"In Antiquities, Lloyd Wilkinson Petrie, one of the seven elderly trustees of the now-defunct (for thirty-four years) Temple Academy for Boys, is preparing a memoir of his days at the school, intertwined with the troubling distractions of present events. As he navigates, with faltering recall, between the subtle anti-Semitism that pervaded the school's ethos and his fascination with his own family's heritage-in particular, his illustrious cousin, the renowned archaeologist Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie-he reconstructs the passions of a childhood encounter with the oddly named Ben-Zion Elefantin, a mystifying older pupil who claims descent from Egypt's Elephantine Island. Included alongside this wondrous tale, touched by unsettling irony and with the elusive flavor of a Kafka parable, are four additional stories in Cynthia Ozick's brilliant, distinctive voice, weaving myth and mania, history and illusion: The Coast of New Zealand, The Bloodline of the Alkanas, Sin, and A Hebrew Sibyl."--

New Page 1 "Its official title is Town House, but in Hollywood they're already calling Tish Cohen's novel About a Girl." --The Globe and Mail. Jack Madigan should be leading an enviable life. He's the sole heir of a '70s rock icon. He lives with his retro-obsessed teenage son, Harlan, in a once-magnificent Boston town house. But now 36, Jack's painting career is buckling under a raging case of agoraphobia. And when the foreclosure notice arrives, Jack must face losing the only home he's ever known--and his only safe zone. When Jack's ex-wife announces that Harlan would be better off living with her and her vitamin-enriched fiancé, Jack has to figure out how to deter the perky, inexperienced real-estate agent, hold on to his house, keep his son at home, and--through the tenacity of the little girl next door--finally step out onto the sidewalk. Fox 2000 swooped in to pre-empt the film rights while Town House was still on submission to publishers. Ridley Scott's Scott Free Productions is set to produce the movie and Pulitzer Prize- winning screenwriter Doug Wright (Memoirs of a Geisha) is adapting the screenplay. A book with the ability to both entertain and move us, Town House is a smart, acerbic novel bursting with heart and quirky charm.

Taut, stylish, and psychologically acute, Afternoon of a Faun dramatizes the search for truth as an accusation of sexual assault plunges a journalist into a series of deepening crises. "The truth might be hard to bring to light, but that didn’t mean it didn’t exist, because it did exist: fixed in its moment, unalterable, and certainly not a matter of ‘belief.’ " When an old flame accuses him of sexual assault in her memoir, expat English journalist Marco Rosedale is brought rapidly and inexorably to the brink of ruin. His reputation and livelihood at stake, Marco confides in a close friend, who finds himself caught between the obligations of friendship and an increasingly urgent desire to uncover the truth. This unnamed friend is drawn, magnetized, into the orbit of the woman at the center of the accusation—and finds his position as the safely detached narrator turning into something more dangerous. Soon, the question of his own complicity becomes impossible to avoid. Set during the months leading up to Donald Trump’s election, with detours into the 1970s, this propulsive novel investigates the very meaning of truth at a time when it feels increasingly malleable. An atmospheric and unsettling drama from a novelist acclaimed as “the literary descendent of Dostoevsky and Patricia Highsmith” ( Boston Globe ), Afternoon of a Faun combines a sharply observed study of our shifting social mores with a meditation on what makes us believe, or disbelieve, the stories people tell about themselves.

A daring darling from the Live Girls series offers a collection of provocative, confessional stories sure to inspire one-handed reading. This isn't dusty, for-ladies-only fiction, just high-quality erotica that doesn't require a whips-and-chains appetite for thorough enjoyment of each sensual, sometimes wicked admission. Recalling the sweat and sizzle of an old affair, a woman wonders if her former lover can ever forgive her for having ended up with his wife. A Haitian couple reveals the passion born of desperation and the searing fires of loss and love. A young woman abroad loses her virginity to a sophisticated older man in a scorching-hot life lesson in sexual possibility. Ovulation brings sweet, slippery horniness?and volatile, supercharged impregnation fantasies?to a childless-by-choice bi-chick. And a pregnant bitch goddess recounts the night she took over her husband's body the same way her growing baby took over her own: relentlessly and with delicious, paradoxical pleasure and pain. The memoir-like style of these stories allows the reader to devour private letters, peek into diaries, and listen to the most intimate confessions of women acting out in inspirational sexual abandon. Seasoned editor Blank has collected only the hottest, most ?confidential” and scintillating erotic moments by expert eroticists including Dawn O'Hara, Adhara Law, Lisa Bland, and R. Gay.

The acclaimed and influential dancer-choreographer recounts the circumstances of the paralyzing stroke she suffered in 1975, her return to the stage, and the realignment of her life occasioned by those experiences

A fictionalized memoir of the Spanish Civil War by the last commander of the Lincoln Brigade. The protagonist is Mitch Castle, a 21-year-old youth from Brooklyn who enrolls as a water carrier and rises to become the brigade commander. Against the background of trench warfare, the novel analyzes the bravery of non-military men who are fighting for a cause.

Eleanor Antin's coming-of-age memoir is a smart, no-holds-barred black comedy in the picaresque coming-of-age tradition of Holden Caulfield, Huck Finn, and the irrepressible Dorothy on the road to Oz. Her stand-up, punch, and inventive style allows her audiences to enjoy any or all of her "meetings" with Joseph Stalin in Central Park.

In August 1948, 545 passengers boarded an overcrowded, clapped-out vessel in Marseilles to face an uncertain future in Australia and New Zealand. they came from displaced persons camps in Germany, death camps in Poland, labour camps in Hungary, gulags in Siberia and stony Aegean islands. there were those who had been hunted by the Nazis and those who had welcomed them; those who had followed the Communists and those who had fled from them. the epic voyage lasted almost three months and was marked by conflict and controversy until it seemed as though this hellship had absorbed the traumas of its passengers. As the conditions on board deteriorated, tension and violence simmered above and below decks. But romances and seductions also flourished, and lifelong bonds were formed. Diane Armstrong set sail on the Derna with her parents when she was nine years old. Like a detective searching for clues, she has located over a hundred of the passengers. through their recollections and memorabilia, as well as archival documents, she has recreated the voyage and traced what became of their hopes and dreams. the result is the unique portrayal of a migrant ship and its passengers.

Approaching the end of her eventful life, Elisabeth Rother has decided to write her memoirs, brushing aside her and her Jewish husband's narrow escape from the Nazis and their difficult arrival in New Jersey in order to concentrate her story on the wayward behavior of her impossible daughter, Renate, and granddaughter, Irene.

"This rediscovered gem of Czech literature, a crime novel by renowned Holocaust memoirist Heda Margolius Kovaly, depicts a chilling moment in history, redolent with the stifling atmosphere of political and personal oppression of the early days of Socialist Czechoslovakia. In 1985, Czech Holocaust memoirist, literary translator, and political exile Heda Margolius Kovaly turned her pen to fiction. Inspired by the stories of Raymond Chandler, Kovaly knit her own terrifying experiences in early 1950s Socialist Prague -- her husband's imprisonment and wrongful execution, her own persecution at his disgrace -- into a gorgeous psychological thriller-cum-detective novel. Set in and around a cinema where a murder was recently committed, Innocence follows the unfolding of the investigation while telling the stories of the women who work there as ushers, each of whom is forced to support herself in difficult circumstances. As the novel brings this group alive, it tells their various life stories that have brought them to this job, the secrets they share with one another, and the secrets they keep. When the detective trying to solve the first murder is found slain by the cinema, all of their secrets come into the light. A smart, evocative, and deeply stirring literary crime novel with international appeal"--

With lively style, good humor and insight, Robin Hemley helps you turn all that you experience into fresh and powerful fiction. By learning to "reimagine," you'll focus on translating real-world people and events into characters and scenes that happen on paper for the first time. You'll think "what if" instead of "what is" in order to take control of your material and cut loose the inhibitions of real life. In these pages, you'll learn how to hone your observation skills and fill your journal with rich and vivid details. (Because, as Hemley writes, "Life is in the details, and so is good fiction.") You'll see how to decide which ideas to bring to fiction and which ones to let go. And you'll learn how to: find the right form - novel, short story, vignette, memoir - for the story you want to tell; use "triggers" to start your reader's imagination rolling; keep your fiction emotionally honest by making the right choices between "the way it happened" and what the story dictates (ask "Is it believable?", not "Did it happen?"); create composites of real people and places that fit the unique needs of your story and empower your imagination; focus your fiction. Make sure everything, every character counts - and eliminate "people who sit at the end of the bar without a role to play"; fictionalize - ethically and legally - other people's stories. Learn your rights as a writer versus their rights to privacy. (Can you use actual names? When do you need to get permission?) To illustrate how writers feed their fiction with reality, Hemley uses examples from his own work and from fiction masters of yesterday and today. At the end of each chapter, challenging exercises help you apply the basic theories and push them even further. An adventurous read, Turning Life Into Fiction will help you create fiction that's just as strange and wonderful and "real" as the life that inspires it.

In 1942, after hiding to escape the Nazis, our narrator (named, simply, Federman) finds his way to Vichy France. Unwanted by his relatives, he is forced to spend the remainder of the war as an unpaid laborer. For three wordless years on the farm, this thirteen-year-old is assailed by suffering, death, sex, and the back-breaking labor of shoveling manure. Sixty years later, in the United States, Federman—the author? the narrator? both?—wrestles with nostalgia and bitterness. He finally returns to the farm with his wife, but once the journey is complete he no longer knows why he has made it, nor what he expected to find. Through the merger of fact and fiction, storytelling and reality, memoir and imagination, Return to Manure extends and enhances Raymond Federman’s brilliant ability to side-step narration’s limits and impossibilities. --

Lee Emery is an empty nester, contentedly married to a man she has known forever and hunkering down in the house where she grew up. She believes she is happy occupying such a familiar emotional and physical space. But questions of the path not taken start to haunt her after she publishes a memoir of her deliciously eccentric grandmother with whom she traipsed through Europe at eighteen. It was then that Lee fell in love for the first time. Twenty-five years later, "what if" obsessions shake up her settled life. Should she have made a different choice—Simon—instead of the man now next to her? Struck once more by the lingering power of first love, she sets off a chain of events that catapults her back to Europe and to a second chance that she may or may not want to risk.

The award-winning author of Minor Characters writes with delicious transparency about a love that cannot be harnessed and a woman who refuses to be deceived In the great wave of husband-leaving ushered in by the Sexual Revolution, Molly Held frees herself from her cold, flagrantly unfaithful husband after their final quarrel turns violent. With her five-year-old son, she lights out for an Upper West Side apartment and the new life she hopes to find with Conrad Schwartzberg-the charismatic radical lawyer who has recently become her lover. Having escaped from a desert, she lands in a swamp. While Conrad radiates positive energy, he is unable to tell Molly-or anyone who loves him-the truth. No longer the wronged wife, Molly now finds herself the Other Woman. She is sharing Conrad with Roberta, another refugee from marriage-with Conrad's movements between the two of them disguised by his suspiciously frequent out-of-town engagements. Roberta either knows nothing or prefers to look the other way, but Molly's maddening capacity for double vision takes over her mind. What saves her from herself is her well-developed sense of irony, which never fails her-or the reader. "Ironic, witty and always graceful." -Marilyn French, author of The Women's Room "Johnson . . . reveals a knack for lyric bitterness." -Kirkus Reviews "Another superb novel of feminine risk-taking." -Ann Douglas " Bad Connections] is controlled, smooth, deftly written: it evokes scene and character with admirable sure swiftness. . . . Joyce Johnson's touches are all true." -Harper's Magazine "Joyce Johnson is a writer of wit and perception . . . and she has a keen eye for the irony of modern life." -The New York Times Book Review "Often funny, sometimes cathartically angry, always skillful in rendering the small, excruciating moments that add up to the misery of love gone bad." -The Village Voice "The new literature of the aggrieved woman has produced something here quite memorable, a sad, beautiful casebook of unrequited love, unrequited humanity." -E. L. Doctorow "Painfully perceptive, psychologically accurate." -Judith Rossner "A subtle, witty, rueful tour de force of that strange new territory which all of us now inhabit: modern women's modern lives." -Barbara Probst Solomon Joyce Johnson was born in 1935 in New York City, the setting for all her fiction: Come and Join the Dance, recognized as the first Beat novel by a woman writer, Bad Connections, and In the Night Caf . She is best known for her memoir Minor Characters, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1983 and dealt with coming of age in the 1950s and with her involvement with Jack Kerouac. She has published two other Beat-related books: Door Wide Open: A Beat Love Affair in Letters, and The Voice Is All: The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac. She has also written a second memoir, Missing Men, and the nonfiction title What Lisa Knew: The Truths and Lies of the Steinberg Case.

At turns funny and strangely sobering, this "found memoir" is a picaresque tale of inspired, heroic deceit, incompetence, and -- just possibly -- triumph. Follow the flailing escapades of maverick music manager Campbell Ouiniette at the Calgary Folk Festival, as he leaves a trail of empty liquor bottles, cigarette butts, bruised egos, and obliterated relationships behind him. His top headlining act has abandoned him for the Big Time. In a fit of self-delusion or pure genius (or perhaps a bit of both), Ouiniette devises an intricate scam, a last hurrah in an attempt to redeem himself in the eyes of his girlfriend, the music industry, and the rest of the world. He reveals his path of destruction in his own transparently self-justifying, expulsive, profane words, with digressions into the Edmonton hardcore punk rock scene, the Yugoslavian Civil War, and other epicentres of chaos.

Continuing her narration of the story of the Patriarchs in the Book of Genesis, After These Things recounts the relationship between Abraham’s tragic son Isaac and Isaac’s son Jacob. In following the psychological trail of the children of Abraham, the first properly constituted family, we discover all the complexities of love, power, and desire that make them so quintessentially human. Jenny Diski is the author of eight novels and two memoirs: Skating to Antarctica and Stranger on a Train.

Kahane, father of Olympia Press founder Maurice Girodias, recalls his life and his incredible publishing run in Paris from '31-39.

U+0032ThreeU+0032, a collection of memoirs by Lillian Hellman, comprises three volumes: U+0032An Unfinished WomanU+0033 about her childhood and early years as playwright; U+0032PentimentoU+0033, a series of portraits of the people who made a significant impact in her personal and professional life; and U+0032Scoundrel TimeU+0033, an account of her persecution during the McCarthy witch hunt of the 1950′s.

Published here for the very first time through our House Sparrow Press imprint, Through the Billboard Promised Land Without Ever Stopping is Derek Jarman's only piece of narrative fiction. Written in 1971, it is a surreal, fabular, lyrical work - a literary fairytale acid-trip road movie hybrid - the energies and details of which influenced much of his later work across media. The richly poetic story, a cinematic prose quest, tracks the journey of a blind young King and his valet, disguised as beggars, who set out in no particular direction and with no particular purpose. Departing from Fargo, across the frontier of Movietown, along the Superhighway and picnicking on the Lawns of Paradise, they encounter vivid characters like Pierrot, Borgia Ginz and Topaz, an Emperor who 'smiles with the art of mirrors', as well as a Sphinx with 'Silence is Golden' written in her eyes. The story serves as a foundational text, laying out many of the themes, images and styling of Jarman's work in painting, film and design whilst also being haunted by the then emerging ecological crisis in its juxtaposition of the beauty of nature with the reckless consumption of modernity. This edition features facsimile images of the story's handwritten drafts from Jarman's archive, a link to an exclusive audio recording of Jarman himself reading the story in full, and is comprehensively informed by a vivid foreword from Philip Hoare, a deeply researched afterword by Jarman scholar Declan Wiffen, and a warm memoir by the artist Michael Ginsborg, a close friend of Jarman's throughout the period of the story's writing

Capturing a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the world of science fiction, this unique autobiography by Robert Silverberg shows how famous stories in this genre were conceived and written. Chronicling his career as one of the most important American science fiction writers of the 20th century, this account reveals how he rose to prominence as the pulp era was ending--and the genre was beginning to take on a more sophisticated tone--to eventually be named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America. Stating that this will be his only autobiographical work, Silverberg's book includes rare photos, ephemera from his own archives, and a complete bibliography of his works, from novels and short story collections to nonfiction.