8 results for "Historical Fiction"

The Volcano Lover A Romance

Susan Sontag
Set in 18th century Naples, based on the lives of Sir William Hamilton, his celebrated wife Emma, and Lord Nelson, and peopled with many of the great figures of the day, this unconventional, bestselling historical romance from the National Book Award-winning author of In America touches on themes of sex and revolution, the fate of nature, art and the collector's obsessions, and, above all, love.
Macmillan 1992 419 pages

The group

McCarthy, Mary
Written with a trenchant, sardonic edge, The Group is a dazzlingly outspoken novel and a captivating look at the social history of America between two world wars. "Juicy, shocking, witty, and almost continually brilliant."--CosmopolitanAward-winning Mary McCarthy's most celebrated novel follows the lives of eight Vassar graduates, known simply to their classmates as “the group.” An eclectic mix of personalities and upbringings, they meet a week after graduation to watch Kay Strong get married. After the ceremony, the women begin their adult lives -- traveling to Europe, tackling the worlds of nursing and publishing, and finding love and heartbreak in the streets of New York City. Through the years, some of the friends grow apart and some become entangled in each other's affairs, but all vow not to become like their mothers and fathers. It is only when one of them passes away that they all come back together again to mourn the loss of a friend, a confidante, and most importantly, a member of the group.
Harcourt Brace 2001 487 pages

In Sunlight and in Shadow

Mark Helprin
A literary love story that rivals those celebrated in earlier classics. "St. Louis Post-Dispatch" In Helprin s rhapsodic rendering . . . "In Sunlight and in Shadow" is . . . the romance of life itself. " Los Angeles Times" In the summer of 1946, New York City pulses with energy. Harry Copeland, a World War II veteran, has returned home to run the family business. Yet his life is upended by a single encounter with the young singer and heiress Catherine Thomas Hale, as each falls for the other in an instant. They pursue one another in a romance played out in Broadway theaters, Long Island mansions, the offices of financiers, and the haunts of gangsters. Catherine s choice of Harry over her longtime fiance endangers Harry s livelihood and threatens his life. In the end, Harry must summon the strength of his wartime experience to fight for Catherine, and risk everything. In its storytelling heft, its moral rectitude, the solemn magnificence of its writing and the splendor of its hymns to New York City, ["In Sunlight and in Shadow"] is a spiritual pendant to Winter s Tale and every bit as extraordinary . . . Even the most stubbornly resistant readers will soon be disarmed by the nobility of the novel s sentiments and seduced by the pure music of its prose. "Wall Street Journal" [NO AUTHOR PHOTO] Mark Helprin is the acclaimed author of Winter s Tale, A Soldier of the Great War, The Pacific, Memoir from Antproof Case, Freddy and Fredericka, Ellis Island, and numerous other works. "
Mariner Books/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2013 705 pages

The Inheritors

Harold Robbins
From the author of The New York Times #1 bestselling novel The Carpetbaggers comes a powerful yarn exposing the money, fame, sex, politics, and power that accompany being at the top of the entertainment industry.... Based on the real lives of network executives and other high-profile personalities in the early days when television first became a viable threat to the all-powerful business of the silver screen, The Inheritors is the first in Harold Robbins's "Trilogy of Greed," and spent 21 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list. Steve Gaunt, the rebellious visionary, is the head of a successful television empire, making him a hit, both in the ratings and with the gorgeous women he meets. Sam Benjamin, one of the last of the old motion picture tycoons, desperately wants to hold on to the power that has long been associated with the more "glamorous" part of the business--the movies. When the two combine forces, they have the potential to remake the entertainment industry--or be each other's undoing. Will their friendship fall apart when their money is on the line, or will their partnership make them even more wealthy and powerful? Entertainment is a dirty business, built by ruthless mavericks, and friendships can fall in a heartbeat when money is on the line. The only rule is that nothing is real in Hollywood. In its initial publication, The Inheritors was a timely indictment of an industry on fire. Today, it is a fascinating look back at a time when television was just coming into its own, and how the movie industry dealt with this new and growing threat.
Oghma Creative Media 2019-11-19 400 pages

The two hotel francforts

Leavitt, David
It is the summer of 1940, and Lisbon is one of the only neutral ports left in Europe - a city filled with spies, crowned heads and refugees of every nationality, tipping back absinthe to while away the time until their escape. Awaiting safe passage to New York on the S. S. Manhattan, two couples meet: Pete and Julia Winters, expatriate Americans fleeing their sedate life in Paris; and Edward and Iris Freleng, elegant, independently wealthy, bohemian, and beset by the social and sexual anxieties of their class. Swept up in the tumult, the hidden currents of the lives of these four characters - Julia's status as a Jew, Pete and Edward's affair, Iris's increasingly desperate efforts to save her tenuous marriage - begin to come loose. This journey will change the four of them irrevocably, as Europe sinks into war.
Bloomsbury 2013 257 pages

Unravelling

Elizabeth Graver
From a small, bogside cabin in rural New England, 38-year-old Aimee Slater unravels the story of her life, attempting to make sense of the tangled thread that leads from her mother's house-a short, unbridgeable distance away-to the world she now inhabits. It is soon after the Civil War; Aimee lives alone, but is graced with visits from two friends, a crippled man and a troubled eleven-year-old girl. She is perpetually caught between the sensual world she so desires and the divine retribution passed down to her by her mother's scorn. How Aimee ultimately creates a life for herself and bridges that distance makes for a moving story of love and loss. Told in a voice of spare New England lyricism, Unravelling is a remarkably haunting account of the power of redemption.
Harcourt Brace 1999 304 pages

Rending the Garment

Willa Schneberg
Poetry. Jewish Studies. RENDING THE GARMENT is a narrative tapestry encompassing persona poems, prose poems, flash fiction, imagined meetings with historical figures, ancestral appearances, and ephemera. This series of linked poems explores the life and times of one Jewish family. "RENDING THE GARMENT tells a familiar tale, the Jewish immigrant family romance, but with an important difference: using shifting points of views and narrative interruptions (biographical essays, scolding notes from school Principals, diary entries), not to mention a cast of characters as lively as a borscht belt revue, Willa Schneberg tells her story from the inside, where grief and love live side by side in bed, 'neither old, nor young' bodies outside of time. A fresh, original and moving addition to our literature." Philip Schultz "RENDING THE GARMENT draws us intimately into one family and through them into the world of immigrant Jews born almost a century ago and their lives in America. Willa Schneberg has a fine ear and her poems capture their voices, their cadences, the way they think, mixing Yiddish with English, the old and the new. The people of her poems come alive on the page: irreverant, beautiful, flawed, funny, sad, loving, opinionated, stubborn, real. They embody a wealth of contradictions, perfectly exemplified in these lines that her mother who smoked so glamorously and lost her voice to cancer writes in a notebook near the end of her life, 'I'm Jewish. / There is no God.' I recognize these people and I come to care for them deeply." Ellen Bass "In RENDING THE GARMENT, Willa Schneberg juxtaposes humor and heartbreak, Jewish Brooklyn's cultural/ linguistic referents and post-modernity. Readers hear the iconic, self-mocking conversation of familial bickering and the deep devotion of a daughter charged with helping her parents die 'good' deaths. 'Soon it will be as if language never knew him, ' says one speaker of her father. With precise, unsparing detail, Schneberg's language rewards our journey into the difficult, mortal territory we all share." Robin Becker "In one memorable episode in Willa Schneberg's RENDING THE GARMENT, the author's dying mother sits by the hospital bed of the Israeli poet Abba Kovner. 'Stars don't go out when we die, ' he writes on her notepad. 'Now you're talking, ' she writes in reply. This funny, poignant imagined moment is representative of the moments Schneberg has gathered to create her richly woven memoir in poetry of a loving, contentious Jewish family and the world they lived in of junk men, corset shops, and immigrant ambitions." Lee Sharkey"
Box Turtle Press 2014 103 pages

West Side Story

Irving Shulman
The classic novelization of one of Broadway’s most enduring and beloved musicals, updated with a beautiful new cover. Maria is young and innocent and has never known love—until Tony. And Tony, searching for life beyond the savagery of the streets, has discovered love for the first time with her, too. But Maria’s brother is the leader of the Sharks and Tony had once led the rival Jets. Now, both gangs are claiming the same turf and with tensions rising to the point of explosion, it seems there is no way to stop a rumble. Tony promised Maria that he would stay out of it. But will he be able to keep his word or will their newfound love be destroyed by violence or even death? Evocative and unforgettable, this novelization brings out all of the depth, drama, and beauty of one of the most enduring stories in the history of American theater.
Simon and Schuster 2021-11-16 160 pages