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It was through the Patterson-Pratt forgery case that I first made the acquaintance of Terry Patten, and at the time I should have been more than willing to forego the pleasure.
Our firm rarely dealt with criminal cases, but the Patterson family were long standing clients, and they naturally turned to us when the trouble came. Ordinarily, so important a matter would have been put in the hands of one of the older men, but it happened that I was the one who had drawn up the will for Patterson Senior the night before his suicide, therefore the brunt of the work devolved upon me. The most unpleasant part of the whole affair was the notoriety. Could we have kept it from the papers, it would not have been so bad, but that was a physical impossibility; Terry Patten was on our track, and within a week he had brought down upon us every newspaper in New York.
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Kasey Michaels - Maggie Needs an Alibi
New York Times bestselling author Kasey Michaels has a knack for whacking her readers in the heart and the funny bone with her witty tales of unexpected love. Now she delivers a whole new twist on sexual tension, as mystery writer Maggie Kelly sees her fantasy man come to life right before a couple of her colleagues meet very untimely deaths .
Maggie Kelly is nothing if not resilient. She bounced back after getting fired from her old job as a writer of historical romances, reinventing herself as a mystery author. She bounced back when she discovered her lover who also happens to be her publisher cheating on her. And she bounces right back into her smoking habit whenever she tries to quit. But something just happened that's got tough-talking, quick-thinking Maggie swooning into her super-soft sofa cushions.
Something in the form of an incredibly sexy Englishman by the name of Saint Just. Alexandre Drake, Viscount Saint Just, to be exact. Tall, dark, handsome, with an accent to die for and charm to spare, he's everything she's ever dreamed of in a man. There's just one problem. He is her dream man. He's every woman's fantasy. He's the character who's made her a bestselling author. He's not real. No, he's not real but he is, for some reason, standing in the middle of Maggie's apartment. With the adorable, bumbling sidekick she created expressly for him right by his side and eating that piece of fried chicken she was saving for lunch.
What's a savvy, New York City writer to do when faced with the figments of her imagination in the flesh? Well, short of checking herself into Bellevue, she'd better get used to it. Because these guys aren't going anywhere at least not until they've given Maggie a little unsolicited editorial advice regarding her latest telling of their adventures. Still, it's not the worst thing in the world to have a roomie as gorgeous as Saint Just even if he is somewhat arrogant and prone to leaving the cap off the toothpaste.
But just as Maggie's getting used to her new houseguests, things start to get quite a bit more complicated in the homicide sense of the word. It seems her ex-lover, Kirk Toland, ever the inconsiderate cad, has had the nerve to die right there in her living room of poisoning after eating a dinner Maggie made. Her cooking isn't that bad is it? And if that weren't weird enough, Toland's death is soon followed by the murder of a colleague whom everyone knows Maggie hated.
So, the mystery writer has become the murder suspect. And the only sleuth who's really on Maggie's side is the one she invented .
Eugene O'Neill - Mourning Becomes Electra
The story is an update of the Greek myth of Orestes to the family of a Northern general in the American Civil War. Agamemnon is now General Ezra Mannon, Clytemnestra is his second wife Christine, Orestes is his son Orin, and Electra is his daughter Lavinia. As an updated Greek tragedy, the play features murder, adultery, incestuous love and revenge, and even a group of townspeople who function as a kind of Greek chorus. Though fate alone guides characters' actions in Greek tragedies, O'Neill's characters have motivations grounded in 1930s-era psychological theory as well. The play can easily be read from a Freudian perspective, paying attention to various characters' Oedipus complexes and Electra complexes.
Mourning Becomes Electra is divided into three plays with themes corresponding to The Oresteia trilogy by Aeschylus. In order, the three plays are titled Homecoming, The Hunted, and The Haunted. However, these plays are normally not produced individually, but only as part of the larger trilogy. Each of these plays contain four to five acts, and so Mourning Becomes Electra is extraordinarily lengthy for a drama. In production, it is often cut down. Also, because of the large cast size, it is not performed as often as some of O'Neill's other major plays. (Wikipédia)
Alison Lurie - Foreign Affairs
A Pulitzer Prize-winning story which is both a comedy and a poignant love story about two American academics in London. The separate paths of these two lonely and naive innocents abroad lead them to strikingly similar destinations of new-found passion, and unexpected love.
Tennessee Williams - A Streetcar Named Desire
The Pulitzer Prize and Drama Critics Circle Award winning play—reissued with an introduction by Arthur Miller (Death of a Salesman and The Crucible), and Williams' essay "The World I Live In."
It is a very short list of 20th-century American plays that continue to have the same power and impact as when they first appeared—57 years after its Broadway premiere, Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire is one of those plays. The story famously recounts how the faded and promiscuous Blanche DuBois is pushed over the edge by her sexy and brutal brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski. Streetcar launched the careers of Marlon Brando, Jessica Tandy, Kim Hunter and Karl Malden, and solidified the position of Tennessee Williams as one of the most important young playwrights of his generation, as well as that of Elia Kazan as the greatest American stage director of the '40s and '50s.
Who better than America's elder statesman of the theater, Williams' contemporary Arthur Miller, to write as a witness to the lightning that struck American culture in the form of A Streetcar Named Desire? Miller's rich perspective on Williams' singular style of poetic dialogue, sensitive characters, and dramatic violence makes this a unique and valuable new edition of A Streetcar Named Desire. This definitive new edition will also include Williams' essay "The World I Live In," and a brief chronology of the author's life.
Charles Bukowski - Mockingbird Wish Me Luck
Mockingbird Wish Me Luck captures glimpses of Charles Bukowski's view on life through his poignant poetry: the pain, the hate, the love, and the beauty. He writes of lechery and pain while finding still being able to find its beauty.
Charles Bukowski - Notes of a Dirty Old Man
'One day after the races, I sat down and wrote the heading NOTES OF A DIRTY OLD MAN, opened a beer, and the writing got done by itself ... Just sit by the window, lift the beer and let it come. Anything that wanted to arrive, arrived.'
This collection of Bukowski’s columns for an underground LA newspaper epitomises his style of gritty realism. Writing as himself, or his alter-ego Henry Chinaski, Bukowski delves into America’s lowlife to eulogise life’s losers and antiheroes. Packed with violence, women, gambling and booze, Bukowski’s semi-autobiographical stories veer between hilarity and despair, as he extols the inherent beauty and futility of life.
Charles Bukowski was one of America’s best-known and most prolific writers. During his lifetime Bukowski published more than forty-five books of poetry and prose including the novels Post Office (1971), Factotum (1975), Women (1978) and Pulp (1994), all available from Virgin Books.
Charles Bukowski - Women
Low life writer and alcoholic Henry Chinaski was born to survive. Now, at the age of fifty, he is living the life of a rock star, running three hundred hangovers a year and a sex life that would cripple Casanova. "Women" is a riotous and uncompromisingly vivid account of life on the edge.
William Faulkner - As I Lay Dying
The death and burial of Addie Bundren is told by members of her family, as they cart the coffin to Jefferson, Mississippi to bury her among her people. And as the intense desires, fears and rivalries of the family are revealed in the vernacular of the Deep South, Faulkner presents a portrait of extraordinary power - as epic as the Old Testament, as American as Huckleberry Finn.
Art Spiegelman - Maus: A Survivor's Tale - And Here My Troubles Began
Acclaimed as a "quiet triumph"* and a "brutally moving work of art,"** the first volume of Art Spiegelman's Maus introduced readers to Vladek Spiegelman, a Jewish survivor of Hitler's Europe, and his son, a cartoonist trying to come to terms with his father, his father's terrifying story, and History itself. Its form, the cartoon (the Nazis are cats, the Jews mice), succeeds perfectly in shocking us out of any lingering sense of familiarity with the events described, approaching, as it does, the unspeakable through the diminutive. As the New York Times Book Review commented," [it is] a remarkable feat of documentary detail and novelistic vividness...an unfolding literary event."
This long-awaited sequel, subtitled And Here My Troubles Began, moves us from the barracks of Auschwitz to the bungalows of the Catskills. Genuinely tragic and comic by turns, it attains a complexity of theme and a precision of thought new to comics and rare in any medium. Maus ties together two powerful stories: Vladek's harrowing tale of survival against all odds, delineating the paradox of daily life in the death camps, and the author's account of his tortured relationship with his aging father.
Vladek's troubled remarriage, minor arguments between father and son, and life's everyday disappointments are all set against a backdrop of history too large to pacify. At every level this is the ultimate survivor's tale -- and that too of the children who somehow survive even the survivors.
* Washington Post
** Boston Globe
***
"Maus is a book that cannot be put down, truly, even to sleep. When two of the mice speak of love, you are moved, when they suffer, you weep. Slowly through this little tale comprised of suffering, humor and life's daily trials, you are captivated by the language of an old Eastern European family, and drawn into the gentle and mesmerizing rhythm, and when you finish Maus, you are unhappy to have left that magical world and long for the sequel that will return you to it." - Umberto Eco
Art Spiegelman is co-founder/editor of _Raw_, the acclaimed magazine of avant-garde comics and graphics. His work has been published in the _New York Times_, _Playboy_, the _Village Voice_ and many other periodicals, and his drawings have been exhibited in museums and galleries here and abroad. Honors he has received for _Maus_ include a Guggenheim fellowship and nomination for the National Books Critics Circle Award. Mr. Spiegelman lives in New York City with his wife, Françoise Mouly and their daughter, Nadja.
William Faulkner - Early Prose and Poetry
Contains 16 poems, 16 pen-and-ink drawings, and 17 prose pieces. Edited by Carvel Collins. 134 pages.
Bill Watterson - Scientific Progress Goes "Boink"
Calvin and Hobbes touched the hearts (and funny bones) of the millions who read the award-winning strip. One look at this Calvin and Hobbes collection and it is immediately evident that Bill Watterson's imagination, wit, and sense of adventure were unmatched. In this collection, Calvin and his tiger-striped sidekick Hobbes are hilarious whether the two are simply lounging around philosophizing about the future of mankind or plotting their latest money-making scheme. Chock-full of the familiar adventures of Spaceman Spiff, findings of Dad's popularity poll, and time travel to the Jurrassic Age, Scientific Progress Goes "Boink" is guaranteed to set scientific inquiry back an ean--and advance the reading pleasure of all Calvin and Hobbes fans.
Bill Watterson - Yukon Ho!
The spirit of childhood leaps to life again with boundless energy and magic in Yukon Ho!, the newest collection of adventures featuring rambunctious six-year-old Calvin and his co-conspirator tiger-chum, Hobbes. Picking up where The Essential Calvin and Hobbes left off, Yukon Ho! is sure to begin an immediate reign at the top of bestseller lists everywhere!
Sylvia Plath - Selected Poems
Sylvia Plath is one of the defining voices in twentieth-century poetry. This classic selection of her work, made by her former husband Ted Hughes, provides the perfect introduction to this most influential of poets. The poems are taken from Sylvia Plath's four collections Ariel, The Colossus, Crossing the Water and Winter Trees, and include many of her most celebrated works, such as 'Daddy', 'Lady Lazarus' and 'Wuthering Heights'.
Edgar Allan Poe - The Gold Bug
The discovery of a message in code on a shoreline formerly infested with pirates sends William Legrand and his friends on a hunt for buried treasure.
Saul Bellow - The Victim
Leventhal is a natural victim; a man uncertain of himself, never free from the nagging suspicion that the other guy may be right. So when he meets a down-at-heel stranger in the park one day and finds himself being accused of ruining the man's life, he half believes it.
Maggie Stiefvater - The Dream Thieves
Now that the ley lines around Cabeswater have been woken, nothing for Ronan, Gansey, Blue, and Adam will be the same. Ronan, for one, is falling more and more deeply into his dreams, and his dreams are intruding more and more into waking life. Meanwhile, some very sinister people are looking for some of the same pieces of the Cabeswater puzzle that Gansey is after....
F. Scott Fitzgerald - Flappers and Philosophers
Flappers and Philosophers was F. Scott Fitzgerald's initial encore - his first collection of short fiction, published in 1920 to capitalize on the success of This Side of Paradise, the novel that had made him famous at the age of twenty-three. Flappers and Philosophers contains some of Fitzgerald's best early stories: 'The Offshore Pirate' 'Bernice Bobs Her Hair', 'The Ice Palace', and 'Benediction'. In these narratives Fitzgerald presented his prototypical Jazz-Age heroines, beautiful and willful young women who later became trademarks of his fiction.
Tennessee Williams - The Glass Menagerie
Set in St. Louis during the Depression of the 1930s, this work is a personal account of the author's family and its gradual disintegration as it succumbed to external and internal pressures. It provides the author's favoured text along with a selection of notes and commentary.
Djuna Barnes - Nightwood
Published in 1937, Djuna Barnes's novel Nightwood was immediately recognized as a great work of art, a masterpiece comparable, T.S. Eliot argued in his enthusiastic introduction, to the finest Elizabethan tragedy. In complex, dense, and stunningly beautiful prose, Barnes delineates the lives of her characters: the mysterious expatriate American Robin Vote, her Viennese husband Felix Volkbein, her lover Nora Flood, and their loquacious, outrageous friend Dr. Matthew O'Connor. As a meditation on love, loss, language, and identity, Nightwood invites study from a variety of literary, linguistic, and philosophical perspectives. Moreover, readers interested in history and religious studies will find much to repay their attention. Set mostly in Paris between the world wars, the novel has been seen as both a prescient critique of fascism and a trenchant deconstruction of the illusions of historical progress and historiography. Religious as well as national differences among the characters occupy much of the text's attention: Felix is a self-hating Jew, Nora a puritan Protestant, Matthew an Irish Catholic sinner, and Robin a Catholic convert. In short, Nightwood is an extraordinarily rich text
F. Scott Fitzgerald - Tales of the Jazz Age
Though most widely known for the novella The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald gained a major source of income as a professional writer from the sale of short stories. Over the course of his career, Fitzgerald published more than 160 stories in the period's most popular magazines. His second short fiction collection, Tales of the Jazz Age (1922), includes two masterpieces as well as several other stories from his earlier career. One, "May Day," depicts a party at a popular club in New York that becomes a night of revelry during which former soldiers and an affluent group of young people start an anti-Bolshevik demonstration that results in an attack on a leftist newspaper office. "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz" is a fantastic satire of the selfishness endemic to the wealthy and their undying pursuit to preserve that way of life.
All of these stories, like his best novels, meld Fitzgerald's fascination with wealth with an awareness of a larger world, creating a subtle social critique. With his discerning eye, Fitzgerald elucidates the interactions of the young people of post-World War I America who, cut off from traditions, sought their place in the modern world amid the general hysteria of the period that inaugurated the age of jazz.
This new edition reproduces in full the original collection, stories that represent a clear movement in theme and character development toward what would become The Great Gatsby. In introducing each story, Fitzgerald offers accounts of its textual history, revealing decisions about which stories to include.
