Presents the timeless love story between a farm boy named Westley and the beautiful Princess Buttercup, along with the author's comments on life and art as he attempts to edit the children's classic. A tale of true love and high adventure, pirates, princesses, giants, miracles, fencing, and a frightening assortment of wild beasts. William Goldman's modern fantasy classic is a simple, exceptional story about quests--for riches, revenge, power, and, of course, true love--that's thrilling and timeless. Anyone who lived through the 1980s may find it impossible--inconceivable, even--to equate "The Princess Bride" with anything other than the sweet, celluloid romance of Westley and Buttercup, but the film is only a fraction of the ingenious storytelling you'll find in these pages. Rich in character and satire, the novel is set in 1941 and framed cleverly as an "abridged" retelling of a centuries-old tale set in the fabled country of Florin that's home to "Beasts of all natures and descriptions. Pain. Death. Brave men. Coward men. Strongest men. Chases. Escapes. Lies. Truths. Passions."

"On a clear December morning in 1937, at the famous gold clock in Grand Central Terminal, Joe Reynolds, a hardworking railroad man from Queens, meets a vibrant young woman who seems mysteriously out of place. Nora Lansing is a Manhattan socialite whose flapper clothing, pearl earrings, and talk of the Roaring Twenties don't seem to match the bleak mood of Depression-era New York. Captivated by Nora from her first electric touch, Joe despairs when he tries to walk her home and she disappears. Finding her again--and again--will become the focus of his love and his life. Nora, an aspiring artist and fiercely independent, is shocked to find she's somehow been trapped, her presence in the terminal governed by rules she cannot fathom. It isn't until she meets Joe that she begins to understand the effect that time is having on her, and the possible connections to the workings of Grand Central and the astrological phenomenon known as Manhattanhenge. As thousands of visitors pass under the famous celestial blue ceiling each day, Joe and Nora create a life unlike any they could have imagined. With infinite love in a finite space, they take full advantage of the "Terminal City" within a city, dining at the Oyster Bar, visiting the Whispering Gallery, and making a home at the Biltmore Hotel. But when the construction of another historic landmark threatens their future, Nora and Joe are forced to test the limits of freedom and love. Delving into Grand Central's rich past, Lisa Grunwald crafts a masterful historical novel about a love affair that defies age, class, place, and even time"--

"Welcome to Heaven, Inc., the grossly mismanaged corporation in the sky. For as long as anyone can remember, the founder and CEO (known in some circles as "God") has been phoning it in. Lately, he's been spending most of his time on the golf course. And when he does show up at work, it's not to resolve wars or end famines, but to Google himself and read what humans have been blogging about him. When God decides to retire (to pursue his lifelong dream of opening an Asian Fusion restaurant), he also decides to destroy Earth. His employees take the news in stride, except for Craig and Eliza, two underpaid angels in the lowly Department of Miracles. Unlike their boss, Craig and Eliza love their jobs - uncapping city fire hydrants on hot days, revealing lost keys in snow banks - and they refuse to accept that earth is going under. The angels manage to strike a deal with their boss. He'll call off his Armageddon, if they can solve their toughest miracle yet: getting the two most socially awkward humans on the planet to fall in love. With doomsday fast approaching, and the humans ignoring every chance for happiness thrown their way, Craig and Eliza must move heaven and earth to rescue them - and the rest of us, too." -- back cover

Harry Trellman doesn't belong. Not in the Chicago orphanage where he is sent by his mother, not in high school (too brainy), not even on the streets. Human attachments? Yes, he has them, but they are like everything else in his life, singular and irregular. People who know him say that he "drowns his feelings in his face," and that he has a Mongolian "masked look." But though Harry stands apart, he has always been a most keen observer, listener, recorder and interpreter, and none of this is lost on the Chicago billionaire, Sigmund Adletsky, who takes Harry into his "brain trust." He retains Harry to advise him. They discuss ordinary things - they gossip together. Old Adletsky has set feelings aside while he amassed his vast fortune. The old man is so apt that he divines the secrets behind Harry's mask, and brings him together with the one person Harry has loved dumbly for forty years. Amy Wustrin has not exactly stood apart from the sexual revolution while waiting for Harry to come wooing. Far from remaining the static object of his fantasy, she has moved about in the real world, from one marriage to another, from rich to broke, from hot high-school girl to correct matron. Still, in Amy, Harry sees what he calls his "actual." Harry has had his opportunities with Amy, but it is not until he finds himself at the cemetery with her for the exhumation and reburial of her husband that he feels free to speak out.

“Jonathan Carroll is a cult waiting to be born, a novelist of rare and terrifying power.”—Pat Conroy Ricocheting between Vienna and Los Angeles, between the worlds of desires and dreams, Sleeping in Flame is a hypnotic literary novel with irresistible elements of fantasy and magic. “I envy anyone who has yet to enjoy the sexy, eerie, and addictive novels of Jonathan Carroll.”—The Washington Post Book World “Jonathan Carroll is a master of sunlit surrealism.”—Jonathan Lethem

"In The Third Body, the poet, novelist, feminist critic, and theorist Helene Cixous interweaves a loose narrative line with anecdotal presentations, autobiography, lyricism, myth, dream, fantasy, philosophical insights, and intertextual citations of and conversations with other authors and thinkers. Cixous evokes the relationship of the female narrator and her lover, a relationship of alternating presences and absences, separations and rejoinings - a passionate and ever-buoyant relationship in which the partners partake of life and death, memory and oblivion, desire and discovery, the transgressive and the visionary, and the chimerical and the "real." This relationship assumes protean forms within a complex web of writing, creating a "third body" out of the entwined bodies of the narrator and her lover. This is a sensuous body endowed with flesh-and-blood reality, and it is also the body of the text: for Cixous, writing is grounded in the physical body, and the physical body becomes writing." "The three dominant texts that Cixous cites or alludes to Wilhelm Jensen's novel Gradiva; Freud's interpretation of that work in the essay "Delusion and Dream"; and Kleist's "Earthquake in Chile" - are integrated with reminiscences of the narrator's dead father, juxtaposed with thoughts about her lover; evocations of the narrator's mother; and ruminations on figures taken from Scripture, classical mythology, and fairy tales." --Book Jacket.

Winter, 1981, and fifteen-year-old Alistair Black is wrestling with the fierce power of his imagination. The boundaries between what is real and what is fantasy are dissolving to increasingly dangerous effect. And then he falls in love with Alice . . . WHAT HAPPENS NOW is a mesmerizing story about love, fear and faith. Atmospheric, suspenseful and spiked with black humour, it confirms Jeremy Dyson as one of the most exciting and original writers of his generation.