The New Dress and Other Stories

The New Dress and Other Stories

Virginia Woolf

Fiction / Essays

As Mabel Waring takes off her cloak and steps into the drawing room of Clarissa Dalloway, she immediately realizes that something is not right: her pale-yellow silk dress, which she has had specially made for the occasion, is clearly old-fashioned, dowdy and out of place. Everyone seems to be looking at her in dismay or mocking her appearance. Crushed at once by her insecurity, Mabel is pervaded by a sense of selfloathing, and feels utter revulsion for the social world she has tried so hard to impress.Written in 1924 and perhaps intended for inclusion in Mrs Dalloway, a book Woolf was working on at the time, "The New Dress" is here accompanied by most of the short stories she published in her lifetime, as well as six posthumously published pieces that share the milieu and some of the characters of her celebrated novel. Together, they reveal their author as one of the finest practitioners in the field of short fiction.
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The Death of Artemio Cruz

The Death of Artemio Cruz

Carlos Fuentes

Fiction / Essays

Hailed as a masterpiece since its publication in 1962, The Death of Artemio Cruz is Carlos Fuentes's haunting voyage into the soul of modern Mexico. Its acknowledged place in Latin American fiction and its appeal to a fresh generation of readers have warranted this new translation by Alfred Mac Adam, translator (with the author) of Fuentes's Christopher Unborn. As in all his fiction, but perhaps most powerfully in this book, Fuentes is a passionate guide to the ironies of Mexican history, the burden of its past, and the anguish of its present.
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The Life of Violet

The Life of Violet

Virginia Woolf

Fiction / Essays

Virginia Woolf's first fully realized work of fiction—published in its final, revised form for the first timeA beguiling trio of fantastical and farcical anti-fairy tales about a giantess who builds a magical "cottage of one's own," battles a silver-scaled sea monster, and defies governesses and gravity alikeIn 1907, eight years before she published her first novel, a twenty-five-year-old Virginia Woolf drafted three interconnected comic stories chronicling the adventures of a giantess named Violet—a teasing tribute to Woolf's friend Mary Violet Dickinson. But it was only in 2022 that Woolf scholar Urmila Seshagiri discovered a final, revised typescript of the stories. The typescript revealed that Woolf had finished this mock-biography, making it her first fully realized literary experiment and a work that anticipates her later masterpieces. Published here for the first time in its final form, The Life of Violet blends fantasy, fairy...
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Ducie

Ducie

Chris Freeman

Nonfiction / Writing / Essays

61 people live on a remote South Pacific island.Why are they there?What does this place have to do with a drug rehabilitation institute in Birmingham, England?And why are both of these places consuming the thoughts of the British Prime Minister? For every answer this story affords you, you'll be another step away from where you thought you'd be.Welcome to Ducie!Cheeps the Chick is a gorgeous illustrated children's book about a silly little baby chicken named Cheeps. Cheeps is very adventurous and loves to explore! One day he decides to find out what is on the other side of the fence (with the help of his best friend, Chuck). Little do they know, there's a fox nearby. What happens next? The illustrations in the kid's picture book are optimized to be superior quality and vivid for tablets and e-readers to improve the story and bring it to life for early and beginner readers!This is an excellent read for beginning and early readers.This book is great for a quick bedtime story or a cute tale to be read aloud with friends and family.* Excellent for early and beginning readers* Great for reading aloud with friends and family* Cute short story that is great for a quick bedtime story* Big and beautiful illustrations for kidsThis books is especially great for traveling, waiting rooms, and reading aloud at home!
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The Second Plane

The Second Plane

Martin Amis

Fiction / Essays / Contemporary

A master not only of fiction but also of fiercely controversial political engagement, Martin Amis here gathers fourteen pieces that constitute an evolving, provocative, and insightful examination of the most momentous event of our time.At the heart of this collection is the long essay "Terror and Boredom," an unsparing analysis of Islamic fundamentalism and the West's flummoxed response to it, while other pieces address the invasion of Iraq, the realities of Iran, and Tony Blair's lingering departure from Downing Street (and also his trips to Washington and Iraq). Whether lambasted for his refusal to kowtow to Muslim pieties or hailed for his common sense, wide reading, and astute perspective, Amis is indisputably a great pleasure to read--informed, elegant, surprising--and this collection a resounding contemplation of the relentless, manifold dangers we suddenly find ourselves living with.From the Trade Paperback edition.
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Murder by Kindness

Murder by Kindness

Barbara Graham

Nonfiction / Writing / Essays

The residents of tiny Park County, Tennessee, are looking forward to the end of winter and plan to celebrate Valentine's Day in style with a community fundraiser. Sheriff Tony Abernathy's dream of a crime-free county explodes, along with an illegal still. An underage driver, bar fights and the arrival of a popular young movie star with his entourage promise to keep his small staff busy. Theo, Tony's wife, is pulled away from her quilt shop by a phone call. Her best friend Nina is out of town and water has been spotted pouring out from under Nina's front door. Theo arranges to turn off the water and puts a restoration company to work removing the water and drying the contents of the house but the discovery of Nina's ex-husband's corpse in the storm cellar stops everything. The county chaos increases with the arrival of some extra wives, more exploding stills and Cupid leaving a trail of paper hearts...
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What Are We Doing Here?

What Are We Doing Here?

Marilynne Robinson

Fiction / Religion / Essays

New essays on theological, political, and contemporary themes, by the Pulitzer Prize winner Marilynne Robinson has plumbed the human spirit in her renowned novels, including Lila, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Gilead, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In this new essay collection she trains her incisive mind on our modern political climate and the mysteries of faith. Whether she is investigating how the work of great thinkers about America like Emerson and Tocqueville inform our political consciousness or discussing the way that beauty informs and disciplines daily life, Robinson's peerless prose and boundless humanity are on full display. What Are We Doing Here? is a call for Americans to continue the tradition of those great thinkers and to remake American political and cultural life as "deeply impressed by obligation [and as] a great theater of heroic generosity, which, despite all, is sometimes palpable still."
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Essays Virginia Woolf, Volume 6

Essays Virginia Woolf, Volume 6

Virginia Woolf

Fiction / Essays

With this sixth volume The Hogarth Press completes a major literary undertaking - the publication of the complete essays of Virginia Woolf. In this, the last decade of her life, Woolf wrote distinguished literary essays on Turgenev, Goldsmith, Congreve, Gibbon and Horace Walpole. In addition, there are a number of more political essays, such as 'Why Art To-Day Follows Politics', 'Women Must Weep' (a cut-down version of Three Guineas and never before reprinted), 'Royalty' (rejected by Picture Post in 1939 as 'an attack on the Royal family, and on the institution of kingship in this country'), 'Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid', and even 'America, which I Have Never Seen...' ('['Americans are] the most interesting people in the world - they face the future, not the past'). In 'The Leaning Tower' (1940), Virginia Woolf faced the future and looked forward to a more democratic post-war age: 'will there be no more towers and no more classes and shall we stand, without...
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Yellow Dog

Yellow Dog

Martin Amis

Fiction / Essays / Contemporary

Brilliant, painful, dazzling, and funny as hell, Yellow Dog is Martin Amis’ highly anticipated first novel in seven years and a stunning return to the fictional form. When “dream husband” Xan Meo is vengefully assaulted in the garden of a London pub, he suffers head injury, and personality change. Like a spiritual convert, the familial paragon becomes an anti-husband, an anti-father. He submits to an alien moral system -- one among many to be found in these pages. We are introduced to the inverted worlds of the “yellow” journalist, Clint Smoker; the high priest of hardmen, Joseph Andrews; and the porno tycoon, Cora Susan. Meanwhile, we explore the entanglements of Henry England: his incapacitated wife, Pamela; his Chinese mistress, He Zhezun; his fifteen-year-old daughter, Victoria, the victim of a filmed “intrusion” that rivets the world -- because she is the future Queen of England, and her father, Henry IX, is its King. The connections between these characters provide the pattern and drive of Yellow Dog. If, in the 21st century, the moral reality is changing, then the novel is changing too, whether it likes it or not. Yellow Dog is a model of how the novel, or more particularly the comic novel, can respond to this transformation. But Martin Amis is also concerned here with what is changeless and perhaps unchangeable. Patriarchy, and the entire edifice of masculinity; the enormous category-error of violence, arising between man and man; the tortuous alliances between men and women; and the vanished dream (probably always an illusion, but now a clear delusion) that we can protect our future and our progeny. *Meo heard no footsteps; what he heard was the swish, the shingly soft-shoe of the hefted sap. Then the sharp two-finger prod on his shoulder. It wasn’t meant to happen like this. They expected him to turn and he didn’t turn -- he half-turned, then veered and ducked. So the blow intended merely to break his cheekbone or his jawbone was instead received by the cranium, that spacey bulge (in this instance still quite marriageably forested) where so many delicate and important powers are so trustingly encased. He crashed, he crunched to his knees, in obliterating defeat. . . . *-- from Yellow Dog From the Hardcover edition.
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