The Arbor House library of contemporary Americana

Sweet, sleepy -- beautiful -- old Pompey's Head, South Carolina. Anson Page thought he'd ground it out of his life for good. Now a Manhattan lawyer representing a large publishing house, he's returning to his hometown after fifteen years to investigate the mystery surrounding one of his client's authors, a major American novelist who lives on nearby Tamburlaine Island. Both painfully familiar and irrevocably altered, the landmarks and people in Pompey's Head resurrect for Page the sweep of his past life.

Imagine a place where you can go to decide whether you wish to live or die. And you have exactly twenty-four hours to decide. Through one devastating, snowy New Year's Day, Wolf Walker, the director of The Suicide Academy, struggles to survive - goaded by his black, subtly anti-Semitic assistant Gilliatt, and thrown by the arrival of Jewel, his beautiful gentile ex-wife, and her lover. It is a story the San Francisco Chronicle calls "so free of the obvious, so profoundly amusing and amusingly profound".

"Angela is trapped in her basement, waiting out an approaching tornado. Though a self-proclaimed unreliable narrator, she begins to reflect on a lifetime of trauma, illuminating the truth behind her endangerment. Based on Hamlet's famous 'To be or not to be' soliloquy, NATURAL SHOCKS is a damning condemnation of violence, abuse, and firearms in America"--

Review by Shelter Somerset: Set and written during World War II, Charles Jackson’s “The Fall of Valor” is a masterful work that depicts marital crisis and simmering sexuality at a time when most of us might assume Americans would rather recoil from such frankness. But as Jackson highlights, the second war, in some ways, brought sexuality to the American forefront for perhaps the first time. John and Ethel Grandin, together ten years, hope a trip to the seashore might rekindle their troubled marriage. But after meeting young honeymooners on the boat to Martha’s Vineyard, John becomes obsessed with the groom, the handsome and burly Marine captain Cliff Hauman.

Major Amberson had "made a fortune" in 1878, when other people were losing fortunes, and the magnificence of the Ambersons began then. Magnificence, like the size of a fortune, is always comparative, as even Magnificent Lorenzo may now perceive, if he has happened to haunt New York in 1916; and the Ambersons were magnificent in their day and place. Their splendour lasted throughout all the years that saw their Midland town spread and darken into a city, but reached its topmost during the period when every prosperous family with children kept a Newfoundland dog.