"We have here, then a novelistic document of life, of the inferno of a marriage. ... --a marriage that should never have been contracted nor would have been save for the man's weakness and youthful inexperience."--Preface, p. vii.

In April 1864, the Union garrison at Fort Pillow was comprised of almost six hundred troops, about half of them black. The Confederacy, incensed by what it saw as a crime against nature, sent its fiercest cavalry commander, Nathan Bedford Forrest, to attack the fort with about 1,500 men. The Confederates overran the fort and drove the Federals into a deadly crossfire. Only sixty-two of the U.S. colored troops survived the fight unwounded. Many accused the Confederates of massacring the black troops after the fort fell and fighting should have ceased. The "Fort Pillow Massacre" became a Union rallying cry and cemented resolve to see the war through to its conclusion. Harry Turtledove has written a dramatic recreation of an astounding battle, telling a bloody story of courage and hope, freedom and hatred. With brilliant characterization of all the main figures, this is a novel that reminds us that Fort Pillow was more than a battle---it was a clash of ideas between men fighting to define what being an American ought to mean.

Originally written in 1950, then revised and first published in 1992, The Dwarfs is Harold Pinter's only novel. Set in postwar Britain, The Dwarfs describes the intertwined lives and concerns of four young Londoners: Len, working at the Euston train station but fascinated by abstract mathematics; Mark, a sometime actor; and Virginia and Pete, a young couple trying to define their relationship amid the powerful, sometimes destructive forces at work among the four. In the evolution of this quadrilateral friendship and the strains it creates, Harold Pinter explores how ordinary lives are molded by the limitations and boundaries of sexuality, intimacy, and mortality. It is a world populated by dwarfs -- young people who have departed, only to leave emptiness. Funny, vivid, and haunting, The Dwarfs is a brilliantly intriguing and chillingly perceptive novel by a writer whose imagination has shaped our lives.

"Gathers ten previously uncollected tales from the fifth and sixth decades of Harlan Ellison's professional writing career."--Dust jacket, page [3].

Two thematically-related novellas by Georges Perec in one volume. In each, Perec probes our obsession with society's trappings--the seductive mass of things that masquerade as stability and meaning. In Things: A Story of the Sixties , Jerome and Sylvie, a young, upwardly mobile couple lust for the good life, caught between the fantasy of "the film they would have liked to live" and the reality of life's daily mundanities. The nameless student in A Man Asleep attempts to purify himself entirely of material desires and ambition. He longs "to want nothing. Just to wait, until there is nothing left to wait for. Just to wander, and to sleep." Yearning to exist on neutral ground as "a blessed parenthesis," he discovers something unexpected. With the American publication of Life: A User's Manual in 1987, Georges Perec was recognized in the United States as one of this century's most innovative writers. Things: A Story of the Sixties is accessible, sobering, and deeply involving. Each novel distills Perec's unerring grasp of the human condition and displays his rare comic talent, detachment, and compassion.

The Book of Dede Korkut is a collection of twelve stories set in the heroic age of the Oghuz Turks, a nomadic tribe who had journeyed westwards through Central Asia from the ninth century onwards. The stories are peopled by characters as bizarre as they are unforgettable: Crazy Karchar, whose unpredictability requires an army of fleas to manage it; Kazan, who cheerfully pretends to necrophilia in order to escape from prison; the monster Goggle-eye; and the heroine Chichek, who shoots, races on horseback and wrestles her lover. Geoffrey Lewis's classic translation retains the odd and oddly appealing style of the stories, with their mixture of the colloquial, the poetic and the dignified, and magnificently conveys the way in which they bring to life a wild society and its inhabitants. This edition also includes an introduction, a map and explanatory notes.

Lucas Baird is on the lam. He accidentally killed a man in LA. Totally defensible, but he chose to run, as he has done most of his aimless twenty-four years of life. This time Luke ends up in New York, making love to Daisy on a beach on Long Island. A sudden storm traps him under debris in a rain sewer where he is held captive by a gang of kids under the sway and prod of a fiendish twelve-year-old town bully. The kids, in dreadful fear of their tyrannical master, turn savage, heaping hideous acts of torment and cruelty upon poor Luke. P> How he manages to free himself becomes a redemptive tale woven into the fabric of a fraught, bizarre love story reminiscent of THE BEACH and LORD OF THE FLIES.

“Elegantly unnerving.” — New York Times Book Review A year has passed since Catherine and Michael Hall lost their teenage daughter in a car accident, leaving them and their sixteen-year-old son, Rowan, reeling in the aftermath of the tragedy. Catherine withdraws to Hamdean, the family’s apartment in a Georgian country manor, where the mysteries of the past begin to collide with the truth of the present.

This book written by Ellery Queen, the famous radio detective story man, is a history of the detective crime short story as revealed by the 125 most important books published on that subject since 1845.

"If Graham Greene's thrillers fascinate you, if Brighton Rock gives you mental fever blisters, don't miss this book. In a desolate underworld setting, Kabbalah generates continuous suspense and a haunting religious intensity. Like Greene, David Scott Milton uses people in danger to illuminate the interior drama of souls in jeopardy. And he goes further than Greene in one way. He ends the book with a vision of redemption which may be uniquely Jewish and is surely ecstatic."- West Coast Review of Books "Will be read by a devoted audience long after other novels have been discarded!"- Chronicles of Culture

"Torday is a singular American writer with a big heart and a real love for the world. He has the rare gift for writing dynamic action scenes while being genuinely funny." —George Saunders Bluegrass musician, former journalist and editor, and now PhD in English, Mark Brumfeld has arrived at his thirties with significant debt and no steady prospects. His girlfriend Cassie—a punk bassist in an all-female band, who fled her Midwestern childhood for a new identity—finds work at a “new media” company. When Cassie refuses his marriage proposal, Mark leaves New York and returns to the basement of his childhood home in the Baltimore suburbs. Desperate and humiliated, Mark begins to post a series of online video monologues that critique Baby Boomers and their powerful hold on the job market. But as his videos go viral, and while Cassie starts to build her career, Mark loses control of what he began—with consequences that ensnare them in a matter of national security. Told through the perspectives of Mark, Cassie, and Mark’s mother, Julia, a child of the '60s whose life is more conventional than she ever imagined, Boomer1 is timely, suspenseful, and in every line alert to the siren song of endless opportunity that beckons and beguiles all of us.

A gripping tale of guilty secrets, betrayal, and racial tension, of isolation and revenge in modern-day South Africa, from the Man Booker Prize—shortlisted author of The Good Doctor When Adam moves into the abandoned house on the dusty edge of town, he is hoping to recover from the loss of his job and his home in the city. But when he meets Canning — a shadowy figure from his childhood — and Canning’s enigmatic and beautiful wife, a sinister new chapter in his life begins. Canning has inherited a vast fortune and a giant folly in the veld, a magical place of fantasy and dreams that seduces Adam and transforms him absolutely, violently — and perhaps forever. The Impostor evokes a hot and cruel and claustrophobic world, in which sex and death are never far from the surface. Skilfully interweaving the story of one man’s struggle to regain his moral centre with the disorienting, often tragic effects of massive social and political change, it is Galgut’s most powerful and unforgettable novel yet. From the Hardcover edition.

A gripping tale of guilty secrets, betrayal, and racial tension, of isolation and revenge in modern-day South Africa, from the Man Booker Prize—shortlisted author of The Good Doctor When Adam moves into the abandoned house on the dusty edge of town, he is hoping to recover from the loss of his job and his home in the city. But when he meets Canning — a shadowy figure from his childhood — and Canning’s enigmatic and beautiful wife, a sinister new chapter in his life begins. Canning has inherited a vast fortune and a giant folly in the veld, a magical place of fantasy and dreams that seduces Adam and transforms him absolutely, violently — and perhaps forever. The Impostor evokes a hot and cruel and claustrophobic world, in which sex and death are never far from the surface. Skilfully interweaving the story of one man’s struggle to regain his moral centre with the disorienting, often tragic effects of massive social and political change, it is Galgut’s most powerful and unforgettable novel yet.

âeoeFor the sake of argument, one must never let a euphemism or a false consolation pass uncontested. The truth seldom lies, but when it does it lies somewhere in between.âe

In Shrink Thyself , Charlie Traub decides to leave psychotherapy and live the unexamined life. A noble goal, which would be even more noble if his former therapist (now his friend) didn't turn out to be beyond inappropriate and his mother didn't die in a way that would have made Freud transfer to dental school. Despite all unexamined evidence to the contrary, Charlie just might be unable to accept that wherever he goes, there he is.

The work of a woman who has invested her life in her art, and who will, I think be remembered as one of the significant writers of her generation.' Saul BellowBlue in Chicago collects together the sharp, bittersweet stories of Bette Howland and restores to our bookshelves an extraordinarily gifted writer, who was recognized as a major talent before all but disappearing from public view for decades, until nearly the end of her life. Bette Howland was an outsider: an intellectual from a working-class neighborhood in Chicago; a divorcée and single mother, to the disapproval of her family; an artist chipped away at by poverty and perfection. Each of these sides of her life plays a shaping role in her work. Mining her most precarious struggles for her art in each of these stories, she chronicles the fears and hopes of her generation.Blue in Chicago, and other stories introduces UK readers to a wry, brilliant observer and a writer of great empathy and sly, joyous humor. Published in the US under the title Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage.'If there's a Howland bandwagon (and there should be), hold me a seat, or I'll stand. No problem, I'll stand.' Paris Review

The acclaimed author of The Age of Wire and String writes an allegory of the power and impotence of modern women. On a farm in Ohio, a mother and father attempt to raise a boy without feelings. He tells the only story a boy with no feelings can, until the arrival of Jane Dark, whose fierce belief in Silence brings the family to a terrible crisis.

The Queen's conjurer, Doctor John Dee, is an Elizabethan mathematician, cryptographer, and mystic commissioned by Her Majesty's spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham, to suss out a noble Count who governs an island in the English Channel. Dee's mission? Uncover treason, reveal terrorists, and unveil threats to The Crown. Embarking, Dr. Dee is accosted by an eager acolyte. The unknown teen playwright, William, has just endured his first flop-Prince Amleth. Will solicits the renowned scholar's mentorship. A winter tide sees these unlikely collaborators set sail for the Channel Islands to sleuth out sedition on Protestant England's strategic outpost. On Illyria, clues appear as Dee comes to rely on the surprising ingenuity of his young companion. Clandestine powers collide as Queen Elizabeth's spy tracks each slim lead. When Dee is brought to the brink of destruction, can his incipient discovery of Count Orsino's recusants and loyalists be thwarted?

"The literature of the twenty-first century will belong to Neuman." —Roberto Bolaño Searching for an inn, the enigmatic traveler Hans stops in a small city on the border between Saxony and Prussia. The next morning, Hans meets an old organ-grinder in the market square and immediately finds himself enmeshed in an intense debate—on identity and what it is that defines us—from which he cannot break free. Indefinitely stuck in Wandernburg until his debate with the organ-grinder is concluded, he begins to meet the various characters who populate the town, including a young freethinker named Sophie. Though she is engaged to be married, Sophie and Hans begin a relationship that defies contemporary mores about female sexuality and what can and cannot be said about it. Traveler of the Century is a deeply intellectual novel, chock-full of discussions about philosophy, history, literature, love, and translation. It is a book that looks to the past in order to have us reconsider the conflicts of our present. The winner of Spain's prestigious Alfaguara Prize and the National Critics Prize, Traveler of the Century marks the English-language debut of Andrés Neuman, a writer described by Roberto Bolaño as being "touched by grace."

1924. This book tells the tale of Percy Bysshe Shelley, whose life was singularly interesting and diverse. His friends unanimously testify that his character was one of gentleness, purity, generosity and strong affection. As a poet, he stands in the front rank and in some of his shorter poems he is unsurpassed. During his short life of 30 years, he was not the object of much severe judgment and his poetic power was recognized by only a few. Contents Part Keate's Way; The Home; The Confidant; The Neighbouring Pine; Quod Erat Demonstrandum; Timothy Shelley's Vigorous Dialectics; An Academy for Young Ladies; The Despotic Chain; A Very Young Couple; Hogg; First Encounter with Middle Age; Soap Bubbles; The Venerated Friend; Miss Hitchener; Harriet; Comparisons; and Second Incarnation of the Goddess. Contents Part A Six Weeks' Tour; The Pariahs; Godwin; Don Juan Conquered; Ariel and Don Juan; Graves in the Garden of Love; The Rules of the Game; Queen of Marble and Mud; The Roman Cemetery; Any Wife to Any Husband; The Cavaliere Servente; A Scandalous Letter; Lord Byron's Silence; Miranda; The Disciples; II Samuel The Refuge; Ariel Set Free; and Last Links.