Seventy-two-year-old August Brill is recovering from a car accident in his daughter's house in Vermont. When sleep refuses to come, he lies in bed and tells himself stories, struggling to push back thoughts about things he would prefer to forget--his wife's recent death and the horrific murder of his granddaughter's boyfriend, Titus. The retired book critic imagines a parallel world in which America is not at war with Iraq but with itself. In this...

Continuing the subversive self-revelation begun in Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn, Henry Miller takes readers along on a mad, free-associating journey from the damp grime of his Brooklyn youth to the sun-splashed cafes and squalid flats of Paris. With incomparable glee, Miller shifts effortlessly from Virgil to venereal disease, from Rabelais to Roquefort. In this seductive technicolor swirl of Paris and New York, he captures like no one...

"The reportorial relentlessness of [David] Vann's imagination often makes his fiction seem less written than chiseled. A small, lovely book has been written out of his large and evident pain. "-New York Times Book Review In Legend of a Suicide, his heartbreaking semi-autobiographical debut story-collection, David Vann relates the story of a young man trying to come to terms with the guilt and pain of his father's suicide. The wild outback of the author's...

Available for the first time in a single volume are the three holiday stories that Truman Capote regarded as among his greatest works of short fiction. Two of these childhood memoirs - "A Christmas Memory" and "The Thanksgiving Visitor"--Center on the author's early years with a family of distant relatives in rural Alabama. Both pay loving tribute to an eccentric old-maid cousin, Miss Sook Faulk, who became his best friend. In "A Christmas Memory,"...

"In 1917, after the entry of America into World War I, E. E. Cummings, arecent graduate of Harvard College, volunteered to serve on an ambulance corps in France. Arrived in Paris with a new friend, William Slater Brown, the two young men set about living it up in the big city before heading off to their assignment. Once in the field, they wrote irreverent letters about their experiences which attracted the attention of the censors and ultimately led...

Banned in America for almost thirty years because of its explicit sexual content, this companion volume to Miller's Tropic of Cancer chronicles his life in 1920s New York City. Famous for its frank portrayal of life in Brooklyn's ethnic neighboorhoods and Miller's outrageous sexual exploits, Tropic of Capricorn is now considered a cornerstone of modern literature. -- Book cover.

En route to England and a date with a hangman's noose, the irrepressible, unapologetic villain of Treasure Island, Long John Silver, shares the story of his life and piracy career, from his poverty-stricken childhood to his murderous ascent to pirate captain, and offers clues to a long-lost treasure.

Vivian is a cosmopolitan Taiwanese-American tourist who often escapes her busy life in London through adventure and travel. Johnny is a fifteen year old Irish teenager, growing up in a family where crime is customary, violence is necessary, and everything and anyone is yours for the taking. Their paths collide one afternoon in West Belfast, culminating in a horrific act of violence. Vivian tries to recapture the woman she was, as she struggles with...