Since quitting work to look after his eight-year-old daughter, Alexa, Thomas Bradshaw has found solace and grace in his daily piano study. His pursuit of a more artistic way of life shocks and irritates his parents and in-laws. Why has he swapped...
Young Peony is sold into a rich Chinese household as a bondmaid — an awkward role in which she is more a servant, but less a daughter. As she grows into a lovely, provocative young woman, Peony falls in love with the family's only son. However,...
While the Women are Sleeping - A Dozen unforgettable stories by "one of the most original writers at work today" (Wyatt Mason, The New York Times Book Review). Slippery figures in anomalous situations — ghosts,...
George Saunders has earned enthusiastic acclaim and a devoted cult-following with his first two story collections and the recent novella The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil. With his new book, In Persuasion Nation, Saunders ups the ante in...
One of Dickens’ most enduringly popular stories is Oliver Twist, an early work published 1837-8. Like many of his later novels, its central theme is the hardship faced by the dispossessed and those of the outside of ‘polite’ society. Oliver...
Irene is thirty-seven years old and just out of prison after a four-year sentence for terrorist involvement. On her first night of freedom, she wanders from bar to bar, picks up a stranger, and spends the night with him in a hotel. He treats her...
Ignazio Silvio Di Palermo was born in an Italian neighborhood in New York’s East Harlem in 1926. He was born blind but was raised in a close, vivid, lusty world bounded by his grandfather’s love, his mother’s volatility, his huge array of...