Vintage contemporaries

Milo once had a thriving divorce-case business in the small town of Meriwether, in the pacific Northwest, but because of liberal new divorce laws has taken to drinking and staring out the window. He's up to his third drink of the morning when an attractive young woman walks into his office and asks him to find her brother. he takes on what seems a routine missing-person case in hopes of getting to know her better, but finds himself involved in what is most definitely The Wrong Case. Everyone is a victim, one way or another, of crime that took place long before the novel begins.

Provides an overview of the geography, history, and culture of the small North American country that touches two oceans and links two continents.

When a gang of twentysomething women get together, men are always on the menu!Life is all about sizzle for marketing guru Delaney Phillips. She's always on the prowl for the next big thrill—or so she tells the supper club's members when they ask why she refuses to settle down. Dom Gordon, however, might prove the exception to her rule....Sixteen years ago a boy with some intriguing rough edges dumped Delaney and left town, maturing into a huge success. Now Dom is back. And her friends predict if he's as talented at bad behavior as he is at everything else, Delaney will enjoy the fling of a lifetime!

Chronicles the relationship between two women--Julia, the glamorous, manipulative ex-cabaret star, and the timid, modest Faye--whose husbands are business associates, in a study of the fragility and resilience of friendship.

Judith Gill's world is shaped by the actions of those around her. As a biographer, she spends her days analyzing the minutiae of past lives. As a mother, she is perplexed by her children's developing lives. As a wife, she struggles to sympathize with and support a man who sometimes acts like a stranger. Her own life recedes, overshadowed by the urge to observe and understand the people she encounters. Yet, in this lovingly documented year of a woman's life, Judith is revealed to herself; a person with desires, passions, and faults; with instincts that are sometimes right and often wrong. And it is through the very observations she can't help but make that Judith finds her place in the world: as translator and celebrant of life's small - and very important - ceremonies.

No one remains untouched by the luscious Myra Breckinridge's quest for Hollywood fame. Her job teaching Empathy and Posture at the Academy of Drama and Modeling gives her the perfect opportunity to vamp, scheme, and seduce her way into the undiscovered lives and passions of others - while trying to keep a few secrets of her own. In the sequel, Myron, the Breckinridge saga takes an increasingly bizarre turn. Myron seems to be an inconspicuous man with a sweet wife and a Chinese catering business, and Myra - still determined to become a megastar - wages an outrageous battle for hormonal supremacy over the body she shares with Myron. Gore Vidal leads us through the movie-star world of the fabulous forties as Myra attempts to alter cinema history.

Susan Redmon, the plain eldest daughter of a Carolina Colony preacher, comes to "own" indentured servant Ian Connelly, Marquis of Derne.

Powerful,convincing account of U.S. army life in early '60's but so over written and badly edited- in fact not edited at all. Recommend his other novels.

When Anna Durant disappears, it is months before anyone notices. To understand the connections of the characters to Anna's disturbing disappearance, they must first confront their own fraudulent behavior.

Willie and Liberty are drifters. They break into Florida vacation homes while the owners are away, stay a while, and then move on. They have been lovers since they were teenagers, yet Liberty now senses that Willie is drifting away from her--that their search, so relentless and mysterious, is becoming increasingly dangerous.

"Simply told but deeply affecting, in the bestselling tradition of Alice McDermott and Tom Perrotta, this urgent novel unravels the heartrending yet unsentimental tale of a woman who kidnaps a baby in a superstore--and gets away with it for twenty-one years. Lucy Wakefield is a seemingly ordinary woman who does something extraordinary in a desperate moment: she takes a baby girl from a shopping cart and raises her as her own. It's a secret she manages to keep for over two decades--from her daughter, the babysitter who helped raise her, family, coworkers, and friends. When Lucy's now-grown daughter Mia discovers the devastating truth of her origins, she is overwhelmed by confusion and anger and determines not to speak again to the mother who raised her. She reaches out to her birth mother for a tearful reunion, and Lucy is forced to flee to China to avoid prosecution. What follows is a ripple effect that alters the lives of many and challenges our understanding of the very meaning of motherhood. Author Helen Klein Ross, whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, weaves a powerful story of upheaval and resilience told from the alternating perspectives of Lucy, Mia, Mia's birth mother, and others intimately involved in the kidnapping. What Was Mine is a compelling tale of motherhood and loss, of grief and hope, and the life-shattering effects of a single, irrevocable moment"-- "Simply told but deeply affecting, this urgent novel unravels the heartrending yet unsentimental tale of a woman who kidnaps a baby in a superstore--and gets away with it for twenty-one years"--

When young Marcus is bonded out of jail, where he has been awaiting his trial for murder, he is sent to the Hebert plantation to work in the fields. He treats the Cajun overseer, Sidney Bonbon, with supreme contempt, even as Bonbon works him nearly to death. Marcus takes his revenge by first seducing Bonbon's black mistress, Pauline, and then his wife, Louise. Jim Kelly, the tractor driver, watches the contest between the two men, knowing Marcus is doomed and hating him for disturbing the status quo. Grudgingly, however, Jim begins to admire the young man's spirit as the inevitable climactic showdown draws near. --Back cover.

Fiction- The chosen place is Bourneville, a remote, devastated part of a Carribean island; the timeless people are its inhabitants- black, poor, inextricably linked to their past enslavement. The advance team for an ambitious American research project arrives, and the tense ambivalent relationships that evolve - between natives and foreigners, blacks and whites, haves and have-nots - keenly dramatize the vicissitudes of power.

A five-year-old, his photographer mother, and his prepetually unlucky, philandering father populate this novel about the trials and rewards of both being and raising a child.

No matter how hard she tries, Ellen Burns will never be Scarlett O'Hara. As a little girl in South Carolina, she prefers playing Tarzan to playing Jane. As a teenage beauty queen she spikes her Cokes with spirits of ammonia and baffles her elders with her Freedom Riding sympathies. As a young woman in the 1960s and '70s, she hypnotizes her way to Harvard, finds herself as a lesbian, then very nearly loses herself to booze and shamans. And though the wry, rebellious, and vision-haunted heroine of this exhilarating novel may sometimes seem to be living a magnolia-scented Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman, Blanche McCrary Boyd's The Revolution Of Little Girls is a completely original arid captivating work.

The author of The House on Mango Street gives voice to characters on both sides of the Mexican border, from a young girl harboring special secrets to a witch woman circling above her village.

Destined to be a haunter of libraries, Lewis's cautious progress through life reveals to him only his own shortcomings. Estranged from his wife and daughter, he searches for an alternative. This novel presents the life and aspirations of one man who remains out of step with his times.

A collection of ten short stories deals with such subjects as a woman haunted by dreams of her dead mother; an adulterous couple; and a widow discovering unpleasant truths about her husband's past.

Fifteen short stories record the author's ideas about the challenge and complexity of contemporary life.

Mama day is about many things. It's the story of Ophelia and George two black American's and how they fall in love in try to reconcile their differences of upbringing and culture. It's about the dying culture of Gullah on the Georgia sea islands and it is even a reworking of Shakespeare's Tempest.

In his second collection of stories, as in his first, Carver's characters are peripheral people--people without education, insight or prospects, people too unimaginative to even give up. Carver celebrates these men and women.

Although most of the action of The Mezzanine occurs on the escalator of an office building, where its narrator is returning to work after buying shoelaces, this startlingly inventive and witty novel takes us farther than most fiction written today. It lends to milk cartons the associative richness of Marcel Proust's madeleines. It names the eight most significant advances in a human life —beginning with shoe-tying. It asks whether the hot air blowers in bathrooms really are more sanitary than towels. And it casts a dazzling light on our relations with the objects and people we usually take for granted.

"Story of a community of black people searching for the healing properties of salt, who witness an event that will change their lives forever. Some of them are centered, some are off-balance; some are frightened, and some are daring."--Page 4 of cover.

A young man courts disaster when he decides to compete with two established fishing guides in Key West.

"In 1987 Rita Dove became one of the youngest writers to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry - and only the second African-American to do so. Now in her radiant first novel, Dove combines her remarkable storytelling ability with what critic Arnold Rampersad has praised in her poetry as an "almost uncanny sense of peace and grace."" "It is the tail end of the Vietnam era, and Virginia King, most recently a puppeteer with an experimental theater troupe, returns to her hometown in the Midwest to work as an "artist in residence" at a local public school. As her puppets win the hearts of her students, memories of her own childhood surface, triggering a chain of recollections - from grade school, with its subtle and not-so-subtle bigotries, to college where, as a cellist, she became involved with a brilliant and enigmatic fellow musician. But what startles her most is a visit to an elderly aunt, whose revelations about Virginia's family threaten to shatter the healing these memories bring. Seamlessly weaving together past and present, Through the Ivory Gate renders an unforgettable portrait of a period in American life and offer in Virginia King one of the most endearing heroines to emerge in contemporary fiction."--BOOK JACKET.

Cette oeuvre s'inscrit dans la tradition du roman psychologique à l'anglaise. L'auteure y poursuit sa réflexion sur la tension entre le "désir infini" et sa "réalisation limitée", comme le signale C. Jordis. Un roman qui n'a pas la profondeur de ##Regardez-moi## mais qui constitue cependant une réussite.

A collection of the author's most recent stories features unnervingly sophisticated young people and older folks striving for wisdom and grace.

For two decades Ned is shuttled back and forth between his mother, Jenny, and his father, Sam, after Sam abandoned them and now Ned struggles to win his father's affection while avoiding his sins.

"Ernest J. Gaines's new novella revolves around a courthouse shooting that leads a young reporter to uncover the long story of race and power in his small town and the relationship between the white sheriff and the black man who "whipped children" to keep order. After Brady Sims pulls out a gun in a courtroom and shoots his own son, who has just been convicted of robbery and murder, he asks only to be allowed two hours before he'll give himself up to the sheriff. When the editor of the local newspaper asks his cub reporter to dig up a "human interest" story about Brady, he heads for the town's barbershop. It is the barbers and the regulars who hang out there who narrate with empathy, sadness, humor, and a profound understanding the life story of Brady Sims--an honorable, just, and unsparing man who with his tough love had been handed the task of keeping the black children of Bayonne, Louisiana in line to protect them from the unjust world in which they lived. And when his own son makes a fateful mistake, it is up to Brady to carry out the necessary reckoning. In the telling, we learn the story of a small southern town, divided by race, and the black community struggling to survive even as many of its inhabitants head off northwards during the Great Migration"-- "Ernest J. Gaines's new novella is about a courthouse shooting that leads a young reporter to uncover the long story of race and power in his small town and the relationship between the white sheriff and the black man who "whipped children" to keep order"--

At the age of twelve, Sophie Caco is sent from the impoverished village of Croix-des-Rosets to New York to be reunited with her mother she barely remembers. There she discovers secrets that no child should ever know and where she gains a legacy of shame that can only be healed when she returns to Haiti, to the woman who first reared her. What ensues is a passionate journey through a landscape charged with the supernatural and scarred by political violence, in a novel that bears witness to the traditions, suffering, and wisdom of an entire people.

When Haitians tell a story, they say "Krik?" and the eager listeners answer "Krak!" In Krik? Krak!, Edwidge Danticat establishes herself as the latest heir to that narrative tradition with ten stories that encompass both the cruelties and the high ideals of Haitian life. Examining the lives of ordinary Haitians, particularly those struggling to survive under the brutal Duvalier regime, Danticat illuminates the distance between people's desires and the stifling reality of their lives.

By the author of Blood Meridian and All the Pretty Horses, Suttree is the story of Cornelius Suttree, who has forsaken a life of privilege with his prominent family to live in a dilapidated houseboat on the Tennessee River near Knoxville. Remaining on the margins of the outcast community there--a brilliantly imagined collection of eccentrics, criminals, and squatters--he rises above the physical and human squalor with detachment, humor, and dignity.

Catherine Carmier is a compelling love story set in a deceptively bucolic Louisiana countryside, where blacks, Cajuns, and whites maintain an uneasy coexistence. After living in San Francisco for ten years, Jackson returns home to his benefactor, Aunt Charlotte. Surrounded by family and old friends, he discovers that his bonds to them have been irreparably rent by his absence. In the midst of his alienation from those around him, he falls in love with Catherine Carmier, setting the stage for conflicts and confrontations which are complex, tortuous, and universal in their implications.

With the passionate lyricism of a Maya Angelou and the sharply edged wit of a young Lillian Hellman, award-winning journalist Itabari Njeri creates a kaleidoscopic portrait of the extraordinary family in which she grew up., Njeri?s memoir is improbable, complex, grandly dramatic; from her grandmother Ruby, a West Indian matriarch with a devastating tongue and a reverence for Marcus Garvey and Queen Elizabeth, to her father, a brilliant Marxist historian, to her own travels to Georgia to track down the man who killed her grandfather, Every Good-bye Ain?t Gone is a passionate account of a woman finding herself in a world filled with obstacles, from racism to a surfeit of unreliable men.