Kategoria BISAC: Fiction >> World Literature - American - 20th Century

George Mahoney suspects he is getting a little stale at redesigning refrigerators, after fourteen years in the same job. With the arrival of his new office mate, Niagara Spense, George is forced to re-evaluate everything in his life from love and family, to science itself. Obsessed by the six feet tall Niagara, the very foundations of George's belief in facts and the physical world are shaken when she reveals that she is on an incredible quest for electrical evidence of life after death--"audible fossils" she calls them. As Niagara Spense seeks the dead, and George seeks her, everything...

When Deborah Eisenberg's first book of stories, Transactions in a Foreign Currency, was published, John Updike noted: "Whenever a new writer arrives, a new window of life is opened, and this has happened here." The scope and depth of Eisenberg's idiosyncratic vision were even more apparent in her second collection, Under the 82nd Airborne, which The New York Times Book Review called "nothing short of extraordinary."

As these two collections gathered here into one volume show, Eisenberg's stories have an astonishing power and range. Her characters, whether they...

With its depictions of the downtrodden prostitutes, bootleggers, and hustlers of Perdido Street in the old French Quarter of 1930s New Orleans, A Walk in the Wild Side has found a place in the imaginations of all generations since it first appeared. As Algren admitted, the book "wasn't written until long after it had been walked . . . I found my way to the streets on the other side of the Southern Pacific station, where the big jukes were singing something called 'Walking the Wild Side of Life.' I've stayed pretty much on that side of the curb ever since."

Perhaps the author's...

"As nearly perfect as any American fiction I know," is how Reynolds Price (The New York Times) described this classic that has been a favorite of readers, both here and in Europe, for almost forty years. Set in provincial France in the 1960s, it is the intensely carnal story--part shocking reality, part feverish dream --of a love affair between a footloose Yale dropout and a young French girl. There is the seen and the unseen--and pages that burn with a rare intensity.

Edith Wharton (1862-1937) wrote carefully structured fiction that probed the psychological and social elements guiding the behavior of her characters. Her portrayals of upper-class New Yorkers were unrivaled. The Age of Innocence, for which Wharton won the Pulitzer Prize in 1920, is one of her most memorable novels.
At the heart of the story are three people whose entangled lives are deeply affected by the tyrannical and rigid requirements of high society. Newland Archer, a restrained young attorney, is engaged to the lovely May Welland but falls in love with May's beautiful and...

A masterpiece of storytelling, this epic saga pits Ahab, a brooding and fantastical sea captain, against the great white whale that crippled him. In telling the tale of Ahab's passion for revenge and the fateful voyage that ensued, Melville produced far more than the narrative of a hair-raising journey; Moby-Dick is a tale for the ages that sounds the deepest depths of the human soul.
Interspersed with graphic sketches of life aboard a whaling vessel, and a wealth of information on whales and 19th-century whaling, Melville's greatest work presents an imaginative and thrilling...

Anne Lamott's poignant first novel, reissued in an attractive new edition.

Writer (and sometime housecleaner) Jennifer is twenty-three when her beloved father, Wallace, is diagnosed with a brain tumor. This catastrophic discovery sets off Anne Lamott's unexpectedly sweet and funny first novel, which is made dramatic not so much by Wallace's illness as by the emotional wake it sweeps under Jen and her brothers, self-contained Ben and feckless, lovable Randy. With characteristic affection and accuracy, Lamott sketches this offbeat family and their nearest and dearest as they draw ever...

This novel exposes the obsession that draws climbers away from civilization to test themselves against the most intimidating and inaccessible mountains in the world.

James Salter captures the adventure of Gary, a roofer of churches, who feels restrained by conventions and flat ground. Unable to find happiness in his life, he travels to southern France to climb to the summits of the Alps. He finds peace and happiness within himself soon after. But when fellow climbers are trapped on the mountain, he makes a daring one-man rescue during a storm that brings him the notice he has always...

Seven men, friends and strangers, gather in a house in Berkeley. They intend to start a men's club, the purpose of which isn't immediately clear to any of them; but very quickly they discover a powerful and passionate desire to talk. First published in 1981, The Men's Club is a scathing, pitying, absurdly dark and funny novel about manhood in the age of therapy. "The climax is fitting, horrific, and wonderfully droll" (The New York Times Book Review).

Described by Anne Tyler as "the undisputed master of the short story form," Peter Taylor imbued his stories with a powerful sense of the conflicts between the old rural society and the increasingly urbanized South. Ranging in subject from the story of the exposure of a respected doctor's infidelity by the family's longtime cook to the tale of elderly siblings whose party for young people exposes the town's class divisions, the stories often explore family dynamics within the larger society of the South.

Kenny Becker just dumped his girlfriend--the reasons are a little complex. Young and newly unemployed, his main assets at the moment are six-pack abs and a healthy libido--he's ready to get out, find a little action, and maybe find himself too. But New York is no place for the lonely, and with one meaningless sexual encounter after another, Kenny begins to wonder if the singles scene is not itself a complete con job, with his heart and his future at stake. Raunchy, funny, and surprisingly heartfelt, this 1978 clubland slice-of-life displays Richard Price in gritty good form.

From the Bestselling Author of Lush Life

Peter Keller, first college grad from a working-class Yonkers family, thought he was on the road to success. Until no law school wanted him. As he watches his friends advance into promising careers, he jumps from job to job---mail clerk, phone solicitor, stand-up comic---until he breaks down and starts phoning in bomb threats on his own house. He's going to have to work hard to change the pattern of self-sabotage that has defined most of his life. And taking that job at his alma mater as a teacher of freshman comp and starting an affair...

Anna Berter is a teenager growing up in a privileged home in Iowa just before World War I. Anna's life is dominated by two women: her stern mother and her adoring Scottish housekeeper, "the Old One," who fills Anna's imagination with Celtic legends and songs. But Anna's years of idyllic innocence end with the arrival of Hailus Tucker, a houseguest who charms all the ladies and leaves one--the housekeeper's granddaughter, Edwina--pregnant. When Anna's family adopts the illegitimate child, Anna demands the truth about...