This is the small, but pleasant tale of how the theater brought together two lovers: a dancer and a stagehand.Assassins have no fun...at least that is how Jake Monday feels. Sure, it pays well and has tons of great benefits like beautiful women, fast cars and expensive clothes. But, when you hate your job, how can you enjoy its perks?Jake finds that although he excels at killing, he finds no joy in it. His employer continues to push him to his limits, forcing Jake to re-evaluate his career choice.A chance meeting with a woman aboard a flight to Los Angeles leaves Jake questioning more than his occupation. She leaves him with a strange gift and a feeling that they are somehow connected.Before Jake can unravel the mysterious woman, he takes an assignment that changes his life forever. The stakes are legendary, the danger acute, and the world may never be the same.

Speaking from a mental hospital, a teenage girl recounts the tremendous media pressure preceding the breaking scandal of her father's unethical business dealings. "This affecting account of a family under siege by the media is both an engaging read and a strong psychological exploration".--"Booklist".

The bestselling author of A Natural History of the Senses now explores the allure of adultery, the appeal of aphrodisiacs, and the cult of the kiss. Enchantingly written and stunningly informed, this "audaciously brilliant romp through the world of romantic love" (Washington Post Book World) is the next best thing to love itself. From the Trade Paperback edition.

Men fall hard. Rock stars? Fall the hardest. This is the conclusion to Alec and Nat's story. I breathed in and out for a few seconds as I waited at the end of the aisle. It felt like I was standing overlooking the edge of a cliff, and the minute I saw my future wife, I was going to freefall. The music started. Shit, I was seriously going to pass out. People stood, Demetri nodded his head and patted me on the back. And then I saw her. It was like seeing her for the first time all over again. Memories of meeting her that first day of school had me grinning from ear to ear. The local girl, who didn’t even know who I was the first time she saw me, fell for me. And in return, gave me her heart for safekeeping. I ached to touch her as she walked slowly down the aisle. Her brown eyes met mine. And I lost it. Every single fear that I was holding on to snapped. Forget drugs. Forget needing to calm down. I couldn’t stop my heart from beating out of my chest, and I didn’t want to. I just wanted to touch her, to tell her how pretty she was in her white dress. I wanted to promise her forever, I wanted to be her eternity.

The author initially intended to call this novel The Lyrical Age. The lyrical age, according to Kundera, is youth, and this novel, above all, is an epic of adolescence; an ironic epic that tenderly erodes sacrosanct values: childhood, motherhood, revolution, and even poetry. Jaromil is in fact a poet. His mother made him a poet and accompanies him (figuratively) to his love bed and (literally) to his deathbed. A ridiculous and touching character, horrifying and totally innocent ("innocence with its bloody smile"!), Jaromil is at the same time a true poet. He's no creep, he's Rimbaud. Rimbaud entrapped by the communist revolution, entrapped in a somber farce.

The hyperactive love child of Page Six and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? caught in a tawdry love triangle with The Fan. Even Kitty Kelly will blush. Soaked, nay, marinated in the world of vintage Hollywood, Tell-All is a Sunset Boulevard–inflected homage to Old Hollywood when Bette Davis and Joan Crawford ruled the roost; a veritable Tourette’s syndrome of rat-tat-tat  name-dropping, from the A-list to the Z-list; and a merciless  send-up of Lillian Hellman’s habit of butchering the truth that will have Mary McCarthy cheering from the beyond. Our Thelma Ritter–ish narrator is Hazie Coogan, who for decades has tended to the outsized needs of Katherine “Miss Kathie”  Kenton—veteran of multiple marriages, career comebacks, and cosmetic surgeries. But danger arrives with gentleman caller Webster Carlton Westward III, who worms his way into Miss Kathie’s heart (and boudoir). Hazie discovers that this bounder has already written a celebrity tell-all memoir foretelling Miss Kathie’s death in a forthcoming Lillian Hellman–penned musical extravaganza; as the body count mounts, Hazie must execute a plan to save Katherine Kenton for her fans—and for posterity. Tell-All is funny, subversive, and fascinatingly clever. It’s wild, it’s wicked, it’s  bold-faced—it’s vintage Chuck.

Now a major BBC drama starring Benedict Cumberbatch ‘Only Ian McEwan could write about loss with such telling honesty’ Benedict Cumberbatch On a routine trip to the supermarket with his daughter one Saturday morning, Stephen Lewis, a well-known writer of children’s books, turns his back momentarily. When he looks around again, his child is gone. In a single moment, everything is changed. The kidnapping has a devastating effect on Stephen’s life and marriage. Memories and the present become inseparable – as Stephen gets lost in daydreams of the past – and time bends back on itself, dragging Stephen’s own childhood back into the present.

John Irving wishes. That he could be as mordantly funny as Elizabeth Gilbert, that is. With the publication of her first novel, Stern Men, Gilbert has been widely compared to New England's unofficial novelist laureate. And the comparison is a natural; this writer gives us a tough, lovable heroine against an iconoclastic, rural backdrop. Ruth Thomas grows up on Fort Niles Island, off the coast of Maine, among lobstermen, lobster boats, and, well, lobsters. There's just not much out there besides ocean. Abandoned by her mother, she lives sometimes with her dad and sometimes with her beautiful neighbor, Mrs. Pommeroy, and the seven idiot Pommeroy boys. Eventually she is plucked from obscurity by the wealthy Ellises—vacationers on Fort Niles for some hundred years—and sent, against her will, to a fancy boarding school in Delaware. (Sorting out her relationship with this highly manipulative family is one of the novel's crooked joys.) Now she has returned, and is casting about for something to do. What Ruth does (hang around with her eccentric island friends, fall in love, organize the lobstermen) makes for an engaging book that's all the more charming for its rather lumpy, slow-paced plotting. Gilbert delivers a kind of delicious ethnography of lobster-fishing culture, if such a thing is possible, as well as a love story and a bildungsroman. But best of all, she possesses an ear for the ridiculous ways people communicate. One of Mrs. Pommeroy's young sons, "in addition to having the local habit of not pronouncing r at the end of a word—could not say any word that started with r.... What's more, for a long time everyone on Fort Niles Island imitated him. Over the whole spread of the island, you could hear the great strong fishermen complaining that they had to mend their wopes or fix their wigging or buy a new short-wave wadio."

Days before his death, Borges gave an intimate interview to his friend, the Argentine journalist Gloria Lopez Lecube. That interview is translated for the first time here, giving English-language readers a new insight into his life, loves, and thoughts about his work and country at the end of his life. Accompanying that interview are a selection of the fascinating interviews he gave throughout his career. Highlights include his celebrated conversations with Richard Burgin during Borges's time as a lecturer at Harvard University, in which he gives rich new insights into his own works and the literature of others, as well as discussing his now oft-overlooked political views. The pieces combine to give a new and revealing window on one of the most celebrated cultural figures of the past century.

A comedian, singer, composer, musician, linguist, actor, author and a favourite of Sean Connery and Billy Connolly's, Norman MacLean is a living legend in the Gaelic world. Based in the Uists in the Outer Hebrides, with side trips to Glasgow, Hamburg and Amsterdam, this dotty adventure embraces frustrated sex, drugs, eightsome reels and a memorable cast of oddball characters: three inept would-be criminals, a demented care-home resident, an ex-communicant of the Free Church of Scotland who moonlights as an enforcer, a pair of Russian weight-lifters who raise ostriches by day and mud-wrestle by night, and a formidable woman lawyer determined to cleanse the island of wrongdoing before HM The Queen arrives on her annual visit. Something akin to a mad Gaelic version of The Sopranos as directed by the Coen Brothers, this novella is a masterclass of understatement, pitch-perfect dialogue and confident narration.

Finding Eden is the continuation, and conclusion, to Becoming Calder. When the world as you know it has ended, when all that you love has been washed away, where do you find strength? When the new world you've stepped into is as isolating as the last, when your heart is broken, and your future is unclear, where do you find hope? Finding Eden is a story of strength, discovery, forgiveness, and undying love. It is about believing in your destiny and following the path that leads to peace. THIS IS THE SECOND PART, AND CONCLUSION, IN A TWO-PART SIGN OF LOVE SERIES INSPIRED BY AQUARIUS (BECOMING CALDER SHOULD BE READ FIRST). New Adult Contemporary Romance: Due to strong language and graphic sexual content, this book is not intended for readers under the age of 18.

No one description will fit this strange, eccentric, endlessly complex masterpiece. It is a fiction about fiction-writing in which the invented world is as much infused with wit and genius as the theme of inventing it. It is a joyful celebration of the infinite possibilities of the art of fiction, and a wry demonstration of its limitations. This Penguin Classic contains Christopher Ricks's introductory essay, itself a classic of English literary criticism, together with a new introduction on the recent critical history and influence of Tristram Shandy by Melvyn New. The text and notes are based on the acclaimed Florida Edition, making the scholarship of the Florida editors readily available for the first time.

Turgenev's first major prose work is a series of twenty-five Sketches: the observations and anecdotes of the author during his travels through Russia satisfying his passion for hunting. His album is filled with moving insights into the lives of those he acquaints with, peasants and landowners, doctors and bailiffs, neglected wives and bereft mothers each providing a glimpse of love, tragedy, courage and loss, and anticipating Turgenev's great later works such as First Love and Fathers and Sons. His depiction of the cruelty and arrogance of the ruling classes was considered subversive and led to his arrest and confinement to his estate, but these sketches opened the minds of contemporary readers to the plight of the peasantry and were even said to have led Tsar Alexander II to abolish serfdom.