books tagged “General fiction”

books tagged “General fiction”

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  • The Accidental Tourist
    by Anne Tyler
    ISBN 039454689X (0-394-54689-X)
    Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    Meet Macon Leary--a travel writer who hates both travel and strangeness. Grounded by loneliness, comfort, and a somewhat odd domestic life, Macon is about to embark on a surprising new adventure, arriving in the form of a fuzzy-haired dog obedience trainer who promises to turn his life around. [via]

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  • The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
    by Mark Twain, Beverly Lyon Clark
    ISBN 0393926036 (0-393-92603-6)
    Softcover, W W Norton & Co Inc

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    Book summary:

    The text of this Norton Critical Edition is based, with typesetting errors corrected, on the first U.S. edition (1876), the most authoritative of the editions published in Twains lifetime.

    Backgrounds and Contexts provides students with the standard source materials often cited by criticsTwains stories of Good and Bad Boys, his Boys Manuscript, his correspondence with William Dean Howells, and his 1870 letter to Will Bowen. This section also includes lesser-known but valuable contextual materials, among them Twains journalistic description of school exercise and the discussion of Perry Davis Pain Killer and other nineteenth-century nostrums.

    Criticism includes interpretations by William Dean Howells, Hamlin L. Hill, Judith Fetterley, Alan Gribben, Glenn Hendler, Carter Revard, and Susan R. Gannon.

    A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are also included. [via]

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  • Alias Grace
    by Margaret Atwood
    ISBN 0385490445 (0-385-49044-5)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    In the astonishing new novel by the author of the bestsellers The Robber Bride, Cat's Eye, and The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood takes us back in time and into the life and mind of one of the most enigmatic and notorious women of the nineteenth century. Grace Marks has been convicted for her involvement in the vicious murders of her employer, the wealthy Thomas Kinnear, and of Nancy Montgomery, his housekeeper and mistress. Some believe Grace is innocent; others think her evil or insane. Now serving a life sentence after a stint in Toronto's lunatic asylum, Grace herself claims to have no memory of the murders.

    Dr. Simon Jordan, an up-and-coming expert in the burgeoning field of mental illness, is engaged by a group of reformers and spiritualists who seek a pardon for Grace. He listens to her story, from her family's difficult passage out of Ireland into Canada, to her time as a maid in Thomas Kinnear's household. As he brings Grace closer and closer to the day she cannot remember, he hears of the turbulent relationship between Kinnear and Nancy Montgomery, and of the alarming behavior of Grace's fellow servant, James McDermott. Jordan is drawn to Grace, but he is also baffled by her. What will he find in attempting to unlock her memories? Is Grace a female fiend, a bloodthirsty femme fatale? Or is she a victim of circumstances?

    Alias Grace is a beautifully crafted work of the imagination that reclaims a profoundly mysterious and disturbing story from the past century. With compassion, an unsentimental lyricism, and her customary narrative virtuosity, Margaret Atwood mines the often convoluted relationships between men and women, and between the affluent and those without position. The result is her most captivating, disturbing, and ultimately satisfying work since The Handmaid's Tale--in short, vintage Atwood. [via]

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  • All the Pretty Horses
    by Cormac McCarthy
    ISBN 0394574745 (0-394-57474-5)
    Hardcover, Alfred a Knopf Inc

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    Book summary:

    Part bildungsroman, part horse opera, part meditation on courage and loyalty, this beautifully crafted novel won the National Book Award in 1992. The plot is simple enough. John Grady Cole, a 16-year-old dispossessed Texan, crosses the Rio Grande into Mexico in 1949, accompanied by his pal Lacey Rawlins. The two precocious horsemen pick up a sidekick--a laughable but deadly marksman named Jimmy Blevins--encounter various adventures on their way south and finally arrive at a paradisiacal hacienda where Cole falls into an ill-fated romance. Readers familiar with McCarthy's Faulknerian prose will find the writing more restrained than in Suttree and Blood Meridian. Newcomers will be mesmerized by the tragic tale of John Grady Cole's coming of age. [via]

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  • Anna Karenina
    by Leo Tolstoy, George Gibian, Aylmer Maude
    ISBN 0393966429 (0-393-96642-9)
    Softcover, W W Norton & Co Inc

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    Book summary:

    Some people say Anna Karenina is the single greatest novel ever written, which makes about as much sense to me as trying to determine the world's greatest color. But there is no doubt that Anna Karenina, generally considered Tolstoy's best book, is definitely one ripping great read. Anna, miserable in her loveless marriage, does the barely thinkable and succumbs to her desires for the dashing Vronsky. I don't want to give away the ending, but I will say that 19th-century Russia doesn't take well to that sort of thing. [via]

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  • As I Lay Dying
    by William Faulkner
    ISBN 0394415817 (0-394-41581-7)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    Faulkner's distinctive narrative structures--the uses of multiple points of view and the inner psychological voices of the characters--in one of its most successful incarnations here in As I Lay Dying. In the story, the members of the Bundren family must take the body of Addie, matriarch of the family, to the town where Addie wanted to be buried. Along the way, we listen to each of the members on the macabre pilgrimage, while Faulkner heaps upon them various flavors of disaster. Contains the famous chapter completing the equation about mothers and fish--you'll see. [via]

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  • Atonement: A Novel
    by Ian McEwan
    ISBN 038572179X (0-385-72179-X)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    On the hottest day of the summer of 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis sees her older sister Cecilia strip off her clothes and plunge into the fountain in the garden of their country house. Watching Cecilia is their housekeeper's son Robbie Turner, a childhood friend who, along with Briony's sister, has recently graduated from Cambridge.

    By the end of that day the lives of all three will have been changed forever. Robbie and Cecilia will have crossed a boundary they had never before dared to approach and will have become victims of the younger girl's scheming imagination. And Briony will have committed a dreadful crime, the guilt for which will color her entire life.

    In each of his novels Ian McEwan has brilliantly drawn his reader into the intimate lives and situations of his characters. But never before has he worked with so large a canvas: In Atonement he takes the reader from a manor house in England in 1935 to the retreat from Dunkirk in 1941; from the London's World War II military hospitals to a reunion of the Tallis clan in 1999.

    Atonement is Ian McEwan's finest achievement. Brilliant and utterly enthralling in its depiction of childhood, love and war, England and class, the novel is at its center a profound-and profoundly moving-exploration of shame and forgiveness and the difficulty of absolution. [via]

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  • Bodily Harm
    by Margaret Atwood
    ISBN 0385491077 (0-385-49107-7)
    Softcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group

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    Book summary:

    A powerfully and brilliantly crafted novel, Bodily Harm is the story of Rennie Wilford, a young journalist whose life has begun to shatter around the edges.  Rennie flies to the Caribbean to recuperate, and on the tiny island of St.  Antoine she is confronted by a world where her rules for survival no longer apply.  By turns comic, satiric, relentless, and terrifying, Margaret Atwood's Bodily Harm is ultimately an exploration of the lust for power, both sexual and political, and the need for compassion that goes beyond what we ordinarily mean by love.


    Margaret Atwood is the author of over twenty-five books, including fiction, poetry, and essays.  Among her most recent works are the bestselling novels Alias Grace and The Robber Bride and the collections Wilderness Tips and Good Bones and Simple Murders.  She lives in Toronto. [via]

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  • The Book of Daniel
    by E.L. Doctorow
    ISBN 0394462718 (0-394-46271-8)
    Hardcover, Random House

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    Book summary:

    The central figure of this novel is a young man whose parents were executed for conspiring to steal atomic secrets for Russia.

    His name is Daniel Isaacson, and as the story opens, his parents have been dead for many years. He has had a long time to adjust to their deaths. He has not adjusted.

    Out of the shambles of his childhood, he has constructed a new lifemarriage to an adoring girl who gives him a son of his own, and a career in scholarship. It is a life that enrages him.

    In the silence of the library at Columbia University, where he is supposedly writing a Ph.D. dissertation, Daniel composes something quite different.

    It is a confession of his most intimate relationshipswith his wife, his foster parents, and his kid sister Susan, whose own radicalism so reproaches him.

    It is a book of memories: riding a bus with his parents to the ill-fated Paul Robeson concert in Peekskill; watching the FBI take his father away; appearing with Susan at rallies protesting their parents innocence; visiting his mother and father in the Death House.

    It is a book of investigation: transcribing Daniels interviews with people who knew his parents, or who knew about them; and logging his strange researches and discoveries in the library stacks.

    It is a book of judgments of everyone involved in the caselawyers, police, informers, friends, and the Isaacson family itself.

    It is a book rich in characters, from elderly grand- mothers of immigrant culture, to covert radicals of the McCarthy era, to hippie marchers on the Pen-tagon. It is a book that spans the quarter-century of American life since World War II. It is a book about the nature of Left politics in this countryits sacrificial rites, its peculiar cruelties, its humility, its bitterness. It is a book about some of the beautiful and terrible feelings of childhood. It is about the nature of guilt and innocence, and about the relations of people to nations.

    It is The Book of Daniel. [via]

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  • Candide or Optimism: A Fresh Translation, Backgrounds, Criticism
    by Voltaire
    ISBN 0393960587 (0-393-96058-7)
    Softcover, W W Norton & Co Inc

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    Book summary:

    Robert M. Adams's superlative revised translation of Candide provides the basis for this widely adopted Norton Critical Edition.

    The accompanying apparatus has been revised in accordance with recent biographical and critical materials. The Backgrounds and Criticism sections provide important essays that shed light on major critical issues relevant to Candide and to the intellectual climate of the period. In addition to the reports of five English visitors to Ferney, essays by Haydn Mason, Erich Auerbach, Ernst Cassirer, and Robert M. Adams are included. The final section of the edition, "The Climate of Controversy," summarizes the debate surrounding Voltaire's works and includes essays by Peter Gay, Raymond Naves, Gustave Lanson, and John Morley. Also included are a series of quotations about Voltaire by such prominent figures as Gustave Flaubert, Frederick the Great, and Stendhal, as well as the text of "Pangloss's Song," a ballad from the 1956 Candide-based operetta by Richard Wilbur. [via]

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  • Cat's Cradle
    by Kurt Vonnegut
    ISBN 038533348X (0-385-33348-X)
    Softcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group

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    Book summary:

    Cat's Cradle, one of Vonnegut's most entertaining novels, is filled with scientists and G-men and even ordinary folks caught up in the game. These assorted characters chase each other around in search of the world's most important and dangerous substance, a new form of ice that freezes at room temperature. At one time, this novel could probably be found on the bookshelf of every college kid in America; it's still a fabulous read and a great place to start if you're young enough to have missed the first Vonnegut craze. [via]

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  • Circle of Friends
    by Maeve Binchy
    ISBN 0385301499 (0-385-30149-9)
    Hardcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group

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    Book summary:

    It began with Benny Hogan and Eve Malone, growing  up, inseparable, in the village of Knockglen.  Benny--the only child, yearning to break free from  her adoring parents...Eve--the orphaned offspring  of a convent handyman and a rebellious blueblood,  abandoned by her mother's wealthy family to be  raised by nuns. Eve and Benny--they knew the sins  and secrets behind every villager's lace  curtains...except their own.

    It widened at Dublin,  at the university where Benny and Eve met  beautiful Nan Mahlon and Jack Foley, a doctor's handsome  son. But heartbreak and betrayal would bring the  worlds of Knockglen and Dublin into explosive  collision. Long-hidden lies would emerge to test the  meaning of love and the strength of ties held within  the fragile gold bands of a... Circle Of  Friends. [via]

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  • Como Agua Para Chocolate / Like Water for Chocolate
    by Laura Esquivel
    ISBN 0385721234 (0-385-72123-4)
    Softcover, Random House Espanol

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    Book summary:

    Esta novela, relata las tradiciones y las vivencias de una familia latinoamericana, en la que se viven muchos desengaños y desobediencias. La hija menor, Tita, está condenada a cuidar a su madre hasta que esta muera, olvidándose así de conocer lo que es el amor y el matrimonio. Su novio, Pedro , no contento con tener que resignarse a estar sin su querida, se casa con la hermana de esta para así poder vivir junto a ella, y verla siempre, sin pensar que su madre, Mamá Elena no lo permitirá. A parte de este gran problema surgirán otros, así como también historias divertidas y buenos ratos. En Como agua para chocolate las relaciones son complejas y desarrolladas bajo signos opuestos, en ocasiones irreconciliables. Aparece una fuerte rivalidad entre hermanas, el choque fraternal queda signado en la relación entre Rosaura y Tita, metaforizada en el contacto «del agua en aceite hirviendo». Desde niñas muestran naturalezas diferentes: Tita hace de la cocina su universo propio, su lugar de juegos y su modo de vida, mientras que Rosaura no tiene sazón, es torpe para cocinar y melindrosa para comer. Pero será en su juventud cuando estas diferencias se acentúen y culminen con la traición de Rosaura al casarse con el novio de su hermana. De ahí nació la aversión de Nacha para con Rosaura y la rivalidad entre las dos hermanas, que culmina con esa boda en la que Rosaura se casa con el hombre que Tita ama. [via]

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  • The Complete Novels of Jane Austen
    by Jane Austen
    ISBN 0394604369 (0-394-60436-9)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    Collected together in one volume, The Complete Novels show the development of Austen as a writer and social commentator. From the early optimism and youthful energy of Northanger Abbey to the quiet and subtle art of Persuasion, this collection reveals the breadth of one of the best loved novelists of all time. [via]

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  • A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
    by Mark Twain
    ISBN 0393951375 (0-393-95137-5)
    Softcover, W W Norton & Co Inc

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    Book summary:

    This edition of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court reprints the text of the first American edition, approved by Clemens and published by his own company. Accompanying the text are thirteen of the original illustrations by Daniel Carter Beard, many of which are caricatures of well-known figures of the day. Annotations point out significant textual problems and variants, as well as explaining unfamiliar references within the text.

    "Backgrounds and Sources" includes selections on King Arthur from the Oxford Companion to English Literature; on the total eclipse from The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus by Washington Irving; and on the "king's touch," the ascetic saints, and the financing of the Mansion House by W. E. H. Lecky. Selections from Clemens's letters, notebooks, autobiography, and other writings and newspaper reports of his 1886 manuscript reading at Governor's Island show how the novel developed. A section of the Beard illustrations includes material by Beard, Clemens, and Henry Nash Smith. The English edition is discussed by Dennis Welland.

    Early critical views are by Sylvester Baxter, William Dean Howells, Andrew Lang, Rudyard Kipling, Charles Whibley, Albert Bigelow Paine, John B. Hoben, and anonymous reviewers in the London Daily Telegraph and the Boston Literary World. The later critical essays are by Howard G. Baetzhold, James D. Williams, Kenneth S. Lynn, James M. Cox, Louis J. Budd, Henry Nash Smith, David Ketterer, and Everett Carter.

    A Selected Bibliography is also included. [via]

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  • Binchy, Maeve: The Copper Beech
    The Copper Beech
    by Maeve Binchy
    ISBN 0385307756 (0-385-30775-6)
    Hardcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group

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  • Couples
    by John Updike
    ISBN 0394420667 (0-394-42066-7)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    The provocative novel about sex in suburbia, striking in its complete sexual frankness and rightly praised as an artful, seductive, savagely graphic portrayal of love, marriage and adultery in America.


    From the Paperback edition. [via]

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  • Crime and Punishment
    by Fyodor Dostoevsky, George Gibian
    ISBN 0393956237 (0-393-95623-7)
    Softcover, W W Norton & Co Inc

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    A Norton Critical Edition with the novel, letters from Dostoevsky and a collection of critical essays. [via]

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  • The Da Vinci Code
    by Dan Brown
    ISBN 0385504209 (0-385-50420-9)
    Hardcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group

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    Book summary:

    With The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown masterfully concocts an intelligent and lucid thriller that marries the gusto of an international murder mystery with a collection of fascinating esoteria culled from 2,000 years of Western history.

    A murder in the silent after-hour halls of the Louvre museum reveals a sinister plot to uncover a secret that has been protected by a clandestine society since the days of Christ. The victim is a high-ranking agent of this ancient society who, in the moments before his death, manages to leave gruesome clues at the scene that only his daughter, noted cryptographer Sophie Neveu, and Robert Langdon, a famed symbologist, can untangle. The duo become both suspects and detectives searching for not only Neveu's father's murderer but also the stunning secret of the ages he was charged to protect. Mere steps ahead of the authorities and the deadly competition, the mystery leads Neveu and Langdon on a breathless flight through France, England, and history itself.

    Brown (Angels and Demons) has created a page-turning thriller that also provides an amazing interpretation of Western history. Brown's hero and heroine embark on a lofty and intriguing exploration of some of Western culture's greatest mysteries--from the nature of the Mona Lisa's smile to the secret of the Holy Grail. Though some will quibble with the veracity of Brown's conjectures, therein lies the fun. The Da Vinci Code is an enthralling read that provides rich food for thought. --Jeremy Pugh [via]

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  • David Copperfield
    by Charles Dickens, Jerome Hamilton Buckley
    ISBN 0393958280 (0-393-95828-0)
    Softcover, W W Norton & Co Inc

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    Book summary:

    This Norton Critical Edition reprints the original 1850 text of Dickens most autobiographical novel, and his own personal favorite, including all of the line drawings by Phiz.

    The editor has made necessary typographical corrections and carefully introduced and annotated the text for the student reader.

    Dickens number plans for David Copperfield, which reveal his practice both as a serial writer and as a craftsman, are also included.

    "Backgrounds" focuses on Dickens personal involvement with and response to the novels publication.  Included are passages from his letters relating to David Copperfield, an autobiographical fragment, his preface to the 1869 edition of the novel, and a relevant excerpt from Little Dorrit.

    "Criticism" is comprised of twelve essays by distinguished Dickensians representing a wide range of judgment and analysis. John Forster, Matthew Arnold, E. K. Brown, Gwendolyn B. Needham, Monroe Engel, J. Hillis Miller, Mark Spilka, Harry Stone, Bert G. Hornback, Garrett Stewart, Robert L. Patten, and Alexander Walsh provide a variety of perspectives.

    A Chronology of Dickens Life and Works and a Selected Bibliography are also included.
    [via]

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  • Don Quixote
    by Miguel De Cervantes, Burton Raffel, Diana De Armas Wilson
    ISBN 039397281X (0-393-97281-X)
    Softcover, W W Norton & Co Inc

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    Book summary:

    The complete text of "The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha, Parts I and II," is here offered in a substantially revised version of the translation by John Ormsby, first published in 1885. Spelling and punctuation have been modernized, and recent textual scholarship has been taken into account in preparing the revisions; a detailed discussion of the procedures and principles followed by all the original prefatory material, including dedications, copyright notices, statements by the censor, and other items omitted by Ormsby. [via]

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  • The English Patient
    by Michael Ondaatje
    ISBN 039428013X (0-394-28013-X)
    Softcover, Random House of Canada Ltd

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    Book summary:

    Haunting and harrowing, as beautiful as it is disturbing, The English Patient tells the story of the entanglement of four damaged lives in an Italian monastery as World War II ends. The exhausted nurse, Hana; the maimed thief, Caravaggio; the wary sapper, Kip: each is haunted by the riddle of the English patient, the nameless, burn victim who lies in an upstairs room and whose memories of passion, betrayal, and rescue illuminate this book like flashes of heat lightning. In lyrical prose informed by a poetic consciousness, Michael Ondaatje weaves these characters together, pulls them tight, then unravels the threads with unsettling acumen.

    A book that binds readers of great literature, The English Patient garnered the Booker Prize for author Ondaatje. The poet and novelist has also written In the Skin of a Lion, Coming Through Slaughter and The Collected Works of Billy the Kid; two collections of poems, The Cinnamon Peeler and There's a Trick with a Knife I'm Learning to Do; and a memoir, Running in the Family. [via]

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  • Eva Luna
    by Isabel Allende, Margaret Sayers Peden
    ISBN 0394572734 (0-394-57273-4)
    Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    An exotic dance that beguiles and entices... The enchanted and enchanting account of a  contemporary Scheherazade, a wide-eyed American  teller-of-tales who triumphs over harsh reality  through the creative power of her own imagination...


    From the Paperback edition. [via]

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  • Binchy, Maeve: Evening Class
    Evening Class
    by Maeve Binchy
    ISBN 0385318073 (0-385-31807-3)
    Hardcover, Dell Publishing

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  • Fight Club
    by Chuck Palahniuk
    ISBN 0393327345 (0-393-32734-5)
    Softcover, W W Norton & Co Inc

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    Book summary:

    The only person who gets called Ballardesque more often than Chuck Palahniuk is, well... J.G. Ballard. So, does Portland, Oregon's "torchbearer for the nihilistic generation" deserve that kind of treatment? Yes and no. There is a resemblance between Fight Club and works such as Crash and Cocaine Nights in that both see the innocuous mundanities of everyday life as nothing more than the severely loosened cap on a seething underworld cauldron of unchecked impulse and social atrocity. Welcome to the present-day U.S. of A. As Ballard's characters get their jollies from staging automobile accidents, Palahniuk's yuppies unwind from a day at the office by organizing bloodsport rings and selling soap to fund anarchist overthrows. Let's just say that neither of these guys are going to be called in to do a Full House script rewrite any time soon.

    But while the ingredients are the same, Ballard and Palahniuk bake at completely different temperatures. Unlike his British counterpart, who tends to cast his American protagonists in a chilly light, holding them close enough to dissect but far enough away to eliminate any possibility of kinship, Palahniuk isn't happy unless he's first-person front and center, completely entangled in the whole sordid mess. An intensely psychological novel that never runs the risk of becoming clinical, Fight Club is about both the dangers of loyalty and the dreaded weight of leadership, the desire to band together and the compulsion to head for the hills. In short, it's about the pride and horror of being an American, rendered in lethally swift prose. Fight Club's protagonist might occasionally become foggy about who he truly is (you'll see what I mean), but one thing is for certain: you're not likely to forget the book's author. Never mind Ballardesque. Palahniukian here we come! --Bob Michaels [via]

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  • Lurie, Alison: Foreign Affairs
    Foreign Affairs
    by Alison Lurie
    ISBN 039454076X (0-394-54076-X)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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  • Geek Love
    by Katherine Dunn
    ISBN 0394569024 (0-394-56902-4)
    Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    A wild, often horrifying, novel about freaks, geeks and other aberrancies of the human condition who travel together (a whole family of them) as a circus. It's a solipsistic funhouse world that makes "normal" people seem bland and pitiful. Arturo the Aqua-Boy, who has flippers and an enormous need to be loved. A museum of sacred monsters that didn't make it. An endearing "little beetle" of a heroine. Sort of like Tod Browning's Freaks crossed with David Lynch and John Irving and perhaps George Eliot -- the latter for the power of the emotions evoked. [via]

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  • The General and His Labyrinth
    by Gabriel García Márquez, Edith Grossman
    ISBN 0394582586 (0-394-58258-6)
    Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    General Simon Bolivar, the Liberator of five South American countries, takes a last melancholy journey down the Magdalena River, revisiting cities along its shores, and reliving the triumphs, passions, and betrayals of his life. Infinitely charming, prodigiously successful in love, war and politics, he still dances with such enthusiasm and skill that his witnesses cannot believe he is ill. Aflame with memories of the power that he commanded and the dream of continental unity that eluded him, he is a moving exemplar of how much can be wonand lostin a life.


    From the Trade Paperback edition. [via]

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  • Get Shorty
    by Elmore Leonard
    ISBN 0385315678 (0-385-31567-8)
    Softcover, Dell Publishing

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    Book summary:

    Nobody writes openings like Elmore Leonard. Case in point: "When Chili first came to Miami Beach twelve years ago they were having one of their off-and-on cold winters: thirty-four degrees the day he met Tommy Carlo for lunch at Vesuvio's on South Collins and had his leather jacket ripped off." You need to know about this because you need to know why there's bad blood between Chili Palmer and Ray Bones, the guy who stole his coat and is now his boss--and has ordered him to collect $4,200 from a dead guy. Except the guy didn't die; he went to Las Vegas with $300,000. So Chili goes to Las Vegas, one thing leads to another, and pretty soon he's in Los Angeles, hanging out with a movie producer named Harry Zimm and learning what it takes to be a player in Hollywood.

    Get Shorty is classic Elmore Leonard: While other people write "crime fiction," Leonard's come up with a masterful social comedy that happens to be about criminals (and other fast operators). He's a master of snappy dialogue and dizzying plot twists. The best parts of Get Shorty move along so briskly you almost forget there's somebody with a firm control over the story. And you'll be rooting for Chili to get the money, the girl, and the studio deal. --Ron Hogan [via]

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  • Go Tell It on the Mountain
    by James Baldwin
    ISBN 0385334575 (0-385-33457-5)
    Softcover, Delta

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    Book summary:

    First published in 1953 when James Baldwin was nearly 30, Go Tell It on the Mountain is a young man's novel, as tightly coiled as a new spring, yet tempered by a maturing man's confidence and empathy. It's not a long book, and its action spans but a single day--yet the author packs in enough emotion, detail, and intimate revelation to make his story feel like a mid-20th-century epic. Using as a frame the spiritual and moral awakening of 14-year-old John Grimes during a Saturday night service in a Harlem storefront church, Baldwin lays bare the secrets of a tormented black family during the depression. John's parents, praying beside him, both wrestle with the ghosts of their sinful pasts--Gabriel, a preacher of towering hypocrisy, fathered an illegitimate child during his first marriage down South and refused to recognize his doomed bastard son; Elizabeth fell in love with a charming, free-spirited young man, followed him to New York, became pregnant with his son, and lost him before she could reveal her condition.

    Baldwin lays down the terrible symmetries of these two blighted lives as the ironic context for John's dark night of the soul. When day dawns, John believes himself saved, but his creator makes it clear that this salvation arises as much from blindness as revelation: "He was filled with a joy, a joy unspeakable, whose roots, though he would not trace them on this new day of his life, were nourished by the wellspring of a despair not yet discovered."

    Though it was hailed at publication for its groundbreaking use of black idiom, what is most striking about Go Tell It on the Mountain today is its structure and its scope. In peeling back the layers of these damaged lives, Baldwin dramatizes the story of the great black migration from rural South to urban North. "Behind them was the darkness," Baldwin writes of Gabriel and Elizabeth's lost generation, "nothing but the darkness, and all around them destruction, and before them nothing but the fire--a bastard people, far from God, singing and crying in the wilderness!" This is Baldwin's music--a music in which rhapsody is rooted anguish--and there is none finer in American literature. --David Laskin [via]

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  • God Knows
    by Joseph Heller
    ISBN 0394529197 (0-394-52919-7)
    Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    Joseph Heller's powerful, wonderfully funny, deeply moving novel is the story of David -- yes, King David -- but as you've never seen him before. You already know David as the legendary warrior king of Israel, husband of Bathsheba, and father of Solomon; now meet David as he really was: the cocky Jewish kid, the plagiarized poet, and the Jewish father. Listen as David tells his own story, a story both relentlessly ancient and surprisingly modern, about growing up and growing old, about men and women, and about man and God. It is quintessential Heller. [via]

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  • Going after Cacciato
    by Tim O'Brien
    ISBN 0385283490 (0-385-28349-0)
    Softcover, Dell Publishing

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    Book summary:

    "In October, near the end of the month, Cacciato left the war."

    In Tim O'Brien's novel Going After Cacciato the theater of war becomes the theater of the absurd as a private deserts his post in Vietnam, intent on walking 8,000 miles to Paris for the peace talks. The remaining members of his squad are sent after him, but what happens then is anybody's guess: "The facts were simple: They went after Cacciato, they chased him into the mountains, they tried hard. They cornered him on a small grassy hill. They surrounded the hill. They waited through the night. And at dawn they shot the sky full of flares and then they moved in.... That was the end of it. The last known fact. What remained were possibilities."

    It is these possibilities that make O'Brien's National Book Award-winning novel so extraordinary. Told from the perspective of squad member Paul Berlin, the search for Cacciato soon enters the realm of the surreal as the men find themselves following an elusive trail of chocolate M&M's through the jungles of Indochina, across India, Iran, Greece, and Yugoslavia to the streets of Paris. The details of this hallucinatory journey alternate with feverish memories of the war--men maimed by landmines, killed in tunnels, engaged in casual acts of brutality that would be unthinkable anywhere else. Reminiscent of Joseph Heller's Catch-22, Going After Cacciato dishes up a brilliant mix of ferocious comedy and bleak horror that serves to illuminate both the complex psychology of men in battle and the overarching insanity of war. --Alix Wilber [via]

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  • The Good Soldier
    by Ford Madox Ford
    ISBN 0393966348 (0-393-96634-8)
    Softcover, W W Norton & Co Inc

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    Book summary:

    This Norton Critical Edition includes: 15 contemporary reviews; a chapter on literary impressionism with critiques by Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Ford himself and others; critical essays that provide a variety of perspectives on the book; and Ford's letter to Stella Ford, published in 1927. [via]

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  • Gardner, John: Grendel
    Grendel
    by John Gardner
    ISBN 0394471431 (0-394-47143-1)
    Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group

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  • Happy All the Time
    by Laurie Colwin
    ISBN 039450190X (0-394-50190-X)
    Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    This delightful comedy of manners and morals is about romantic friendship, romantic marriage, and romantic love--about four people who are good-hearted and sane, lucky and gifted, and who find one another. Knowing that happiness is an art form that requires energy, discipline, and talent, Guido, Holly, Vincnt, and Misty deal with jealousy, estrangement, and other perils involved in the search for love. [via]

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  • The History of That Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote De LA Mancha
    by Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra, Burton Raffel
    ISBN 0393315096 (0-393-31509-6)
    Softcover, W W Norton & Co Inc

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    Book summary:

    This novel chronicles the exploits of Don Quixote, the bumbling and infinitely compassionate knight, and his shrewdly simple servant, Sancho Panza. This version was translated by Burton Raffel, French-American Foundation Translation Prize winner (1991) for Rabelais's "Gargantua and Pantagruel". [via]

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  • A History of the World in 10 and Half Chapters
    by Julian Barnes
    ISBN 0394580613 (0-394-58061-3)
    Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    This is, in short, a complete, unsettling, and frequently exhilarating vision of the world, starting with the voyage of Noah's ark and ending with a sneak preview of heaven!


    From the Trade Paperback edition. [via]

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  • The House of the Spirits
    by Isabel Allende
    ISBN 0394539079 (0-394-53907-9)
    Hardcover, Alfred a Knopf Inc

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    Book summary:

    A best seller and critical success all over the world, The House of the Spirits is the magnificent epic of the Trueba family -- their loves, their ambitions, their spiritual quests, their relations with one another, and their participation in the history of their times, a history that becomes destiny and overtakes them all. We begin -- at the turn of the century, in an unnamed South American country -- in the childhood home of the woman who will be the mother and grandmother of the clan, Clara del Valle. A warm-hearted, hypersensitive girl, Clara has distinguished herself from an early age with her telepathic abilities -- she can read fortunes, make objects move as if they had lives of their own, and predict the future. Following the mysterious death of her sister, the fabled Rosa the Beautiful, Clara has been mute for nine years, resisting all attempts to make her speak. When she breaks her silence, it is to announce that she will be married soon. Her husband-to-be is Esteban Trueba, a stern, willful man, given to fits of rage and haunted by a profound loneliness. At the age of thirty-five, he has returned to the capital from his country estate to visit his dying mother and to find a wife. (He was Rosa's fiance, and her death has marked him as deeply as it has Clara.) This is the man Clara has foreseen -- has summoned -- to be her husband; Esteban, in turn, will conceive a passion for Clara that will last the rest of his long and rancorous life. We go with this couple as they move into the extravagant house he builds for her, a structure that everyone calls "the big house on the corner," which is soon populated with Clara's spiritualist friends, the artists she sponsors, the charity cases she takes an interest in, with Esteban's political cronies, and, above all, with the Trueba children...their daughter, Blanca, a practical, self-effacing girl who will, to the fury of her father, form a lifelong liaison with the son of his foreman...the twins, Jaime and Nicol [via]

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  • I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
    by Maya Angelou
    ISBN 0394429869 (0-394-42986-9)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    In this first of five volumes of autobiography, poet Maya Angelou recounts a youth filled with disappointment, frustration, tragedy, and finally hard-won independence. Sent at a young age to live with her grandmother in Arkansas, Angelou learned a great deal from this exceptional woman and the tightly knit black community there. These very lessons carried her throughout the hardships she endured later in life, including a tragic occurrence while visiting her mother in St. Louis and her formative years spent in California--where an unwanted pregnancy changed her life forever. Marvelously told, with Angelou's "gift for language and observation," this "remarkable autobiography by an equally remarkable black woman from Arkansas captures, indelibly, a world of which most Americans are shamefully ignorant." [via]

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  • Bedford, Sybille: Jigsaw : An Unsentimental Education
    Jigsaw : An Unsentimental Education
    by Sybille Bedford
    ISBN 0394493400 (0-394-49340-0)
    Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group

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  • Lady Chatterley's Lover
    by D. H. Lawrence
    ISBN 0394601483 (0-394-60148-3)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    The last and most famous of D. H. Lawrence's novels, Lady Chatterley's Lover was published in 1928 and banned in England and the United States as pornographic. While sexually tame by today's standards, the book is memorable for better reasons-Lawrence's masterful and lyrical prose, and a vibrant story that takes us bodily into the world of its characters.As the novel opens, Constance Chatterley finds herself trapped in an unfulfilling marriage to a rich aristocrat whose war wounds have left him paralyzed and impotent. After a brief but unsatisfying affair with a playwright, Lady Chatterley enjoys an extremely passionate relationship with the gamekeeper on the family estate, Oliver Mellors. As Lady Chatterley falls in love and conceives a child with Mellors, she moves from the heartless, bloodless world of the intelligentsia and aristocracy into a vital and profound connection rooted in sexual fulfillment.Through this novel, Lawrence attempted to revive in the human consciousness an awareness of savage sensuality, a sensuality with the power to free men and women from the enslaving sterility of modern technology and intellectualism. Perhaps even more relevant today than when it first appeared, Lady Chatterley's Lover is a triumph of passion and an erotic celebration of life.
    [via]

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  • Weldon, Fay: The Life and Loves of a She Devil
    The Life and Loves of a She Devil
    by Fay Weldon
    ISBN 0394539206 (0-394-53920-6)
    Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group

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  • Like Water for Chocolate
    by Thomas Christensen, Laura Esquivel, Carol Christensen
    ISBN 038542017X (0-385-42017-X)
    Softcover, Anchor Books

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    Book summary:

    Despite the fact that she has fallen in love with a young man, Tita, the youngest of three daughters born to a tyrannical rancher, must obey tradition and remain single and at home to care for her mother. Reprint. Movie tie-in. [via]

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  • Like Water for Chocolate
    by Laura Esquivel, Carol Christensen
    ISBN 0385420161 (0-385-42016-1)
    Hardcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group

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    Book summary:

    Earthy, magical, and utterly charming, this tale of family life in turn-of-the-century Mexico became a best-selling phenomenon with its winning blend of poignant romance and bittersweet wit. The classic love story takes place on the De la Garza ranch, as the tyrannical owner, Mama Elena, chops onions at the kitchen table in her final days of pregnancy. While still in her mother's womb, her daughter to be weeps so violently she causes an early labor, and little Tita slips out amid the spices and fixings for noodle soup. This early encounter with food soon becomes a way of life, and Tita grows up to be a master chef. She shares special points of her favorite preparations with listeners throughout the story. [via]

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  • The Mind-Body Problem
    by Rebecca Goldstein
    ISBN 0394524748 (0-394-52474-8)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    Wonderful book from perhaps the greatest living author today. Volume One of his "Border Trilogy." Hardcover. Original jacket. Stated First Edition. Light bumping. PO writing on front end page. Jacket price intact. Looks great. Very Good/Near Fine condition. [via]

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  • Moby Dick
    by Herman Melville, Hershel Parker, Harrison Hayford
    ISBN 0393972836 (0-393-97283-6)
    Softcover, W W Norton & Co Inc

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    Book summary:

    In this adaptation of Melville's masterpiece, McCaughrean recounts the tale of the obsessed Captain Ahab, as he pursues the great white whale--a creature as vast and dangerous as the sea itself. 55 illustrations, 25 in color. [via]

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  • Maugham, W. Somerset: Of Human Bondage
    Of Human Bondage
    by W. Somerset Maugham
    ISBN 0394601769 (0-394-60176-9)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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  • Only in London
    by Hanan Al-Shaykh
    ISBN 0385721218 (0-385-72121-8)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    Four strangers meet on a turbulent flight from Dubai to London: Amira, a canny Moroccan prostitute; Lamis, a 30-year old Iraqi divorcee; Nicholas, an English expert on Islamic art; and Samir, a Lebanese man who is delivering a monkey on a mission he doesn't fully understand. Once safely on British soil, Lamis and Nicholas fall in love, Samir chases after blond British youths, and Amira reinvents herself as a princess, the better to lure clients at the best London hotels. Through the city and across cultural borders, Only in London wittily portrays the smells, sounds, and sights of London's lively Arab neighorhoods, as well as the freedoms the city both offers and withholds from its immigrants. [via]

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  • A Painted House
    by John Grisham
    ISBN 0385337930 (0-385-33793-0)
    Softcover, Delta

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    Book summary:

    Ever since he published The Firm in 1991, John Grisham has remained the undisputed champ of the legal thriller. With A Painted House, however, he strikes out in a new direction. As the author is quick to note, this novel includes "not a single lawyer, dead or alive," and readers will search in vain for the kind of lowlife machinations that have been his stock-in-trade. Instead, Grisham has delivered a quieter, more contemplative story, set in rural Arkansas in 1952. It's harvest time on the Chandler farm, and the family has hired a crew of migrant Mexicans and "hill people" to pick 80 acres of cotton. A certain camaraderie pervades this bucolic dream team. But it's backbreaking work, particularly for the 7-year-old narrator, Luke: "I would pick cotton, tearing the fluffy bolls from the stalks at a steady pace, stuffing them into the heavy sack, afraid to look down the row and be reminded of how endless it was, afraid to slow down because someone would notice."

    What's more, tensions begin to simmer between the Mexicans and the hill people, one of whom has a penchant for bare-knuckles brawling. This leads to a brutal murder, which young Luke has the bad luck to witness. At this point--with secrets, lies, and at least one knife fight in the offing--the plot begins to take on that familiar, Grisham-style momentum. Still, such matters ultimately take a back seat in A Painted House to the author's evocation of time and place. This is, after all, the scene of his boyhood, and Grisham waxes nostalgic without ever succumbing to deep-fried sentimentality. Meanwhile, his account of Luke's Baptist upbringing occasions some sly (and telling) humor:

    I'd been taught in Sunday school from the day I could walk that lying would send you straight to hell. No detours. No second chances. Straight into the fiery pit, where Satan was waiting with the likes of Hitler and Judas Iscariot and General Grant. Thou shalt not bear false witness, which, of course, didn't sound exactly like a strict prohibition against lying, but that was the way the Baptists interpreted it.
    Whether Grisham will continue along these lines, or revert to the judicial shark tank for his next book, is anybody's guess. But A Painted House suggests that he's perfectly capable of telling an involving story with nary a subpoena in sight. --James Marcus [via]

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  • The Plague Dogs
    by Richard Adams
    ISBN 0394422473 (0-394-42247-3)
    Hardcover, Knopf

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    Book summary:

    Richard Adams, the author of Watership Down, creates a lyrical and engrossing tale, a remarkable journey into the hearts and minds of two canine heroes, Snitter and Rowf.

    After being horribly mistreated at a government animal research facility, Snitter and Rowf escape into the isolation--and terror--of the wilderness. Aided only by a fox they call ''the Tod,'' the two dogs must struggle to survive in their new environment. When the starving dogs attack some sheep, they are labeled ferocious man-eating monsters, setting off a great dog hunt that is later intensified by the fear that the dogs could be carriers of the bubonic plague. [via]

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  • Player Piano
    by Kurt Vonnegut
    ISBN 0385333781 (0-385-33378-1)
    Softcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group

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  • Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man
    by James Joyce
    ISBN 0393926796 (0-393-92679-6)
    Softcover, W W Norton & Co Inc

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    Book summary:

    A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is one of the twentieth centurys great coming-of-age novels.

    This Norton Critical Edition is based on Hans Gablers acclaimed text and is accompanied by his introduction and textual notes. John Paul Riquelme provides detailed explanatory annotations. Backgrounds and Contexts is thematically organized to provide readers with a clear picture of the novels historical, cultural, and literary inspirations. Topics include Political Nationalism: Irish History, 1798-1916, The Irish Literary and Cultural Revival, Religion, and Aesthetic Backgrounds. Criticism begins with John Paul Riquelmes helpful essay on the novels structural form and follows with twelve diverse interpretations by, among others, Kenneth Burke, Umberto Eco, Hugh Kenner, Maud Ellmann, Joseph Valente, and Marian Eide. A Selected Bibliography is also included. [via]

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  • The Road to Omaha
    by Robert Ludlum
    ISBN 0394573293 (0-394-57329-3)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    "A very funny book... no character is minor:  they're all hilarious." --Houston  Chronicle.

    In The Road To  Gandolfo, Robert Ludlum introduced us to the  outrageous General MacKenzie Hawkins and his legal  wizard, Sam Devereaux, whose plot to kidnap the  Pope spun wildly out of control into sheer hilarity.  Now Ludlum's two wayward heroes return with a  diabolical scheme to right a very old wrong -- and  wreak vengeance on the (expletive deleted) who  drummed the hawk out of the military. Their outraged  opposition will be no less than the White House.  Byzantine Treachery. Discovering a long-buried 1878  treaty with an obscure Indian tribe, the hawk --  a.k.a. Chief Thunder Head -- hatches a brilliant plot  that will ultimately bring him and his reluctant  lawyer Sam before the Supreme Court. Their goal: to  reclaim a choice piece of American real estate --  the state of Nebraska. Which just happened to the  headquarters of the U.S. Strategic Air Command!  Will they succeed against the powers that be? Will  the Wopotami tribe ever have their day in the  Supreme Court? From the Oval Office to the Pentagon,  all the president's men are outfitted, until it  rests with CIA Director Vincent  "Vinnie the Bam-Bam" Mangecavallo to cut Sam  and Hawk off at the pass. And only one thing is  certain: Robert Ludlum will keep us in nonstop  suspense and side-splitting laughter-through the very  last page.


    From the Paperback edition. [via]

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  • Shogun
    by James Clavell
    ISBN 0385292244 (0-385-29224-4)
    Hardcover, Dell Publishing

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    Book summary:

    A bold English adventurer. An invincible Japanese warlord. A beautiful woman torn between two ways of life, two ways of love. All brought together in an extraordinary saga of a time and a place aflame with conflict, passion, ambition, lust, and the struggle for power...


    From the Paperback edition. [via]

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  • Grisham, John: Skipping Christmas
    Skipping Christmas
    by John Grisham
    ISBN 0385508417 (0-385-50841-7)
    Hardcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group

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    Book summary:

    John Grisham turns a satirical eye on the overblown ritual of the festive holiday season, and the result is Skipping Christmas, a modest but funny novel about the tyranny of December 25. Grisham's story revolves around a typical middle-aged American couple, Luther and Nora Krank. On the first Sunday after Thanksgiving they wave their daughter Blair off to Peru to work for the Peace Corps, and they suddenly realize that "for the first time in her young and sheltered life Blair would spend Christmas away from home."

    Luther Krank sees his daughter's Christmas absence as an opportunity. He estimates that "a year earlier, the Luther Krank family had spent $6,100 on Christmas," and have "precious little to show for it." So he makes an executive decision, telling his wife, friends, and neighbors that "we won't do Christmas." Instead, Luther books a 10-day Caribbean cruise. But things start to turn nasty when horrified neighbors get wind of the Krank's subversive scheme and besiege the couple with questions about their decision.

    Grisham builds up a funny but increasingly terrifying picture of how this tight-knit community turns on the Kranks, who find themselves under increasing pressure to conform. As the tension mounts, readers may wonder whether they will manage to board their plane on Christmas day. Skipping Christmas is Grisham-lite, with none of the serious action or drama of his legal thrillers, but a funny poke at the craziness of Christmas. --Jerry Brotton, Amazon.co.uk [via]

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  • The Sound and the Fury
    by William Faulkner, David Minter
    ISBN 0393964817 (0-393-96481-7)
    Softcover, W W Norton & Co Inc

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    Book summary:

    The ostensible subject of The Sound and the Fury is the dissolution of the Compsons, one of those august old Mississippi families that fell on hard times and wild eccentricity after the Civil War. But in fact what William Faulkner is really after in his legendary novel is the kaleidoscope of consciousness--the overwrought mind caught in the act of thought. His rich, dark, scandal-ridden story of squandered fortune, incest (in thought if not in deed), madness, congenital brain damage, theft, illegitimacy, and stoic endurance is told in the interior voices of three Compson brothers: first Benjy, the "idiot" man-child who blurs together three decades of inchoate sensations as he stalks the fringes of the family's former pasture; next Quentin, torturing himself brilliantly, obsessively over Caddy's lost virginity and his own failure to recover the family's honor as he wanders around the seedy fringes of Boston; and finally Jason, heartless, shrewd, sneaking, nursing a perpetual sense of injury and outrage against his outrageous family.

    If Benjy's section is the most daringly experimental, Jason's is the most harrowing. "Once a bitch always a bitch, what I say," he begins, lacing into Caddy's illegitimate daughter, and then proceeds to hurl mud at blacks, Jews, his sacred Compson ancestors, his glamorous, promiscuous sister, his doomed brother Quentin, his ailing mother, and the long-suffering black servant Dilsey who holds the family together by sheer force of character.

    Notoriously "difficult," The Sound and the Fury is actually one of Faulkner's more accessible works once you get past the abrupt, unannounced time shifts--and certainly the most powerful emotionally. Everything is here: the complex equilibrium of pre-civil rights race relations; the conflict between Yankee capitalism and Southern agrarian values; a meditation on time, consciousness, and Western philosophy. And all of it is rendered in prose so gorgeous it can take your breath away. Here, for instance, Quentin recalls an autumnal encounter back home with the old black possum hunter Uncle Louis:

    And we'd sit in the dry leaves that whispered a little with the slow respiration of our waiting and with the slow breathing of the earth and the windless October, the rank smell of the lantern fouling the brittle air, listening to the dogs and to the echo of Louis' voice dying away. He never raised it, yet on a still night we have heard it from our front porch. When he called the dogs in he sounded just like the horn he carried slung on his shoulder and never used, but clearer, mellower, as though his voice were a part of darkness and silence, coiling out of it, coiling into it again. WhoOoooo. WhoOoooo. WhoOooooooooooooooo.
    What Faulkner has created is a modernist epic in which characters assume the stature of gods and the primal family events resonate like myths. It is The Sound and the Fury that secures his place in what Edmund Wilson called "the full-dressed post-Flaubert group of Conrad, Joyce, and Proust." --David Laskin [via]

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  • Morrison, Toni: Sula
    Sula
    by Toni Morrison
    ISBN 0394480449 (0-394-48044-9)
    Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group

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  • Barker, Raffaella: Summertime
    Summertime
    by Raffaella Barker
    ISBN 0385721854 (0-385-72185-4)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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  • Surfacing
    by Margaret Atwood
    ISBN 0385491050 (0-385-49105-0)
    Softcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group

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    Book summary:

    Part detective novel, part psychological thriller, Surfacing is the story of a talented woman artist who goes in search of her missing father on a remote island in northern Quebec.  Setting out with her lover and another young couple, she soon finds herself captivated by the isolated setting, where a marriage begins to fall apart, violence and death lurk just beneath the surface, and sex becomes a catalyst for conflict and dangerous choices.  Surfacing is a work permeated with an aura of suspense, complex with layered meanings, and written in brilliant, diamond-sharp prose.  Here is a rich mine of ideas from an extraordinary writer about contemporary life and nature, families and marriage, and about women fragmented...and becoming whole. [via]

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  • Binchy, Maeve: Tara Road
    Tara Road
    by Maeve Binchy
    ISBN 0385333951 (0-385-33395-1)
    Hardcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group

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  • Trainspotting
    by Irvine Welsh
    ISBN 0393314804 (0-393-31480-4)
    Softcover, W W Norton & Co Inc

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    Book summary:

    Irvine Welsh's controversial first novel, set on the heroin-addicted fringe of working-class youth in Edinburgh, is yet another exploration of the dark side of Scottishness. The main character, Mark Renton, is at the center of a clique of nihilistic slacker junkies with no hopes and no possibilities, and only "mind-numbing and spirit-crushing" alternatives in the straight world they despise. This particular slice of humanity has nothing left but the blackest of humor and a sharpness of wit. American readers can use the glossary in the back to translate the slang and dialect--essential, since the dialogue makes the book. This is a bleak vision sung as musical comedy. [via]

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  • Tuesdays With Morrie: An Old Man, a Young Man, and Lifes Greatest Lesson
    by Mitch Albom
    ISBN 0385484518 (0-385-48451-8)
    Hardcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group

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    Book summary:

    This true story about the love between a spiritual mentor and his pupil has soared to the bestseller list for many reasons. For starters: it reminds us of the affection and gratitude that many of us still feel for the significant mentors of our past. It also plays out a fantasy many of us have entertained: what would it be like to look those people up again, tell them how much they meant to us, maybe even resume the mentorship? Plus, we meet Morrie Schwartz--a one of a kind professor, whom the author describes as looking like a cross between a biblical prophet and Christmas elf. And finally we are privy to intimate moments of Morrie's final days as he lies dying from a terminal illness. Even on his deathbed, this twinkling-eyed mensch manages to teach us all about living robustly and fully. Kudos to author and acclaimed sports columnist Mitch Albom for telling this universally touching story with such grace and humility. --Gail Hudson [via]

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  • Ulysses
    by James Joyce
    ISBN 0394450051 (0-394-45005-1)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    Ulysses has been labeled dirty, blasphemous, and unreadable. In a famous 1933 court decision, Judge John M. Woolsey declared it an emetic book--although he found it sufficiently unobscene to allow its importation into the United States--and Virginia Woolf was moved to decry James Joyce's "cloacal obsession." None of these adjectives, however, do the slightest justice to the novel. To this day it remains the modernist masterpiece, in which the author takes both Celtic lyricism and vulgarity to splendid extremes. It is funny, sorrowful, and even (in a close-focus sort of way) suspenseful. And despite the exegetical industry that has sprung up in the last 75 years, Ulysses is also a compulsively readable book. Even the verbal vaudeville of the final chapters can be navigated with relative ease, as long as you're willing to be buffeted, tickled, challenged, and (occasionally) vexed by Joyce's sheer command of the English language.

    Among other things, a novel is simply a long story, and the first question about any story is: What happens?. In the case of Ulysses, the answer might be Everything. William Blake, one of literature's sublime myopics, saw the universe in a grain of sand. Joyce saw it in Dublin, Ireland, on June 16, 1904, a day distinguished by its utter normality. Two characters, Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom, go about their separate business, crossing paths with a gallery of indelible Dubliners. We watch them teach, eat, stroll the streets, argue, and (in Bloom's case) masturbate. And thanks to the book's stream-of-consciousness technique--which suggests no mere stream but an impossibly deep, swift-running river--we're privy to their thoughts, emotions, and memories. The result? Almost every variety of human experience is crammed into the accordian folds of a single day, which makes Ulysses not just an experimental work but the very last word in realism.

    Both characters add their glorious intonations to the music of Joyce's prose. Dedalus's accent--that of a freelance aesthetician, who dabbles here and there in what we might call Early Yeats Lite--will be familiar to readers of Portrait of an Artist As a Young Man. But Bloom's wistful sensualism (and naive curiosity) is something else entirely. Seen through his eyes, a rundown corner of a Dublin graveyard is a figure for hope and hopelessness, mortality and dogged survival: "Mr Bloom walked unheeded along his grove by saddened angels, crosses, broken pillars, family vaults, stone hopes praying with upcast eyes, old Ireland's hearts and hands. More sensible to spend the money on some charity for the living. Pray for the repose of the soul of. Does anybody really?" --James Marcus [via]

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  • Women in Love
    by D. H. Lawrence
    ISBN 0385487347 (0-385-48734-7)
    Hardcover, Doubleday Publishing

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    Book summary:

    The erotic sequel to The Rainbow chronicles the lives, loves, obsessions, and struggles of the Brangwen sisters, Ursula and Gudrun, and their lovers, Rupert Birkin and Gerald Crich, as they search for fulfillment in post-World War I society. Reprint. [via]

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  • Wuthering Heights
    by Emily Bronte, Richard J. Dunn
    ISBN 0393978893 (0-393-97889-3)
    Softcover, W W Norton & Co Inc

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    Book summary:

    The text used in this edition is a collation of both the 1847 and 1850 editions of the novel. This book also includes the 17 poems by Charlotte Bronte which Emily selected for the 1850 edition to introduce her sister to the public as a poet. Also included are selections from Emily's diary and some contemporary reviews of the novel. Five critical essays appear: two pieces by A.Stuart Daley examine the significance of nature and chronology in the novel, and Carol Jacobs, Nancy Armstrong and J.Hillis Miller examine the problems of genre and critical reputation which continue to surround this novel. [via]

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