For more than five decades, with relentless candor, biting wit, and striking imagery, Bruce Benderson's fiction has celebrated the warped beauty of our megalopolises, including their clashes between the classes and their subcultures of sex and drugs. Oppressed but flamboyant, the voices of his subterranean worlds have become just too intense to be ignored. Now, for the first time, all his short texts, including 21 never before published, appear together in the same volume. Included is one of the first post-Stonewall coming out stories, written in 1970, decades before such narratives developed into a full genre. This, then, is the complete and definitive Bruce Benderson reader. Benderson's most well-known book, The Romanian: Story of an Obsession, was awarded the prestigious Prix de Flore in its French edition. Other publications include the essay collection Sex and Isolation, the short story collection Pretending to Say No, and the novels Pacific Agony and User.

Love's Shadow (1908) is a novel by Ada Leverson. Having established herself as a journalist and short story writer, Leverson published her debut novel in 1907 to moderate acclaim. Entertaining and effortlessly witty, Leverson's prose paints a stunning portrait of the Edwardian era, a time when hope and relative peace proved prosperous for many. Often compared to her close friend Oscar Wilde, Leverson, a pioneering Jewish woman, remains a unique and refreshing voice in English literature. Love's Shadow is the first installment in her Little Ottleys trilogy, a series of novels exploring the romantic lives of a hilariously diverse group of friends. Edith and Bruce Ottley seem to have it all--a charming flat, a healthy child, and a group of entertaining friends. Although they are far from perfect--Bruce can be jealous and quite the hypochondriac at times--their marriage remains strong and their home remains a place of refuge to their frequently lovelorn comrades. Among a dizzying array of faces and names, Hyacinth Verney, Mrs. Eugenia Raymond, Cecil Reeve, and Lord Selsey stand out. Although Hyacinth loves Cecil, a match favored by his uncle Lord Selsey, the young man seems inexplicably smitten with the widow Eugenia, who has no interest in marrying again. Edith and Bruce do their best to make themselves hospitable while defending their home against the hostilities of love, but the hearts and minds of their eclectic guests prove difficult to assuage. Love's Shadow is a humorous tale of romance and desire from Ada Leverson, an underappreciated novelist of the Edwardian era. This edition of Ada Leverson's Love's Shadow is a classic work of British literature reimagined for modern readers. Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book. With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.

When she met the best engineer of dams at the railway station, her inside pleasantly warmed to medium rare. At the end of a two-minute small talk, she sensed that Mr. Winter, skipping the intermediate phases, was already overcooked.

Tornado Pratt is the last of the old-style American tycoons who has lived his life with ferocious vigour through the vacillating fortunes of twentieth-century America. The novel finds him in a hotel room at the end of his days, as he recounts in a dying monologue the events of his turbulent life. What is revealed, in an account full of jokes and surprises, is a brash, lustful, comic, profane, naive and sentimental man who, driven on by remorse, displays a wry and perceptive honesty about himself, even as his memories begin to merge with imaginings. Often funny and sometimes moving, Tornado Pratt's voice is an unforgettable one in which he confronts his own mortality, and in which Paul Ableman gives us an astonishing, affecting and life-affirming story. Auberon Waugh called Tornado Pratt 'a magnificent and memorable novel'.

Living in a rat-infested hotel in Franco’s post-war Spain, André Bennett, a Canadian painter, loves Toni, his girl friend, who wants him to return home. Roger Kraus, a Nazi on the run, shadows the young artist day and night. They meet on a bridge during the last night of the fiesta, and as the sky is shredded by exploding fireworks, the story draws to its violent climax. Originally published in 1954, The Acrobats marks Mordecai Richler’s stunning debut as a novelist.

When a beautiful stranger comes to hear him preach, Pastor Daniel Vedra soon finds himself falling in love with another man's wife. With the brilliance and humanity that have made him a major figure in world literature, Ivan Klima explores the universal themes of love, adultery and God.

Ray Tompkins is the kind of person you never get to know. He's the security guard, the factory worker, the man working the midnight shift. Nobody really understands Ray - not his coworkers, not his family, and certainly not the women in his life. There is a rage building inside Ray Tompkins and Los Angeles is the fuel - the sick obsession with celebrity mixed with the vacuousness of everyday life. Against this backdrop, Ray Tompkins finds a way to vent his anger. He, too, will be known.

Internationally renowned novelist Harry Mulisch's The Procedure is a haunting and fascinating novel about two men who try to create life but fail. In the late sixteenth century, Rabbi Jehudah Löw, in order to guarantee the safety of the Jews in Prague, creates a golem by following a procedure outlined in a third-century cabalist text. Four hundred years later, Victor Werker, a Dutch biologist mourning the loss of his stillborn daughter, causes an international uproar when he creates a complex organic clay crystal that can reproduce and has a metabolism. But his unsettling discovery takes its toll as his inner and outer demons pursue him around the world, from California to Venice, Cairo, and Jerusalem.

In artfully crafted interlocking flashbacks set against a vividly drawn scrim of New York City, Busch lets his hapless hero tell his story of the angst-driven complications of both licit and illicit love. It was Greenwich Village in the Sixties, and Zimmer was writing copy for a sleazy PR agency. Rhona was a voluptuous Nazi-hunting librarian who taught him introductory love and guilt and drove him into the arms of the tall blonde shiksa Lillian.

To six-year-old Dori, everything seems possible. To her family and their Peers-secular, left-leaning North American Jews-the young state of Israel seems to offer the same promise, as the starry-eyed kibbutz movement prepares the ground for their ideals of justice and cooperation to take root and flourish. They settle on Eldar in northern Galilee, determined to create a new utopia, but life on this remote hill, three kilometres from the Lebanese border, is far more complex than any of its inhabitants could have imagined. "The Last Rain" tells the story of Eldar's emergence as a kibbutz through the eyes of Dori, as well as through documentary fragments that take the reader on a labyrinthine journey through the characters' collective past. With humour, sensitivity, and a deep love for the land, "The Last Rain" follows the coming of age not only of a young girl, but also of a country in the first fraught years of its existence.

In Undue Influence , acclaimed novelist Anita Brookner proves once again that even in the most closely circumscribed of lives, hearts can venture into unknown-and potentially explosive-territory. Claire Pitt is nothing if not a practical young woman, living a life in contemporary London that is to all appearances placid, orderly and consciously lacking in surprise. And yet Claire's tangled interior life gives the lie to that illusion. She is prone to vivid speculation about the lives of others, and to fantasies about her own fate that lead her into a courtship so strange that even she wonders at its power to compel her. Martin Gibson and his chronically ill wife Cynthia come to depend on Claire to an extent that is nothing short of baffling, and yet Claire becomes ever bolder in her pursuit of their acquaintance-and, ultimately, of Martin's elusive affections. The result, a potent tale of urban loneliness and the chance intersections that assuage it, constitutes one of Brookner's finest and most psychologically acute achievements.

“SOPHISTICATED AND SUSPENSEFUL . . . TAUTLY WRITTEN . . . Wilentz knows the world she writes about very well, and her descriptions have a solid specificity that lends authority to her fiction.” –The New York Times Book Review “At a closed Israeli checkpoint, Marina, a Palestinian mother, clutches her ailing boy, desperate for access to Jerusalem and its doctors. When a young Israeli soldier waits too long before deciding to disobey orders, a martyr is born. Thus begins a graceful, painful, illuminating novel of the Middle East. . . . [Wilentz’s] prose tugs at the reader. . . . The characters are magnetic. . . . [This] is a very human tale of regrets, revenge, and the elusive nature of absolution.” –Entertainment Weekly “SO PRECISE, SO STARTLING, SO UNFORGETTABLE. . . . These characters are all pawns of history and politics, but Wilentz makes them live.” –Los Angeles Times “MAGNIFICENT . . . Wilentz writes with a prose style reminiscent of The New Yorker ’s highest ambitions: crystalline, pure, faultlessly communicative. . . . Like the best documentaries, Martyrs’ Crossing allows us unprecedented access to a little-understood and often misrepresented part of the world.” –Chicago Tribune “A BRILLIANTLY RESEARCHED MEDIDATION ON THE CRISIS IN THE MIDDLE EAST . . . Martyr’s Crossing matches Damascus Gate in the quality of research and the mass of intriguing characters–and yet it remains a lean thriller.” –The New York Observer

Tournament is Shelby Foote's first novel, published originally by Dial Press in 1949. Summa's reprint includes an exclusive preface by the author concerning his literary development and the genesis of Tournament and an introduction by Louis D. Rubin, Jr., the dean of American literature criticism. Tournament is a brilliant novel of the post-Civil War South, replete with Proustian and Faulknerian overtones. Many of the characters that appear in subsequent novels by Shelby Foote come onto the scene for the first time in this work. It is a must acquisition for every fan of Shelby Foote--From item description.

"The Frontier Garrison" is the first English translation of "Az elõretolt helyõrség" by the Hungarian novelist Jenõ Rejtõ (1905-1943), originally published in 1939 under the pen name of "P. Howard." The translator, Balint Kacsoh (a university professor) also annotated the edition. The preface provides biographical data of Jenõ Rejtõ in historical and literary context. The genre is fiction; elements of action, adventure, mystery, and comedy are mixed in the story. It is suitable for young readers and adults. Synopsis: Action and adventure are mixed with a healthy dose of offbeat humor in this P. Howard classic, set in the second half of the 1930s. Harrincourt is dishonorably discharged from the French Naval Academy for a prank. He realizes that his carefree behavior put the livelihood of his widowed mother and teenage sister in jeopardy. To secure their financial future, he pays the premium on his life insurance policy and joins the French Foreign Legion destined to Africa, where his death "in the course of professional duty" would be all but guaranteed. While in basic training in Oran, he unwittingly becomes mixed up in murder and espionage and encounters the ghost of a murdered woman who has a penchant for singing. In short order, his unit is dispatched to a frontier garrison established to support French colonial expansion into equatorial Africa. Rival foreign powers, however, attempt to thwart the French plans and Harrincourt finds himself in the crossfire of international intrigue and falls in love with the beautiful woman whose haunting ghost follows the legionnaires as they march through the deadly Sahara. It is up to Harrincourt to save the day and uncover the secret of a mysterious watch, even if it might mean foregoing the death benefit his insurance policy would pay to his family.

In the tradition of the old "Ace Doubles" two-in-one books (flip one over to read the second title)--here is the twelfth Wildside Double: LISA KANE: A NOVEL OF WEREWOLVES, by Richard A. Lupoff. Lisa is a 12-year-old girl with all the worries of any normal girl beginning the transition to womanhood. She's frightened by the changes happening to her body--the budding breasts, the stiff black hairs that appear on the back of her hands, and the way her nails twist to look like claws during the full moon. Is this normal? Why is she so different from everyone else? Scott A. Culp says: "A good book...that does not deserve to be forgotten." THE PRINCES OF EARTH: A SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL, by Michael Kurland. Adam Warrington is a young man from a repressive plant in the grasp of fundamental Puritanism. Then he's accepted by the University of Sol on Mars, and his great adventure begins. On the way there his spaceship is hijacked by a disgruntled noble who wants to overthrow the emperor, and Adam is forced to choose sides. A grand tale in the tradition of Robert A. Heinlein. A Young Adult Literary Guild Selection.

We're living a national ideology that's invisible to us because we're inside it." "We're living a national ideology that's invisible to us because we're inside it." At the outset of his career E. L. Doctorow told Paul Levine, "History written by historians is clearly insufficient." Doctorow's novels carry out that conviction by imagining the great moments of American history--the Old West, the gilded age, the Depression, the cold war--as backdrops for tales of excruciating moral pain and injustice in America. In Conversations with E. L. Doctorow Christopher D. Morris has gathered over twenty of the most revelatory interviews with the acclaimed author of Ragtime, World's Fair, Billy Bathgate, The Book of Daniel, and other novels, plays, and short stories. Whatever the setting or time period, Doctorow's characters spark an unparalleled urgency in the novelist's recreations of history. In his work the American dream and the values his characters try to live by turn to madness and ashes. Within this collection Doctorow explores the themes of his work not only in the contexts of national and literary history but also in terms of disturbing trends in contemporary American culture. Talking about style, Doctorow discusses his experiments with shifting points of view and unreliable narrators as part of the modernist heritage to which readers have become accustomed. But he stresses that these techniques are always subordinate to the telling of a good story and the creation of memorable characters. "My portrait of J. P. Morgan in Ragtime is truer to the man's soul and the substance of his life than his authorized biography," he says. Doctorow's critical and popular success comes from the creation and re-creation of such great characters and the telling of captivating stories in which the writer serves as an independent witness to both the ideals and the corruptions that have driven our history. Christopher D. Morris has been the Charles A. Dana Professor of English at Norwich University in Northfield, Vermont, since 1996. He is also the author of Models of Misrepresentation: On the Fiction of E. L. Doctorow and regularly publishes in journals like The Ohio Review, Critique, and Film Criticism.

While living in exile in Berlin, the formidable literary critic Viktor Shklovsky fell in love with Elsa Triolet. He fell into the habit of sending Elsa several letters a day, a situation she accepted under one condition: he was forbidden to write about love. Zoo, or Letters Not about Love is an epistolary novel born of this constraint, and although the brilliant and playful letters contained here cover everything from observations about contemporary German and Russian life to theories of art and literature, nonetheless every one of them is indirectly dedicated to the one topic they are all required to avoid: their author's own unrequited love.

MODERN & CONTEMPORARY FICTION (POST C 1945). Harriet Mansfield, brave, wry and handsome, is determined to triumph no matter what. With a decade of therapy under her belt and a new large inheritance, it seems there is nothing she cannot achieve. So she decides to open the school of her dreams. To her precious little girls, rich in everything but care, she vows to provide the happiest childhoods in the world. For everyone knows that early years passed in delightful ways can set you up for life. But can this ambitious new departure spill some retrospective sweetness onto Harriet's own harsh beginnings, or better still cancel them out altogether? Will the family she's estranged from ever grant her the recognition she craves? Written with deep psychological insight and coal-black humour The Small Hours is a stunning meditation on love, self-love and forgiveness, and their shadowy opposites.

The hallucinatory, unforgettable account of a moment - or an eternity - in an uncertain love affair The man has actually come to tell his lover that he wants to leave her, but as soon as he walks in he realizes he won't be able to tell her. The woman rolls a joint. They smoke it. And as they drift into another state of mind, he approaches the border zones between being and nonbeing, between living and imagining, or is it between life and death? From the acclaimed author of A Book of Memories we now have this unsettling and strangely beautiful exploration of the impossibility of love. The mysterious musicality and physical intensity of the narration will be familiar to readers of Nadas's other fiction, but Love is a radical new departure.

- The author's most recent novel, What Remains (Warner, 2000, 0-446-52416-6), received rave reviews and was selected as a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice. His previous novels for Warner include Old Scores (1997) and In the Name of Mercy (1995). - Nicholas Delbanco is the Robert Frost Collegiate Professor of English Literature and Language at the University of Michigan. He is the award-winning author of 20 fiction and nonfiction books and has taught at Columbia and Iowa Universities, as well as at Bennington, Skidmore, Trinity, and Williams Colleges. - Delbanco is the co-founder, with the late John Gardner, of the Bennington Writing Workshops, and currently administers the prestigious Hopwood Awards at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.