Excerpt from Salt: A Novel Now he tried her name once more: Sarah. Sarah. Sarah. Yes, over. He opened the refrigerator and gazed inside. It began its hot pumping labor at keeping cool. The last evident sign of Sarah's taking nourishment with him was the two pears she had brought as her Saturday morning gift - luxury fruits from a luxury fruiterer, deep yellow and green, carried in tissue across town from Madison Avenue. Well, those pears should be served at room temperature, but they were pretty good chilled, too. Gluttonous, destroying, he ate them both, hunched over the sink, his hands drenched in ripe pear juice. He washed. He opened the window. Bruised pear fragrance gone. Goodbye, Sarah; go home to your cuckold; farewell. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Inge, thirteen, and her older brother, Dolphe are sent away from Nazi Germany by their parents, but still face rejection in England as both Jews and Germans

First edition. "Bibliosexuality is the desire for an unnatural relationship with a book. St. John had it, he swallowed one ... The true purpose of the Reading Room in the British Museum is revealed for the first time..." With an interesting cover illustration. viii , 230, 2 pages. cloth, dust jacket.. 8vo..

Trying to recover from the physical and emotional wounds of World War II, Edward Allison returns to live with his family, which is dominated by his father, a cynical writer

The collection's cornerstones are two rhapsodies - long poems which combine the richness of a novel, the intimacy of a lyric, and the immediacy of a performance. At the climax of the first, the poet meets his double, a dying boy whose shameful moniker is Baldie. As if in response to this explosive confrontation, the poet dares to write a second, wilder Rhapsody - a confessional, improvisatory fantasia, virtually a book in itself, where abjection blossoms into formally-innovative extravagance. Three sequences complete the collection: Piano Life, a series of haunted meditations on music and mortality; Erotic Collectibles, a disarmingly unsentimental account of sexual awakening; and Star Vehicles, in which the poet sees his perplexities reflected in Bette Davis, Sophia Loren, Ida Lupino, and other leading ladies.

Her husband left her for another man. Her boyfriend may be cheating. Her mother's got a secret. Is everyone having great sex but Rachel? Lately, stand-up comic Rachel Katz's life has begun to resemble a not-so-funny comedy routine -- the kind where nobody laughs and everybody inches toward the door. It began when her husband cheated ... with another man. Now she's raising a ten-year-old son who's fixated on Barbra Streisand and wondering if her dentist boyfriend -- who won't stop flossing long enough to make love to her -- is having an affair. Enter Matt Clapton, a wickedly sexy washing machine repairman who likes Rachel's jokes and makes her feel like a woman for the first time in ages -- maybe in her entire life. With her mother busy planning a wedding Rachel isn't sure she wants, her son dead set on inviting Barbra to the reception, and the groom-to-be in South Africa, working on someone else's oral hygiene, the question is: What's she going to do about it? Especially when fame and fortune beckon in a comedy contest that could put her on the map ... and change her life forever. Spin Cycle tells a wickedly funny, shamelessly erotic story of lovers and liars, exes and children, parents and other strangers. This hip and hilarious new novel by the acclaimed author of Neurotica introduces a heroine who never loses her sense of humor and who discovers, somewhere between the rinse and spin cycles, that love -- and laughter -- can truly conquer all.

From the acclaimed author of Gucci Gucci Coo and Apocalipstick comes a funny, sexy novel about questionable engagements—and a love worthy perhaps of the big screen. Florist Abby Crompton has a knack for arranging the most exquisite bouquets for the hippest clientele. If only her personal life could run as smoothly. Although her fiancé, Toby, proposed a month ago, Abby’s still waiting for the ring. An up-and-coming lawyer, Toby’s been far too busy to shop—let alone muster the energy for romance. If that wasn’t frustrating enough, the night she’s supposed to meet her future mother-in-law, Abby gets stuck in an elevator—with a sexy stranger bearing fine wine. Needless to say, a tipsy Abby arrives late for dinner and doesn’t make the best impression. In the aftermath of the dinner disaster, Abby is thrilled to learn that a film studio wants to use her shop in an upcoming movie. But when she meets the director, Dan, she’s shocked to discover that he’s none other than the same man with whom she shared the elevator—and some highly personal information. Now, with Toby putting in more overtime, Abby’s feeling even more neglected. And her attraction to Dan is growing daily—as her own life begins to mirror the romantic comedy he’s shooting. Featuring an irrepressible heroine, Forget Me Knot blooms with charm, wit, and fun.

In the new novel from the author of Losing Me , one woman is about to discover what happens when you take the grand out of grandma. Recently widowed, Judy Schofield jumps at the chance to look after her two grandchildren for six weeks while their parents are out of the country. After all, she s already raised her own daughter and quite successfully, if she may say so herself. But all it takes is a few days of private school functions, helicopter parents, video games, and never-ending Frozen sing-alongs for Judy to feel she s in over her head. As weeks become months, Judy feels more and more like an outsider among all the young mothers with their parenting theories du jour, especially when she gets on the wrong side of the school s snooty alpha mom. But finding a friend in another grandmother and a man who takes her mind off all the stress almost makes it worthwhile. She just needs to take it one incomprehensible homework assignment and one major meltdown at a time. . . ."

"Now I am going to tell the story of something that happened one night years ago, and the events of the morning and afternoon that followed." The Incompletes begins with this simple promise. But to try to get at the complete meaning of the day's events, the narrator must first take us on an international tour-from the docks of Buenos Aires, to Barcelona, until we check in at the gloomy Hotel Salgado with the narrator's transient friend Felix in Moscow. From scraps of information left behind on postcards and hotel stationery, the narrator hopes to reconstruct Felix's stay there. With flights of imagination, he conjures up the hotel's labyrinthine hallways, Masha, the captive hotel manager, and the city's public markets, filled with piles of broken televisions. Each character carries within them a secret that they don't quite understand-a stash of foreign money hidden in the pages of a book, a wasteland at the edge of the city, a mysterious shaft of light in the sky. The Incompletes is a novel disturbed by this half-knowledge, haunted by the fact that any complete version of events is always just outside our reach"--

"We cannot help wincing, cannot help feeling that the author has committed an error of taste, cannot help hoping with all the vigour at our command that his example will not be followed. [...] We are compelled by conviction to express in clear terms the disfavour with which we regard audacious enterprises such as the one undertaken by the author of this novel." -- The Literary World, May 25, 1900 "Richard Marsh, author of A Second Coming , is the author also of 'The Beetle' and 'The Crime and the Criminal.' This, therefore, is his third coming. If one wishes to read one of his books, let it be 'The Crime' or 'The Beetle.' It may be better than 'A Second Coming.' It cannot easily be worse." -- The Critic, July, 1900 A Second Coming (1900) was the first attempt at serious literature by popular novelist Richard Marsh, and when it was published by the influential London publisher Grant Richards, whose publishing house helped launched the careers of George Bernard Shaw, G. K. Chesterton, and James Joyce, it appeared Marsh was on his way toward success as a respected literary writer. But the reviews were uniformly negative, decrying the book as blasphemous, and Marsh's bold and fascinating work was declared a failure and quickly consigned to oblivion. In A Second Coming , Marsh imagines what would happen if the long-awaited second coming of Christ took place in present-day London. How would he be received in a modern, industrialized world that had begun to question the relevance of his teachings and had tacitly given up hope of his return? Surprising and thought-provoking, Marsh's novel and the questions it raises are perhaps as relevant as ever. This edition features the unabridged text of the novel, a reproduction of its original cover, and a new introduction by Paul Fox.

During 2007-2008 Nicholas Rescher continued his longstanding practice of writing occasional studies on philosophical topics, both for formal presentation and for informal discussion with colleagues. While his forays of this kind have usually been issued in journal publications, this has not been so in the present case so that the studies offered here encompass substantially new material. Notwithstanding their thematic variation, these exemplify a problem-oriented method in the treatment of philosophical issues that is characteristic of Rescher's philosophical modus operandi and inherent in its endeavors to treat classical issues from novel points of view. For Rescher usually more concerned with what should be said about a philosophical question than with what X, Y, and Z have said about it, and he inclined to address issues of the latter sort primarily as a means for addressing the former.

Maxwell Bodenheim's 1934 novel Slow Vision depicts a young couple, a pair of average Americans swept up in labor struggles and reduced to painful subsistence, portraying the protagonists' gradual understanding of labor unions and the psychological, philosophical, and political trials that led to sympathetic affiliations in Socialism and Communism. Thus initiates their "slow vision," a simmering understanding of the manifestations of Leftist movements and of special relevance to the climate of the first two decades of the 21st century. Bodenheim's books-thirteen novels and nine volumes of verse-are mostly out of print. Some were resurrected in the late-1940s through the mid-1950s as cheap pulp paperbacks after Bodenheim had lost the rights to his own work. Slow Vision was not one of them. Presumably, nobody wanted to be reminded of the Great Depression. Slow Vision would be Bodenheim's last published novel and literary history has forgotten it.

Maxine Kumin's novel is onve of the first serious fictions to deal with the new possibiliti4es of man=woman relationships. It is about the genuine liberation of two people struggling honestly toward a mutually rewarding love. It is a refreshing and humanizing book, written with the grace and skill of one of America's best poets.

"This volume celebrates the literary oeuvres of David Shrayer-Petrov-poet, fiction writer, memoirist, essayist, and literary translator (and medical doctor and researcher in his parallel career). Author of the refusenik novel Doctor Levitin, Shrayer-Petrov is one of the most important representatives of Jewish-Russian literature. Published in the year of Shrayer-Petrov's eighty-fifth birthday, thirty-five years after the writer's emigration from the former USSR, this is the first volume to gather materials and investigations that examine his writings from various literary-historical and theoretical perspectives. By focusing on many different aspects of Shrayer-Petrov's multifaceted and eventful literary career, the volume brings together some of the leading American, European, Israeli and Russian scholars of Jewish poetics, exilic literature, and Russian and Soviet culture and history. In addition to fifteen essays and an extensive interview with Shrayer-Petrov, the volume features a detailed bibliography and a pictorial biography"--

"The novel opens in 1945. Five Britons, shipwrecked on an island in the Far East in the early years of World War 2, listen to the general election results on their radio and learn that a Socialist government has been elected. They are rescued and return home by ship. While waiting to disembark at Southampton, James prays to God to "fix the election" and let him see "the England of all decent Conservatives' dreams." He hears a clap of thunder over his right shoulder and once on dry land, finds himself in a society designed entirely to suit people of his class. An entertaining satirical novel"--Review.

"Karl Shapiro was one of the twentieth-century's major poets. He published more than twenty books of poetry, two autobiographies, including poetry, seven collections of essays, and a novel. Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress (the position now known as the U.S. Poet Laureate), he was the winner of numerous prizes and awards, including the Contemporary Poetry prize, two Guggenheim Foundation fellowships, the Pulitzer Prize in poetry, the Shelley Memorial Prize, and the Bollingen Prize. He was also a member of the Academy of Arts and Letters and a faculty member at several universities. Active in his craft well into his late seventies, in 2000 Shapiro died at the age of 86. This collection is compiled from the unpublished poems of Karl Shapiro at the University of Texas in Austin and elsewhere. They are largely as Shapiro left them, in a desk drawer in his apartment in uptown Manhattan"--

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."

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1881 edition. Excerpt: ...none that offers difficulties so great, as that of laughing and the ridiculous. You will find that we feel tempted to smile, sometimes, even when our soul is filled with horror. There is always something risible in the Blue Beards, and, strange to say, the highest degree of horror frequently causes physical convulsive laughter.' We ought, then, to take care not to be betrayed into an act so little understood, when done at the cost of another, who may feel pained or humbled by our inadvertence. We may further say that everything novel, which does not at once strike us as grand, sublime, or awful, inclines us first of all to smile. The advanced state of my address prevents me from giving you instances. You can easily, however, provide them for yourselves. But, if the fact is as I have stated, you will readily see that the smiling, caused by everything novel,betrays as often our own ignorance as a fair cause of risibility. You ought, moreover, to remember that every human action perceptible by the senses, and which strikes us at all, causes us to laugh, if we are unacquainted with its antecedents, or if we see it out of connection, unless an expe 1 We are here reminded even of the sardonic smile. Laughter, so distinguishing a feature of man, and so closely interwoven with literature, with civilization, and with ethnography, for some races are more cachinnatory than others--the negroes and Indians occupying apparently the two ends of the scale--laughter, I say, seems nevertheless unexplained, even more so than disgust, that "mystic union between imagination and the stomach." I know of no profound physiology of laughter, not even of a sound Chapter on this remarkable subject. Von. I.--18 rienced mind and vivid imagination...