Stolen jewels, black markets, hired guns, crossed lovers, unregistered addresses, people gone missing, shadowy figures disappearing in crowds, newspaper stories uncomfortably close and getting closer . . . this ominous novel is Patrick Modiano's most noirish work to date. Set in Nice--a departure from the author's more familiar Paris--this novel evokes the bright sun and dark shadow of the Riviera. Modiano's trademark ability to create a haunting atmosphere is here on full display: readers descend precipitously into a world of mystery, uneasiness, inevitability. A young couple in hiding keeps close watch over a notorious diamond necklace known as the Southern Cross. Its provenance is murky, its whereabouts known only to our hero and heroine, who find themselves trapped by its potential value--and its ultimate cost. Deftly Modiano reaches further and further into the past, revealing the secret histories of the two even as the pressurized present threatens to overwhelm them.

Revisits moments of the author's past to produce a spare yet moving reflection on the destructive underside of love, the dreams and follies of youth, the vagaries of memory, and the melancholy of loss. Writing from the perspective of an older man, the narrator relives a key period in his life through his relationships with several enigmatic women--Geneviève, Martine, Madeleine, a certain Madame Huberson--in the process unearthing his troubled relationship with his parents, his unorthodox childhood, and the unsettled years of his youth that helped form the celebrated writer he would become.

"In Jonathan Carroll's surreal masterpiece, Bathing the Lion, five people who live in the same New England town go to sleep one night and all share the same hyper-realistic dream. Some of these people know each other; some don't. When they wake the next day all of them know what has happened. All five were at one time "mechanics," a kind of cosmic repairman whose job is to keep order in the universe and clean up the messes made both by sentient beings and the utterly fearsome yet inevitable Chaos that periodically rolls through, wreaking mayhem wherever it touches down--a kind of infinitely powerful, merciless tornado. Because the job of a mechanic is grueling and exhausting, after a certain period all of them are retired and sent to different parts of the cosmos to live out their days as "civilians." Their memories are wiped clean and new identities are created for them that fit the places they go to live out their natural lives to the end. For the first time all retired mechanics are being brought back to duty: Chaos has a new plan, and it's not looking good for mankind.."--

This story, "To See the Invisible Man," written in June of 1962, marks the beginning of my real career as a science-fiction writer, I think. The 1953-58 stories collected in To Be Continued, the first of this series of volumes, are respectable professional work, some better than others but all of them at least minimally acceptable--but most of them could have been written by just about anyone. Aside from a few particularly ambitious items, they were designed to slip unobtrusively into the magazines of their time, efficiently providing me with regular paychecks. But now, by freeing me from the need to calculate my way around the risk of rejection, Fred Pohl allowed--indeed, required--me to reach as deep into my literary resources as I was capable of doing. I knew that unless I gave him my very best, the wonderful guaranteed-sale deal I had with him would vanish as quickly as it had appeared. Therefore I would reach deeper and deeper, in the years ahead, until I had moved so far away from my youthful career as a hack writer that latecomers would find it hard to believe that I had been emotionally capable of writing all that junk, let alone willing to do it. In "To See the Invisible Man" the distinctive Silverberg fictional voice is on display for just about the first time. --Robert Silverberg

One of America's preeminent writers of gay fiction validates his reputation with his third, and sadly, last collection. Here are love stories, both passionate and compassionate; tales of suspense; narratives on the theme of AIDS; even a ghost story. "A standout read".--The Advocate. Hall died of AIDS-related complications in October, 1992.

"As a boarding school student in the early 1960s, Patrick Modiano lived among the troubled teenage sons of wealthy but self-involved parents. In this mesmerizing novel, Modiano weaves together a series of exquisitely crafted stories about such jettisoned boys at the exclusive Valvert School on the outskirts of Paris: abandoned children of privilege, left to create new family ties among themselves. Misfits and heroes, sports champions and good-hearted chums, the boys of Valvert misbehave, run away, get expelled, and engage in various forms of delinquency and disappearance. They emerge into adulthood tragically damaged, still tethered to their adolescent selves, powerless to escape the central loneliness of their lives in an ever-darkening spiral of self-delusion and grim consequence"--Back cover.

The haunting story of a woman who desires “something more, as if something more had been promised her that was not yet given.” Vivian Carpentier, confined by her role as an upper class woman in the 1940s, gleans meaning only from erotic love. Troubled by the elusiveness of men, yet convinced that they run the world, she can barely conceal her desperation to entice. Struggling with motherhood and the failure of marriage, she takes jobs to bridge intervals between lovers. She sings in a hotel bar, sells dresses, and nurses her father’s friend through his last illness, hoping to atone for a self-centered life. The constant in Vivian’s life is her son, David. Having seen her worst and best moments, he provides her with consolation and a reason for living.

Despite growing up with a widowed and reclusive mother, young Zoë Cunningham retains an unshakable faith in storybook happy endings. When her mother, Anne, finally decides to remarry, Zoë is thrilled with her prospective stepfather, Simon Gould, who is not only wealthy, but also kind and generous. Simon’s affection for his new family allows Zoë to pursue what she thinks is an independent life: her own apartment in a fashionable part of London, a university education, casual affairs, and carefree holidays at Simon’s villa in Nice. When a series of unexpected calamities intervene, Zoë learns that the idyllic freedom she enjoys has come at a steep price. To preserve both her mother’s and her own sense of wellbeing, Zoë must discern the real motives of the strangers on whom she now depends, including the silent and mysterious man whose nocturnal movements have attracted her attention.

Maud Gonthier yearns for an escape from the cocoon of the bourgeois modesty. The splendid, caddish David Tyler appears to offer one. In this stylish, deeply knowing novel by the Booker Prize winning author of Hotel du Lac, Maud's seduction creates a chemistry of longing, sensuality, and betrayal--with a surprising climax.

Written in the tradition of the classic American noir of Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain, In Praise of Lies is a brilliantly clever, fiendishly funny crime novel about a woman who raises poisonous snakes and the man who loves her enough to attempt murder.... Jose Guber is in love with a deadly woman. While writing his next crime novel, he is in search of a unique murder weapon, which is how he meets Melissa, a serologist who specializes in venomous snakes. Melissa becomes rather too interested in Jose's dastardly plots--unashamedly plagiarized from the classics: Chesterton, Poe, Dostoevsky, his editor none the wiser--and she especially likes the ones where diabolical women seduce and corrupt weak men. Melissa makes it clear that she would like to adapt one of the plots to dispose of her present husband, enabling Jose and Melissa to be together. But the course of true love and homicide does not always run smoothly, certainly not when the accomplice rattlesnake gets depressed and everything that can go wrong does go hilariously haywire. With sharp wit and impressive agility, Patricia Melo leads the reader into a teasing world of deviousness. Literary puzzles and comic swipes at book publishing trends are added pleasures in what is, above all, a glorious page-turner.

An inventive literary account of Cixous's remarkable journey to her mother's birthplace Winner, French Voices Award for Excellence in Publication and Translation For about eighty years, the Jonas family of Osnabrück were part of a small but vibrant Jewish community in this mid-size city of Lower Saxony. After the war, Osnabrück counted not a single Jew. Most had been deported and murdered in the camps, others emigrated if they could and if they managed to overcome their own inertia. It is this inertia and failure to escape that Hélène Cixous seeks to account for in Osnabrück Station to Jerusalem. Vicious anti-Semitism hounded all of Osnabrück's Jews long before the Nazis' rise to power in 1933. So why did people wait to leave when the threat was so patent, so in-their-face? Drawn from the stories told to Cixous by her mother, Ève, and grandmother, Rosalie (Rosi), this literary work reimagines fragments of Ève's and Rosi's stories, including the death of Ève's uncle, Onkel André. Piecing together the story of Andreas Jonas from what she was told and from what she envisages, Cixous recounts the tragedy of the one she calls the King Lear of Osnabrück, who followed his daughter to Jerusalem only to be sent away by her and to return to Osnabrück in time to be deported to a death camp. Cixous wanders the streets of the city she had heard about all her life in her mother's and grandmother's stories, digs into its archives, meets city officials, all the while wondering if she should have come. These hesitations and reflections in the present, often voiced in dialogues staged with her own son or daughter, are woven with scenes from her childhood in Algeria and the half-remembered, half-invented stories of the Jonas family, making Osnabrück Station to Jerusalem one of the author's most intensely engaging books. This work received the French Voices Award for excellence in publication and translation. French Voices is a program created and funded by the French Embassy in the United States and FACE (French American Cultural Exchange).

"All is true," realist writers would say of their work, to which critics now respond: All is art and artifice. Offering a new approach to reading nineteenth-century realist fiction, Lilian R. Furst seeks to reconcile these contradictory claims. In doing so, she clarifies the deceptions, appropriations, intentions, and ultimately the power of literary realism.In close textual analyses of works ranging across European and American literature, including paradigmatic texts by Balzac, Flaubert, George Eliot, Zola, Henry James, and Thomas Mann, Furst shows how the handling of time, the presentation of place, and certain narrational strategies have served the realists’ claim. She demonstrates how readers today, like those a hundred years ago, are convinced of the authenticity of the created illusion by such means as framing, voice, perspective, and the slippage from metonymy to metaphor. Further, Furst reveals the pains the realists took to conceal these devices, and thus to protect their claim to be employing a simple form. Taking into account both the claims and the covert strategies of these writers, All Is True puts forward an alternative to the conventional polarized reading of the realist text—which emerges here as neither strictly an imitation of an extraneous model nor simply a web of words but a brilliantly complex imbrication of the two.A major statement on one of the most enduring forms in cultural history, this book promises to alter not only our view of realist fiction but our understanding of how we read it.

From the author of The Last Testament comes the true love of Bonnie Prince Charlie, her adventures in America and her lasting legacy. In the page-turning popular genre trail-blazed by Antonia Fraser and Phillippa Gregory, The Pretender’s Lady , Alan Gold’s meticulously researched novel, accurately opens history’s pages on a peerless woman who helped change the course of history and whose legend lives on in Scotland today—Flora MacDonald. She was the most famous Scotswoman of her day, single handedly saving Bonnie Prince Charlie. This is her fictionalized life story—her relations with the Prince, her flight to America, Ben Franklin’s influence, and her return to Britain to lobby for peace But what’s hidden from history, revealed now for the first time in Gold’s dazzling new work of fiction, is the result of Flora’s and Charlie’s love: a beautiful and talented boy raised on an American farm. But only she knows his true heritage and his claim to the world’s greatest throne. And only the genius of Ben Franklin understands how to use this naïve boy to change the history of America. Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade, Yucca, and Good Books imprints, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in fiction—novels, novellas, political and medical thrillers, comedy, satire, historical fiction, romance, erotic and love stories, mystery, classic literature, folklore and mythology, literary classics including Shakespeare, Dumas, Wilde, Cather, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

This collection of 37 stories by a master of the form features tales that are sometimes funny, sometimes violent, and sometimes weird and nightmarish: in short, it is quintessential Gerald Kersh. Kersh (1911-1968) published more than thirty books, including the noir classic Night and the City (1938) and Fowlers End (1957), which Anthony Burgess called "one of the great comic novels of the century," as well as hundreds of short stories which were once ubiquitous in British and American magazines. But though he has been championed by Angela Carter, Harlan Ellison, Ian Fleming, Michael Moorcock and others, Kersh has undeservedly fallen into neglect since his death. This is the first-ever reprint of Neither Man Nor Dog (1946), one of the author's scarcest volumes. Kersh's novels Fowlers End and The Great Wash and the short story collections Nightshade and Damnations , On an Odd Note , and Clock Without Hands are also available from Valancourt. "[B]rutal but highly talented ... at least one [story] is ... a little masterpiece, and all of them possess the virtue of being highly readable." - J.D. Beresford, The Guardian "[E]xplosive with violence . . . The best of them are very good. The unfailing fertility of his imagination is indeed to be wondered at . . . For entertainment of a strong kind, Mr. Kersh would be hard to beat." - Times Literary Supplement "Kersh tells a story, as such, rather better than anybody else." - Pamela Hansford Johnson, Daily Telegraph

The death of flamboyant writer and womanizer Peter Grosvenor sets in motion a series of spiraling events surrounding his legacy and his estate. His bitter third wife, his two children, his sister, his friends, and his would-be biographers are drawn into a maelstrom of intense memories and painful encounters as each of the major players in Peter's life seeks to appropriate Peter's estate for his or her own purposes. As a complex story of passion, jealousy, and loss unfolds, the figures that had once blossomed in Peter's presence spin off into their own orbits and turn against one another without the anchor of his charismatic presence. Ultimately, the tragedy and scandal that marred his life cannot be ended even by his death. Susan Fromberg Schaeffer writes with exquisite flavor and measure; character, history, and relationships build into a large, minutely detailed canvas and remind us why she is a master of the epic novel. Reading group guide included.

Sunday, July 13. 1:46 A.M. Near Lookout Mountain and Laurel Canyon. An unidentified woman in her twenties, wearing a nightgown, was the victim of a hit-and-run accident that left her unconscious and seriously injured. There were no witnesses. So reads the report on the accident off Mulholland Drive in Molly Blume's Crime Sheet column for a weekly Los Angeles tabloid. Just another small L.A. tragedy, soon forgotten. But the image of the young woman in her nightgown stumbling along a dark, winding road is one Molly, a freelance true-crime writer, cannot shake. In fact, it draws her to a bedside in intensive care, where the victim whispers to her three names: Robbie, Max, and Nina. It's not a smoking gun, but is sufficient to reinforce Molly's gut instinct that there are sinister circumstances behind the assault on Lenore Saunders. With fearless conviction, Molly asks questions that nobody--including Lenore's mom, her ex-husband, her shrink, or even Molly's L.A.P.D. buddy, Detective Connors--wants to answer. Nevertheless, the astute Molly discovers Lenore lived a fractured life, so different from Molly's own secure and loving Orthodox Jewish background. And as a chilling picture of the unfortunate woman begins to take shape, the menace of murders past and present stirs and quickens. In her first Molly Blume novel, award-winning novelist Rochelle Krich tells a story in the tradition of the great L.A. mysteries of the past--and introduces an investigator who is pure gold. Twentysomething divorcee Molly Blume, with her deep faith, short skirts, and nose for the truth, is a heroine to cherish. From the Hardcover edition.

A well-intentioned English family unwittingly becomes complicit in state violence while traveling through China. A ploddingly respectable London lawyer chances upon a stash of cocaine and realizes it offers the wealth and status he's always hungered for. A salesman in Africa gets caught up in a riot, and a Palestinian suicide bomber has a moment of self-doubt. Kneale transports readers across continents in a nanosecond, reaching to the heart of faraway societies with rare perceptiveness. With wry humor and razor-sharp satire, these twelve thought-provoking stories illuminate the moral uncertainty of our time.

A coming-of-age novel set in New York and Michigan during the Vietnam War era, Winter Eyes shows how the past controls and divides the immigrant Borowski family, and isolates their American-born son Stefan. But when Stefan comes to learn the terrible secrets at the heart of his family, that knowledge transforms them all and points the way to a happy new future for him, despite his doubts about his sexual identity. A haunting and remarkable novel, Winter Eyes is a tale of family secrets, silence, revelation - and the hope for healing and change. A spellbinding achievement from a talented author of American fiction. This new 2022 edition contains a foreword by Brian Bouldrey (The Genius of Desire). "Raphael's Winter Eyes resembles a piano sonata, a piece he knows so well that his fingers breathed the music." - Los Angeles Times "Winter Eyes is one of the most affecting, absorbing, and quietly powerful American coming-of-age novels." - Booklist "Loneliness, separation, desire and the struggle with gay identity are leitmotifs of Lev Raphael's novel. What distinguishes it is Raphael's handling of grand themes, and his ongoing exploration of worlds both Jewish and gay and how they intersect, daring himself and his readers to contemplate wholeness." - Jenifer Levin

In this psychologically complex and darkly humorous debut collection, awardwinning writer Henry Shukman introduces an unforgettable cast of characters, travelers whose certain paths around the world lead invariably back to the uncertain self. In “The Garden of God” an aging, ailing war reporter reflects on his adventures covering a little-known conflict in the Sahara and the precipitous and disgraced end of his career; In “Old Providence,” a dissolute artist mourns a lost love and the “bloody perfect island” where, through his own callow foolishness, he lost her. In “Darien Dogs” a man goes south to Panama, desperate for a business deal that will restore his finances and sense of mastery, only to find himself on a confounding search for a beautiful, mysterious woman and his stolen wallet. By turns full of suspense, farce and poignance, always alive with energy and atmosphere, these are the stories of a gifted and assured writer.