From Publishers WeeklyBeagle's novella, set in the world of 1991's The Innkeeper's Song, is an intimate take on the relatively common fantasy conceit of a powerful band of recluses. Following an encounter with three assassins, the wanderer Soukyan decides it is time to return to the monastery from which he had long ago escaped and take revenge on those who sent the killers. Beagle hints that Soukyan's world stretches far and wide but mostly focuses on a small area where various organizations have institutionalized murder and torture. Thoughtful, well-rounded characters make an intriguing contrast to scenes of bloody brutality. Readers familiar with The Innkeeper's Song will love this tie-in, while newcomers will both enjoy the tight focus and find plenty of incentive to seek out related works that further explore this complex, fully realized setting. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From BooklistBeagle returns to the world of his acclaimed The Innkeeper’s Song (1993) with this novel of Soukyan, the wandering fugitive from the Hunters. When their latest attack takes an unusual shape, it arouses Soukyan’s curiosity to the point of returning to the weird and sinister monastery where she was raised. Her disguise is quickly penetrated, and a gaggle of mad monks prepares to sacrifice her to the Hunter’s Tree, where Hunters grow like peapods. This is the secret of the monastery, an inexhaustible supply of assassins. Soukyan’s death is to revive the dying tree, but instead she brings it to a fiery end before fleeing. The quality of Beagle’s prose, characterization, and world building (without the aid of maps or glossaries) is as superlative as ever, and he manages to compress a full-fledged story into an amazingly small space. Masterpieces, let all take note, do not have to be lifted with both hands. --Roland Green

Every student at Shame U has their secrets, and Henley Brooks is no exception. Struggling to pay for college and maintain her perfect reputation has become overwhelming. When her friend Gigi Oxford offers her a night of carefree fun, she can’t pass up the opportunity to unwind. After a night of drinking turns to chaos, Henley finds herself alone with Lucas Young, a student from London who has come to America to unravel a few secrets of his own, as well as break a few hearts. Covered in tattoos and drowning in liquor, Lucas was everything Henley should avoid but couldn’t resist. She soon begins to fall for him like the many women before her. But after stumbling across something he didn’t want her to see, she learns that Lucas may not be who she thinks he is. Henley and Gigi devise a plan to teach Lucas a lesson, but it isn’t long before Henley learns that no one at Shamus Thornton College can be trusted. When everything begins to feel like it is falling apart, there is only one person Henley wants to pick up the pieces, even if he is the person who caused her to crumble.

"This collection has a straightforward ambition: to redirect the interpretive perspective that readers bring to Lawrence Durrell's literary works by returning their attention to his short prose." - From the Introduction Best known for his novels and travel writing, Lawrence Durrell defied easy classification within twentieth-century modernism. His anti-authoritarian tendencies put him at odds with many contemporaries-aesthetically and politically. However, thanks to a compelling recontextualization by editor James Gifford, these 38 previously unpublished or out-of-print essays and letters reveal that Durrell's maturation as an artist was rich, complex, and subtle. This edition promises to open up new approaches to interpreting his more famous works. Durrell fans will treasure this selection of rare nonfiction, while scholars of Durrell, Modernist literature, anti-authoritarian artists, and the Personalist movement will also appreciate Gifford's fine editorial work.

"This is a novel in the guise of the  tape-recorded recollections of a black woman who has  lived 110 years, who has been both a slave and a  witness to the black militancy of the 1960's. In this  woman Ernest Gaines has created a legendary figure,  a woman equipped to stand beside William  Faulkner's Dilsey in The Sound And The  Fury." Miss Jane Pittman, like Dilsey, has  'endured,' has seen almost everything and foretold the  rest. Gaines' novel brings to mind other  great works The Odyssey for the way  his heroine's travels manage to summarize the  American history of her race, and Huckleberry  Finn for the clarity of her voice, for  her rare capacity to sort through the mess of years  and things to find the one true story in it all."  -- Geoffrey Wolff, Newsweek. "Stunning. I know of no  black novel about the South  that excludes quite the same refreshing mix of wit  and wrath, imagination and indignation, misery and  poetry. And I can recall no more memorable female  character in Southern fiction since Lena of  Faulkner's Light In August than Miss  Jane Pittman." -- Josh Greenfeld,  Life

When Oliver Sacks was twelve years old, a perceptive schoolmaster wrote in his report: “Sacks will go far, if he does not go too far.” It is now abundantly clear that Sacks has never stopped going. From its opening pages on his youthful obsession with motorcycles and speed, On the Move is infused with his restless energy. As he recounts his experiences as a young neurologist in the early 1960s, first in California, where he struggled with drug addiction, and then in New York, where he discovered a long-forgotten illness in the back wards of a chronic hospital, we see how his engagement with patients comes to define his life. With unbridled honesty and humor, Sacks shows us that the same energy that drives his physical passions—weight lifting and swimming—also drives his cerebral passions. He writes about his love affairs, both romantic and intellectual; his guilt over leaving his family to come to America; his bond with his schizophrenic brother; and the writers and scientists—Thom Gunn, A. R. Luria, W. H. Auden, Gerald M. Edelman, Francis Crick—who influenced him. On the Move is the story of a brilliantly unconventional physician and writer—and of the man who has illuminated the many ways that the brain makes us human.

Allan Gurganus's Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All became an instant classic upon its publication. Critics and readers alike fell in love with the voice of ninety-nine-year-old Lucy Marsden, one of the most entertaining and loquacious heoines in American literature. Lucy married at the turn of the last century, when she was fifteen and her husband was fifty. If Colonel William Marsden was a veteran of the "War for Southern Independence", Lucy became a "veteran of the veteran" with a unique perspective on Southern history and Southern manhood. Her story encompasses everything from the tragic death of a Confederate boy soldier to the feisty narrator's daily battles in the Home--complete with visits from a mohawk-coiffed candy-striper. Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All is proof that brilliant, emotional storytelling remains at the heart of great fiction. From the Trade Paperback edition.

Meet Jenna Boller, star employee at Gladstone's Shoe Store in Chicago. Standing a gawky 5'11'' at 16 years old, Jenna is the kind of girl most likely to stand out in the crowd for all the wrong reasons. But that doesn't stop Madeline Gladstone, the president of Gladstone's Shoes 176 outlets in 37 states, from hiring Jenna to drive her cross country in a last ditch effort to stop Elden Gladstone from taking over his mother's company and turning a quality business into a shop-and-schlock empire. Now Jenna Boller shoe salesperson is about to become a shoe-store spy as she joins her crusty old employer for an eye-opening adventure that will teach them both the rules of the road...and the rules of life. Joan Bauer lives in Darien, CT.

A dazzling blend of military history, high-flying fantasy, and edge-of-your-seat adventure, Naomi Novik’s Temeraire novels, set in an alternate Napoleonic era in which intelligent dragons have been harnessed as weapons of war, are more than just perennial bestsellers—they are a worldwide phenomenon. Now, in Tongues of Serpents, Naomi Novik is back, along with the dragon Temeraire and his rider and friend, Capt. Will Laurence. . . . .

The Pilot: A Tale of the Sea is a historical novel by James Fenimore Cooper. Its subject is the life of a naval pilot during the American Revolution. The hero of the book is John Paul Jones, who appears as always brooding upon a dark past and a darker fate. Yet he is not so morbid but that he can occasionally rouse himself to terrific activities in his raids along the English coast. Another character is Long Tom Coffin, of Nantucket, comparable to Harvey Birch and Natty Bumppo from Cooper's other novels.

Kabuki plays “dazzling” “haiku-like” Chicago Sun-Times “best of two worlds, fascinating” Oakland Tribune “resounds with Kabuki’s passion, fascination...in Sunde's adaptation, Zen philosophy is engrained into story, not imposed” L.A.Daily News “Essence of passion. Sunde's play compresses Homeric epic, is lucid and direct, makes you see and hear with awakened eyes and ears." Philadelphia InquirerKabuki versions of classic stories in which – ghostly spinners of fate, with KABUKI MACBETH’s severed heads, hanging sword and resounding temple bell recount humans metamorphosing to demons, while KABUKI RICHARD III presents him as Shiva, the god dancing creation and destruction, and exposes a hidden family drama to make the Borgias blush, and ACHILLES’ war-prize concubine relates his rage, his sea goddess mother enchants, he dances his fight with a corpse-choked river, his race before mangling great Hector of Troy, to finally find peace in his enemy's embrace.These plays were originally created for professional American actors working in a Japanese tradition, directed by Shozo Sato, a master of Zen arts awarded the “Order of the Sacred Treasure” by the Emperor of Japan. Since then, other college, high school, even grade school students have taken exuberant delight (with their audiences) in creating their own productions of Kabuki plays I’ve written. KABUKI OTHELLO and KABUKI LADY MACBETH, not included here, are available from www.dramaticpublishing.com

Sennefer's life didn't go as he had imagined. Raised amongst princes and courtiers on the grounds of a royal estate in Memphis, he lived a life of privilege. But this life ended much sooner than he had expected.After a naked lawn party during clothing optional day, Stevenson Garden Products Malibu teleoperator Clarity Nice agrees with her friend Cynthia Stevenson, daughter of company owner Bill Stevenson, to build an outdoor shower on company lawn, in order to bring publicity for the company. Bypassing the head of human resources at Stevenson, Brock Cheevers, Clarity finds out that the municipality of Malibu prohibits the use of a shower on any company garden lawn, and that it has assigned officer Packwood and his nephew Avery to the 'Stevenson shower' case.When the outdoor shower faucet is closed by Packwood, Clarity decides to build a shower inside the premises of Stevenson, near the rooftop pool of the company, so that employees can relax after a rough day's work. To pay for the expense, Clarity uses Cynthia's power of attorney which allows her to charge and spend company money when her father is away on a trip. Learning that Stevenson sales have dropped and looking for new job opportunities inside the company, Clarity decides to purchase a shower patent using company money savings, in order to boost sales by establishing a new shower division at Stevenson. Without any official document backing her, she uses the funds available to pay for the patent, knowing that her initiative may mean that she is out of a job.With a new patent in her hands, Clarity sets out to sell a number of showers at a Las Vegas bathroom and accessories exhibit, in order to refund Stevenson's money, borrowed to buy the patent, and also to avoid being fired by the owner of the garden company himself, Mr. Stevenson, for having used company funds without authorization.

It's a hard life in the vegetable patch as Sir Thomas de Tomato finds out on his return from the pea pod wars. All the vegetables are getting ready for war. During the war a great black cloud is seen and King Billy Brussel knows that it is St George de Gardiner and that his army is doomed. Read this fantastically silly and funny tale of vegetable matters.The telegram that has just arrived brings good news for Doctor Beth, giving her something to look forward to. However, it also reminds her of another telegram that her guardian aunt received on her behalf twenty years earlier. Ever since, Beth has waited. This is a short story of the grim affects of racial and ideological prejudice which can rear its head in the least likely of places and the long-lasting pain caused.

Chama is a little fat brown pony. But no one calls him Chama. Everyone calls him Lazy, Lazy pony! Read on as Chama, in his own words, tells you the thrilling story of his life.2036 was the year that nobody wants to remember. The world was split up into five zones, the authorities zone, the opulent zone, the upper class, the prevalent zone, the middle class, the corrupt, no mans' land, and the destitute zone, where people like me live. It was all a normal day in the Destitute zone, I took the subway to and fro the schoolhouse. On my way home, I came to find that my hut was locked. My guardian usually always came to the door when I knocked the first time. Then the crazy man came dashing towards me, pleading for me to follow him. I do, but bombs are exploding in the sky, so eventually, I lost him. In this time, in all times of sadness, all I have to comfort me in the most time of need, is a compass. A compass. The man's name is Henry. He sends me a letter at an unknown place. It says that my guardian was killed by a man that I must stay away from. I find something throughout a long journey. Not something on the ground or something that I took from someone. I find something, a massive force, within me. I shall kill the man who took everything, the only thing that I have, from me.

It was a clear spring day, Monday, March 20, 1995, when five members of the religious cult Aum Shinrikyo conducted chemical warfare on the Tokyo subway system using sarin, a poison gas twenty-six times as deadly as cyanide. The unthinkable had happened, a major urban transit system had become the target of a terrorist attack. In an attempt to discover why, Haruki Murakami, internationally acclaimed author of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and arguably Japan’s most important contemporary novelist, talked to the people who lived through the catastrophe—from a Subway Authority employee with survivor guilt, to a fashion salesman with more venom for the media than for the perpetrators, to a young cult member who vehemently condemns the attack though he has not quit Aum. Through these and many other voices, Murakami exposes intriguing aspects of the Japanese psyche. And as he discerns the fundamental issues leading to the attack, we achieve a clear vision of an event that could occur anytime, anywhere. Hauntingly compelling and inescapably important, Underground is a powerful work of journalistic literature from one of the world’s most perceptive writers. From the Trade Paperback edition.

Annie loves Duncan — or thinks she does. Duncan loves Annie, but then, all of a sudden, he doesn't. Duncan really loves Tucker Crowe, a reclusive Dylanish singer-songwriter who stopped making music ten years ago. Annie stops loving Duncan, and starts getting her own life. In doing so, she initiates an e-mail correspondence with Tucker, and a connection is forged between two lonely people who are looking for more out of what they've got. Tucker's been languishing (and he's unnervingly aware of it), living in rural Pennsylvania with what he sees as his one hope for redemption amid a life of emotional and artistic ruin -- his young son, Jackson. But then there's also the new material he's about to release to the world: an acoustic, stripped-down version of his greatest album, Juliet — entitled, Juliet, Naked. What happens when a washed-up musician looks for another chance? And miles away, a restless, childless woman looks for a change? Juliet, Naked is a powerfully engrossing, humblingly humorous novel about music, love, loneliness, and the struggle to live up to one's promise.