Search

•Now an Apple TV+ limited series starring Julianne Moore and Clive Owen• The “haunting…tender, intimate book that makes an epic interior journey” (The New York Times), Lisey's Story is a literary masterpiece—an extraordinarily moving and haunting portrait of a marriage and its aftermath.Lisey lost her husband Scott two years ago, after a twenty-five year marriage of profound and sometimes frightening intimacy. Scott was an award-winning, bestselling novelist and a very complicated man. Early in their relationship, before they married, Lisey knew there was a place Scott went—a place that both terrified and healed him, could eat him alive or give him the ideas he needed in order to live. Now it's Lisey's turn to face Scott's demons, to go to that terrifying place known as Boo'ya Moon. What begins as a widow's effort to sort through the papers of her celebrated husband becomes a nearly fatal journey into the darkness he inhabited. “Intricate...exhilarating” (The New Yorker), perhaps Stephen King's most personal and powerful novel ever, Lisey's Story is about the wellsprings of creativity, the temptations of madness, and the secret language of love. It is a beautiful, “rich portrait of a marriage, and the complicated affection that outlives death” (The Washington Post).

Dany Laferrière qui s'entretient avec Albert Camus… Anne Hébert qui se fait taquiner par Jean-Paul Sartre et Simone de Beauvoir… et Victor-Lévy Beaulieu qui se défile devant Jack Kerouac… Voici un huis clos improbable, mais ô combien réjouissant! Dans une mise en scène légère et carnavalesque, c'est à une véritable fête de la parole et de l'écriture que nous convie Alain Beaulieu. Sa connaissance raffinée de l'œuvre des auteurs qu'il célèbre donne lieu à des échanges tantôt émouvants tantôt d'une irrésistible drôlerie, et sa maîtrise de leur écriture nous offre quelques pastiches tout à fait anthologiques. Pour notre plus grand plaisir, Alain Beaulieu a réuni une quarantaine d'écrivains, des hommes, des femmes, des vivants et des trépassés, autant de Québécois que de Français, pour un huis clos des plus délurés. De Gaston Miron et Jean-Paul Dubois à Amélie Nothomb et Yves Beauchemin ou Réjean Ducharme, tous ils ignorent la raison de leur énigmatique et subite collégialité. La rumeur veut qu'il serait question du sort de la littérature, de son avenir, voire de sa survie. Quand donc Bernard Pivot, leur hôte, se joindra-t-il à eux? Qu'aura-t-il de si cataclysmique à leur apprendre? Qu'est-ce que c'est que cette histoire de Cadillac blanche? Et qui est cet énigmatique Bookie Joe qu'il semble craindre de leur présenter? Le dénouement de ce fascinant huis clos sera à la mesure de l'événement : inattendu et méchamment intelligent.

Hollis Clayton is in trouble. His wife has decamped for the summer, leaving him to pursue his increasingly overwhelming compulsions: drinking; spying on neighbors; worrying about the fate of an abducted local girl; avoiding his editor, who is on the verge of rejecting his new collection of stories; and confronting as obliquely as possible the recent death of his young son. Meanwhile, he is spending more time with Jack Daniels and a stubbornly persistent stray dog than with anyone else, including his girlfriend Marissa, who has either abandoned him or been abandoned by him, he's not sure which. A tender and comic portrait of suburban despair, Fireworks details the events of one strange summer in which a man's troubled soul hangs in the balance. In her perceptive exploration of Hollis's disintegrating life, Elizabeth Winthrop gives us an unforgettably powerful portrait of an anguished man, one who is both endearingly flawed and vividly real.

“With humor and a nice southern accent…a fine follow-up to her highlypraised first novel, Grace at Love Tide.”–Booklist, starred reviewThe year is 1989 and dark currents lurk beneath the smooth surface of theelite Virginia campus where Adelaide Piper has come to study. Her poeticsensibility and idealism only irritate the socialites and cynics who notice herat all.After a heartbreaking loss of innocence, Adelaide must navigate between hergenteel Southern upbringing and the gritty realities of a new generation.Ultimately Adelaide must return to the very ground she once cursed, findinga deeper appreciation for her Southern heritage, however broken and imperfect.Featured in Southern Living's Books of the South

Title from eBook title screen (viewed on August 16, 2006).

BOOKER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • An “extraordinary meditation on mortality, grief, death, childhood and memory'(USA Today) about a middle-aged Irishman who has gone back to the seaside to grieve the loss of his wife. In this luminous novel, John Banville introduces us to Max Morden, a middle-aged Irishman who has gone back to the seaside town where he spent his summer holidays as a child to cope with the recent loss of his wife. It is also a return to the place where he met the Graces, the well-heeled family with whom he experienced the strange suddenness of both love and death for the first time. What Max comes to understand about the past, and about its indelible effects on him, is at the center of this elegiac, gorgeously written novel—among the finest we have had from this masterful writer.

It is 1920 and the beautiful village of Yegen, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, awakens to a new year and two events that are to change the pueblo for ever: the birth of Encarnita, a beautiful dark-eyed girl; and the arrival of the British writer Gerald Brenan and his string of artistic and literary visitors, including Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey and Dora Carrington. Growing up in Yegen, and taught English by Brenan, the beautiful Encarnita longs for the world outside the small pueblo - the stories Brenan and his friends tell her spark her imagination. And so begins her long journey, from the Sierra to Edinburgh, where eighty years after her birth, she will have one last story to tell. Exquisitely written, Encarnita's Journey is a tale as beautiful as its Spanish setting, with touches of true insight into the lives of its literati cast and dark-eyed heroine.

La nueva novela del aclamado autor de El Alquimista y Once Minutos acerca del poder de una obsesión, y la búsqueda de un hombre que intenta recuperar un amor perdido El narrador de El Zahir es un aclamado autor de renombre internacional que vive en Francia y disfruta de los privilegios que le otorgan su fama y su dinero. Esther, su esposa de hace diez años, es corresponsal de guerra y a pesar de su éxito profesional, y su relativa libertad de los confines tradicionales del matrimonio, se enfrenta a una crisis existencial que la atormenta silenciosamente. Un día, Esther desaparece con su amigo Mikhail —quien podría o no ser su amante— y, perplejas ante la ausencia de indicios, las autoridades deciden cuestionar al narrador. Todos se preguntan si Esther fue secuestrada o asesinada, o si fue que simplemente decidió abandonar un matrimonio que la dejaba insatisfecha. El narrador no tiene las respuestas pero poco a poco comienza a interrogarse sobre su propia existencia. Sin embargo un día, Mikhail, el hombre con quien Esther fue visto por última vez, encuentra al narrador y promete llevarlo a donde se encuentra su mujer. Se embarcan un viaje que los lleva del suntuoso glamour de Paris, a Kazakhstan, el lugar de origen de Mikhail. Y es en este misterioso lugar, marcado por una historia a la vez trágica y espiritualmente poderosa, que el narrador comienza a hacer sorprendentes descubrimientos sobre si mismo. Esta evocadora novela escrita por el aclamado autor de los bestsellers internacionales El Alquimista y Once Minutos es la fascinante historia de una obsesión por recuperar un amor perdido, y una búsqueda por comprender cómo se relaciona con la libertad, la realización personal, y la necesidad que cada cual tiene de alcanzar sus metas.

In seventeenth-century Valladolid, Spain's new capital, Miguel Cervantes is busy writing his comic masterpiece, Don Quixote, which is being issued in installments. It is quickly making him the most popular author in the country, when three potential disasters strike: Cervantes discovers that there is a real Don Quixote, just like the character he thought he'd invented; a jealous poet concocts a scheme involving one of the novel's other characters to make Cervantes a laughingstock; and Cervantes falls in love with a beautiful, widowed, but un-available duchess. Many duels, misunderstandings, politicking, and betrayals later, Don Quixote himself comes to Cervantes'rescue.This sparkling tale of crazed knights, thwarted love, and literary rivalry is set against the back-ground of a mighty empire suffering from a century of reckless wars and a ruling hierarchy stultified by patronage and ritual. Peopled with an engagingly idiosyncratic cast that ranges from a Machiavellian duke to a misanthropic poacher, this charming story is imbued with the spirit, verve, and humor of the great novel to which it pays playful tribute. Tilting at Windmills is a dazzling evocation of Cervantes'life and times, and a brilliant weave of fact, fiction, and farce.

Theda Krakow is in a funk. Her sometime boyfriend is gone, her beloved cat has died, and the career leap she's made from copy editor to freelance writer has left her finances—and her spirit—flat. She desperately needs a headline. One day, strolling in her Cambridge neighborhood, Theda spies an adorable stray kitten who leads her to an old woman holed up in a decrepit house full of cats. Could this be the story to catapult Theda out of the dumps? Or deeper into something more sinister?

'You know as well as you sit there that you'd put a pistol-ball into your brain if you had written my books!'Exemplifying Henry James's famous belief that'Art makes life,'The Lesson of the Master is a piercing study of the life that art makes. When the tale's protagonist—a gifted young writer—meets and befriends a famous author he has long idolized, he is both repelled by and attracted to the artist's great secret: the emotional costs of a life dedicated to art. With extraordinary psychological insight and devastating wit, the novella asks the question of whether art is, ultimately, demeaning or ennobling for the artist, while capturing the ambiguities of a life devoted to art, and the choices artists must make. The expatriate James knew these choice well by the time he published the novella in the Universal Review in 1888, and the work reveals him at the height of his powers. The Art of The Novella Series Too short to be a novel, too long to be a short story, the novella is generally unrecognized by academics and publishers. Nonetheless, it is a form beloved and practiced by literature's greatest writers. In the Art Of The Novella series, Melville House celebrates this renegade art form and its practitioners with titles that are, in many instances, presented in book form for the first time.

Award-winning author Millie Criswell has won a loyal following with her gift for creating unforgettable characters with lots of humor and heart. Now comes her newest confection of a novel—a story filled with delicious passion and a delirious sense of fun!It might be hard to picture impish Mia DeNero as a bodyguard, but what she lacks in size she makes up for in determination. So when straight-laced Nick Caruso walks into her office and says he needs protection from the mob because of a book he's writing, she doesn't hesitate to take the job. Moving the studious author into her apartment seems like the best way to protect him from shady characters. But soon after he's settled in, the thick, nerdy glasses come off and Mia starts wondering who's going to protect her from this irresistible new client?Posing as a geeky author on the run from the mob is making FBI agent Nick Caruso crazy. But if it will help him shut down a money laundering operation out of Little Italy, he can ignore the wimp jokes for a little while longer. It's harder to ignore the sassy woman he hired to be his “bodyguard.” There are a number of things he'd like Mia to do to his body, and guarding it isn't on the list. As things heat up—on the job and in the apartment—Nick begins to see he's in danger of losing his heart to the woman he's deceived, and who is determined to save his life....

Joylynn M. Jossel's The Root of All Evil is a sexy, drama-filled, roller coaster of a ride about a woman's pursuit of the perfect man to provide all her needs.THE ALMIGHTY $. SOME PEOPLE PRAY FOR IT.SOME PEOPLE PRAY TO IT.Thirty-four-year-old Klarke Taylor has two children, a pile of bills and creditors who won't leave her alone. And she's had just about enough. So Klarke and her confidants, Breezy and Jeva, resort to devising a shady plan to snag her a man who will make all her monetary dreams come true.Reo Laroque, is a bestselling author and is right where he always dreamed of being in life. He has it all, including women who come out in droves for this high-ticketed bachelor. But all Reo wants is a virtuous woman to claim as his own. Now Klarke has him in her sights and he soon becomes entangled in a twisted pursuit or love, lust and the almighty dollar.

A shotgun marriage of fact and fiction by one of the most highly regarded writers and teachers of our time A writer named George Garrett, suffering from double vision as a result of a neurological disorder, is asked to review a recent, first biography of the late Peter Taylor, a renowned writer who has been his long-time friend and neighbor in Charlottesville. Reflecting on their relationship, Garrett conceives of a character—not unlike himself—a writer in his early 70s, ill and suffering from double vision, named Frank Toomer. He gives Toomer a neighbor, a distinguished short story writer named Aubrey Carver. As the real George Garrett and Peter Taylor are replaced by two very different and imaginary writers, the story becomes a wise and insightful exploration of American literary life, the art of biography, the comical rivalries among writers and academics, notions of success, and the knotty relationship of art to life, fact to fiction, and life to death. Double Vision is a witty tour de force and an elegy for a gifted generation of writers.

From the bestselling, award-winning author of Bad Land comes a powerful novel set in Seattle in 1999, a city troubled by rioting anarchists, vanishing children, and the discovery of an al-Qaeda operative. “A tour de force.” —The Washington Post Book WorldJonathan Raban's powerful novel is set in Seattle at the height of its infatuation with the virtual. It's a place that attracts immigrants. One of these is Tom Janeway, a bookish Hungarian-born Englishman who makes his living commenting on American mores on NPR. Another, who calls himself Chick, is a frenetically industrious illegal alien from China who makes his living any way he can.Through a series of extraordinary but chillingly plausible events, the paths of these newcomers converge. Tom is uprooted from his marriage and must learn to father his endearing eight-year old son part-time. Chick claws his way up from exploited to exploiter. Meanwhile Seattle is a city on the brink. Savage and tender, visionary and addictively entertaining, Waxwings is a major achievement.

When Washington's splendid Union Station opened its doors in 1908, the glorious structure epitomized capital stylishness. Today, restored and refurbished, the station is again a hub of activity where the world's most famous and infamous people meet–and often collide. Now, in Margaret Truman's new Capital Crime novel, this landmark locale becomes the scene of a sensational shooting whose consequences ricochet from seedy bars to the halls of Congress.Historic Union Station means nothing to the elderly man speeding south on the last lap of what turns out to be a one-way journey from Tel Aviv to D.C.–on a train that will soon land him at Gate A-8 and, moments later, at St. Peter's Gate. This weary traveler, whose terminal destination is probably hell, is Louis Russo, former mob hit man and government informer. Two men are at the station to meet him. One is Richard Marienthal, a young writer whose forthcoming book is based on Russo's life. The other is the man who kills him.Russo has returned to help promote Marienthal's book, which, although no one has been allowed to read it, already has some people shaking in their Gucci boots. The powerful fear the contents will not only expose organized crime's nefarious business, but also a top-secret assignment abroad that Russo once masterminded for a very-high-profile Capitol Hill client. As news of Russo's murder rockets from the MPD to the FBI and the CIA, from Congress to the West Wing, the final chapter of the story begins its rapid-fire unfolding.In addition to the bewildered Marienthal and his worried girlfriend, there is an array of memorable characters: rock-ribbed right-wing Senator Karl Widmer; ruthless New York publisher Pamela Warren; boozy MPD Detective Bret Mullin; shoe-shine virtuoso Joe Jenks; dedicated presidential political adviser Chet Fletcher; and President Adam Parmele himself–not to mention freelance snoops, blow-dried climbers, and a killer or two. There's no place like the nation's capital, and as her myriad fans know, Margaret Truman always gets it right. Murder at Union Station is a luxury express, nonstop delight.

Possessing a style of deceptive simplicity, emotional immediacy and tremendous psychological point, among the novels, short stories and screenplays that complete his career, Fante's crowning accomplishment is the Arturo Bandini tetralogy. This quartet of novels tell of Fante's fictional alter-ego Bandini, an impoverished young Italian-American escaping his suffocating home in Colorado for Depression-era Los Angeles. In the beginning, it is the triple weights of poverty, father and Church that Bandini struggles under but though the physical escape is complete, the psychological imprint continues as he comes to terms with love, desire and the knowledge his talent may not be recognised.

Ninety years ago the Toomey brothers, along with twenty-five other men and four thousand head of cattle, vanished en route to Arizona. When writer and historian Dan Sheridan is invited to the missing brothers'ranch by its current owner, he jumps at the chance. The visit fits right in with his plan to solve the century-old mystery—but it turns out that his host isn't a fan of books, writers, or people who don't mind their own business. Soon Dan is living the dangers of the Old West firsthand—tracked through the savage wilderness by vicious killers straight out of the most violent pages of his stories. However, his enemies have made one serious mistake: Sheridan is no pencil-pushing greenhorn, and killing him won't be as easy as they think.

A mesmerizing novel of deception and betrayal from the acclaimed author of Wartime Lies and About Schmidt. John North, a prize-winning American writer, is suddenly beset by dark suspicions about the real value of his work. Over endless hours and bottles of whiskey consumed in a mysterious café called L'Entre Deux Mondes, he recounts, in counterpoint to his doubts, the one story he has never told before, perhaps the only important one he will ever tell. North's chosen interlocutor–who could be his doppelgänger–is transfixed by the revelations and becomes the narrator of North's tale. North has always been faithful to his wife, Lydia, but when one of his novels achieves a special success, he allows himself a dalliance with Léa, a starstruck young journalist. Coolly planning to make sure that his life with Lydia will not be disturbed, North is taken off guard when Léa becomes obsessed with him and he with her elaborate erotic games. As the hypnotic and serpentine confession unfurls, we gradually discover the extraordinary lengths to which North has gone to indulge a powerful desire for self-destruction. Shipwreck is a daring parable of the contradictory impulses that can rend a single soul–narcissism and self-loathing, refinement and lust. BONUS: This edition includes an excerpt from Louis Begley's Memories of a Marriage.

Following the success of his wildly popular debut novel, Sean Murphy returns with a hip, imaginative, and slyly comedic tale set amidst a West Coast world of wildfires and wannabes, hipsters and heavy smog—offering a wry, rollicking look at love, the literati, and Southern California.Frank, a penniless and hapless writer, has nothing to show for himself but an unfinished novel and an unclear future. So when he bumps into Max—an arrogant former classmate who is a terrible, but successful, author—Frank agrees to take up residence in his garage apartment. After all, a glimpse at the inner workings of Max's glittering life will provide great material for his book. Soon, Frank is swept up in a world of glossy cocktail parties, nouveau-wealth, and near-celebrity—as well as a passionate love affair with Max's beautiful wife. And although his nemesis possesses everything Frank desires, he remains secure in his sense of artistic superiority—until Max's latest work heralds him as one of the great new voices in American literature. Seething with envy, Frank sets out to uncover the true source of his newfound talent and gets a lot more than he bargained for. Told in Murphy's distinctive, tongue-in-cheek style, this is a lively and engaging book that will appeal to Murphy's established fans and win him new ones.?

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Before The Dante Chamber, there was The Dante Club: “an ingenious thriller that... brings Dante Alighieri's Inferno to vivid, even unsettling life.”—The Boston Globe “With intricate plots, classical themes, and erudite characters... what's not to love?”—Dan Brown, author of The Da Vinci Code and Origin Boston, 1865. The literary geniuses of the Dante Club—poets and Harvard professors Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James Russell Lowell, along with publisher J. T. Fields—are finishing America's first translation of The Divine Comedy. The powerful Boston Brahmins at Harvard College are fighting to keep Dante in obscurity, believing the infiltration of foreign superstitions to be as corrupting as the immigrants arriving at Boston Harbor. But as the members of the Dante Club fight to keep a sacred literary cause alive, their plans fall apart when a series of murders erupts through Boston and Cambridge. Only this small group of scholars realizes that the gruesome killings are modeled on the descriptions of Hell's punishments from Dante's Inferno. With the lives of the Boston elite and Dante's literary future in the New World at stake, the members of the Dante Club must find the killer before the authorities discover their secret. Praise for The Dante Club “Ingenious... [Matthew Pearl] keeps this mystery sparkling with erudition.”—Janet Maslin, The New York Times “Not just a page-turner but a beguiling look at the U.S. in an era when elites shaped the course of learning and publishing. With this story of the Dante Club's own descent into hell, Mr. Pearl's book will delight the Dante novice and expert alike.”—The Wall Street Journal “[Pearl] ably meshes the... literary analysis with a suspenseful plot and in the process humanizes the historical figures.... A divine mystery.”—People (Page-turner of the Week) “An erudite and entertaining account of Dante's violent entrance into the American canon.”—Los Angeles Times “A hell of a first novel... The Dante Club delivers in spades.... Pearl has crafted a work that maintains interest and drips with nineteenth-century atmospherics.”—San Francisco Chronicle

Il se nomme Thomas Roy. C'est l'écrivain le plus adulé du Québec. Invité régulier des talk-shows, la parution de ses romans d'horreur est toujours un événement médiatique majeur. Or, voici qu'on le retrouve chez lui, horriblement mutilé et catatonique. Tentative de meurtre ou suicide manqué? Pendant que la police enquête, Roy est placé en observation dans un hôpital de Montréal. Paul Lacasse, le psychiatre qui traite l'écrivain, considère au départ le cas comme assez banal. La découverte de faits troublants l'oblige cependant à reconsidérer petit à petit son opinion. Bientôt, ce sont toutes ses certitudes, tant personnelles que professionnelles, qui chancellent. Car, au-delà du drame de Roy, quelque chose de terrifiant se dévoile lentement, quelque chose d'inimaginable et aux conséquences monstrueuses... Sur le seuil : un suspense d'une redoutable efficacité, écrit par celui que plusieurs considèrent déjà comme le maître du roman d'horreur québécois. PRIX DU PUBLIC - SALON DU LIVRE DE LA CÔTE NORD 2004 PRIX MASTERTON 2007

Bradley Pearson, an unsuccessful novelist in his late fifties, has finally left his dull office job as an Inspector of Taxes. Bradley hopes to retire to the country, but predatory friends and relations dash his hopes of a peaceful retirement. He is tormented by his melancholic sister, who has decided to come live with him; his ex-wife, who has infuriating hopes of redeeming the past; her delinquent brother, who wants money and emotional confrontations; and Bradley's friend and rival, Arnold Baffin, a younger, deplorably more successful author of commercial fiction. The ever-mounting action includes marital cross-purposes, seduction, suicide, abduction, romantic idylls, murder, and due process of law. Bradley tries to escape from it all but fails, leading to a violent climax and a coda that casts shifting perspectives on all that has preceded.

Hailed as Gissing's finest novel, New Grub Street portrays the intrigues and hardships of the publishing world in late Victorian England. In a materialistic, class-conscious society that rewards commercial savvy over artistic achievement, authors and scholars struggle to earn a living without compromising their standards. “Even as the novel chills us with its still-recognizable portrayal of the crass and vulgar world of literary endeavor,” writes Francine Prose in her Introduction, “its very existence provides eloquent, encouraging proof of the fact that a powerful, honest writer can transcend the constraints of commerce.” This Modern Library Paperback Classic is set from the text of the 1891 first edition.

From the prodigiously talented A. L. Kennedy comes a flamboyantly stylish and fiercely emotional novel about fathers and daughters, creation and self-destruction, and love's paradoxical power to heal its most devastated victims. One such victim is Nathan Staples, a writer whose hilarious contempt for humanity is surpassed only by his corrosive self-loathing. Along with five equally dysfunctional colleagues Nathan lives on an island retreat off the coast of Wales, where he yearns for the daughter he lost years before. Now, in defiance of all his hopes, Mary Lamb–herself an aspiring writer–is about to join him as the seventh member of the colony. As Nathan tortuously wins the trust of the child who has no inkling of their true relationship, Mary comes to a gradual understanding of her gift. In Everything You Need, A. L. Kennedy combines the mythic resonance of Arthurian legend with a sensibility as lyrical as it is profane.

Lawyer-turned-writer Nic Gabriel is stunned when womanising Dylan Rees, his host at a champagne reception at the Houses of Parliament, is knifed by an ex-girlfriend and bleeds to death in front of him. It's not just the horrific murder, but the fact that the ex, Ella, had apparently committed suicide over five years ago. Before the party Dylan had made cryptic mention of strange and sudden deaths and now, with his friend's death, Nic is determined to discover his meaning. His research takes him to Creed, the country's leading human rights law firm, where Nic meets Roxanne, a young lawyer starting out in her dream job with a secret to hide...

Deep inside the Vatican library, a priest discovers the rarest and most valuable art object ever found: the manuscript of The Divine Comedy, written in Dante's own hand. Via Sicily, the manuscript makes its way from the priest to a mob boss in New York City, where a writer named Nick Tosches is called to authenticate the prize. For this writer, the temptation is too great: he steals the manuscript in a last-chance bid to have it all. Some will find it offensive; others will declare it transcendent; it is certain to be the most ragingly debated novel of the decade.

“Spectacular... [Norman Mailer] makes every word count, like a master knife thrower zinging stilettos in a circle around your head.”—PeopleNorman Mailer peers into the recesses and buried virtues of the modern American male in a brilliant crime novel that transcends genre. When Tim Madden, an unsuccessful writer living on Cape Cod, awakes with a gruesome hangover, a painful tattoo on his upper arm, and a severed female head in his marijuana stash, he has almost no memory of the night before. As he reconstructs the missing hours, Madden runs afoul of retired prizefighters, sex addicts, mediums, former cons, a world-weary ex-girlfriend, and his own father, old now but still a Herculean figure. Stunningly conceived and vividly composed, Tough Guys Don't Dance represents Mailer at the peak of his powers. Praise for Tough Guys Don't Dance “As brash, brooding and ultimately mesmerizing as the author himself... [Mailer strikes a] dazzling balance between humor and horror.”—New York Daily News “A first-rate page-turner of a murder mystery... full of great characters, littered with dead bodies and replete with plausible suspects.”—Chicago Tribune “[Tough Guys Don't Dance] has that charming Mailer bravado.”—The New York Times

A sci-fi convention gets a dose of true crime in this Edgar Award-winning mystery by the New York Times bestselling author of the Ballad novels.When Virginia Tech professor James Owen Mega wrote a fictional account of his real-life research, he hardly expected it to get published. But when a publisher changed the title of his novel to Bimbos of the Death Sun, James—under the pen name Jay Omega—becomes an overnight sci-fi star. Invited to the annual fan convention Rubicon, James is both a fish out of water and a Guest of Honor among the Trekkies and sword-wielding cosplayers. But he's not the only VIP at the overrun hotel. Revered fantasy author Appin Dungannon never misses a Rubicon—or a chance to belittle his legions of devotees. But when Dungannon turns up dead, police wonder if a die-hard fan finally turned to murder. As the list of suspects grows and hucksters hunt for the victim's autograph, James devises an ingenious way to catch a killer.

Former CIA agent Matthew Broussard came to Vienna to catch a killer. But when his only lead is shot dead, he is left without answers and with an injured witness in his arms. The enticing young woman may be his last chance to resolve the tragedy that still haunts his past. He cannot let her out of his sight, even if it means getting close to someone again.For aspiring travel writer Chloe Nichols, escorting a tour group of wealthy old ladies through Europe was supposed to be anything but thrilling. Then she is rescued from an assassin's bullet by a stranger on the train–a perfectly handsome, charming stranger who saves her life with a kiss and asks her to pose as his fiancée. Chloe believes Matthew is trying to protect her, until the seductive charade becomes part of a lethal international conspiracy in which no one is what they seem–including her captivating hero....From the Paperback edition.

Stan Rogal's second novel is the story of one writer's journey through the urban wilderness. Taking the form of a writer's journal, Bafflegab is a gross collection of entries, observations and letters to the editor; a scatological scrapbook of philosphical musings, literary meanderings, quotes, misquotes, contradictions and criticisms and a kaleidoscope of perversions. Bafflegab excavates the meaning of love in the impenetrable city. At the same time, it navigates the crooked path to the heart of culture. In Rogal's trademark unsentimental treatment of raw emotion, his narrator attacks the movement towards a more conservative, less caring society, and the more materialistic, less humanistic individual it breeds.

This historical novel set during the eighteenth century recounts the tumultuous final years of famed English lexicographer and poet Samuel Johnson. In 1764, Britain's greatest man of letters—the writer of the first English dictionary—shut himself in his room and refused to come out. Exhausted from working on an edition of Shakespeare's plays, Samuel Johnson had fallen into a deep depression. He refused to eat and only opened his door to cry out incomprehensible phrases or empty his chamber pot. Finally, a priest was able to lure the scholar out of confinement, and, as he did, Johnson's friend Henry Thrales arrived. Shocked by Johnson's fit of madness, Thrales promptly whisked the man away for recuperation at a country mansion south of London. Thus began one of the happiest periods of Johnson's life. At the Thrales residence in Streatham, Johnson regained his sanity and engaged in family life. He selected books for the estate's library, joked around at parties, and became close to Thrales's wife, Hester. But as the years passed, the affection between Johnson and Hester developed into a dark romantic affair, the Thrales's daughter grew up and became aware of her mother's emotional unavailability, and Johnson's passions and eccentricities led to cumbersome moral and spiritual dilemmas. With chapter titles taken from entries in Johnson's legendary dictionary, lauded British author Beryl Bainbridge paints a well-rounded portrait of an extraordinary man and his all-too-human experiences. Written from the perspective of the Thrales's daughter, According to Queeney heightens fact with fiction, sincerity with irony, and humor with despair. Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, it is a captivating account of the Georgian era, lending modern insight to British history.

Nadia Wentworth is a Hollywood star. A big star. And she's so dreadfully bored on location in the South Pacific, she begins reading the first thing her assistant can dig up: a piece of gloriously bad pulp fiction by 1920s author Valerian Ricardo. Nadia soon falls under the spell of the bewitching Kali-Ra, the Queen of Doom, and knows she must portray the infamous character on the big screen. Ecstatic, she hires a famous British screenwriter to pen the script, and as word leaks out, all sorts of pests start popping up, including: Ricardo's great grandnephew; his elderly'wife'; his biographer, who also happens to be an illegitimate granddaughter; and a gaggle of obsessed Ricardo fans. When someone is murdered, there are scads of suspects, a multitude of motives, and much mayhem in this delightful, laugh-out-loud farce from one of the most accomplished novelists in the genre.

Thomas Wainewright - Regency fop, literary hanger-on, collector of art and artifacts, forger and deported felon - is considered one of the most notorious of English murderers. He is believed to have been one of the first recorded serial killers.James King takes on this spectral character in his first novel, Faking, and examines a number of serious questions. Was Wainewright a faker? It's historical'fact'that he forged sketches, paintings, letters and banknotes - but, more importantly, did he fake his life? In a complex tapestry of styles and voices, King plays with the assumptions of originality and experience, of academic fashions and biography.Told through the voice of a Toronto housewife, Thomas Wainewright's story is revealed through the voices of its main characters: the overly sensitive Tom, who wishes to address the characterizations of which he perceives himself to be victim (an essay by Wilde, a character in Dickens, a novel by Bulwer-Lytton); Tom's cunning wife, Eliza; his sister-in-law, Helen; and his son, Griffiths.Wainewright asserts his innocence of the murders (of his uncle, his mother-in-law, and his sister-in-law) but lays claim to the more fashionable - if not prestigious - guilt of forging a number of canvases, including the Gainsborough reproduced on the cover of the Simon & Pierre edition of Faking.With a deft hand, James King weaves together the language of the Regency with the language of contemporary prose (while knocking the academic conventions) to provide the reader with a novel that is sure to entertain and, at its end, cause a moment of reflection on the nature and importance of authenticity, of leading an authentic life.The Dundurn Group is pleased to announce the release of James King's first novel, Faking. This is the first of five literary books to be published this season under the revived literary imprint, Simon & Pierre.

Written as fiction, this text is Patrick MacGill's autobiography. Starting with an account of his childhood in Ireland at the end of the 19th century, the story moves to Scotland where, tramp then gang-labourer then navvy, Dermond Flynn (as he sometimes calls himself) discovers himself as a writer.

The groundbreaking autobiographical novel by the renowned Irish journalist, poet, and author of The Great Push and The Rat-Pit. Peopled with extraordinary characters, suffused with humor and yet unflinching in its portrayal of the near slavery of the poor in Scotland and Ireland, Children of the Dead End sold 50,000 copies a year in the 1920s. It was as influential in its own way as the work of social investigators such as Rowntree in bringing about change in British and Irish attitudes to poverty and destitution. Starting with an account of his childhood in Donegal, Ireland at the end of the 19th century, the story moves to Scotland where, living as a tramp, then working as a gang laborer, and for some years as a navvy at Kinlochleven near Fort William, Dermod Flynn (as he calls himself) begins to discover himself as a writer. “Its freshness and force is the mark of true literature—the structure is perfect Heartily recommended.” —Irish Press “Splendid... a superb account of its times... Children of the Dead End and The Rat-Pit blaze with a passionate sincerity.” —Irish Times

Gideon. An identity shrouded in mystery - the anonymous source who holds the key to an explosive secret. In a clandestine meeting, writer Carl Granville is hired to take the pages of an old diary, articles, letters, documents in which all proper names and locations have been blacked out - and turn them into compelling fiction. He will be paid a quarter of a million dollars. But he can never tell a soul.As he is fed information and his work progresses, Granville begins to realize that Gideon's book is more than just a potential bestseller. It is a revelation of chilling evil and a decades-long cover-up by someone with far-reaching power. He starts to have second thoughts. How will his book be used? Whose lives will be shattered? What is the truth behind the story - and who is the true storyteller?Then someone close to Granville is bludgeoned to death. Another is savagely murdered. His apartment is ransacked, his computer destroyed, all his records stolen. Suspicion falls on Granville. He tries to explain the shadowy assignment. No one believes him. He has no proof, no alibis...

In 30 Dixon presents us with life according to Gould, his brilliant fictional narrator who shares with us his thoroughly examined life from start to several finishes, encompassing his real past, imagined future, mundane present, and a full range of regrets, lapses, misjudgments, feelings, and the whole set of human emotions. All of Gould's foibles-his lusts and obsessions, fears and anxieties-are conveyed with such candor and lack of pretension that we can't help but be seduced into recognizing a little bit of Gould in us or perhaps a lot of us in Gould. For Gould is indeed an Everyman for the end of themillennium, a good man trying to live an honest life without compromise and without losing his mind.

From the author of 1984, George Orwell narrates the journey of a writer among the down-and-out in two great cities in this sobering, truthful portrayal of poverty and society. Famous for its realistic and unsentimental description of poverty, Down and Out in London and Paris follows the adventures of a penniless British writer who finds himself rapidly descending into the seedy heart of two great European capitals. As a dishwasher in Paris, he describes in vivid detail the horrors of what goes on behind the scenes in the kitchens of posh French restaurants. In London, he encounters the disturbing world of the unhoused and charitable shelters. His adventures conniving landlords and negotiating with pawnshops as he searches for work, food, and lodging are told without self-pity and often with humor.

A novel by the author of 1984 about a man determined to reject middle-class values who finds living in noble poverty more difficult than expected. Gordon Comstock despises the materialism and shallowness of middle-class life—the worship of money, the striving for dull, stuffy respectability. To live up to his ideals, he quits his lucrative position as an advertising copywriter and devotes himself to poetry and other high-minded pursuits. But low-paid part-time employment and a constant shortage of cash is not exactly conducive to creativity and happiness. The stress even causes him to lash out at his devoted girlfriend, Rosemary, who he suspects of preferring a richer man. This sharply witty novel about the difficulties of idealism and the effects of financial strain is yet another outstanding read from the genius who brought us Animal Farm, Down and Out in Paris and London, and other enduring works.

An unforgettable tale of mystery and obsession by Barbara Vine (pseudonym of Ruth Rendell, winner of the Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Award for lifetime achievement)This is the utterly absorbing story of best-selling novelist Gerald Candless, whose sudden death from a heart attack leaves behind a wife and two doting daughters. To sort through her grief, one of his daughters, Sarah, decides to write a biography of her internationally celebrated father. Within hours of beginning her research, Sarah comes across the first of what will be many shocking revelations. As her life is slowly torn apart, a terrible logic finally emerges to explain her mother's remoteness, her father's need to continually reinvent himself in his work, and a long-forgotten London murder.

Working with the great Mark Twain is a job Wentworth Cabot relishes -- especially when it includes a first-class boat trip, a visit to Europe, and a steady paycheck. But Cabot hopes his third adventure with the renowned author won't involve any murders... The genial company of Twain's friend Rudyard Kipling seems to guarantee smooth sailing. A German prince, a pretentious Italian art critic, and a rich young lout from Philadelphia are nuisances to Cabot -- but for Twain they only figure as ready targets for his wit. Then the wealthy young man disappears. His father, a prominent prosecutor, insists he was murdered...and accuses the German prince. But Twain suspects otherwise -- and with the help of Cabot and Kipling, must race against time to ensure justice...

Partly a roman à clef, partly a paradic'novel-within-a-novel,'Writing for Love and Money is perhaps best described as a comic odyssey into the world of the bestseller, a tour guide for writing a blockbuster. Playfully weaving literary puns and allusions into an enthralling narrative, Perutz allows Kate, assisted by a host of'real'and fictional authors, to learn page by page the ingredients of popular fiction. While some critics may argue about the genre—is the book a novel? a memoir? an expose?—Perutz's readers will agree that Writing for Love and Money is one of the funniest nonnovels, nonmemoirs, nonexposes they've read.

From the New York Times bestselling author of Mystery, Shadowland, and The Talisman, the tale of an inspired literary sojourn that turns into something far more sinister Esswood House. Home and estate of the Seneschal family, aristocratic patrons of the literary arts for well over a hundred years. D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot, Ford Madox Ford, and Henry James were privileged to call themselves guests and Esswood Fellows. Even minor poets such as Isobel Standish found in Esswood a respite from the outer world and its refined atmosphere an inspiration for her work. There was always talk of a hidden secret in Esswood's past, and the Seneschal children were often so pale and sickly, but don't all English manor houses have a few ghost stories to call their own? When Professor William Standish receives the rare honor of an Esswood Fellowship, and the chance to study Isobel's private manuscripts at close hand, he is thrilled beyond his wildest ambitions. But something seems slightly off at Esswood House, a feeling Standish cannot quite put his finger on. He hears faint laughter in the halls, the pitter-pattering of small feet in the night; strange faces appear in the windows of the library, and there are those giant dollhouses in the basement... Never before published as a separate volume, Mrs. God is a very different kind of ghost story from one of America's most celebrated authors.

A beautiful city with ugly traditions of corruption and racism. A black man set to hang for a murder he didn't commit. A world-famous author -- and detective -- who isn't about to let it happen...'An enjoyable tour of 1890s New Orleans... Twain can take a bow for his perfomance. Heck takes a colorful city (New Orleans) an a colorful character (Mark Twain), adds a murder, a duel, some voodoo and period detail and conjures up an entertaining sequel to Death on the Mississippi.'-- Publishers Weekly'A period charmer...'-- Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine'This Crescent City mystery simmers.'-- Booklist'The second of Heck's Mark Twain detective novels is a charming winner.'-- Ed's Internet Book Review'Exciting.'-- Book Alert