Showing titles in World Literature

This temptation is my punishment. His redemption is my penance. Jonah Hendrix is the bad boy of the music industry. As lead guitarist of The Hometown Heartless, negative press follows him like a scorned lover. And even his fans fuel the flames of his torched reputation. Despite his permanent residence in the media, he’s never been on my radar. Not until my boss comes to me with a proposition.

Pigeonholed in popular memory as a Jazz Age epicurean, a playboy, and an emblem of the Lost Generation, F. Scott Fitzgerald was at heart a moralist struck by the nation's shifting mood and manners after World War I. In Paradise Lost, David Brown contends that Fitzgerald's deepest allegiances were to a fading antebellum world he associated with his father's Chesapeake Bay roots. Yet as a midwesterner, an Irish Catholic, and a perpetually in-debt author, he felt like an outsider in the haute bourgeoisie haunts.

Cilka is just 16-years-old when she is taken to Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp in 1942, where the commandant immediately notices how beautiful she is. Forcibly separated from the other women prisoners, Cilka learns quickly that power, even unwillingly taken, equals survival. When the war is over and the camp is liberated, freedom is not granted to Cilka: She is charged as a collaborator for sleeping with the enemy and sent to a Siberian prison camp. But did she really have a choice?

A story about privacy and its importance for happiness and personal fulfillment.

Cora Zeng is a crime scene cleaner, washing away the remains of brutal murders and suicides in Chinatown. But none of that seems so terrible when she’s already witnessed the most horrific thing possible: her sister, Delilah, being pushed in front of a train. Before fleeing the scene, the murderer shouted two words: bat eater. So the bloody messes don’t really bother Cora—she’s more bothered by the germs on the subway railing, the bare hands of a stranger, the hidden viruses in every corner, and the bite marks on her coffee table.

"¿Con quién pasarías el fin del mundo?" podría parecer una pregunta hipotética, pero para Angélica, que vive en un mundo dominado por la catástrofe climática, con estaciones extremas y días de encierro, se vuelve una obsesión. En Madrid, Manu y Susana, sus vecinos, amigos, amores, representan una opción posible: los tres juntos, acostados en el parque; juntos, abrazados viendo alguna película en el cuarto de Manu; juntos, durante la emergencia, en el bar que atiende Susana.

In 2008, a serial killer known as the Cajun Cannibal brutally murders and consumes the flesh of eight people in a small Louisiana parish. With law enforcement closing in on him, he takes his own life before he can face the inside of a courtroom.

In his great triptych The Millennium, Bosch used oranges and other fruits to symbolize the delights of Paradise. Whence Henry Miller's title for this, one of his most appealing books; first published in 1957, it tells the story of Miller's life on the Big Sur, a section of the California coast where he lived for 15 years. Big Sur is the portrait of a place - one of the most colorful in the United States - and of the extraordinary people Miller knew there.

Pulitzer prize-winning author David K. Shipler’s fictionalized story of a Vietnamese interpreter, based on his own experiences as a war correspondent, brings back the tensions within Vietnam during the war, focusing on a local with close ties to American journalists and politicians.

Amsterdam 1654: a dangerous secret threatens to destroy a young widow's new life. Following the sudden death of her husband, 25-year-old Catrin leaves her small village and takes a job as housekeeper to the successful Van Nulandt merchant family. Amsterdam is a city at the peak of its powers: science and art are flourishing, and Dutch ships bring back exotic riches from the Far East. When a figure from her past threatens her new life, Catrin flees to Delft. There, her painting talent earns her a chance as a pottery painter.

In a small Southern town where loyalty to family and to "your people" carries the weight of a sacred oath, defying those unspoken rules can be a deadly proposition. After 15 years of growing up in the Ozark hills with his widowed mother, high-school freshman Boady Sanden is beyond ready to move on. He dreams of glass towers and cityscapes, driven by his desire to be anywhere other than Jessup, Missouri. The new kid at St. Ignatius High School, if he isn't being pushed around, he is being completely ignored.

This ambitious, electrifying work traces the harrowing journey of the famed Sarajevo Haggadah, a beautifully illuminated Hebrew manuscript created in 15th-century Spain. When it falls to Hanna Heath, an Australian rare-book expert, to conserve this priceless work, the series of tiny artifacts she discovers in its ancient binding—an insect wing fragment, wine stains, salt crystals, a white hair—only begin to unlock its deep mysteries.

Tucked away in an old building at the end of a narrow alley in Kyoto, the Kokoro Clinic for the Soul can only be found by people who are struggling in their lives and genuinely need help. The mysterious clinic offers a unique treatment to those who find their way there: it prescribes cats as medication. Patients are often puzzled by this unconventional prescription, but when they “take” their cat for the recommended duration, they witness profound transformations in their lives, guided by the playful, empathetic, occasionally challenging yet endearing cats.

"Her immediate concern was money." So begins the first story in Manuel Muñoz's dazzling new collection. In it, Delfina has moved from Texas to California's Central Valley with her husband and small son, and her isolation and desperation force her to take a risk that ends in profound betrayal.

Imagine a 1980s world of sumptuous hotel rooms, restaurants, New York City penthouses, and the powerful men who move easily between these pinnacles of luxury. They are music producers, rock stars, writers, and restaurateurs. They are household names like Billy Joel, Art Garfunkel, Eric Clapton, and Sting. And yet, each man has an entire aspect to his life that he doesn’t talk about publicly—his depression, his rocky marriage, his feelings of shame and failure, his private loss of faith. And now: The phone rings. Imagine the woman who has each of these men at her beck and call.

In 1920, Ireland stands on the brink of civil war. Lucie returns to her familial home to settle the estate, where she uncovers an abundance of handwritten letters—a lifetime’s worth of cherished memories and guarded secrets between her mother and aunts—as well as her grandfather’s diary. As she reads through her findings, Lucie begins to wonder just how well she knew her relatives and the circumstances of their lives.

First published in 1909, A Girl of the Limberlost is a novel by American writer and naturalist Gene Stratton-Porter. This classic of Indiana literature is a sequel to Stratton-Porter's earlier novel Freckles. Wholesome, sensible, and beautiful, the heroine, Elnora, is also compassionate, self-reliant, and intelligent. Neglected by her mother, Elnora reaches through this hardship toward education, friendship, and love. There are no shortcuts and her hard work brings joy to herself and all those she loves.

91 year-old Ira Levinson is kept concious after a car wreck by visions of his late wife, Ruth, who recounts stories of their lifetime together. A few miles away, at a local rodeo, Sophia Danko, a senior at Wake Forest, meets a young cowboy named Luke. Ira and Ruth. Sophia and Luke. Two couples who have little in common. Yet their lives will converge with unexpected poignancy, reminding us all that even the most difficult decisions can yield extraordinary journeys: beyond despair, beyond death, to the farthest reaches of the human heart.

Martin Arrowsmith’s youthful curiosity for science has blossomed into an altruistic devotion to medicine and research. The doctor moves from small towns to big cities and from local offices to prestigious institutes. With every step upward that Arrowsmith takes in his career, his idealism is challenged by the greed, corruption, and commercialism of the scientific community, as well as by the temptations of women, money, power, and glory. Against the odds, and through loss and groundbreaking discovery, Dr. Arrowsmith must stay true.

Before he became a best-selling novelist (The Bonfire of the Vanities), Tom Wolfe was an essayist and keen observer of 1960s and 1970s culture for Esquire and Rolling Stone. (This is the man who coined the phrase "Me Decade", after all.) This ear-candy collection of 20 essays and articles narrated by Edoardo Ballerini was handpicked by Wolfe and includes some of his best-known nonfiction work.