A story which attempts to capture the fierce heat of the Italian landscape as well as the rhythm of London days and evenings. The author is also known for her novels The Elected Member, Kingdom Come and Five Year Sentence.

In his latest book, Swimming Laps: Stories and Meditations, B.H. FRIEDMAN writes: “These are not ‘stories,’ in the sense that my previous collections fit into that category. They are typically less narrative, less explicit, less long. If they fit within any category, it is ‘minimalism’ – a septuagenarian’s alternative to garrulousness.” Friedman, a native New Yorker, has spent many years in the Provincetown and East Hampton art colonies. He has written Jackson Pollock: Energy Made Visible and (with the research collaboration of Flora Biddle) Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney – both first biographies of these very different subjects. He has also written or contributed to monographs on Franz Kline, Lee Krasner, Michael Lekakis, Alfonso Ossorio, Salvatore Scarpitta, and Myron Stout, among others. One of his novels, Whispers, was recommended by William Gass for a National Book Award, and The Polygamist was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. His two previous collections of stories and meditations include “Moving in Place” and “Duplex,” which received, respectively, CCLM and Nelson Algren awards. In recent years Friedman has concentrated mainly on plays, several of which have been presented in the Hamptons and off-Broadway. He is currently revising one of these, My Small Self, which deals with the relationship between Pirandello and Mussolini.

'Over the years, Ariel Dorfman has written movingly and often brilliantly of the cultural dislocations and political fractures of his dual heritage. Dorfman has, in an impressive body of work, done justice to the two languages that have battled for his voice and the two countries that claim his allegiance.' Shashi Tharoor, New York Times Book ReviewOther Septembers, Many Americas: Selected Provocations, 1980-2004 is the first major collection of acclaimed novelist and playwright Ariel Dorfman's best shorter works, including essays, opinion pieces, poems and previously unpublished speeches. Gathered here are writings about America, North and South, that touch on topics as diverse as Scrooge McDuck, barbarians, Vietnam and video games, and as profound as redemption, forgiveness, art and memory. Over and over, in a literary career that has spanned almost a quarter of a century, Dorfman weaves together sentiment and politics with an unmistakable message to his readers that we must never forget to resist and to imagine. This collection forms a rich historical and social text essential for anyone who wishes to understand how the roots of our present crisis are embedded deep within the American psyche, documented by a writer who exists uniquely both inside and out of it.

In the world of Chilean poet Ariel Dorfman, men and women can be forced to choose between leaving their country or dying for it. The living risk losing everything, but what they hold onto—love, faith, hope, truth—might change the world. It is this subversive possibility that speaks through these poems. A succession of voices—exiles, activists, separated lovers, the families of those victimized by political violence—gives an account of ruptured safety. They bear witness to the resilience of the human spirit in the face of personal and social damage in the aftermath of terror. The first bilingual edition of Dorfman’s work, In Case of Fire in a Foreign Land includes ten new poems and a new preface, and brings back into print the classic poems of the celebrated Last Waltz in Santiago. Always an eloquent voice against the ravages of inhumanity, Dorfman’s poems, like his acclaimed novels, continue to be a searing testimony of hope in the midst of despair.

El Norte Grande of Chile is the world's driest desert, a vast, barren expanse where a person can live an entire lifetime without ever feeling a single drop of rain, where rivers vanish into the sands and trees are all but unknown. But this forbidding landscape has many stories to tell an observant, inquisitive traveler. Someone like Ariel Dorfman. Renowned as a poet, essayist, novelist, and playwright, he combines eloquence, passion, and personal experience with a sure sense of place and a keen eye for the telling detail that brings history to life -- for this account of his journey through the desert is also a chronicle of modern Chile. Like an archaeologist, he sifts through shards of memory to recreate a world that no longer exists but still casts a long shadow over his native land. Ghosts are at the heart of his tale, from the ruined boomtowns where great nitrate fortunes were built to the seaside prison where Dorfman's old friend Freddy Taberna spent his last night before being executed in 1973 after the overthrow of Salvador Allende's government. In these pages, long-abandoned mining communities are summoned up in their glory days, when the mansions of mineral millionaires were built on the punishing labor of workers forever in hock to the company store. Nor are these the only ghosts. In this sweeping book, Dorfman also examines the oldest mummies in the world, visits an observatory at the top of the world that scans the light from long-dead stars, and sifts through the remains of indigenous villages buried under tons of sand. Skillfully interweaving present and past, memoir and meditation, fascinating history and colorful family lore, Desert Memories gazes across the seeming emptiness of el Norte Grande, finds a complete and compelling world, and conjures it up with the kind of elegant simplicity that only the most sophisticated of travelers can achieve.

From Alison Pick, Booker longlisted author of FAR TO GO comes a suspenseful, dystopian reimagining of the founding of a kibbutz in 1920s Palestine, for readers of WHEN I LIVED IN MODERN TIMES, THE HANDMAID'S TALE or THE POWER. 'We came into their valley at dawn'. From three vastly different points of view, Alison Pick relates the story of a group of Jewish pioneers, many escaping violent homelands, who have come together to found a kibbutz on a patch of land that will later become Israel. With tightly controlled intensity, Pick takes us into three very different minds to show us how a utopian dream is punctured by messy human entanglements. Yet this is also the story of the land itself (present day Israel and Palestine), revealing the way the newcomers chose to ignore the fact that their valley was already populated, home to a people that the pioneers did not want to see. In writing of extraordinary, at times heartbreaking power, Pick has created unforgettable characters, haunted by ghosts and compromised by unbearable secrets. The novel's shocking conclusion is a tour de force , the work of a writer uniquely in control of her craft and with an extraordinary insight into the innermost workings of the human heart.

Every Day in the Morning (slow) is a work that looks and reads like no other. Sam, a composer, reflects on his floundering career, life with his lover and tensions with his father. Some thoughts, like facial hair and breakfast, are mundane; others, like love, money and war, are often overwhelming. At turns laughable and vain, at others, tender and considered, Sam's feelings and ideas turn continuously. The result is an oddly lyrical streamof– consciousness that's as conversational as its appearance is unconventional. Spare text and the generous white space invite a distinct interaction with the story, one where every detail, every placement and every repetition influences meaning. The lack of punctuation allows the reader the freedom to internalize this exquisitely crafted work and understand the protagonist's state of mind. The exceptional style of Every Day in the Morning (slow) amounts to a kind of thinging , somewhere between singing and thinking, thing and thought, utter brilliance and complete crap. A novella with long poem features, slow breaks the rules of both genres, while at the same time offering an addictive and compulsive flow that may make it the fastest book you will ever (want to) read.

Extending the story of the troubled life of Rosa, a character first developed by the author in "Longing," this novel describes her difficult relationship with her mother, Eleanor. Rosa's story unfolds as though in a parallel world: dogged by the same obsessions as her mother and resorting to sex and madness as elements of destruction. At the core of their tension is the illicit affair Eleanor has had with her daughter s husband, Antonio. Both Rosa and Eleanor find the defining focal point in the same man, whose gift for interpreting the longing of others means his own bitter destruction. Narrated in two voices from perspectives of both women, this novel describes both their lives in depth, covering a span of nearly 70 years during which the world around them undergoes enormous change."

A bizarre and compelling story of a contemporary woman's initiation into an ancient goddess-worshipping sect and its secret teachings. A first novel by an established writer of non-fiction with a solid reputation in the women's market.

The lovely suburban streets are quiet, until one day the lawn of the philosopher is stolen, strange rains come, and little Celia makes a crashing announcement in class that closes her school. The Mud Game is a charming, surreal, entertaining novel about the way television took over our lives one strange day but left us still singing.

A new edition of a “dazzlingly seductive” fever dream written in “brilliant poetic vernacular” ( Bookforum ) by a beloved poet and cultural critic, now with an introduction by Rachel Kushner. For five years, concert pianist Theo Mangrove has been living at his family’s home in East Kill, New York, recovering from a nervous breakdown that derailed his career, and attempting to relieve his relentless polysexual appetite in the company of male hustlers, random strangers, music students, his aunt, and occasionally his wife. As he prepares for a comeback recital in Aigues-Mortes, a walled medieval town in southern France, he becomes obsessed with the idea that the Italian circus star Moira Orfei must join him there to perform alongside him. Extravagantly (and tragicomically) describing his hallucinatory plans in a series of twenty-five notebooks, he assembles an incantatory meditation on performance, failure, fame, decay, and delusion. "If Debussy and Robert Walser had collaborated on an opera, it would sound like this. --John Ashbery

This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curated for quality. Quality assurance was conducted on each of these books in an attempt to remove books with imperfections introduced by the digitization process. Though we have made best efforts - the books may have occasional errors that do not impede the reading experience. We believe this work is culturally important and have elected to bring the book back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide.

Set in a small town that houses little more than a research lab and an engineering school, the body of the lab's director is found in a pit used for maternal deprivation experiments with monkeys. A few days later, a graduate student is found murdered as well. Are these deaths connected? And who's responsible for these murders? Written by one of America's greatest poets, this mystery is a scathing social commentary with a criminal twist. Maxine Kumin is the author of poetry, novels, short stories, essays and a number of children's books. She has received several awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Poets' Prize, the Levinson Prize, and most recently, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. She lives in Warner, New Hampshire.

Tracker of lost memories and lost souls, the veteran San Francisco private eye Dan Kasdan manages, along his way from the 1960s to the 1990s, to find Priscilla, the love of his life, only to lose her. Kasdan, urged on by Priscilla, also finds himself entangled with Karim, the sleek pornographer and drug dealer who insists that only Dan is the right person to handle his transfers of cash and drugs. All three, Kasdan, Priscilla, and Karim, want more than what ordinary life can afford them. She Took My Arm As If She Loved Me is the story of the risks of love and age, played out against the turbulence of America's great metropolitan village, where freedom is no more easily come by than anywhere else.

A murder mystery featuring as sleuth an alternative 20th century Goethe. On winning the 1992 Nobel Prize for Literature, he travels to Stockholm where he investigates the murder of another winner of the prize. By the author of Kassandrus.