“Crackling and bighearted...A powerhouse [that] echoes with the truth that we find harmony when we listen first to ourselves.” — Oprah Daily * “Takes off with magnificent speed and never lets up.” — The New York Times * “Revolutionary.” —NPR’s Morning Edition * A Los Angeles Times and Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year A provocative and “darkly funny” ( Cosmopolitan ) novel about a woman who desperately wants a child but struggles to accept the use of assisted reproductive technology—a “riotous, visceral” ( Vanity Fair ) send-up of feminism, fame, art, commerce, and autonomy. On the eve of her fourth album, singer-songwriter Aviva Rosner is plagued by infertility. The twist: as much as Aviva wants a child, she is wary of technological conception, and has poured her ambivalence into her music. As the album makes its way in the world, the shock of the response from fans and critics is at first exciting—and then invasive and strange. Aviva never wanted to be famous, or did she? Meanwhile, her evolving obsession with another iconic musician, gone too soon, might just help her make sense of things. Told over the course of nine menstrual cycles, this utterly original novel is a “fast, fiery, and often funny” ( The Boston Globe ) interrogation of our cultural obsession with childbearing. It’s also the story of one fearless woman at the crossroads, ruthlessly questioning what she wants and what she’s willing—or not willing—to do to get it.

Landing a prestigious position as a Supreme Court clerk fresh out of Yale Law, Ben Addison is on the ultra-fast track to success—until he inadvertently shares a classified secret with the wrong listener. And now the anonymous blackmailer who made a killing with Ben's information is demanding more. Guilty of a criminal act, his golden future suddenly in jeopardy, Ben turns for help to his roommates—three close friends from childhood, each strategically placed near the seats of Washington power—and to his beautiful, whip-smart fellow clerk, Lisa Schulman. But trust is a dangerous commodity in the nation's capital. And when lives, careers, and power are at stake, loyalties can shatter like glass . . . and betrayals can be lethal.

Hardcover with DJ. Book is very good, clean and unmarked, mild foxing, light schelf anf edge wear from normal handling. Boards are blck and dark blue. DJ is very good with normal foxing, sunfading to spine, Several small tears to spine - Fireside theatre book Club Edition. Satisfaction guaranteed

A kaleidoscopic portrait of a modern American family—steadfast, complicated, begrudging, and loving—from the bestselling author of Isola Was this just a brief skirmish, or the beginning of a thirty-year feud? In the Rubinstein family, it could go either way. When their beloved sister passes away, Sylvia and Helen Rubinstein are unmoored. A misunderstanding about apple cake turns into a decade of stubborn silence. Busy with their own lives—divorces, dating, career setbacks, college applications, bat mitzvahs and ballet recitals—their children do not want to get involved. As for their grandchildren? Impossible. With This Is Not About Us, master storyteller Allegra Goodman—whose prior collection was heralded as “one of the most astute and engaging books about American family life” ( The Boston Globe )—returns to the form and subject that endeared her to legions of readers. Sharply observed and laced with humor, This Is Not About Us is a story of growing up and growing old, the weight of parental expectations, and the complex connection between sisters—a big-hearted book about the love that binds a family across generations.

Presenting the complete texts of eight of the world’s greatest plays, this important volume illuminates the changing concept of tragedy from Sophocles to O’Neill. Some of the world’s greatest dramas unfold on these pages. In the powerful and famous plays of Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Euripedes, Oedipus makes his disastrous marriage, Prometheus struggles against Zeus to break his painful chains, and the Love Goddess, Aphrodite, takes her revenge on the Theban prince who slighted her. Shakespeare’s King Lear suffers at the hands of his two evil daughters. The great Scandinavian dramatists Ibsen and Strindberg fearlessly present stories of infidelity and social disease, while Desire under the Elms, Eugene O’Neill’s savage picture of primitive desires in modern New England, rounds out this excellent anthology. Including important essays by noteworthy critics and philosophers, this book is an ideal companion to the editors’ Eight Great Comedies. Featured Plays: Prometheus Unbound (Aeschylus) Oedipus the King (Sophocles) Hippolytus (Euripedes) King Lear (William Shakespeare) Ghosts (Henrik Ibsen) Miss Julie (August Strindberg) On Baile’s Strand (William Butler Yeats) Desire under the Elms (Eugene O’Neill) Also includes essays by Aristotle, Hume, Emerson, Tillyard, Richards, and Krutch.

The startling, witty, highly anticipated second novel from the critically acclaimed author of Atmospheric Disturbances . The story begins in 1618, in the German duchy of Württemberg. Plague is spreading. The Thirty Years' War has begun, and fear and suspicion are in the air throughout the Holy Roman Empire. In the small town of Leonberg, Katharina Kepler is accused of being a witch. Katharina is an illiterate widow, known by her neighbors for her herbal remedies and the success of her children, including her eldest, Johannes, who is the Imperial Mathematician and renowned author of the laws of planetary motion. It's enough to make anyone jealous, and Katharina has done herself no favors by being out and about and in everyone's business. So when the deranged and insipid Ursula Reinbold (or as Katharina calls her, the Werewolf) accuses Katharina of offering her a bitter, witchy drink that has made her ill, Katharina is in trouble. Her scientist son must turn his attention from the music of the spheres to the job of defending his mother. Facing the threat of financial ruin, torture, and even execution, Katharina tells her side of the story to her friend and next-door neighbor Simon, a reclusive widower imperiled by his own secrets. Drawing on real historical documents but infused with the intensity of imagination, sly humor, and intellectual fire for which Rivka Galchen is known, Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch will both provoke and entertain. The story of how a community becomes implicated in collective aggression and hysterical fear is a tale for our time. Galchen's bold new novel touchingly illuminates a society and a family undone by superstition, the state, and the mortal convulsions of history.

2003, Paperback, 243 pages

A piercing, magical story about?a life-altering friendship Toward the end of his life, H looks back on the relationship that has shaped and obsessed him for nearly a century. It began many years earlier at St. Oswald's, a dismal boarding school on the coast of England, where the young H came face- to-face with an almost unbearably beautiful boy living by himself at the edge of the sea. At first, the mysterious Finn appears to have no past-his home is an ancient fisherman's hut with a woodstove, a case of books, striped blankets, and a cat. H insinuates his way into Finn's life, stalking him with perfect patience until an unlikely friendship is kindled; a confused idyll of ?devotion and longing set against a background of blazing wood fires and fishing expeditions. Their friendship deepens, offering H both the freedom and the human connection that has always eluded him. But in a world of conformity, can one eccentric idyll be ?allowed to survive?

Jules is confronted headlong and all at once by a series of challenges to his principles, livelihood, and home, forcing him to grapple with his complex past and find a way forward. He risks fraud to save his terminally ill infant grandson, matches wits with a renegade insurance investigator, is drawn into an act of savage violence, and falls deeply, excitingly in love with a young cellist a third his age. He forges a denouement that is staggering in its humanity, elegance, and truth.

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Devil Wears Prada comes an irresistible novel about what happens when a girl on the fringe enters the realm of New York’s chic, party-hopping elite. On paper, Bette Robinson’s life is good. At twenty-six, she’s got a great deal on an apartment in Manhattan, and she’s on target to become an associate at the prestigious investment bank where she works with her best friend. Her eighty-hour workweeks might keep her from socializing or dating outside her office walls—but she’s paying her dues on the well-trod path to wealth and happiness. So when Bette quits her job like the impulsive girl she’s never been, she not only shocks her friends and family—she has no idea what to do next. For months, Bette gets out and about by walking her four-pound dog around her decidedly unglamorous Murray Hill neighborhood. Then she meets Kelly, head of Manhattan’s hottest PR and events planning firm, and suddenly Bette has a brand-new job where the primary requirement is to see and be seen. The work at Kelly & Company takes Bette inside the VIP rooms of the city’s most exclusive nightclubs, to parties crowded with celebrities and socialites. Bette learns not to blink at the famous faces, the black Amex cards, the magnums of Cristal, or the ruthless paparazzi. Soon she’s dating an infamous playboy who’s great for her career but bad for her sanity—and scaring off the one decent guy she meets. Still, as her coworkers repeatedly point out, how can you complain about a job that pays you to party? Bette has to agree—until she begins appearing in a vicious new gossip column. That's when Bette’s life on paper takes on a whole new meaning—and she learns the line between her personal and professional lives is...invisible.

n a novel as darkly comic and audaciously ambitious as was Catch-22, Joseph Heller has dared to write the sequel to his American classic, using many of Catch-22's characters, now older if not wiser, to deftly satirize the realities and the myths of America in the half century since they fought World War II. In 1961, Joseph Heller's remarkable first novel made its way immediately into the American psyche and came to symbolize the absurdity of war and of life. Catch-22 was recognized overnight as a classic and has sold nearly ten million copies in the United States alone. It remains perhaps the funniest - and the most serious - novel ever written about war, "an apocalyptic masterpiece, " in the words of one reviewer. Now, thirty-three years later, Joseph Heller has written the sequel. You don't have to have read Catch-22 (But then, who on earth hasn't?) to enjoy Closing Time, which is a fully independent companion work, a comic masterpiece in its own right, in which Heller spears the inflated balloons of our national consciousness - the absurdity of our politics, the decline of society and our great cities, the greed and hypocrisy of our business and culture - with the same ferocious humor that he used against the conventional view of warfare. His characters are those of Catch-22, coming to the end of their lives and the century, as is the entire generation that fought in World War II: Yossarian, and Milo Minderbinder, the chaplain, and such newcomers as little Sammy Singer and giant Lew, all linked, this time in uneasy peace and old age, fighting, not the Germans this time, but The End. Closing Time is outrageously funny and totally serious, and as brilliant and successful as Catch-22itself, a fun-house mirror that captures, at once grotesquely and accurately, the truth about ourselves.

Kosinski, Jerzy N.

In 1907 novelist James Joyce was engaged as Svevo's English tutor in Trieste, and in the process they developed a friendship. When Joyce read Svevo's novel La coscienza di Zeno (Confessions of Zeno), he was so impressed with it that he encouraged the writer to publish it, and later helped to promote it. While Joyce became enthralled with the latest novelistic techniques -particularly the stream of consciousness and indirect free style- to get inside the mind of his characters, Svevo accomplished the same thing without the new tools. Zeno's consciousness is not the flowing of a stream, but the cascading, torrential avalanche of details that is the essence of humanness in all aspects: from low double entry bookkeeping, business, and economics, to manipulations of the Stock Market, to moral dilemmas, and raw passions. Italo Svevo's Confessions of Zeno belongs to the comic tradition of Don Quixote and Tristram Shandy, though not in the realist manner, but rather in a psychological vein. After reading a few pages the reader will have no doubt that he is confronting a paradoxical juxtaposition between things of the mind and things themselves. Zeno -the narrator and eponymous hero- on the surface is a hypochondriac, neurotic, quirky, solipsistic, self-examining and self-serving bourgeois; deep down, however, he is love and goodness incarnate, not by design but by the whims of life. Although Svevo wrote many other works, his opus magnum will remain his Confessions of Zeno. While Proust and others wrote lengthy psychological novels, by their sheer length and density, they become soporific. Not so with Zeno, which is intriguing, suspenseful, engaging-never boring, a magnificent tour de force.

Winner of the Scott Moncrieff Prize for translation A mind-bending and mysterious comedy from the author of Life A User's Manual . A Void is a great linguistic adventure and a metaphysical whodunit, chock-full of plots and subplots, of trails in pursuit of trails, all displaying Georges Perec's virtuosity as a verbal magician. It is also an outrageous verbal stunt: a 300-page novel that never once employs the letter E. The year is 1968, and as France is torn apart by social and political anarchy, the noted eccentric and insomniac Anton Vowl goes missing. Ransacking his Paris flat, his best friends scour his diary for clues to his whereabouts. At first glance these pages reveal nothing but Vowl's penchant for word games, especially for "lipograms," compositions in which the use of a particular letter is suppressed. But as the friends work out Vowl's verbal puzzles, and as they investigate various leads discovered among the entries, they too disappear, one by one by one, and under the most mysterious circumstances . . . A book that only Georges Perec could have conceived, The New York Times called A Void , "a rollicking story, wildly amusing and easily accessible to all of us who don't mind slipping, sliding and being tripped."

From the writer of the award-winning Game of Thrones series for HBO based on the books of George R. R. Martin. Over the course of eight tales, often with an appealing touch of the surreal, we are introduced to a record comany exec searching for a rock star, an inexperienced Russian soldier trapped between his murderous colleagues and a clever old woman, a faded football star recalling his lost chance at love, an acress who has a shot at a role that will free her from a lifetime of waitressing, a young man who kidnap's his ex-girlfriend's father's ashes, and other young people on the cusp of discovery, jubilation or loss. As he evokes the various states of agony and pleasure - humiliation, rebellion, cameraderie, and desire - Benioff displays a profound understanding of how single moments lead to transformation, and how sadness can be illuminated by a humorous flip side.

Who knows you better than your best friend? Who knows your secrets, your fears, your desires, your strange imperfect self? Edi and Ash have been best friends for over forty years. Since childhood they have seen each other through life's milestones: stealing vodka from their parents, the Madonna phase, REM concerts, unexpected wakes, marriages, infertility, children. As Ash notes,[Bokinfo]

Hell in a very small place: the siege of Dien Bien Phu by Bernard B. Fall.

"From New York Times bestselling author Alice Hoffman comes a beautiful story of one Jewish child refugee's flight to safety in Nazi German and her mother's impossible decision to set her free"--

DR. ALFRED ADLER'S work in psychology, while it is scientific and general in method, is essentially the study of the separate personalities we are, and is therefore called Individual Psychology. Concrete, particular, unique human beings are the subjects of this psychology, and it can only be truly learned from the men, women and children we meet.The supreme importance of this contribution to modern psychology is due to the manner in which it reveals how all the activities of the soul are drawn together into the service of the individual, how all his faculties and strivings are related to one end. We are enabled by this to enter into the ideals, the difficulties, the efforts and discouragements of our fellow-men, in such a way that we may obtain a whole and living picture of each as a personality. In this coordinating idea, something like finality is achieved, though we must understand it as finality of foundation. There has never before been a method so rigorous and yet adaptable for following the fluctuations of that most fluid, variable and elusive of all realities, the individual human soul.