 |
Michael Tolliver Lives
by Armistead Maupin
Michael Tolliver, the sweet-spirited Southerner in Armistead Maupin's classic Tales of the City series, is arguably the most beloved gay character in fiction. Now, almost twenty years after ending his groundbreaking saga of San Francisco life, Maupin revisits his all-too-human hero, letting the 55-year-old gardener tell his story in his own voice. Having survived the plague that took so many of his friends and lovers, Michael has learned to embrace the random pleasures of life, the tender alliances that sustain him in the hardest of times, Michael Tolliver Lives follows its protagonist as he finds love with a younger man, attends to his dying fundamentalist mother in Florida, and finally reaffirms his allegiance to a wise octogenarian who was once his landlady. While Maupin insists that this book is not, strictly speaking, a continuation of Tales of the City, a reassuring number of familiar faces appear along the way. As usual, the author's mordant wit and ear for pitch-perfect dialogue serve every aspect of the story - from the bawdy to the bittersweet. Michael Tolliver Lives is a novel about the act of growing older joyfully and the everyday miracles that somehow make that possible. |
 |
 |
Falling Man
by Don DeLillo
There is September 11 and then there are the days after, and finally the years. Falling Man is a magnificent, essential novel about the event that defines turn-of-the-century America. It begins in the smoke and ash of the burning towers and tracks the aftermath of this global tremor in the intimate lives of a few people. First there is Keith, walking out of the rubble into a life that he'd always imagined belonged to everyone but him. Then Lianne, his es-tranged wife, memory-haunted, trying to reconcile two versions of the same shadowy man. And their small son Justin, standing at the window, scanning the sky for more planes. These are lives choreographed by loss, grief and the enormous force of history. Brave and brilliant, Falling Man traces the way the events of September 11 have reconfigured our emotional landscape, our memory and our perception of the world. It is cathartic, beautiful, heartbreaking.
|
|
 |
A Thousand Splendid Suns
by Khaled Hosseini
Propelled by the same superb instinct for storytelling that made The Kite Runner a beloved classic, A Thousand Splendid Suns is at once an incredible chronicle of thirty years of Afghan history and a deeply moving story of family, friendship, faith, and the salvation to be found in love. Born a generation apart and with very different ideas about love and family, Mariam and Laila are two women brought jarringly together by war, by loss and by fate. As they endure the ever escalating dangers around them-in their home as well as in the streets of Kabul-they come to form a bond that makes them both sisters and mother-daughter to each other, and that will ultimately alter the course not just of their own lives but of the next generation. With heart-wrenching power and suspense, Hosseini shows how a woman's love for her family can move her to shocking and heroic acts of self-sacrifice, and that in the end it is love, or even the memory of love, that is often the key to survival. A stunning accomplishment, A Thousand Splendid Suns is a haunting, heartbreaking, compelling story of an unforgiving time, an unlikely friendship, and an indestructible love.
|
|
 |
The Woman in the Fifth
by Douglas Kennedy
Douglas Kennedy's new novel demonstrates once again his talent for writing serious popular fiction. The Pursuit of Happiness and A Special Relationship were both Sunday Times bestsellers in paperback. That was the year my life fell apart, and that was the year I moved to Paris. When Harry Ricks arrives in Paris on a bleak January morning he is a broken man. He is running away from a failed marriage and a dark scandal that ruined his career as a film lecturer in a small American university. With no money and nowhere to live, Harry swiftly falls in with the city's underclass, barely scraping a living while trying to finish the book he'd always dreamed of writing. A chance meeting with a mysterious woman, Margit Kadar, with whom Harry falls in love, is his only hope of a brighter future. However, Margit isn't all she seems to be and Harry soon has to make a decision that will alter his life forever.
|
|
 |
Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn
by Caroline Moorehead
Celebrated American war reporter Martha Gellhorn (1908-1998) was a prolific letter-writer, sharing with a circle of cherished intellectual friends her declarations against war and poverty; her frustrations in an almost exclusively male profession; her hopes for success as a novelist; and disappointments in love. Gellhorn's biographer organizes correspondence from 1930 to 1996, interspersing brief commentaries that place it in the context of Gellhorn's nonstop global assignments and various international domiciles. Gellhorn's tone is typically warm, forthright and full of spirited analysis. More guarded are letters to her former second husband, Ernest Hemingway, and letters to her adopted son, Sandy, with whom she had a troubled relationship. With Eleanor Roosevelt, a lifelong friend, she shared a passionate liberal outlook; letters to Leonard Bernstein attempt to convey her appreciation of his art. While Gellhorn's unswerving energy and work ethic impress, her love of fierce debate, hard drinking, male company and sunbathing, and her capacity to lose her head in romance render her thoroughly human. Particularly moving is Gellhorn's troubled passage into old age and isolation in the African bush, before being rediscovered as a grande dame of journalism by a young London literary crowd, in whose company she delighted. Gellhorn's letters sparkle to the very last. (PW Review)
|
|
 |
Adverbs
by Daniel Handler
Can Joe help it if he falls in love with people who don't make him happy? And what about Helena—she's in love, but somehow this isn't enough. Shouldn't it be? And if it isn't enough, does this mean she's not really in love? It certainly seems to be spoiling the love she's in. And let's say there's a volcano underneath the city—doesn't that make things more urgent? Does urgency mean that you should keep the person you're with, or search for the best possible person? And what if the best possible person loves someone else—like the Snow Queen, for instance? This novel may not answer these questions, but nevertheless the author and publisher hope it will be of interest. Daniel Handler is the author of the novels The Basic Eight, Watch Your Mouth, and as Lemony Snicket, a sequence of children's novels collectively entitled A Series of Unfortunate Events.
|
|
 |
Let Me Finish
by Roger Angell
Widely known as an original and graceful writer, Roger Angell has developed a devoted following through his essays in the New Yorker. Now, in Let Me Finish, a deeply personal, fresh form of autobiography, he takes an unsentimental look at his early days as a boy growing up in Prohibition-era New York with a remarkable father; a mother, Katharine White, who was a founding editor of the New Yorker; and a famous stepfather, the writer E. B. White. Intimate, funny, and moving portraits form the book's centerpiece as Angell remembers his surprising relatives, his early attraction to baseball in the time of Ruth and Gehrig and DiMaggio, and his vivid colleagues during a long career as a New Yorker writer and editor. Infused with pleasure and sadness, Angell's disarming memoir also evokes an attachment to life's better moments.
|
|
 |
Back to Wando Passo
by David Payne
Payne's richly ornate Southern saga (after Gravesend Light) follows Ransom Hill, a current New York cabbie and former '80s songwriter-in-demand, back South. Ran is rejoining his estranged wife, Claire DeLay, and their two small children at Wando Passo, the South Carolina rice plantation Claire has inherited. Originally a poor boy from North Carolina, Ran truly loves his Charleston-born, flaky musician wife of 19 years. But the past dogs Ran: Claire, a former concert pianist, finds work teaching music at a local college and reconnects with her childhood friend Marcel Jones, a black musician and sour ex-member of Ran's band. At Wando Passo, he excavates an old pot containing ceremonial objects, and, later, two corpses are unearthed—perhaps solving the mysterious disappearance of the Civil War master of the house, Harlan DeLay, and his Charleston wife, Addie, who soon get alternating diary entry-like chapters. Addie reveals her illicit romance with Harlan's black half-brother, Jarry, the son of a Cuban buja; their biracial love resonates with Claire's attraction to Marcel, while Ran's loopy purpose seems to be to release the ancestral curse so that the whole family can function again. Despite a rather too-tidy plot, Payne fashions elaborate prose and touching characterization into an absorbing tale. (PW Review)
|
|
 |
Dear Mr. President
by Gabe Hudson
Everybody's Gulf War Syndrome is a little bit different. Or so believes Larry, who returns home from Desert Storm to find his hair gone and his bones rapidly disintegrating. Then there's Lance Corporal James Laverne of the US Marines, who grows a third ear in Kuwait. And in the audaciously comic novella "Notes from a Bunker Along Highway 8," a Green Beret deserts his team after seeing a vision of George Washington, only to find a new calling—administering aid to wounded Iraqi civilians; he's hindered only by the furtive nature of his mission and an unruly band of chimpanzees. Together these narratives form a bracing amalgamation of devastating humor and brilliant cultural observation, in which Gabe Hudson fearlessly explores the darker implications of American military power.
|
|
 |
When We Were Romans
by Matthew Kneale
Nine-year-old Lawrence is the man in his family. He watches protectively over his mother and his wilful little sister Jemima. He is the one who keeps things in order, especially when, quite suddenly, his mother decides the three of them must leave their life in England behind. Their destination is Rome, where she lived when she was young, and as they drive through the night in a car filled to bursting, the excitement takes them back to those happier days. For Lawrence, fascinated by stories of popes and emperors, Rome is an adventure. Though short of money, and passed from one to another of his mother's old friends, it seems that little by little their new life is beginning to take shape. But the mystery that brought them to Italy will not quite leave them in peace. When We Were Romans is a haunting psychological novel, another masterful work from the author of the prize-winning English Passengers . Powerfully evoking the feelings of childhood - the triumphs, the jealousies, the fears, the possessions, the love—it is most of all the story of Lawrence, of how, with a wisdom well in advance of his years, he strives to keep his family together, as everything he understands is turned upside down. |
|
 |
Rust and Bone
by Craig Davidson
In steel-tipped prose, Craig Davidson conjures a savage world populated by fighting dogs, prizefighters, sex addicts, gamblers, a repo man and a disappearing magician. The title of the lead story, "28 Bones", refers to the number of bones in a boxer's hands; once broken, they never heal properly, and the fighter's career descends to bouts that have less to do with sport than with survival: no referee, no rules, not even gloves. In "A Mean Utility" we enter an even more desperate arena: dogfights where Rottweilers, pit bulls and Dobermans fight each other to the death. Davidson's stories are small monuments to the telling detail. The hostility of his fictional universe is tempered by the humanity he invests in his characters and by his subtle and very moving observations of their motivation. In the tradition of Hemingway, Rust and Bone explores violence, masculinity and life on the margins. Visceral and with a dark urgency, this is a truly original debut. "These big, riveting stories about tough guys in trouble are the best I've read in a long time from a young writer. There's enough incident, shock and suspense for a dozen books. This collection is filled with stories you haven't heard before" - Bret Easton Ellis. "There is a strikingly original tone to Mr Davidson's stories. The prose is spare yet elegant, the insights are fresh and real, and best of all there is a boundless humanity in Mr. Davidson's writing: a love of life that is beautifully woven with an acute sense of its darkness. This is in every way an extraordinary book" - Clive Barker.
|
|
Paperback Book Archives
May 2007
March 2007
January 2007
December 2006
October 2006
July 2006
|
|
Special Orders
|
| Even with 18,000 titles regularly in stock, we realize that you may want a book that we don't usually carry. We are happy to take special orders. Timing varies with publishers and distributors but on average books are delivered within 5 to 10 working days. Books can be ordered by mail or email (including French books) and mailed all over the world. Click here for ordering instructions. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
