Readers everywhere know that nothing soothes the spirit like sinking into a really good (e)book. If you're one of that happy band, you'll quickly recognize the authors of this inspired reading guide as kindred spirits.
If a moment can be everything, then how can a life be nothing?
It was the end of summer in 2006, five years after the best and worst week of Cara Dolorina's life. Her tour of Italy was confirmed; it would take her to some of the most exquisite regions
The small-town South and tobacco land. Incest, suicide, love, old men, old ways, Blacks, white folks, the Nixon administration from inside, travelling behind the Iron Curtain. Life ashore and at sea. Making fine art. WWII homecoming. Short stories, poems
There is something about these bloody squadron leaders that makes them think that if they lock you up in a cell, put their stinking mouth to your ear, and shout something about your mother, they can find all the answers. They are generally a sad lot, these
A short comic novel about a Hawaii-bound holiday traveler who ends up stranded in his North Dakota hometown during a blizzard. A wealthy and depressed man (thanks to the economy he's not quite rich enough to expand his cache of paintings by Vincent Van
Kim Barnes is the author of the novel Finding Caruso and two memoirs, In the Wilderness: Coming of Age in Unknown Country—a finalist for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize—and Hungry for the World. She is coeditor with Mary Clearman Blew of Circle
Forty years after its original publication, James Agee's last novel seems, more than ever, an American classic. For in his lyrical, sorrowful account of a man's death and its impact on his family, Agee painstakingly created a small world of domestic happiness
"If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very
Lorrie Moore is the author of the story collections Birds of America, Like Life, and Self-Help and the novels Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? and Anagrams. Her work has won honors from the Lannan Foundation and the American Academy of Arts and
American starlet Paige Carson is off to London to try her hand at Shakespeare, and prove that she deserves more than bimbo roles and Hollywood hunks who can't see beyond their own reflections. But stage acting is not quite what she expected. Neither is
When Robin Fitzvitry, the fun-loving Earl of Huntersdown, encounters a cursing nun in a French inn, he can't resist the mystery. He offers to help Sister Immaculata reach England, expecting amusement on the tedious journey home from Versailles. Petre d'Avernio
In 1961, Harold Binder's dad, Otto, did the unthinkable: defying convention, he abandoned his wife and six-year-old son to go west and take up the life of a cowboy. Now a forty-eight-year-old, successful doctor of medicine, Harold still longs to know his
Isaiah, a gay man, has waited all his life to find acceptance and love. On the day after his twenty-ninth birthday, Isaiah knows that he is dying from AIDS and asks his sister, Sarah, to come to his house and listen to him read his life story.
Susan Straight is the author of five previous novels, including the best-selling I Been in Sorrow's Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots and Highwire Moon, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the California Book Award. She is
