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<title><![CDATA[Awared]]></title>

<description><![CDATA[]]></description>

<link><![CDATA[http://www.indiebound.org/users/mhirschhorn/list/awared]]></link>

<language><![CDATA[en-us]]></language>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[Invisible Man]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780679732761</link>
<description><![CDATA[Invisible Man is a milestone in American literature, a book that has continued to engage readers since its appearance in 1952.  A first novel by an unknown writer, it remained on the bestseller list for sixteen weeks, won the National Book Award for fiction, and established Ralph Ellison as one of the key writers of the century.  The nameless narrator of the novel describes growing up in a black community in the South, attending a Negro college from which he is expelled, moving to New York and becoming the chief spokesman of the Harlem branch of "the Brotherhood", and retreating amid violence and confusion to the basement lair of the Invisible Man he imagines himself to be.  The book is a passionate and witty tour de force of style, strongly influenced by T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Joyce, and Dostoevsky.]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[Invisible Man]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ralph Ellison]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Vintage]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9780679732761]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[Invisible Man is a milestone in American literature, a book that has continued to engage readers since its appearance in 1952.  A first novel by an unknown writer, it remained on the bestseller list for sixteen weeks, won the National Book Award for fiction, and established Ralph Ellison as one of the key writers of the century.  The nameless narrator of the novel describes growing up in a black community in the South, attending a Negro college from which he is expelled, moving to New York and becoming the chief spokesman of the Harlem branch of "the Brotherhood", and retreating amid violence and confusion to the basement lair of the Invisible Man he imagines himself to be.  The book is a passionate and witty tour de force of style, strongly influenced by T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Joyce, and Dostoevsky.]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:date>1995-03-14T00:00:00-05:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[The Man with the Golden Arm (50th Anniv.)]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9781583220085</link>
<description><![CDATA[]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[The Man with the Golden Arm (50th Anniv.)]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Nelson Algren]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Seven Stories Press]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9781583220085]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:date>2003-04-01T00:00:00-05:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[Collected Stories]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780679764038</link>
<description><![CDATA[This magisterial collection of short works by Nobel Prize-winning author William Faulkner reminds readers of his ability to compress his epic vision into narratives as hard and wounding as bullets. Among the 42 selections in this book are such classics as "A Bear Hunt, " "A Rose for Emily, " Two Soldiers, " and "The Brooch."]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[Collected Stories]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[William Faulkner]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Vintage]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9780679764038]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[This magisterial collection of short works by Nobel Prize-winning author William Faulkner reminds readers of his ability to compress his epic vision into narratives as hard and wounding as bullets. Among the 42 selections in this book are such classics as "A Bear Hunt, " "A Rose for Emily, " Two Soldiers, " and "The Brooch."]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:date>1995-10-31T00:00:00-05:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[From Here to Eternity]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780385333641</link>
<description><![CDATA[Diamond Head, Hawaii, 1941.  Pvt. Robert E. Lee Prewitt is a champion welterweight and a fine bugler.  But when he refuses to join the company's boxing team, he gets "the treatment" that may break him or kill him.  First Sgt. Milton Anthony Warden knows how to soldier better than almost anyone, yet he's risking his career to have an affair with the commanding officer's wife.  Both Warden and Prewitt are bound by a common bond:  the Army is their heart and blood . . .and, possibly, their death.In this magnificent but brutal classic of a soldier's life, James Jones portrays the courage, violence and passions of men and women who live by unspoken codes and with unutterable despair. . .in the most important American novel to come out of World War II, a masterpiece that captures as no ther the honor and savagery of men.From the Paperback edition.]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[From Here to Eternity]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[James Jones]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Delta]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9780385333641]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[Diamond Head, Hawaii, 1941.  Pvt. Robert E. Lee Prewitt is a champion welterweight and a fine bugler.  But when he refuses to join the company's boxing team, he gets "the treatment" that may break him or kill him.  First Sgt. Milton Anthony Warden knows how to soldier better than almost anyone, yet he's risking his career to have an affair with the commanding officer's wife.  Both Warden and Prewitt are bound by a common bond:  the Army is their heart and blood . . .and, possibly, their death.In this magnificent but brutal classic of a soldier's life, James Jones portrays the courage, violence and passions of men and women who live by unspoken codes and with unutterable despair. . .in the most important American novel to come out of World War II, a masterpiece that captures as no ther the honor and savagery of men.From the Paperback edition.]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:date>1998-10-13T00:00:00-04:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[The Adventures of Augie March]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780143039570</link>
<description><![CDATA[As soon as it first appeared in 1953, this gem by the great Saul Bellow was hailed as an American classic. Bold, expansive, and keenly humorous, The Adventures of Augie March blends street language with literary elegance to tell the story of a poor Chicago boy growing up during the Great Depression. A "born recruit," Augie makes himself available for hire by plungers, schemers, risk takers, and operators, compiling a record of choices that is-to say the least- eccentric.]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[The Adventures of Augie March]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Saul  Bellow]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Penguin Classics]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9780143039570]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[As soon as it first appeared in 1953, this gem by the great Saul Bellow was hailed as an American classic. Bold, expansive, and keenly humorous, The Adventures of Augie March blends street language with literary elegance to tell the story of a poor Chicago boy growing up during the Great Depression. A "born recruit," Augie makes himself available for hire by plungers, schemers, risk takers, and operators, compiling a record of choices that is-to say the least- eccentric.]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:date>2006-10-01T00:00:00-04:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[A Fable]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780394724133</link>
<description><![CDATA[This novel won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 195.  An allegorical story of World War I, set in the trenches in France and dealing ostensibly with a mutiny in a French regiment, it was originally considered a sharp departure for Faulkner.  Recently it has come to be recognized as one of his major works and an essential part of the Faulkner oeuvre.  Faulkner himself fought in the war, and his descriptions of it "rise to magnificence," according to The New York Times, and include, in Malcolm Cowley's words, "some of the most powerful scenes he ever conceived."]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[A Fable]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[William Faulkner]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Vintage]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9780394724133]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[This novel won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 195.  An allegorical story of World War I, set in the trenches in France and dealing ostensibly with a mutiny in a French regiment, it was originally considered a sharp departure for Faulkner.  Recently it has come to be recognized as one of his major works and an essential part of the Faulkner oeuvre.  Faulkner himself fought in the war, and his descriptions of it "rise to magnificence," according to The New York Times, and include, in Malcolm Cowley's words, "some of the most powerful scenes he ever conceived."]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Mass Market Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:date>1977-12-12T00:00:00-05:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[The Field of Vision]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780803257894</link>
<description><![CDATA[Winner of the National Book Award "Wright Morris seems to me the most important novelist of the American middle generation. Through a large body of work --which, unaccountably, has yet to receive the wide attention it deserves--Mr. Morris has adhered to standards which we have come to identify as those of the most serious literary art. His novel The Field of Vision brilliantly climaxes his most richly creative period. It is a work of permanent significance and relevance to those who cannot be content with less than a full effort to cope with the symbolic possibilities of the human condition at the present time."--John W. Aldridge One of America's most distinguished authors, Wright Morris (1910-1988) wrote thirty-three books.]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[The Field of Vision]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Wright Morris]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[University of Nebraska Press]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9780803257894]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[Winner of the National Book Award "Wright Morris seems to me the most important novelist of the American middle generation. Through a large body of work --which, unaccountably, has yet to receive the wide attention it deserves--Mr. Morris has adhered to standards which we have come to identify as those of the most serious literary art. His novel The Field of Vision brilliantly climaxes his most richly creative period. It is a work of permanent significance and relevance to those who cannot be content with less than a full effort to cope with the symbolic possibilities of the human condition at the present time."--John W. Aldridge One of America's most distinguished authors, Wright Morris (1910-1988) wrote thirty-three books.]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:date>1974-07-01T00:00:00-04:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[The Wapshot Chronicle]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780060528874</link>
<description><![CDATA[ When The Wapshot Chronicle was published in 1957, John Cheever was already recognized as a writer of superb short stories. But The Wapshot Chronicle, which won the 1958 National Book Award, established him as a major novelist.   Based in part on Cheever's adolescence in New England, the novel follows the destinies of the impecunious and wildly eccentric Wapshots of St. Botolphs, a quintessential Massachusetts fishing village. Here are the stories of Captain Leander Wapshot, venerable sea dog and would-be suicide; of his licentious older son, Moses; and of Moses' adoring and errant younger brother, Coverly. Tragic and funny, ribald and splendidly picaresque, The Wapshot Chronicle is a family narrative in the tradition of Trollope, Dickens, and Henry James. ]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[The Wapshot Chronicle]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[John Cheever]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Harper Perennial Modern Classics]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9780060528874]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[ When The Wapshot Chronicle was published in 1957, John Cheever was already recognized as a writer of superb short stories. But The Wapshot Chronicle, which won the 1958 National Book Award, established him as a major novelist.   Based in part on Cheever's adolescence in New England, the novel follows the destinies of the impecunious and wildly eccentric Wapshots of St. Botolphs, a quintessential Massachusetts fishing village. Here are the stories of Captain Leander Wapshot, venerable sea dog and would-be suicide; of his licentious older son, Moses; and of Moses' adoring and errant younger brother, Coverly. Tragic and funny, ribald and splendidly picaresque, The Wapshot Chronicle is a family narrative in the tradition of Trollope, Dickens, and Henry James. ]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:date>2003-06-01T00:00:00-04:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[The Magic Barrel]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780374525866</link>
<description><![CDATA[Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction Introduction by Jhumpa LahiriBernard Malamud's first book of short stories, The Magic Barrel, has been recognized as a classic from the time it was published in 1959. The stories are set in New York and in Italy (where Malamud's alter ego, the struggleing New York Jewish Painter Arthur Fidelman, roams amid the ruins of old Europe in search of his artistic patrimony); they tell of egg candlers and shoemakers, matchmakers, and rabbis, in a voice that blends vigorous urban realism, Yiddish idiom, and a dash of artistic magic.The Magic Barrel is a book about New York and about the immigrant experience, and it is high point in the modern American short story. Few books of any kind have managed to depict struggle and frustration and heartbreak with such delight, or such artistry.]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[The Magic Barrel]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bernard Malamud; Jhumpa Lahiri]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Farrar, Straus and Giroux]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9780374525866]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction Introduction by Jhumpa LahiriBernard Malamud's first book of short stories, The Magic Barrel, has been recognized as a classic from the time it was published in 1959. The stories are set in New York and in Italy (where Malamud's alter ego, the struggleing New York Jewish Painter Arthur Fidelman, roams amid the ruins of old Europe in search of his artistic patrimony); they tell of egg candlers and shoemakers, matchmakers, and rabbis, in a voice that blends vigorous urban realism, Yiddish idiom, and a dash of artistic magic.The Magic Barrel is a book about New York and about the immigrant experience, and it is high point in the modern American short story. Few books of any kind have managed to depict struggle and frustration and heartbreak with such delight, or such artistry.]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:date>2003-07-01T00:00:00-04:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[Goodbye, Columbus]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780679748267</link>
<description><![CDATA[Roth's award-winning first book instantly established its author's reputation as a writer of explosive wit, merciless insight, and a fierce compassion for even the most self-deluding of his characters.Goodbye, Columbus is the story of Neil Klugman and pretty, spirited Brenda Patimkin, he of poor Newark, she of suburban Short Hills, who meet one summer break and dive into an affair that is as much about social class and suspicion as it is about love. The novella is accompanied by five short stories that range in tone from the iconoclastic to the astonishingly tender and that illuminate the subterranean conflicts between parents and children and friends and neighbors in the American Jewish diaspora.]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[Goodbye, Columbus]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Philip Roth]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Vintage]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9780679748267]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[Roth's award-winning first book instantly established its author's reputation as a writer of explosive wit, merciless insight, and a fierce compassion for even the most self-deluding of his characters.Goodbye, Columbus is the story of Neil Klugman and pretty, spirited Brenda Patimkin, he of poor Newark, she of suburban Short Hills, who meet one summer break and dive into an affair that is as much about social class and suspicion as it is about love. The novella is accompanied by five short stories that range in tone from the iconoclastic to the astonishingly tender and that illuminate the subterranean conflicts between parents and children and friends and neighbors in the American Jewish diaspora.]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:date>1994-01-13T00:00:00-05:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[The Waters of Kronos]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780271022406</link>
<description><![CDATA[From the time of its first publication in 1960, Conrad Richter's The Waters of Kronos sparked lively debate about the extent to which its story of a belated return to childhood scenes mirrored key events of Richter's own life. As was well known at the time, Richter had spent several years in the Southwest, where he collected the material for his first successful book, Early Americans and Other Stories, but by 1933, he had returned to live in his hometown, Pine Grove, Pennsylvania.John Donner, the main protagonist in The Waters of Kronos, traces a similar route from west to east, although he finds that his family home and native town have been submerged under the deep waters of a lake formed by the construction of a hydroelectric dam. As Richter narrates his alter ego's efforts to salvage his past, he moves beyond "semi-autobiography" to offer what are widely recognized as his most haunting reflections upon the power of family history, the fragility of human memory, and art's role in structuring the communal ethos.David McCullough, a fellow Pulitzer Prize winner, met and befriended Richter in the 1960s and has called him "an American master, " praising The Waters of Kronos as "his most beautiful book." McCullough has contributed a foreword to this edition of The Waters of Kronos, which established Richter as one of the literary giants of the United States.]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[The Waters of Kronos]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Conrad Richter]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Pennsylvania State University Press]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9780271022406]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[From the time of its first publication in 1960, Conrad Richter's The Waters of Kronos sparked lively debate about the extent to which its story of a belated return to childhood scenes mirrored key events of Richter's own life. As was well known at the time, Richter had spent several years in the Southwest, where he collected the material for his first successful book, Early Americans and Other Stories, but by 1933, he had returned to live in his hometown, Pine Grove, Pennsylvania.John Donner, the main protagonist in The Waters of Kronos, traces a similar route from west to east, although he finds that his family home and native town have been submerged under the deep waters of a lake formed by the construction of a hydroelectric dam. As Richter narrates his alter ego's efforts to salvage his past, he moves beyond "semi-autobiography" to offer what are widely recognized as his most haunting reflections upon the power of family history, the fragility of human memory, and art's role in structuring the communal ethos.David McCullough, a fellow Pulitzer Prize winner, met and befriended Richter in the 1960s and has called him "an American master, " praising The Waters of Kronos as "his most beautiful book." McCullough has contributed a foreword to this edition of The Waters of Kronos, which established Richter as one of the literary giants of the United States.]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:date>2002-11-01T00:00:00-05:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[The Moviegoer]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780375701962</link>
<description><![CDATA[Winner of the 1961 National Book AwardThe dazzling novel that established Walker Percy as one of the major voices in Southernliterature is now available for the first time in Vintage paperback.The Moviegoer is Binx Bolling, a young New Orleans stockbroker who surveys the world withthe detached gaze of a Bourbon Street dandy even as he yearns for a spiritual redemption hecannot bring himself to believe in. On the eve of his thirtieth birthday, he occupieshimself dallying with his secretaries and going to movies, which provide him with the"treasurable moments" absent from his real life. But one fateful Mardi Gras, Binx embarkson a hare-brained quest that outrages his family, endangers his fragile cousin Kate, andsends him reeling through the chaos of New Orleans' French Quarter. Wry and wrenching, richin irony and romance, The Moviegoer is a genuine American classic.]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[The Moviegoer]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Walker Percy]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Vintage]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9780375701962]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[Winner of the 1961 National Book AwardThe dazzling novel that established Walker Percy as one of the major voices in Southernliterature is now available for the first time in Vintage paperback.The Moviegoer is Binx Bolling, a young New Orleans stockbroker who surveys the world withthe detached gaze of a Bourbon Street dandy even as he yearns for a spiritual redemption hecannot bring himself to believe in. On the eve of his thirtieth birthday, he occupieshimself dallying with his secretaries and going to movies, which provide him with the"treasurable moments" absent from his real life. But one fateful Mardi Gras, Binx embarkson a hare-brained quest that outrages his family, endangers his fragile cousin Kate, andsends him reeling through the chaos of New Orleans' French Quarter. Wry and wrenching, richin irony and romance, The Moviegoer is a genuine American classic.]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:date>1998-04-14T00:00:00-04:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[Morte D'Urban]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780940322233</link>
<description><![CDATA[Winner of The 1963 National Book Award for Fiction.The hero of J.F. Powers's comic masterpiece is Father Urban, a man of the cloth who is also a man of the world. Charming, with an expansive vision of the spiritual life and a high tolerance for moral ambiguity, Urban enjoys a national reputation as a speaker on the religious circuit and has big plans for the future. But then the provincial head of his dowdy religious order banishes him to a retreat house in the Minnesota hinterlands. Father Urban soon bounces back, carrying God's word with undaunted enthusiasm through the golf courses, fishing lodges, and backyard barbecues of his new turf. Yet even as he triumphs his tribulations mount, and in the end his greatest success proves a setback from which he cannot recover.First published in 1962, Morte D'Urban has been praised by writers as various as Gore Vidal, William Gass, Mary Gordon, and Philip Roth. This beautifully observed, often hilarious tale of a most unlikely Knight of Faith is among the finest achievements of an author whose singular vision assures him a permanent place in American literature.]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[Morte D'Urban]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[J.F. Powers; Elizabeth Hardwick]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[NYRB Classics]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9780940322233]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[Winner of The 1963 National Book Award for Fiction.The hero of J.F. Powers's comic masterpiece is Father Urban, a man of the cloth who is also a man of the world. Charming, with an expansive vision of the spiritual life and a high tolerance for moral ambiguity, Urban enjoys a national reputation as a speaker on the religious circuit and has big plans for the future. But then the provincial head of his dowdy religious order banishes him to a retreat house in the Minnesota hinterlands. Father Urban soon bounces back, carrying God's word with undaunted enthusiasm through the golf courses, fishing lodges, and backyard barbecues of his new turf. Yet even as he triumphs his tribulations mount, and in the end his greatest success proves a setback from which he cannot recover.First published in 1962, Morte D'Urban has been praised by writers as various as Gore Vidal, William Gass, Mary Gordon, and Philip Roth. This beautifully observed, often hilarious tale of a most unlikely Knight of Faith is among the finest achievements of an author whose singular vision assures him a permanent place in American literature.]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:date>2000-05-31T00:00:00-04:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[Centaur]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780449912164</link>
<description><![CDATA[In a small Pennsylvania town in the late 1940s, schoolteacher George Caldwell yearns to find some meaning in his life. Alone with his teenage son for three days in a blizzard, Caldwell sees his son grow and change as he himself begins to lost touch with his life. Interwoven with the myth of Chiron, the noblest centaur, and his own relationship to Prometheus, The Centaur one of John Updike's most brilliant and unusual novels.]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[Centaur]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[John Updike]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Ballantine Books]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9780449912164]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[In a small Pennsylvania town in the late 1940s, schoolteacher George Caldwell yearns to find some meaning in his life. Alone with his teenage son for three days in a blizzard, Caldwell sees his son grow and change as he himself begins to lost touch with his life. Interwoven with the myth of Chiron, the noblest centaur, and his own relationship to Prometheus, The Centaur one of John Updike's most brilliant and unusual novels.]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:date>1996-08-27T00:00:00-04:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[Herzog]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780142437292</link>
<description><![CDATA[In one of his finest achievements, Nobel Prize winner Saul Bellow presents a multifaceted portrait of a modern-day hero, a man struggling with the complexity of existence and longing for redemption.  Introduction by Philip Roth]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[Herzog]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Saul  Bellow; Philip  Roth]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Penguin Classics]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9780142437292]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[In one of his finest achievements, Nobel Prize winner Saul Bellow presents a multifaceted portrait of a modern-day hero, a man struggling with the complexity of existence and longing for redemption.  Introduction by Philip Roth]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:date>2003-02-01T00:00:00-05:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780156188760</link>
<description><![CDATA[Porter’s reputation as one of americanca’s most distinguished writers rests chiefly on her superb short stories. This volume includes the collections Flowering Judas; Pale Horse, Pale Rider; and The Leaning Tower as well as four stories not available elsewhere in book form. Winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Katherine Anne Porter]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Mariner Books]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9780156188760]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[Porter’s reputation as one of americanca’s most distinguished writers rests chiefly on her superb short stories. This volume includes the collections Flowering Judas; Pale Horse, Pale Rider; and The Leaning Tower as well as four stories not available elsewhere in book form. Winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:date>1979-09-01T00:00:00-04:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[The Fixer]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780374529383</link>
<description><![CDATA[A classic that won Malamud both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book AwardThe Fixer  (1966) is Bernard Malamud's best-known and most acclaimed novel -- one that makes manifest his roots in Russian fiction, especially that of Isaac Babel.Set in Kiev in 1911 during a period of heightened anti-Semitism, the novel tells the story of Yakov Bok, a Jewish handyman blamed for the brutal murder of a young Russian boy. Bok leaves his village to try his luck in Kiev, and after denying his Jewish identity, finds himself working for a member of the anti-Semitic Black Hundreds Society. When the boy is found nearly drained of blood in a cave, the Black Hundreds accuse the Jews of ritual murder. Arrested and imprisoned, Bok refuses to confess to a crime that he did not commit.                                              Bernard Malamud (1914-1986) published eight novels, including The Fixer, which won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. The Magic Barrel, a collection of short stories, also won the National Book Award. Born in Brooklyn, Malamud was a beloved teacher for many years at Bennington College in Vermont.               Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book AwardThe Fixer (1966) is Bernard Malamud's best-known and most acclaimed novel, and one that makes manifest his roots in Russian fiction, especially that of Isaac Babel.Set in Tsarist Russia during a period of virulent anti-Semitism, the novel tells the story of Yakov Bok, a Jewish handyman blamed for the brutal murder of a young Russian boy. At the outset, Bok leaves his village to try his luck in Kiev, and after denying his Jewish identity, he finds himself working for a member of the anti-Semitic Black Hundreds Society. When the boy is found dead in a cave, drained of nearly all his blood, the Jews are accused of ritual murder. Arrested and imprisoned, Bok refuses to confess to a crime that he did not commit. Malamud said of the book: "Whatever else it had to be about, it had to be about how the idea of freedom grows in the mind of a man subjected to a grave injustice." The Fixer dramatizes a particular kind of injustice, and the result is a masterpiece of twentieth-century fiction.                                                                            "When I finished reading this novel, I felt castigated and inspired. Grumbling about the state of the world suddenly wasn't enough. And excusing myself from political activity felt wrong. In light of this book, my inaction felt immoral. While The Fixer isn't a book about morality, it is a moral book. That is, rather than offering a flimsy directive, it presents the reader with a forceful question: Why aren't you doing anything."—Jonathan Safran Foer, from the Introduction "A literary event in any season."—Eliot Fremont-Smith, The New York Times"Brilliant [and] harrowing . . . Historical reality combined with fictional skill and beauty of a high order make [it] a novel of startling importance."—Elizabeth Hardwick  "The Fixer deserves to rank alongside the great Jewish-American novels of Saul Bellow and Philip Roth."—The Independent (London)]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[The Fixer]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bernard Malamud; Jonathan Safran Foer]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Farrar, Straus and Giroux]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9780374529383]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[A classic that won Malamud both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book AwardThe Fixer  (1966) is Bernard Malamud's best-known and most acclaimed novel -- one that makes manifest his roots in Russian fiction, especially that of Isaac Babel.Set in Kiev in 1911 during a period of heightened anti-Semitism, the novel tells the story of Yakov Bok, a Jewish handyman blamed for the brutal murder of a young Russian boy. Bok leaves his village to try his luck in Kiev, and after denying his Jewish identity, finds himself working for a member of the anti-Semitic Black Hundreds Society. When the boy is found nearly drained of blood in a cave, the Black Hundreds accuse the Jews of ritual murder. Arrested and imprisoned, Bok refuses to confess to a crime that he did not commit.                                              Bernard Malamud (1914-1986) published eight novels, including The Fixer, which won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. The Magic Barrel, a collection of short stories, also won the National Book Award. Born in Brooklyn, Malamud was a beloved teacher for many years at Bennington College in Vermont.               Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book AwardThe Fixer (1966) is Bernard Malamud's best-known and most acclaimed novel, and one that makes manifest his roots in Russian fiction, especially that of Isaac Babel.Set in Tsarist Russia during a period of virulent anti-Semitism, the novel tells the story of Yakov Bok, a Jewish handyman blamed for the brutal murder of a young Russian boy. At the outset, Bok leaves his village to try his luck in Kiev, and after denying his Jewish identity, he finds himself working for a member of the anti-Semitic Black Hundreds Society. When the boy is found dead in a cave, drained of nearly all his blood, the Jews are accused of ritual murder. Arrested and imprisoned, Bok refuses to confess to a crime that he did not commit. Malamud said of the book: "Whatever else it had to be about, it had to be about how the idea of freedom grows in the mind of a man subjected to a grave injustice." The Fixer dramatizes a particular kind of injustice, and the result is a masterpiece of twentieth-century fiction.                                                                            "When I finished reading this novel, I felt castigated and inspired. Grumbling about the state of the world suddenly wasn't enough. And excusing myself from political activity felt wrong. In light of this book, my inaction felt immoral. While The Fixer isn't a book about morality, it is a moral book. That is, rather than offering a flimsy directive, it presents the reader with a forceful question: Why aren't you doing anything."—Jonathan Safran Foer, from the Introduction "A literary event in any season."—Eliot Fremont-Smith, The New York Times"Brilliant [and] harrowing . . . Historical reality combined with fictional skill and beauty of a high order make [it] a novel of startling importance."—Elizabeth Hardwick  "The Fixer deserves to rank alongside the great Jewish-American novels of Saul Bellow and Philip Roth."—The Independent (London)]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:date>2004-05-01T00:00:00-04:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[The Eighth Day]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780060088910</link>
<description><![CDATA[ This new edition of Thornton Wilder's renowned 1967 National Book Award?winning novel features a new foreword by John Updike and an afterword by Tappan Wilder, who draws on such unique sources as Wilder's unpublished letters, handwritten annotations in the margins of the book, and other illuminating documentary material.    In 1962 and 1963, Thornton Wilder spent twenty months in hibernation, away from family and friends, in the Rio Grande border town of Douglas, Arizona. While there, he launched The Eighth Day, a tale set in a mining town in southern Illinois about two families blasted apart by the apparent murder of one father by the other. The miraculous escape of the accused killer, John Ashley, on the eve of his execution and his flight to freedom triggers a powerful story tracing the fate of his and the victim's wife and children. At once a murder mystery and a philosophical story, The Eighth Day is a "suspenseful and deeply moving" (New York Times) work of classic stature that has been hailed as a great American epic. ]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[The Eighth Day]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Thornton Wilder]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Harper Perennial Modern Classics]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9780060088910]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[ This new edition of Thornton Wilder's renowned 1967 National Book Award?winning novel features a new foreword by John Updike and an afterword by Tappan Wilder, who draws on such unique sources as Wilder's unpublished letters, handwritten annotations in the margins of the book, and other illuminating documentary material.    In 1962 and 1963, Thornton Wilder spent twenty months in hibernation, away from family and friends, in the Rio Grande border town of Douglas, Arizona. While there, he launched The Eighth Day, a tale set in a mining town in southern Illinois about two families blasted apart by the apparent murder of one father by the other. The miraculous escape of the accused killer, John Ashley, on the eve of his execution and his flight to freedom triggers a powerful story tracing the fate of his and the victim's wife and children. At once a murder mystery and a philosophical story, The Eighth Day is a "suspenseful and deeply moving" (New York Times) work of classic stature that has been hailed as a great American epic. ]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:date>2007-01-01T00:00:00-05:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[Steps]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780802135261</link>
<description><![CDATA[From the esteemed author of "The Painted Bird" and "Being There" comes this award-winning novel about one man's sexual and sensual experiences, the fabric from which the shape of his life has been woven. In this winner of the National Book Award for Fiction, distinctions are eroded between oppressor and oppressed, perpetrator and victim, narcissism and anonymity.]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[Steps]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jerzy N. Kosinski]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Grove Press]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9780802135261]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[From the esteemed author of "The Painted Bird" and "Being There" comes this award-winning novel about one man's sexual and sensual experiences, the fabric from which the shape of his life has been woven. In this winner of the National Book Award for Fiction, distinctions are eroded between oppressor and oppressed, perpetrator and victim, narcissism and anonymity.]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:date>1997-08-01T00:00:00-04:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[them]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780345484406</link>
<description><![CDATA[Joyce Carol Oates’s Wonderland Quartet comprises four remarkable novels that explore social class in America and the inner lives of young Americans. As powerful and relevant today as it on its initial publication, them chronicles the tumultuous lives of a family living on the edge of ruin in the Detroit slums, from the 1930s to the 1967 race riots. Praised by The Nation for her “potent, life-gripping imagination,” Oates traces the aspirations and struggles of Loretta Wendall, a dreamy young mother who is filled with regret by the age of sixteen, and the subsequent destinies of her children, Maureen and Jules, who must fight to survive in a world of violence and danger.Winner of the National Book Award, them is an enthralling novel about love, class, race, and the inhumanity of urban life. It is, raves The New York Times, “a superbly accomplished vision.”Them is the third novel in the Wonderland Quartet. The books that complete this acclaimed series, A Garden of Earthly Delights, Expensive People, and Wonderland, are also available from the Modern Library.]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[them]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Elaine Showalter; Joyce Carol Oates]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Modern Library]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9780345484406]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[Joyce Carol Oates’s Wonderland Quartet comprises four remarkable novels that explore social class in America and the inner lives of young Americans. As powerful and relevant today as it on its initial publication, them chronicles the tumultuous lives of a family living on the edge of ruin in the Detroit slums, from the 1930s to the 1967 race riots. Praised by The Nation for her “potent, life-gripping imagination,” Oates traces the aspirations and struggles of Loretta Wendall, a dreamy young mother who is filled with regret by the age of sixteen, and the subsequent destinies of her children, Maureen and Jules, who must fight to survive in a world of violence and danger.Winner of the National Book Award, them is an enthralling novel about love, class, race, and the inhumanity of urban life. It is, raves The New York Times, “a superbly accomplished vision.”Them is the third novel in the Wonderland Quartet. The books that complete this acclaimed series, A Garden of Earthly Delights, Expensive People, and Wonderland, are also available from the Modern Library.]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:date>2006-09-12T00:00:00-04:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[Mr. Sammler's Planet]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780142437834</link>
<description><![CDATA[Mr. Artur Sammler, Holocaust survivor, intellectual, and occasional lecturer at Columbia University in 1960s New York City, is a "registrar of madness," a refined and civilized being caught among people crazy with the promises of the future (moon landings, endless possibilities). His Cyclopean gaze reflects on the degradations of city life while looking deep into the sufferings of the human soul. "Sorry for all and sore at heart," he observes how greater luxury and leisure have only led to more human suffering. To Mr. Sammler--who by the end of this ferociously unsentimental novel has found the compassionate consciousness necessary to bridge the gap between himself and his fellow beings--a good life is one in which a person does what is "required of him." To know and to meet the "terms of the contract" was as true a life as one could live. At its heart, this novel is quintessential Bellow: moral, urbane, sublimely humane.]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[Mr. Sammler's Planet]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Saul  Bellow; Stanley  Crouch]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Penguin Classics]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9780142437834]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[Mr. Artur Sammler, Holocaust survivor, intellectual, and occasional lecturer at Columbia University in 1960s New York City, is a "registrar of madness," a refined and civilized being caught among people crazy with the promises of the future (moon landings, endless possibilities). His Cyclopean gaze reflects on the degradations of city life while looking deep into the sufferings of the human soul. "Sorry for all and sore at heart," he observes how greater luxury and leisure have only led to more human suffering. To Mr. Sammler--who by the end of this ferociously unsentimental novel has found the compassionate consciousness necessary to bridge the gap between himself and his fellow beings--a good life is one in which a person does what is "required of him." To know and to meet the "terms of the contract" was as true a life as one could live. At its heart, this novel is quintessential Bellow: moral, urbane, sublimely humane.]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:date>2004-01-01T00:00:00-05:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[The Complete Stories]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780374515362</link>
<description><![CDATA[Winner of the National Book AwardThe publication of this extraordinary volume firmly established Flannery O'Connor's monumental contribution to American fiction. There are thirty-one stories here in all, including twelve that do not appear in the only two story collections O'Connor put together in her short lifetime--Everything That Rises Must Converge and A Good Man Is Hard to Find. O'Connor published her first story, "The Geranium," in 1946, while she was working on her master's degree at the University of Iowa. Arranged chronologically, this collection shows that her last story, "Judgement Day"--sent to her publisher shortly before her death—is a brilliantly rewritten and transfigured version of "The Geranium." Taken together, these stories reveal a lively, penetrating talent that has given us some of the most powerful and disturbing fiction of the twentieth century. Also included is an introduction by O'Connor's longtime editor and friend, Robert Giroux.]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[The Complete Stories]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Flannery O'Connor]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Farrar, Straus and Giroux]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9780374515362]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[Winner of the National Book AwardThe publication of this extraordinary volume firmly established Flannery O'Connor's monumental contribution to American fiction. There are thirty-one stories here in all, including twelve that do not appear in the only two story collections O'Connor put together in her short lifetime--Everything That Rises Must Converge and A Good Man Is Hard to Find. O'Connor published her first story, "The Geranium," in 1946, while she was working on her master's degree at the University of Iowa. Arranged chronologically, this collection shows that her last story, "Judgement Day"--sent to her publisher shortly before her death—is a brilliantly rewritten and transfigured version of "The Geranium." Taken together, these stories reveal a lively, penetrating talent that has given us some of the most powerful and disturbing fiction of the twentieth century. Also included is an introduction by O'Connor's longtime editor and friend, Robert Giroux.]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:date>1971-01-01T00:00:00-05:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[Augustus]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9781400076734</link>
<description><![CDATA[A brilliant and beautifully written novel in the tradition of Robert Graves’ I, Claudius, Augustus is a sweeping narrative that brings vividly to life a compelling cast of historical figures through their letters, dispatches, and memoirs. A mere eighteen years of age when his uncle, Julius Caesar, is murdered, Octavius Caesar prematurely inherits rule of the Roman Republic. Surrounded by men who are jockeying for power–Cicero, Brutus, Cassius, and Mark Antony–young Octavius must work against the powerful Roman political machinations to claim his destiny as first Roman emperor. Sprung from meticulous research and the pen of a true poet, Augustus tells the story of one man’s dream to liberate a corrupt Rome from the fancy of the capriciously crooked and the wildly wealthy.]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[Augustus]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[John Edward Williams]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Vintage]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9781400076734]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[A brilliant and beautifully written novel in the tradition of Robert Graves’ I, Claudius, Augustus is a sweeping narrative that brings vividly to life a compelling cast of historical figures through their letters, dispatches, and memoirs. A mere eighteen years of age when his uncle, Julius Caesar, is murdered, Octavius Caesar prematurely inherits rule of the Roman Republic. Surrounded by men who are jockeying for power–Cicero, Brutus, Cassius, and Mark Antony–young Octavius must work against the powerful Roman political machinations to claim his destiny as first Roman emperor. Sprung from meticulous research and the pen of a true poet, Augustus tells the story of one man’s dream to liberate a corrupt Rome from the fancy of the capriciously crooked and the wildly wealthy.]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:relation><![CDATA[9780307513595]]></dc:relation>
<dc:date>2004-11-09T00:00:00-05:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[Chimera]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780618131709</link>
<description><![CDATA[In CHIMERAJohn Barth injects his signature wit into the tales of Scheherezade of the Thousand and One Nights, Perseus, the slayer of Medusa, and Bellerophon, who tamed the winged horse Pegasus. In a book that the Washington Post called ?stylishly maned, tragically songful, and serpentinely elegant,” Barth retells these tales from varying perspectives, examining the myths’ relationship to reality and their resonance with the contemporary world. A winner of the National Book Award, this feisty, witty, sometimes bawdy book provoked Playboy to comment, ?There’s every chance in the world that John Barth is a genius.”]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[Chimera]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[John Barth]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Mariner Books]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9780618131709]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[In CHIMERAJohn Barth injects his signature wit into the tales of Scheherezade of the Thousand and One Nights, Perseus, the slayer of Medusa, and Bellerophon, who tamed the winged horse Pegasus. In a book that the Washington Post called ?stylishly maned, tragically songful, and serpentinely elegant,” Barth retells these tales from varying perspectives, examining the myths’ relationship to reality and their resonance with the contemporary world. A winner of the National Book Award, this feisty, witty, sometimes bawdy book provoked Playboy to comment, ?There’s every chance in the world that John Barth is a genius.”]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:date>2001-11-01T00:00:00-05:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[A Crown of Feathers]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780374516246</link>
<description><![CDATA[]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[A Crown of Feathers]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Isaac Bashevis Singer]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Farrar, Straus and Giroux]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9780374516246]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:date>1981-04-01T00:00:00-05:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[Gravity's Rainbow (Classics Deluxe Edition)]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780143039945</link>
<description><![CDATA[Winner of the 1973 National Book Award, Gravity's Rainbow is a postmodern epic, a work as exhaustively significant to the second half of the twentieth century as Joyce's Ulysses was to the first. Its sprawling, encyclopedic narrative and penetrating analysis of the impact of technology on society make it an intellectual tour de force.]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[Gravity's Rainbow (Classics Deluxe Edition)]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Thomas  Pynchon; Frank  Miller]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Penguin Classics]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9780143039945]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[Winner of the 1973 National Book Award, Gravity's Rainbow is a postmodern epic, a work as exhaustively significant to the second half of the twentieth century as Joyce's Ulysses was to the first. Its sprawling, encyclopedic narrative and penetrating analysis of the impact of technology on society make it an intellectual tour de force.]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:date>2006-11-01T00:00:00-05:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[Dog Soldiers]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780395860250</link>
<description><![CDATA[In Saigon during the waning days of the Vietnam War, a small-time journalist named John Converse thinks he'll find action - and profit - by getting involved in a big-time drug deal. But back in the States, things go horribly wrong for him. Dog Soldiers perfectly captures the underground mood of America in the 1970s, when amateur drug dealers and hippies encountered profiteering cops and professional killers - and the price of survival was dangerously high.]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[Dog Soldiers]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Robert Stone]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Mariner Books]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9780395860250]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[In Saigon during the waning days of the Vietnam War, a small-time journalist named John Converse thinks he'll find action - and profit - by getting involved in a big-time drug deal. But back in the States, things go horribly wrong for him. Dog Soldiers perfectly captures the underground mood of America in the 1970s, when amateur drug dealers and hippies encountered profiteering cops and professional killers - and the price of survival was dangerously high.]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:date>1997-04-01T00:00:00-05:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[The Hair of Harold Roux]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780874517019</link>
<description><![CDATA[Aaron Benham - professor, novelist, friend, mentor, family man, and sometime idealist - is supposed to be working on his new novel, The Hair of Harold Roux. But instead, tormented by the chaos of his present and the demons of his past, he is riding his motorcycle too fast, drinking too much, and thinking too often and deeply. Through Aaron's rich, if angst-ridden, mind we discover that his novel-within-a-novel is really a thinly disguised account of his own turbulent post-World War II collegiate days. Harold Roux, a naive but well-meaning ex-GI who hides his premature baldness under an ill-fitting hairpiece, and Allard Benson, Aaron's fictional alter ego, become locked in what Aaron sardonically describes as "a simple story of seduction, rape, madness, and murder - the usual human preoccupations".]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[The Hair of Harold Roux]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Thomas William Simpson; Thomas Williams]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[University Press of New England]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9780874517019]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[Aaron Benham - professor, novelist, friend, mentor, family man, and sometime idealist - is supposed to be working on his new novel, The Hair of Harold Roux. But instead, tormented by the chaos of his present and the demons of his past, he is riding his motorcycle too fast, drinking too much, and thinking too often and deeply. Through Aaron's rich, if angst-ridden, mind we discover that his novel-within-a-novel is really a thinly disguised account of his own turbulent post-World War II collegiate days. Harold Roux, a naive but well-meaning ex-GI who hides his premature baldness under an ill-fitting hairpiece, and Allard Benson, Aaron's fictional alter ego, become locked in what Aaron sardonically describes as "a simple story of seduction, rape, madness, and murder - the usual human preoccupations".]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:date>1995-02-01T00:00:00-05:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[JR]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780140187076</link>
<description><![CDATA[]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[JR]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[William  Gaddis; Frederick R. Karl]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Penguin Classics]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9780140187076]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:date>1993-05-01T00:00:00-04:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[The Spectator Bird]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780140139402</link>
<description><![CDATA[Joe Allston is a retired literary agent whose parents and only son are dead, and who feels that he has been a mere spectator through life. Than a postcard from a friend causes him to return to the journals of a trip he took to his mother's birthplace to search for his roots; memories of that journey reveal tha t he is not quite spectator enough. Winner of the National Book Award.]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[The Spectator Bird]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Wallace  Stegner]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Penguin (Non-Classics)]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9780140139402]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[Joe Allston is a retired literary agent whose parents and only son are dead, and who feels that he has been a mere spectator through life. Than a postcard from a friend causes him to return to the journals of a trip he took to his mother's birthplace to search for his roots; memories of that journey reveal tha t he is not quite spectator enough. Winner of the National Book Award.]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:date>1990-11-01T00:00:00-05:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[Blood Tie]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9781570030970</link>
<description><![CDATA[In a novel that begins with accidental death and ends with deliberate murder, Mary Lee Settle tells the story of an eclectic collection of American and European expatriates who take refuge in an ancient Turkish city and, once there, wreak havoc on the Aegean paradise. At first the characters, who range from a former accountant to a petulant heiress, appear to have little in common, but as the novel progresses their motives and desires cross and blend in an eerie, sometimes comic geometry of misunderstanding. In this award-winning work of fiction, Settle reveals new life springing forth out of death and change, and blood as the only tie that endures. With her trademark versatility, Settle conveys the restlessness and ennui of the foreigners as successfully as the humanity of the native Turks. To both humorous and pitiable examples of culture clash she adds vivid scenes of archaeological digs, underwater diving, and a children's festival. Further, Settle's description of Timur, a fugitive who is lost in a cave, remains as terrifying as anything since Mark Twain placed Tom Sawyer in the same predicament.]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[Blood Tie]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Mary Lee Settle]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[University of South Carolina Press]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9781570030970]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[In a novel that begins with accidental death and ends with deliberate murder, Mary Lee Settle tells the story of an eclectic collection of American and European expatriates who take refuge in an ancient Turkish city and, once there, wreak havoc on the Aegean paradise. At first the characters, who range from a former accountant to a petulant heiress, appear to have little in common, but as the novel progresses their motives and desires cross and blend in an eerie, sometimes comic geometry of misunderstanding. In this award-winning work of fiction, Settle reveals new life springing forth out of death and change, and blood as the only tie that endures. With her trademark versatility, Settle conveys the restlessness and ennui of the foreigners as successfully as the humanity of the native Turks. To both humorous and pitiable examples of culture clash she adds vivid scenes of archaeological digs, underwater diving, and a children's festival. Further, Settle's description of Timur, a fugitive who is lost in a cave, remains as terrifying as anything since Mark Twain placed Tom Sawyer in the same predicament.]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:date>1995-10-01T00:00:00-04:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[Going After Cacciato]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780767904421</link>
<description><![CDATA["To call Going After Cacciato a novel about war is like calling Moby-Dick a novel about whales."So wrote The New York Times of Tim O'Brien's now classic novel of Vietnam. Winner of the 1979 National Book Award, Going After Cacciato captures the peculiar mixture of horror and hallucination that marked this strangest of wars.In a blend of reality and fantasy, this novel tells the story of a young soldier who one day lays down his rifle and sets off on a quixotic journey from the jungles of Indochina to the streets of Paris. In its memorable evocation of men both fleeing from and meeting the demands of battle, Going After Cacciato stands as much more than just a great war novel. Ultimately it's about the forces of fear and heroism that do battle in the hearts of us all.]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[Going After Cacciato]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Tim O'Brien]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Broadway]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9780767904421]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA["To call Going After Cacciato a novel about war is like calling Moby-Dick a novel about whales."So wrote The New York Times of Tim O'Brien's now classic novel of Vietnam. Winner of the 1979 National Book Award, Going After Cacciato captures the peculiar mixture of horror and hallucination that marked this strangest of wars.In a blend of reality and fantasy, this novel tells the story of a young soldier who one day lays down his rifle and sets off on a quixotic journey from the jungles of Indochina to the streets of Paris. In its memorable evocation of men both fleeing from and meeting the demands of battle, Going After Cacciato stands as much more than just a great war novel. Ultimately it's about the forces of fear and heroism that do battle in the hearts of us all.]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:date>1999-09-01T00:00:00-04:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[Bendigo Shafter]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780553264463</link>
<description><![CDATA[At what point does a group of strangers become a community? When young Bendigo Shafter and a ragtag bunch of travelers settle in the rugged Wyoming mountains, they quickly come to depend on a toughness and wisdom many of them never knew they possessed. Led by the beautiful and resourceful widow Ruth Macken, the settlers battle harsh winters, renegade opportunists, and the destructive lure of gold. Through these brutally demanding experiences, young Bendigo is forged into a man. But when he travels to New York to reclaim the love of Ninon, his childhood sweetheart, Bendigo is faced with new challenges. Will hard-edged instincts, honed from years in the mountains, serve him in the big city? Does Ninon’s heart belong to the lights and glamour of the theater? And if his destiny deems it so, will he be willing to leave the community he toiled so long and hard to build?]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[Bendigo Shafter]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Louis L'Amour]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Bantam]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9780553264463]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[At what point does a group of strangers become a community? When young Bendigo Shafter and a ragtag bunch of travelers settle in the rugged Wyoming mountains, they quickly come to depend on a toughness and wisdom many of them never knew they possessed. Led by the beautiful and resourceful widow Ruth Macken, the settlers battle harsh winters, renegade opportunists, and the destructive lure of gold. Through these brutally demanding experiences, young Bendigo is forged into a man. But when he travels to New York to reclaim the love of Ninon, his childhood sweetheart, Bendigo is faced with new challenges. Will hard-edged instincts, honed from years in the mountains, serve him in the big city? Does Ninon’s heart belong to the lights and glamour of the theater? And if his destiny deems it so, will he be willing to leave the community he toiled so long and hard to build?]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Mass Market Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:relation><![CDATA[9780553898903]]></dc:relation>
<dc:date>1983-11-01T00:00:00-05:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[Birdy]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780679734123</link>
<description><![CDATA[Hailed upon its publication as "a classic for readers not yet born" (Philadelphia Inquirer), Birdy is an inventive, hypnotic novel about friendship and family, dreaming and surviving, love and war, madness and beauty, and, above all, "birdness."  It tells the story of Al, a bold, hot-tempered boy whose goals in life are to life weights and pick up girls, and his strange friend Birdy, the skinny, tongue-tied perhaps genius who only wants to raise canaries and to fly.  While fighting in World War II, they find their dreams become all too real—and their lives are changed forever.In Birdy, William Wharton crafts an unforgettable tale that suggests another notion of sanity in a world that is manifestly insane.]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[Birdy]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[William Wharton]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Vintage]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9780679734123]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[Hailed upon its publication as "a classic for readers not yet born" (Philadelphia Inquirer), Birdy is an inventive, hypnotic novel about friendship and family, dreaming and surviving, love and war, madness and beauty, and, above all, "birdness."  It tells the story of Al, a bold, hot-tempered boy whose goals in life are to life weights and pick up girls, and his strange friend Birdy, the skinny, tongue-tied perhaps genius who only wants to raise canaries and to fly.  While fighting in World War II, they find their dreams become all too real—and their lives are changed forever.In Birdy, William Wharton crafts an unforgettable tale that suggests another notion of sanity in a world that is manifestly insane.]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:date>1992-02-04T00:00:00-05:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[The Book of the Dun Cow]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780060574604</link>
<description><![CDATA[Walter Wangerin's profound fantasy concerns a time when the sun turned around the earth and the animals could speak, when Chauntecleer the Rooster ruled over a more or less peaceful kingdom. What the animals did not know was that they were the Keepers of Wyrm, monster of evil long imprisoned beneath the earth ... and Wyrm, sub terra, was breaking free.]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[The Book of the Dun Cow]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Walter Wangerin]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[HarperOne]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9780060574604]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[Walter Wangerin's profound fantasy concerns a time when the sun turned around the earth and the animals could speak, when Chauntecleer the Rooster ruled over a more or less peaceful kingdom. What the animals did not know was that they were the Keepers of Wyrm, monster of evil long imprisoned beneath the earth ... and Wyrm, sub terra, was breaking free.]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:date>2003-09-01T00:00:00-04:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[Green Ripper]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780449224816</link>
<description><![CDATA[]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[Green Ripper]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[John D. Macdonald]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Fawcett]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9780449224816]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Mass Market Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:date>1996-04-20T00:00:00-04:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[Sophie's Choice]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780679736370</link>
<description><![CDATA[Three stories are told: a young Southerner wants to become a writer; a turbulent love-hate affair between a brilliant Jew and a beautiful Polish woman; and of an awful wound in that woman's past--one that impels both Sophie and Nathan toward destruction.]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[Sophie's Choice]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[William Styron]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Vintage]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9780679736370]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[Three stories are told: a young Southerner wants to become a writer; a turbulent love-hate affair between a brilliant Jew and a beautiful Polish woman; and of an awful wound in that woman's past--one that impels both Sophie and Nathan toward destruction.]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:date>1992-03-03T00:00:00-05:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[Stained Glass]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9781888952292</link>
<description><![CDATA[]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[Stained Glass]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jr. William F. Buckley]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Cumberland House Publishing]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9781888952292]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:date>1997-05-01T00:00:00-04:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[The World According to Garp]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780345418012</link>
<description><![CDATA[This is the life and times of T. S. Garp, the bastard son of Jenny Fields, a feminist leader ahead of her time. This is the life and death of a famous mother and her almost-famous son; theirs is a world of sexual extremes, even of sexual assassinations. It is a novel rich with lunacy and sorrow, yet the dark, violent events of the story do not undermine a comedy both ribald and robust. In more than thirty languages, in more than forty countries–with more than ten million copies in print–this novel provides almost cheerful, even hilarious evidence of its famous last line: “In the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases.”]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[The World According to Garp]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[John Irving]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Ballantine Books]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9780345418012]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[This is the life and times of T. S. Garp, the bastard son of Jenny Fields, a feminist leader ahead of her time. This is the life and death of a famous mother and her almost-famous son; theirs is a world of sexual extremes, even of sexual assassinations. It is a novel rich with lunacy and sorrow, yet the dark, violent events of the story do not undermine a comedy both ribald and robust. In more than thirty languages, in more than forty countries–with more than ten million copies in print–this novel provides almost cheerful, even hilarious evidence of its famous last line: “In the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases.”]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:date>1997-06-23T00:00:00-04:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[Plains Song]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780803282674</link>
<description><![CDATA[Wright Morris (1910-1998) wrote thirty-three books, including The Home Place, also available in a Bison Books edition, and Field of Vision, which won the National Book Award. Charles Baxter is a professor of English at the University of Michigan and the author of numerous works, including The Feast of Love.]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[Plains Song]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Wright Morris; Charles Baxter]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Bison Books]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9780803282674]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[Wright Morris (1910-1998) wrote thirty-three books, including The Home Place, also available in a Bison Books edition, and Field of Vision, which won the National Book Award. Charles Baxter is a professor of English at the University of Michigan and the author of numerous works, including The Feast of Love.]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:date>2000-10-01T00:00:00-04:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[The Stories of John Cheever]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780375724428</link>
<description><![CDATA[When The Stories of John Cheever was originally published, it became an immediate national bestseller and won the Pulitzer Prize.  In the years since, it has become a classic.  Vintage Books is proud to reintroduce this magnificent collection.Here are sixty-one stories that chronicle the lives of what has been called "the greatest generation."  From the early wonder and disillusionment of city life in "The Enormous Radio" to the surprising discoveries and common mysteries of suburbia in "The Housebreaker of Shady Hill" and "The Swimmer," Cheever tells us everything we need to know about "the pain and sweetness of life."]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[The Stories of John Cheever]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[John Cheever]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Vintage]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9780375724428]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[When The Stories of John Cheever was originally published, it became an immediate national bestseller and won the Pulitzer Prize.  In the years since, it has become a classic.  Vintage Books is proud to reintroduce this magnificent collection.Here are sixty-one stories that chronicle the lives of what has been called "the greatest generation."  From the early wonder and disillusionment of city life in "The Enormous Radio" to the surprising discoveries and common mysteries of suburbia in "The Housebreaker of Shady Hill" and "The Swimmer," Cheever tells us everything we need to know about "the pain and sweetness of life."]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:date>2000-05-16T00:00:00-04:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[Dale Loves Sophie to Death]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780316890663</link>
<description><![CDATA[Robb Forman Dew's cult first novel explores themes of familial and romantic bonds as it tells the story of a woman whose husband stays behind in New England while she and their children spend the summer in her Midwestern hometown.]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[Dale Loves Sophie to Death]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Robb Forman Dew]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Back Bay Books]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9780316890663]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[Robb Forman Dew's cult first novel explores themes of familial and romantic bonds as it tells the story of a woman whose husband stays behind in New England while she and their children spend the summer in her Midwestern hometown.]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:date>2001-09-01T00:00:00-04:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[Rabbit Is Rich]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780449911822</link>
<description><![CDATA[Winner of the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.Ten years after RABBIT REDUX, Harry Angstrom has come to enjoy prosperity as the Chief Sales Representative of Springer Motors. The rest of the world may be falling to pieces, but Harrry's doing all right. That is, until his son returns from the West, and the image of an old love pays a visit to his lot....From the Paperback edition.]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[Rabbit Is Rich]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[John Updike]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Ballantine Books]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9780449911822]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[Winner of the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.Ten years after RABBIT REDUX, Harry Angstrom has come to enjoy prosperity as the Chief Sales Representative of Springer Motors. The rest of the world may be falling to pieces, but Harrry's doing all right. That is, until his son returns from the West, and the image of an old love pays a visit to his lot....From the Paperback edition.]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:date>1996-08-27T00:00:00-04:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[So Long, See You Tomorrow]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780679767206</link>
<description><![CDATA[In this magically evocative novel, William Maxwell explores the enigmatic gravity of the past, which compels us to keep explaining it even as it makes liars out of us every time we try.  On a winter morning in the 1920s, a shot rings out on a farm in rural Illinois.  A man named Lloyd Wilson has been killed.  And the tenuous friendship between two lonely teenagers—one privileged yet neglected, the other a troubled farm boy—has been shattered.Fifty years later, one of those boys—now a grown man—tries to reconstruct the events that led up to the murder.  In doing so, he is inevitably drawn back to his lost friend Cletus, who has the misfortune of being the son of Wilson's killer and who in the months before witnessed things that Maxwell's narrator can only guess at.  Out of memory and imagination, the surmises of children and the destructive passions of their parents, Maxwell creates a luminous American classic of youth and loss.]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[So Long, See You Tomorrow]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[William Maxwell]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Vintage]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9780679767206]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[In this magically evocative novel, William Maxwell explores the enigmatic gravity of the past, which compels us to keep explaining it even as it makes liars out of us every time we try.  On a winter morning in the 1920s, a shot rings out on a farm in rural Illinois.  A man named Lloyd Wilson has been killed.  And the tenuous friendship between two lonely teenagers—one privileged yet neglected, the other a troubled farm boy—has been shattered.Fifty years later, one of those boys—now a grown man—tries to reconstruct the events that led up to the murder.  In doing so, he is inevitably drawn back to his lost friend Cletus, who has the misfortune of being the son of Wilson's killer and who in the months before witnessed things that Maxwell's narrator can only guess at.  Out of memory and imagination, the surmises of children and the destructive passions of their parents, Maxwell creates a luminous American classic of youth and loss.]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:date>1996-01-03T00:00:00-05:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780156189217</link>
<description><![CDATA[Stories are as good in themselves and as influential on the aspirations of others as any since Hemingway's. The breadth of Welty's offering is finally most visible not in the variety of types--farce, satire, horror, lyric, pastoral, mystery--but in the clarity and solidity and absolute honesty of a lifetime's vision.]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Eudora Welty]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Mariner Books]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9780156189217]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[Stories are as good in themselves and as influential on the aspirations of others as any since Hemingway's. The breadth of Welty's offering is finally most visible not in the variety of types--farce, satire, horror, lyric, pastoral, mystery--but in the clarity and solidity and absolute honesty of a lifetime's vision.]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:date>1982-02-01T00:00:00-05:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[The Color Purple]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780156028356</link>
<description><![CDATA[Celie is a poor black woman whose letters tell the story of 20 years of her life, beginning at age 14 when she is being abused and raped by her father and attempting to protect her sister from the same fate, and continuing over the course of her marriage to "Mister," a brutal man who terrorizes her. Celie eventually learns that her abusive husband has been keeping her sister's letters from her and the rage she feels, combined with an example of love and independence provided by her close friend Shug, pushes her finally toward an awakening of her creative and loving self.]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[The Color Purple]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Alice Walker]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Mariner Books]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9780156028356]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[Celie is a poor black woman whose letters tell the story of 20 years of her life, beginning at age 14 when she is being abused and raped by her father and attempting to protect her sister from the same fate, and continuing over the course of her marriage to "Mister," a brutal man who terrorizes her. Celie eventually learns that her abusive husband has been keeping her sister's letters from her and the rage she feels, combined with an example of love and independence provided by her close friend Shug, pushes her finally toward an awakening of her creative and loving self.]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:date>2003-05-01T00:00:00-04:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[The Women of Brewster Place]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780140066906</link>
<description><![CDATA[The women of Brewster Place are "hard-edged, soft-centered, brutally demanding, and easily pleased". In their stories, Gloria Naylor has created a community of women that has touched thousands of readers across the country. Now the basis for a November 1988, ABC-TV, three-hour movie, starring Oprah Winfrey.]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[The Women of Brewster Place]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Gloria  Naylor]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Penguin (Non-Classics)]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9780140066906]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[The women of Brewster Place are "hard-edged, soft-centered, brutally demanding, and easily pleased". In their stories, Gloria Naylor has created a community of women that has touched thousands of readers across the country. Now the basis for a November 1988, ABC-TV, three-hour movie, starring Oprah Winfrey.]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:date>1983-01-01T00:00:00-05:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[Stones for Ibarra]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780140075625</link>
<description><![CDATA[Two Americans, Richard and Sara Everton, are the only foreigners in Ibarra. They live among people who both respect and misunderstand them, and gradually, the villagers--at first enigmas to the Evertons--come to teach them much about life and the relentless tide of fate.]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[Stones for Ibarra]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Harriet  Doerr]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Penguin (Non-Classics)]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9780140075625]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[Two Americans, Richard and Sara Everton, are the only foreigners in Ibarra. They live among people who both respect and misunderstand them, and gradually, the villagers--at first enigmas to the Evertons--come to teach them much about life and the relentless tide of fate.]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:date>1985-01-01T00:00:00-05:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[Victory Over Japan]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780316313070</link>
<description><![CDATA[]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[Victory Over Japan]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ellen Gilchrist]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Back Bay Books]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9780316313070]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:date>1985-09-01T00:00:00-04:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[Easy in the Islands]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780802140593</link>
<description><![CDATA[Winner of the National Book Award for first fiction, "Easy in the Islands is a "stunning" ("The Washington Post) collection of stories by one of America's foremost contemporary fiction writers. Infused with the rhythms and the beat of the Caribbean, these vivid tales of paradise sought and paradise lost are as lush, steamy, and invigorating as the islands themselves. From fishing fleets in remote atolls too small to appear on any map and reggae bars on islands narrow enough to walk across in an hour, to the sprawling barrios and yacht-filled marinas of Miami, Bob Shacochis charts a course across a Caribbean that no one who has ever been there on vacation will recognize.]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[Easy in the Islands]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bob Shacochis]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Grove Press]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9780802140593]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[Winner of the National Book Award for first fiction, "Easy in the Islands is a "stunning" ("The Washington Post) collection of stories by one of America's foremost contemporary fiction writers. Infused with the rhythms and the beat of the Caribbean, these vivid tales of paradise sought and paradise lost are as lush, steamy, and invigorating as the islands themselves. From fishing fleets in remote atolls too small to appear on any map and reggae bars on islands narrow enough to walk across in an hour, to the sprawling barrios and yacht-filled marinas of Miami, Bob Shacochis charts a course across a Caribbean that no one who has ever been there on vacation will recognize.]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:date>2004-02-01T00:00:00-05:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[White Noise]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780140077025</link>
<description><![CDATA[]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[White Noise]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Don  DeLillo]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Penguin (Non-Classics)]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9780140077025]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:date>1986-01-01T00:00:00-05:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[World's Fair]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780812978209</link>
<description><![CDATA["Something close to magic." The Los Angeles TimesThe astonishing novel of a young boy's life in the New York City of the 1930s, a stunning recreation of the sights, sounds, aromas and emotions of a time when the streets were safe, families stuck together through thick and thin, and all the promises of a generation culminate in a single great World's Fair . . .From the Paperback edition.]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[World's Fair]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[E.L. Doctorow]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Random House Trade Paperbacks]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9780812978209]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA["Something close to magic." The Los Angeles TimesThe astonishing novel of a young boy's life in the New York City of the 1930s, a stunning recreation of the sights, sounds, aromas and emotions of a time when the streets were safe, families stuck together through thick and thin, and all the promises of a generation culminate in a single great World's Fair . . .From the Paperback edition.]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:date>2007-07-10T00:00:00-04:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[Paco's Story]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9781400076833</link>
<description><![CDATA[Paco Sullivan is the only man in Alpha Company to survive a cataclysmic Viet Cong attack on Fire Base Harriette in Vietnam.  Everyone else is annihilated. When a medic finally rescues Paco almost two days later, he is waiting to die, flies and maggots covering his burnt, shattered body.  He winds up back in the US with his legs full of pins, daily rations of Librium and Valium, and no sense of what to do next. One evening, on the tail of a rainstorm, he limps off the bus and into the small town of Boone, determined to find a real job and a real bed–but no matter how hard he works, nothing muffles the anguish in his mind and body. Brilliantly and vividly written, Paco’s Story–winner of a National Book Award–plunges you into the violence and casual cruelty of the Vietnam War, and the ghostly aftermath that often dealt the harshest blows.]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[Paco's Story]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Larry Heinemann]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Vintage]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9781400076833]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[Paco Sullivan is the only man in Alpha Company to survive a cataclysmic Viet Cong attack on Fire Base Harriette in Vietnam.  Everyone else is annihilated. When a medic finally rescues Paco almost two days later, he is waiting to die, flies and maggots covering his burnt, shattered body.  He winds up back in the US with his legs full of pins, daily rations of Librium and Valium, and no sense of what to do next. One evening, on the tail of a rainstorm, he limps off the bus and into the small town of Boone, determined to find a real job and a real bed–but no matter how hard he works, nothing muffles the anguish in his mind and body. Brilliantly and vividly written, Paco’s Story–winner of a National Book Award–plunges you into the violence and casual cruelty of the Vietnam War, and the ghostly aftermath that often dealt the harshest blows.]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:date>2005-04-12T00:00:00-04:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[Paris Trout]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780140122060</link>
<description><![CDATA[A respected white citizen of Cotton Point, Georgia, Paris Trout is a shopkeeper, a money-lender, and a murderer of blacks. And his friends, family and foes do not realize the danger they face in a man who simply will not see his own guilt.
]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[Paris Trout]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Pete  Dexter]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Penguin (Non-Classics)]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9780140122060]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[A respected white citizen of Cotton Point, Georgia, Paris Trout is a shopkeeper, a money-lender, and a murderer of blacks. And his friends, family and foes do not realize the danger they face in a man who simply will not see his own guilt.
]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:date>1989-08-01T00:00:00-04:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[Spartina]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780375702686</link>
<description><![CDATA[Winner of the 1989 National Book AwardA classic tale of a man, a boat, and a storm, Spartina is the lyrical and compassionatestory of Dick Pierce, a commercial fisherman along the shores of Rhode Island'sNarragansett Bay. A kind, sensitive, family man, he is also prone to irascible outburstsagainst the people he must work for, now that he can no longer make his living from thesea.Pierce's one great passion, a fifty-foot fishing boat called Spartina, lies unfinished inhis back yard.  Determined to get the funds he needs to buy her engine, he finds himselftaking a foolish, dangerous risk.  But his real test comes when he must weather a storm atsea in order to keep his dream alive.  Moving and poetic, Spartina is a masterly story ofone man's ongoing struggle to find his place in the world.]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[Spartina]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[John Casey]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Vintage]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9780375702686]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[Winner of the 1989 National Book AwardA classic tale of a man, a boat, and a storm, Spartina is the lyrical and compassionatestory of Dick Pierce, a commercial fisherman along the shores of Rhode Island'sNarragansett Bay. A kind, sensitive, family man, he is also prone to irascible outburstsagainst the people he must work for, now that he can no longer make his living from thesea.Pierce's one great passion, a fifty-foot fishing boat called Spartina, lies unfinished inhis back yard.  Determined to get the funds he needs to buy her engine, he finds himselftaking a foolish, dangerous risk.  But his real test comes when he must weather a storm atsea in order to keep his dream alive.  Moving and poetic, Spartina is a masterly story ofone man's ongoing struggle to find his place in the world.]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:date>1998-04-28T00:00:00-04:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[Middle Passage]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780684855882</link>
<description><![CDATA[Charles Johnson, author of Dreamer, received the National Book Award for Middle Passage in 1990. Currently the Pollock Professor of English at the University of Washington, he lives in Seattle with his wife and their two children.]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[Middle Passage]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Charles Johnson]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Scribner]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9780684855882]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[Charles Johnson, author of Dreamer, received the National Book Award for Middle Passage in 1990. Currently the Pollock Professor of English at the University of Washington, he lives in Seattle with his wife and their two children.]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:date>1998-07-01T00:00:00-04:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[Mating]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780679737094</link>
<description><![CDATA[The narrator of this splendidly expansive novel of high intellect and grand passion is an American anthropologist at loose ends in the South African republic of Botswana.  She has a noble and exacting mind, a good waist, and a busted thesis project.  She also has a yen for Nelson Denoon, a charismatic intellectual who is rumored to have founded a secretive and unorthodox utopian society in a remote corner of the Kalahari—one in which he is virtually the only man.  What ensues is both a quest and an exuberant comedy of manners, a book that explores the deepest canyons of eros even as it asks large questions about the good society, the geopolitics of poverty, and the baffling mystery of what men and women really want.]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[Mating]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Norman Rush]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Vintage]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9780679737094]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[The narrator of this splendidly expansive novel of high intellect and grand passion is an American anthropologist at loose ends in the South African republic of Botswana.  She has a noble and exacting mind, a good waist, and a busted thesis project.  She also has a yen for Nelson Denoon, a charismatic intellectual who is rumored to have founded a secretive and unorthodox utopian society in a remote corner of the Kalahari—one in which he is virtually the only man.  What ensues is both a quest and an exuberant comedy of manners, a book that explores the deepest canyons of eros even as it asks large questions about the good society, the geopolitics of poverty, and the baffling mystery of what men and women really want.]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:date>1992-09-01T00:00:00-04:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[All the Pretty Horses]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780679744399</link>
<description><![CDATA[Now a major motion picture from Columbia Pictures starring Matt Damon, produced by Mike Nichols, and directed by Billy Bob Thornton.The national bestseller and the first volume in Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy, All the Pretty Horses is the tale of John Grady Cole, who at sixteen finds himself at the end of a long line of Texas ranchers, cut off from the only life he has ever imagined for himself.  With two companions, he sets off for Mexico on a sometimes idyllic, sometimes comic journey to a place where dreams are paid for in blood.  Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction.]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[All the Pretty Horses]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Cormac Mccarthy]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Vintage]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9780679744399]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[Now a major motion picture from Columbia Pictures starring Matt Damon, produced by Mike Nichols, and directed by Billy Bob Thornton.The national bestseller and the first volume in Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy, All the Pretty Horses is the tale of John Grady Cole, who at sixteen finds himself at the end of a long line of Texas ranchers, cut off from the only life he has ever imagined for himself.  With two companions, he sets off for Mexico on a sometimes idyllic, sometimes comic journey to a place where dreams are paid for in blood.  Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction.]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:relation><![CDATA[9780307481306]]></dc:relation>
<dc:date>1993-06-29T00:00:00-04:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[The Shipping News]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780671510053</link>
<description><![CDATA[When Quoyle's two-timing wife meets her just desserts, he retreats with his two daughters to his ancestral home on the starkly beautiful Newfoundland coast, where a rich cast of local characters and family members all play a part in Quoyle's struggle to reclaim his life. As Quoyle confronts his private demons -- and the unpredictable forces of nature and society -- he begins to see the possibility of love without pain or misery.A vigorous, darkly comic, and at times magical portrait of the contemporary North American family, The Shipping News shows why Annie Proulx is recognized as one of the most gifted and original writers in America today.]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[The Shipping News]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Annie Proulx]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Scribner]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9780671510053]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[When Quoyle's two-timing wife meets her just desserts, he retreats with his two daughters to his ancestral home on the starkly beautiful Newfoundland coast, where a rich cast of local characters and family members all play a part in Quoyle's struggle to reclaim his life. As Quoyle confronts his private demons -- and the unpredictable forces of nature and society -- he begins to see the possibility of love without pain or misery.A vigorous, darkly comic, and at times magical portrait of the contemporary North American family, The Shipping News shows why Annie Proulx is recognized as one of the most gifted and original writers in America today.]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:date>1994-06-01T00:00:00-04:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[Frolic of His Own]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780684800523</link>
<description><![CDATA[With dazzling wit, William Gaddis brings his unmatched powers of observation and satirical sensibilities to bear on the American legal system. "A Frolic of His Own is a tour de force. It is a profound entertainment. It is scalding and Swiftian . . . darkly hilarious".--The New Republic. 1994 National Book Award winner.]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[Frolic of His Own]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[William Gaddis]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Scribner]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9780684800523]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[With dazzling wit, William Gaddis brings his unmatched powers of observation and satirical sensibilities to bear on the American legal system. "A Frolic of His Own is a tour de force. It is a profound entertainment. It is scalding and Swiftian . . . darkly hilarious".--The New Republic. 1994 National Book Award winner.]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:date>1995-02-01T00:00:00-05:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[Sabbath's Theater]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780679772590</link>
<description><![CDATA[Sabbath's Theater is a comic creation of epic proportions, and Mickey Sabbath is its gargantuan hero. Once a scandalously inventive puppeteer, Sabbath at sixty-four is still defiantly antagonistic and exceedingly libidinous. But after the death of his long-time mistress—an erotic free spirit whose adulterous daring surpassed even his own—Sabbath embarks on a turbulent journey into his past. Bereft and grieving, besieged by the ghosts of those who loved and hated him most, he contrives a succession of farcical disasters that take him to the brink of madness and extinction.]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[Sabbath's Theater]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Philip Roth]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Vintage]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9780679772590]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[Sabbath's Theater is a comic creation of epic proportions, and Mickey Sabbath is its gargantuan hero. Once a scandalously inventive puppeteer, Sabbath at sixty-four is still defiantly antagonistic and exceedingly libidinous. But after the death of his long-time mistress—an erotic free spirit whose adulterous daring surpassed even his own—Sabbath embarks on a turbulent journey into his past. Bereft and grieving, besieged by the ghosts of those who loved and hated him most, he contrives a succession of farcical disasters that take him to the brink of madness and extinction.]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:date>1996-08-06T00:00:00-04:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[Ship Fever]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780393316001</link>
<description><![CDATA[1996 National Book Award Winner for Fiction.]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[Ship Fever]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Andrea Barrett]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[W. W. Norton & Company]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9780393316001]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[1996 National Book Award Winner for Fiction.]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:date>1996-11-01T00:00:00-05:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[Cold Mountain]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780802142849</link>
<description><![CDATA[In 1997, Charles Frazier's debut novel "Cold Mountain" made publishing history when it sailed to the top of "The New York Times" best-seller list for sixty-one weeks, won numerous literary awards, including the National Book Award, and went on to sell over three million copies. Now, the beloved American epic returns, reissued by Grove Press to coincide with the publication of Frazier's eagerly-anticipated second novel, "Thirteen Moons". Sorely wounded and fatally disillusioned in the fighting at Petersburg, a Confederate soldier named Inman decides to walk back to his home in the Blue Ridge mountains to Ada, the woman he loves. His trek across the disintegrating South brings him into intimate and sometimes lethal converse with slaves and marauders, bounty hunters and witches, both helpful and malign. At the same time, the intrepid Ada is trying to revive her father's derelict farm and learning to survive in a world where the old certainties have been swept away. As it interweaves their stories, "Cold Mountain" asserts itself as an authentic odyssey, hugely powerful, majestically lovely, and keenly moving.]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[Cold Mountain]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Charles Frazier]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Grove Press]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9780802142849]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[In 1997, Charles Frazier's debut novel "Cold Mountain" made publishing history when it sailed to the top of "The New York Times" best-seller list for sixty-one weeks, won numerous literary awards, including the National Book Award, and went on to sell over three million copies. Now, the beloved American epic returns, reissued by Grove Press to coincide with the publication of Frazier's eagerly-anticipated second novel, "Thirteen Moons". Sorely wounded and fatally disillusioned in the fighting at Petersburg, a Confederate soldier named Inman decides to walk back to his home in the Blue Ridge mountains to Ada, the woman he loves. His trek across the disintegrating South brings him into intimate and sometimes lethal converse with slaves and marauders, bounty hunters and witches, both helpful and malign. At the same time, the intrepid Ada is trying to revive her father's derelict farm and learning to survive in a world where the old certainties have been swept away. As it interweaves their stories, "Cold Mountain" asserts itself as an authentic odyssey, hugely powerful, majestically lovely, and keenly moving.]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:date>2006-09-01T00:00:00-04:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[Waiting]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780375706417</link>
<description><![CDATA["In Waiting, Ha Jin portrays the life of Lin Kong, a dedicated doctor torn by his love for two women: one who belongs to the New China of the Cultural Revolution, the other to the ancient traditions of his family's village. Ha Jin profoundly understands the conflict between the individual and society, between the timeless universality of the human heart and constantly shifting politics of the moment. With wisdom, restraint, and empathy for all his characters, he vividly reveals the complexities and subtleties of a world and a people we desperately need to know."--Judges' Citation, National Book Award"Ha Jin's novel could hardly be less theatrical, yet we're immediately engaged by its narrative structure, by its wry humor and by the subtle, startling shifts it produces in our understanding of characters and their situation."--The New York Times Book Review"Subtle and complex--his best work to date. A moving meditation on the effects of time upon love."--The Washington Post"A high achievement indeed."--Ian Buruma, The New York Review of Books"A portrait of Chinese provincial life that terrifies with its emptiness even more than with its all-pervasive vulgarity. The poet in [Jin] intersperses these human scenes with achingly beautiful vignettes of natural beauty."--Los Angeles Times"A simple love story that transcends cultural barriers--. From the idyllic countryside to the small towns in northeast China, Jin's depictions are filled with an earthy poetic grace--. Jin's account of daily life in China is convincing and rich in detail."--The Chicago Tribune"Compassionate, earthy, robust, and wise, Waiting blends provocative allegory with all-too-human comedy. The result touches and reveals, bringing to life a singular world in its spectacular intricacy."--Gish Jen, author of Who's Irish?"A remarkable love story. Ha Jin's understanding of the human heart and the human condition transcends borders and time. Waiting is an outstanding literary achievement."--Lisa See, author of On Gold Mountain]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[Waiting]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ha Jin]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Vintage]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9780375706417]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA["In Waiting, Ha Jin portrays the life of Lin Kong, a dedicated doctor torn by his love for two women: one who belongs to the New China of the Cultural Revolution, the other to the ancient traditions of his family's village. Ha Jin profoundly understands the conflict between the individual and society, between the timeless universality of the human heart and constantly shifting politics of the moment. With wisdom, restraint, and empathy for all his characters, he vividly reveals the complexities and subtleties of a world and a people we desperately need to know."--Judges' Citation, National Book Award"Ha Jin's novel could hardly be less theatrical, yet we're immediately engaged by its narrative structure, by its wry humor and by the subtle, startling shifts it produces in our understanding of characters and their situation."--The New York Times Book Review"Subtle and complex--his best work to date. A moving meditation on the effects of time upon love."--The Washington Post"A high achievement indeed."--Ian Buruma, The New York Review of Books"A portrait of Chinese provincial life that terrifies with its emptiness even more than with its all-pervasive vulgarity. The poet in [Jin] intersperses these human scenes with achingly beautiful vignettes of natural beauty."--Los Angeles Times"A simple love story that transcends cultural barriers--. From the idyllic countryside to the small towns in northeast China, Jin's depictions are filled with an earthy poetic grace--. Jin's account of daily life in China is convincing and rich in detail."--The Chicago Tribune"Compassionate, earthy, robust, and wise, Waiting blends provocative allegory with all-too-human comedy. The result touches and reveals, bringing to life a singular world in its spectacular intricacy."--Gish Jen, author of Who's Irish?"A remarkable love story. Ha Jin's understanding of the human heart and the human condition transcends borders and time. Waiting is an outstanding literary achievement."--Lisa See, author of On Gold Mountain]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:relation><![CDATA[9780375726958]]></dc:relation>
<dc:date>2000-09-19T00:00:00-04:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[In America]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780312273200</link>
<description><![CDATA[In America is a kaleidoscopic portrait of America on the cusp of modernity. As she did in her enormously popular novel The Volcano Lover, Susan Sontag casts a story located in the past in a fresh, provocative light to create a fictional world full of contemporary resonance.  In 1876 a group of Poles led by Maryna Zalezowska, Poland's greatest actress, emigrate to the United States and travel to California to found a "utopian commune." When the commune fails, Maryna stays, learns English, and—as Marina Zalenska—forges a new, even more triumphant career on the American stage, becoming a diva on par with Sara Bernhardt.  In America is about many things: a woman's search for self-transformation; the fate of idealism; a life in the theater; the many varieties of love; and, not least of all, stories and storytelling itself. Operatic in the scope and intensity of the emotions it depicts, richly detailed and visionary in its account of America, and peopled with unforgettable characters.                                                 Susan Sontag became a cultural figure upon the publication of her pathbreaking collection of essays Against Interpretation in 1966.  She went on to write four novels, including In America, which won the National Book Award for Fiction, as well as a collection of stories, several plays, and seven subsequent works of nonfiction, among them On Photography, Illness as Metaphor, and Regarding the Pain of Others. Her many international honors included the Jerusalem Prize in 2001 and the Friedenspreis (Peace Prize) of the German Book Trade in 2003. She died in New York City on December 28, 2004.                                          Winner of the National Book AwardIn America is a kaleidoscopic portrait of America on the cusp of modernity. As she did in her enormously popular novel The Volcano Lover, Susan Sontag casts a story located in the past in a fresh, provocative light to create a fictional world full of contemporary resonance.  In 1876 a group of Poles led by Maryna Zalezowska, Poland's greatest actress, emigrate to the United States and travel to California to found a "utopian commune." When the commune fails, Maryna stays, learns English, and—as Marina Zalenska—forges a new, even more triumphant career on the American stage, becoming a diva on par with Sara Bernhardt.  In America is about many things: a woman's search for self-transformation; the fate of idealism; a life in the theater; the many varieties of love; and, not least of all, stories and storytelling itself. Operatic in the scope and intensity of the emotions it depicts, richly detailed and visionary in its account of early America, and peopled with unforgettable characters.       Winner of the National Book Award"Like its brilliant essayist author, this 'novel' defies every convention of storytelling . . . Most original and innovative."—The Philadelphia Inquirer"An exhilarating journey into the past, freighted with dazzling detail, the product of an endlessly inquisitive, historical imagination."—The Economist                                                    "Often brave and beautiful . . . The scope of the take is vast, and there is a largesse in the telling, the sheer happiness of art. But In America is also an intimate portrait of a willful woman who, like the liner which brings her to America, trails a great wake behind her . . . In this novel about Poland and America, acting and living, transformation and respiration, Susan Sontag has indeed found a story that tells many stories with élan, intelligence, and delight."—Richard Lourie, The Washington Post Book World"Sure-footed and wonderfully daring."—Sarah Kerr, The New York Times Book Review"An inventive work, written in fluid prose . . . Beautiful and unsettling."—Lisa Michaels, The Wall Street Journal"A fascinating exploration of what's real in a culture that preaches authenticity but worships artificiality."—The Christian Science Monitor"Enough incident, psychology, local color, and fascinating detail to stock a flotilla of popular novels, a couple of Ragtimes, and a brace of theatrical memoirs."—Michael Silverblatt, Los Angeles Times Book Review"What is wonderful about this book is . . . [the] counterpoint of novelist and essayist, of innocence and knowingness. From the knowingness comes another excellence of In America, its cat's cradle of meanings."—Joan Acocella, The New Yorker"In America displays Sontag in a relaxed, pleasure-seeking mode, guiding her character through a long travelogue in time, specifically the beginnings of the gilded age in the brave new world. Here are sumptuous theaters in Manhattan and hotels in San Francisco; a journey 1,900 feet down into a silver mine in Virginia City, Nevada; cameo appearances by such luminaries as Henry James and the Shakespearean actor Edwin Booth."—Paul Gray, Timecf0 "Like its brilliant essayist author, this 'novel' defies every convention of storytelling . . . Most original and innovative."—The Philadelphia Inquirer"An exhilarating journey into the past, freighted with dazzling detail, the product of an endlessly inquisitive, historical imagination."—The Economist"Sontag weaves an expansive broad narrative cloth here, keeping us under her spell until the very last word."—Chicago Tribune"A powerful story of a woman transcending herself . . . Mesmerizing."—Palo Alto Daily News"[In America] showcases Sontag's gift for cultural commentary and her eye for sumptuous detail."—Rocky Mountain News (Denver)"Susan Sontag is a powerful thinker, and a better writer, sentence for sentence, than anyone who now wears the tag 'intellectual.'"—The New York Observer"Sontag crafts a novel of ideas in which real figures from the past enact their lives against an assiduously researched, almost cinematically vivid background." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)"Sontag uses dense, elegant language, inventive dialogue, impassioned monologue, and diary entries to lure the reader more deeply into the fascinating historical journey of a powerful actress . . . Sontag triumphs once again with her gift for turning history into riveting fiction."—Library Journal]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[In America]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Susan Sontag]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Picador]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9780312273200]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[In America is a kaleidoscopic portrait of America on the cusp of modernity. As she did in her enormously popular novel The Volcano Lover, Susan Sontag casts a story located in the past in a fresh, provocative light to create a fictional world full of contemporary resonance.  In 1876 a group of Poles led by Maryna Zalezowska, Poland's greatest actress, emigrate to the United States and travel to California to found a "utopian commune." When the commune fails, Maryna stays, learns English, and—as Marina Zalenska—forges a new, even more triumphant career on the American stage, becoming a diva on par with Sara Bernhardt.  In America is about many things: a woman's search for self-transformation; the fate of idealism; a life in the theater; the many varieties of love; and, not least of all, stories and storytelling itself. Operatic in the scope and intensity of the emotions it depicts, richly detailed and visionary in its account of America, and peopled with unforgettable characters.                                                 Susan Sontag became a cultural figure upon the publication of her pathbreaking collection of essays Against Interpretation in 1966.  She went on to write four novels, including In America, which won the National Book Award for Fiction, as well as a collection of stories, several plays, and seven subsequent works of nonfiction, among them On Photography, Illness as Metaphor, and Regarding the Pain of Others. Her many international honors included the Jerusalem Prize in 2001 and the Friedenspreis (Peace Prize) of the German Book Trade in 2003. She died in New York City on December 28, 2004.                                          Winner of the National Book AwardIn America is a kaleidoscopic portrait of America on the cusp of modernity. As she did in her enormously popular novel The Volcano Lover, Susan Sontag casts a story located in the past in a fresh, provocative light to create a fictional world full of contemporary resonance.  In 1876 a group of Poles led by Maryna Zalezowska, Poland's greatest actress, emigrate to the United States and travel to California to found a "utopian commune." When the commune fails, Maryna stays, learns English, and—as Marina Zalenska—forges a new, even more triumphant career on the American stage, becoming a diva on par with Sara Bernhardt.  In America is about many things: a woman's search for self-transformation; the fate of idealism; a life in the theater; the many varieties of love; and, not least of all, stories and storytelling itself. Operatic in the scope and intensity of the emotions it depicts, richly detailed and visionary in its account of early America, and peopled with unforgettable characters.       Winner of the National Book Award"Like its brilliant essayist author, this 'novel' defies every convention of storytelling . . . Most original and innovative."—The Philadelphia Inquirer"An exhilarating journey into the past, freighted with dazzling detail, the product of an endlessly inquisitive, historical imagination."—The Economist                                                    "Often brave and beautiful . . . The scope of the take is vast, and there is a largesse in the telling, the sheer happiness of art. But In America is also an intimate portrait of a willful woman who, like the liner which brings her to America, trails a great wake behind her . . . In this novel about Poland and America, acting and living, transformation and respiration, Susan Sontag has indeed found a story that tells many stories with élan, intelligence, and delight."—Richard Lourie, The Washington Post Book World"Sure-footed and wonderfully daring."—Sarah Kerr, The New York Times Book Review"An inventive work, written in fluid prose . . . Beautiful and unsettling."—Lisa Michaels, The Wall Street Journal"A fascinating exploration of what's real in a culture that preaches authenticity but worships artificiality."—The Christian Science Monitor"Enough incident, psychology, local color, and fascinating detail to stock a flotilla of popular novels, a couple of Ragtimes, and a brace of theatrical memoirs."—Michael Silverblatt, Los Angeles Times Book Review"What is wonderful about this book is . . . [the] counterpoint of novelist and essayist, of innocence and knowingness. From the knowingness comes another excellence of In America, its cat's cradle of meanings."—Joan Acocella, The New Yorker"In America displays Sontag in a relaxed, pleasure-seeking mode, guiding her character through a long travelogue in time, specifically the beginnings of the gilded age in the brave new world. Here are sumptuous theaters in Manhattan and hotels in San Francisco; a journey 1,900 feet down into a silver mine in Virginia City, Nevada; cameo appearances by such luminaries as Henry James and the Shakespearean actor Edwin Booth."—Paul Gray, Timecf0 "Like its brilliant essayist author, this 'novel' defies every convention of storytelling . . . Most original and innovative."—The Philadelphia Inquirer"An exhilarating journey into the past, freighted with dazzling detail, the product of an endlessly inquisitive, historical imagination."—The Economist"Sontag weaves an expansive broad narrative cloth here, keeping us under her spell until the very last word."—Chicago Tribune"A powerful story of a woman transcending herself . . . Mesmerizing."—Palo Alto Daily News"[In America] showcases Sontag's gift for cultural commentary and her eye for sumptuous detail."—Rocky Mountain News (Denver)"Susan Sontag is a powerful thinker, and a better writer, sentence for sentence, than anyone who now wears the tag 'intellectual.'"—The New York Observer"Sontag crafts a novel of ideas in which real figures from the past enact their lives against an assiduously researched, almost cinematically vivid background." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)"Sontag uses dense, elegant language, inventive dialogue, impassioned monologue, and diary entries to lure the reader more deeply into the fascinating historical journey of a powerful actress . . . Sontag triumphs once again with her gift for turning history into riveting fiction."—Library Journal]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:date>2001-05-01T00:00:00-04:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[The Corrections]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780312421274</link>
<description><![CDATA[Winner of the National Book AwardAfter almost fifty years as a wife and mother, Enid Lambert is ready to have some fun. Unfortunately, her husband, Alfred, is losing his sanity to Parkinson's disease, and their children have long since flown the family nest to the catastrophes of their own lives. The oldest, Gary, a once-stable portfolio manager and family man, is trying to convince his wife and himself, despite clear signs to the contrary, that he is not clinically depressed. The middle child, Chip, has lost his seemingly secure academic job and is failing spectacularly at his new line of work. And Denise, the youngest, has escaped a disastrous marriage only to pour her youth and beauty down the drain of an affair with a married man-or so her mother fears. Desperate for some pleasure to look forward to, Enid has set her heart on an elusive goal: bringing her family together for one last Christmas at home.                             Jonathan Franzen is the author of The Twenty-Seventh City, Strong Motion, and the essay collection How to Be Alone. He has been named one of the Granta 20 Best Novelists under 40 and is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and Harper's. He lives in New York City.                                         Winner of the National Book Award Pulitzer Prize FinalistNational Book Critics Circle Award FinalistPEN/Faulkner Award FinalistLos Angeles Times Book Award FinalistNew York Times Book Review Editors' ChoiceAmerican Library Association Notable BookThe Corrections is a grandly entertaining novel for the new century—a comic, tragic masterpiece about a family breaking down in an age of easy fixes. After almost fifty years as a wife and mother, Enid Lambert is ready to have some fun. Unfortunately, her husband, Alfred, is losing his sanity to Parkinson's disease, and their children have long since flown the family nest to the catastrophes of their own lives. The oldest, Gary, a once-stable portfolio manager and family man, is trying to convince his wife and himself, despite clear signs to the contrary, that he is not clinically depressed. The middle child, Chip, has lost his seemingly secure academic job and is failing spectacularly at his new line of work. And Denise, the youngest, has escaped a disastrous marriage only to pour her youth and beauty down the drain of an affair with a married man—or so her mother fears. Desperate for some pleasure to look forward to, Enid has set her heart on an elusive goal: bringing her family together for one last Christmas at home. Stretching from the Midwest at midcentury to the Wall Street and Eastern Europe of today, The Corrections brings an old-fashioned world of civic virtue and sexual inhibitions into violent collision with the era of home surveillance, hands-off parenting, do-it-yourself mental health care, and globalized greed. Richly realistic and darkly hilarious, it confirms Jonathan Franzen as one of our most brilliant interpreters of American society and the American soul.                                                       "Funny and deeply sad, large-hearted and merciless, The Corrections is a testament to the range and depth of pleasures great fiction affords."?David Foster Wallace"Jonathan Franzen has built a powerful novel out of the swarming consciousness of a marriage, a family, a whole culture?our culture. And he has done it with sympathy and expansiveness that bend the edgy modern temper to a generous breadth of vision."?Don DeLillo"In its complexity, its scrutinizing and utterly unsentimental humanity, and its grasp of the subtle relationships between domestic drama and global events, The Corrections stands in the company of Mann's Buddenbrooks and DeLillo's White Noise. It is a major accomplishment."?Michael Cunningham"Looms as a model for what ambitious storytelling can still say about modern life."?San Francisco Chronicle"The Corrections is the brightest, boldest, and most ambitious novel I've read in many years. With this dazzling work, Franzen gives notice that from now on, he is only going to hunt with the big cats."?Pat Conroy"You will laugh, wince, groan, weep, leave the table and maybe the country, promise never to go home again, and be reminded of why you read serious fiction in the first place . . . Wordplay worthy of Nabokov . . . Tiny, revelatory gestures . . . Magically precise images . . . Knowing one-liners . . . Franzen writes with convincing authority about the minutiae of railroads, clothing, medicine, economics, industry, cuisine, and Eastern European politics, and he knows just when to push his conceits over the top . . . But he also knows his way around more intimate territory . . . No one book, of course, can provide everything we want in a novel. But a book as strong as The Corrections seems ruled only by its own self-generated aesthetic: it creates the illusion of giving a complete account of a world, and while we're under its enchantment it temporarily eclipses whatever else we may have read. But I guess that is everything we want in a novel?except, when it's rocking along, for it never to be over."?The New York Times Book Review"What we're asking is whether Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections will become that rare thing, a literary work that everybody's reading? A lot of people are saying yes."?Time"The last 100 pages of The Corrections is an unforgettably sad, indelibly beautiful piece of literature . . . [Franzen] is a writer with talent to burn."?Newsweek"The novel of the year."?Fortune"Franzen is a wizard, endlessly inventive in his thematic connections and scene setting . . . The Corrections is a wide-open performance showcasing the full range of his skills and his eclectic intelligence . . . [It] recalls no novel so much as John Cheever's The Wapshot Scandal. The Corrections is just as funny and sad and smart as that masterpiece, and Franzen, like Cheever, reminds us of the timelessness of human folly."?Stewart O'Nan, The Atlantic Monthly "Dazzling . . . electric . . . There's something thrilling, heartening, and inspiring about seeing life revealed so accurately, so transparently?and finally, so forgivingly."?Francine Prose, O magazine" 'Honestly' hype[d] . . . novel of extraordinary merit . . . Franzen's ability to infuse each character with such appealing vulnerability. Which, of course, is the redemptive hat trick of great literature: The Lamberts may be humming with unhappiness, but we are left humming with their?and our own?humanity."?Vogue"Let's not mince words or pussyfoot with fancy lit-crit lingo. This is a great book. It needs to be read . . . A panoramic work that frequently zeroes in, with almost claustrophobic clarity, on human foibles . . . A huge, ambitious, powerful, funny, imaginative yet realistic novel. This book is a gift."?The Philadelphia Inquirer"A big, showy powerhouse of a novel, revved up with ideas but satisfyingly beholden to the traditions of character and plot . . . Smart and boisterous and beautifully paced . . . Franzen's epic study in irony suggests Wolfe running into Don DeLillo . . . The greatest strength of The Corrections, and there are many, is its skillful narrative relativism, the way it delivers one version of the truth about a character, then fleshes out that reality over time into something larger and more complex . . . His rendering [of the autumnal prairie of millennial America] is frighteningly, luminously authentic."?The Boston Globe"[Combines] the deadpan dazzle and intricate ironies of Don DeLillo with the more homey concerns of Anne Tyler . . . There is bravura writing here, wizardly wordplay, sharp insights."?The Dallas Morning News"Remarkable and possibly unprecedented: a merciless satirical look at contemporary life that is also fundamentally generous and humane."?Salon.com"Wondrously devastating . . . In prose that is by turns suspenseful, brooding, and, oh yes, compassionate, Franzen unrolls the huge, bleak panorama of the Lamberts' past and present lives, their temptations, failures, mistakes and false hopes, their intimate acquaintance with the hot flash of selfishness and the sharp bitterness of rue."?The Miami Herald"Remarkable . . . The best comparisons are to David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest and Don DeLillo's Underworld . . . but The Corrections has more heart."?The Oregonian (Portland)"A big, intelligent and mostly compassionate novel that's so much fun one hates to see it end . . . A novel of our times . . . Think of the book as a blend of postmodern meganovel and Victorian family saga."?The News and Observer (Raleigh)"The best American novel published to date this year."?St. Louis Post-Dispatch"More engaging and readable than other chilly magnum opuses in the same league . . . Unlike his Big Book peers, [Franzen] wants things tidy?not in the middle, maybe, but at the end. The chaos-theory math wizards of antimatter fiction don't often show such good manners, such politeness, and it's touching to find it here. Not just dazzle?warmth."?GQ "Agreeably accessible, . . . poised halfway between postmodern chic and plain old-fashioned storytelling. It sucks you into the vortex of family life, the whirling blend of happy and unhappy; it lands you in the sticky goo of mingled love and hate. What Mr. Franzen does?brilliantly? is to risk sentimentality to get at emotional truth."?Adam Begley, The New York Observer "[The Corrections is] Franzen's most autobiographical novel, his most engrossing (do not be surprised to find yourself trying to read it all in one sitting), and, stylistically, his most lyrical. In its gorgeous, sweeping scope and the sympathy of its tone, it owes 0more to Tolstoy than to Pynchon, but ultimately the novel offers up pleasures that are utterly Franzenian; a sense of exhilaration permeates The Corrections, which is, in part, the exhilaration of a writer who has broken free of his masters."?Poets and Writers         Excerpt from Chapter OneSt. JudeThe Madness of an autumn prairie cold front coming through. You could feel it: something terrible was going to happen. The sun low in the sky, a minor light, a cooling star. Gust after gust of disorder. Trees restless, temperatures falling, the whole northern religion of things coming to an end. No children in the yards here. Shadows lengthened on yellowing zoysia. Red oaks and pin oaks and swamp white oaks rained acorns on houses with no mortgage. Storm windows shuddered in the empty bedrooms. And the drone and hiccup of a clothes dryer, the nasal contention of a leaf blower, the ripening of local apples in a paper bag, the smell of the gasoline with which Alfred Lambert had cleaned the paintbrush from his morning painting of the wicker love seat. Three in the afternoon was a time of danger in these gerontocratic suburbs of St. Jude. Alfred had awakened in the great blue chair in which he'd been sleeping since lunch. He'd had his nap and there would be no local news until five o'clock. Two empty hours were a sinus in which infections bred. He struggled to his feet and stood by the Ping-Pong table, listening in vain for Enid.Ringing throughout the house was an alarm bell that no one but Alfred and Enid could hear directly. It was the alarm bell of anxiety. It was like one of those big cast-iron dishes with an electric clapper that send schoolchildren into the street in fire drills. By now it had been ringing for so many hours that the Lamberts no longer heard the message of "bell ringing" but, as with any sound that continues for so long that you have the leisure to learn its component sounds (as with any word you stare at until it resolves itself into a string of dead letters), instead heard a clapper rapidly striking a metallic resonator, not a pure tone but a granular sequence of percussions with a keening overlay of overtones; ringing for so many days that it simply blended into the background except at certain early-morning hours when one or the other of them awoke in a sweat and realized that a bell had been ringing in their heads for so long as they could remember; ringing for so many months that the sound had given way to a kind of metasound whose rise and fall was not the beating of compression waves but the much, much slower waxing and waning of their consciousness of the sound. Which consciousness was particularly acute when the weather itself was in an anxious mood. Then Enid and Alfred—she on her knees in the dining room opening drawers, he in the basement surveying the disastrous Ping-Pong table—each felt near to exploding with anxiety. The anxiety of coupons, in a drawer containing candles in designer autumn colors. The coupons were bundled in a rubber band, and Enid was realizing that their expiration dates (often jauntily circled in red by the manufacturer) lay months and even years in the past: that these hundred-odd coupons, whose total face value exceeded sixty dollars (potentially one hundred twenty dollars at the Chiltsville supermarket that doubled coupons), had all gone bad. Tilex, sixty cents off. Excedrin PM, a dollar off. The dates were not even close. The dates were historical. The alarm bell had been ringing for years. She pushed the coupons back in among the candles and shut the drawer. She was looking for a letter that had come by Registered mail some days ago. Alfred had heard the mailman knock on the door and had shouted, "Enid! Enid!" so loudly that he couldn't hear her shouting back, "Al, I'm getting it!" He'd continued to shout her name, coming closer and closer, and because the sender of the letter was the Axon Corporation, 24 East Industrial Serpentine, Schwenksville, PA, and because there were aspects of the Axon situation that Enid knew about and hoped that Alfred didn't, she'd quickly stashed the letter somewhere within fifteen feet of the front door. Alfred had emerged from the basement bellowing like a piece of earth-moving equipment, "There's somebody at the door!" and she'd fairly screamed, "The mailman! The mailman!" and he'd shaken his head at the complexity of it all. Enid felt sure that her own head would clear if only she didn't have to wonder, every five minutes, what Alfred was up to. But, try as she might, she couldn't get him interested in life. When she encouraged him to take up his metallurgy again, he looked at her as if she'd lost her mind. When she asked whether there wasn't some yard work he could do, he said his legs hurt. When she reminded him that the husbands of her friends all had hobbies (Dave Schumpert his stained glass, Kirby Root his intricate chalets for nesting purple finches, Chuck Meisner his hourly monitoring of his investment portfolio), Alfred acted as if she were trying to distract him from some great labor of his. And what was that labor? Repainting the porch furniture? He'd been repainting the love seat since Labor Day. She seemed to recall that the last time he'd painted the furniture he'd done the love seat in two hours. Now he went to his workshop morning after morning, and after a month she ventured in to see how he was doing and found that all he'd painted of the love seat was the legs. He seemed to wish that she would go away. He said that the brush had got dried out, that that was what was taking so long. He said that scraping wicker was like trying to peel a blueberry. He said that there were crickets. She felt a shortness of breath then, but perhaps it was only the smell of gasoline and of the dampness of the workshop that smelled like urine (but could not possibly be urine). She fled upstairs to look for the letter from Axon. Six days a week several pounds of mail came through the slot in the front door, and since nothing incidental was allowed to pile up downstairs—since the fiction of living in this house was that no one lived here—Enid faced a substantial tactical challenge. She didn't think of herself as a guerrilla, but a guerrilla was what she was. By day she ferried matériel from depot to depot, often just a step ahead of the governing force. By night, beneath a charming but too-dim sconce at a too-small table in the breakfast nook, she staged various actions: paid bills, balanced checkbooks, attempted to decipher Medicare copayment records and make sense of a threatening Third Notice from a medical lab that demanded immediate payment of $0.22 while simultaneously showing an account balance of $0.00 carried forward and thus indicating that she owed nothing and in any case offering no address to which remittance might be made. It would happen that the First and Second Notices were underground somewhere, and because of the constraints under which Enid waged her campaign she had only the dimmest sense of where those other Notices might be on any given evening. She might suspect, perhaps, the family-room closet, but the governing force, in the person of Alfred, would be watching a network newsmagazine at a volume thunderous enough to keep him awake, and he had every light in the family room burning, and there was a non-negligible possibility that if she opened the closet door a cascade of catalogues and House Beautifuls and miscellaneous Merrill Lynch statements would come toppling and sliding out, incurring Alfred's wrath. There was also the possibility that the Notices would not be there, since the governing force staged random raids on her depots, threatening to "pitch" the whole lot of it if she didn't take care of it, but she was too busy dodging these raids to ever quite take care of it, and in the succession of forced migrations and deportations any lingering semblance of order was lost, and so the random Nordstrom shopping bag that was camped behind a dust ruffle with one of its plastic handles semi-detached would contain the whole shuffled pathos of a refugee existence—non-consecutive issues of Good Housekeeping, black-and-white snapshots of Enid in the 1940s, brown recipes on high-acid paper that called for wilted lettuce, the current month's telephone and gas bills, the detailed First Notice from the medical lab instructing co-payers to ignore subsequent billings for less than fifty cents, a complimentary cruise ship photo of Enid and Alfred wearing leis and sipping beverages from hollow coconuts, and the only extant copies of two of their children's birth certificates, for example. Although Enid's ostensible foe was Alfred, what made her a guerrilla was the house that occupied them both. Its furnishings were of the kind that brooked no clutter. There were chairs and tables by Ethan Allen. Spode and Waterford in the breakfront. Obligatory ficuses, obligatory Norfolk pines. Fanned copies of Architectural Digest on a glass-topped coffee table. Touristic plunder—enamelware from China, a Viennese music box that Enid out of a sense of duty and mercy every so often wound up and raised the lid of. The tune was "Strangers in the Night." Unfortunately, Enid lacked the temperament to manage such a house, and Alfred lacked the neurological wherewithal. Alfred's cries of rage on discovering evidence of guerrilla actions—a Nordstrom bag surprised in broad daylight on the basement stairs, nearly precipitating a tumble—were the cries of a government that could no longer govern. He'd lately developed a knack for making his printing calculator spit columns of meaningless eight-digit figures. After he devoted the better part of an afternoon to figuring the cleaning woman's social security payments five different times and came up with four different numbers and finally just accepted the one number ($635.78) that he'd managed to come up with twice (the correct figure was $70.00), Enid staged a nighttime raid on his filing cabinet and relieved it of all tax files, which might have improved household efficiency had the files not found their way into a Nordstrom bag with some misleadingly ancient Good Housekeepings concealing the more germane documents underneath, which casualty of war led to the cleaning woman's filling out the forms herself, with Enid merely writing the checks and Alfred shaking his head at the complexity of it all. It's the fate of most Ping-Pong tables in home basements eventually to serve the ends of other, more desperate games. After Alfred retired he appropriated the eastern end of the table for his banking and correspondence. At the western end was the portable color TV on which he'd intended to watch the local news while sitting in his great blue chair but which was now fully engulfed by Good Housekeepings and the seasonal candy tins and baroque but cheaply made candle holders that Enid never quite found time to transport to the Nearly New consignment shop. The Ping-Pong table was the one field on which the civil war raged openly. At the eastern end Alfred's calculator was ambushed by floral print pot-holders and souvenir coasters from the Epcot Center and a device for pitting cherries which Enid had owned for thirty years and never used, while he, in turn, at the western end, for absolutely no reason that Enid could ever fathom, ripped to pieces a wreath made of pinecones and spray-painted filberts and brazil nuts.To the east of the Ping-Pong table was the workshop that housed Alfred's metallurgical lab. The workshop was now home to a colony of mute, dust-colored crickets, which, when startled, would scatter across the room like a handful of dropped marbles, some of them misfiring at crazy angles, others toppling over with the weight of their own copious protoplasm. They popped all too easily, and cleanup took more than one Kleenex. Enid and Alfred had many afflictions which they believed to be extraordinary, outsized—shameful—and the crickets were one of them. The gray dust of evil spells and the cobwebs of enchantment thickly cloaked the old electric arc furnace, and the jars of exotic rhodium and sinister cadmium and stalwart bismuth, and the hand-printed labels browned by the vapors from a glass-stoppered bottle of aqua regia, and the quad-ruled notebook in which the latest entry in Alfred's hand dated from a time, fifteen years ago, before the betrayals had begun. Something as daily and friendly as a pencil still occupied the random spot on the workbench where Alfred had laid it in a different decade; the passage of so many years imbued the pencil with a kind of enmity. Asbestos mitts hung from a nail beneath two certificates of U.S. patents, the frames warped and sprung by dampness. On the hood of a binocular microscope lay big chips of peeled paint from the ceiling. The only dust-free objects in the room were the wicker love seat, a can of Rust-Oleum and some brushes, and a couple of Yuban coffee cans which despite increasingly strong olfactory evidence Enid chose not to believe were filling up with her husband's urine, because what earthly reason could he have, with a nice little half-bathroom not twenty feet away, for peeing in a Yuban can? To the west of the Ping-Pong table was Alfred's great blue chair. The chair was overstuffed, vaguely gubernatorial. It was made of leather, but it smelled like the inside of a Lexus. Like something modern and medical and impermeable that you could wipe the smell of death off easily, with a damp cloth, before the next person sat down to die in it. The chair was the only major purchase Alfred had ever made without Enid's approval. When he'd traveled to China to confer with Chinese railroad engineers, Enid had gone along and the two of them had visited a rug factory to buy a rug for their family room. They were unaccustomed to spending money on themselves, and so they chose one of the least expensive rugs, with a simple blue design from the Book of Changes on a solid field of beige. A few years later, when Alfred retired from the Midland Pacific Railroad, he set about replacing the old cow-smelling black leather armchair in which he watched TV and took his naps. He wanted something really comfortable, of course, but after a lifetime of providing for others he needed more than just comfort: he needed a monument to this need. So he went, alone, to a non-discount furniture store and picked out a chair of permanence. An engineer's chair. A chair so big that even a big man got lost in it; a chair designed to bear up under heavy stress. And because the blue of its leather vaguely matched the blue in the Chinese rug, Enid had no choice but to suffer its deployment in the family room.Soon, however, Alfred's hands were spilling decaffeinated coffee on the rug's beige expanses, and wild grandchildren were leaving berries and crayons underfoot, and Enid began to feel that the rug was a mistake. It seemed to her that in trying to save money in life she had made many mistakes like this. She reached the point of thinking it would have been better to buy no rug than to buy this rug. Finally, as Alfred's naps deepened toward enchantment, she grew bolder. Her own mother had left her a tiny inheritance years ago. Interest had been added to principal, certain stocks had performed rather well, and now she had an income of her own. She reconceived the family room in greens and yellows. She ordered fabrics. A paperhanger came, and Alfred, who was napping temporarily in the dining room, leaped to his feet like a man with a bad dream. "You're redecorating again?" "It's my own money," Enid said. "This is how I'm spending it." "And what about the money I made? What about the work I did?" This argument had been effective in the past—it was, so to speak, the constitutional basis of the tyranny's legitimacy—but it didn't work now. "That rug is nearly ten years old, and we'll never get the coffee stains out," Enid answered. Alfred gestured at his blue chair, which under the paperhanger's plastic dropcloths looked like something you might deliver to a power station on a flatbed truck. He was trembling with incredulity, unable to believe that Enid could have forgotten this crushing refutation of her arguments, this overwhelming impediment to her plans. It was as if all the unfreedom in which he'd spent his seven decades of life were embodied in this six-year-old but essentially brand-new chair. He was grinning, his face aglow with the awful perfection of his logic. "And what about the chair, then?" he said. "What about the chair?" Enid looked at the chair. Her expression was merely pained, no more. "I never liked that chair." This was probably the most terrible thing she could have said to Alfred. The chair was the only sign he'd ever given of having a personal vision of the future. Enid's words filled him with such sorrow—he felt such pity for the chair, such solidarity with it, such astonished grief at its betrayal—that he pulled off the dropcloth and sank into its arms and fell asleep. (It was a way of recognizing places of enchantment: people falling asleep like this.) When it became clear that both the rug and Alfred's chair had to go, the rug was easily shed. Enid advertised in the free local paper and netted a nervous bird of a woman who was still making mistakes and whose fifties came out of her purse in a disorderly roll that she unpeeled and flattened with shaking fingers. But the chair? The chair was a monument and a symbol and could not be parted from Alfred. It could only be relocated, and so it went into the basement and Alfred followed. And so in the house of the Lamberts, as in St. Jude, as in the country as a whole, life came to be lived underground. Enid could hear Alfred upstairs now, opening and closing drawers. He became agitated whenever they were going to see their children. Seeing their children was the only thing he seemed to care about anymore. In the streaklessly clean windows of the dining room there was chaos. The berserk wind, the negating shadows. Enid had looked everywhere for the letter from the Axon Corporation, and she couldn't find it. Alfred was standing in the master bedroom wondering why the drawers of his dresser were open, who had opened them, whether he had opened them himself. He couldn't help blaming Enid for his confusion. For witnessing it into existence. For existing, herself, as a person who could have opened these drawers. "Al? What are you doing?" He turned to the doorway where she'd appeared. He began a sentence: "I am—" but when he was taken by surprise, every sentence became an adventure in the woods; as soon as he could no longer see the light of the clearing from which he'd entered, he would realize that the crumbs he'd dropped for bearings had been eaten by birds, silent deft darting things which he couldn't quite see in the darkness but which were so numerous and swarming in their hunger that it seemed as if they were the darkness, as if the darkness weren't uniform, weren't an absence of light but a teeming and corpuscular thing, and indeed when as a studious teenager he'd encountered the word "crepuscular" in McKay's Treasury of English Verse, the corpuscles of biology had bled into his understanding of the word, so that for his entire adult life he'd seen in twilight a corpuscularity, as of the graininess of the high-speed film necessary for photography under conditions of low ambient light, as of a kind of sinister decay; and hence the panic of a man betrayed deep in the woods whose darkness was the darkness of starlings blotting out the sunset or black ants storming a dead opossum, a darkness that didn't just exist but actively consumed the bearings that he'd sensibly established for himself, lest he be lost; but in the instant of realizing he was lost, time became marvelously slow and he discovered hitherto unguessed eternities in the space between one word and the next, or rather he became trapped in that space between words and could only stand and watch as time sped on without him, the thoughtless boyish part of him crashing on out of sight blindly through the woods while he, trapped, the grownup Al, watched in oddly impersonal suspense to see if the panic-stricken little boy might, despite no longer knowing where he was or at what point he'd entered the woods of this sentence, still manage to blunder into the clearing where Enid was waiting for him, unaware of any woods—"packing my suitcase," he heard himself say. This sounded right. Verb, possessive, noun. Here was a suitcase in front of him, an important confirmation. He'd betrayed nothing. But Enid had spoken again. The audiologist had said that he was mildly impaired. He frowned at her, not following. "It's Thursday," she said, louder. "We're not leaving until Saturday." "Saturday!" he echoed. She berated him then, and for a while the crepuscular birds retreated, but outside the wind had blown the sun out, and it was getting very cold. Copyright © 2001 Jonathan Franzen]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[The Corrections]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jonathan Franzen]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Picador]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9780312421274]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[Winner of the National Book AwardAfter almost fifty years as a wife and mother, Enid Lambert is ready to have some fun. Unfortunately, her husband, Alfred, is losing his sanity to Parkinson's disease, and their children have long since flown the family nest to the catastrophes of their own lives. The oldest, Gary, a once-stable portfolio manager and family man, is trying to convince his wife and himself, despite clear signs to the contrary, that he is not clinically depressed. The middle child, Chip, has lost his seemingly secure academic job and is failing spectacularly at his new line of work. And Denise, the youngest, has escaped a disastrous marriage only to pour her youth and beauty down the drain of an affair with a married man-or so her mother fears. Desperate for some pleasure to look forward to, Enid has set her heart on an elusive goal: bringing her family together for one last Christmas at home.                             Jonathan Franzen is the author of The Twenty-Seventh City, Strong Motion, and the essay collection How to Be Alone. He has been named one of the Granta 20 Best Novelists under 40 and is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and Harper's. He lives in New York City.                                         Winner of the National Book Award Pulitzer Prize FinalistNational Book Critics Circle Award FinalistPEN/Faulkner Award FinalistLos Angeles Times Book Award FinalistNew York Times Book Review Editors' ChoiceAmerican Library Association Notable BookThe Corrections is a grandly entertaining novel for the new century—a comic, tragic masterpiece about a family breaking down in an age of easy fixes. After almost fifty years as a wife and mother, Enid Lambert is ready to have some fun. Unfortunately, her husband, Alfred, is losing his sanity to Parkinson's disease, and their children have long since flown the family nest to the catastrophes of their own lives. The oldest, Gary, a once-stable portfolio manager and family man, is trying to convince his wife and himself, despite clear signs to the contrary, that he is not clinically depressed. The middle child, Chip, has lost his seemingly secure academic job and is failing spectacularly at his new line of work. And Denise, the youngest, has escaped a disastrous marriage only to pour her youth and beauty down the drain of an affair with a married man—or so her mother fears. Desperate for some pleasure to look forward to, Enid has set her heart on an elusive goal: bringing her family together for one last Christmas at home. Stretching from the Midwest at midcentury to the Wall Street and Eastern Europe of today, The Corrections brings an old-fashioned world of civic virtue and sexual inhibitions into violent collision with the era of home surveillance, hands-off parenting, do-it-yourself mental health care, and globalized greed. Richly realistic and darkly hilarious, it confirms Jonathan Franzen as one of our most brilliant interpreters of American society and the American soul.                                                       "Funny and deeply sad, large-hearted and merciless, The Corrections is a testament to the range and depth of pleasures great fiction affords."?David Foster Wallace"Jonathan Franzen has built a powerful novel out of the swarming consciousness of a marriage, a family, a whole culture?our culture. And he has done it with sympathy and expansiveness that bend the edgy modern temper to a generous breadth of vision."?Don DeLillo"In its complexity, its scrutinizing and utterly unsentimental humanity, and its grasp of the subtle relationships between domestic drama and global events, The Corrections stands in the company of Mann's Buddenbrooks and DeLillo's White Noise. It is a major accomplishment."?Michael Cunningham"Looms as a model for what ambitious storytelling can still say about modern life."?San Francisco Chronicle"The Corrections is the brightest, boldest, and most ambitious novel I've read in many years. With this dazzling work, Franzen gives notice that from now on, he is only going to hunt with the big cats."?Pat Conroy"You will laugh, wince, groan, weep, leave the table and maybe the country, promise never to go home again, and be reminded of why you read serious fiction in the first place . . . Wordplay worthy of Nabokov . . . Tiny, revelatory gestures . . . Magically precise images . . . Knowing one-liners . . . Franzen writes with convincing authority about the minutiae of railroads, clothing, medicine, economics, industry, cuisine, and Eastern European politics, and he knows just when to push his conceits over the top . . . But he also knows his way around more intimate territory . . . No one book, of course, can provide everything we want in a novel. But a book as strong as The Corrections seems ruled only by its own self-generated aesthetic: it creates the illusion of giving a complete account of a world, and while we're under its enchantment it temporarily eclipses whatever else we may have read. But I guess that is everything we want in a novel?except, when it's rocking along, for it never to be over."?The New York Times Book Review"What we're asking is whether Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections will become that rare thing, a literary work that everybody's reading? A lot of people are saying yes."?Time"The last 100 pages of The Corrections is an unforgettably sad, indelibly beautiful piece of literature . . . [Franzen] is a writer with talent to burn."?Newsweek"The novel of the year."?Fortune"Franzen is a wizard, endlessly inventive in his thematic connections and scene setting . . . The Corrections is a wide-open performance showcasing the full range of his skills and his eclectic intelligence . . . [It] recalls no novel so much as John Cheever's The Wapshot Scandal. The Corrections is just as funny and sad and smart as that masterpiece, and Franzen, like Cheever, reminds us of the timelessness of human folly."?Stewart O'Nan, The Atlantic Monthly "Dazzling . . . electric . . . There's something thrilling, heartening, and inspiring about seeing life revealed so accurately, so transparently?and finally, so forgivingly."?Francine Prose, O magazine" 'Honestly' hype[d] . . . novel of extraordinary merit . . . Franzen's ability to infuse each character with such appealing vulnerability. Which, of course, is the redemptive hat trick of great literature: The Lamberts may be humming with unhappiness, but we are left humming with their?and our own?humanity."?Vogue"Let's not mince words or pussyfoot with fancy lit-crit lingo. This is a great book. It needs to be read . . . A panoramic work that frequently zeroes in, with almost claustrophobic clarity, on human foibles . . . A huge, ambitious, powerful, funny, imaginative yet realistic novel. This book is a gift."?The Philadelphia Inquirer"A big, showy powerhouse of a novel, revved up with ideas but satisfyingly beholden to the traditions of character and plot . . . Smart and boisterous and beautifully paced . . . Franzen's epic study in irony suggests Wolfe running into Don DeLillo . . . The greatest strength of The Corrections, and there are many, is its skillful narrative relativism, the way it delivers one version of the truth about a character, then fleshes out that reality over time into something larger and more complex . . . His rendering [of the autumnal prairie of millennial America] is frighteningly, luminously authentic."?The Boston Globe"[Combines] the deadpan dazzle and intricate ironies of Don DeLillo with the more homey concerns of Anne Tyler . . . There is bravura writing here, wizardly wordplay, sharp insights."?The Dallas Morning News"Remarkable and possibly unprecedented: a merciless satirical look at contemporary life that is also fundamentally generous and humane."?Salon.com"Wondrously devastating . . . In prose that is by turns suspenseful, brooding, and, oh yes, compassionate, Franzen unrolls the huge, bleak panorama of the Lamberts' past and present lives, their temptations, failures, mistakes and false hopes, their intimate acquaintance with the hot flash of selfishness and the sharp bitterness of rue."?The Miami Herald"Remarkable . . . The best comparisons are to David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest and Don DeLillo's Underworld . . . but The Corrections has more heart."?The Oregonian (Portland)"A big, intelligent and mostly compassionate novel that's so much fun one hates to see it end . . . A novel of our times . . . Think of the book as a blend of postmodern meganovel and Victorian family saga."?The News and Observer (Raleigh)"The best American novel published to date this year."?St. Louis Post-Dispatch"More engaging and readable than other chilly magnum opuses in the same league . . . Unlike his Big Book peers, [Franzen] wants things tidy?not in the middle, maybe, but at the end. The chaos-theory math wizards of antimatter fiction don't often show such good manners, such politeness, and it's touching to find it here. Not just dazzle?warmth."?GQ "Agreeably accessible, . . . poised halfway between postmodern chic and plain old-fashioned storytelling. It sucks you into the vortex of family life, the whirling blend of happy and unhappy; it lands you in the sticky goo of mingled love and hate. What Mr. Franzen does?brilliantly? is to risk sentimentality to get at emotional truth."?Adam Begley, The New York Observer "[The Corrections is] Franzen's most autobiographical novel, his most engrossing (do not be surprised to find yourself trying to read it all in one sitting), and, stylistically, his most lyrical. In its gorgeous, sweeping scope and the sympathy of its tone, it owes 0more to Tolstoy than to Pynchon, but ultimately the novel offers up pleasures that are utterly Franzenian; a sense of exhilaration permeates The Corrections, which is, in part, the exhilaration of a writer who has broken free of his masters."?Poets and Writers         Excerpt from Chapter OneSt. JudeThe Madness of an autumn prairie cold front coming through. You could feel it: something terrible was going to happen. The sun low in the sky, a minor light, a cooling star. Gust after gust of disorder. Trees restless, temperatures falling, the whole northern religion of things coming to an end. No children in the yards here. Shadows lengthened on yellowing zoysia. Red oaks and pin oaks and swamp white oaks rained acorns on houses with no mortgage. Storm windows shuddered in the empty bedrooms. And the drone and hiccup of a clothes dryer, the nasal contention of a leaf blower, the ripening of local apples in a paper bag, the smell of the gasoline with which Alfred Lambert had cleaned the paintbrush from his morning painting of the wicker love seat. Three in the afternoon was a time of danger in these gerontocratic suburbs of St. Jude. Alfred had awakened in the great blue chair in which he'd been sleeping since lunch. He'd had his nap and there would be no local news until five o'clock. Two empty hours were a sinus in which infections bred. He struggled to his feet and stood by the Ping-Pong table, listening in vain for Enid.Ringing throughout the house was an alarm bell that no one but Alfred and Enid could hear directly. It was the alarm bell of anxiety. It was like one of those big cast-iron dishes with an electric clapper that send schoolchildren into the street in fire drills. By now it had been ringing for so many hours that the Lamberts no longer heard the message of "bell ringing" but, as with any sound that continues for so long that you have the leisure to learn its component sounds (as with any word you stare at until it resolves itself into a string of dead letters), instead heard a clapper rapidly striking a metallic resonator, not a pure tone but a granular sequence of percussions with a keening overlay of overtones; ringing for so many days that it simply blended into the background except at certain early-morning hours when one or the other of them awoke in a sweat and realized that a bell had been ringing in their heads for so long as they could remember; ringing for so many months that the sound had given way to a kind of metasound whose rise and fall was not the beating of compression waves but the much, much slower waxing and waning of their consciousness of the sound. Which consciousness was particularly acute when the weather itself was in an anxious mood. Then Enid and Alfred—she on her knees in the dining room opening drawers, he in the basement surveying the disastrous Ping-Pong table—each felt near to exploding with anxiety. The anxiety of coupons, in a drawer containing candles in designer autumn colors. The coupons were bundled in a rubber band, and Enid was realizing that their expiration dates (often jauntily circled in red by the manufacturer) lay months and even years in the past: that these hundred-odd coupons, whose total face value exceeded sixty dollars (potentially one hundred twenty dollars at the Chiltsville supermarket that doubled coupons), had all gone bad. Tilex, sixty cents off. Excedrin PM, a dollar off. The dates were not even close. The dates were historical. The alarm bell had been ringing for years. She pushed the coupons back in among the candles and shut the drawer. She was looking for a letter that had come by Registered mail some days ago. Alfred had heard the mailman knock on the door and had shouted, "Enid! Enid!" so loudly that he couldn't hear her shouting back, "Al, I'm getting it!" He'd continued to shout her name, coming closer and closer, and because the sender of the letter was the Axon Corporation, 24 East Industrial Serpentine, Schwenksville, PA, and because there were aspects of the Axon situation that Enid knew about and hoped that Alfred didn't, she'd quickly stashed the letter somewhere within fifteen feet of the front door. Alfred had emerged from the basement bellowing like a piece of earth-moving equipment, "There's somebody at the door!" and she'd fairly screamed, "The mailman! The mailman!" and he'd shaken his head at the complexity of it all. Enid felt sure that her own head would clear if only she didn't have to wonder, every five minutes, what Alfred was up to. But, try as she might, she couldn't get him interested in life. When she encouraged him to take up his metallurgy again, he looked at her as if she'd lost her mind. When she asked whether there wasn't some yard work he could do, he said his legs hurt. When she reminded him that the husbands of her friends all had hobbies (Dave Schumpert his stained glass, Kirby Root his intricate chalets for nesting purple finches, Chuck Meisner his hourly monitoring of his investment portfolio), Alfred acted as if she were trying to distract him from some great labor of his. And what was that labor? Repainting the porch furniture? He'd been repainting the love seat since Labor Day. She seemed to recall that the last time he'd painted the furniture he'd done the love seat in two hours. Now he went to his workshop morning after morning, and after a month she ventured in to see how he was doing and found that all he'd painted of the love seat was the legs. He seemed to wish that she would go away. He said that the brush had got dried out, that that was what was taking so long. He said that scraping wicker was like trying to peel a blueberry. He said that there were crickets. She felt a shortness of breath then, but perhaps it was only the smell of gasoline and of the dampness of the workshop that smelled like urine (but could not possibly be urine). She fled upstairs to look for the letter from Axon. Six days a week several pounds of mail came through the slot in the front door, and since nothing incidental was allowed to pile up downstairs—since the fiction of living in this house was that no one lived here—Enid faced a substantial tactical challenge. She didn't think of herself as a guerrilla, but a guerrilla was what she was. By day she ferried matériel from depot to depot, often just a step ahead of the governing force. By night, beneath a charming but too-dim sconce at a too-small table in the breakfast nook, she staged various actions: paid bills, balanced checkbooks, attempted to decipher Medicare copayment records and make sense of a threatening Third Notice from a medical lab that demanded immediate payment of $0.22 while simultaneously showing an account balance of $0.00 carried forward and thus indicating that she owed nothing and in any case offering no address to which remittance might be made. It would happen that the First and Second Notices were underground somewhere, and because of the constraints under which Enid waged her campaign she had only the dimmest sense of where those other Notices might be on any given evening. She might suspect, perhaps, the family-room closet, but the governing force, in the person of Alfred, would be watching a network newsmagazine at a volume thunderous enough to keep him awake, and he had every light in the family room burning, and there was a non-negligible possibility that if she opened the closet door a cascade of catalogues and House Beautifuls and miscellaneous Merrill Lynch statements would come toppling and sliding out, incurring Alfred's wrath. There was also the possibility that the Notices would not be there, since the governing force staged random raids on her depots, threatening to "pitch" the whole lot of it if she didn't take care of it, but she was too busy dodging these raids to ever quite take care of it, and in the succession of forced migrations and deportations any lingering semblance of order was lost, and so the random Nordstrom shopping bag that was camped behind a dust ruffle with one of its plastic handles semi-detached would contain the whole shuffled pathos of a refugee existence—non-consecutive issues of Good Housekeeping, black-and-white snapshots of Enid in the 1940s, brown recipes on high-acid paper that called for wilted lettuce, the current month's telephone and gas bills, the detailed First Notice from the medical lab instructing co-payers to ignore subsequent billings for less than fifty cents, a complimentary cruise ship photo of Enid and Alfred wearing leis and sipping beverages from hollow coconuts, and the only extant copies of two of their children's birth certificates, for example. Although Enid's ostensible foe was Alfred, what made her a guerrilla was the house that occupied them both. Its furnishings were of the kind that brooked no clutter. There were chairs and tables by Ethan Allen. Spode and Waterford in the breakfront. Obligatory ficuses, obligatory Norfolk pines. Fanned copies of Architectural Digest on a glass-topped coffee table. Touristic plunder—enamelware from China, a Viennese music box that Enid out of a sense of duty and mercy every so often wound up and raised the lid of. The tune was "Strangers in the Night." Unfortunately, Enid lacked the temperament to manage such a house, and Alfred lacked the neurological wherewithal. Alfred's cries of rage on discovering evidence of guerrilla actions—a Nordstrom bag surprised in broad daylight on the basement stairs, nearly precipitating a tumble—were the cries of a government that could no longer govern. He'd lately developed a knack for making his printing calculator spit columns of meaningless eight-digit figures. After he devoted the better part of an afternoon to figuring the cleaning woman's social security payments five different times and came up with four different numbers and finally just accepted the one number ($635.78) that he'd managed to come up with twice (the correct figure was $70.00), Enid staged a nighttime raid on his filing cabinet and relieved it of all tax files, which might have improved household efficiency had the files not found their way into a Nordstrom bag with some misleadingly ancient Good Housekeepings concealing the more germane documents underneath, which casualty of war led to the cleaning woman's filling out the forms herself, with Enid merely writing the checks and Alfred shaking his head at the complexity of it all. It's the fate of most Ping-Pong tables in home basements eventually to serve the ends of other, more desperate games. After Alfred retired he appropriated the eastern end of the table for his banking and correspondence. At the western end was the portable color TV on which he'd intended to watch the local news while sitting in his great blue chair but which was now fully engulfed by Good Housekeepings and the seasonal candy tins and baroque but cheaply made candle holders that Enid never quite found time to transport to the Nearly New consignment shop. The Ping-Pong table was the one field on which the civil war raged openly. At the eastern end Alfred's calculator was ambushed by floral print pot-holders and souvenir coasters from the Epcot Center and a device for pitting cherries which Enid had owned for thirty years and never used, while he, in turn, at the western end, for absolutely no reason that Enid could ever fathom, ripped to pieces a wreath made of pinecones and spray-painted filberts and brazil nuts.To the east of the Ping-Pong table was the workshop that housed Alfred's metallurgical lab. The workshop was now home to a colony of mute, dust-colored crickets, which, when startled, would scatter across the room like a handful of dropped marbles, some of them misfiring at crazy angles, others toppling over with the weight of their own copious protoplasm. They popped all too easily, and cleanup took more than one Kleenex. Enid and Alfred had many afflictions which they believed to be extraordinary, outsized—shameful—and the crickets were one of them. The gray dust of evil spells and the cobwebs of enchantment thickly cloaked the old electric arc furnace, and the jars of exotic rhodium and sinister cadmium and stalwart bismuth, and the hand-printed labels browned by the vapors from a glass-stoppered bottle of aqua regia, and the quad-ruled notebook in which the latest entry in Alfred's hand dated from a time, fifteen years ago, before the betrayals had begun. Something as daily and friendly as a pencil still occupied the random spot on the workbench where Alfred had laid it in a different decade; the passage of so many years imbued the pencil with a kind of enmity. Asbestos mitts hung from a nail beneath two certificates of U.S. patents, the frames warped and sprung by dampness. On the hood of a binocular microscope lay big chips of peeled paint from the ceiling. The only dust-free objects in the room were the wicker love seat, a can of Rust-Oleum and some brushes, and a couple of Yuban coffee cans which despite increasingly strong olfactory evidence Enid chose not to believe were filling up with her husband's urine, because what earthly reason could he have, with a nice little half-bathroom not twenty feet away, for peeing in a Yuban can? To the west of the Ping-Pong table was Alfred's great blue chair. The chair was overstuffed, vaguely gubernatorial. It was made of leather, but it smelled like the inside of a Lexus. Like something modern and medical and impermeable that you could wipe the smell of death off easily, with a damp cloth, before the next person sat down to die in it. The chair was the only major purchase Alfred had ever made without Enid's approval. When he'd traveled to China to confer with Chinese railroad engineers, Enid had gone along and the two of them had visited a rug factory to buy a rug for their family room. They were unaccustomed to spending money on themselves, and so they chose one of the least expensive rugs, with a simple blue design from the Book of Changes on a solid field of beige. A few years later, when Alfred retired from the Midland Pacific Railroad, he set about replacing the old cow-smelling black leather armchair in which he watched TV and took his naps. He wanted something really comfortable, of course, but after a lifetime of providing for others he needed more than just comfort: he needed a monument to this need. So he went, alone, to a non-discount furniture store and picked out a chair of permanence. An engineer's chair. A chair so big that even a big man got lost in it; a chair designed to bear up under heavy stress. And because the blue of its leather vaguely matched the blue in the Chinese rug, Enid had no choice but to suffer its deployment in the family room.Soon, however, Alfred's hands were spilling decaffeinated coffee on the rug's beige expanses, and wild grandchildren were leaving berries and crayons underfoot, and Enid began to feel that the rug was a mistake. It seemed to her that in trying to save money in life she had made many mistakes like this. She reached the point of thinking it would have been better to buy no rug than to buy this rug. Finally, as Alfred's naps deepened toward enchantment, she grew bolder. Her own mother had left her a tiny inheritance years ago. Interest had been added to principal, certain stocks had performed rather well, and now she had an income of her own. She reconceived the family room in greens and yellows. She ordered fabrics. A paperhanger came, and Alfred, who was napping temporarily in the dining room, leaped to his feet like a man with a bad dream. "You're redecorating again?" "It's my own money," Enid said. "This is how I'm spending it." "And what about the money I made? What about the work I did?" This argument had been effective in the past—it was, so to speak, the constitutional basis of the tyranny's legitimacy—but it didn't work now. "That rug is nearly ten years old, and we'll never get the coffee stains out," Enid answered. Alfred gestured at his blue chair, which under the paperhanger's plastic dropcloths looked like something you might deliver to a power station on a flatbed truck. He was trembling with incredulity, unable to believe that Enid could have forgotten this crushing refutation of her arguments, this overwhelming impediment to her plans. It was as if all the unfreedom in which he'd spent his seven decades of life were embodied in this six-year-old but essentially brand-new chair. He was grinning, his face aglow with the awful perfection of his logic. "And what about the chair, then?" he said. "What about the chair?" Enid looked at the chair. Her expression was merely pained, no more. "I never liked that chair." This was probably the most terrible thing she could have said to Alfred. The chair was the only sign he'd ever given of having a personal vision of the future. Enid's words filled him with such sorrow—he felt such pity for the chair, such solidarity with it, such astonished grief at its betrayal—that he pulled off the dropcloth and sank into its arms and fell asleep. (It was a way of recognizing places of enchantment: people falling asleep like this.) When it became clear that both the rug and Alfred's chair had to go, the rug was easily shed. Enid advertised in the free local paper and netted a nervous bird of a woman who was still making mistakes and whose fifties came out of her purse in a disorderly roll that she unpeeled and flattened with shaking fingers. But the chair? The chair was a monument and a symbol and could not be parted from Alfred. It could only be relocated, and so it went into the basement and Alfred followed. And so in the house of the Lamberts, as in St. Jude, as in the country as a whole, life came to be lived underground. Enid could hear Alfred upstairs now, opening and closing drawers. He became agitated whenever they were going to see their children. Seeing their children was the only thing he seemed to care about anymore. In the streaklessly clean windows of the dining room there was chaos. The berserk wind, the negating shadows. Enid had looked everywhere for the letter from the Axon Corporation, and she couldn't find it. Alfred was standing in the master bedroom wondering why the drawers of his dresser were open, who had opened them, whether he had opened them himself. He couldn't help blaming Enid for his confusion. For witnessing it into existence. For existing, herself, as a person who could have opened these drawers. "Al? What are you doing?" He turned to the doorway where she'd appeared. He began a sentence: "I am—" but when he was taken by surprise, every sentence became an adventure in the woods; as soon as he could no longer see the light of the clearing from which he'd entered, he would realize that the crumbs he'd dropped for bearings had been eaten by birds, silent deft darting things which he couldn't quite see in the darkness but which were so numerous and swarming in their hunger that it seemed as if they were the darkness, as if the darkness weren't uniform, weren't an absence of light but a teeming and corpuscular thing, and indeed when as a studious teenager he'd encountered the word "crepuscular" in McKay's Treasury of English Verse, the corpuscles of biology had bled into his understanding of the word, so that for his entire adult life he'd seen in twilight a corpuscularity, as of the graininess of the high-speed film necessary for photography under conditions of low ambient light, as of a kind of sinister decay; and hence the panic of a man betrayed deep in the woods whose darkness was the darkness of starlings blotting out the sunset or black ants storming a dead opossum, a darkness that didn't just exist but actively consumed the bearings that he'd sensibly established for himself, lest he be lost; but in the instant of realizing he was lost, time became marvelously slow and he discovered hitherto unguessed eternities in the space between one word and the next, or rather he became trapped in that space between words and could only stand and watch as time sped on without him, the thoughtless boyish part of him crashing on out of sight blindly through the woods while he, trapped, the grownup Al, watched in oddly impersonal suspense to see if the panic-stricken little boy might, despite no longer knowing where he was or at what point he'd entered the woods of this sentence, still manage to blunder into the clearing where Enid was waiting for him, unaware of any woods—"packing my suitcase," he heard himself say. This sounded right. Verb, possessive, noun. Here was a suitcase in front of him, an important confirmation. He'd betrayed nothing. But Enid had spoken again. The audiologist had said that he was mildly impaired. He frowned at her, not following. "It's Thursday," she said, louder. "We're not leaving until Saturday." "Saturday!" he echoed. She berated him then, and for a while the crepuscular birds retreated, but outside the wind had blown the sun out, and it was getting very cold. Copyright © 2001 Jonathan Franzen]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:date>2002-09-01T00:00:00-04:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[Three Junes]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780385721424</link>
<description><![CDATA[An astonishing first novel that traces the lives of a Scottish family over a decade as they confront the joys and longings, fulfillments and betrayals of love in all its guises. In June of 1989 Paul McLeod, a newspaper publisher and recent widower, travels to Greece, where he falls for a young American artist and reflects on the complicated truth about his marriage. . ..Six years later, again in June, Paul’s death draws his three grown sons and their families back to their ancestral home. Fenno, the eldest, a wry, introspective gay man, narrates the events of this unforeseen reunion. Far from his straitlaced expatriate life as a bookseller in Greenwich Village, Fenno is stunned by a series of revelations that threaten his carefully crafted defenses. . .. Four years farther on, in yet another June, a chance meeting on the Long Island shore brings Fenno together with Fern Olitsky, the artist who once captivated his father. Now pregnant, Fern must weigh her guilt about the past against her wishes for the future and decide what family means to her. In  prose rich with compassion and wit, Three Junes paints a haunting portrait of love’s redemptive powers.]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[Three Junes]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Julia Glass]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Anchor]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9780385721424]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[An astonishing first novel that traces the lives of a Scottish family over a decade as they confront the joys and longings, fulfillments and betrayals of love in all its guises. In June of 1989 Paul McLeod, a newspaper publisher and recent widower, travels to Greece, where he falls for a young American artist and reflects on the complicated truth about his marriage. . ..Six years later, again in June, Paul’s death draws his three grown sons and their families back to their ancestral home. Fenno, the eldest, a wry, introspective gay man, narrates the events of this unforeseen reunion. Far from his straitlaced expatriate life as a bookseller in Greenwich Village, Fenno is stunned by a series of revelations that threaten his carefully crafted defenses. . .. Four years farther on, in yet another June, a chance meeting on the Long Island shore brings Fenno together with Fern Olitsky, the artist who once captivated his father. Now pregnant, Fern must weigh her guilt about the past against her wishes for the future and decide what family means to her. In  prose rich with compassion and wit, Three Junes paints a haunting portrait of love’s redemptive powers.]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:relation><![CDATA[9780375422423]]></dc:relation>
<dc:date>2003-04-22T00:00:00-04:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[The Great Fire]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780312423582</link>
<description><![CDATA[More than twenty years after the classic The Transit of Venus, Shirley Hazzard returns to fiction with a novel that in the words of Ann Patchett "is brilliant and dazzling..."The Great Fire is an extraordinary love story set in the immediate aftermath of the great conflagration of the Second World War. In war-torn Asia and stricken Europe, men and women, still young but veterans of harsh experience, must reinvent their lives and expectations, and learn, from their past, to dream again. Some will fulfill their destinies, others will falter. At the center of the story, a brave and brilliant soldier finds that survival and worldly achievement are not enough. His counterpart, a young girl living in occupied Japan and tending her dying brother, falls in love, and in the process discovers herself. In the looming shadow of world enmities resumed, and of Asia’s coming centrality in world affairs, a man and a woman seek to recover self-reliance, balance, and tenderness, struggling to reclaim their humanity. The Great Fire is a story of love in the aftermath of war by "purely and simply, one of the greatest writers working in English today." (Michael Cunningham)                                      Shirley Hazzard was born in Australia, and in early years traveled the world with her parents due to their diplomatic postings. At sixteen, living in Hong Kong, she was engaged by British Intelligence, where, in 1947-48, she was involved in monitoring the civil war in China. Thereafter, she lived in New Zealand and in Europe; in the United States, where she worked for the United Nations Secretariat in New York; and in Italy. In 1963, she married the writer Francis Steegmuller, who died in 1994. Ms. Hazzard's previous novels are The Evening of the Holiday (1966), The Bay of Noon (1970), and The Transit of Venus (1981). She is also the author of two collections of short fiction, Cliffs of Fall and Other Stories (1963) and People in Glass Houses (1967). Her nonfiction works include Defeat of an Ideal (1973), Countenance of Truth (1990), and the memoir Greene on Capri (2000). She lives in New York, with sojourns in Italy.                                         Winner of the National Book AwardA New York Times Notable BookA Los Angeles Times Best BookA Chicago Tribune Best BookA San Francisco Chronicle Best BookA Library Journal Best BookWinner of the Miles Franklin PrizeBooklist Editors' ChoiceA Kiriyama Prize Finalist The year is 1947. The great fire of the Second World War has convulsed Europe and Asia. In its wake, Aldred Leith, an acclaimed hero of the conflict, has spent two years in China at work on an account of world-transforming change there. Son of a famed and sexually ruthless novelist, Leith begins to resist his own self-sufficiency, nurtured by war. Peter Exley, another veteran and an art historian by training, is prosecuting war crimes committed by the Japanese. Both men have narrowly escaped death in battle, and Leith saved Exley's life. The men have maintained long-distance friendship in a postwar loneliness that haunts them both, and which has swallowed Exley whole. Now in their thirties, with their youth behind them and their world in ruins, both must invent the future and retrieve a private humanity. Arriving in Occupied Japan to record the effects of the bomb at Hiroshima, Leith meets Benedict and Helen Driscoll, the Australian son and daughter of a tyrannical medical administrator. Benedict, at twenty, is doomed by a rare degenerative disease. Helen, still younger, is inseparable from her brother. Precocious, brilliant, sensitive, at home in the books they read together, these two have been, in Leith's words, delivered by literature. The young people capture Leith's sympathy; indeed, he finds himself struggling with his attraction to this girl whose feelings are as intense as his own and from whom he will soon be fatefully parted. A deeply observed story of love and separation, of disillusion and recovered humanity, The Great Fire marks the much-awaited return to fiction of an author whose novel The Transit of Venus won the National Book Critics Circle Award and, twenty years after its publication, is considered a modern classic.                                                       "What better gift . . . than a novel that confirms the value of the individual—the individual heart, mind, spirit—even amidst the obfuscating demands of history and politics and culture . . . [The Great Fire] is a novel of incredible emotional wisdom, full of authentic characters, vivid places, and language that is both precise and beautiful."—Alice McDermott, Commonweal                       "Beauty is felt in almost every line of this austerely gorgeous work."—Chicago Tribune "Stunning . . . Shirley Hazzard has gifted us, in The Great Fire, a novel of indispensable happiness and sorrow. I loved this novel beyond dreams."—Howard Norman, The Washington Post Book World  "A classic romance . . . the greatest pleasure is [Hazzard] subtle and unexpected prose."—Regina Marler, Los Angeles Book Review "What better gift . . . than a novel that confirms the value of the individual—the individual heart, mind, spirit—even amidst the obfuscating demands of history and politics and culture . . . [The Great Fire] is a novel of incredible emotional wisdom, full of authentic characters, vivid places, and language that is both precise and beautiful."—Alice McDermott, Commonweal "The Great Fire is a perfect book, without a superfluous word . . . radiant."—Eve Claxton, Time Out (New York) "I wish there were a set of words like 'brilliant' and 'dazzling' that we saved for only the rarest occasions, so that when I tell you The Great Fire is brilliant and dazzling you would know it is the absolute truth. This is a book that is worth a twenty-year wait."—Ann Patchett, author of Bel Canto"Shirley Hazzard has written an hypnotic novel that unfolds like a dream: Japan, Southeast Asia, the end of one war and the beginning of another, the colonial order gone, and at the center of it all, a love story."—Joan Didion"A striking timeless novel with an aura of aged profundity . . . extraordinary [and arresting] . . . Flashes of violence cut through the contemplative narrative, but in her exquisitely cut sentences, Hazzard concentrates on the subtler movements of these hearts cauterized by violence. Her story is eerily quiet, filled with despair but also traces of hope, caught indirectly, as astronomers locate dark matter by the way it bends light."—Ron Charles, The Christian Science Monitor"The Great Fire is a brilliant, brave and sublimely-written novel that allows the literate reader ‘the consolation of having touched infinity.’ This wonderful book, which must be read at least twice simply to savor Hazzard’s sentences and set-pieces, is among the most transcendent works I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading."—Anita Shreve"The most interesting novel published this year . . . Exquisitely crafted . . . Every sentence hits its mark."—The Economist "A new novel from Hazzard is a literary event. It's been two decades between the publication of The Transit of Venus and this magnificent book, but her burnished prose has not diminished in luster nor has her wisdom about the human condition . . . Hazzard writes gently, tenderly, yet with fierce knowledge of how a dearth of love can render lives meaningless. The purity of her sentences, each one resonant with implication, create an effortless flow. This is a quiet book, but one that carries portents well beyond its time and place, suggesting the disquieting state of our current world."—Publishers Weekly"This almost indescribably rich story (which will remind many of Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient) moves from strength to strength, and no reader will be unmoved by its sorrowing, soaring eloquence. One of the finest novels ever written about war and its aftermath, and well worth the 23-year wait."—Kirkus Reviews]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[The Great Fire]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Shirley Hazzard]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Picador]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9780312423582]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[More than twenty years after the classic The Transit of Venus, Shirley Hazzard returns to fiction with a novel that in the words of Ann Patchett "is brilliant and dazzling..."The Great Fire is an extraordinary love story set in the immediate aftermath of the great conflagration of the Second World War. In war-torn Asia and stricken Europe, men and women, still young but veterans of harsh experience, must reinvent their lives and expectations, and learn, from their past, to dream again. Some will fulfill their destinies, others will falter. At the center of the story, a brave and brilliant soldier finds that survival and worldly achievement are not enough. His counterpart, a young girl living in occupied Japan and tending her dying brother, falls in love, and in the process discovers herself. In the looming shadow of world enmities resumed, and of Asia’s coming centrality in world affairs, a man and a woman seek to recover self-reliance, balance, and tenderness, struggling to reclaim their humanity. The Great Fire is a story of love in the aftermath of war by "purely and simply, one of the greatest writers working in English today." (Michael Cunningham)                                      Shirley Hazzard was born in Australia, and in early years traveled the world with her parents due to their diplomatic postings. At sixteen, living in Hong Kong, she was engaged by British Intelligence, where, in 1947-48, she was involved in monitoring the civil war in China. Thereafter, she lived in New Zealand and in Europe; in the United States, where she worked for the United Nations Secretariat in New York; and in Italy. In 1963, she married the writer Francis Steegmuller, who died in 1994. Ms. Hazzard's previous novels are The Evening of the Holiday (1966), The Bay of Noon (1970), and The Transit of Venus (1981). She is also the author of two collections of short fiction, Cliffs of Fall and Other Stories (1963) and People in Glass Houses (1967). Her nonfiction works include Defeat of an Ideal (1973), Countenance of Truth (1990), and the memoir Greene on Capri (2000). She lives in New York, with sojourns in Italy.                                         Winner of the National Book AwardA New York Times Notable BookA Los Angeles Times Best BookA Chicago Tribune Best BookA San Francisco Chronicle Best BookA Library Journal Best BookWinner of the Miles Franklin PrizeBooklist Editors' ChoiceA Kiriyama Prize Finalist The year is 1947. The great fire of the Second World War has convulsed Europe and Asia. In its wake, Aldred Leith, an acclaimed hero of the conflict, has spent two years in China at work on an account of world-transforming change there. Son of a famed and sexually ruthless novelist, Leith begins to resist his own self-sufficiency, nurtured by war. Peter Exley, another veteran and an art historian by training, is prosecuting war crimes committed by the Japanese. Both men have narrowly escaped death in battle, and Leith saved Exley's life. The men have maintained long-distance friendship in a postwar loneliness that haunts them both, and which has swallowed Exley whole. Now in their thirties, with their youth behind them and their world in ruins, both must invent the future and retrieve a private humanity. Arriving in Occupied Japan to record the effects of the bomb at Hiroshima, Leith meets Benedict and Helen Driscoll, the Australian son and daughter of a tyrannical medical administrator. Benedict, at twenty, is doomed by a rare degenerative disease. Helen, still younger, is inseparable from her brother. Precocious, brilliant, sensitive, at home in the books they read together, these two have been, in Leith's words, delivered by literature. The young people capture Leith's sympathy; indeed, he finds himself struggling with his attraction to this girl whose feelings are as intense as his own and from whom he will soon be fatefully parted. A deeply observed story of love and separation, of disillusion and recovered humanity, The Great Fire marks the much-awaited return to fiction of an author whose novel The Transit of Venus won the National Book Critics Circle Award and, twenty years after its publication, is considered a modern classic.                                                       "What better gift . . . than a novel that confirms the value of the individual—the individual heart, mind, spirit—even amidst the obfuscating demands of history and politics and culture . . . [The Great Fire] is a novel of incredible emotional wisdom, full of authentic characters, vivid places, and language that is both precise and beautiful."—Alice McDermott, Commonweal                       "Beauty is felt in almost every line of this austerely gorgeous work."—Chicago Tribune "Stunning . . . Shirley Hazzard has gifted us, in The Great Fire, a novel of indispensable happiness and sorrow. I loved this novel beyond dreams."—Howard Norman, The Washington Post Book World  "A classic romance . . . the greatest pleasure is [Hazzard] subtle and unexpected prose."—Regina Marler, Los Angeles Book Review "What better gift . . . than a novel that confirms the value of the individual—the individual heart, mind, spirit—even amidst the obfuscating demands of history and politics and culture . . . [The Great Fire] is a novel of incredible emotional wisdom, full of authentic characters, vivid places, and language that is both precise and beautiful."—Alice McDermott, Commonweal "The Great Fire is a perfect book, without a superfluous word . . . radiant."—Eve Claxton, Time Out (New York) "I wish there were a set of words like 'brilliant' and 'dazzling' that we saved for only the rarest occasions, so that when I tell you The Great Fire is brilliant and dazzling you would know it is the absolute truth. This is a book that is worth a twenty-year wait."—Ann Patchett, author of Bel Canto"Shirley Hazzard has written an hypnotic novel that unfolds like a dream: Japan, Southeast Asia, the end of one war and the beginning of another, the colonial order gone, and at the center of it all, a love story."—Joan Didion"A striking timeless novel with an aura of aged profundity . . . extraordinary [and arresting] . . . Flashes of violence cut through the contemplative narrative, but in her exquisitely cut sentences, Hazzard concentrates on the subtler movements of these hearts cauterized by violence. Her story is eerily quiet, filled with despair but also traces of hope, caught indirectly, as astronomers locate dark matter by the way it bends light."—Ron Charles, The Christian Science Monitor"The Great Fire is a brilliant, brave and sublimely-written novel that allows the literate reader ‘the consolation of having touched infinity.’ This wonderful book, which must be read at least twice simply to savor Hazzard’s sentences and set-pieces, is among the most transcendent works I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading."—Anita Shreve"The most interesting novel published this year . . . Exquisitely crafted . . . Every sentence hits its mark."—The Economist "A new novel from Hazzard is a literary event. It's been two decades between the publication of The Transit of Venus and this magnificent book, but her burnished prose has not diminished in luster nor has her wisdom about the human condition . . . Hazzard writes gently, tenderly, yet with fierce knowledge of how a dearth of love can render lives meaningless. The purity of her sentences, each one resonant with implication, create an effortless flow. This is a quiet book, but one that carries portents well beyond its time and place, suggesting the disquieting state of our current world."—Publishers Weekly"This almost indescribably rich story (which will remind many of Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient) moves from strength to strength, and no reader will be unmoved by its sorrowing, soaring eloquence. One of the finest novels ever written about war and its aftermath, and well worth the 23-year wait."—Kirkus Reviews]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:date>2004-07-01T00:00:00-04:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[The News from Paraguay]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780060934866</link>
<description><![CDATA[The year is l854. In Paris, Francisco Solano -- the future dictator of Paraguay -- begins his courtship of the young, beautiful Irish courtesan Ella Lynch with a poncho, a Paraguayan band, and ahorse named Mathilde. Ella follows Franco to Asunción and reigns there as his mistress. Isolated and estranged in this new world, she embraces her lover's ill-fated imperial dream -- one fueled by a heedless arrogance that will devastate all of Paraguay.With the urgency of the narrative, rich and intimate detail, and a wealth of skillfully layered characters, The News from Paraguay recalls the epic novels of Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa.]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[The News from Paraguay]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Lily Tuck]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Harper Perennial]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9780060934866]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[The year is l854. In Paris, Francisco Solano -- the future dictator of Paraguay -- begins his courtship of the young, beautiful Irish courtesan Ella Lynch with a poncho, a Paraguayan band, and ahorse named Mathilde. Ella follows Franco to Asunción and reigns there as his mistress. Isolated and estranged in this new world, she embraces her lover's ill-fated imperial dream -- one fueled by a heedless arrogance that will devastate all of Paraguay.With the urgency of the narrative, rich and intimate detail, and a wealth of skillfully layered characters, The News from Paraguay recalls the epic novels of Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa.]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:date>2004-12-01T00:00:00-05:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[Europe Central]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780143036593</link>
<description><![CDATA[In this magnificent work of fiction, William T. Vollmann turns his trenchant eye to the authoritarian cultures of Germany and the USSR in the twentieth century. Assembling a composite portrait of these two warring leviathans and the terrible age they defined, the narrative intertwines experiences both real and fictional--a young German who joins the SS to expose its crimes, two generals who collaborate with the enemy for different reasons, the Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich laboring under Stalinist oppression. Through these and other lives, Vollmann offers a daring and mesmerizing perspective on human actions during wartime.]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[Europe Central]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[William  Vollmann]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Penguin (Non-Classics)]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9780143036593]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[In this magnificent work of fiction, William T. Vollmann turns his trenchant eye to the authoritarian cultures of Germany and the USSR in the twentieth century. Assembling a composite portrait of these two warring leviathans and the terrible age they defined, the narrative intertwines experiences both real and fictional--a young German who joins the SS to expose its crimes, two generals who collaborate with the enemy for different reasons, the Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich laboring under Stalinist oppression. Through these and other lives, Vollmann offers a daring and mesmerizing perspective on human actions during wartime.]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:date>2005-12-01T00:00:00-05:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[The Echo Maker]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780312426439</link>
<description><![CDATA[Winner of the 2006 National Book Award The Echo Maker is "a remarkable novel, from one of our greatest novelists, and a book that will change all who read it" (Booklist, starred review). On a winter night on a remote Nebraska road, twenty-seven-year-old Mark Schluter has a near-fatal car accident. His older sister, Karin, returns reluctantly to their hometown to nurse Mark back from a traumatic head injury. But when Mark emerges from a coma, he believes that this woman--who looks, acts, and sounds just like his sister--is really an imposter. When Karin contacts the famous cognitive neurologist Gerald Weber for help, he diagnoses Mark as having Capgras syndrome. The mysterious nature of the disease, combined with the strange circumstances surrounding Mark's accident, threatens to change all of their lives beyond recognition. In The Echo Maker, Richard Powers proves himself to be one of our boldest and most entertaining novelists.                      Richard Powers is the author of ten novels, including Generosity, Gain, The Time of Our Singing, Galatea 2.2, and Plowing the Dark. The Echo Maker won the National Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Powers has received a MacArthur Fellowship and a Lannan Literary Award. He lives in Illinois.                                                       Winner of the National Book AwardPulitzer Prize FinalistA New York Times Notable Book of the YearA Boston Globe Best Book of the Year A Chicago Tribune Best Book of the YearA Kirkus Reviews Best Fiction Book of the YearLonglisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award Set against the Platte River's massive spring migrations—one of the greatest spectacles in nature—The Echo Maker is a mystery that explores the improvised human self and the even more precarious brain that splits us from and joins us to the rest of creation. On a winter night on a remote Nebraska road, twenty-seven-year-old Mark Schluter flips his truck in a near-fatal accident. His older sister Karin, his only near kin, returns reluctantly to their hometown to nurse Mark back from a traumatic head injury. But when he emerges from a protracted coma, Mark believes that this woman—who looks, acts, and sounds just like his sister—is really an identical impostor. Shattered by her brother’s refusal to recognize her, Karin contacts the cognitive neurologist Gerald Weber, famous for his case histories describing the infinitely bizarre worlds of brain disorder. Weber recognizes Mark as a rare case of Capgras Syndrome—the delusion that people in one's life are doubles or imposters—and eagerly investigates. What he discovers in Mark slowly undermines even his own sense of being. Meanwhile, Mark, armed only with a note let by an anonymous witness, attempts to learn what happened the night of his inexplicable accident. The truth of that evening will change the lives of all three beyond recognition.             Winner of the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize Finalist "A wise and elegant post-9/11 novel . . . As the features of life after 9/11 come into focus—the engagement in Afghanistan, 'that bleak, first anniversary' of the attacks, the march to war in Iraq—Powers accomplishes something magnificent, no facile conflation of personal catastrophe with national calamity, but a lovely essay on perseverance in all its forms."—Colson Whitehead, The New York Times Book Review                                                  "A wise and elegant post-9/11 novel . . . It avoids some of the now familiar features of the genre . . . The Echo Maker is not an elegy for How We Used to Live or a salute to Coming to Grips, but a quiet exploration of how we survive, day to day . . . The Echo Maker joins my Powers favorites through the admirable harmony he achieves between his rhetorical strategies—on the life of the sandhill cranes, on the furrowed dynamism of the brain—and the travails of Mark, Karin and Weber as they try to navigate their altered territories . . . Part of the joy of reading Powers over the years has been his capacity for revelation. His scientific discourses point to how the world works, but the struggles of his characters, whether down-and-out misfits like Mark or well-heeled magicians like Weber, help us understand how we work. And that's where the setting—2002, early 2003—comes in. As the features of life after 9/11 come into focus—the engagement in Afghanistan, 'that bleak, first anniversary' of the attacks, the march to war in Iraq—Powers accomplishes something magnificent, no facile conflation of personal catastrophe with national calamity, but a lovely essay on perseverance in all its forms."—Colson Whitehead, The New York Times Book Review  "Richard Powers has a lot of ideas: complex, articulate, deeply informed ideas about artificial intelligence, virtual reality, relativity, genetics, music and much more  . . . Powers has established himself as one of our most praised as well as one of our most prolific writers of fiction. . . . Powers is not only adept at crafting large-scale narrative and symbolic structures; he is also a remarkably gifted aphorist, a lyrical nature writer and a sharp observer of human situations . . . It is telling that Powers is typically praised for his intellect . . . His capacity to elucidate scientific ideas and speculate about their larger meanings is indeed impressive . . . Powers's feeling for this material is exhilarating, his sense of wonder infectious . . . Powers's characters tend to be paragons, intellectual or ethical, but Mark, in particular, is convincingly imagined, with a fine ear for his verbal and mental rhythms . . . Powers's eye for social detail remains as sharp as ever . . .  The range and magnitude of Powers's talents are not in question . . .  Powers's descriptions . . . are sublime, as is his vision, woven into the novel's metaphorical texture, of the human species as but another evanescent episode in life's vast flow. The cycling of time, the interconnectedness of all living things, the mind-blowing—indeed, mind-creating—magnificence of nature, the obligation to live humbly and responsibly: All of Powers's great themes return here."—William Deresiewicz, The Nation "A grand novel—grand in its reach, grand in its themes, grand in its patterning . . . If Powers were an American writer of the nineteenth century . . . he'd probably be the Herman Melville of Moby-Dick. His picture is that big."—Margaret Atwood, The New York Review of Books "Powers may well be one of the smartest novelists now writing . . . In The Echo Maker Powers hopes to plumb the nature of consciousness, and he does so with such alert passion that we come to recognize in his quest the novel's abiding theme—What it means to be human will forever elude us."—Albert Mobilio, Los Angeles Book Review “His philosophical musings have the energy of a thriller, and he gives lyrical, haunting life to the landscape of the Great Plains.”—The New Yorker"The Echo Maker is a mystery. But it is a Rich]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[The Echo Maker]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Richard Powers]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Picador]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9780312426439]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[Winner of the 2006 National Book Award The Echo Maker is "a remarkable novel, from one of our greatest novelists, and a book that will change all who read it" (Booklist, starred review). On a winter night on a remote Nebraska road, twenty-seven-year-old Mark Schluter has a near-fatal car accident. His older sister, Karin, returns reluctantly to their hometown to nurse Mark back from a traumatic head injury. But when Mark emerges from a coma, he believes that this woman--who looks, acts, and sounds just like his sister--is really an imposter. When Karin contacts the famous cognitive neurologist Gerald Weber for help, he diagnoses Mark as having Capgras syndrome. The mysterious nature of the disease, combined with the strange circumstances surrounding Mark's accident, threatens to change all of their lives beyond recognition. In The Echo Maker, Richard Powers proves himself to be one of our boldest and most entertaining novelists.                      Richard Powers is the author of ten novels, including Generosity, Gain, The Time of Our Singing, Galatea 2.2, and Plowing the Dark. The Echo Maker won the National Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Powers has received a MacArthur Fellowship and a Lannan Literary Award. He lives in Illinois.                                                       Winner of the National Book AwardPulitzer Prize FinalistA New York Times Notable Book of the YearA Boston Globe Best Book of the Year A Chicago Tribune Best Book of the YearA Kirkus Reviews Best Fiction Book of the YearLonglisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award Set against the Platte River's massive spring migrations—one of the greatest spectacles in nature—The Echo Maker is a mystery that explores the improvised human self and the even more precarious brain that splits us from and joins us to the rest of creation. On a winter night on a remote Nebraska road, twenty-seven-year-old Mark Schluter flips his truck in a near-fatal accident. His older sister Karin, his only near kin, returns reluctantly to their hometown to nurse Mark back from a traumatic head injury. But when he emerges from a protracted coma, Mark believes that this woman—who looks, acts, and sounds just like his sister—is really an identical impostor. Shattered by her brother’s refusal to recognize her, Karin contacts the cognitive neurologist Gerald Weber, famous for his case histories describing the infinitely bizarre worlds of brain disorder. Weber recognizes Mark as a rare case of Capgras Syndrome—the delusion that people in one's life are doubles or imposters—and eagerly investigates. What he discovers in Mark slowly undermines even his own sense of being. Meanwhile, Mark, armed only with a note let by an anonymous witness, attempts to learn what happened the night of his inexplicable accident. The truth of that evening will change the lives of all three beyond recognition.             Winner of the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize Finalist "A wise and elegant post-9/11 novel . . . As the features of life after 9/11 come into focus—the engagement in Afghanistan, 'that bleak, first anniversary' of the attacks, the march to war in Iraq—Powers accomplishes something magnificent, no facile conflation of personal catastrophe with national calamity, but a lovely essay on perseverance in all its forms."—Colson Whitehead, The New York Times Book Review                                                  "A wise and elegant post-9/11 novel . . . It avoids some of the now familiar features of the genre . . . The Echo Maker is not an elegy for How We Used to Live or a salute to Coming to Grips, but a quiet exploration of how we survive, day to day . . . The Echo Maker joins my Powers favorites through the admirable harmony he achieves between his rhetorical strategies—on the life of the sandhill cranes, on the furrowed dynamism of the brain—and the travails of Mark, Karin and Weber as they try to navigate their altered territories . . . Part of the joy of reading Powers over the years has been his capacity for revelation. His scientific discourses point to how the world works, but the struggles of his characters, whether down-and-out misfits like Mark or well-heeled magicians like Weber, help us understand how we work. And that's where the setting—2002, early 2003—comes in. As the features of life after 9/11 come into focus—the engagement in Afghanistan, 'that bleak, first anniversary' of the attacks, the march to war in Iraq—Powers accomplishes something magnificent, no facile conflation of personal catastrophe with national calamity, but a lovely essay on perseverance in all its forms."—Colson Whitehead, The New York Times Book Review  "Richard Powers has a lot of ideas: complex, articulate, deeply informed ideas about artificial intelligence, virtual reality, relativity, genetics, music and much more  . . . Powers has established himself as one of our most praised as well as one of our most prolific writers of fiction. . . . Powers is not only adept at crafting large-scale narrative and symbolic structures; he is also a remarkably gifted aphorist, a lyrical nature writer and a sharp observer of human situations . . . It is telling that Powers is typically praised for his intellect . . . His capacity to elucidate scientific ideas and speculate about their larger meanings is indeed impressive . . . Powers's feeling for this material is exhilarating, his sense of wonder infectious . . . Powers's characters tend to be paragons, intellectual or ethical, but Mark, in particular, is convincingly imagined, with a fine ear for his verbal and mental rhythms . . . Powers's eye for social detail remains as sharp as ever . . .  The range and magnitude of Powers's talents are not in question . . .  Powers's descriptions . . . are sublime, as is his vision, woven into the novel's metaphorical texture, of the human species as but another evanescent episode in life's vast flow. The cycling of time, the interconnectedness of all living things, the mind-blowing—indeed, mind-creating—magnificence of nature, the obligation to live humbly and responsibly: All of Powers's great themes return here."—William Deresiewicz, The Nation "A grand novel—grand in its reach, grand in its themes, grand in its patterning . . . If Powers were an American writer of the nineteenth century . . . he'd probably be the Herman Melville of Moby-Dick. His picture is that big."—Margaret Atwood, The New York Review of Books "Powers may well be one of the smartest novelists now writing . . . In The Echo Maker Powers hopes to plumb the nature of consciousness, and he does so with such alert passion that we come to recognize in his quest the novel's abiding theme—What it means to be human will forever elude us."—Albert Mobilio, Los Angeles Book Review “His philosophical musings have the energy of a thriller, and he gives lyrical, haunting life to the landscape of the Great Plains.”—The New Yorker"The Echo Maker is a mystery. But it is a Rich]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:date>2007-08-21T00:00:00-04:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[Tree of Smoke]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780312427740</link>
<description><![CDATA[Winner of the National Book AwardOne of the New York Times 10 Best Books of the YearNamed a Best Book of the Year by Time, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, Amazon.com, Salon, Slate, The National Book Critics Circle, The Christian Science Monitor. . . .Tree of Smoke is the story of William "Skip" Sands, CIA--engaged in Pschological Operations against the Vietcong--and the disasters that befall him. It is also the story of the Houston brothers, Bill and James, young men who drift out of the Arizona desert and into a war where the line between disinformation and delusion has blurred away. In the words of Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times, Tree of Smoke is "bound to become one of the classic works of literature produced by that tragic and uncannily familiar war."                                                         Denis Johnson is the author of five novels, a collection of poetry and one book of reportage. He is the recipient of a Lannan Fellowship and a Whiting Writer's Award, among many other honors for his work. He lives in northern Idaho.             Winner of the National Book Award A Pulitzer Prize FinalistLonglisted for the IMPAC Dublin Literary AwardOne of the New York Times 10 Best Books of the YearA Time Magazine Top 10 of the YearA Boston Globe Best Book of the YearA Washington Post Top 10 Book of the YearA San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the YearA Chicago Tribune Favorite Book of the YearA Seattle Times Favorite Book of the YearA Library Journal  Best Book of the Year This is the story of Skip Sands?spy-in-training, engaged in Psychological Operations against the Vietcong?and the disasters that befall him thanks to his famous uncle, a war hero known in intelligence circles simply as the Colonel. This is also the story of the Houston brothers, Bill and James, young men who drift out of the Arizona desert into a war in which the line between disinformation and delusion has blurred away. In its vision of human folly, and its gritty, sympathetic portraits of men and women desperate for an end to their loneliness, whether in sex or death or by the grace of God, this is a story like nothing in our literature.  Also available on CD as an unabridged audiobook.  Please email academic@macmillan.com for more information.                        " [A] deeply resonant novel that is bound to become one of the classic works of literature produced by that tragic and uncannily familiar war."?Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times                                                               "Denis Johnson's wildly ambitious new novel, Tree of Smoke, reads like a whacked-out, hallucinogenic variation on such whacked-out, hallucinogenic Vietnam classics as Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, Michael Herr's Dispatches, Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers and Stephen Wright's Meditations in Green. It features a central character who comes to see himself as a combination of the Quiet American and the Ugly American, and another who comes across as a latter-day version of Kurtz in Conrad's Heart of Darkness. What's amazing is that Mr. Johnson somehow manages to take these derivative elements and turn them into something highly original?and potent . . . it's a powerful story about the American experience in Vietnam, with unsettling echoes of the current American experience in Iraq. It is a story about bad intelligence and military screw-ups and people who have lost their way, a story like so many of Mr. Johnson's earlier novels, about Americans in purgatory, waiting impatiently, even expectantly, for the coming apocalypse . . . Mr. Johnson not only succeeds in conjuring the anomalous, hallucinatory aura of the Vietnam War as authoritatively as Stephen Wright or Francis Ford Coppola, but he also shows its fallout on his characters with harrowing emotional precision . . . [A] deeply resonant novel that is bound to become one of the classic works of literature produced by that tragic and uncannily familiar war."?Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times "Good morning and please listen to me: Denis Johnson is a true American artist, and Tree of Smoke is a tremendous book, a strange entertainment, very long but very fast, a great whirly ride that starts out sad and gets sadder and sadder, loops unpredictably out and around, and then lurches down so suddenly at the very end that it will make your stomach flop . . . Tree of Smoke is a soulful book, even a numinous one . . . and it ought to secure Johnson's status as a revelator for this still new century . . . I spent a long time reading Tree of Smoke, and as I neared the end I found myself wishing it were longer."?Jim Lewis, The New York Times"Tree of Smoke is an ambitious, long, dense, daunting novel sited at the heart of a great American evil, the Vietnam War . . . Like the war itself, Tree of Smoke delivers an intense experience of loss, shame, futility, confusion . . . Denis Johnson is a formidable prose writer, and his book is composed in a plain, straightforward, efficient style. Understatement rules The physical experiences of daily life in tropical Asia is kept fresh, page to page. The dialogue is convincing, neatly adapted to the particularities of the widely different characters. The moments of black comedy that can emerge even amid the worst miseries of war are deftly captured . . . Tree of Smoke joins the corporal’s guard of truly significant novels about the Vietnam War?works such as The Quiet American, Going After Cacciato, Dog Soldiers, The Things They Carried, Meditations in Green . . . Denis Johnson has created an absorbing, provocative work of art."?Norman Rush, The New York Review of Books"For a reader with stamina, the rewards come steadily. Johnson is a fine stylist of the world of soulful disaster. The phrase 'tree of smoke,' as he presents it, is the literal translation from the Hebrew of the pillar in Exodus. This time?in these pages?that pillar of smoke leaves us to a dark, dark vision of a promised land."?Alan Cheuse, All Things Considered "To write a fat novel about Vietnam nearly 35 years after it ended is an act of literary bravado. To do so as brilliantly as Denis Johnson has in Tree of Smoke is positively a miracle . . . This novel makes large demands on the reader: to submit to its length, to its disorienting language and structure, to the elusive and shattering experience of its characters, and finally to its sheer ambition to be definitive for the Vietnam generation.  It is a presumptuous book, in other words, and you may resist for the first several hundred pages. But it will grab you eventually, and get inside your head like the war it is describing?mystifying, horrifying, mesmerizing. Johnson, a poet, ex-junkie and adventure journalist, has written a book that by the end wraps around you as tightly as a jungle snake . . . As a serious war novel, Tree of Smoke is implicitly a story about all wars. And a reader cannot travel this journey without thinking about America’s current war in Iraq."?David Ignatius, The Washington Post Book World (cover review)"Denis Johnson's apocalyptic, doom-and-grace ridden Vietnam novel has a lot of fire in its belly . . . if Johnson has a signature theme throughout his work, it's a kind of quasi-mystical redemption on the other side of the abyss; his gorgeous prose and willingness to go deep have led the way through the scarily lightless corridors of his fiction."?Gail Caldwall, The Boston Globe"Tree of Smoke will surely be hailed as a great novel of the Vietnam War, which it is?but more than that it's a caterwauling anthem about American jitters, American doubt and American folly, an oblique and unsettling account of Americans growing Quiet and Ugly in the second half of the 20th century . . . A novel that sets you spinning and leaves you reeling . . . Tree of Smoke is as forceful and disturbing as a Robert Rauschenberg combine: There's the same disjunctive composition, stark unfinished texture, hints of bone and earth and broken language, and suggestions of both psychological and physical violence . . . Tree of Smoke makes no explicit argument against containment or preemptive war or liberal interventionism. But as a fictional account of how American military involvement abroad saps its people, its institutions, its heart?a work of moral criticism in the form a novel?it's more convincing than most arguments, and more urgently needed."?Matt Weiland, The New York Observer "Taking place in Southeast Asian?Vietnam mostly?during the period from 1963 to 1970, Tree of Smoke is a massive patchwork of people and stories that overlap and drift apart . . . It's beautiful writing: With Johnson, the writing is always beautiful."?David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times "'Once upon a time there was a war.' This statement comes late in Denis Johnson's tour de force of a novel, Tree of Smoke, and indicates much of the misguided storybook romanticism at the heart of many world conflicts . . . In an opening scene that symbolizes much of the heartbreak summoned in the novel, Bill Houston shoots a monkey and then regrets the utter pointlessness of his deed. It is a tiny moment involving a relatively minor character, but it has significant reverberations throughout the work . . . Tree of Smoke is a distinctly literary type of spy novel and political thriller, owing more to John le Carré and the Bible (from which it draws its name) than to Ian Fleming and 'The Bourne Identity.' Plenty of space is afforded to rumination and soul-searching, but Johnson is smart enough to recognize that something like the Tet Offensive can judiciously move along the pace: There is a time to dwell on the mythology of a place and then a time to hit the deck . . . There is so much going on in Tree of Smoke, and so many levels of symbolism, that it is hard to do the story justice here . . . It will be interesting to see how readers respond to Johnson's novel. Stylistically, it ranges from Hemingwayesque straightforward simplicity to Proustian narrative complexity and descriptive splendor. Johnson brings his talents as a poet to bear, especially when describing the jungles and cities of Asia."?David Hellman, San Francisco Chronicle  "In Tree of Smoke, the new novel from the gifted Denis Johnson, a young CIA operative goes to Vietnam as part of his family legacy, where he's misled, exposed and betrayed into having an affair with the wife of a missionary. The book's saga begins on the day of Kennedy's assassination, as experienced in the Far East . . . [Johnson] has an eye for detail and writes about an alcoholic blackout and its shameful aftermath as Dostoyevsky wrote about compulsive crime. Johnson is an author who has captured the zeitgeist of American experience as surely as Twain, Hemingway or Ellison. As Hemingway's children grew up in the shadow of World War I, what survived in America was the belief in the honorable intentions of our country. Johnson’s generation was not cut the same break. For the post-Woodstock, post-punk age, consciousness changes; everything believed in was swept off the stage or shot in the street. Johnson gets this on a visceral level. As the generation before him had to write about the excitement of expanding consciousness, Johnson’s has had to contend with the aftermath of that trip. Hunter Thompson began to diagnose this malaise. Johnson's fiction is all about what comes next. It begins with the shock of loss and post-traumatic stress. And in Tree of Smoke, he makes you believe all over again."?Andrew Hubner, New York Post "The novel is about the Vietnam War and its legacy of ruined bodies and even more wrecked minds, and it surely represents a huge investment on Mr. Johnson's part of blood, sweat, and years. The book is full of incident and rat-a-tat dialogue, and is peopled by undercover operatives; soldiers in action; agents who might be double agents; desperate aid workers, and friends, family, and lovers who often act as if they are nothing of the sort. There is movie potential here, but a film would never be able to capture the richness of interior life that is Mr. Johnson's greatest achievement . . . The point of view in Tree of Smoke is an effective hybrid of third-person omniscient and third-person limited; each section provides the convincingly complex thoughts of only one person, but this focal character keeps shifting, sometimes within a page, and more than a handful of people get a substantial portion of the book. Often we badly want to know what someone else is thinking, but Mr. Johnson either denies us entirely or elegantly builds tension by withholding this knowledge . . . Mr. Johnson’s narrative of an improbably ambitious mission guided by an increasingly embattles raison d’être will be minded for comment on today’s war in Iraq. But at bottom this is not a political novel. War mat be 90% myth, but it is 100% real to those it touches and breaks, and their lives are at the vivid center of Mr. Johnson’s canvas . . . With its humane depiction of the most private battles within battles, Tree of Smoke ought to take its place among the great American novels of any war."?Evan Hughes, The New York Sun  "Brilliant . . . [Tree of Smoke] opens a window onto a world of mystery, war and intrigue whose importance in the (usually) unwritten history of our republic can't be denied . . . A full and heart-shaking narrative of our war?including much blood of soldiers (ours and theirs), destruction, rape and pillage?against the Asian communists and the people of the region . . . Johnson is a fine stylist of the world of soulful disaster, and his kind of work doesn’t usually jibe well with a long, involved narrative . . . But this time he merges his tightly tuned sense of language with the needs of an extended and complicated story . . . When it comes to creating the central metaphor of the book, from which the novel gains its title, it is surpassing in its brilliance. Tree of smoke?Sands finds the image in a set of file cards given to him for cataloging by his CIA uncle. There's a reference to it in the Bible’s Song of Solomon. And in Exodus. And an apocalyptic version of it in Joel . . . And in this extraordinary novel, which itself becomes a version of the biblical sign of beckoning disaster."?Alan Cheuse, Chicago Tribune "In the more hopeful days of the Iraq war, some newly arrived U.S. solider probably looked up to a desert sky guarded by American Blackhawk helicopters and jets and had the same reassuring thoughts as Skips, Sands, on the CIA's trainee first night of duty in Vietnam in Denis Johnson’s epic, wrenching novel, Tree of Smoke . . . The immensely talented Johnson (Jesus's Son, Resuscitation of a Dead Man) delivers a beautifully layered, insightful and visceral montage of stories that examines the Vietnam War experience from multiple points of view . . . One gets the sense that everyone in the long, colorful cast of characters in Tree of Smoke is on a Danteesque excursion through a hell of misguided intentions."?Tyron Beason, The Seattle Times"Long, rich, dazzling, Tree of Smoke should finally establish him among the most profound and truly humane American novelists extant . . . People and places, complete with sounds, smells and weather, are rendered throughout with an extraordinary empathy and vividness. Tree of Smoke is a great read, an amazing achievement."?James Leigh, The San Diego Union-Tribune"In 'Nam,' a 1981 oral history of the Vietnam War, a former prisoner of war recalled his 'mental exercises' during years of captivity: he promoted himself to four-star general and invaded Hanoi. He relived his past and imagined the future, designing the dream house he intended to build after the war. He computed materials and costs?board feet of lumber, lengths of tubing and wiring, fixtures and hardware. And then he built the house in real time in his head. If he'd imagined a book about the war, the manipulation and miscalculation that led us into it, the search-and-destroy savagery of combat and America’s post-World War II loss of innocence and moral authority, he could not have done better than Denis Johnson’s novel Tree of Smoke . . . Tree of Smoke is vintage Johnson, combining the grim, gritty realism of Angels, the everyday hallucinatory absurdity of Jesus’ Son, and the post-apocalypse invention of Fiskadaro. He has a fine ear for American speech, captured brilliantly in James Houston's shift from the demented patois of his socially malformed family to the war zone slang of the long-range patrol. And Johnson can mold language to theme like a sculptor shaping clay . . . Tree of Smoke is a biblical image for the conflagration of war, and in Johnson's novel it serves as a thematic link between indiscriminate carpet bombing, the Cold War fear of mutual assured destruction, and the code name for an ill-conceived CIA pacification plan. And, in poignant counterpoint, the autumn smoke of dead leaves burning in Skip's boyhood Kansas. But Skip is not in Kansas anymore."?Vernon Peterson, The Oregonian (Portland)"For a novel that’s supposed to be about military intelligence, Denis Johnson's crucial new Tree of Smoke sure is populated by a bunch of clueless characters. And yet his epic tale, some 600 pages that span two decades, isn't so much about getting facts or information straight as it is about learning to make one's way in a world that has stopped making sense. Set largely during the Vietnam War and mostly in Southeast Asia, Johnson's bracing, zigzagging narrative is ultimately a story about how to learn to see in the dark . . . Much like Jesus' Son, Johnson's celebrated 1992 collection of short stories, Tree of Smoke is hardly the stuff of uplift. In passage after passage, however, Johnson’s writing is sublime: His urgent, visceral prose conveys the humanity at the heart of even the most messed-up situations, often redeeming that humanity in the process  . . . It might strike some as odd, even counterintuitive, as one reviewer has suggested, that Johnson would write a book about Vietnam now. Tree of Smoke, though, speaks not just to the United States' misguided participation in that war but also to the psychology of war in general. It couldn't be timelier given the debacle in Iraq."?Bill Friskics-Warren, The Tennessean "One does not read Johnson's fiction for narrative clarity?the joy of this book lies in its meandering and tangents, in its lacerating details and hallucinatory wonder, its unexpected twists and dead ends, its richness, strangeness, shadows and sudden, devastating beauty . . . Tree of Smoke should be considered the literary bible of the Vietnam War?and perhaps the bible of war itself."?Nathan Ihara, LA Weekly  "A redefinition of [Vietnam literature] done in a poetic style that captures the beauty of the landscape of Southeast Asia, as well as the moral confusion of the Westerners trapped in the war's spell . . . Tree of Smoke can't be fully explored here in its many layered shape of symbols and images, but as a piece of pure writing its is one of the year's best in fiction. Johnson's powers of observation and care for creating scenes of beauty and horror are at their peak."?Bob Hoover, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette"This new novel, Tree of Smoke, a 614-page multigenerational, transnational, braided morality saga about Westerners in Southeast Asia and the Southeast Asians who have to figure out how to stay alive around them, is something else entirely. It's a book that needs every bit of its space to do what it wants to do. Johnson has made himself into a different kind of writer in order to do this book?that's the first thing that needs to be said. The second is that he's made himself into a better writer. He didn’t owe anyone a long, complex, conventionally satisfying but formally daring masterpiece of an American novel, but he produced one anyway . . . It takes a while to get into Tree of Smoke. Not because it's slow going but because it's too tempting to stop and read over again the opening scene of a young Navy crewman half-accidentally shooting to death a small monkey in the Philippine jungle . . . Johnson has written his War and Peace . . . You can't exactly over-read this book. Johnson has put it all out there, as we say. He’s written a novel that, with its own internal referencing of stories he's written before, more or less begs to be read as a summation and validation of his fiction to this point, and he's written one that wears its high-modernist sense of the novel’s task unfashionably high on its sleeve. Maybe it's the case that Johnson himself felt an urge to make the kind of outsize novelistic statement no one could mistake for minor. If so, he has not been made to look foolish by the ambition."?John Jeremiah Sullivan, Harper’s Magazine"Tree of Smoke is the Denis Johnson novel which we've been waiting for. The Vietnam War continues to haunt us in countless ways, and Tree of Smoke demonstrates precisely why that is. Set mainly in southeast Asia, with a few stateside chapters thrown in, the novel takes place between 1963 and 1983. You can say it's about the Vietnam War, but that would be an oversimplification. Johnson's more interested in what changed at home as a result of that war. It's a novel about America, and in many ways it’s a novel about American today . . . I'm not sure there's been a better Vietnam novel since William Eastlake's The Bamboo Bed. Honestly, I can't be sure that there’s been a better American novel published in the past 10 years. Johnson understands the conflicts at the heart of the American psyche, and in Tree of Smoke he delivers the sort of historical novel that not only shows us where we've been but also shines a light on where we're going. It is a masterpiece."?Andrew Ervin, The Miami Herald  "Tree of Smoke, a tortuous epic of American counterinsurgency in Asia, presents an array of characters bearing familiar Johnsonian auras of desperation, threat, and abjection."?James Gibbons, Bookforum "Tree of Smoke is a Vietnam War novel almost with peer, in which 'the abyss is alive' across seven years and more than 600 pages. Denis Johnson?best known for the short stories in Jesus’ Son, and the reporting in Seek: Reports from the Edges of American and Beyond?pays homage to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Graham Greene’s The Quiet American. His superb, disorienting book winds up not just equaling them, but betting everything written about Vietnam . . . The fierce, lucid detachment of Tree of Smoke would make Soren Kierkegaard proud. Johnson, a poet and novelist who lives in Northern Idaho, has written the best work of his career, an existential tour de force."?John Repp, The Plain Dealer (Cleveland) "Denis Johnson's seventh novel is his masterpiece and perhaps one of the most powerful novels published in the last several years. As in his other works but here on a larger scale, his characters negotiate a dark, violent world in search of meaning, some kind of salvation. And Johnson takes us with them into the world’s pain and these soul's anguish in a narrative that carries is along, turning the pages, anxious to see where the story leads . . . Johnson has published poetry and reportage, and he puts both skills to use in his novels . . . Johnson's prose continually wrings emotions out of readers, drawing us into troubled lives as they experience the mystery of suffering in the world. The book includes many poetic turns, for example, 'He could hear also the pulse snickering in the heat of his flesh, and the creak of sweat in his ears.' The action is marked by unpredictable turns, yet it follows an arc that fills out the story's themes. Those themes include Johnson's major one of the possibilities of grace amid inexplicable suffering. He dissects America and the Vietnam experience, showing it through a variety of perspectives?soldiers, spies, medical volunteers and the Vietnamese themselves. It is a war that 'failed to give any romances outside of hellish myths.' Violence erupts amid beauty and tenderness. Throughout the book, a cloud of hopelessness hovers over small acts of humanity . . . Tree of Smoke has resonances of Heart of Darkness and Catch-22, and Johnson draws on the influences of Graham Greene and Robert Stone. The ending has the grit and grace, the apocalyptic universalism of a Flannery O'Connor story. Nevertheless, Johnson's voice is unique in fiction. No one writes like he does. He is that rare artist who seeks not just to entertain or convince but to wrong revelation out of the story."?Gordon Houser, The Wichita Eagle"Smoke is damn impressive, a layered, rich, sweaty accomplishment of massive proportions, a novel whose first three pages are nothing short of perfect."?Whitney Pastorek, Entertainment Weekly"This major Vietnam novel depicts the era's distinctive psychedelic brutality, the ineptitude of the U.S. military effort, and the otherworldly theater of the 'intelligence' operations surrounding the politics of the war. Skip Sands is starting out in the hazy world of the CIA under the tutelage of his uncle, Col. F.X. Sands, a veteran of World War II and many years of mercenary covert actions. They are involved in an assassination in the Philippines, where the novel begins in November 1963, and then move on to Vietnam. There, the Colonel sets up an undercover situation for Skip. Whether the Colonel is a rogue agent gone over the edge is open to question. Down at the bottom of the command chain are the brothers Houston, Bill Jr. and James, members of the alcoholic, sociopathic underclass of rural and Bible Belt America last seen in Johnson's Angels. It is these characters with whom the author seems truly in touch. Moving chronologically, the novel proceeds into the late Sixties, when the war seems not so much lost as running down on the political, military, and cultural energy powering it earlier. Ugly and fascinating, with many shattering scenes, this long work may seem familiar to fans of Apocalypse Now but is nevertheless gripping. Recommended for all fiction collections."?Library Journal"Colonel Francis F. X. Sands' wartime exploits made him something of a legend. He flew as a mercenary for the Republic of China Air Force unit known as the Flying Tigers, shooting down Japanese planes. Shot down himself by the Japanese, he suffered sickness, beatings, torture, and starvation before escaping from a prison camp in Burma. He rose to the rank of colonel during World War II and joined the CIA in the 1950s, his background in Southeast Asia an asset as the U.S. replaced France in the Vietnamese war against communism. Enter Skip Sands, the colonel's nephew, a young intelligence officer currently a clerk in charge of cataloging his uncle's three footlockers full of thousands of index cards, 'almost none of them comprehensible.' The colonel enlists Skip in a secret operation involving a double, an agent ready to betray the Vietcong. Skip, an earnest patriot, nevertheless finds himself deep in the unauthorized world of renegade psychological ops, off the grid and outside the chain of command, an ethical quagmire where almost anything goes, where he encounters conflicts of loyalty between his family, his country, and his religion. Johnson is a gifted writer with a knack for erudite and colorful dialogue, and his sense of time and place is visceral and evocative. With this worthy addition to Vietnam literature, he confidently joins the ranks of Tim O'Brien, Larry Heinemann, and Michael Herr."?Ben Segedin, Booklist"If this novel [is] . . . about Skip Sands, it's also about his uncle, a legendary CIA operative; Kathy Jones, a widowed, saintly Canadian nurse; Trung, a North Vietnamese spy; and the Houston brothers, Bill and James, misguided GIs who haunt the story's periphery. And it's also about Sgt. Jimmy Storm, whose existence seems to be one long vision quest . . . the real point is the possibility of grace in a world of total mystery and inexplicable suffering. In Johnson's honest world, no one story dominates. For all the story lines, the structure couldn't be simpler: each year, from 1963 (the book opens in the Philippines: 'Last night at 3:00 a.m. President Kennedy had been killed') to 1970, gets its own part, followed by a coda set in 1983. Readers familiar with the Vietnam War will recognize its arc?the Tet offensive . . . the deaths of Martin Luther King and RFK; the fall of Saigon, swift and seemingly foreordained. Skip is a CIA recruit working under his uncle, Francis X. Sands, known as the Colonel. Skip is mostly in the dark, awaiting direction, living under an alias and falling in love with Kathy while the Colonel deals in double agents, Bushmills whiskey and folk history. He's a soldier-scholar pursuing theories of how to purify an information stream; he bloviates in gusts of sincerity and blasphemy, all of it charming. A large cast of characters, some colorful, some vaguely chalked, surround this triad . . . Given the covert nature of much of the goings-on, perhaps it is necessary that characters become blurred. 'We're on the cutting edge of reality itself,' says Storm. 'Right where it turns into a dream.' Is this our last Vietnam novel? One has to wonder. What serious writer, after tuning in to Johnson's terrifying, dissonant opera, can return with a fresh ear? The work of many past chroniclers?Graham Greene, Tim O'Brien, the filmmakers Coppola, Cimino and Kubrick, all of whom have contributed to our cultural 'understanding' of the war?is both evoked and consumed in the fiery heat of Johnson's story. In the novel's coda, Storm, a war cliché now way gone and deep in the Malaysian jungle near Thailand, attends preparations for a village's sacrificial bonfire (consisting of personal items smashed and axed by their owners) and offers himself as 'compensation, baby.' When the book ends, in a heartbreaking soliloquy from Kathy (fittingly, a Canadian) on the occasion of a war orphan benefit in a Minneapolis Radisson, you feel that America's Vietnam experience has been brought to a closure that's as good as we'll ever get."?Publishers Weekly]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[Tree of Smoke]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Denis Johnson]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Picador]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9780312427740]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[Winner of the National Book AwardOne of the New York Times 10 Best Books of the YearNamed a Best Book of the Year by Time, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, Amazon.com, Salon, Slate, The National Book Critics Circle, The Christian Science Monitor. . . .Tree of Smoke is the story of William "Skip" Sands, CIA--engaged in Pschological Operations against the Vietcong--and the disasters that befall him. It is also the story of the Houston brothers, Bill and James, young men who drift out of the Arizona desert and into a war where the line between disinformation and delusion has blurred away. In the words of Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times, Tree of Smoke is "bound to become one of the classic works of literature produced by that tragic and uncannily familiar war."                                                         Denis Johnson is the author of five novels, a collection of poetry and one book of reportage. He is the recipient of a Lannan Fellowship and a Whiting Writer's Award, among many other honors for his work. He lives in northern Idaho.             Winner of the National Book Award A Pulitzer Prize FinalistLonglisted for the IMPAC Dublin Literary AwardOne of the New York Times 10 Best Books of the YearA Time Magazine Top 10 of the YearA Boston Globe Best Book of the YearA Washington Post Top 10 Book of the YearA San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the YearA Chicago Tribune Favorite Book of the YearA Seattle Times Favorite Book of the YearA Library Journal  Best Book of the Year This is the story of Skip Sands?spy-in-training, engaged in Psychological Operations against the Vietcong?and the disasters that befall him thanks to his famous uncle, a war hero known in intelligence circles simply as the Colonel. This is also the story of the Houston brothers, Bill and James, young men who drift out of the Arizona desert into a war in which the line between disinformation and delusion has blurred away. In its vision of human folly, and its gritty, sympathetic portraits of men and women desperate for an end to their loneliness, whether in sex or death or by the grace of God, this is a story like nothing in our literature.  Also available on CD as an unabridged audiobook.  Please email academic@macmillan.com for more information.                        " [A] deeply resonant novel that is bound to become one of the classic works of literature produced by that tragic and uncannily familiar war."?Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times                                                               "Denis Johnson's wildly ambitious new novel, Tree of Smoke, reads like a whacked-out, hallucinogenic variation on such whacked-out, hallucinogenic Vietnam classics as Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, Michael Herr's Dispatches, Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers and Stephen Wright's Meditations in Green. It features a central character who comes to see himself as a combination of the Quiet American and the Ugly American, and another who comes across as a latter-day version of Kurtz in Conrad's Heart of Darkness. What's amazing is that Mr. Johnson somehow manages to take these derivative elements and turn them into something highly original?and potent . . . it's a powerful story about the American experience in Vietnam, with unsettling echoes of the current American experience in Iraq. It is a story about bad intelligence and military screw-ups and people who have lost their way, a story like so many of Mr. Johnson's earlier novels, about Americans in purgatory, waiting impatiently, even expectantly, for the coming apocalypse . . . Mr. Johnson not only succeeds in conjuring the anomalous, hallucinatory aura of the Vietnam War as authoritatively as Stephen Wright or Francis Ford Coppola, but he also shows its fallout on his characters with harrowing emotional precision . . . [A] deeply resonant novel that is bound to become one of the classic works of literature produced by that tragic and uncannily familiar war."?Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times "Good morning and please listen to me: Denis Johnson is a true American artist, and Tree of Smoke is a tremendous book, a strange entertainment, very long but very fast, a great whirly ride that starts out sad and gets sadder and sadder, loops unpredictably out and around, and then lurches down so suddenly at the very end that it will make your stomach flop . . . Tree of Smoke is a soulful book, even a numinous one . . . and it ought to secure Johnson's status as a revelator for this still new century . . . I spent a long time reading Tree of Smoke, and as I neared the end I found myself wishing it were longer."?Jim Lewis, The New York Times"Tree of Smoke is an ambitious, long, dense, daunting novel sited at the heart of a great American evil, the Vietnam War . . . Like the war itself, Tree of Smoke delivers an intense experience of loss, shame, futility, confusion . . . Denis Johnson is a formidable prose writer, and his book is composed in a plain, straightforward, efficient style. Understatement rules The physical experiences of daily life in tropical Asia is kept fresh, page to page. The dialogue is convincing, neatly adapted to the particularities of the widely different characters. The moments of black comedy that can emerge even amid the worst miseries of war are deftly captured . . . Tree of Smoke joins the corporal’s guard of truly significant novels about the Vietnam War?works such as The Quiet American, Going After Cacciato, Dog Soldiers, The Things They Carried, Meditations in Green . . . Denis Johnson has created an absorbing, provocative work of art."?Norman Rush, The New York Review of Books"For a reader with stamina, the rewards come steadily. Johnson is a fine stylist of the world of soulful disaster. The phrase 'tree of smoke,' as he presents it, is the literal translation from the Hebrew of the pillar in Exodus. This time?in these pages?that pillar of smoke leaves us to a dark, dark vision of a promised land."?Alan Cheuse, All Things Considered "To write a fat novel about Vietnam nearly 35 years after it ended is an act of literary bravado. To do so as brilliantly as Denis Johnson has in Tree of Smoke is positively a miracle . . . This novel makes large demands on the reader: to submit to its length, to its disorienting language and structure, to the elusive and shattering experience of its characters, and finally to its sheer ambition to be definitive for the Vietnam generation.  It is a presumptuous book, in other words, and you may resist for the first several hundred pages. But it will grab you eventually, and get inside your head like the war it is describing?mystifying, horrifying, mesmerizing. Johnson, a poet, ex-junkie and adventure journalist, has written a book that by the end wraps around you as tightly as a jungle snake . . . As a serious war novel, Tree of Smoke is implicitly a story about all wars. And a reader cannot travel this journey without thinking about America’s current war in Iraq."?David Ignatius, The Washington Post Book World (cover review)"Denis Johnson's apocalyptic, doom-and-grace ridden Vietnam novel has a lot of fire in its belly . . . if Johnson has a signature theme throughout his work, it's a kind of quasi-mystical redemption on the other side of the abyss; his gorgeous prose and willingness to go deep have led the way through the scarily lightless corridors of his fiction."?Gail Caldwall, The Boston Globe"Tree of Smoke will surely be hailed as a great novel of the Vietnam War, which it is?but more than that it's a caterwauling anthem about American jitters, American doubt and American folly, an oblique and unsettling account of Americans growing Quiet and Ugly in the second half of the 20th century . . . A novel that sets you spinning and leaves you reeling . . . Tree of Smoke is as forceful and disturbing as a Robert Rauschenberg combine: There's the same disjunctive composition, stark unfinished texture, hints of bone and earth and broken language, and suggestions of both psychological and physical violence . . . Tree of Smoke makes no explicit argument against containment or preemptive war or liberal interventionism. But as a fictional account of how American military involvement abroad saps its people, its institutions, its heart?a work of moral criticism in the form a novel?it's more convincing than most arguments, and more urgently needed."?Matt Weiland, The New York Observer "Taking place in Southeast Asian?Vietnam mostly?during the period from 1963 to 1970, Tree of Smoke is a massive patchwork of people and stories that overlap and drift apart . . . It's beautiful writing: With Johnson, the writing is always beautiful."?David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times "'Once upon a time there was a war.' This statement comes late in Denis Johnson's tour de force of a novel, Tree of Smoke, and indicates much of the misguided storybook romanticism at the heart of many world conflicts . . . In an opening scene that symbolizes much of the heartbreak summoned in the novel, Bill Houston shoots a monkey and then regrets the utter pointlessness of his deed. It is a tiny moment involving a relatively minor character, but it has significant reverberations throughout the work . . . Tree of Smoke is a distinctly literary type of spy novel and political thriller, owing more to John le Carré and the Bible (from which it draws its name) than to Ian Fleming and 'The Bourne Identity.' Plenty of space is afforded to rumination and soul-searching, but Johnson is smart enough to recognize that something like the Tet Offensive can judiciously move along the pace: There is a time to dwell on the mythology of a place and then a time to hit the deck . . . There is so much going on in Tree of Smoke, and so many levels of symbolism, that it is hard to do the story justice here . . . It will be interesting to see how readers respond to Johnson's novel. Stylistically, it ranges from Hemingwayesque straightforward simplicity to Proustian narrative complexity and descriptive splendor. Johnson brings his talents as a poet to bear, especially when describing the jungles and cities of Asia."?David Hellman, San Francisco Chronicle  "In Tree of Smoke, the new novel from the gifted Denis Johnson, a young CIA operative goes to Vietnam as part of his family legacy, where he's misled, exposed and betrayed into having an affair with the wife of a missionary. The book's saga begins on the day of Kennedy's assassination, as experienced in the Far East . . . [Johnson] has an eye for detail and writes about an alcoholic blackout and its shameful aftermath as Dostoyevsky wrote about compulsive crime. Johnson is an author who has captured the zeitgeist of American experience as surely as Twain, Hemingway or Ellison. As Hemingway's children grew up in the shadow of World War I, what survived in America was the belief in the honorable intentions of our country. Johnson’s generation was not cut the same break. For the post-Woodstock, post-punk age, consciousness changes; everything believed in was swept off the stage or shot in the street. Johnson gets this on a visceral level. As the generation before him had to write about the excitement of expanding consciousness, Johnson’s has had to contend with the aftermath of that trip. Hunter Thompson began to diagnose this malaise. Johnson's fiction is all about what comes next. It begins with the shock of loss and post-traumatic stress. And in Tree of Smoke, he makes you believe all over again."?Andrew Hubner, New York Post "The novel is about the Vietnam War and its legacy of ruined bodies and even more wrecked minds, and it surely represents a huge investment on Mr. Johnson's part of blood, sweat, and years. The book is full of incident and rat-a-tat dialogue, and is peopled by undercover operatives; soldiers in action; agents who might be double agents; desperate aid workers, and friends, family, and lovers who often act as if they are nothing of the sort. There is movie potential here, but a film would never be able to capture the richness of interior life that is Mr. Johnson's greatest achievement . . . The point of view in Tree of Smoke is an effective hybrid of third-person omniscient and third-person limited; each section provides the convincingly complex thoughts of only one person, but this focal character keeps shifting, sometimes within a page, and more than a handful of people get a substantial portion of the book. Often we badly want to know what someone else is thinking, but Mr. Johnson either denies us entirely or elegantly builds tension by withholding this knowledge . . . Mr. Johnson’s narrative of an improbably ambitious mission guided by an increasingly embattles raison d’être will be minded for comment on today’s war in Iraq. But at bottom this is not a political novel. War mat be 90% myth, but it is 100% real to those it touches and breaks, and their lives are at the vivid center of Mr. Johnson’s canvas . . . With its humane depiction of the most private battles within battles, Tree of Smoke ought to take its place among the great American novels of any war."?Evan Hughes, The New York Sun  "Brilliant . . . [Tree of Smoke] opens a window onto a world of mystery, war and intrigue whose importance in the (usually) unwritten history of our republic can't be denied . . . A full and heart-shaking narrative of our war?including much blood of soldiers (ours and theirs), destruction, rape and pillage?against the Asian communists and the people of the region . . . Johnson is a fine stylist of the world of soulful disaster, and his kind of work doesn’t usually jibe well with a long, involved narrative . . . But this time he merges his tightly tuned sense of language with the needs of an extended and complicated story . . . When it comes to creating the central metaphor of the book, from which the novel gains its title, it is surpassing in its brilliance. Tree of smoke?Sands finds the image in a set of file cards given to him for cataloging by his CIA uncle. There's a reference to it in the Bible’s Song of Solomon. And in Exodus. And an apocalyptic version of it in Joel . . . And in this extraordinary novel, which itself becomes a version of the biblical sign of beckoning disaster."?Alan Cheuse, Chicago Tribune "In the more hopeful days of the Iraq war, some newly arrived U.S. solider probably looked up to a desert sky guarded by American Blackhawk helicopters and jets and had the same reassuring thoughts as Skips, Sands, on the CIA's trainee first night of duty in Vietnam in Denis Johnson’s epic, wrenching novel, Tree of Smoke . . . The immensely talented Johnson (Jesus's Son, Resuscitation of a Dead Man) delivers a beautifully layered, insightful and visceral montage of stories that examines the Vietnam War experience from multiple points of view . . . One gets the sense that everyone in the long, colorful cast of characters in Tree of Smoke is on a Danteesque excursion through a hell of misguided intentions."?Tyron Beason, The Seattle Times"Long, rich, dazzling, Tree of Smoke should finally establish him among the most profound and truly humane American novelists extant . . . People and places, complete with sounds, smells and weather, are rendered throughout with an extraordinary empathy and vividness. Tree of Smoke is a great read, an amazing achievement."?James Leigh, The San Diego Union-Tribune"In 'Nam,' a 1981 oral history of the Vietnam War, a former prisoner of war recalled his 'mental exercises' during years of captivity: he promoted himself to four-star general and invaded Hanoi. He relived his past and imagined the future, designing the dream house he intended to build after the war. He computed materials and costs?board feet of lumber, lengths of tubing and wiring, fixtures and hardware. And then he built the house in real time in his head. If he'd imagined a book about the war, the manipulation and miscalculation that led us into it, the search-and-destroy savagery of combat and America’s post-World War II loss of innocence and moral authority, he could not have done better than Denis Johnson’s novel Tree of Smoke . . . Tree of Smoke is vintage Johnson, combining the grim, gritty realism of Angels, the everyday hallucinatory absurdity of Jesus’ Son, and the post-apocalypse invention of Fiskadaro. He has a fine ear for American speech, captured brilliantly in James Houston's shift from the demented patois of his socially malformed family to the war zone slang of the long-range patrol. And Johnson can mold language to theme like a sculptor shaping clay . . . Tree of Smoke is a biblical image for the conflagration of war, and in Johnson's novel it serves as a thematic link between indiscriminate carpet bombing, the Cold War fear of mutual assured destruction, and the code name for an ill-conceived CIA pacification plan. And, in poignant counterpoint, the autumn smoke of dead leaves burning in Skip's boyhood Kansas. But Skip is not in Kansas anymore."?Vernon Peterson, The Oregonian (Portland)"For a novel that’s supposed to be about military intelligence, Denis Johnson's crucial new Tree of Smoke sure is populated by a bunch of clueless characters. And yet his epic tale, some 600 pages that span two decades, isn't so much about getting facts or information straight as it is about learning to make one's way in a world that has stopped making sense. Set largely during the Vietnam War and mostly in Southeast Asia, Johnson's bracing, zigzagging narrative is ultimately a story about how to learn to see in the dark . . . Much like Jesus' Son, Johnson's celebrated 1992 collection of short stories, Tree of Smoke is hardly the stuff of uplift. In passage after passage, however, Johnson’s writing is sublime: His urgent, visceral prose conveys the humanity at the heart of even the most messed-up situations, often redeeming that humanity in the process  . . . It might strike some as odd, even counterintuitive, as one reviewer has suggested, that Johnson would write a book about Vietnam now. Tree of Smoke, though, speaks not just to the United States' misguided participation in that war but also to the psychology of war in general. It couldn't be timelier given the debacle in Iraq."?Bill Friskics-Warren, The Tennessean "One does not read Johnson's fiction for narrative clarity?the joy of this book lies in its meandering and tangents, in its lacerating details and hallucinatory wonder, its unexpected twists and dead ends, its richness, strangeness, shadows and sudden, devastating beauty . . . Tree of Smoke should be considered the literary bible of the Vietnam War?and perhaps the bible of war itself."?Nathan Ihara, LA Weekly  "A redefinition of [Vietnam literature] done in a poetic style that captures the beauty of the landscape of Southeast Asia, as well as the moral confusion of the Westerners trapped in the war's spell . . . Tree of Smoke can't be fully explored here in its many layered shape of symbols and images, but as a piece of pure writing its is one of the year's best in fiction. Johnson's powers of observation and care for creating scenes of beauty and horror are at their peak."?Bob Hoover, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette"This new novel, Tree of Smoke, a 614-page multigenerational, transnational, braided morality saga about Westerners in Southeast Asia and the Southeast Asians who have to figure out how to stay alive around them, is something else entirely. It's a book that needs every bit of its space to do what it wants to do. Johnson has made himself into a different kind of writer in order to do this book?that's the first thing that needs to be said. The second is that he's made himself into a better writer. He didn’t owe anyone a long, complex, conventionally satisfying but formally daring masterpiece of an American novel, but he produced one anyway . . . It takes a while to get into Tree of Smoke. Not because it's slow going but because it's too tempting to stop and read over again the opening scene of a young Navy crewman half-accidentally shooting to death a small monkey in the Philippine jungle . . . Johnson has written his War and Peace . . . You can't exactly over-read this book. Johnson has put it all out there, as we say. He’s written a novel that, with its own internal referencing of stories he's written before, more or less begs to be read as a summation and validation of his fiction to this point, and he's written one that wears its high-modernist sense of the novel’s task unfashionably high on its sleeve. Maybe it's the case that Johnson himself felt an urge to make the kind of outsize novelistic statement no one could mistake for minor. If so, he has not been made to look foolish by the ambition."?John Jeremiah Sullivan, Harper’s Magazine"Tree of Smoke is the Denis Johnson novel which we've been waiting for. The Vietnam War continues to haunt us in countless ways, and Tree of Smoke demonstrates precisely why that is. Set mainly in southeast Asia, with a few stateside chapters thrown in, the novel takes place between 1963 and 1983. You can say it's about the Vietnam War, but that would be an oversimplification. Johnson's more interested in what changed at home as a result of that war. It's a novel about America, and in many ways it’s a novel about American today . . . I'm not sure there's been a better Vietnam novel since William Eastlake's The Bamboo Bed. Honestly, I can't be sure that there’s been a better American novel published in the past 10 years. Johnson understands the conflicts at the heart of the American psyche, and in Tree of Smoke he delivers the sort of historical novel that not only shows us where we've been but also shines a light on where we're going. It is a masterpiece."?Andrew Ervin, The Miami Herald  "Tree of Smoke, a tortuous epic of American counterinsurgency in Asia, presents an array of characters bearing familiar Johnsonian auras of desperation, threat, and abjection."?James Gibbons, Bookforum "Tree of Smoke is a Vietnam War novel almost with peer, in which 'the abyss is alive' across seven years and more than 600 pages. Denis Johnson?best known for the short stories in Jesus’ Son, and the reporting in Seek: Reports from the Edges of American and Beyond?pays homage to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Graham Greene’s The Quiet American. His superb, disorienting book winds up not just equaling them, but betting everything written about Vietnam . . . The fierce, lucid detachment of Tree of Smoke would make Soren Kierkegaard proud. Johnson, a poet and novelist who lives in Northern Idaho, has written the best work of his career, an existential tour de force."?John Repp, The Plain Dealer (Cleveland) "Denis Johnson's seventh novel is his masterpiece and perhaps one of the most powerful novels published in the last several years. As in his other works but here on a larger scale, his characters negotiate a dark, violent world in search of meaning, some kind of salvation. And Johnson takes us with them into the world’s pain and these soul's anguish in a narrative that carries is along, turning the pages, anxious to see where the story leads . . . Johnson has published poetry and reportage, and he puts both skills to use in his novels . . . Johnson's prose continually wrings emotions out of readers, drawing us into troubled lives as they experience the mystery of suffering in the world. The book includes many poetic turns, for example, 'He could hear also the pulse snickering in the heat of his flesh, and the creak of sweat in his ears.' The action is marked by unpredictable turns, yet it follows an arc that fills out the story's themes. Those themes include Johnson's major one of the possibilities of grace amid inexplicable suffering. He dissects America and the Vietnam experience, showing it through a variety of perspectives?soldiers, spies, medical volunteers and the Vietnamese themselves. It is a war that 'failed to give any romances outside of hellish myths.' Violence erupts amid beauty and tenderness. Throughout the book, a cloud of hopelessness hovers over small acts of humanity . . . Tree of Smoke has resonances of Heart of Darkness and Catch-22, and Johnson draws on the influences of Graham Greene and Robert Stone. The ending has the grit and grace, the apocalyptic universalism of a Flannery O'Connor story. Nevertheless, Johnson's voice is unique in fiction. No one writes like he does. He is that rare artist who seeks not just to entertain or convince but to wrong revelation out of the story."?Gordon Houser, The Wichita Eagle"Smoke is damn impressive, a layered, rich, sweaty accomplishment of massive proportions, a novel whose first three pages are nothing short of perfect."?Whitney Pastorek, Entertainment Weekly"This major Vietnam novel depicts the era's distinctive psychedelic brutality, the ineptitude of the U.S. military effort, and the otherworldly theater of the 'intelligence' operations surrounding the politics of the war. Skip Sands is starting out in the hazy world of the CIA under the tutelage of his uncle, Col. F.X. Sands, a veteran of World War II and many years of mercenary covert actions. They are involved in an assassination in the Philippines, where the novel begins in November 1963, and then move on to Vietnam. There, the Colonel sets up an undercover situation for Skip. Whether the Colonel is a rogue agent gone over the edge is open to question. Down at the bottom of the command chain are the brothers Houston, Bill Jr. and James, members of the alcoholic, sociopathic underclass of rural and Bible Belt America last seen in Johnson's Angels. It is these characters with whom the author seems truly in touch. Moving chronologically, the novel proceeds into the late Sixties, when the war seems not so much lost as running down on the political, military, and cultural energy powering it earlier. Ugly and fascinating, with many shattering scenes, this long work may seem familiar to fans of Apocalypse Now but is nevertheless gripping. Recommended for all fiction collections."?Library Journal"Colonel Francis F. X. Sands' wartime exploits made him something of a legend. He flew as a mercenary for the Republic of China Air Force unit known as the Flying Tigers, shooting down Japanese planes. Shot down himself by the Japanese, he suffered sickness, beatings, torture, and starvation before escaping from a prison camp in Burma. He rose to the rank of colonel during World War II and joined the CIA in the 1950s, his background in Southeast Asia an asset as the U.S. replaced France in the Vietnamese war against communism. Enter Skip Sands, the colonel's nephew, a young intelligence officer currently a clerk in charge of cataloging his uncle's three footlockers full of thousands of index cards, 'almost none of them comprehensible.' The colonel enlists Skip in a secret operation involving a double, an agent ready to betray the Vietcong. Skip, an earnest patriot, nevertheless finds himself deep in the unauthorized world of renegade psychological ops, off the grid and outside the chain of command, an ethical quagmire where almost anything goes, where he encounters conflicts of loyalty between his family, his country, and his religion. Johnson is a gifted writer with a knack for erudite and colorful dialogue, and his sense of time and place is visceral and evocative. With this worthy addition to Vietnam literature, he confidently joins the ranks of Tim O'Brien, Larry Heinemann, and Michael Herr."?Ben Segedin, Booklist"If this novel [is] . . . about Skip Sands, it's also about his uncle, a legendary CIA operative; Kathy Jones, a widowed, saintly Canadian nurse; Trung, a North Vietnamese spy; and the Houston brothers, Bill and James, misguided GIs who haunt the story's periphery. And it's also about Sgt. Jimmy Storm, whose existence seems to be one long vision quest . . . the real point is the possibility of grace in a world of total mystery and inexplicable suffering. In Johnson's honest world, no one story dominates. For all the story lines, the structure couldn't be simpler: each year, from 1963 (the book opens in the Philippines: 'Last night at 3:00 a.m. President Kennedy had been killed') to 1970, gets its own part, followed by a coda set in 1983. Readers familiar with the Vietnam War will recognize its arc?the Tet offensive . . . the deaths of Martin Luther King and RFK; the fall of Saigon, swift and seemingly foreordained. Skip is a CIA recruit working under his uncle, Francis X. Sands, known as the Colonel. Skip is mostly in the dark, awaiting direction, living under an alias and falling in love with Kathy while the Colonel deals in double agents, Bushmills whiskey and folk history. He's a soldier-scholar pursuing theories of how to purify an information stream; he bloviates in gusts of sincerity and blasphemy, all of it charming. A large cast of characters, some colorful, some vaguely chalked, surround this triad . . . Given the covert nature of much of the goings-on, perhaps it is necessary that characters become blurred. 'We're on the cutting edge of reality itself,' says Storm. 'Right where it turns into a dream.' Is this our last Vietnam novel? One has to wonder. What serious writer, after tuning in to Johnson's terrifying, dissonant opera, can return with a fresh ear? The work of many past chroniclers?Graham Greene, Tim O'Brien, the filmmakers Coppola, Cimino and Kubrick, all of whom have contributed to our cultural 'understanding' of the war?is both evoked and consumed in the fiery heat of Johnson's story. In the novel's coda, Storm, a war cliché now way gone and deep in the Malaysian jungle near Thailand, attends preparations for a village's sacrificial bonfire (consisting of personal items smashed and axed by their owners) and offers himself as 'compensation, baby.' When the book ends, in a heartbreaking soliloquy from Kathy (fittingly, a Canadian) on the occasion of a war orphan benefit in a Minneapolis Radisson, you feel that America's Vietnam experience has been brought to a closure that's as good as we'll ever get."?Publishers Weekly]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:date>2008-09-02T00:00:00-04:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[Shadow Country]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780812980622</link>
<description><![CDATA[2008 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNERPeter Matthiessen’s great American epic–Killing Mister Watson, Lost Man’s River, and Bone by Bone–was conceived as one vast mysterious novel, but because of its length it was originally broken up into three books. In this bold new rendering, Matthiessen has cut nearly a third of the overall text and collapsed the time frame while deepening the insights and motivations of his characters with brilliant rewriting throughout. In Shadow Country, he has marvelously distilled a monumental work, realizing his original vision. Inspired by a near-mythic event of the wild Florida frontier at the turn of the twentieth century, Shadow Country reimagines the legend of the inspired Everglades sugar planter and notorious outlaw E. J. Watson, who drives himself relentlessly toward his own violent end at the hands of neighbors who mostly admired him, in a killing that obsessed his favorite son.Shadow Country traverses strange landscapes and frontier hinterlands inhabited by Americans of every provenance and color, including the black and Indian inheritors of the archaic racism that, as Watson’s wife observed, "still casts its shadow over the nation."Peter Matthiessen’s lyrical and illuminating work in the Watson narrative has been praised highly by such contemporaries as Saul Bellow, William Styron, and W. S. Merwin. Joseph Heller said "I read it in great gulps, up each night later than I wanted to be, in my hungry impatience to find out more and more." Praise for Shadow Country“Shadow Country is altogether gripping, shocking, and brilliantly told, not just a tour de force in its stylistic range, but a great American novel, as powerful a reading experience as nearly any in our literature. This magnificent, sad masterpiece about race, history, and defeated dreams can easily stand comparison with Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men. Little wonder, too, that parts of the story of E.J. Watson call up comparisons with Dostoevsky, Conrad, and, inevitably, Faulkner. In every way, Shadow Country is a bravura performance, at once history, fiction, and myth–as well as the capstone to the career of one of the most admired and admirable writers of our time.” — The New York Review of Books“Magnificent and capacious…. I'll just say right here that the book took my sleeve and like the ancient mariner would not let go. Matthiessen has made his three-part saga into a new thing…. Finally now we have these books welded like a bell, and with Watson's song the last sound, all the elements fuse and resonate….a breathtaking saga.” — The Los Angeles Times“Gorgeously written and unfailingly compelling, Shadow Country is the exhilarating masterwork of [Matthiessen’s] career, every bit as ambitious as Moby Dick.” — National Geographic Adventure magazine“Peter Mattiessen consolidates his epic masterpiece of Florida -- and crafts something even better…[He] deserves credit for decades of meticulous research and obsessive details and soaring prose that converted the Watson legend into critically acclaimed literature….Anyone wanting an explanation for what happened to Florida can now find it in a single novel, a great American novel.” — Miami Herald“Matthiessen is writing about one man's life in Shadow Country, but he is also writing about the life of the nation over the course of half a century. Watson's story is essentially the story of the American frontier, of the conquering of wild lands and people, and of what such empires cost….Even among a body of work as magnificent as Matthiessen's, this is his great book.” — St. Petersburg Times“Shadow Country is a magnum opus. Matthiessen is meticulous in creating characters, lyrical in describing landscapes, and resolute in dissecting the values and costs that accompanied the development of this nation.” --Seattle Times“Shadow Country” is an ambitious, lasting, and meaningful work of literature that will not soon fade away. It is a testament to Mr. Matthiessen’s integrity as an artist that he felt compelled to return to the Watson material to produce this work and satisfy his original vision….a multifaceted work that can be read variously or simultaneously as a psychological novel, a historical novel, a morality tale, a political allegory, or a mystery. -- East Hampton Star“Matthiessen’s Watson trilogy is a touchstone of modern American literature…this reworking…is remarkable….Where Watson was a magnificent character before, he comes across as nothing short of iconic here; it’s difficult to find another figure in American literature so thoroughly and confincingly portrayed.” — Publishers Weekly, starred review, Pick of the Week“Matthiessen has reinvigorated and rejoined the trilogy’s novels…a mosaic about the life and lynch-mob death of a turn-of-the century Florida Everglades sugar planter and serial killer named E. J. Watson — into the 900-plus-page Shadow Country. This is no mere repackaging: Four hundred pages were cut from the novels, previous background characters now tromp to the foreground, and the books’ rangy, Faulknerian essence is rendered more digestible. Deliciously digestible, that is; this is a thick porterhouse of a novel.” — Men’s Journal "The fiction of Peter Matthiessen is the reason a lot of people in my generation decided to be writers. No doubt about it. SHADOW COUNTRY lives up to anyone's highest expectations for great writing." --  Richard Ford "Peter Matthiessen is a brilliantly gifted and ambitious writer, an inspired anatomist of the American mythos.  His storytelling skills are prodigious and his rapport with his subject is remarkable."  -- Joyce Carol Oates"Peter Matthiessen's work, both in fiction and non-fiction, has become a unique achievement in his own generation and in American literature as a whole. Everything that he has written has been conveyed in his own clear, deeply informed, elegant and powerful prose.  The Watson saga-in-the-round, to which he has devoted nearly thirty years, is his crowning achievement.  SHADOW COUNTRY, his distillation of the earlier trilogy, is his transmutation of it to represent his original vision.  It is the quintessence of his lifelong concerns, and a great legacy."  -- W.S. Merwin]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[Shadow Country]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Peter Matthiessen]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Modern Library]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9780812980622]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[2008 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNERPeter Matthiessen’s great American epic–Killing Mister Watson, Lost Man’s River, and Bone by Bone–was conceived as one vast mysterious novel, but because of its length it was originally broken up into three books. In this bold new rendering, Matthiessen has cut nearly a third of the overall text and collapsed the time frame while deepening the insights and motivations of his characters with brilliant rewriting throughout. In Shadow Country, he has marvelously distilled a monumental work, realizing his original vision. Inspired by a near-mythic event of the wild Florida frontier at the turn of the twentieth century, Shadow Country reimagines the legend of the inspired Everglades sugar planter and notorious outlaw E. J. Watson, who drives himself relentlessly toward his own violent end at the hands of neighbors who mostly admired him, in a killing that obsessed his favorite son.Shadow Country traverses strange landscapes and frontier hinterlands inhabited by Americans of every provenance and color, including the black and Indian inheritors of the archaic racism that, as Watson’s wife observed, "still casts its shadow over the nation."Peter Matthiessen’s lyrical and illuminating work in the Watson narrative has been praised highly by such contemporaries as Saul Bellow, William Styron, and W. S. Merwin. Joseph Heller said "I read it in great gulps, up each night later than I wanted to be, in my hungry impatience to find out more and more." Praise for Shadow Country“Shadow Country is altogether gripping, shocking, and brilliantly told, not just a tour de force in its stylistic range, but a great American novel, as powerful a reading experience as nearly any in our literature. This magnificent, sad masterpiece about race, history, and defeated dreams can easily stand comparison with Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men. Little wonder, too, that parts of the story of E.J. Watson call up comparisons with Dostoevsky, Conrad, and, inevitably, Faulkner. In every way, Shadow Country is a bravura performance, at once history, fiction, and myth–as well as the capstone to the career of one of the most admired and admirable writers of our time.” — The New York Review of Books“Magnificent and capacious…. I'll just say right here that the book took my sleeve and like the ancient mariner would not let go. Matthiessen has made his three-part saga into a new thing…. Finally now we have these books welded like a bell, and with Watson's song the last sound, all the elements fuse and resonate….a breathtaking saga.” — The Los Angeles Times“Gorgeously written and unfailingly compelling, Shadow Country is the exhilarating masterwork of [Matthiessen’s] career, every bit as ambitious as Moby Dick.” — National Geographic Adventure magazine“Peter Mattiessen consolidates his epic masterpiece of Florida -- and crafts something even better…[He] deserves credit for decades of meticulous research and obsessive details and soaring prose that converted the Watson legend into critically acclaimed literature….Anyone wanting an explanation for what happened to Florida can now find it in a single novel, a great American novel.” — Miami Herald“Matthiessen is writing about one man's life in Shadow Country, but he is also writing about the life of the nation over the course of half a century. Watson's story is essentially the story of the American frontier, of the conquering of wild lands and people, and of what such empires cost….Even among a body of work as magnificent as Matthiessen's, this is his great book.” — St. Petersburg Times“Shadow Country is a magnum opus. Matthiessen is meticulous in creating characters, lyrical in describing landscapes, and resolute in dissecting the values and costs that accompanied the development of this nation.” --Seattle Times“Shadow Country” is an ambitious, lasting, and meaningful work of literature that will not soon fade away. It is a testament to Mr. Matthiessen’s integrity as an artist that he felt compelled to return to the Watson material to produce this work and satisfy his original vision….a multifaceted work that can be read variously or simultaneously as a psychological novel, a historical novel, a morality tale, a political allegory, or a mystery. -- East Hampton Star“Matthiessen’s Watson trilogy is a touchstone of modern American literature…this reworking…is remarkable….Where Watson was a magnificent character before, he comes across as nothing short of iconic here; it’s difficult to find another figure in American literature so thoroughly and confincingly portrayed.” — Publishers Weekly, starred review, Pick of the Week“Matthiessen has reinvigorated and rejoined the trilogy’s novels…a mosaic about the life and lynch-mob death of a turn-of-the century Florida Everglades sugar planter and serial killer named E. J. Watson — into the 900-plus-page Shadow Country. This is no mere repackaging: Four hundred pages were cut from the novels, previous background characters now tromp to the foreground, and the books’ rangy, Faulknerian essence is rendered more digestible. Deliciously digestible, that is; this is a thick porterhouse of a novel.” — Men’s Journal "The fiction of Peter Matthiessen is the reason a lot of people in my generation decided to be writers. No doubt about it. SHADOW COUNTRY lives up to anyone's highest expectations for great writing." --  Richard Ford "Peter Matthiessen is a brilliantly gifted and ambitious writer, an inspired anatomist of the American mythos.  His storytelling skills are prodigious and his rapport with his subject is remarkable."  -- Joyce Carol Oates"Peter Matthiessen's work, both in fiction and non-fiction, has become a unique achievement in his own generation and in American literature as a whole. Everything that he has written has been conveyed in his own clear, deeply informed, elegant and powerful prose.  The Watson saga-in-the-round, to which he has devoted nearly thirty years, is his crowning achievement.  SHADOW COUNTRY, his distillation of the earlier trilogy, is his transmutation of it to represent his original vision.  It is the quintessence of his lifelong concerns, and a great legacy."  -- W.S. Merwin]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:relation><![CDATA[9781588368249]]></dc:relation>
<dc:date>2008-11-26T00:00:00-05:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[2666]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780374100148</link>
<description><![CDATA[THE  POSTHUMOUS MASTERWORK FROM “ONE OF THE GREATEST AND MOST INFLUENTIAL MODERN WRITERS” (JAMES WOOD, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW)  Composed in the last years of Roberto Bolaño’s life, 2666 was greeted across Europe and Latin America as his highest achievement, surpassing even his previous work in its strangeness, beauty, and scope. Its throng of unforgettable characters includes academics and convicts, an American sportswriter, an elusive German novelist, and a teenage student and her widowed, mentally unstable father. Their lives intersect in the urban sprawl of SantaTeresa—a fictional Juárez—on the U.S.-Mexico border, where hundreds of young factory workers, in the novel as in life, have disappeared.]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[2666]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Roberto Bolano; Natasha Wimmer]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Farrar, Straus and Giroux]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9780374100148]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[THE  POSTHUMOUS MASTERWORK FROM “ONE OF THE GREATEST AND MOST INFLUENTIAL MODERN WRITERS” (JAMES WOOD, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW)  Composed in the last years of Roberto Bolaño’s life, 2666 was greeted across Europe and Latin America as his highest achievement, surpassing even his previous work in its strangeness, beauty, and scope. Its throng of unforgettable characters includes academics and convicts, an American sportswriter, an elusive German novelist, and a teenage student and her widowed, mentally unstable father. Their lives intersect in the urban sprawl of SantaTeresa—a fictional Juárez—on the U.S.-Mexico border, where hundreds of young factory workers, in the novel as in life, have disappeared.]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Hardcover]]></dc:format>
<dc:date>2008-11-11T00:00:00-05:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[Ruined]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9781559363556</link>
<description><![CDATA[Winner of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Drama“A powerhouse drama. . . . Lynn Nottage’s beautiful, hideous and unpretentiously important play [is] a shattering, intimate journey into faraway news reports.”—Linda Winer, Newsday“An intense and gripping new drama . . . the kind of new play we desperately need: well-informed and unafraid of the world’s brutalities. Nottage is one of our finest playwrights, a smart, empathetic and daring storyteller who tells a story an audience won’t expect.”—David Cote, Time Out New YorkA rain forest bar and brothel in the brutally war-torn Congo is the setting for Lynn Nottage’s extraordinary new play. The establishment’s shrewd matriarch, Mama Nadi, keeps peace between customers from both sides of the civil war, as government soldiers and rebel forces alike choose from her inventory of women, many already “ruined” by rape and torture when they were pressed into prostitution. Inspired by interviews she conducted in Africa with Congo refugees, Nottage has crafted an engrossing and uncommonly human story with humor and song served alongside its postcolonial and feminist politics in the rich theatrical tradition of Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage.Lynn Nottage’s plays include Crumbs from the Table of Joy, Fabulation, and Intimate Apparel, winner of the American Theatre Critics’ Steinberg New Play Award and the Francesca Primus Prize. Her plays have been widely produced, with Intimate Apparel receiving more productions than any other play in America during the 2005-2006 season.]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[Ruined]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Lynn Nottage]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Theatre Communications Group]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9781559363556]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[Winner of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Drama“A powerhouse drama. . . . Lynn Nottage’s beautiful, hideous and unpretentiously important play [is] a shattering, intimate journey into faraway news reports.”—Linda Winer, Newsday“An intense and gripping new drama . . . the kind of new play we desperately need: well-informed and unafraid of the world’s brutalities. Nottage is one of our finest playwrights, a smart, empathetic and daring storyteller who tells a story an audience won’t expect.”—David Cote, Time Out New YorkA rain forest bar and brothel in the brutally war-torn Congo is the setting for Lynn Nottage’s extraordinary new play. The establishment’s shrewd matriarch, Mama Nadi, keeps peace between customers from both sides of the civil war, as government soldiers and rebel forces alike choose from her inventory of women, many already “ruined” by rape and torture when they were pressed into prostitution. Inspired by interviews she conducted in Africa with Congo refugees, Nottage has crafted an engrossing and uncommonly human story with humor and song served alongside its postcolonial and feminist politics in the rich theatrical tradition of Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage.Lynn Nottage’s plays include Crumbs from the Table of Joy, Fabulation, and Intimate Apparel, winner of the American Theatre Critics’ Steinberg New Play Award and the Francesca Primus Prize. Her plays have been widely produced, with Intimate Apparel receiving more productions than any other play in America during the 2005-2006 season.]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:relation><![CDATA[9781559366298]]></dc:relation>
<dc:date>2009-09-01T00:00:00-04:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[Olive Kitteridge]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780812971835</link>
<description><![CDATA[At times stern, at other times patient, at times perceptive, at other times in sad denial, Olive Kitteridge, a retired schoolteacher, deplores the changes in her little town of Crosby, Maine, and in the world at large, but she doesn’t always recognize the changes in those around her: a lounge musician haunted by a past romance; a former student who has lost the will to live; Olive’s own adult child, who feels tyrannized by her irrational sensitivities; and her husband, Henry, who finds his loyalty to his marriage both a blessing and a curse. As the townspeople grapple with their problems, mild and dire, Olive is brought to a deeper understanding of herself and her life–sometimes painfully, but always with ruthless honesty. Olive Kitteridge offers profound insights into the human condition–its conflicts, its tragedies and joys, and the endurance it requires.Praise for Olive Kitteridge:“Perceptive, deeply empathetic . . . Olive is the axis around which these thirteen complex, relentlessly human narratives spin themselves into Elizabeth Strout’s unforgettable novel in stories.”–O: The Oprah Magazine “Fiction lovers, remember this name: Olive Kitteridge. . . . You’ll never forget her. . . . [Elizabeth Strout] constructs her stories with rich irony and moments of genuine surprise and intense emotion. . . . Glorious, powerful stuff.”–USA Today“Funny, wicked and remorseful, Mrs. Kitteridge is a compelling life force, a red-blooded original. When she’s not onstage, we look forward to her return. The book is a page-turner because of her.”–San Francisco Chronicle“Olive Kitteridge still lingers in memory like a treasured photograph.”–Seattle Post-Intelligencer“Rarely does a story collection pack such a gutsy emotional punch.”–Entertainment Weekly“Strout animates the ordinary with astonishing force. . . . [She] makes us experience not only the terrors of change but also the terrifying hope that change can bring: she plunges us into these churning waters and we come up gasping for air.”–The New Yorker]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[Olive Kitteridge]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Elizabeth Strout]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Random House Trade Paperbacks]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9780812971835]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[At times stern, at other times patient, at times perceptive, at other times in sad denial, Olive Kitteridge, a retired schoolteacher, deplores the changes in her little town of Crosby, Maine, and in the world at large, but she doesn’t always recognize the changes in those around her: a lounge musician haunted by a past romance; a former student who has lost the will to live; Olive’s own adult child, who feels tyrannized by her irrational sensitivities; and her husband, Henry, who finds his loyalty to his marriage both a blessing and a curse. As the townspeople grapple with their problems, mild and dire, Olive is brought to a deeper understanding of herself and her life–sometimes painfully, but always with ruthless honesty. Olive Kitteridge offers profound insights into the human condition–its conflicts, its tragedies and joys, and the endurance it requires.Praise for Olive Kitteridge:“Perceptive, deeply empathetic . . . Olive is the axis around which these thirteen complex, relentlessly human narratives spin themselves into Elizabeth Strout’s unforgettable novel in stories.”–O: The Oprah Magazine “Fiction lovers, remember this name: Olive Kitteridge. . . . You’ll never forget her. . . . [Elizabeth Strout] constructs her stories with rich irony and moments of genuine surprise and intense emotion. . . . Glorious, powerful stuff.”–USA Today“Funny, wicked and remorseful, Mrs. Kitteridge is a compelling life force, a red-blooded original. When she’s not onstage, we look forward to her return. The book is a page-turner because of her.”–San Francisco Chronicle“Olive Kitteridge still lingers in memory like a treasured photograph.”–Seattle Post-Intelligencer“Rarely does a story collection pack such a gutsy emotional punch.”–Entertainment Weekly“Strout animates the ordinary with astonishing force. . . . [She] makes us experience not only the terrors of change but also the terrifying hope that change can bring: she plunges us into these churning waters and we come up gasping for air.”–The New Yorker]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:date>2008-09-30T00:00:00-04:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[Wandering Star]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9781931896115</link>
<description><![CDATA["Wandering Star is a luminous lesson in humanity amid the ruins of civilization and intelligence."--Le Figaro"Wandering Star can unquestionably be ranked among the very great novels. This is true not only because of the precision and evocative power of the writing, the subtlety and balance of the construction, the magnitude and loftiness of the subject, but also because of the stature and the trajectory of the protagonist, Esther Greve, who survives the Holocaust only to be confronted in the land of her dreams with another tragedy."--L' Humanite"Those unfamiliar with Mr. Le Clezio and his work should know that he is considered that rare beast by the French: an artist and a best-selling author."--Dallas Morning News "This novel brilliantly depicts the universality of human suffering, but it also affirms the existence of kindness and understanding...Le Clezio rises above politics and religious and cultural differences to express the girls' humanity in the struggles they both face."--MultiCultural Review ..".the beauty of Le Clezio's language belies the horror of his subject...We can only hope that Esther and Nejma might someday walk out of these pages, meet once more, and plant and nourish the garden that others battle so feverishly to destroy."--Bloomsbury Review "Striking a delicate balance between despair and dignity, between incantation and prayer, in  Wandering Star], Le Clezio touches upon each of the many themes he has addressed during his thirty years as a novelist, mixing and weaving them together into a story that combines elements of adventure, literary epic, confession, and history. It is at one and the same time a painful cry and peaceful sigh."--Telerama "From page one, I knew I was in capable hands. J.M.G. Le Clezio's novel of a young Jewish girl coming of age in wartime France is compelling."--Baltimore Jewish Times "Beautifully written and seamlessly translated by C. Dickson, Wandering Star is both a coming-of-age story and a powerful tale of survival. For readers hoping to better understand the world we live in, this book also helpt shed light on current events in the Middle East."--MoorishGirl "Le Clezio goes beyond politics, cultural differences, and historical moments to cast light on the universal feelings in experiences of suffering and the struggles, desires, and dreams growing out of such experiences."--Midwest Book Review "Le Clezio has fashioned an intimate, searching novel about the price of war and exile."--Stewart O'Nan " An] exquisitely written story...I was struck by the beauty in the midst of the searing pain."--Penny Rosenwasser, author of Voices from a Promised Land J.M.G. Le Clezio is that rare combination of best-selling author and artist of the highest order. Wandering Star (A Lannan Translation Selection) received extraordinary critical praise in France. Pierre Lepape extolled it in Le Monde, noting that Le Clezio neither moralizes nor takes a political stance: "He goes much farther than that, much deeper; he seeks the signs of human misery and of potential peace at the very heart of life, in a confrontation with time and the elements; with the sun and the earth, with birth and death, with the mystery of origins and the enigma of the future, with the necessity of both remembering and forgetting, without which nothing can be healed."Wandering Star tells two discrete stories of two young girls, one Jewish and one Palestinian, who meet once briefly by chance. Their stories are connected by substance, rather than plot. Each is a wandering star in search of a homeland--Esther escaping the Nazi Holocaust, and Nejma, who experiences the horrors of life in the camps. Yet through this novel of dark times and human suffering, affirmation shines as the characters encounter the beauty of nature and instances of human kindness and love.Author of over thirty novels, essays, story collections, and translations, J.M.G. Le Clezio and his wife share their time between Albuquerque, New Mexico, the island of Mauritius, and Nice, France. He is the winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature.]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[Wandering Star]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio; C. Dickson]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Curbstone Press]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9781931896115]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA["Wandering Star is a luminous lesson in humanity amid the ruins of civilization and intelligence."--Le Figaro"Wandering Star can unquestionably be ranked among the very great novels. This is true not only because of the precision and evocative power of the writing, the subtlety and balance of the construction, the magnitude and loftiness of the subject, but also because of the stature and the trajectory of the protagonist, Esther Greve, who survives the Holocaust only to be confronted in the land of her dreams with another tragedy."--L' Humanite"Those unfamiliar with Mr. Le Clezio and his work should know that he is considered that rare beast by the French: an artist and a best-selling author."--Dallas Morning News "This novel brilliantly depicts the universality of human suffering, but it also affirms the existence of kindness and understanding...Le Clezio rises above politics and religious and cultural differences to express the girls' humanity in the struggles they both face."--MultiCultural Review ..".the beauty of Le Clezio's language belies the horror of his subject...We can only hope that Esther and Nejma might someday walk out of these pages, meet once more, and plant and nourish the garden that others battle so feverishly to destroy."--Bloomsbury Review "Striking a delicate balance between despair and dignity, between incantation and prayer, in  Wandering Star], Le Clezio touches upon each of the many themes he has addressed during his thirty years as a novelist, mixing and weaving them together into a story that combines elements of adventure, literary epic, confession, and history. It is at one and the same time a painful cry and peaceful sigh."--Telerama "From page one, I knew I was in capable hands. J.M.G. Le Clezio's novel of a young Jewish girl coming of age in wartime France is compelling."--Baltimore Jewish Times "Beautifully written and seamlessly translated by C. Dickson, Wandering Star is both a coming-of-age story and a powerful tale of survival. For readers hoping to better understand the world we live in, this book also helpt shed light on current events in the Middle East."--MoorishGirl "Le Clezio goes beyond politics, cultural differences, and historical moments to cast light on the universal feelings in experiences of suffering and the struggles, desires, and dreams growing out of such experiences."--Midwest Book Review "Le Clezio has fashioned an intimate, searching novel about the price of war and exile."--Stewart O'Nan " An] exquisitely written story...I was struck by the beauty in the midst of the searing pain."--Penny Rosenwasser, author of Voices from a Promised Land J.M.G. Le Clezio is that rare combination of best-selling author and artist of the highest order. Wandering Star (A Lannan Translation Selection) received extraordinary critical praise in France. Pierre Lepape extolled it in Le Monde, noting that Le Clezio neither moralizes nor takes a political stance: "He goes much farther than that, much deeper; he seeks the signs of human misery and of potential peace at the very heart of life, in a confrontation with time and the elements; with the sun and the earth, with birth and death, with the mystery of origins and the enigma of the future, with the necessity of both remembering and forgetting, without which nothing can be healed."Wandering Star tells two discrete stories of two young girls, one Jewish and one Palestinian, who meet once briefly by chance. Their stories are connected by substance, rather than plot. Each is a wandering star in search of a homeland--Esther escaping the Nazi Holocaust, and Nejma, who experiences the horrors of life in the camps. Yet through this novel of dark times and human suffering, affirmation shines as the characters encounter the beauty of nature and instances of human kindness and love.Author of over thirty novels, essays, story collections, and translations, J.M.G. Le Clezio and his wife share their time between Albuquerque, New Mexico, the island of Mauritius, and Nice, France. He is the winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature.]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:date>2004-10-01T00:00:00-04:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[The Golden Notebook]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780060931407</link>
<description><![CDATA[ Anna is a writer, author of one very successful novel, who now keeps four notebooks. In one, with a black cover, she reviews the African experience of her earlier year. In a red one she records her political life, her disillusionment with communism. In a yellow one she writes a novel in which the heroine reviles part of her own experience. And in the blue one she keeps a personal diary. Finally, in love with an American writer and threatened with insanity, Anna tries to bring the threads of all four books together in a golden notebook. ]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[The Golden Notebook]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Doris Lessing]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Harper Perennial Modern Classics]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9780060931407]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[ Anna is a writer, author of one very successful novel, who now keeps four notebooks. In one, with a black cover, she reviews the African experience of her earlier year. In a red one she records her political life, her disillusionment with communism. In a yellow one she writes a novel in which the heroine reviles part of her own experience. And in the blue one she keeps a personal diary. Finally, in love with an American writer and threatened with insanity, Anna tries to bring the threads of all four books together in a golden notebook. ]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:date>1999-02-01T00:00:00-05:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[Other Colors]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780307266750</link>
<description><![CDATA[Orhan Pamuk’s first book since winning the Nobel Prize, Other Colors is a dazzling collection of essays on his life, his city, his work, and the example of other writers.Over the last three decades, Pamuk has written, in addition to his seven novels, scores of pieces—personal, critical, and meditative—the finest of which he has brilliantly woven together here. He opens a window on his private life, from his boyhood dislike of school to his daughter’s precocious melancholy, from his successful struggle to quit smoking to his anxiety at the prospect of testifying against some clumsy muggers who fell upon him during a visit to New York City. From ordinary obligations such as applying for a passport or sharing a holiday meal with relatives, he takes extraordinary flights of imagination; in extreme moments, such as the terrifying days following a cataclysmic earthquake in Istanbul, he lays bare our most basic hopes and fears. Again and again Pamuk declares his faith in fiction, engaging the work of such predecessors as Laurence Sterne and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, sharing fragments from his notebooks, and commenting on his own novels. He contemplates his mysterious compulsion to sit alone at a desk and dream, always returning to the rich deliverance that is reading and writing.By turns witty, moving, playful, and provocative, Other Colors glows with the energy of a master at work and gives us the world through his eyes, assigning every radiant theme and shifting mood its precise shade in the spectrum of significance.]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[Other Colors]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Maureen Freely; Orhan Pamuk]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Knopf]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9780307266750]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[Orhan Pamuk’s first book since winning the Nobel Prize, Other Colors is a dazzling collection of essays on his life, his city, his work, and the example of other writers.Over the last three decades, Pamuk has written, in addition to his seven novels, scores of pieces—personal, critical, and meditative—the finest of which he has brilliantly woven together here. He opens a window on his private life, from his boyhood dislike of school to his daughter’s precocious melancholy, from his successful struggle to quit smoking to his anxiety at the prospect of testifying against some clumsy muggers who fell upon him during a visit to New York City. From ordinary obligations such as applying for a passport or sharing a holiday meal with relatives, he takes extraordinary flights of imagination; in extreme moments, such as the terrifying days following a cataclysmic earthquake in Istanbul, he lays bare our most basic hopes and fears. Again and again Pamuk declares his faith in fiction, engaging the work of such predecessors as Laurence Sterne and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, sharing fragments from his notebooks, and commenting on his own novels. He contemplates his mysterious compulsion to sit alone at a desk and dream, always returning to the rich deliverance that is reading and writing.By turns witty, moving, playful, and provocative, Other Colors glows with the energy of a master at work and gives us the world through his eyes, assigning every radiant theme and shifting mood its precise shade in the spectrum of significance.]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Hardcover]]></dc:format>
<dc:date>2007-09-18T00:00:00-04:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[Death Etc.]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780802142252</link>
<description><![CDATA[Throughout his life, playwright and political activist Harold Pinter has consistently cast light on the hypocrisy of conformist truths in pure and simple terms. Awarded the Wilfred Owen Prize in 2004 for his poetry condemning U.S. military intervention in Iraq, Mr. Pinter has succeeded as no other of his generation in combining his artistry with his political activism. "Death etc." brings together Pinter's most poignant and especially relevant writings in this time of war. From chilling psychological portraits of those who commit atrocities in the name of a higher power, to essays on the state-sponsored terrorism of present-day regimes, to solemn hymns commemorating the faceless masses that perish unrecognized, Mr. Pinter's writings are as essential to the preservation of open debate as to our awareness of personal involvement in the fate of our global community.]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[Death Etc.]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Harold Pinter]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Grove Press]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9780802142252]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[Throughout his life, playwright and political activist Harold Pinter has consistently cast light on the hypocrisy of conformist truths in pure and simple terms. Awarded the Wilfred Owen Prize in 2004 for his poetry condemning U.S. military intervention in Iraq, Mr. Pinter has succeeded as no other of his generation in combining his artistry with his political activism. "Death etc." brings together Pinter's most poignant and especially relevant writings in this time of war. From chilling psychological portraits of those who commit atrocities in the name of a higher power, to essays on the state-sponsored terrorism of present-day regimes, to solemn hymns commemorating the faceless masses that perish unrecognized, Mr. Pinter's writings are as essential to the preservation of open debate as to our awareness of personal involvement in the fate of our global community.]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:date>2005-09-01T00:00:00-04:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[The Piano Teacher]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9781852427504</link>
<description><![CDATA[""The Piano Teacher ,"  winner of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Literature, ] is an exploration of fascism, not so much in the political sense as in the personal. In Joachim Neugroschel's excellent translation, the language is simple yet full of imaginative, often-funny metaphors, the view of the world original, if at times almost painfully bizarre."-"New York Times Book Review""A dazzling performance that will make the blood run cold."-Walter Abish"A brilliant, bitter, wonderful portrait of mother and daughter, artist and lover."-John Hawkes"A brilliant, uncompromising book."-"Publishers Weekly"Erika Kohut teaches piano at the Vienna Conservatory by day. But by night she trawls the porn shows of Vienna while her mother, whom she loves and hates in equal measure, waits up for her.Into this emotional pressure-cooker bounds music student and ladies' man, Walter Klemmer. With Walter as her student, Erika spirals out of control, consumed by the ecstasy of self-destruction.First published in 1983, "The Piano Teacher "is the masterpiece of Elfriede Jelinek, Austria's most famous writer. Now a feature film directed by Michael Haneke," The Piano Teacher "won three major prizes at the Cannes 2001 Festival including best actor for BenoA(R)t Magimel and best actress for Isabelle Huppert.Elfriede Jelinek was born in Austria in 1946 and grew up in Vienna where she attended the famous Music Conservatory. The leading Austrian writer of her generation, she has been awarded the Heinrich BAll Prize for her contribution to German-language literature.]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[The Piano Teacher]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Elfriede Jelinek; Joachim Neugroschel]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Serpent's Tail]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9781852427504]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[""The Piano Teacher ,"  winner of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Literature, ] is an exploration of fascism, not so much in the political sense as in the personal. In Joachim Neugroschel's excellent translation, the language is simple yet full of imaginative, often-funny metaphors, the view of the world original, if at times almost painfully bizarre."-"New York Times Book Review""A dazzling performance that will make the blood run cold."-Walter Abish"A brilliant, bitter, wonderful portrait of mother and daughter, artist and lover."-John Hawkes"A brilliant, uncompromising book."-"Publishers Weekly"Erika Kohut teaches piano at the Vienna Conservatory by day. But by night she trawls the porn shows of Vienna while her mother, whom she loves and hates in equal measure, waits up for her.Into this emotional pressure-cooker bounds music student and ladies' man, Walter Klemmer. With Walter as her student, Erika spirals out of control, consumed by the ecstasy of self-destruction.First published in 1983, "The Piano Teacher "is the masterpiece of Elfriede Jelinek, Austria's most famous writer. Now a feature film directed by Michael Haneke," The Piano Teacher "won three major prizes at the Cannes 2001 Festival including best actor for BenoA(R)t Magimel and best actress for Isabelle Huppert.Elfriede Jelinek was born in Austria in 1946 and grew up in Vienna where she attended the famous Music Conservatory. The leading Austrian writer of her generation, she has been awarded the Heinrich BAll Prize for her contribution to German-language literature.]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:date>2002-06-01T00:00:00-04:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[The Piano Teacher]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780670020485</link>
<description><![CDATA[In the sweeping tradition of The English Patient, a gripping tale of love and betrayal set in war-torn Hong KongIn 1942, Will Truesdale, an Englishman newly arrived in Hong Kong, falls headlong into a passionate relationship with Trudy Liang, a beautiful Eurasian socialite. But their love affair is soon threatened by the invasion of the Japanese as World War II overwhelms their part of the world. Will is sent to an internment camp, where he and other foreigners struggle daily for survival. Meanwhile, Trudy remains outside, forced to form dangerous alliances with the Japanese-in particular, the malevolent head of the gendarmerie, whose desperate attempts to locate a priceless collection of Chinese art lead to a chain of terrible betrayals. Ten years later, Claire Pendleton comes to Hong Kong and is hired by the wealthy Chen family as their daughter's piano teacher. A provincial English newlywed, Claire is seduced by the heady social life of the expatriate community. At one of its elegant cocktail parties, she meets Will, to whom she is instantly attracted-but as their affair intensifies, Claire discovers that Will's enigmatic persona hides a devastating past. As she begins to understand the true nature of the world she has entered, and long-buried secrets start to emerge, Claire learns that sometimes the price of survival is love.]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[The Piano Teacher]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Janice Y. K.  Lee]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Viking Adult]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9780670020485]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[In the sweeping tradition of The English Patient, a gripping tale of love and betrayal set in war-torn Hong KongIn 1942, Will Truesdale, an Englishman newly arrived in Hong Kong, falls headlong into a passionate relationship with Trudy Liang, a beautiful Eurasian socialite. But their love affair is soon threatened by the invasion of the Japanese as World War II overwhelms their part of the world. Will is sent to an internment camp, where he and other foreigners struggle daily for survival. Meanwhile, Trudy remains outside, forced to form dangerous alliances with the Japanese-in particular, the malevolent head of the gendarmerie, whose desperate attempts to locate a priceless collection of Chinese art lead to a chain of terrible betrayals. Ten years later, Claire Pendleton comes to Hong Kong and is hired by the wealthy Chen family as their daughter's piano teacher. A provincial English newlywed, Claire is seduced by the heady social life of the expatriate community. At one of its elegant cocktail parties, she meets Will, to whom she is instantly attracted-but as their affair intensifies, Claire discovers that Will's enigmatic persona hides a devastating past. As she begins to understand the true nature of the world she has entered, and long-buried secrets start to emerge, Claire learns that sometimes the price of survival is love.]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Hardcover]]></dc:format>
<dc:date>2009-01-01T00:00:00-05:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[Life & Times of Michael K]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780140074482</link>
<description><![CDATA[In a south Africa turned by war, Michael K. sets out to take his ailing mother back to her rural home. On the way there she dies, leaving him alone in an anarchic world of brutal roving armies. Imprisoned, Michael is unable to bear confinement and escapes, determined to live with dignity. This life affirming novel goes to the center of human experience-the need for an interior, spiritual life; for some connections to the world in which we live; and for purity of vision.]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[Life & Times of Michael K]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[J. M.  Coetzee]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Penguin (Non-Classics)]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9780140074482]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[In a south Africa turned by war, Michael K. sets out to take his ailing mother back to her rural home. On the way there she dies, leaving him alone in an anarchic world of brutal roving armies. Imprisoned, Michael is unable to bear confinement and escapes, determined to live with dignity. This life affirming novel goes to the center of human experience-the need for an interior, spiritual life; for some connections to the world in which we live; and for purity of vision.]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:date>1985-01-01T00:00:00-05:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[Fatelessness]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9781400078639</link>
<description><![CDATA[At the age of 14  Georg Koves is plucked from his home in a Jewish section of Budapest and without any particular malice, placed on a train to Auschwitz. He does not understand the reason for his fate. He doesn’t particularly think of himself as Jewish. And his fellow prisoners, who decry his lack of Yiddish, keep telling him, “You are no Jew.” In the lowest circle of the Holocaust, Georg remains an outsider. The genius of Imre Kertesz’s unblinking novel lies in its refusal to mitigate the  strangeness of its events, not least of which is Georg’s dogmatic insistence on making sense of what he witnesses–or pretending that what he witnesses makes sense. Haunting, evocative, and all the more horrifying for its rigorous avoidance of sentiment, Fatelessness is a masterpiece in the traditions of Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, and Tadeusz Borowski.]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[Fatelessness]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Tim Wilkinson; Imre Kertesz]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Vintage]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9781400078639]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[At the age of 14  Georg Koves is plucked from his home in a Jewish section of Budapest and without any particular malice, placed on a train to Auschwitz. He does not understand the reason for his fate. He doesn’t particularly think of himself as Jewish. And his fellow prisoners, who decry his lack of Yiddish, keep telling him, “You are no Jew.” In the lowest circle of the Holocaust, Georg remains an outsider. The genius of Imre Kertesz’s unblinking novel lies in its refusal to mitigate the  strangeness of its events, not least of which is Georg’s dogmatic insistence on making sense of what he witnesses–or pretending that what he witnesses makes sense. Haunting, evocative, and all the more horrifying for its rigorous avoidance of sentiment, Fatelessness is a masterpiece in the traditions of Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, and Tadeusz Borowski.]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:date>2004-12-07T00:00:00-05:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[The Enigma of Arrival]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780394757605</link>
<description><![CDATA[The autobiographical novel of a journey from the British colony of Trinidad to the ancient countryside of England.]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[The Enigma of Arrival]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[V.S. Naipaul]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Vintage]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9780394757605]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[The autobiographical novel of a journey from the British colony of Trinidad to the ancient countryside of England.]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:date>1988-04-12T00:00:00-04:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[Soul Mountain]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780060936235</link>
<description><![CDATA[In 1983, Chinese playwright, critic, fiction writer, and painter Gao Xingjian was diagnosed with lung cancer and faced imminent death.But six weeks later, a second examination revealed there was no cancer—he had won "a second reprieve from death." Faced with a repressive cultural environment and the threat of a spell in a prison farm, Gao fled Beijing and began a journey of 15,000 kilometers into the remote mountains and ancient forests of Sichuan in southwest China. The result of this epic voyage of discovery is Soul Mountain.Bold, lyrical, and prodigious, Soul Moutain probes the human soul with an uncommon directness and candor and delights in the freedom of the imagination to expand the notion of the individual self.]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[Soul Mountain]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Gao Xingjian]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Harper Perennial]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9780060936235]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[In 1983, Chinese playwright, critic, fiction writer, and painter Gao Xingjian was diagnosed with lung cancer and faced imminent death.But six weeks later, a second examination revealed there was no cancer—he had won "a second reprieve from death." Faced with a repressive cultural environment and the threat of a spell in a prison farm, Gao fled Beijing and began a journey of 15,000 kilometers into the remote mountains and ancient forests of Sichuan in southwest China. The result of this epic voyage of discovery is Soul Mountain.Bold, lyrical, and prodigious, Soul Moutain probes the human soul with an uncommon directness and candor and delights in the freedom of the imagination to expand the notion of the individual self.]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:date>2001-11-01T00:00:00-05:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[The Time Traveler's Wife]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780156029438</link>
<description><![CDATA[A dazzling novel in the most untraditional fashion, this is the remarkable story of Henry DeTamble, a dashing, adventuresome librarian who travels involuntarily through time, and Clare Abshire, an artist whose life takes a natural sequential course. Henry and Clare's passionate love affair endures across a sea of time and captures the two lovers in an impossibly romantic trap, and it is Audrey Niffenegger's cinematic storytelling that makes the novel's unconventional chronology so vibrantly triumphant. An enchanting debut and a spellbinding tale of fate and belief in the bonds of love, The Time Traveler's Wife is destined to captivate readers for years to come.]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[The Time Traveler's Wife]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Audrey Niffenegger]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Mariner Books]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9780156029438]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[A dazzling novel in the most untraditional fashion, this is the remarkable story of Henry DeTamble, a dashing, adventuresome librarian who travels involuntarily through time, and Clare Abshire, an artist whose life takes a natural sequential course. Henry and Clare's passionate love affair endures across a sea of time and captures the two lovers in an impossibly romantic trap, and it is Audrey Niffenegger's cinematic storytelling that makes the novel's unconventional chronology so vibrantly triumphant. An enchanting debut and a spellbinding tale of fate and belief in the bonds of love, The Time Traveler's Wife is destined to captivate readers for years to come.]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:date>2004-07-01T00:00:00-04:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[The Help]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780399155345</link>
<description><![CDATA[Three ordinary women are about to take one extraordinary step. Twenty-two-year-old Skeeter has just returned home after graduating from Ole Miss. She may have a degree, but it is 1962, Mississippi, and her mother will not be happy till Skeeter has a ring on her finger. Skeeter would normally find solace with her beloved maid Constantine, the woman who raised her, but Constantine has disappeared and no one will tell Skeeter where she has gone. 	Aibileen is a black maid, a wise, regal woman raising her seventeenth white child. Something has shifted inside her after the loss of her own son, who died while his bosses looked the other way. She is devoted to the little girl she looks after, though she knows both their hearts may be broken. 	Minny, Aibileen's best friend, is short, fat, and perhaps the sassiest woman in Mississippi. She can cook like nobody's business, but she can't mind her tongue, so she's lost yet another job. Minny finally finds a position working for someone too new to town to know her reputation. But her new boss has secrets of her own. 	Seemingly as different from one another as can be, these women will nonetheless come together for a clandestine project that will put them all at risk. And why? Because they are suffocating within the lines that define their town and their times. And sometimes lines are made to be crossed. In pitch-perfect voices, Kathryn Stockett creates three extraordinary women whose determination to start a movement of their own forever changes a town, and the way women--mothers, daughters, caregivers, friends--view one another. A deeply moving novel filled with poignancy, humor, and hope, The Help is a timeless and universal story about the lines we abide by, and the ones we don't.]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[The Help]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Kathryn  Stockett]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9780399155345]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[Three ordinary women are about to take one extraordinary step. Twenty-two-year-old Skeeter has just returned home after graduating from Ole Miss. She may have a degree, but it is 1962, Mississippi, and her mother will not be happy till Skeeter has a ring on her finger. Skeeter would normally find solace with her beloved maid Constantine, the woman who raised her, but Constantine has disappeared and no one will tell Skeeter where she has gone. 	Aibileen is a black maid, a wise, regal woman raising her seventeenth white child. Something has shifted inside her after the loss of her own son, who died while his bosses looked the other way. She is devoted to the little girl she looks after, though she knows both their hearts may be broken. 	Minny, Aibileen's best friend, is short, fat, and perhaps the sassiest woman in Mississippi. She can cook like nobody's business, but she can't mind her tongue, so she's lost yet another job. Minny finally finds a position working for someone too new to town to know her reputation. But her new boss has secrets of her own. 	Seemingly as different from one another as can be, these women will nonetheless come together for a clandestine project that will put them all at risk. And why? Because they are suffocating within the lines that define their town and their times. And sometimes lines are made to be crossed. In pitch-perfect voices, Kathryn Stockett creates three extraordinary women whose determination to start a movement of their own forever changes a town, and the way women--mothers, daughters, caregivers, friends--view one another. A deeply moving novel filled with poignancy, humor, and hope, The Help is a timeless and universal story about the lines we abide by, and the ones we don't.]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Hardcover]]></dc:format>
<dc:date>2009-02-01T00:00:00-05:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780307454546</link>
<description><![CDATA[An international publishing sensation, Stieg Larsson's The Girl  with the Dragon Tattoo combines murder mystery, family saga, love story, and financial  intrigue into one satisfyingly complex and entertainingly atmospheric novel. Harriet  Vanger, a scion of one of Sweden's wealthiest families disappeared over forty years  ago. All these years later, her aged uncle continues to seek the truth. He hires  Mikael Blomkvist, a crusading journalist recently trapped by a libel conviction,  to investigate. He is aided by the pierced and tattooed punk prodigy Lisbeth Salander.  Together they tap into a vein of unfathomable iniquity and astonishing corruption.]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Stieg Larsson]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Vintage]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9780307454546]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[An international publishing sensation, Stieg Larsson's The Girl  with the Dragon Tattoo combines murder mystery, family saga, love story, and financial  intrigue into one satisfyingly complex and entertainingly atmospheric novel. Harriet  Vanger, a scion of one of Sweden's wealthiest families disappeared over forty years  ago. All these years later, her aged uncle continues to seek the truth. He hires  Mikael Blomkvist, a crusading journalist recently trapped by a libel conviction,  to investigate. He is aided by the pierced and tattooed punk prodigy Lisbeth Salander.  Together they tap into a vein of unfathomable iniquity and astonishing corruption.]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:relation><![CDATA[9780307272119]]></dc:relation>
<dc:date>2009-06-23T00:00:00-04:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[The Girl Who Played with Fire]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780307269980</link>
<description><![CDATA[Mikael Blomkvist, crusading journalist and publisher of the magazine Millennium, has decided to run a story that will expose an extensive sex trafficking operation between Eastern Europe and Sweden, implicating well-known and highly placed members of Swedish society, business, and government.But he has no idea just how explosive the story will be until, on the eve of publication, the two investigating reporters are murdered. And even more shocking for Blomkvist: the fingerprints found on the murder weapon belong to Lisbeth Salander—the troubled, wise-beyond-her-years genius hacker who came to his aid in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and who now becomes the focus and fierce heart of The Girl Who Played with Fire.As Blomkvist, alone in his belief in Salander’s innocence, plunges into an investigation of the slayings, Salander herself is drawn into a murderous hunt in which she is the prey, and which compels her to revisit her dark past in an effort to settle with it once and for all.]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[The Girl Who Played with Fire]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Stieg Larsson]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Knopf]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9780307269980]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[Mikael Blomkvist, crusading journalist and publisher of the magazine Millennium, has decided to run a story that will expose an extensive sex trafficking operation between Eastern Europe and Sweden, implicating well-known and highly placed members of Swedish society, business, and government.But he has no idea just how explosive the story will be until, on the eve of publication, the two investigating reporters are murdered. And even more shocking for Blomkvist: the fingerprints found on the murder weapon belong to Lisbeth Salander—the troubled, wise-beyond-her-years genius hacker who came to his aid in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and who now becomes the focus and fierce heart of The Girl Who Played with Fire.As Blomkvist, alone in his belief in Salander’s innocence, plunges into an investigation of the slayings, Salander herself is drawn into a murderous hunt in which she is the prey, and which compels her to revisit her dark past in an effort to settle with it once and for all.]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Hardcover]]></dc:format>
<dc:relation><![CDATA[9780307272300]]></dc:relation>
<dc:date>2009-07-28T00:00:00-04:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780385341004</link>
<description><![CDATA[January 1946: writer Juliet Ashton receives a letter from a stranger, a founding member of the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. And so begins a remarkable tale of the island of Guernsey during the German occupation, and of a society as extraordinary as its name.]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Mary Ann Shaffer; Annie Barrows]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Dial Press Trade Paperback]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9780385341004]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[January 1946: writer Juliet Ashton receives a letter from a stranger, a founding member of the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. And so begins a remarkable tale of the island of Guernsey during the German occupation, and of a society as extraordinary as its name.]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:relation><![CDATA[9780440337973]]></dc:relation>
<dc:date>2009-05-05T00:00:00-04:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[Outliers]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780316017923</link>
<description><![CDATA[In this stunning new book, Malcolm Gladwell takes us on an intellectual journey through the world of "outliers"--the best and the brightest, the most famous and the most successful. He asks the question: what makes high-achievers different? His answer is that we pay too much attention to what successful people are like, and too little attention to where they are from: that is, their culture, their family, their generation, and the idiosyncratic experiences of their upbringing. Along the way he explains the secrets of software billionaires, what it takes to be a great soccer player, why Asians are good at math, and what made the Beatles the greatest rock band.  Brilliant and entertaining, OUTLIERS is a landmark work that will simultaneously delight and illuminate.]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[Outliers]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Malcolm Gladwell]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Little, Brown and Company]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9780316017923]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[In this stunning new book, Malcolm Gladwell takes us on an intellectual journey through the world of "outliers"--the best and the brightest, the most famous and the most successful. He asks the question: what makes high-achievers different? His answer is that we pay too much attention to what successful people are like, and too little attention to where they are from: that is, their culture, their family, their generation, and the idiosyncratic experiences of their upbringing. Along the way he explains the secrets of software billionaires, what it takes to be a great soccer player, why Asians are good at math, and what made the Beatles the greatest rock band.  Brilliant and entertaining, OUTLIERS is a landmark work that will simultaneously delight and illuminate.]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Hardcover]]></dc:format>
<dc:date>2008-11-18T00:00:00-05:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[The Soloist]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780399155062</link>
<description><![CDATA[A moving story of the remarkable bond between a journalist in search of a story and a homeless, classically trained musician--destined to be a major motion picture from DreamWorks, starring Jamie Foxx and Robert Downey Jr.When Steve Lopez saw Nathaniel Ayers playing his heart out on a two-string violin on Los Angeles' skid row, he found it impossible to walk away. More than thirty years earlier, Ayers had been a promising classical bass student at Juilliard--ambitious, charming, and also one of the few African-Americans--until he gradually lost his ability to function, overcome by schizophrenia. When Lopez finds him, Ayers is homeless, paranoid, and deeply troubled, but glimmers of that brilliance are still there. Over time, Steve Lopez and Nathaniel Ayers form a bond, and Lopez imagines that he might be able to change Ayers's life. Lopez collects donated violins, a cello, even a stand-up bass and a piano; he takes Ayers to Walt Disney Concert Hall and helps him move indoors. For each triumph, there is a crashing disappointment, yet neither man gives up. In the process of trying to save Ayers, Lopez finds that his own life is changing, and his sense of what one man can accomplish in the lives of others begins to expand in new ways. Poignant and ultimately hopeful, The Soloist is a beautifully told story of friendship and the redeeming power of music.]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[The Soloist]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Steve  Lopez]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Putnam Adult]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9780399155062]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[A moving story of the remarkable bond between a journalist in search of a story and a homeless, classically trained musician--destined to be a major motion picture from DreamWorks, starring Jamie Foxx and Robert Downey Jr.When Steve Lopez saw Nathaniel Ayers playing his heart out on a two-string violin on Los Angeles' skid row, he found it impossible to walk away. More than thirty years earlier, Ayers had been a promising classical bass student at Juilliard--ambitious, charming, and also one of the few African-Americans--until he gradually lost his ability to function, overcome by schizophrenia. When Lopez finds him, Ayers is homeless, paranoid, and deeply troubled, but glimmers of that brilliance are still there. Over time, Steve Lopez and Nathaniel Ayers form a bond, and Lopez imagines that he might be able to change Ayers's life. Lopez collects donated violins, a cello, even a stand-up bass and a piano; he takes Ayers to Walt Disney Concert Hall and helps him move indoors. For each triumph, there is a crashing disappointment, yet neither man gives up. In the process of trying to save Ayers, Lopez finds that his own life is changing, and his sense of what one man can accomplish in the lives of others begins to expand in new ways. Poignant and ultimately hopeful, The Soloist is a beautifully told story of friendship and the redeeming power of music.]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Hardcover]]></dc:format>
<dc:date>2008-04-01T00:00:00-04:00</dc:date>
</item>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[Kindred]]></title>
<link>http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780807083697</link>
<description><![CDATA[A whole new look for the classic novel that has sold over 450,000 copies Dana, a modern black woman, is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South. Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, is drowning, and Dana has been summoned to save him. Dana is drawn back repeatedly through time to the slave quarters, and each time the stay grows longer, more arduous, and more dangerous until it is uncertain whether or not Dana's life will end, long before it has a chance to begin.]]></description>
<dc:title><![CDATA[Kindred]]></dc:title>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Octavia E. Butler]]></dc:creator>
<dc:publisher><![CDATA[Beacon Press]]></dc:publisher>
<dc:identifier><![CDATA[9780807083697]]></dc:identifier>
<dc:description><![CDATA[A whole new look for the classic novel that has sold over 450,000 copies Dana, a modern black woman, is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South. Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, is drowning, and Dana has been summoned to save him. Dana is drawn back repeatedly through time to the slave quarters, and each time the stay grows longer, more arduous, and more dangerous until it is uncertain whether or not Dana's life will end, long before it has a chance to begin.]]></dc:description>
<dc:format><![CDATA[Paperback]]></dc:format>
<dc:date>2004-02-01T00:00:00-05:00</dc:date>
</item>

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