Maeve Brennan

The twenty-one stories in The Springs of Affection trace the patterns of love within three middle-class Dublin families, patterns as intricate and various as Irish lace. Love between husband and wife, which begins in courtship and in laughter, loses all power of expression and then vanishes forever. The natural over of sister for brother, of mother for son, is twisted into the rage to possess. And love that gives rise to the rituals of family life grows solid as a rock that will never crumble. In his introduction, William Maxwell, Maeve Brennan's editor at The New Yorker, writes of the special quality of her stories, of being her friend, and of the premature end of her writing life. In Mr. Maxwell's telling, Maeve Brennan's own story proves as moving as any she ever wrote, and ultimately as heartbreaking.

Includes stories by Vladimir Nabokov, V.S. Pritchett, J.D. Salinger, John Updike, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Tennessee Williams, Mary McCarthy, Roald Dahl, Dorothy Parker, Nadine Gordimer, Eudora Welty, and John Cheever, among others.

Lee Child's latest unputdownable thriller starring Jack Reacher features a chilling serial killer.Sergeant Amy Callan and Lieutenant Caroline Cook have a lot in common. Both were army high-flyers.Both were acquainted with Jack Reacher.Both were forced to resign from the service. Now they're both dead.Both were found in their own home, naked, in a bath full of paint.Both apparent victims of an army man.A loner, a smart guy with a score to settle, a ruthless vigilante.A man just like Jack Reacher.

Combining the genres of fiction, memoir, the familiar essay and theoretical speculation, The Rose Garden forms an unusual synthesis. The protagonist and narrator is a Canadian literary scholar on study leave in Germany. While there, her involvement with her books on the one hand and a love relationship on the other creates a surprising blend of life and fiction. Her readings in classical European texts forefront the question of a woman reader's response. Her involvement with her lover makes her wonder why there is so little difference between life and literature on the level of experience. This is an uncommon book that defies traditional rules of style and genre and provokes the question of what meaning literary works actually have in our lives.