By the author of *Reasons to Stay Alive* Terence Cave, the intellectual owner of Cave Antiques, has already experienced the tragedies of his mother's suicide and his wife's murder when his teenage son, Reuben, is killed in a grotesque accident. His remaining child, Bryony, has always been the family's golden girl, in love with her cello and her pony, and Terence comes to realise that his one duty in life is to protect her from the world's malign forces, whatever that may take. But as he starts to follow his grieving daughter's movements and enforce a draconian set of rules, his love for Bryony becomes a possessive force that leads to destruction and, ultimately, murder.

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Eight years after being tossed aside by the husband who took her son away, Holly Lang finds herself caught between two lovers - the exotic and dangerous Alexei Markov and the gentle but haunted Dr. Caleb Burke. A former hit man for the Russian mafia, Alexei has been in witness protection while he testified against the mob. Now that he is done, he will do anything to earn Holly's love. Dr. Caleb Burke is a walking contradiction. His love for Holly is obvious, but he keeps her at a distance. Underneath his gruff demeanor is a tortured soul that only Holly can heal. As their passions burn out of control, Alexei and Caleb discover someone is trying to kill her. The only way to discover the identity of the killer is for all three to face up to the secrets of their past and work together to fight for everything they have found in Bliss.

A Contemporary Romance Novel by USA Today Bestselling Author Priscilla West * "What are you doing?" Jax struggled. My heart breaking for him, I raised his bruised hand to my mouth and kissed it tenderly. "Burning away the past."* Beaten, bruised, and broken, I made a desperate move that would change our lives forever. Just when I thought the worst was behind us, cracks appeared, secrets surfaced, and lies unraveled. With threats closing in from all sides and our very lives hanging in the balance, I was faced with the most difficult decision of my life.

Everyone's favorite Dirty Old Man returns with a new volume of uncollected work. Charles Bukowski (1920-1994), one of the most outrageous figures of twentieth-century American literature, was so prolific that many significant pieces never found their way into his books. Absence of the Hero contains much of his earliest fiction, unseen in decades, as well as a number of previously unpublished stories and essays. The classic Bukowskian obsessions are here: sex, booze, and gambling, along with trenchant analysis of what he calls "Playing and Being the Poet." Among the book's highlights are tales of his infamous public readings ("The Big Dope Reading," "I Just Write Poetry So I Can Go to Bed with Girls"); a review of his own first book; hilarious installments of his newspaper column, Notes of a Dirty Old Man, including meditations on neo-Nazis and driving in Los Angeles; and an uncharacteristic tale of getting lost in the Utah woods ("Bukowski Takes a Trip"). Yet the book also showcases the other Bukowski-an astute if offbeat literary critic. From his own "Manifesto" to his account of poetry in Los Angeles ("A Foreword to These Poets") to idiosyncratic evaluations of Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, LeRoi Jones, and Louis Zukofsky, Absence of the Hero reveals the intellectual hidden beneath the gruff exterior. Our second volume of his uncollected prose, Absence of the Hero is a major addition to the Bukowski canon, essential for fans, yet suitable for new readers as an introduction to the wide range of his work.

Sharing a summer house with a hot-as-hell roommate should be a dream come true, right? Not when it’s Justin…the only person I’d ever loved…who now hates me. When my grandmother died and left me half of the house on Aquidneck Island, there was a catch: the other half would go to the boy she helped raise. The same boy who turned into the teenager whose heart I broke years ago. The same teenager who’s now a man with a hard body and a hardass personality to match. I hadn’t seen him in years, and now we’re living together because neither one of us is willing to give up the house. The worst part? He didn’t come alone. I’d soon realize there’s a thin line between love and hate. I could see through that smug smile. Beneath it all…the boy is still there. So is our connection. The problem is…now that I can’t have Justin, I’ve never wanted him more. Author's note – RoomHate is a full-length standalone novel. Due to strong language and sexual content, this book is not intended for readers under the age of 18.

What happens when an unsuspecting girl and guy are thrown into a marriage they don't want? That's exactly the case of Ivory and Darius, born into different families whose marriage serves to prevent competition between their businesses. No matter how they oppose the idea, their parents are hell-bent on marrying them to each other to honor a five-generation-old deal that took place between their ancestors. For Ivory, whose heart has just been broken, her marriage to the handsome but cold Darius Quartz fails to provide her the happy life she wants. Instead, she finds herself in endless boredom and doing the same things she'd been doing the past six months. That is, until Darius arrives home from his training and her ex returns in the picture. Thrown in her loyal best friend, Rose, and Darius's insane cousin, Adrian. Her life suddenly turns upside down and becomes exciting and a whole lot crazier! It's a long journey full of tears, fun, joy, even insanity, and most of all, love.

Collected for the first time, the New York stories of John O'Hara, "among the greatest short story writers in English, or in any other language" (Brendan Gill, Here at The New Yorker) Collected for the first time, here are the New York stories of one of the twentieth century’s definitive  chroniclers of the city—the speakeasies and highballs, social climbers and cinema stars, mistresses and powerbrokers, unsparingly observed by a popular American master of realism. Spanning his four-decade career, these more than thirty refreshingly frank, sparely written stories are among John O’Hara’s finest work, exploring the materialist aspirations and sexual exploits of flawed, prodigally human characters and showcasing the snappy dialogue, telling details and ironic narrative twists that made him the most-published short story writer in the history of the New Yorker.

Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1909  — the first woman to be so honored — Swedish novelist Selma Lagerlöf (1858–1940) was a gifted storyteller whose writings were often tinged with the supernatural and rooted in the sagas and legends of her homeland. She secured her reputation as a children's-book author with  The Wonderful Adventures of Nils, long considered a masterpiece of children's literature. Written at the request of Swedish school authorities and first published in 1906, it is the enchanting and remarkably original tale of Nils Holgersson, a mischievous boy of 14 who is changed by an elf into a tiny being able to understand the speech of birds and animals. Brilliantly weaving fact and fiction into a breathtaking and beautiful fable, the story recounts Nils's adventures as he is transported over the countryside on the back of a goose. From this vantage point, Nils witnesses a host of events that provide young readers with an abundance of information about nature, geography, folklore, animal life, and more. Reset in easy-to-read type and enhanced with 10 new illustrations, this inexpensive, unabridged edition will bring new generations of readers under the magical spell of a timeless classic.

Finalist for the National Book Award 2002 Look out for Elizabeth Gilbert's new book, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear, on sale now! In this rousing examination of contemporary American male identity, acclaimed author and journalist Elizabeth Gilbert explores the fascinating true story of Eustace Conway. In 1977, at the age of seventeen, Conway left his family's comfortable suburban home to move to the Appalachian Mountains. For more than two decades he has lived there, making fire with sticks, wearing skins from animals he has trapped, and trying to convince Americans to give up their materialistic lifestyles and return with him back to nature. To Gilbert, Conway's mythical character challenges all our assumptions about what it is to be a modern man in America; he is a symbol of much we feel how our men should be, but rarely are.

Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre formed one of the most famous literary couples of the twentieth century. Their relationship took on the quality of legend and served as a model of openness and honesty for countless men and women. Sartre was revered during his lifetime as a paradigm of the modern philosophe and intellectual, but since de Beauvoir’s death in 1986, her literary reputation has threatened to eclipse Sartre’s. Her work The Second Sex is, by any standard, one of the most important and influential books of the twentieth century. When these private and revealing letters were published in France in 1990, they caused a storm of controversy. Here de Beauvoir tells Sartre everything, tracing the extraordinary complications of their triangular love life. These letters reveal de Beauvoir not only as manipulative and dependent, but also as vulnerable, passionate, jealous, and committed. This reissue of a New York Times Notable Book will inspire philosophers, writers, and lovers of literature for decades to come.

"Reading is a many-layered process — like writing," observes Samuel R. Delany, a Nebula and Hugo award-winning author and a major commentator on American literature and culture. In this collection of six extended essays, Delany challenges what he calls "the hard-edged boundaries of meaning" by going beyond the customary limits of the genre in which he's writing. By radically reworking the essay form, Delany can explore and express the many layers of his thinking about the nature of art, the workings of language, and the injustices and ironies of social, political, and sexual marginalization. Thus Delany connects, in sometimes unexpected ways, topics as diverse as the origins of modern theater, the context of lesbian and gay scholarship, the theories of cyborgs, how metaphors mean, and the narrative structures in the Star Wars trilogy. "Over the course of his career," Kenneth James writes in his extensive introduction, "Delany has again and again thrown into question the world-models that all too many of us unknowingly live by." Indeed, Delany challenges an impressive list of world-models here, including High and Low Art, sanity and madness, mathematical logic and the mechanics of mythmaking, the distribution of wealth in our society, and the limitations of our sexual vocabulary. Also included are two essays that illustrate Delany's unique chrestomathic technique, the grouping of textual fragments whose associative interrelationships a reader must actively trace to read them as a resonant argument. Whether writing about Wagner or Hart Crane, Foucault or Robert Mapplethorpe, Delany combines a fierce and often piercing vision with a powerful honesty that beckons us to share in the perspective of these Longer Views.

Writing at the height of her powers, Alice Hoffman conjures three generations of a family haunted by love. Cool, practical, and deliberate, John is dreamy Arlyn's polar opposite. Yet the two are drawn powerfully together even when it is clear they are bound to bring each other grief. Their difficult marriage leads them and their children to a house made of glass in the Connecticut countryside, to the avenues of Manhattan, and to the blue waters of Long Island Sound. Glass breaks, love hurts, and families make their own rules. Ultimately, it falls to their grandson, Will, to solve the emotional puzzle of his family and of his own identity.

Thirty-three-year-old Shea Rigsby has spent her entire life in Walker, Texas--a small college town that lives and dies by football. Raised alongside her best friend Lucy, the daughter of Walker's legendary head coach Clive Carr, Shea was too devoted to her hometown team to leave. Instead she stayed in Walker for college, even taking a job in the university athletic department after graduation, where she has remained for more than a decade. But when an unexpected tragedy strikes the tight-knit Walker community, Shea's comfortable world is upended, and she begins to wonder if the life she's chosen is really enough for her. As she gives up her safety net to set out on an unexpected path, Shea discovers unsettling truths about the people and things she has always trusted most--and is forced to confront her deepest desires, fears, and secrets.

Lawrence Durrell's series of four novels set in Alexandria, Egypt during the 1940s. The lush and sensuous series consists of Justine(1957) Balthazar(1958) Mountolive(1958) Clea(1960). Justine, Balthazar and Mountolive use varied viewpoints to relate a series of events in Alexandria before World War II. In Clea, the story continues into the years during the war. One L.G. Darley is the primary observer of the events, which include events in the lives of those he loves and those he knows. In Justine, Darley attempts to recover from and put into perspective his recently ended affair with a woman. Balthazar reinterprets the romantic perspective he placed on the affair and its aftermath in Justine, in more philosophical and intellectual terms. Mountolive tells a story minus interpretation, and Clea reveals Darley's healing, and coming to love another woman.