believes Grimbald's original manuscript may be in the cathedral library--a manuscript that he hopes will validate his own version of the great king's reign.
Palliser takes his time setting up his story, seeding it with clues that more often than not lead to dead ends. We learn, for example, that Courtine was once married, that his wife ran off with another man, and that he blames his school pal Austin Fickling for the rupture in his marital bliss. Dark doings at the cathedral are also hinted at, with quite a lot of space devoted to a murder that occurred centuries earlier. Meanwhile, ecclesiastical renovations turn up some unpleasant surprises--and as yet another murder ensues, Courtine is swept up in less scholarly pursuits. As the hapless academic (a Watson without a Holmes) pursues one red herring after another, it becomes apparent that Courtine's psyche is the real mystery on hand. History, he discovers, can obscure as much as it elucidates. All these years, his obsession with an idealized past has provided an excellent refuge from the realities of his present. In the end, what he uncovers is the secret of himself--and the reader of The Unburied is treated to a fine ghost story, in which the ghosts are quite literally all in the mind. --Alix Wilber [via]
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The Vagina Monologues: The V-Day Editionby Eve EnslerISBN 0375505652 (0-375-50565-2)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Vagina Monologues: The V-Day Edition'Book summary:"I say vagina because I want people to respond," says playwright Eve Ensler, creator of the hilarious, disturbing soliloquies in The Vagina Monologues, a book based on her one-woman play. And respond they do--with horror, anger, censure, and sparks of wonder and pleasure. Ensler is on a fervent mission to elevate and celebrate this much mumbled-about body part. She asked hundreds of women of all ages a series of questions about their vaginas (What do you call it? How would you dress it?) that prompt some wondrous answers. Standouts among the euphemisms are tamale, split knish, choochi snorcher, Gladys Siegelman--Gladys Siegelman?--and, of course, that old standby "down there." "Down there?" asks a composite character springing from several older women. "I haven't been down there since 1953. No, it had nothing to do with [American president] Eisenhower." Two of the most powerful pieces include a jagged poem stitched together from the memories of a Bosnian woman raped by soldiers and an American woman sexually abused as a child who reclaims her vagina as a place of wild joy. [via]
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The Vampire Armandby Anne RiceISBN 0375704159 (0-375-70415-9)
Softcover, Random House Large Print
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Vampire Armand'Book summary:In The Vampire Armand, Anne Rice returns to her indomitable Vampire Chronicles and recaptures the gothic horror and delight she first explored in her classic tale Interview with the Vampire (in which Armand, played by Antonio Banderas in the film version, made his first appearance as director of the Théâtre des Vampires).
The story begins in the aftermath of Memnoch the Devil. Vampires from all over the globe have gathered around Lestat, who lies prostrate on the floor of a cathedral. Dead? In a coma? As Armand reflects on Lestat's condition, he is drawn by David Talbot to tell the story of his own life. The narrative abruptly rushes back to 15th-century Constantinople, and the Armand of the present recounts the fragmented memories of his childhood abduction from Kiev. Eventually, he is sold to a Venetian artist (and vampire), Marius. Rice revels in descriptions of the sensual relationship between the young and still-mortal Armand and his vampiric mentor. But when Armand is finally transformed, the tone of the book dramatically shifts. Raw and sexually explicit scenes are displaced by Armand's introspective quest for a union of his Russian Orthodox childhood, his hedonistic life with Marius, and his newly acquired immortality. These final chapters remind one of the archetypal significance of Rice's vampires; at their best, Armand, Lestat, and Marius offer keen insights into the most human of concerns.
The Vampire Armand is richly intertextual; readers will relish the retelling of critical events from Lestat and Louis's narratives. Nevertheless, the novel is very much Armand's own tragic tale. Rice deftly integrates the necessary back-story for new readers to enter her epic series, and the introduction of a few new voices adds a fresh perspective--and the promise of provocative future installments. --Patrick O'Kelley [via]
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A Whistling Womanby A. S. ByattISBN 0375415343 (0-375-41534-3)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Whistling Woman'Book summary:This electrifying new novel forms the triumphant conclusion to the great Frederica quartet depicting the forces in English life from the early 50s to 1970.
While Frederica -- the spirited heroine of Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, and Babel Tower -- falls almost by accident into a career in television in London, tumultuous events in her home county of Yorkshire threaten to change her life and those of the people she loves. In the late 1960s the world begins to split. Near the university, where the scientists Luk and Jacqueline are studying snails and neurons and the working of the brain, an anti-university springs up. On the high moors nearby, a gentle therapeutic community is taken over by a turbulent, charismatic leader. Visions of blood and flames, of mirrors and doubles, share the refracting energy of Fredericas mosaic-like television shows. The languages of religion, myth and fairy-tale overlap with the terms of science and the new computer age. Darkness and light are in perpetual tension and the meaning of love itself seems to vanish; people flounder, often comically, to find their true sexual, intellectual and emotional identity.
The focus of these novels first widened from the old nuclear family to the experimental group and now narrows again to reveal the different, modern patterns of intimacy which emerged in these years. Through her wayward, lovingly drawn characters and breath-taking twists of plot, Byatt illuminates the effervescence of the 1960s -- both its excitements and its dangers -- as no one has done before. A Whistling Woman is the ultimate novel of ideas made flesh -- gloriously sensual, sexy and scary, bursting with ideas, contradictions, scientific discoveries, ethical conflicts, sly humour and wonderful humanity. [via]More editions of A Whistling Woman:
Witchcraft: Witchcraft/Last Chance Cafe/Bayou Moonby Jayne Ann Krentz, Amanda Stevens, Rebecca YorkISBN 0373835426 (0-373-83542-6)
Softcover, Harlequin Enterprises, Limited
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Witchcraft: Witchcraft/Last Chance Cafe/Bayou Moon'Book summary:Love isn't always what it seems . . .
WITCHCRAFT
A NOVEL OF ELECTRIFYING MYSTERY AND ROMANCE BY NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR JAYNE ANN KRENTZ
Mystery writer Kimberly Sawyer received a single blood-red rose with a needle thrust into its heart -- and she was terrified. Then, just as she remembered Darius Cavenaugh's promise to help her anytime, anywhere, he appeared at her door. How had he known she needed him? Was it the deep, intuitive intimacy of a soul mate . . . or witchcraft?Plus two suspense-filled romantic stories
AMANDA STEVENS
Last Chance Café
Leni Crowe "knew" the stranger the moment he walked into her west Texas café. Cade Walker had her husband's eyes. But her husband was dead, killed in a fiery car crash while investigating a local drug cartel, and Cade was very, very alive . . .REBECCA YORK
Bayou Reunion
When Chase Melancon inherited the crumbling Belle Vista plantation, he was shocked to find Julienne Rousseau waiting for him. Theirs was a haunted past, and she could be there only because she loved him . . . or to lure him to his death. [via]More editions of Witchcraft: Witchcraft/Last Chance Cafe/Bayou Moon:
The Working Poor: Invisible In Americaby David K. ShiplerISBN 0375708219 (0-375-70821-9)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Working Poor: Invisible In America'Book summary:Most of the people I write about in this book do not have the luxury of rage. They are caught in exhausting struggles. Their wages do not lift them far enough from poverty to improve their lives, and their lives, in turn, hold them back. The term by which they are usually described, working poor, should be an oxymoron. Nobody who works hard should be poor in America. from the Introduction
From the author of the Pulitzer Prizewinning Arab and Jew, a new book that presents a searing, intimate portrait of working American families struggling against insurmountable odds to escape poverty.
As David K. Shipler makes clear in this powerful, humane study, the invisible poor are engaged in the activity most respected in American ideologyhard, honest work. But their version of the American Dream is a nightmare: low-paying, dead-end jobs; the profound failure of government to improve upon decaying housing, health care, and education; the failure of families to break the patterns of child abuse and substance abuse. Shipler exposes the interlocking problems by taking us into the sorrowful, infuriating, courageous lives of the poorwhite and black, Asian and Latino, citizens and immigrants. We encounter them every day, for they do jobs essential to the American economy.
We meet drifting farmworkers in North Carolina, exploited garment workers in New Hampshire, illegal immigrants trapped in the steaming kitchens of Los Angeles restaurants, addicts who struggle into productive work from the cruel streets of the nations capitaleach life another aspect of a confounding, far-reaching urgent national crisis. And unlike most works on poverty, this one delves into the calculations of some employers as welltheir razor-thin profits, their anxieties about competition from abroad, their frustrations in finding qualified workers.
This impassioned book not only dissects the problems, but makes pointed, informed recommendations for change. It is a book that stands to make a difference. [via]More editions of The Working Poor: Invisible In America:
Spanish
Caramelo : En Españolby Sandra Cisneros, Liliana ValenzuelaISBN 0375415092 (0-375-41509-2)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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