books tagged “modern fiction”

books tagged “modern fiction”

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  • Howatch, Susan: Absolute Truths
    Absolute Truths
    by Susan Howatch
    ISBN 0679412069 (0-679-41206-9)
    Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group

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  • Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass
    by Lewis Carroll
    ISBN 0671437887 (0-671-43788-7)
    Hardcover, Smithmark Pub

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    Book summary:

    That Alice. When she's not traipsing after a rabbit into Wonderland, she's gallivanting off into the topsy-turvy world behind the drawing-room looking glass. In Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll's masterful and zany sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, she makes more eccentric acquaintances, including Tweedledee and Tweedledum, the White Queen, and a somewhat grumpy Humpty Dumpty. Through a giant and elaborate chess game, Alice explores this odd country, where one must eat dry biscuits to quench thirst, and run like the wind to stay in one place. As in life, Alice must stay on her toes to learn the rules of this game. Through the Looking Glass immediately took its rightful place beside its partner on the shelf of eternal classics. And luckily for generations of enraptured children, Carroll was again able to persuade John Tenniel to create the fantastic woodblock engravings that have become so indelibly associated with the Alice stories. For almost 130 years, Alice's curious adventures have amused, perplexed, and delighted readers, young and old. This gorgeous, deluxe boxed set of both volumes contains engravings from Tenniel's original woodblocks that were discovered in a London bank in 1985, and reproduced for the first time here. "'What is the use of a book,' thought Alice, 'without pictures?'" What indeed? (All ages) [via]

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  • Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There
    by Lewis Carroll, John Tenniel
    ISBN 0679417958 (0-679-41795-8)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    That Alice. When she's not traipsing after a rabbit into Wonderland, she's gallivanting off into the topsy-turvy world behind the drawing-room looking glass. In Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll's masterful and zany sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, she makes more eccentric acquaintances, including Tweedledee and Tweedledum, the White Queen, and a somewhat grumpy Humpty Dumpty. Through a giant and elaborate chess game, Alice explores this odd country, where one must eat dry biscuits to quench thirst, and run like the wind to stay in one place. As in life, Alice must stay on her toes to learn the rules of this game. Through the Looking Glass immediately took its rightful place beside its partner on the shelf of eternal classics. And luckily for generations of enraptured children, Carroll was again able to persuade John Tenniel to create the fantastic woodblock engravings that have become so indelibly associated with the Alice stories. For almost 130 years, Alice's curious adventures have amused, perplexed, and delighted readers, young and old. This gorgeous, deluxe boxed set of both volumes contains engravings from Tenniel's original woodblocks that were discovered in a London bank in 1985, and reproduced for the first time here. "'What is the use of a book,' thought Alice, 'without pictures?'" What indeed? (All ages) [via]

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  • American Tabloid
    by James Ellroy
    ISBN 0679403914 (0-679-40391-4)
    Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    We are behind, and below, the scenes of JFK's presidential election, the Bay of Pigs, the assassination--in the underworld that connects Miami, Los Angeles, Chicago, D.C. . . .

    Where the CIA, the Mob, J. Edgar Hoover, Howard Hughes, Jimmy Hoffa, Cuban political exiles, and various loose cannons conspire in a covert anarchy . . .

    Where the right drugs, the right amount of cash, the right murder, buys a moment of a man's loyalty . . .

    Where three renegade law-enforcement officers--a former L.A. cop and two FBI agents--are shaping events with the virulence of their greed and hatred, riding full-blast shotgun into history. . . .

    James Ellroy's trademark nothing-spared rendering of reality, blistering language, and relentless narrative pace are here in electrifying abundance, put to work in a novel as shocking and daring as anything he's written: a secret history that zeroes in on a time still shrouded in secrets and blows it wide open.


    From the Trade Paperback edition. [via]

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  • Byatt, A. S.: Angels & Insects
    Angels & Insects
    by A. S. Byatt
    ISBN 0676503187 (0-676-50318-7)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    In these breathtaking novellas, A.S. Byatt returns to the territory she explored in Possession: the landscape of Victorian England, where science and spiritualism are both popular manias, and domestic decorum coexists with brutality and perversion. Angels and Insects is "delicate and confidently ironic.... Byatt perfectly blends laughter and sympathy [with] extraordinary sensuality" (San Francisco Examiner).


    From the Trade Paperback edition. [via]

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  • Anna Karenina
    by Leo Tolstoy, Aylmer Maude, Louise Shanks Maude
    ISBN 0679410007 (0-679-41000-7)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    Translated by Constance Garnett, Introduction by Leonard J. Kent and Nina Berberova [via]

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  • Harris, Robert: Archangel
    Archangel
    by Robert Harris
    ISBN 0679428887 (0-679-42888-7)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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  • Faulks, Sebastian: Birdsong
    Birdsong
    by Sebastian Faulks
    ISBN 067943545X (0-679-43545-X)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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  • The Blue Afternoon
    by William Boyd
    ISBN 0679432957 (0-679-43295-7)
    Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    From the acclaimed author of Brazzaville Beach and The Blue Afternoon, a new novel, set in present-day London, which demonstrates the superbly plotted storytelling that has earned William Boyd his reputation as a writer whose "eccentric wit and restless intelligence exert a powerful appeal" (New York Times Book Review).
    One cold winter's morning, Lorimer Black--
    insurance adjuster, young, good-looking, on the rise--goes out on a perfectly ordinary business appointment, finds a hanged man and realizes that his life is about to be turned upside down. The elements at play: a beautiful actress glimpsed in a passing taxi . . . an odd new business associate whose hiring, firing  and rehiring make little sense . . . a rock musician who is losing his mind--and a web of fraud in which virtually everyone Lorimer Black knows has been caught and in which he finds himself increasingly entangled.
    Boyd at his urbane and mesmerizing best. [via]

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  • Bluest Eye
    by Toni Morrison
    ISBN 0671742922 (0-671-74292-2)
    Softcover, Pocket Books

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    Book summary:

    Oprah Book Club® Selection, April 2000: Originally published in 1970, The Bluest Eye is Toni Morrison's first novel. In an afterword written more than two decades later, the author expressed her dissatisfaction with the book's language and structure: "It required a sophistication unavailable to me." Perhaps we can chalk up this verdict to modesty, or to the Nobel laureate's impossibly high standards of quality control. In any case, her debut is nothing if not sophisticated, in terms of both narrative ingenuity and rhetorical sweep. It also shows the young author drawing a bead on the subjects that would dominate much of her career: racial hatred, historical memory, and the dazzling or degrading power of language itself.

    Set in Lorain, Ohio, in 1941, The Bluest Eye is something of an ensemble piece. The point of view is passed like a baton from one character to the next, with Morrison's own voice functioning as a kind of gold standard throughout. The focus, though, is on an 11-year-old black girl named Pecola Breedlove, whose entire family has been given a cosmetic cross to bear:

    You looked at them and wondered why they were so ugly; you looked closely and could not find the source. Then you realized that it came from conviction, their conviction. It was as though some mysterious all-knowing master had given each one a cloak of ugliness to wear, and they had each accepted it without question.... And they took the ugliness in their hands, threw it as a mantle over them, and went about the world with it.
    There are far uglier things in the world than, well, ugliness, and poor Pecola is subjected to most of them. She's spat upon, ridiculed, and ultimately raped and impregnated by her own father. No wonder she yearns to be the very opposite of what she is--yearns, in other words, to be a white child, possessed of the blondest hair and the bluest eye.

    This vein of self-hatred is exactly what keeps Morrison's novel from devolving into a cut-and-dried scenario of victimization. She may in fact pin too much of the blame on the beauty myth: "Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another--physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion." Yet the destructive power of these ideas is essentially colorblind, which gives The Bluest Eye the sort of universal reach that Morrison's imitators can only dream of. And that, combined with the novel's modulated pathos and musical, fine-grained language, makes for not merely a sophisticated debut but a permanent one. --James Marcus [via]

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  • Burr
    by Gore Vidal
    ISBN 0676546455 (0-676-54645-5)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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  • King, Stephen: Carrie
    Carrie
    by Stephen King
    ISBN 0671039733 (0-671-03973-3)
    Softcover, Pocket Books

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  • Cities of the Plain
    by Cormac McCarthy
    ISBN 0679423907 (0-679-42390-7)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    On a ranch in southeastern Texas, soon after World War II, a group of solitary, inarticulately lonely men gathers to work animals as the sun sets for good on the mythic American West. All of these men nurse losses both personal (siblings or wives) and collective (a shared lifestyle and philosophy). Among them is John Grady Cole, the adolescent hero of the first book in Cormac McCarthy's Border trilogy, All the Pretty Horses. John Grady remains the magnificent horseman he always was, and he still dreams too much. On the ranch, he meets Billy Parham, whose own tragic sojourn through Mexico in The Crossing, the second book of the set, continues to quietly suffocate him. The two form a friendship that will nurture both but save neither from the destiny that McCarthy's characters always sense lurching to meet them.

    Soaked in storm-heavy atmosphere but brightened by the ranch-hands' easy camaraderie and gentle humor, Cities of the Plain surprises with its sweetness. The awkward doomed-romance plot at the center of this tight, concise novel fails to convince, but, remarkably, does little to undercut the book's impact. What lingers here, and what matters, are the brooding, eerie portraits of the plains and the riders, glimpsed mostly alone but occasionally leaning together, who slip across them, over the horizon into memory. --Glen Hirshberg [via]

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  • Durrell, Lawrence: Clea
    Clea
    by Lawrence Durrell
    ISBN 0671451030 (0-671-45103-0)
    Softcover, Pocket Books

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  • Cold Mountain
    by Charles Frazier
    ISBN 0679309454 (0-679-30945-4)
    Softcover, Random House of Canada Ltd

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    Book summary:

    The hero of Charles Frazier's beautifully written and deeply-imagined first novel is Inman, a disillusioned Confederate soldier who has failed to die as expected after being seriously wounded in battle during the last days of the Civil War. Rather than waiting to be redeployed to the front, the soul-sick Inman deserts, and embarks on a dangerous and lonely odyssey through the devastated South, heading home to North Carolina, and seeking only to be reunited with his beloved, Ada, who has herself been struggling to maintain the family farm she inherited. Cold Mountain is an unforgettable addition to the literature of one of the most important and transformational periods in American history. [via]

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  • Cussler, Oliver: Cyclops
    Cyclops
    by Oliver Cussler
    ISBN 0671704648 (0-671-70464-8)
    Softcover, Pocket Books

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    A wealthy American financier disappears on a treasure hunt in an antique blimp. From Cuban waters, the blimp drifts toward Florida with a crew of dead men -- Soviet cosmonauts. DIRK PITT discovers a shocking scheme: a covert group of U.S. industrialists has put a colony on the moon, a secret base they will defend at any cost. Threatened in space, the Russians are about to strike a savage blow in Cuba -- and only DIRK PITT can stop them. From a Cuban torture chamber to the cold ocean depths, Pitt is racing to defuse an international conspiracy that threatens to shatter the earth! [via]

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  • Tey, Josephine: The Daughter of Time
    The Daughter of Time
    by Josephine Tey
    ISBN 0671413260 (0-671-41326-0)
    Softcover, Pocket Books

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    Book summary:

    Josephine Tey is often referred to as the mystery writer for people who don't like mysteries. Her skills at character development and mood setting, and her tendency to focus on themes not usually touched upon by mystery writers, have earned her a vast and appreciative audience. In Daughter of Time, Tey focuses on the legend of Richard III, the evil hunchback of British history accused of murdering his young nephews. While at a London hospital recuperating from a fall, Inspector Alan Grant becomes fascinated by a portrait of King Richard. A student of human faces, Grant cannot believe that the man in the picture would kill his own nephews. With an American researcher's help, Grant delves into his country's history to discover just what kind of man Richard Plantagenet was and who really killed the little princes. [via]

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  • Erickson, Steve: Days Between Stations
    Days Between Stations
    by Steve Erickson
    ISBN 0671532758 (0-671-53275-8)
    Hardcover, Simon & Schuster

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  • Barthelme, Donald: The Dead Father
    The Dead Father
    by Donald Barthelme
    ISBN 0671823051 (0-671-82305-1)
    Softcover, Pocket Books

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  • Dubliners
    by James Joyce
    ISBN 0679405747 (0-679-40574-7)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    (Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)

    Though James Joyce began these stories of Dublin life in 1904 when he was twenty-two and completed them in 1907, their unconventional themes and language led to repeated rejections by publishers and delayed publication until 1914. In the century since, his story The Dead has come to be seen as one of the most powerful evocations of human loss and longing that the English language possesses; all the other stories in Dubliners are as beautifully turned and as greatly admired. They remind us once again that James Joyce was not only modernisms chief innovator but also one of its most intimate and poetic writers.

    In this edition the text has been revised in keeping with Joyces wishes, and the original versions of The Sisters, Eveline, and After the Race have been made available in an appendix, along with Joyces suppressed preface to the 1914 edition of Dubliners. [via]

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  • Einstein's Dreams
    by Alan Lightman
    ISBN 0679416463 (0-679-41646-3)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    If you liked the eerie whimsy of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, Steven Millhauser's Little Kingdoms, or Jorge Luis Borges's Labyrinths, you will love Alan Lightman's ethereal yet down-to-earth book Einstein's Dreams. Lightman teaches physics and writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, helping bridge the light-year-size gap between science and the humanities, the enemy camps C.P. Snow famously called The Two Cultures.

    Einstein's Dreams became a bestseller by delighting both scientists and humanists. It is technically a novel. Lightman uses simple, lyrical, and literal details to locate Einstein precisely in a place and time--Berne, Switzerland, spring 1905, when he was a patent clerk privately working on his bizarre, unheard-of theory of relativity. The town he perceives is vividly described, but the waking Einstein is a bit player in this drama.

    The book takes flight when Einstein takes to his bed and we share his dreams, 30 little fables about places where time behaves quite differently. In one world, time is circular; in another a man is occasionally plucked from the present and deposited in the past: "He is agonized. For if he makes the slightest alteration in anything, he may destroy the future ... he is forced to witness events without being part of them ... an inert gas, a ghost ... an exile of time." The dreams in which time flows backward are far more sophisticated than the time-tripping scenes in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, though science-fiction fans may yearn for a sustained yarn, which Lightman declines to provide. His purpose is simply to study the different kinds of time in Einstein's mind, each with its own lucid consequences. In their tone and quiet logic, Lightman's fables come off like Bach variations played on an exquisite harpsichord. People live for one day or eternity, and they respond intelligibly to each unique set of circumstances. Raindrops hang in the air in a place of frozen time; in another place everyone knows one year in advance exactly when the world will end, and acts accordingly.

    "Consider a world in which cause and effect are erratic," writes Lightman. "Scientists turn reckless and mutter like gamblers who cannot stop betting.... In this world, artists are joyous." In another dream, time slows with altitude, causing rich folks to build stilt homes on mountaintops, seeking eternal youth and scorning the swiftly aging poor folk below. Forgetting eventually how they got there and why they subsist on "all but the most gossamer food," the higher-ups at length "become thin like the air, bony, old before their time."

    There is no plot in this small volume--it's more like a poetry collection than a novel. Like Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time, it's a mind-stretching meditation by a scientist who's been to the far edge of physics and is back with wilder tales than Marco Polo's. And unlike many admirers of Hawking, readers of Einstein's Dreams have a high probability of actually finishing it. [via]

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  • The Elephant Vanishes: Stories
    by Haruki Murakami
    ISBN 0679420576 (0-679-42057-6)
    Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    With the same deadpan mania and genius for dislocation that he brought to his internationally acclaimed novels A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Haruki Murakami makes this collection of stories a determined assault on the normal. A man sees his favorite elephant vanish into thin air; a newlywed couple suffers attacks of hunger that drive them to hold up a McDonald's in the middle of the night; and a young woman discovers that she has become irresistible to a little green monster who burrows up through her backyard.

    By turns haunting and hilarious, The Elephant Vanishes is further proof of Murakami's ability to cross the border between separate realities -- and to come back bearing treasure.


    From the Trade Paperback edition. [via]

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  • Elvis, Jesus & Coca-Cola
    by Kinky Friedman
    ISBN 0671869221 (0-671-86922-1)
    Hardcover, Simon & Schuster

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    Book summary:

    An ex-girlfriend vanishes, a documentary-in-progress disappears, the screenwriter working on it overdoses, and Kinky Friedman is on the case, in an irreverent, unpredictable new mystery by the writer-musician. 35,000 first printing. Tour. [via]

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  • Russo, Richard: Empire Falls
    Empire Falls
    by Richard Russo
    ISBN 0679432477 (0-679-43247-7)
    Hardcover, Alfred a Knopf Inc

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  • Enigma
    by Robert Harris
    ISBN 0679428879 (0-679-42887-9)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    "LITERATE AND SAVVY . . . BRIMS WITH WARTIME INTRIGUE."
    --The Washington Post Book World
    England 1943. Much of the infamous Nazi Enigma code has been cracked. But Shark, the impenetrable operational cipher used by Nazi U-boats, has masked the Germans' movements, allowing them to destroy a record number of Allied vessels. Feeling that the blood of Allied sailors is on their hands, a top-secret team of British cryptographers works feverishly around the clock to break Shark. And when brilliant mathematician Tom Jericho succeeds, it is the stuff of legend. . . .
    "A TENSE AND THOUGHTFUL THRILLER."
    --San Francisco Chronicle
    Until the unthinkable happens: the Germans have somehow learned that Shark has been cracked. And they've changed the code. . . .
    "SUSPENSEFUL AND FASCINATING."
    --The Orlando Sentinel
    As an Allied convoy crosses the U-boat infested North Atlantic . . . as Jericho's ex-lover Claire disappears amid accusations that she is a Nazi collaborator . . . as Jericho strains his last resources to break Shark again, he cannot escape the ultimate truth: There is a traitor among them. . . .
    "GRIPPING . . . CAPTIVATING ."
    --New York Daily News
    "ELEGANTLY RESEARCHED . . . Readers will find themselves perfectly placed to experience one of Britain's finest hours."
    --People
    "SATISFYING . . . Harris does a crackerjack job here, playing his characters' lives off historical events in surprising ways."
    --Entertainment Weekly
    "SUSPENSEFUL . . . FIENDISHLY CLEVER."
    --Detroit Free Press


    From the Paperback edition. [via]

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  • McMurtry, Larry: The Evening Star: A Novel
    The Evening Star: A Novel
    by Larry McMurtry
    ISBN 0671799045 (0-671-79904-5)
    Softcover, Pocket Books

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  • Harrison, Kathryn: Exposure
    Exposure
    by Kathryn Harrison
    ISBN 0679409424 (0-679-40942-4)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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  • Fatherland
    by Robert Harris
    ISBN 0679412735 (0-679-41273-5)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    Fatherland is set in an alternative world where Hitler has won the Second World War. It is April 1964 and one week before Hitler's 75th birthday. Xavier March, a detective of the Kriminalpolizei, is called out to investigate the discovery of a dead body in a lake near Berlin's most prestigious suburb.

    As March discovers the identity of the body, he uncovers signs of a conspiracy that could go to the very top of the German Reich. And, with the Gestapo just one step behind, March, together with an American journalist, is caught up in a race to discover and reveal the truth -- a truth that has already killed, a truth that could topple governments, a truth that will change history.


    From the Paperback edition. [via]

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  • The Fermata
    by Nicholson Baker
    ISBN 0679415866 (0-679-41586-6)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    The Fermata is the most risky of Nicholson Baker's emotional histories. His narrator, Arno Strine, is a 35-year-old office temp who is writing his autobiography. "It's harder than I thought!" he admits. His "Fold-powers" are easier; he can stop the world and use it as his own pleasure ground. Arno uses this gift not for evil or material gain (he would feel guilty about stealing), though he does undress a good number of women and momentarily place them in compromising positions--always, in his view, with respect and love. Anyone who can stop time and refer in self-delight to his "chronanisms" can't be all bad! Like Baker's other books, The Fermata gains little from synopsis. The pleasure is literally in the text. What's memorable is less the sex and the sex toys (including the "Monasticon," in the shape of a monk holding a vibrating manuscript) than Arno's wistful recollections of intimacy: the noise, for instance, of his ex-girlfriend's nail clipper, "which I listened to in bed as some listen to real birdsong." [via]

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  • The Final Confession of Mabel Stark
    by Robert Hough
    ISBN 0679311327 (0-679-31132-7)
    Softcover, McClelland & Stewart Ltd

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    Book summary:

    Robert Hough's first novel, The Final Confession of Mabel Stark, is a gaudy tall tale of circus life that rollicks and rambles in equal measure. Based on the few facts known about Mabel Stark, history's greatest female tiger trainer, this novel spans some 60 years, from the protagonist's rough beginnings as a nurse in a Louisville, Kentucky, hospital to her fading years as an octogenarian cat trainer in a seedy wildlife theme park. The intervening years see Stark persevering through five husbands, a series of scrapes, tears, and maulings, and stints with several circuses, including the still-famous Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey outfit.

    The Final Confession of Mabel Stark is written as an autobiography, and Hough's development of Stark's voice is convincing and consistently charming. His storytelling, however, has a tendency to flag; Stark's life is truly remarkable, but there isn't much variety in it, and the career of a tiger trainer sometimes starts to seem much like any other dangerous job. Realistically presented animals seldom make good protagonists, and Hough's valiant efforts to give a distinct character to Rajah, Stark's prize wrestling tiger, aren't entirely successful. The grit and glamour of Stark's circus career will enchant a good many readers, but it's hard not to wish that this novel were leaner, quicker, more agile, more catlike. --Jack Illingworth [via]

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  • Folding Star
    by Alan Hollinghurst
    ISBN 0679436057 (0-679-43605-7)
    Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    Obsessed with one of his pupils, teacher Edward Manners becomes embroiled in affairs with two other men, but only after discovering the life and work of Symbolist painter Edgard Orst does he come to understand the implications of obsession. 25,000 first printing. [via]

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  • Go Ask Alice
    by Anonymous
    ISBN 0671664581 (0-671-66458-1)
    Hardcover, Simon & Schuster

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    Book summary:

    The torture and hell of adolescence has rarely been captured as clearly as it is in this classic diary by an anonymous, addicted teen. Lonely, awkward, and under extreme pressure from her "perfect" parents, "Anonymous" swings madly between optimism and despair. When one of her new friends spikes her drink with LSD, this diarist begins a frightening journey into darkness. The drugs take the edge off her loneliness and self-hate, but they also turn her life into a nightmare of exalting highs and excruciating lows. Although there is still some question as to whether this diary is real or fictional, there is no question that it has made a profound impact on millions of readers during the more than 25 years it has been in print. Despite a few dated references to hippies and some expired slang, Go Ask Alice still offers a jolting chronicle of a teenager's life spinning out of control. [via]

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  • Lessing, Doris May: The Golden Notebook
    The Golden Notebook
    by Doris May Lessing
    ISBN 0671287702 (0-671-28770-2)
    Hardcover, Simon & Schuster

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  • Good Earth
    by Pearl S. Buck
    ISBN 0671510126 (0-671-51012-6)
    Softcover, Simon & Schuster

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    Book summary:

    Story of the Chinese peasant Wang Lung and his wife O-Lan and their rise from poverty to riches. [via]

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  • The Good Soldier
    by Ford Madox Ford
    ISBN 0679406654 (0-679-40665-4)
    Hardcover, Everymans Library

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    Book summary:

    First published in 1915, Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier begins, famously and ominously, "This is the saddest story I have ever heard." The book then proceeds to confute this pronouncement at every turn, exposing a world less sad than pathetic, and more shot through with hypocrisy and deceit than its incredulous narrator, John Dowell, cares to imagine. Somewhat forgotten as a classic, The Good Soldier has been called everything from the consummate novelist's novel to one of the greatest English works of the century. And although its narrative hook--the philandering of an otherwise noble man--no longer shocks, its unerring cadences and doleful inevitabilities proclaim an enduring appeal.

    Ford's novel revolves around two couples: Edward Ashburnham--the title's soldier--and his capable if off-putting wife, Leonora; and long-transplanted Americans John and Florence Dowell. The foursome's ostensible amiability, on display as they pass parts of a dozen pre-World War I summers together in Germany, conceals the fissures in each marriage. John is miserably mismatched with the garrulous, cuckolding Florence; and Edward, dashing and sentimental, can't refrain from falling in love with women whose charms exceed Leonora's. Predictably, Edward and Florence conduct their affair, an indiscretion only John seems not to notice. After the deaths of the two lovers, and after Leonora explains much of the truth to John, he recounts the events of their four lives with an extended inflection of outrage. From his retrospective perch, his recollections simmer with a bitter skepticism even as he expresses amazement at how much he overlooked.

    Dowell's resigned narration is flawlessly conversational--haphazard, sprawling, lusting for sympathy. He exudes self-preservation even as he alternately condemns and lionizes Edward: "If I had had the courage and the virility and possibly also the physique of Edward Ashburnham I should, I fancy, have done much what he did." Stunningly, Edward's adultery comes to seem not merely excusable, but almost sublime. "Perhaps he could not bear to see a woman and not give her the comfort of his physical attractions," John surmises. Ford's novel deserves its reputation if for no other reason than the elegance with which it divulges hidden lives. --Ben Guterson [via]

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  • Colwin, Laurie: Goodbye Without Leaving
    Goodbye Without Leaving
    by Laurie Colwin
    ISBN 067170706X (0-671-70706-X)
    Hardcover, Simon & Schuster

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  • The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time
    by Hunter S. Thompson
    ISBN 0671400460 (0-671-40046-0)
    Hardcover, Summit Books

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    Book summary:

    In addition to being a testament to the undeniably beatifying properties of American excess--literary, political, chemical, you name it--Hunter Thompson is the high priest of the ad hominem attack. Anyone unlucky enough to get in the way of his satirical sledgehammer will end up with soup for brains. Still, even Thompson needs a good villain to get properly lathered up; that's why he peaked simultaneously with America's 37th president, Richard Milhous Nixon. Tricky Dick was Thompson's dark-jowled, pale-calved Muse, and with his departure Thompson seemed to lose his place a bit. Swatting flies with a baseball bat.

    You need look no further for this writer's best: this collection of pieces, first published in 1979, spans all of Thompson's primo era, including short pieces and selections from longer works. The Great Shark Hunt sports a few articles filed by a pre-Gonzo Hunter S. Thompson, which show flickers of passion but no real fire; the first experiments with the author's drug-fueled brand of journalism at the Kentucky Derby; and finally the gigs that made him an American institution, in Las Vegas and on the 1972 campaign trail.

    Thompson's style is so unique that a reader is tempted to think that he leapt, fully formed, into Gonzohood. However, along with the crazy, careening prose itself, one of the auxiliary pleasures of The Great Shark Hunt is the map that it gives of Thompson's ascent (or descent, if you prefer) from the workaday hyperbole of sports writing to the hell-blast vigor of his later work. The drugs are, by and large, a distraction--lifestyle points that get in the way of the genuinely perceptive journalism that Thompson created. (But they are there, always, and in quantity.) If you're looking for insight into the underbelly of America, Hunter S. Thompson is your best and only guide, and The Great Shark Hunt is an excellent place to begin the grim safari. --Michael Gerber [via]

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  • The Green Mile
    by Stephen King
    ISBN 0671041789 (0-671-04178-9)
    Softcover, Pocket Books

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    Read this history-making serial novel -- from cliffhanger to cliffhanger -- in its entirety. When it first appeared, one volume per month, Stephen King's The Green Mile was an unprecedented publishing triumph: all six volumes ended up on the New York Times bestseller list -- simultaneously -- and delighted millions of fans the world over. Welcome to Cold Mountain Penitentiary, home to the Depression-worn men of E Block. Convicted killers all, each awaits his turn to walk the Green Mile, keeping a date with "Old Sparky," Cold Mountain's electric chair. Prison guard Paul Edgecombe has seen his share of oddities in his years working the Mile. But he's never seen anyone like John Coffey, a man with the body of a giant and the mind of a child, condemned for a crime terrifying in its violence and shocking in its depravity. In this place of ultimate retribution, Edgecombe is about to discover the terrible, wondrous truth about Coffey, a truth that will challenge his most cherished beliefs...and yours. [via]

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  • Heart of Darkness
    by Joseph Conrad
    ISBN 0679428011 (0-679-42801-1)
    Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group

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    (Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)

    Heart of Darkness grew out of a journey Joseph Conrad took up the Congo River; the verisimilitude that the great novelist thereby brought to his most famous tale everywhere enhances its dense and shattering power.

    Apparently a sailors yarn, it is in fact a grim parody of the adventure story, in which the narrator, Marlow, travels deep into the heart of the Congo where he encounters the crazed idealist Kurtz and discovers that the relative values of the civilized and the primitive are not what they seem. Heart of Darkness is a model of economic storytelling, an indictment of the inner and outer turmoil caused by the European imperial misadventure, and a piercing account of the fragility of the human soul. [via]

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  • Howards End
    by E. M. Forster
    ISBN 0679406689 (0-679-40668-9)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Margaret Schlegel, engaged to the much older, widowed Henry Wilcox, meets her intended the morning after accepting his proposal and realizes that he is a man who has lived without introspection or true self-knowledge. As she contemplates the state of Wilcox's soul, her remedy for what ails him has become one of the most oft-quoted passages in literature:

    Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.
    Like all of Forster's work, Howards End concerns itself with class, nationality, economic status, and how each of these affects personal relationships. It follows the intertwined fortunes of the Schlegel sisters, Margaret and Helen, and the Wilcox family over the course of several years. The Schlegels are intellectuals, devotees of art and literature. The Wilcoxes, on the other hand, can't be bothered with the life of the mind or the heart, leading, instead, outer lives of "telegrams and anger" that foster "such virtues as neatness, decision, and obedience, virtues of the second rank, no doubt, but they have formed our civilization." Helen, after a brief flirtation with one of the Wilcox sons, has developed an antipathy for the family; Margaret, however, forms a brief but intense friendship with Mrs. Wilcox, which is cut short by the older woman's death. When her family discovers a scrap of paper requesting that Henry give their home, Howards End, to Margaret, it precipitates a spiritual crisis among them that will take years to resolve.

    Forster's 1910 novel begins as a collection of seemingly unrelated events--Helen's impulsive engagement to Paul Wilcox; a chance meeting between the Schlegel sisters and an impoverished clerk named Leonard Bast at a concert; a casual conversation between the sisters and Henry Wilcox in London one night. But as it moves along, these disparate threads gradually knit into a tightly woven fabric of tragic misunderstandings, impulsive actions, and irreparable consequences, and, eventually, connection. Though set in the early years of the 20th century, Howards End seems even more suited to our own fragmented era of e-mails and anger. For readers living in such an age, the exhortation to "only connect" resonates ever more profoundly. --Alix Wilber [via]

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  • If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
    by William Weaver, Italo Calvino
    ISBN 0679420258 (0-679-42025-8)
    Hardcover, Alfred a Knopf Inc

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    Book summary:

    If on a Winter's Night a Traveler is a marvel of ingenuity, an experimental text that looks longingly back to the great age of narration--"when time no longer seemed stopped and did not yet seem to have exploded." Italo Calvino's novel is in one sense a comedy in which the two protagonists, the Reader and the Other Reader, ultimately end up married, having almost finished If on a Winter's Night a Traveler. In another, it is a tragedy, a reflection on the difficulties of writing and the solitary nature of reading. The Reader buys a fashionable new book, which opens with an exhortation: "Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade." Alas, after 30 or so pages, he discovers that his copy is corrupted, and consists of nothing but the first section, over and over. Returning to the bookshop, he discovers the volume, which he thought was by Calvino, is actually by the Polish writer Bazakbal. Given the choice between the two, he goes for the Pole, as does the Other Reader, Ludmilla. But this copy turns out to be by yet another writer, as does the next, and the next.

    The real Calvino intersperses 10 different pastiches--stories of menace, spies, mystery, premonition--with explorations of how and why we read, make meanings, and get our bearings or fail to. Meanwhile the Reader and Ludmilla try to reach, and read, each other. If on a Winter's Night is dazzling, vertiginous, and deeply romantic. "What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space." [via]

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  • Durrell, Lawrence: Justine
    Justine
    by Lawrence Durrell
    ISBN 0671451049 (0-671-45104-9)
    Softcover, Pocket Books

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  • Kitchen
    by Banana Yoshimoto, Megan Backus
    ISBN 0671880187 (0-671-88018-7)
    Softcover, Pocket Books

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    Book summary:

    Two stories, "Kitchen" and "Moonlight Shadow," told through the eyes of a pair of contemporary young Japanese women, deal with the themes of mothers, love, transsexuality, kitchens, and tragedy. Reprint. NYT. [via]

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  • The Lady and the Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto
    by Pico Iyer
    ISBN 0679403086 (0-679-40308-6)
    Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    When Pico Iyer decided to go to Kyoto and live in a monastery, he did so to learn about Zen Buddhism from the inside, to get to know Kyoto, one of the loveliest old cities in the world, and to find out something about Japanese culture today -- not the world of businessmen and production lines, but the traditional world of changing seasons and the silence of temples, of the images woven through literature, of the lunar Japan that still lives on behind the rising sun of geopolitical power. [via]

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  • Lady Oracle
    by Margaret Atwood
    ISBN 0671223399 (0-671-22339-9)
    Hardcover, Simon & Schuster

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    Joan Foster is the bored wife of a myopic ban-the-bomber.  She takes off overnight as Canada's new superpoet, pens lurid gothics on the sly, attracts a blackmailing reporter, skids cheerfully in and out of menacing plots, hair-raising traps, and passionate trysts, and lands dead and well in Terremoto, Italy.  In this remarkable, poetic, and magical novel, Margaret Atwood proves yet again why she is considered to be one of the most important and accomplished writers of our time. [via]

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  • Lasher
    by Anne Rice
    ISBN 0679412956 (0-679-41295-6)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    From the day her first Vampire Chronicle was published, critics and readers--readers by the hundreds of thousands--have been mesmerized by the writings of Anne Rice.  And with the publication of The Witching Hour, she created for us yet another world and legend, and both the chorus of praise and the multitudes of her readers once more increased.

    Now, Anne Rice brings us again--even more magically--into the midst of the dynasty of witches she introduced in The Witching Hour.

    At the center:  the brilliant an beautiful Rowan Mayfair, queen of the coven, and Lasher, the darkly compelling demon whom she finds irresistible and from whose evil spell and vision she must now flee.  She takes with her their terrifying and exquisite child, one of "a brood of children born knowing, able to stand and talk on the first day."

    Rowan's attempt to escape Lasher and his pursuit of her and their child are at the heart of this extraordinary saga.  It is a novel that moves around the globe, backward and forward through time, and between the human and demonic worlds.  Its many voices--of women, of men, of demons and angels, present and past--haunt and enchant us.  With a dreamlike power, the novel draws us through twilight paths, telling a chillingly hypnotic story of occult and spiritual aspirations and passion. [via]

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  • Coupland, Douglas: Life After God
    Life After God
    by Douglas Coupland
    ISBN 0671874349 (0-671-87434-9)
    Softcover, Pocket Books

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    In a dazzlingly original collection of stories, Doug Coupland envisions a new kind of spiritualism for a culture fast-forwarding into the future. Coupland is the international bestselling author of Generation X and Shampoo Planet. [via]

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  • The Light of Day: Library Edition
    by Graham Swift
    ISBN 0679312455 (0-679-31245-5)
    Hardcover, Random House of Canada Ltd

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    Book summary:

    A single, dazzling day in the life of George Webb -- ex-policeman turned private investigator -- illuminates his checkered past, his now all-consuming relationship with a former client and the catastrophic events that involved them both two years ago. Intimate, tender and humorous in its depiction of life's surface, electrifying in its exploration of the depths that lie within us, this masterful novel is a luminous, gripping tale of love, murder and redemption. [via]

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  • The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
    by Douglas Adams
    ISBN 0671742515 (0-671-74251-5)
    Softcover, Pocket Books

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    Book summary:

    book [via]

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  • Martin, Valerie: Mary Reilly
    Mary Reilly
    by Valerie Martin
    ISBN 0671507028 (0-671-50702-8)
    Softcover, Simon & Schuster

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  • Durrell, Lawrence: Mountolive
    Mountolive
    by Lawrence Durrell
    ISBN 0671451057 (0-671-45105-7)
    Softcover, Pocket Books

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  • Hermes, Patricia: My Girl
    My Girl
    by Patricia Hermes
    ISBN 0671759299 (0-671-75929-9)
    Softcover, Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing

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  • One True Thing
    by Anna Quindlen
    ISBN 067940712X (0-679-40712-X)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    One True Thing is a film starring Meryl Streep as the cancer-stricken homemaker mother, Renee Zellweger as the daughter who quits her top-dog job to care for her, and William Hurt as the chilly professor who lets the women in the family do the heavy emotional lifting dying requires. But the real star of the project remains former New York Times everyday-life columnist Anna Quindlen, who quit her top-dog job to write novels (and who took time off from college to nurse her own dying mother).

    Quindlen hit a nerve with One True Thing, which captures an experience seldom dealt with in popular culture. (One exception: the sensitive 1996 film with Streep and Leonardo DiCaprio of the play Marvin's Room.) Though the heroine of One True Thing, Ellen Gulden, is a golden girl with two brothers who'll lose her career the instant she steps off the fast track, society concurs with her dad, who says, "It seems to me another woman is what's wanted here."

    The book is a mother-daughter tale that should please fans of, say, The Joy Luck Club. It's not flashy, but it has a deep feel for the way children often discover, just before it's too late, who their parents really are. "Our parents are never people to us," Ellen writes, "they're always character traits.... There is only room in the lifeboat of your life for one, and you always choose yourself, and turn your parents into whatever it takes to keep you afloat." The mercy-killing subplot isn't gripping, but the palpable sense of deepening family intimacy certainly is. --Tim Appelo [via]

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  • A Passage to India: Library Edition
    by E. M. Forster
    ISBN 0679405496 (0-679-40549-6)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    What really happened in the Marabar caves? This is the mystery at the heart of E.M. Forster's 1924 novel, A Passage to India, the puzzle that sets in motion events highlighting an even larger question: Can an Englishman and an Indian be friends?

    "It is impossible here," an Indian character tells his friend, Dr. Aziz, early in the novel.

    "They come out intending to be gentlemen, and are told it will not do.... Why, I remember when Turton came out first. It was in another part of the Province. You fellows will not believe me, but I have driven with Turton in his carriage--Turton! Oh yes, we were once quite intimate. He has shown me his stamp collection.

    "He would expect you to steal it now. Turton! But red-nosed boy will be far worse than Turton!

    "I do not think so. They all become exactly the same, not worse, not better. I give any Englishman two years, be he Turton or Burton. It is only the difference of a letter. And I give any Englishwoman six months. All are exactly alike."

    Written while England was still firmly in control of India, Forster's novel follows the fortunes of three English newcomers to India--Miss Adela Quested, Mrs. Moore, and Cyril Fielding--and the Indian, Dr. Aziz, with whom they cross destinies. The idea of true friendship between the races was a radical one in Forster's time, and he makes it abundantly clear that it was not one that either side welcomed. If Aziz's friend, Hamidullah, believed it impossible, the British representatives of the Raj were equally discouraging.
    "Why, the kindest thing one can do to a native is to let him die," said Mrs. Callendar.
    "How if he went to heaven?" asked Mrs. Moore, with a gentle but crooked smile.
    "He can go where he likes as long as he doesn't come near me. They give me the creeps."
    Despite their countrymen's disapproval, Miss Quested, Mrs. Moore, and Mr. Fielding are all eager to meet Indians, and in Dr. Aziz they find a perfect companion: educated, westernized, and open-minded. Slowly, the friendships ripen, especially between Aziz and Fielding. Having created the possibility of esteem based on trust and mutual affection, Forster then subjects it to the crucible of racial hatred: during a visit to the famed Marabar caves, Miss Quested accuses Dr. Aziz of sexually assaulting her, then later recants during the frenzied trial that follows. Under such circumstances, affection proves to be a very fragile commodity indeed.

    Arguably Forster's greatest novel, A Passage to India limns a troubling portrait of colonialism at its worst, and is remarkable for the complexity of its characters. Here the personal becomes the political and in the breach between Aziz and his English "friends," Forster foreshadows the eventual end of the Raj. --Alix Wilber [via]

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  • Atwood, Margaret: The Penelopiad
    The Penelopiad
    by Margaret Atwood
    ISBN 067697418X (0-676-97418-X)
    Hardcover, Knopf

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  • Pompeii: A Novel
    by Robert Harris
    ISBN 0679428895 (0-679-42889-5)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    All along the Mediterranean coast, the Roman empire's richest citizens are relaxing in their luxurious villas, enjoying the last days of summer. The world's largest navy lies peacefully at anchor in Misenum. The tourists are spending their money in the seaside resorts of Baiae, Herculaneum, and Pompeii. But the carefree lifestyle and gorgeous weather belie an impending cataclysm, and only one man is worried. The young engineer Marcus Attilius Primus has just taken charge of the Aqua Augusta, the enormous aqueduct that brings fresh water to a quarter of a million people in nine towns around the Bay of Naples. His predecessor has disappeared. Springs are failing for the ?rst time in generations. And now there is a crisis on the Augusta's sixty-mile main line-somewhere to the north of Pompeii, on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius. Attilius-decent, practical, and incorruptible-promises Pliny, the famous scholar who commands the navy, that he can repair the aqueduct before the reservoir runs dry. His plan is to travel to Pompeii and put together an expedition, then head out to the place where he believes the fault lies. But Pompeii proves to be a corrupt and violent town, and Attilius soon discovers that there are powerful forces at work-both natural and man-made-threatening to destroy him. With his trademark elegance and intelligence, Robert Harris, bestselling author of Archangel and Fatherland , re-creates a world on the brink of disaster. [via]

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  • Posies & Bouquets
    by Malcolm Hillier
    ISBN 067178983X (0-671-78983-X)
    Hardcover, Simon & Schuster

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    Book summary:

    This book provides practical instructions in the making of posies and bouquets with descriptive captions, artwork borders and full-colour photographs throughout. Part of "The Little Scented Library" series, the book gives the reader a host of traditional recipes and gift suggestions as well as imaginative new variations. There are original and pretty ideas for creating a fresh wedding garland, or a Christmas wreath of scented foliage. Scented endpapers are a fragrant reminder that outlives the special occasion. By the author of "Arranging Dried Flowers", "Flowers", "Container Gardening" and co-author of "The Complete Book of Dried Flowers". [via]

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  • Postcards from the Edge
    by Carrie Fisher
    ISBN 0671724738 (0-671-72473-8)
    Softcover, Simon & Schuster

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    Book summary:

    Written in a montage form using diary extracts, memory flashbacks and narrative, this is a novel about stardom and drugs, while looking at some of the dangers and delights of our age - career, money, sex and insecurity. The author is also an actress who played Princess Leia in "Star Wars". [via]

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  • Ford, Richard: Rock Springs
    Rock Springs
    by Richard Ford
    ISBN 0676511120 (0-676-51112-0)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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  • The Rules of Attraction
    by Bret Easton Ellis
    ISBN 067162234X (0-671-62234-X)
    Hardcover, Simon & Schuster

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    Set at a small, affluent liberal-arts college in New England at the height of the Reagan eighties, The Rules of Attraction is a startlingly funny, kaleidoscopic novel about three students with no plans for the futureor even the presentwho become entangled in a curious romantic triangle. Bret Easton Ellis trains his incisive gaze on the kids at self-consciously bohemian Camden College and treats their sexual posturing and agonies with a mixture of acrid hilarity and compassion while exposing the moral vacuum at the center of their lives. Lauren changes boyfriends every time she changes majors and still pines for Victor, who split for Europe months ago, and she might or might not be writing anonymous love letters to ambivalent, hard-drinking Sean, a hopeless romantic who only has eyes for Lauren, even if he ends up in bed with half the campus and with Paul, Laurens ex, who is forthrightly bisexual and whose passion masks a shrewd pragmatism. They waste time getting wasted and race from Thirsty Thursday Happy Hours to Dressed to Get Screwed parties to drinks at the End of the World. The Rules of Attraction is a poignant, hilarious take on the death of romance. [via]

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  • Sachets & Cushions
    by Malcolm Hillier
    ISBN 0671789848 (0-671-78984-8)
    Hardcover, Simon & Schuster

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    Book summary:

    This book provides practical instructions in the making of sachets and cushions with descriptive captions, artwork borders and full-colour photographs throughout. Part of "The Little Scented Library" series, the book gives the reader a host of traditional recipes and gift suggestions as well as imaginative new variations. Scented endpapers are a fragrant reminder that outlives the special occasion. By the author of "Arranging Dried Flowers", "Flowers", "Container Gardening" and co-author of "The Complete Book of Dried Flowers". [via]

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  • Schindler's List
    by Thomas Keneally
    ISBN 0671511718 (0-671-51171-8)
    Softcover, Simon & Schuster, Limited

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    Winner of the Booker Prize Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Fiction Schindler's List is a remarkable work of fiction based on the true story of German industrialist and war profiteer, Oskar Schindler, who, confronted with the horror of the extermination camps, gambled his life and fortune to rescue 1,300 Jews from the gas chambers. Working with the actual testimony of Schindler's Jews, Thomas Keneally artfully depicts the courage and shrewdness of an unlikely savior, a man who is a flawed mixture of hedonism and decency and who, in the presence of unutterable evil, transcends the limits of his own humanity. [via]

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  • Sexing the Cherry
    by Jeanette Winterson
    ISBN 0676973485 (0-676-97348-5)
    Softcover, Random House of Canada Ltd

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    Book summary:

    Set in 17th century London, Sexing the Cherry is about the journeys taken by the boisterous Dog-Woman and her son Jordan: journeys across seas to find bananas and pineapples; journeys through time that weave snatches of the present with tales of Charles 1 and Oliver Cromwell; journeys in search of the self. As mothers go, the Dog-Woman takes some beating. She's a giant, wrapped in a skirt that could "serve as a sail for some wartorn ship" and strong enough to fling an elephant into the air. She's hideous too, with smallpox scars on her face where fleas live, a flat nose and black, broken teeth. To top it all, she's a "fantasist, a liar and a murderer". But her son, Jordan, is proud of her--who else has a mother who can hold a dozen oranges in her mouth at once?

    Like the best of Winterson's writing, such as Oranges are not the Only Fruit and The Passion, the novel is engaging, ambitious and contrary. Alongside a hearty historical realism, young girls swoon in locked towers that don't exist, islands slip sideways in time and mysterious diseases wipe out towns and cities. Even though Sexing the Cherry is short, it is impossible to read it in a straight line--fairy tales and dreams run in and out of the text and it's hard to resist chasing them. There is an exceptional playfulness at work too--an unravelling of the most solid of historical facts and fantastically unconventional fairy tales in which princesses smash the skulls of their princes with silver candlesticks or become worn and grey "like old sweaters". --Jane Honey [via]

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  • Slaves of New York
    by Tama Janowitz
    ISBN 0671745247 (0-671-74524-7)
    Softcover, Simon & Schuster

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    Book summary:

    In Tama Janowitz's story collection of mid-1980s manners, it's all about real estate. Her coterie of New York artists and grad students, junkies and collectors dwells in walk-ups and covets lofts. The occasional socialite wafts through, characterized tersely by statements of fact; for example, "Millie owned her own co-op." But, for the most part, these are the also-rans of Manhattan life, literally looking for a toehold in the city. The main character who emerges is shabby Eleanor, an appealing heroine who appears in several linked stories. A jewelry maker, she lives with an artist named Stash and a treasure-trove of insecurities. Much is made of the squalor of their apartment. In Eleanor, Janowitz finds a channel for her vulnerability--a nice counterpoint to her affectless prose, which attempts and occasionally achieves a deadpan humor.

    Intertwined with the Eleanor stories are the unreliable first-person narratives of Marley Mantello. Marley, too, has serious real estate issues: "My apartment, the sublet from which I was being evicted, looked just as terrible as when I had gone out earlier--worse, even, for there was a foul reek of something fecund and feline, like the stench of old lion spoor upon the veldt."

    The rest of the stories are brief thumbnails, which Janowitz calls "modern saints" and "case histories." Stabbing at experimentalism, they showcase her shortcomings--the lazy satire, the easy laugh. This author's prose seemed of-the-moment when it came out, and time has not been altogether kind. "I was startled to find him so far uptown, knowing how he usually refused to travel above Fourteenth Street, claiming it led to mental decay," says the narrator of "In and Out of the Cat Bag." This kind of observation may have seemed edgy in 1985, but has little staying power. At its best, Slaves effervesces a bittersweet nostalgia for a time when artists could still afford to live in Manhattan. --Claire Dederer [via]

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  • Slouching Towards Bethlehem
    by Joan Didion
    ISBN 0671248065 (0-671-24806-5)
    Softcover, Simon & Schuster

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    Book summary:

    Upon its publication in 1968, Slouching Towards Bethlehem confirmed Joan Didion as one of the most prominent writers on the literary scene. Her unblinking vision and deadpan tone have influenced subsequent generations of reporters and essayists, changing our expectations of style, voice, and the artistic possibilities of nonfiction.
            
    "In her portraits of people," The New York Times Book Review wrote, "Didion is not out to expose but to understand, and she shows us actors and millionaires, doomed brides and naïve acid-trippers, left-wing ideologues and snobs of the Hawaiian aristocracy in a way that makes them neither villainous nor glamorous, but alive and botched and often mournfully beautiful. . . . A rare display of some of the best prose written today in this country."
            
    In essay after essay, Didion captures the dislocation of the 1960s, the disorientation of a country shredding itself apart with social change. Her essays not only describe the subject at hand--the murderous housewife, the little girl trailing the rock group, the millionaire bunkered in his mansion--but also offer a broader vision of America, one that is both terrifying and tender, ominous and uniquely her own.
            
    Joyce Carol Oates has written, "Joan Didion is one of the very few writers of our time who approaches her terrible subject with absolute seriousness, with fear and humility and awe. Her powerful irony is often sorrowful rather than clever. . . . She has been an articulate witness to the most stubborn and intractable truths of our time, a memorable voice, partly eulogistic, partly despairing; always in control." [via]

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  • The Stranger
    by Albert Camus, Matthew Ward
    ISBN 0679420266 (0-679-42026-6)
    Hardcover, Alfred a Knopf Inc

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    The Stranger is not merely one of the most widely read novels of the 20th century, but one of the books likely to outlive it. Written in 1946, Camus's compelling and troubling tale of a disaffected, apparently amoral young man has earned a durable popularity (and remains a staple of U.S. high school literature courses) in part because it reveals so vividly the anxieties of its time. Alienation, the fear of anonymity, spiritual doubt--all could have been given a purely modern inflection in the hands of a lesser talent than Camus, who won the Nobel Prize in 1957 and was noted for his existentialist aesthetic. The remarkable trick of The Stranger, however, is that it's not mired in period philosophy.

    The plot is simple. A young Algerian, Meursault, afflicted with a sort of aimless inertia, becomes embroiled in the petty intrigues of a local pimp and, somewhat inexplicably, ends up killing a man. Once he's imprisoned and eventually brought to trial, his crime, it becomes apparent, is not so much the arguably defensible murder he has committed as it is his deficient character. The trial's proceedings are absurd, a parsing of incidental trivialities--that Meursault, for instance, seemed unmoved by his own mother's death and then attended a comic movie the evening after her funeral are two ostensibly damning facts--so that the eventual sentence the jury issues is both ridiculous and inevitable.

    Meursault remains a cipher nearly to the story's end--dispassionate, clinical, disengaged from his own emotions. "She wanted to know if I loved her," he says of his girlfriend. "I answered the same way I had the last time, that it didn't mean anything but that I probably didn't." There's a latent ominousness in such observations, a sense that devotion is nothing more than self-delusion. It's undoubtedly true that Meursault exhibits an extreme of resignation; however, his confrontation with "the gentle indifference of the world" remains as compelling as it was when Camus first recounted it. --Ben Guterson [via]

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  • Mistry, Rohinton: Such a Long Journey
    Such a Long Journey
    by Rohinton Mistry
    ISBN 0679402586 (0-679-40258-6)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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  • Surfacing
    by Margaret Atwood
    ISBN 0671214500 (0-671-21450-0)
    Hardcover, Simon & Schuster

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    Book summary:

    First published in 1972, Surfacing was Margaret Atwood's second novel, following the critically acclaimed The Edible Woman. Atwood had already made her mark as a one of the most exciting new voices in Canadian poetry, winning the Governor General's Award in 1966 for The Circle Game, while her groundbreaking book of criticism, Survival, had started the process of redefining the meaning of Canadian literature.

    In Surfacing, poetry and prose brilliantly come together in a heart-wrenching novel that focuses on a woman's desperate attempt to put the ghosts of her past to rest. With three friends, she's returned to the remote cabin in Northern Quebec where she spent her childhood. She's overwhelmed, almost to the point of emotional paralysis, by memories of her father and his death by drowning, her failed marriage and painful divorce, and an abortion that haunts her waking dreams. While she appears to be ambivalent about the landscape, it is the landscape that in fact will provide her with the means of healing herself and her broken spirit. Like Atwood's poetry of this period, Surfacing is a deeply psychological novel. Atwood uses the recurring image of surfacing from beneath the waves of an icy northern lake as a symbol of this woman's struggle to regain control of her life, to refuse to be a victim of her past. Surfacing is a poignant novel filled with the power of the Canadian wilderness to cleanse the soul, an image of the wilderness that has remained a preoccupation for Atwood throughout her writing career. --Jeffrey Canton [via]

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  • Taltos
    by Anne Rice
    ISBN 067942573X (0-679-42573-X)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    Ash at once is propelled into de world of Rowan Mayfair, and into the mysteries of the Mayfair family_the New Orleansdynasty of witches forever besieged by ghosts, spirits, and the dizzying powers of his own species... [via]

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  • Things Fall Apart
    by Chinua Achebe
    ISBN 0679417141 (0-679-41714-1)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    One of Chinua Achebe's many achievements in his acclaimed first novel, Things Fall Apart, is his relentlessly unsentimental rendering of Nigerian tribal life before and after the coming of colonialism. First published in 1958, just two years before Nigeria declared independence from Great Britain, the book eschews the obvious temptation of depicting pre-colonial life as a kind of Eden. Instead, Achebe sketches a world in which violence, war, and suffering exist, but are balanced by a strong sense of tradition, ritual, and social coherence. His Ibo protagonist, Okonkwo, is a self-made man. The son of a charming ne'er-do-well, he has worked all his life to overcome his father's weakness and has arrived, finally, at great prosperity and even greater reputation among his fellows in the village of Umuofia. Okonkwo is a champion wrestler, a prosperous farmer, husband to three wives and father to several children. He is also a man who exhibits flaws well-known in Greek tragedy:

    Okonkwo ruled his household with a heavy hand. His wives, especially the youngest, lived in perpetual fear of his fiery temper, and so did his little children. Perhaps down in his heart Okonkwo was not a cruel man. But his whole life was dominated by fear, the fear of failure and of weakness. It was deeper and more intimate than the fear of evil and capricious gods and of magic, the fear of the forest, and of the forces of nature, malevolent, red in tooth and claw. Okonkwo's fear was greater than these. It was not external but lay deep within himself. It was the fear of himself, lest he should be found to resemble his father.
    And yet Achebe manages to make this cruel man deeply sympathetic. He is fond of his eldest daughter, and also of Ikemefuna, a young boy sent from another village as compensation for the wrongful death of a young woman from Umuofia. He even begins to feel pride in his eldest son, in whom he has too often seen his own father. Unfortunately, a series of tragic events tests the mettle of this strong man, and it is his fear of weakness that ultimately undoes him.

    Achebe does not introduce the theme of colonialism until the last 50 pages or so. By then, Okonkwo has lost everything and been driven into exile. And yet, within the traditions of his culture, he still has hope of redemption. The arrival of missionaries in Umuofia, however, followed by representatives of the colonial government, completely disrupts Ibo culture, and in the chasm between old ways and new, Okonkwo is lost forever. Deceptively simple in its prose, Things Fall Apart packs a powerful punch as Achebe holds up the ruin of one proud man to stand for the destruction of an entire culture. --Alix Wilber [via]

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  • Sterns, Kate: Thinking about Magritte
    Thinking about Magritte
    by Kate Sterns
    ISBN 0679412077 (0-679-41207-7)
    Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group

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  • Klinkenborg, Verlyn: Timothy; or, Notes of an Abject Reptile
    Timothy; or, Notes of an Abject Reptile
    by Verlyn Klinkenborg
    ISBN 0679407286 (0-679-40728-6)
    Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group

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  • To the Lighthouse
    by Virginia Woolf
    ISBN 0679405372 (0-679-40537-2)
    Hardcover, Alfred a Knopf Inc

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    Book summary:

    (Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)

    Though its fame as an icon of twentieth-century literature rests primarily on the brilliance of its narrative technique and the impressionistic beauty of its prose, To the Lighthouse is above all the story of a quest, and as such it possesses a brave and magical universality.

    Observed across the years at their vacation house facing the gales of the North Atlantic, Mrs. Ramsay and her family seek to recapture meaning from the flux of things and the passage of time. Though it is the death of Mrs. Ramsay on which the novel turns, her presence pervades every page in a poetic evocation of loss and memory that is also a celebration of domestic life and its most intimate details. Virginia Woolfs great book enacts a powerful allegory of the creative consciousness and its momentary triumphs over fleeting material life. [via]

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  • Zorba the Greek
    by Nikos Kazantzakis
    ISBN 0671211323 (0-671-21132-3)
    Softcover, Simon & Schuster

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    Book summary:

    A Simon & Schuster eBook [via]

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