Gordon Foster’s activities took a sudden bounce off the track of his daily pattern of staid middle-class living when a girl asked him for a match in the lobby of a San Francisco hotel. In a matter of weeks the girl Ruby followed Gordon home to...
The Hotel Years gathers sixty-four feuilletons: on hotels; pains and pleasures; personalities; and the deteriorating international situation of the 1930s. Never before translated into English, these pieces begin in Vienna just at the end of the...
Mightier than the Sword opens with an IRA bomb exploding during the MV Buckingham's maiden voyage across the Atlantic — but how many passengers lose their lives?
When Harry Clifton visits his publisher in New York, he learns that he has been...
V. S. Naipaul’s legendary command of broad comedy and acute social observation is on abundant display in these classic works of fiction — two novels and a collection of stories — that capture the rhythms of life in the Caribbean and England...
A book judged so dangerous in the Soviet Union that not only the manuscript but the ribbons on which it had been typed were confiscated by the state, Life and Fate is an epic tale of World War II and a profound reckoning with the dark forces that...
Jack Kerouac's On the Road is one of the most controversial American novels of the 20th century. When critics concede that the book and its author were instrumental in triggering the rucksack revolution, this is to damn with praise, as Kerouac is...
Veteran epidemiologist Carla Edwards has been dispatched by the C.D.C. to investigate a cluster of inexplicable mutations among the young people of Innsmouth, a sickly and destitute town on the Massachusetts coast. Initially skeptical, she rapidly...
With his New Directions debut in 1938, the twenty-five-year-old Delmore Schwartz was hailed as a genius and among the most promising writers of his generation. Yet he died in relative obscurity in 1966, wracked by mental illness and substance abuse....