The Noonday Cemetery & Other Stories, selected by Herling himself shortly before his death in 2000, is a collection of thirteen brilliant stories spanning the last twenty years of his life. His novel The Island was published to great acclaim in 1993, and his memoir, A World Apart, is among the most powerful accounts of life in the Soviet gulag. Volcano and Miracle, published in 1996, contains short fiction and prose writings from his Journal Written at Night. But nowhere before have Herling's best stories--and Herling was indeed a master of the short story--been compiled and published in English translation. In "The Noonday Cemetery," an eerie graveyard on an Italian hillside overlooks the sea and hides the secrets of a murder (or suicide?). "Beata, Santa" describes the plight of a young Polish woman raped by Serbs, who is pressured by the Catholic Church to keep her child. In "A Madrigal of Mourning," a Russian woman musicologist becomes obsessed with Carlo Gesualdo (1560-1613), Prince of Venosa, a madrigalist and murderer. These timeless stories, dealing with moral, often historical, subjects and written in passionate, deeply affecting prose, affirm without a doubt the assessment by The Boston Globe that Herling is "a writer of stylistic mastery and moral depth, who deserves to be placed among the best in any language."

Clayton Biner had it all--swimming pools in California, haciendas in Mexico, blue evenings on the French Riviera, all the women he could use. But he wanted more. And he got it when he became involved with a vicious syndicate peddling heroin--the big H, the white Horse. Now he was really in the big money--a three-million-dollar bundle of danger and death. Ed Lacy is one of America's all-time best selling authors, with sales of his famous, nerve-chilling books in the millions. Shoot It Again is a powerful, haunting novel of an international crime syndicate and a man trapped by his own greed and passion. (Originally published as The Sex Castle.)

3 women can make a mess out of a man's life. The Right One--Michele, the dark-eyed French beauty who looked like she had just stepped out of a European movie. The Wrong One--Wilma, the red-headed temptress who came along at the wrong time with the right invitation. The Dead One--Francine, whose lifeless body was found in a rowboat in the middle of the bay. Ed Lacy's latest suspense novel is a hard-hitting story of fast-living men and women caught in a web of passion and violence, with a stunning surprise ending.

This is a novel written by Claire Rayner.

From Kirkus Reviews Reading a Rubens novel (Mate in Three, Our Father, Sat on Edge--all 1987) requires an iron-nerved distance. Her cool tales about acrid domestic relations and solitary masturbatory griefs, rages, and obsessions, touched as they are with a bizarre comic irony, cut deep. Here, a London psychiatrist, cold as an arctic bean, germinates an evil seed. Dr. Alistair Crown's wife, Virginia, has just given birth to their first child, named ``Doris'' by an angry Virginia from a card she found in the flowers Alistair brought her--flowers purloined from a cemetery. Alistair is cheap as well as rotten. Doris is born with Down's syndrome, and Alistair will never look at the child's face. But he will touch her body (after covering her face) with what he considers one version of parental love, and then, obsessed, he will draw doodles of an imagined Doris face. Inevitably, Alistair and Virginia separate, and he continues to see patients. (Rubens wickedly skewers the workday of a bored psychiatrist). Into Alistair's office one day comes ``Esau,'' a huge man covered with hair like an animal. Rejected by his father, Esau strips before medical men to reverse his father's withering verdict, and Esau becomes Alistair's gentle friend (platonic). Esau's tragic end preludes another erasure of innocence when little five-year-old Doris is kidnapped. The anguish of temporarily reunited parents and grandparents as hours and days tick by has acid calms and tempests of unrelieved nightmare. The close is predictable, but such is Rubens's skill that the reader must plunge along to the end of a very direful road indeed. A teeth-grinding, chilling tale of human nastiness--in guises that are both horrible and most commonplace. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. Product Description Dr. Alistair Crown is disappointed when his wife gives birth to a daughter, but when he learns that she has Down syndrome, he rejects the child

An unforgettable collection of a master storytellerÂ's final works Throughout his life, Arthur Miller, one of the foremost dramatists of the twentieth century, wrote highly regarded fiction—from his early novel Focus to two collections, I DonÂ't Need You Anymore and Homely Girl . In Presence , a posthumous gathering of his last published stories, he reveals the same profound insight, humanism, and empathy that characterized his great dramatic works. The six stories included here have all appeared in major publications and each displays all the assuredness of an artist in his autumnal prime. Presence is a gift that all fans of MillerÂ's work, as well as readers of contemporary fiction, will applaud.

Kostantin Vaginov is one of Russian modernist literature's best kept secrets. He wrote in the wake of the Bolsheviks' emergence after the Revolution. Vaginov, from a privileged family and highly educated, skillfully concealed his contempt for the new order in his prose and poetry through references to antiquity, obscure metaphor, multiple layers of meaning, overlayed sarcasm, myriad subtexts, and a carnival atmosphere in many of his passages. This is Vaginov's second of four novels and perhaps the most accessible in theme and subject matter to an American audience unfamiliar with this author of stellar brilliance. The "works and days" of the main character, Svistonov, are filled with his tasks in assembling a work of literature. His primary chore is "collecting" characters, and there is no shortage of Leningrad philistines, decadents, and eccentrics to serve Svistonov's (and Vaginov's) purpose of skewering his country's new political/social reality. When the bureaucrats who controlled artistic output finally realized Vaginov's "heresy" they set out to arrest him. But he had the last laugh. Vaginov had already died that year of tuberculosis.

In You and Me, Belonging , Aaron Kreuter explores our contemporary world with insight, originality, and empathy. The stories in this debut collection are brimming with characters striving to fit in, to find their place in the world, to belong. A Jewish waitress has an affair with a Palestinian chef. A one-percenter self-destructs when he becomes obsessed with mastering the guitar. A university student stoned in Amsterdam hallucinates about Anne Frank on Birthright Israel. In the closing novella, a vanful of young women follows a fictional jam band across America, steeping in counterculture, music, and the ups and downs of the road. The collection is satiric and emotional, angry and hopeful, passionate and surprising. Like a wedding speech gone off the rails, like the best improvised music, You and Me, Belonging takes readers to some unexpected places.

This riveting novel tells of four men, inmates in a Nazi concentration camp, who survive the camp by amusing their tormentors.

A richly textured, deeply atmospheric, and engaging novel set in a small Louisiana town in the 1950s, The Cajuns tells a captivating tale of love, life, death, and intrigue in a wonderfully bizarre yet corrupt culture. The descendants of French Canadians who migrated to southern Louisiana in the mid-eighteenth century, Cajuns are known for their fiery and passionate dispositions. In his remarkably moving new novel, Louisiana native Gus Weill presents an affectionate yet unstinting look at Cajun culture in the small town of Richelieu -- a world in which the mix of promiscuity, ribald humor, extreme violence, and devout Catholicism is a way of life. Bobby Boudreaux is the sheriff of Richelieu, where the only laws people respect are those that dictate how much pepper goes into the stew and, of course, the edicts of the Catholic Church. It was not a job Bobby wanted -- in fact, once out of school, his dream had been to escape into the larger world as fast as he possibly could. But life -- and a strong-willed father -- got in the way. On most days being parish sheriff is not that demanding. Yes, laws get broken, but no one else seems to mind, so why should he? Thus, when Ti Boy Brouliette, an altar boy and an all-around good kid, dies in a mysterious gun accident, Bobby's only official action is to join the townsfolk who congregate at the home of the family, offering comfort to the grieving parents. What he doesn't realize, though, is that his life -- and that of everyone in Richelieu -- is about to change forever. Among those gathered at Ti Boy's home is Ruth Ann Daigle, a beautifully sexy and worldly young woman who has returned to her hometown to help out her ailing father, who runs the local newspaper. Ruth Ann intimates to Bobby that she is not convinced that Ti Boy's death was an accident and, as a reporter for the paper, she intends to investigate. Bobby, annoyed by the suggestion that he's not doing his job, is afraid that Ruth Ann may be right. He also fears that Ruth Ann's arrival in Richelieu marks the end of a way of life he has come to depend on -- for not only does she threaten to challenge tradition, she has also awakened in him a sexual need that had grown dormant over the years, and soon his marriage is threatened as well. Against this rich and vivid background, populated by a cast of colorful characters, Gus Weill has crafted a fascinating and compelling tale of a distinctive way of life threatened by scandal and of a unique culture on the brink of dramatic change.

NY 1983 first American edition. Fromm. Hardcover. In English. Large octavo, 547pp. Fine in Near Fine DJ. No ownership marks. Historical novel of Germany in early twentieth century.

With the sweep of Sophie's Choice and search for identity of Everything is Illuminated, Reparations is the story of Molly Rose, an innocent catapulted from the streets of New York into the bombed out cities of Austria and Germany at the end of World War II. This is her story, a story of circumstance and choices, survival and strength, love and betrayal. in the early years in Europe, Molly meets stateless Jews in Austria and Germany. They become her European family. Slowly, they begin to tell their secrets of horror under the Nazis: mutilation, experimentation, rape, torture, state-induced abortions, relentless cruelty and death. Some turn to smuggling goods, gold bullion and loose silver, to Spain and Italy. Molly and Jacob join them, driving across borders in a specially made car. Molly has another quest as well: Molly wants a baby for herself and for the surviving Jewish women experimented on by Nazi doctors. Molly wants to undo the wrong done to her sisters by the ultimate affirming act: Molly wants to create new life.

"Michael Shepard, a detective with his own set of problems, is hired one morning by a fashionable young woman at her Hollywood apartment. Soon he's embroiled in a murder investigation that may shed light on a nearly forgotten tragedy. A divorced father wondering how to set his son on a better course in life, the detective gets into deepening trouble as he negotiates a vivid panorama of the town's modern-day beautiful and damned. Author Aram Saroyan harnesses the hardboiled styles of Chandler, Hammett, and Ross MacDonald into a contemporary tale of information age intrigue. The text is supplemented with cell phone photos taken by Saroyan in the same environs in which the story unfolds." --

The compulsively readable (Susie Essman, actress, "Curb Your Enthusiasm") author of "Best Supporting Role" delivers a new novel of one woman who s stretched so thin, she almost disappears... Knocking on sixty, Barbara Stirling is too busy to find herself, while caring for her mother, husband, children, and grandchildren. But when she loses her job, everything changes. Exhausted, lonely, and unemployed, Barbara is forced to face her feelings and doubts. Then a troubled, vulnerable little boy walks into her life and changes it forever."

From Scout Media comes A Matter of Words--the first volume in an ongoing short story anthology series featuring authors from all over the world. In this first installation, no limits were set on genre, allowing the authors to lead the reader to destinations unknown. From the outer limits of the galaxy to the darkest depths of the ocean, A Matter of Words conquers the struggles of everyday life before revealing the dramatic loss of innocence and disturbing the reader with things that go bump in the night. Whether to be enlightened, entertained, or momentarily caught up in another world, these selections convey the true spirit of the short story. Our list of contributors include Steven Hartov: NY Times best-selling author and military journalist Randy Blazak: expert hate-crime sociologist correspondent and novelist Chuck Mosley: musician and original Faith No More vocalist Brian Paone: musician and critically acclaimed novelist Kim Loraine: award winning romance novelist Douglas Esper: musician, children's book author, and novelist Jacob Prytherch: author of the #1 ranked cyberpunk novel on Amazon UK Michelle Jillian Bailey Faith Cooper Stephanie Rogish Dan Golden Travis West Leah Lederman Stephen Rhodes A. Lee Ajang Alfred Balcon Cynthia Paone Alex Lonchiadis Lee Diogeneia Richard Lopez Salgado S.M.

Ellen and Adam are struggling to determine the future of their relationship. Over the course of one summer, Ellen toils at a trendy urban art gallery while Adam embarks on a solo trip into the Arctic. While Adam enters the compelling and dangerous wilderness alone, Ellen gains fresh perspective via the lens of a new-found collection of friends. Through alternating points of view, we see Adam's and Ellen's impressions of their partnership change, until the end of the novel when their worlds - and changed world-views - suddenly collide.

The narrator of Early Companions was born in Germany. He tells of his early life there during Nazi times. When he came to New York, he participated in a left-wing movement, so he knows a thing or two about the internal squabbling among the comrades. Finally, he became a professor at a university, where he saw his share of faculty politics.