His mother talks piously of the heaven that awaits the good, and disciplines him with an ox prod. His grandmother burns his precious crosses for kindling. His cousins meet to plot their grandfather's death. Yet in the hills surrounding his home, another reality exists, a place where his mother wears flowers in her hair, and his cousin Celestino, a poet who inscribes verse on the trunks of trees, understands his visions.

The first novel in Reinaldo Arenas's -secret history of Cuba, - a quintet he called the Pentagonia, Singing from the Well is by turns explosively crude and...

"One day, Annabel saw the sun and moon in the sky at the same time. The sight filled her with a terror which entirely consumed her for she had no instinct for self-preservation if she was confronted by ambiguities."

Annabel and Lee are married; Lee and Buzz are brothers. A quirky threesome, they have set up a household on the fringes on university life in the late sixties. Their hermetic existence is filled with drugs, sex, alchohol, intensity, and madness; their relationships with one another are haunting and complex.

Carter's compelling tale carries echoes of Poe and Bronte into the...

"A funny, intelligent, superbly paced social comedy." --The New York Times

Vic Wilcox, a self-made man and managing director of an engineering firm. has little regard for academics, and even less for feminists. So when Robyn Penrose, a trendy leftist teacher, is assigned to "shadow" Vic under a goverment program created to foster mutual understanding between town and gown, the hilarious collusion of lifestyles and ideologies that ensues seems unlikely to foster anything besides mutual antipathy. But in the course of a bumpy year, both parties make some surprising discoveries about...

"An absolutely unique voice...It would be an impertinence to call these eight delightful concoctions stories...A virtuoso Mendelssohn of fiction." -- The New York Times Book Review

Drawing on American history, literary legend, and folk tale, Angela Carter transports us to that shadowy country between fact and myth in this book of short stories.

Lizzy Borden, the spinster daughter of a glutton and a compulsive miser, ticks off the hours before a murder. An eighteenth-century whore and pickpocket who runs off to join the Indians tells her story in a voice of bawdy authenticity....