Show Boat is a 1926 novel by American author and dramatist Edna Ferber. It chronicles the lives of three generations of performers on the Cotton Blossom, a floating theater that travels between small towns on the banks of the Mississippi, from the 1880s to the 1920s. The story moves from the Reconstruction-Era river boat to Gilded-Age Chicago to Roaring-Twenties New York, and finally returns to the Mississippi, the river that has flowed throughout the novel with implacable indifference to the petty concerns of mere humans. WIKI

William Goldman's remarkable career spans more than five decades, and his credentials run the gamut from bestselling novelist to Oscar-winning screenwriter to Hollywood raconteur. He's beloved by millions of readers as the author of the classic comic-romantic fantasy The Princess Bride. And he's notorious for creating the most harrowing visit to the dentist in literary and cinematic history--in one of the seminal thrillers of the twentieth century. . . .MARATHON MANTom "Babe" Levy is a runner in every racing tirelessly toward his goals of athletic and academic excellence--and endlessly away from the specter of his famous father's scandal-driven suicide. But an unexpected visit from his beloved older brother will set in motion a chain of events that plunge Babe into a vortex of terror, treachery, and murder--and force him into a race for his life . . . and for the answer to the fateful question, "Is it safe?"

The publication of 'Aurora Dawn' in 1947 immediately established Herman Wouk as a novelist of exceptional literary and historical significance. Today, Aurora Dawn's themes have grown still more relevant and, in the manner of all great fiction, its characters and ironies have only been sharpened by the passage of time. Wouk's raucous satire of Manhattan's high-power elite recounts the adventures of one Andrew Reale as he struggles toward fame and fortune in the early days of radio. On the quest for wealth and prestige, ambitious young Andrew finds himself face-to-face with his own devil's bargain: forced to choose between soul and salary, true love and a strategic romance, Wouk's riotous, endearing hero learns a timeless lesson about the high cost of success in America's most extravagant metropolis.

The plot of GENTLEMAN'S AGREEMENT concerns the experiences of a young Gentile writer who poses as a Jew in order to secure material on anti-Semitism for a series of magazine articles. A thesis novel concerning the social and economic aspects of anti-Semitism in American life. Timely when issued in 1947 - timely today. Number 1 position on the New York Times Best Seller List for five straight months in 1947. Film version chosen as Best Picture of the Year by the New York Film Critics Circle. "If a masterful work of art is one which probes deep into the consciousness of the beholder to create a lasting impression and to forge and refine the higher human impulses, then GENTLEMAN'S AGREEMENT deserves such a description. It is a rare combination of absorbing story and statement of a current problem." - The Indianapolis Star

As far back as 1922 the great poet Garcia Lorca had predicted that I was destined for a literary career and had suggested that my future lie precisely in the "pure novel." In Salvador Dalí's only novel, the reader enters the bizarre world already familiar to us from his paintings. Dalí describes, in vividly visual terms, the intrigues and love affairs of a group of dazzling, eccentric aristocrats who, with their luxurious and extravagant lifestyle, symbolize the decadence of the 1930s. The story of the tangled lives of the protagonists, from the February riots of 1934 in Paris to the closing days of World War II, constitutes a brilliant and dramatic vehicle for Dalí’s vision and reads as an epitaph of pre-war Europe.

On one level, The Stepson is the tale of a young man's infatuation with his stepmother, a well-placed bourgeoise with painterly ambitions, of that young man's replication of his father's life (low-class affair, illegitimate son, marriage); and of his own successive marriages and affairs, none of which work. At a much deeper level, it is a study of what Russians call (after Goncharov's novel) oblomovschina, the paralysis of the will. Jean-Noel, the stepson in question, is a nullity with ambitions as long as he needn't do anything to advance them. He doesn't act, he undergoes. It is the intricate, tortuously rationalized play of his passivity before fate (an awful biological mother, a dreadful, deprived younger brother; young women, on an ascending social scale, who want to fill his void) that makes this one of Bove's most fascinating novels, a sort of tragic bedroom farce. . Bove is the Proust of the lower orders, of the defeated, of collective anonymity; he is all circumstance, context, distance. His style is a form of hyper-objectivity; his world bathes in a light where events always just fail to be understood. We should be grateful that forty years after the oblivion into which he fell after 1945 we have recovered a novelist whose work so perfectly incarnates the underside of French life between the wars, and who is now recognized as one of the key French writers of this century.

A novel of upmanship espionage in which a jobless American is plunged into a spy mission in Venice.

The same kind of biting wit and madcap humor which have helped make Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and Jumpers two of the most celebrated stage works of our time are in evidence again in this, the first novel so far, of the famous English playwright. Lord Malquist & Mr. Moon is set in contemporary London; however, its cast includes not only the eighteenth-century figure of the dandified Malquist and his ineffectual Boswell, Moon, but also a couple of cowboys with live bullets in their sixshooters, a lion, and a donkey-borne Irishman claiming to be the Risen Christ. The novel matter-of-factly accommodates absurd and comic visions familiar from the author’s stage works in which a series of misadventures offer a hilarious but ominous commentary on the manners and morals of contemporary society.

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.

Leonard Michaels (January 2, 1933 - May 10, 2003) was an American writer of short stories, novels, and essays. He was born in New York City to Jewish parents; his father was born in Poland. He went to college and earned his B.A. from New York University and went on to acquire an M.A. as well as a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Michigan, before spending most of his adult life in Berkeley, California.Going Places, his first book of short stories, made his reputation as one of the most brilliant of that era's fiction writers; the stories are urban, funny, and written in a private, hectic diction that gives them a remarkable edge. The follow-up, coming six years later (Michaels was perhaps not prolific enough to build a widely popular career), was I Would Have Saved Them If I Could, a collection as strong as the first.

A great panorama of the years leading up to the Russian Revolution. The novel focuses on St. Petersburg, Warsaw, and Moscow, and how various people deal with these earth shaking events.

A collection of stories and a novella CONTENTS 003 Friday's Footprint 029 The Last Kiss 040 The Night the Favorite Came Home 056 Little Willie 067 A Style of Her Own 082 The Bridegroom 093 Check Yes or No 107 The Gentle Art 125 The Path of the Moon's Dark Fortnight 146 Our Bovary 162 A Thing of the Past 178 Harry's Presence 192 An Image of Success

Dust jacket design by James and Ruth McCrea. His first novel after many non-fiction books about jazz.

Winner of the 2005 Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize "What do I feel?" asks the narrator, Nora García, as she goes back to a Mexican village she has not visited in years to attend the funeral of her ex-husband, a famous pianist who has died of a massive heart attack. This deeply moving novel is the unspoken answer to Nora's self-questioning. "The heart has reasons that reason knows nothing of," Pascal said, and this aphorism of knowing and not knowing is at the core of the novel. Employing motifs of "the heart," modes of music from the tango to Bach, and allusions to poetry, the text is a rich amalgam that reveals a life lived deep within literary culture. Like her ex-husband, Nora is a musician, a cellist, and so it is fitting that her novel takes the form of a canon and fugue: phrases circle and repeat, variations are introduced, motifs come and go and intermingle, reflecting a paralysis of the grieving. The novel moves inexorably toward the burial and the revelation of Nora's complex, emotional reaction to Juan's death. Throughout the novel, Nora is moving in the "wake" of that death, being pulled along by the ceremonies of the funeral, the mass, the burial. A rich, nuanced evocation of states of mind and emotion, The Wake powerfully illuminates Nora's quiet grief and rage.

1928. American author, Hurst is noted for her sympathetic, sentimental novels. The book begins: Twenty-two sat down to dinner on a Thanksgiving afternoon at four, 1903, in the House on Sycamore Street. It might have been the house in Downing Street so far as its centrifugal significance was ground into the consciousness of the men, women and children gathered about its board. See other titles by this author available from Kessinger Publishing.

The Devil's Stocking is the story of Ruby Calhoun, a boxer accused of murder in a shadowy world of low-purse fighters, cops, con artists, and bar girls. Chronicling a battle for truth and human dignity which gives way to a larger story of life and death decisions, literary grandmaster Nelson Algren's last novel is a fitting capstone to a long and brilliant career.-Back cover.

The Heart Is Katmandu tells a tale of new love―of paradise gained. Set in today's Haifa and presented in 237 dream-like small chapters, it is a book in which shyness and stumbling tenderness emerge triumphant. Poet Peter Cole has made a beautiful translation, capturing Hoffmann's intense and unfathomably original style. A starred Kirkus Review acclaimed the novel "Beautiful, humane, priceless."

From Booklist In this collection of stories, Gioseffi, prizewinning anthologist of Women on War (1988), brings together pieces that center on outsiders, race relations, or female sexuality. In the longest story (the novella), a former prostitute and a circus freak find love, only to be torn apart by their pasts. One group of stories deals with the problems of immigrants assimilating to the U.S. Another set deals with racism within the U.S., by and against those who have already been assimilated. Some stories have such a strong element of surprise that they border on magical realism or the supernatural. In many, the main character has or begins an active sexual life. Gioseffi's hard-hitting and guileless prose sometimes adds mystery and sometimes merely confounds. But readers interested in the politically disempowered confronting exploitation and finally having their say will find satisfaction in these parables. Kevin Grandfield Product description Book by Gioseffi, Daniela

This novel of exile focuses on the disassociative aspects of culture shock, language barriers, and political evolution. "Alicia Kozameh’s 259 Leaps is a surprising, engaging, exhilarating book from a gifted writer with a major tale to tell—the contemporary experience of exile—not only because of her prison experience in Argentina and her wandering years in many countries, but because exile is, in this book, the very condition of language. Exile is the site of communication and the locus of speech; it is the excess of life that only language can shelter and host. The writer’s pilgrimage, thus, traces the construction of the book, and the book humanizes the space of exile." —Julio Ortega, professor, Brown University This novel of exile focuses on the disassociative aspects of culture shock, language barriers, and political evolution.

These two novels together comprise one of the most fascinating, obsessive, and erotic works of contemporary French fiction. Philosophically and theologically concerned with "the tension between the form and its actuality," on the simple level of fiction they relate the amatory adventures of an elderly philosopher and his voluptuous young wife whom he is compelled to expose to temptations of the flesh on the premise that identity becomes actualized through interaction with a third person. Klossowski explores the nature of the ultimate relationship between body and soul in a rare combination of a surrealistic work with sadistic, philosophical, and theological overtones.