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'Diane DeSanders's genius lies in her ability to capture the intimate interiority of a very particular childhood while at the same time interrogating larger questions of class, race, and religion. Hap and Hazard and the End of the World is a gorgeous, profoundly original novel.'—Dawn Raffel, author of Carrying the Body and The Secret Life of Objects'Rollicking, tilted, and transporting. As the young narrator tries to manage her fraying family—war-wounded father, suffering mother, misbehaving relatives galore—DeSanders takes us deeper, always with such tenderness and beautiful observation into the ways we shape a narrative that keeps us whole.'—Victoria Redel, author of Loverboy and Before EverythingFor Dick and Jane, Dallas after World War II is a place of promise and prosperity: the first home air conditioners are making summertime bearable and Dick's position at his father's business, the Cadillac dealership, is assured. Jane has help with the house and the children, and garden parties and holiday celebrations are spirited social affairs. For the oldest of their three daughters, however, life is full of frustrating mysteries. The stories the adults tell her don't make sense. Too curious for comfort, she finds her questions only seem to annoy them. Why won't they tell the truth about Santa? What is that Holy Spirit business, and what is the difference between an angel and a ghost? Why is her mother often so tense and sad? And why does her father keep flying into violent rages?Hap and Hazard and the End of the World is an intimate, finely crafted novel about the innocence and vulnerability of childhood and the dangers posed by adults who cannot cope with life's complexities. It is also about the ingenuity born of loneliness and neglect, and the surprising, strange beauty of the world.A fifth-generation Texan, Diane DeSanders is a history buff, theater lover, poet, mother, and grandmother. Between careers as a history teacher and antiques dealer, she has worked in regional theater in almost every capacity. She now writes, gardens, and sings in Brooklyn, New York. This is her first novel.

The seventh novel in the Rougon-Macquart cycle, L'Assommoir (1877) is the story of a woman's struggle for happiness in working-class Paris. It was a contemporary bestseller, outraged conservative critics, and launched a passionate debate about the legitimate scope of modern literature. At the centre of the novel stands Gervaise, who starts her own laundry and for a time makes a success of it. But her husband Coupeau squanders her earnings in the Assommoir, the local drinking shop, and gradually the pair sink into poverty and squalor. L'Assommoir is the most finely crafted of Zola's novels, and this new translation captures not only the brutality but also the pathos of its characters'lives. This book is a pwerful indictment of nineteenth-century social conditions, and the introduction examines its relation to politics and art as well as its explosive effect on the literary scene. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Meet the Troutmans. Hattie's boyfriend has just dumped her, her sister Min's back in the psych ward, and Min's kids, Logan and Thebes, are not talking and talking way too much, respectively. Then there's the past, in which Min tried to kill Hattie once and to kill herself a lot, in which Min threw the kids'father out of the house, in which Hattie dropped out of school, in which Logan and his friends kidnapped a friend and drove around town with him in the trunk, and in which Thebes frequently impersonated their insane mom in order to cut class. When Hattie returns to take care of her niece and nephew, she's rapidly freaked out by the realization that the responsibility is in fact far greater than she'd expected, and she decides to take the kids in the family van to find their father, last heard to be running an idiosyncratic art gallery in South Dakota. What ensues is a remarkable journey across the United States, as aunt and kids discover one another to be both far crazier and far more normal than any of them thought.

Ellen McKinnon's clairvoyant experiences damage her mental and physical health. She must face and assimilate an unwanted but unavoidable family secret, experiencing a revelation that turns her life around in this insightful look at the rift between mysticism and rationalism.

It came to me first of all, quite suddenly, as a sort of legendary tale, suggested by my recollection of having once, in early childhood, seen a linen-weaver with a bag on his back; but, as my mind dwelt on the subject, I became inclined to a more realistic treatment. Falsely accused, cut off from his past, Silas the weaver is reduced to a spider-like existence, endlessly weaving his web and hoarding his gold. Meanwhile, Godfrey Cass, son of the squire, contracts a secret marriage. While the village celebrates Christmas and New Year, two apparently inexplicable events occur: Silas loses his gold and finds a child on his hearth. The imaginative control George Eliot displays as her narrative gradually reveals causes and connections has rarely been surpassed. Silas Marner (1861) is the shortest and most immediately accessible of Eliot's novels. She takes the materials of legend and fairy tale and provides them with a historically precise setting, drawing on some of the most advanced ideas of her day in order to represent states of mind and belief at the limits of rational perception. This edition, which is based on the carefully corrected text George Eliot prepared a few months after the first edition, is accompanied by an introduction which illuminates the intellectual context of what has often been presented as a nostalgic, sentimental tale. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.