From the highly acclaimed author of Edisto and The Interrogative Mood, Padgett Powell’s new collection of stories, Cries for Help, Various, follows his mentor Donald Barthelme’s advice that “wacky mode” must “break their hearts.” The...
Like most men in their early thirties, Lazarus has plans that don't involve dying. He is busy organising his sisters, his business and his women. Life is mostly good, until far away in Galilee, without warning, his childhood best friend turns water...
On Valentine’s Day 2008, Steve Kazmierczak killed five and wounded eighteen at Northern Illinois University, then killed himself. But he was an A student, a Deans’ Award winner. How could this happen?
CNN could not get the story. The...
In this superb novel composed of fragments of memory, Gilbert Sorrentino captures the unconventional nuances of a conventional world. A masterful collage of events is evocatively chained together by secrets and hidden truths that are almost...
It was no time to fear animals when the possibility of the enemy counteroffensive was increasing. It didn’t suit a soldier to lose nerve in the presence of a mere crocodile
At the end of World War II, a garrison of the Twenty-eighth Japanese...
"Rodmoor is, unusually for a John Cowper Powys novel, set in East Anglia, Rodmoor itself being a coastal village. The protagonist, Adrian Sorio, is a typically Powys-like hero, highly-strung with only precarious mental stability. He is in love with...
A mesmerizing novel about memory, privacy, fear, and what happens when our past catches up with us.
After a decade living in England, Jeremy O'Keefe returns to New York, where he has been hired as a professor of German history at New York...
In a literary voice that is both original and powerfully unsettling, William Gay tells the story of Nathan Winer, a young and headstrong Tennessee carpenter who lost his father years ago to a human evil that is greater and closer at hand than any...
John Gardner's most poignant novel of improbable love.
At the heart of John Gardner's Nickel Mountain is an uncommon love story: when at 42, the obese, anxious and gentle Henry Soames marries seventeen-year-old Callie Wells — who is pregnant...