This entire novel consists of a discussion between two friends — one who just returned from Europe, the other a young accountant — about a grand birthday party neither one was able to attend. This doesn't stop them from swapping stories and...
"Will put Allen in the company of writers such as James Joyce, August Wilson, and Ralph Ellison." — The Philadelphia Inquirer.
When it was first published fifteen years ago, Jeffery Renard Allen's debut novel, Rails Under My Back, earned its...
A comic gem, Jerzy Pilch’s A Thousand Peaceful Cities takes place in 1963, in the latter days of the Polish post-Stalinist “thaw.” The narrator, Jerzyk (“little Jerzy”), is a teenager who is keenly interested in his father, a retired...
Suspenseful and atmospheric, this extraordinary novel portrays both the hardship and grace in the life of a man struggling to realize his destiny.
When Samuel Tyne emigrated from the Gold Coast (now Ghana) in 1955, he was determined to...
Nelson’s life is not turning out the way he hoped. His girlfriend is sleeping with another man, his brother has left their South American country and moved to the United States, leaving Nelson to care for their widowed mother, and his...
Butler's inventive third book is dedicated "For no one" and begins with an eerie prologue about the saturation of the world with a damaging light. Suitably forewarned, the reader is introduced to an unexceptional no-name family. All should be...
The Carter House girls are divided when two of them go after the same guy. Rhiannon and Taylor are at serious odds, and before it’s over several girls get...
At once a sensual and irresistible mystery and a haunting work of psychological insight and emotional depth, The Whole World marks the beginning of a brilliant literary career for Emily Winslow, a superb, limitlessly gifted author.
Set in the...
Peter Ackroyd's imagination dazzles in this brilliant novel written in the voice of Victor Frankenstein himself. Mary Shelley and Shelley are characters in the novel.It was at Oxford that I first met Bysshe. We arrived at our college on...