A young subaltern returns to the Western Front after a brief period of sick leave in an England blind to the horrors of the First World War. His battalion is tragically...
Paul Trilby is having a bad day. If he were to be honest with himself, Paul Trilby would have to admit that he's having a bad life. His wife left him. Three subsequent girlfriends left him. He's fallen from a top-notch university teaching job, to a...
These fifteen stories by Ann Beattie garnered universal critical acclaim on their first publication, earning Beattie the reputation as the most celebrated new voice in American fiction. Today these stories — "A Vintage Thunderbird;" "The Lawn...
Dai Wei lies in his bedroom, a prisoner in his body, after he was shot in the head at the Tiananmen Square protest ten years earlier and left in a coma. As his mother tends to him, and his friends bring news of their lives in an almost...
Never before has Gordimer, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991, published such a comprehensive collection of her nonfiction. Telling Tales represents the full span of her works in that field-from the twilight of white rule in South...
An allegory of the struggle between good and evil, in which Eliot Nailles, a chemist, meets Paul Hammer, who is not the ordinary citizen he seems to be. "We're the Hammers," The stranger said to the priest. Nailles did not think this funny,...
The Horned Man opens with a man losing his place in a book, then deepens into a dark and terrifying story of a man losing his place in the world.Lawrence Miller, an English expatriate in New York, is being persecuted – though he doesn't know why,...
There shouldn’t be a Citrus County. Teenage romance should be difficult, but not this difficult. Boys like Toby should cause trouble but not this much. The moon should glow gently over children safe in their beds. Uncles in their rockers...
IN THIS SUITE of five short pieces — one of the unqualified literary masterpieces of the American 1960s — William Gass finds five beautiful forms in which to explore the signature theme of his fiction: the solitary soul's poignant, conflicted,...
The Pisstown Chaos is the story of a family’s dislocation in the midst of chaos, disease, and forced-relocation. Political power seems to be solely in the hands of one Reverend Herman Hooker, an “American Divine,” who revels in the sufferings...