A Globe and Mail Top 100 Book of 2025 Both sweeping and intimate, a majestic novel of love and war that brilliantly evokes the drama and turbulence of medieval France Thierry Villar is a well-known—even notorious— tavern poet, familiar with the rogues and shadows of that world, but not at all with courts and power. He is an unlikely person, despite his quickness, to be caught up in the deadly contests of ambitious royals, assassins, and invading armies. But he is indeed drawn into all these things on a savagely cold night in his beloved city of Orane. And so Thierry must use all the intelligence and charm he can muster as political struggles merge with a decades-long war to bring his country to the brink of destruction. As he does, he meets his poetic equal in an aristocratic woman and is drawn to more than one unsettling person with a connection to the world beyond this one. He also crosses paths with an extraordinary young woman driven by voices within to try to heal the ailing king—and help his forces in war. A wide and varied set of people from all walks of life take their places in the rich tapestry of this story. A new masterwork from the internationally bestselling author of All the Seas of the World , A Brightness Long Ago , and Tigana , Written on the Dark is an elegant tour de force about power and ambition playing out amid the intense human need for art and beauty, and memories to be left behind.

No personage is too big, no nuance too small, no subject too far out for Grouchoâ€s spontaneous, hilarious, and ferocious typewriter. He writes to comics, corporations, children, presidents, and even his daughterâ€s boyfriend. Here is Groucho swapping photos with T. S. Eliot (â€I had no idea you were so handsome!â€); advising his son on courting a rich dame (â€Donâ€t come out bluntly and say, â€How much dough have you got?†That wouldnâ€t be the Marxian wayâ€); crisply declining membership in a Hollywood club (â€I donâ€t care to belong to any social organization that will accept me as a memberâ€); reacting with utmost composure when informed that he has been made into a verb by James Joyce (â€Thereâ€s no reason why I shouldnâ€t appear in Finnegans Wake . Iâ€m certainly as bewildered about life as Joyce wasâ€); responding to a scandal sheet (†If you continue to publish slanderous pieces about me, I shall feel compelled to cancel my subscriptionâ€); describing himself to the Lunts (â€I eat like a vulture. Unfortunately the resemblance doesnâ€t end thereâ€); and much, much more. That mobile visage, that look of wild amazement, and that weaving cigar are wholly captured, bound but untamed, in The Groucho Letters.

The gripping and elegiac stories of eight lost books, and the mysterious circumstances behind their disappearances. They exist as a rumour or a fading memory. They vanished from history leaving scarcely a trace, lost to fire, censorship, theft, war or deliberate destruction, yet those who seek them are convinced they will find them. This is the story of one man's quest for eight mysterious lost books. Taking us from Florence to Regency London, the Russian Steppe to British Columbia, Giorgio van Straten unearths stories of infamy and tragedy, glimmers of hope and bitter twists of fate. There are, among others, the rediscovered masterpiece that he read but failed to save from destruction; the Hemingway novel that vanished in a suitcase at the Gare du Lyon; the memoirs of Lord Byron, burnt to avoid a scandal; the Magnum Opus of Bruno Schulz, disappeared along with its author in wartime Poland; the mythical Sylvia Plath novel that may one day become reality. As gripping as a detective novel, as moving as an elegy, this is the tale of a love affair with the impossible, of the things that slip away from us but which, sometimes, live again in the stories we tell.

Kafka never replied to his father's letter. Kafka's letter was likewise only released after his death. In it, Franz Kafka discusses his father's relationship with him, which he is likely to find difficult, especially as the father vehemently rejects the son's wedding preparations. The son regards himself as a lesser being than his father. The literary, effeminate son was unlikely to acquire the recognition of his hands-on father, a butcher who had made it through hard labor. Several elements from the accusation Letter to the Father are explored throughout Kafka's writings for this purpose. Biography Franz Kafka was born on July 3, 1883, in Prague, to Jewish parents. Kafka joined the "Arbeiter-Unfall-Versicherungs-Anstalt" (Workers' Accident Insurance Institution) in 1908, where he remained a civil servant until his early retirement in 1922, after completing his PhD in law. Franz Kafka suffered a hemorrhage in late summer 1917, which led to the development of TB, from which he died on June 3, 1924, at the age of 41.

Zes studenten aan de Harvard Medical School hebben er in de jaren zestig alles voor over om hun doel te bereiken.

Written in the spirit of a group diary, Ask Elizabeth addresses the emotional lives of teen girls based on the most frequently asked questions from workshops presented by Elizabeth Berkley.

Presents a world in which fiction and reality meet within the 1930s Bronx childhood of Edgar, growing up through the intensity of the Depression and the hope of the New York World's Fair.

The Selected Letters of D.H. Lawrence

In the streets of an ordinary Italian town, the people go about their everyday lives. In an old apartment block above them, a young man pores over photographs and plans, dedicated to his life's most important project. Day by day, in his imagination, he is rehearsing for his greatest performance. Yet when his moment comes, nothing could have prepared him for what happens...

Naomi and Nathan thrive on the yellow journalism of the social-media age. They are nomadic freelancers in pursuit of sensation and depravity. Naomi becomes engrossed about Célestine and Aristide Arosteguy, Marxist philosophers and sexual libertines. Célestine has been found dead and mutilated in her Paris apartment; police suspect Aristide of killing her and consuming parts of her body. Nathan, meanwhile, is in Budapest photographing the controversial work of an unlicensed surgeon. After sleeping with one of Molnár's patients, Nathan contracts a rare STD called Roiphe's. Their parallel narratives become entwined with 3-D printing, North Korea, the Cannes Film Festival and, in an incredible number of varieties, sex.

The members of the literary circle known as the Violet Quill -- Christopher Cox, Robert Ferro, Michael Grumley, Andrew Holleran, Felice Picano, Edmund White, and George Whitmore -- collectively represent the aspirations and the achievement of gay writing during and after the gay liberation movement. This social history shows how the works of these authors both reflected and criticized the values, principles, and prejudices of the culture of gay liberation. In spinning many of the most important stories gay men told of themselves in the short period between the 1969 Stonewall Riots and the devastation of the AIDS epidemic during the 1980s, the Violet Quill exerted an enormous influence on gay culture.

Seven-year-old Martha learns a lesson about responsibility when Daddy gives her a playful new pet.

Hilary learns an important lesson in safety: never accept a ride from a stranger.

"A kaleidoscope of creativity . . . unsentimental and sometimes unpredictable."-- Journal of the American Medical Association Founded just six years ago, Bellevue Literary Review is already widely recognized as a rare forum for emerging and celebrated writers--among them Julia Alvarez, Raphael Campo, Rick Moody, and Abraham Verghese--on issues of health and healing. Gathered here are poignant and prizewinning stories, essays, and poems, the voices of patients and those who care for them, which form the journal's remarkable dialogue on "humanity and the human experience." Danielle Ofri, MD , author of Incidental Findings and Singular Intimacies , is the editor in chief of Bellevue Literary Review . She lives in New York City.

At 32, Jake Singer is trapped inside not only his own thoughts but also those of his antic, hectoring psychiatrist, a "madman privateer for whom conservative Freudianism was merely a flag of convenience." In between his triweekly skirmishes with the malaprop-slinging Dr. Morales, Jake does manage to carry he teaches at Coventry, a New York City private school, and has a small trust fund and an adequate Upper West Side apartment. Yet the protagonist of Daniel Menaker's first novel is increasingly alone. He hasn't seen his doctor father in four years, his mother died when he was six, and his most recent girlfriend left him. "I wasn't so crazy that I didn't know how boring my plight would be to most people," he later realizes. "Even the banality of evil is outstripped by the banality of anxiety neurosis." In fact, there's nothing remotely banal about Jake's anxiety, which Menaker makes both very real and very, very funny. Though Dr. Morales is dead-on about his patient's inertia, his antic method gives the term critical care (not to mention shrink wrap ) new meaning. Indeed, Jake and his doctor's hostilities are both hilarious and deeply painful, skidding between progress and "emotional vivisection." Is the foul-mouthed, foul-minded Morales a sport of psychiatric nature, or is he on the right track? Neither patient nor reader will ever be quite sure, though Jake does come out of his long slump, inheriting the responsibility for his own life--and those of several others. The Treatment ruffles with comic energy and risky shifts, but also with something increasingly rare in fiction--tenderness. Menaker, unlike his protagonist, seems unafraid of emotion and has a perfect ear for the momentary exchange that simultaneously reveals and conceals all. He can also dish up epigrams with the best of them. Jake turns Wallace Stevens's hieratic pronunciamento into a surprising home "If death is in fact the mother of beauty, she never spends any time with her kids." Any reader interested in the fresh pleasures of language, character, and sharp social landscaping should look no further. The Treatment is both a merry novel about loss and a melancholy fiction about the pleasures of intimacy--sexual, familial, and, of course, therapeutic.

"Astute and provocative....Blends the sophistication of recent feminist theory with highly textured details fro the lives of independent and ambitious women." THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW Drawing on the experience of celebrated women, from George Sand and Virginia Woolf to Dorothy Sayers and Adrienne Rich, Heilbrun examines the struggle these writers undertook when their drives made it impossible for them to follow the traditional "male" script for a woman's life. Refreshing and insightful, this is an homage to brave women past and present, and an invitation to all women to write their own scripts, whatever they may be.

Thomas Wiggins' sweet new dog McGrowl is changed forever by the creepy Dr. Minderbinder, who transforms McGrowl into a dog with superpowers, and now Thomas and his pal must find a way to thwart the veterinarian's evil plot.