An NPR 'Great Read of 2014' A brilliant and hilarious satirical novel about the state of twenty-first century Israel On a rock-strewn hilltop in the heart of the West Bank stands a lone second-hand shipping container, a generator and some goats. On this contested land, Othniel Assis - under the wary gaze of the neighbouring Palestinian village - installs his ever-expanding family. As he cheerfully manipulates government agencies, more settlers arrive and, with a hodge-podge of bankers, teachers, kibbutzniks and townies, religious and secular, the outpost takes root. But when a curious journalist stumbles into their midst, the settlement becomes the focus of an international diplomatic scandal.

The Gladiators is a philosophical novel on the nature of revolution; a melancholy commentary on the failure of politics to respond to men’s inner needs. It reveals to us the dialectic of history with a moral for our own times.

Andrea Levy, author of the Man Booker shortlisted novel THE LONG SONG and the prize-winning, million-copy bestseller SMALL ISLAND, draws together a remarkable collection of short stories from across her writing career, which began twenty years ago with the publication of her first novel, the semi-autobiographical EVERY LIGHT IN THE HOUSE BURNIN'. "None of my books is just about race," Levy has said. "They're about people and history." Her novels have triumphantly given voice to the people and stories that might have slipped through the cracks in history. From Jamaican slave society in the nineteenth century, through post-war immigration into Britain, to the children of migrants growing up in '60s London, her books are acclaimed for skilful storytelling and vivid characters. And her unique voice, unflinching but filled with humour, compassion and wisdom, has made her one of the most significant and exciting contemporary authors. This collection opens with an essay about how writing has helped Andrea Levy to explore and understand her heritage. She explains the context of each piece within the chronology of her career and finishes with a new story, written to mark the centenary of the outbreak of the Great War in 1914. As with her novels, these stories are at once moving and honest, deft and humane, filled with insight, anger at injustice and her trademark lightness of touch

Follow sixteen-year-old Faith Duckle in this audacious and darkly funny tale as she moves through the difficult journey from the schoolyard to the harlequin world of the circus. At fifteen, Faith was lured under the bleachers by a bunch of boys at a football game and raped. Now, almost a year later, a newly thin Faith is haunted by her past, and by the cruel, flippant ghost of her formerly fat self, who is bent on revenge. This quest for retribution eventually compels Faith to violence, forcing her to flee home in search of the only friend she has -- a troubled but caring busboy named Charlie, who is the lover of a sideshow performer -- and to tumble into the colorful, transient world of the circus. But as she leaves her old life behind and dives headfirst into a world of adult passions and dreams, mercurial allegiances, and exhilarating self-discovery (while paying considerable dues with a shovel in the elephant tent), Faith ultimately begins to discover who she is and all that she is capable of. Wonder When You'll Miss Me combines tender wit with page-turning energy and characters as original as they are memorable. By turns harrowing and poignant, lyrical and hilarious, it is a vibrant, compelling novel readers won't forget.

The acclaimed author of The Rules of Magic presents a “sexually charged...almost hypnotic”( Publishers Weekly ) novel about men, women, romance, and real life. When Teresa was a little girl, she went to sleep with dreams in her head—dreams of dark-eyed, fearless heroes on white horses who would sweep her away. Then men her mother told her about were a special breed, and someday, Teresa vowed, she would fins one of her own. But now, as the adult Teresa negotiates life and love, she begins to understand that fairy tales don't always come true—and that passion isn't always the stuff of dreams...

This haunting, poignant story travels across three generations and through time. Unravelling the years from the present to the 1950s, 'The Third Angel' is a novel, set mainly in London, about girls and women who make the wrong choices and have to live with the sometimes unbearable consequences.

Alice Hoffman's most magical novel to date--three generations of extraordinary women are driven to unite in crisis and discover the rewards of reconciliation and love. Women of the Sparrow family have unusual gifts. Elinor can detect falsehood. Her daughter, Jenny, can see people's dreams when they sleep. Granddaughter Stella has a mental window on the future--a future that she might not want to see. In "The Probable Future" this vivid and intriguing cast of characters confronts a haunting past--and a very current murder--against the evocative backdrop of small-town New England. By turns chilling and enchanting, "The Probable Future" chronicles the Sparrows's legacy as young Stella struggles to cope with her disturbing clairvoyance. Her potential to ruin or redeem becomes unbearable when one of her premonitions puts her father in jail, wrongly accused of homicide. Yet this ordeal also leads Stella to the grandmother she was forbidden to meet and to a historic family home full of talismans from her ancestors. Poignant, arresting, unsettling, "The Probable Future" showcases the lavish literary gifts that have made Alice Hoffman one of America's most treasured writers.

An electrifying novel about a woman struck by lightning, which brings together, as only Hoffman can, the fabulous and the real, chaos theory and the irrational everyday moment, in a compelling, haunting and sexy novel, with a sharp edge. As in a fairy tale (and the echo in the title is not accidental), the story starts with a little girl who makes a wish one snowy night and ruins her life. Her mother is killed on an icy road. Be careful what you wish for. Later, as a smalltown librarian who knows more than is good for her about ways of death, she lives a quiet life without excitement. One day, standing by her kitchen window, she is struck by lightning. But instead of ending her life, this cataclysmic event sparks it into beginning - if only she knew what she was supposed to do with this second chance. She goes in search of Lazarus Jones, a fellow survivor who was struck dead for forty minutes, but walked away. Perhaps this stranger who has seen death face to face can teach her to live without fear. When she finds him, he is her opposite, a burning man whose breath can boil water and whose touch scorches. As an obsessive love affair begins between them, both are forced to hide their most dangerous secrets - what turned one to ice and the other to fire. THE ICE QUEEN is a haunting story of passion, loss, and the secrets that come to define us, if we're not careful.

In this powerfully moving novel, bestselling novelist Alice Hoffman paints a vivid portrait of the lives of three generations in a family separated by loneliness, hope, and betrayal. Esther the White is the cold matriarch who fled a cruel life in Russia only to rule lovelessly over her own family in an isolated compound on Long Island. Phillip is the son she cannot understand, a man with an overwhelming desire to drown himself in the ocean's inviting waters every summer. Phillip's daughter is barely eighteen and desperate to escape the confines of this isolated world and her grandmother's harsh critiscim. But as Phillip's suicidal urges grow stronger and as outside forces threaten to destroy the family, they must come together to dispel the lifetime of secrets that have kept them apart--or lose everything. This spellbinding novel is a brialliant evocation of the ghosts that haunt all families and a touching testament to the redemptive power of love.

Alexandro Jodorowsky steps up to the challenge of the short graphic novel story format by collaborating with an international panoply of artists. A collection of Sci-Fi short stories all written by Alexandro Jodorowsky ("The Incal", "The Metabarons") and illustrated by talent from various countries and different graphic traditions. The thematic thread of these tales: an asteroid spawned from the destruction of a planet produces sounds (a "howling shriek") which, when crossing an inhabited world, creates a change or imbalance within it…

"The Pillar of Salt the semi-autobiographical novel about a young boy growing up in French colonized Tunisia. To gain access to privileged French society, he must reject his many identities -- Jew, Arab, and African. But, on the eve of World War II, he is forced to come to terms with his loyalties and his past."--

The Wizard of Oz meets America's favorite pastime! Alex Metcalf must be dreaming. What else would explain why he's playing baseball for the Oz Cyclones, with Dorothy as his captain, in the Ever After Baseball Tournament? But Alex isn't dreaming; he's just from the real world. And winning the tournament might be his only chance to get back there, because the champions get a wish granted by the Wizard. Too bad Ever After's most notorious criminal, the Big Bad Wolf, is also after the wishes. And anyone who gets in his way gets eaten! From beloved baseball author Alan Gratz comes a novel in which classic literary characters are baseball crazy, and one real-world boy must face his fears and discover the surprising truth about himself.

A bold, sweeping novel about life and art in 20th-century America, based on the life of Georgia O'Keeffe. Ava Boldin is a visionary woman who will let nothing stand in the way of her artistic genius. She leaves behind the glitter of the New York art world, and a husband as well, for the magic, light, and solitude of the American Southwest.

A well-formatted easy to read edition.On arriving at a rural monastery, the monk Ambrosius meets a young girl, Benedicta. She is shunned by the local community for being the daughter of the local hangman, but Ambrosius is drawn into a dangerous sympathy with her, and in defiance of the community and his superiors, he starts spending time alone with her. But when her virtue is corrupted by an impetuous young man, the stage is set for a battle between heart, mind, body, spirit, the sins of the past, and redemption. Allegedly a rewriting from a lost German original, Ambrose Bierce's 1892 novel reads as a seamless, almost folktale-like masterpiece.

The five short novellas which comprise this anthology were written between 1890 and World War I. All share a common setting-the Eastern European Jewish town or shtetl, and all deal in different ways with a single topic-the Jewish confrontation with modernity. The authors of these novellas are among the greatest masters of Yiddish prose. In their work, today's reader will discover a literary tradition of considerable scope, energy, and variety and will come face to face with an exceptionally memorable cast of characters and with a human community now irrevocably lost.In her general introduction, Professor Wisse traces the development of modern Yiddish literature in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and describes the many shifts that took place between the Yiddish writers and the world about which they wrote. She also furnishes a brief introduction for each novella, giving the historical and biographical background and offering a critical interpretation of the work.

This is a reissue of a critical introduction to the novels of Virginia Woolf, first published in 1977. It makes close, illuminating readings of her nine novels, placing Woolf in her literary context and providing an accessible, clear and valuable guide for students starting out on a study of Woolf as a novelist, and for general readers seeking a fresh, helpful entry-point to the challenge of reading Woolf. Twenty years later, Hermione Lee wrote a prize-winning and acclaimed biography of Virginia Woolf: this critical study represented an early stage in this biographer-criticâe(tm)s life-long interest and involvement with Woolfâe(tm)s life and work.

A superb introduction to modern Japanese fiction as well as a memoir of his own love affair with Japanese literature and culture, this volume consists of chapters on five modern Japanese novelists whom Donald Keene knew personally: Yasunari Kawabata, Yukio Mishima, Jun'ichiro Tanizaki, Ryotaro Shiba, and Kobo Abe. Each chapter opens with a vignette describing Keene's personal encounters with these famous men, blending his autobiographical observations with literary and cultural analysis.

From the author of Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder , Calamities of Exile combines three gripping narratives that afford a sort of double CAT scan into the natures of both modern totalitarianism and timeless exile. "Beautiful but harrowing chronicles of three exiles that probe the moral and personal risks of their encounters with totalitarianism. . . . Piercing and timely."— Kirkus Reviews , starred review "Weschler . . . combines a novelist's gift for drama with the objectivity and research skills of a journalist. . . . The result is three gripping profiles of very human but also extraordinary men."— Publishers Weekly "[Weschler's] thorough accounting of the men's covert operations, assumed identities and strained relationships with fathers, wives, and colleagues creates a disturbing triptych of the perils of totalitarianism."—Lance Gould, New York Times Book Review "Weschler tells these three tragic tales with an admirable combination of psychological penetration, intellectual thrust, concision and compassion."—Francis King, Spectator "Endlessly absorbing. . . . Breathtaking."—Jeri Laber, Los Angeles Times Book Review

"From the acclaimed author of Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage and the memoir W-3, a trio of novellas about three women's bold exploration of the desire for belonging as it comes into conflict with the fulfillment of our individual selves. With an introduction by Rumaan Alam. Over the past several years, A Public Space has brought the work of Bette Howland back into print. First published in 1983, Things to Come and Go is her final book, and a showcase of her stunning talent--the razor-sharp observations, the elusive narrators, the language at once experimental and classical. Nearly forty years later, it's writing that "feel[s] revelatory and imperative to the work we might all be trying to make next" (Lynn Steger Strong)."--provided by publisher.

After being asked to investigate the charges against a white nationalist accused of treason and murder, Joe King Oliver, with help from bodyguard and mercenary Oliya Ruez, embarks on a winding quest to expose the truth.