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.

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. "

The seven stories collected here showcase McCarthy's formidable powers of observation, her deliciously witty writing style, and her celebrated talent for dissecting characters with biting acuity. A young woman looks for subtle (and not-so-subtle) ways to escape her unsatisfying marriage; an innocuous single man's friends realize his companionship has an enormous price; and an Italian guide puzzles a traveling pair of Americans.

This is the author's first novel, which relates the experiences of a young bohemian intellectual. The six episodes create a fascinating portrait of a New York social circle of the 1930s. McCarthy's bold insight and virtuoso style won her immediate recognition as one of the most accomplished, versatile, and penetrating writers in americanca.

With her trademark combination of candor, brass, and wit, Bernhard--a regular on the Roseanne show--presents her singular take on romance, love, and sex in the '90s. The author of Confessions of a Pretty Lady, Bernhard draws on her own experiences to present thought-provoking essays about the sweet-and-sour experiences of love.

We first meet Lucy Appelbaum, the heroine of Paradise, New York , n 1970, when she is a nine year old girl enjoying her family's Catskills hotel, the Garden of Eden. Ten years later, having found nothing else at which she can distinguish herself, she tries to save the Eden by capitalizing on a wave of nostalgia for the Borscht Belt, running the hotel as a sort of living museum of Yiddish culture. In the course of that season, Lucy comes to realize her love for the hotel's black handyman, Mr. Jefferson -- and the difficulties she faces in overcoming the barriers between them. She battles her grandmother's not-so-subtle attempts to sabotage her success, her parents' superstitious fear of anything that attracts attention to the Jews, and her brother's contention that what Lucy is doing is more a matter of ego than authentic religious feeling. On top of all this, Lucy must contend with the Hasid who buys the chicken farm next door, a cell of ancient Jewish Communist who foment a strike among Eden's overworked young staff, and a gay chef and a gay baker who want to prove to the world that kosher cuisine can satisfy the most sophisticated gourmet. Among the novel's characters are Shirley and Nat Feidel, who barely survived the Holocaust but refuse to allow bitterness to rule their lives; Mami Goshgarian, the Eden's tumeler ; and Jimmy Kilcoin, and Irish Catholic insurance adjustor who has earned a reputation as "the Don Juan of the Catskills" and is determined to seduce Lucy before summer's end.

This show-within-a-show follows the romance between a chorus girl and an assistant stage manager leading to their secret marriage. Their happy union is threatened by the electrician who still carries a torch for the girl and, in a drunken rage, tries to kill them both. A contrasting romance involves the stage manager, whose credo never to fall for a girl in a show he's working on is complicated when a dancer he's been wooing is suddenly thrown into the cast of 'Me and Juliet.' Informed by rich insights into the world of Broadway - how jobs are gotten and lost, the inside tricks of the trade and the pitfalls of backstage romances - Me and Juliet is an innovative, irresistible show that consistently delivers both musically and dramatically.

This book has been considered by academicians and scholars of great significance and value to literature. This forms a part of the knowledge base for future generations. We have represented this book in the same form as it was first published. Hence any marks seen are left intentionally to preserve its true nature.

Sir Arthur Wing Pinero (1855-1934) was an English actor and later an important dramatist and stage director. In 1874 he joined R. H. Wyndham's company at the Theatre Royal in Edinburgh. After also acting in Liverpool, he joined Henry Irving's Lyceum Theatre company in London in 1876, where he acted in supporting roles for five years, and later played under the Bancrofts' management at the Haymarket Theatre. He received good notice in Sheridan's The Rivals, in 1884, which he had revised himself. He began writing plays in the late 1870s while at the Lyceum, including Daisy's Escape in 1879 and Bygones in 1880. He became a prolific and successful playwright, authoring fifty-nine plays. His 1923 romance The Enchanted Cottage was successfully filmed in 1924 and 1945. He was knighted in 1909. His works include: Two Hundred a Year (1877), The Squire (1881), The Money Spinner (1881), The Magistrate (1885), The Schoolmistress (1886), Dandy Dick (1887), Sweet Lavender (1888), The Profligate (1889), Lady Bountiful (1891), The Cabinet Minister (1892), The Second Mrs. Tanqueray (1893) and The Weaker Sex (1894).

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.