Walter Snow is doomed. He stares at the blank pages in his typewriter, hoping for the spark that will finally ignite his ambition to write the Great Armenian Novel.

And then he meets Clyde Potts. She is beautiful, intelligent, charming, perhaps psychic, and, for better or worse, very possibly unbalanced. With Potts's joie de vivre and her certified-insane partner in crime, Fox Harris, Snow is caught up in a series of pranks against corporate sprawl that they execute with a bit of booze and some wacky tobaccy from Australia known as Malabimbi Madness.

Things quickly spin out of control as the trio's ultimate, diuretically inspired prank leads to an unexpected, shocking conclusion, and Walter is left to wonder if the only things you ever keep in this life are the things you let slip through your fingers.

Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter Amerie’s dazzling, satirical adult debut tells the story of a Black man who walks into the light…to find himself in Los Angeles, where he becomes an instant celebrity for being the first visible and verifiable ghost.

John’s House provides all he needs. Surrounded by a vast, beautiful ocean under a void of sky, the House is John’s haven. He is alone, but never lonely; he is here now, but neither remembers nor longs for a before. In his House, John is safe and untroubled.

But then a terrible shadow creature breaks in—and it wants him out. Pushed from the House, John falls into the light…

And finds himself in modern-day Los Angeles, the first person to ever come back from the other side. Though he has no memory of his past life, or even how he died, everyone wants to know more about the Black man who has returned from the dead—is he the second coming? A hoax? Or something beyond explanation? Soon he has brand deals, TV interviews, and politicians aiming to use him for their agendas, yet all John wants is to go home.

But going home will require, most unfortunately, help. In search of a way back, John grudgingly joins forces with a mystic holding dubious qualifications, a hard-edged publicist bent on making him famous, and an aspiring actress who is unsettlingly familiar. With this ragtag band of allies, John begins a journey to find his House on the ocean—but getting there will prove more complicated than he imagined, for it will require not only trusting in someone other than himself, but will mean uncovering painful truths about who John was in life and, perhaps most difficult, who he must become.

A gorgeous, tender story of hope, sacrifice, and what it means to be human, This Is Not a Ghost Story introduces an astonishing new voice in literary fiction.

This sequel to Julian Green's epic novel of the ante-bellum South, The Distant Lands, opens with the last tense moments of peace that led up to the final confrontation and all-out war between the North and South. As one state after another secedes from the Union, the gracious-living aristocracy of the old South goes on dancing and feasting and intriguing among themselves as never before. Once again we meet the personages of The Distant Lands: the aunts and uncles and the cousins, the omniscient Charlie Jones, the sinister Miss Llewelyn and, above all, Elizabeth, the beautiful widowed Englishwoman, living with her little son in slightly reduced splendor in Savannah, Georgia. The picture which the nonagenarian Julian Green paints is a nostalgic, poetic and romantic one of a world doomed to extinction but still scintillating brightly, engrossed in its own courtly passions and genteel observances. This feast of story-telling is partly based upon reminiscences of the old South told to him by the author's own 'Southern belle' mother, with a historical background that is both authentic and enthralling.

Hamilton is confused and frightened. Heading he knows not where. The nightmare from which he is trying to escape will follow him wherever he goes. Salvation will come but not before tribulation...

The Winter Children is a haunting mystery from Lulu Taylor, author of The Snow Angel. Behind a selfless act of kindness lies dark intentions . . . After years of IVF, Olivia and Dan are blissfully happy at the arrival of their long dreamed-of twins. At the same time, they make the move to Renniston Hall, a huge, Elizabethan house that belongs to absent friends. Living rent-free in a small part of the unmodernised house, once a boarding school, they can begin to enjoy the family life they've always wanted. But there is a secret at the heart of their family, one that Olivia does not yet know. And the house, too, holds darkness deep within it . . .

Universiteit van Johannesburg-debuutprys (2008) Jan Rabie Rapport-prys vir innoverende letterkunde (2008) Siegfried Landman is iets in die dertig. Sy lewe lank het hy saam met sy pa op ’n afgeleë plaas iewers in die Karoo gewoon. Maar dan, op ’n dag, sterf sy pa, en moet Siegfried maak soos sy pa hom al die jare laat oefen het: gaan haal Wilhelm Smit (jare lank al ’n bywoner op hulle plaas) en gaan Kaap toe, na oom Bert Fischer, sy enigste oorlewende familielid naas sy ma, wat ’n meermin in die see is. Dit word ’n magiese reis, wat begin met ’n besoek aan ’n boeregesin op nog ’n afgeleë plaas in die Karoo en amper eindig by Georg Fafnir, sirkusbaas met ’n voorliefde vir die teatrale. ’n Verstommende, meesleurende roman – ’n verhaal wat voortsnel tot ’n onafwendbare einde. ’n Kosbare toevoeging tot die Afrikaanse letterkunde.

In a thrilling interconnected narrative, You're in the Wrong Place presents characters reaching for transcendence from a place they cannot escape. Charles Baxter stated that "Joseph Harris has a particular feeling for the Detroit suburbs and the slightly stunted lives of the young people there....You're in the Wrong Place isn't uniformly downbeat-there are all sorts of rays of hope that gleam toward the end". The book, composed of twelve stories, begins in the fall of 2008 with the shuttering of Dynamic Fabricating-a fictional industrial shop located in the Detroit suburb of Ferndale. Over the next seven years, the shop's former employees - as well as their friends and families-struggle to find money, purpose, and levity in a landscape suddenly devoid of work, faith, and love. In "Would You Rather", a young couple brought together by Dynamic Fabricating shares a blissful weekend in Northern Michigan, unaware of the catastrophe that awaits them upon their return home. In "Acolytes", a devout Catholic clings to her faith as her brothers descend into cultish soccer violence. In "Memorial", an ex-Dynamic worker scrapes money together for a tribute to his best friend, lost to the war in Afghanistan. In "Was It Good for You?" a cam girl deconstructs materialism with her ageng great aunt, a luxury sales associate, and an anxious, faceless client. And in the title story, simmering tensions come to a boil on a hot summer day for a hardscrabble landscaping crew, hired by the local bank to maintain the lawns of foreclosures In turns elegiac and harrowing, You're in the Wrong Place blends lyric intensity with philosophical eroticism to create a singular, powerful vision of contemporary American life. Readers of contemporary fiction grounded in place need to take up this collection.

This is the story of Chip the Chihuahua who goes on a grand adventure in his own magical garden. Chip meets Bert the Bee who thinks Chip is also a bee. Chip soon discovers just how busy the little bees that live in our gardens really are.

Robert Bage's Hermsprong satirizes English society of the 1790s targeting, in particular, corrupt clergymen, grasping lawyers and wicked aristocrats. The protagonist, a European raised among Native Americans, visits Europe and is dismayed by what he encounters. While such satire might seem conventional enough, Hermsprong is distinguished from other political novels of the period by its comedy, and it is a measure of Bage's success that he won the admiration of writers as different in political outlook as Mary Wollstonecraft and Sir Walter Scott. Indeed, Hermsprong is built around debate, and celebrates the pleasures of the lively exchange of ideas. This Broadview edition contains extensive primary source appendices including material by William Godwin, Benjamin Franklin, Pierre de Charlevoix, and Voltaire.

Three love stories all set in the fair city of Verona and all linked to the overwhelming presence of The Arena, formerly a Roman amphitheatre. AD 30 - Can Lucius overcome the dangers of the arena to win Drusilla? AD 116 - Will Pietro recover his memory of an earlier love before she is lost to him forever? PRESENT DAY - Carletta has an ambition to sing opera in The Arena but many obstacles bar her way. Can the dark-haired man help her?

The year is 1998. The location is Reading, England. Cleo Howard is almost sixteen years old. It's going to be a big year. By the end of it she'll have seen Black Sabbath and Slayer, sat her GCSEs, been alone with a man and Opal Fruits will have been renamed Starburst. It's a time of great change. Cleo is lucky to have her constant companions Ian and Jenni to help her weather the storms of her world.

Une histoire enchantA (c)e que les grands auront plaisir A lire aux enfants. Le monde sous-marin est un endroit magique pour Dilo le dauphin. Sa mAre montre A Dilo comment utiliser ses sens avant de s'aventurer A la recherche de l'ile aux Phoques.

Un cuento encantador que adultos disfrutar de la lectura a los niA+/-os. El mundo submarino es un lugar mA!gico para Dilo el delfA n. Su madre enseA+/-a a Dilo cA(3)mo utilizar su sonido mA!gico antes de salir en una aventura para encontrar La Isla de las Focas.

Joseph Heller's powerful, wonderfully funny, deeply moving novel is the story of David -- yes, King David -- but as you've never seen him before. You already know David as the legendary warrior king of Israel, husband of Bathsheba, and father of Solomon; now meet David as he really was: the cocky Jewish kid, the plagiarized poet, and the Jewish father. Listen as David tells his own story, a story both relentlessly ancient and surprisingly modern, about growing up and growing old, about men and women, and about man and God. It is quintessential Heller.

It's uncanny! Within six months of breaking up with her, Peg Silver's ex-lovers always meet and marry the women of their dreams. Even worse than being the eternal bridesmaid, she's the last girlfriend, the one who awakens in a guy theknowledge of what he's always wanted in a relationship ... and it's never with Peg. Obviously, a major lifestyle change is seriously called for, which is why the distraught interior landscape designer says good-bye to Manhattan and late-night lattes with pal Nina, and hello to a farmhouse on ten acres in tiny, backwater Manshire, Vermont, hoping to meet the ultimate, all-organic country man (without too much facial hair) to keep her warm in those frosty New England winters.

Instead, Peg finds herself at Inward Bound -- a proactive adult-education retreat for the hapless and hopelessly lovelorn -- to try to lift her dreaded "girlfriend curse." A steamy (and expressly forbidden) dalliance with gorgeous woman-eater Ray probably isn't going to help cure her. But some romantic insight could arise from her attraction to Linus, Inward Bound's sexy, scruffy, smart and still-single founder. Perhaps there is a secret to be unearthed in the crunchy Green Mountains, one that will magically transform Peg Silver from the Perpetual Also Ran to the Big Winner in love.

These twenty four short stories are ideal for advent reading or whenever you can fit them into the busy month of December. These festive snapshots into other people's lives aim to enliven and entertain. A handful of the stories are set in the recent past, because Christmas is a great time for nostalgia. There are stories about anticipation, hope and that tingling feeling you get when waiting for something pleasant to happen. There is a cast of characters of all ages and not all of them are human. There are themes of time and counting, dark and light, change and renewal. The book is two dozen slices of Christmas, waiting to bring cheer at the dark time of the year.

In this exuberantly strange story collection, Flores asks: Whose reality? What rules? --Jean Chen Ho, author of The New York Times Book Review These are marvelously unpredictable stories, anchored by Fernando A. Flores's deadpan prose and his surefooted navigation of those overlapping territories, the real and the fantastic, where so much of the best contemporary fiction now lives. --Kelly Link, author of Get in Trouble Psychedelic, dazzling stories set in the cracks of the Texas-Mexico borderland, from an iconoclastic storyteller and the author of Tears of the Trufflepig. No one captures the border--its history and imagination, its danger, contradiction, and redemption--like Fernando A. Flores, whose stories reimagine and reinterpret the region's existence with peerless style. In his immersive, uncanny borderland, things are never what they seem: a world where the sun is both rising and setting, and where conniving possums efficiently take over an entire town and rewrite its history. The stories in Valleyesque dance between the fantastical and the hyperreal with dexterous, often hilarious flair. A dying Frederic Chopin stumbles through Ciudad Juarez in the aftermath of his mother's death, attempting to recover his beloved piano that was seized at the border, while a muralist is taken on a psychedelic journey by an airbrushed Emiliano Zapata T-shirt. A woman is engulfed by a used-clothing warehouse with a life of its own, and a grieving mother breathlessly chronicles the demise of a town decimated by violence. In two separate stories, queso dip and musical rhythms are bottled up and sold for mass consumption. And in the final tale, Flores pieces together the adventures of a young Lee Harvey Oswald as he starts a music career in Texas. Swinging between satire and surrealism, grief and joy, Valleyesque is a boundary- and border-pushing collection from a one-of-a-kind stylist and voice. With the visceral imagination that made his debut novel, Tears of the Trufflepig, a cult classic, Flores brings his vision of the border to life--and beyond.

Fancy a spot of peaceful, dignified golf? Then West Belby, with its dark past and present traumas, is not the place for you. Hard up and desperate, the club's novice managers turn to the services of a mysterious American, who promises what he may never deliver and keeps his past a secret. Fraud, vandalism and an unexplained fire put fragile friendships and rocky relationships to the test. Old rivalries re-emerge, past loves gain new energy, ancient wrongs cry out for revenge and John Winter, a decent man with one major weakness, women, is caught in the middle of a tale of deceit, revenge, passion and humiliation, as the past returns to haunt them all. Even the tightly regulated game of golf, with its strict etiquette, buttoned-up morality, and a rule for every situation proves an unreliable restraint on the explosive emotions of its players. Off the course, moreover, there are no rules, and precious little remains buttoned-up for long! 'Winter Rules' is a rip-roaring follow-up to the popular 'The Trophy Wife'. It deals with grown-up themes in a humorous, witty and down-to earth way. The style is delightful, the characters engaging and the story turns this way and that before reaching a satisfying and surprising conclusion.

An artist in her thirties weaves and unravels connections between the loom and the computer, DNA and technology, dreams and decisions Thread Ripper is a multi-strand novel about weaving, women, and programming. In Copenhagen, a tapestry-weaver embarks on her first big commission, a digitally woven tapestry. As she works, she draws illuminating connections between all the stuff that life is made from - DNA, plant tissue, algorithms, text and textile - and that which disrupts it - radiation, pests, entropy and doubt. In another strand, we follow Ada Lovelace, the 1830s mathematician and pioneer of computer programming. And Penelope, the faithful wife of Odysseus, who wove and unpicked a shroud to put off her 108 suitors. Contemplative yet clear-sighted, Amalie Smith's hybrid textile of a novel bares the aching but crucial interwovenness of art and life.