Five of Saul Bellow’s most moving, richly textured, and exquisitely plotted short stories make up this volume, each providing a history of personality and self-awakening. The title story, “Him with His Foot in His Mouth,” follows a musicologist narrator who for years has scattered wounding witticisms “from the depths of my nature, that hoard of strange formulations.” As the story unfolds he tries to discover what led him into a “deep legal-financial hole,” while he awaits extradition from a refuge in British Columbia. “What Kind of Day Did You Have?” follows a divorced suburban woman and her lovers—would-be and actual—through a frantic day in their lives. Their needs and passions, as well as their comic conflicts, are matters of life and death. In “Zetland: By a Character Witness” and in “A Silver Dish,” Bellow returns, with his unequaled command of eloquent recollected detail, to a bygone Chicago, “Zetland” is a brilliant portrait of an artist as a young boy and a man, precocious and eccentric; “A Silver Dish” is a memorable story of a raffish, willful father and his affectionate son. “Cousins,” the final story in the volume, explores the mysteries of family feeling, mysteries that defy both logic and the worthiness of their objects, as Ijah Brodsky, successful in the larger world, is drawn into an encounter with criminal and naively idealistic forces. This collection represents a turning point in the bountiful career of Saul Bellow, a felicitous rendering of the human condition in all its absurd complexity.

In The Dean's December, the contrasts are between the decaying society of late communist Rumania and the problems of society in contemporary Chicago. The Dean is in Rumania to be with his dying mother-in-law, a formerly powerful party official who has been ostracised for allowing her daughter, an internationally famous astronomer, to emigrate to the west. The Dean, who is a respected journalist, has ruffled powerful feathers in Chicago with a series of pointed articles critical of certain aspects of Chicago society and has also been involved in seeking justice in a case where one of his students has been murdered. In this he is opposed by his radical nephew who thinks that the case is racist because the accused are African Americans of deprived social origins.

Moses Berger's magnificent obsession with the Gursky family leads him to Solomon Gursky, the disdained, disgraced, and dead Gursky brother who figures prominently, but mysteriously, in the annals of Gursky history and finance.

Is keeping a secret from a spouse always an act of infidelity? And what cost does such a secret exact on a family?

The Ryries have suffered a loss: the death of a baby just fifty-seven hours after his birth. Without words to express their grief, the parents, John and Ricky, try to return to their previous lives. Struggling to regain a semblance of normalcy for themselves and for their two older children, they find themselves pretending not only that little has changed, but that their marriage, their family, have always been intact. Yet in the aftermath of the baby's death, long-suppressed uncertainties about their relationship come roiling to the surface. A dreadful secret emerges with reverberations that reach far into their past and threaten their future.

The couple's children, ten-year-old Biscuit and thirteen-year-old Paul, responding to the unnamed tensions around them, begin to act out in exquisitely- perhaps courageously-idiosyncratic ways. But as the four family members scatter into private, isolating grief, an unexpected visitor arrives, and they all find themselves growing more alert to the sadness and burdens of others-to the grief that is part of every human life but that also carries within it the power to draw us together.

Moving, psychologically acute, and gorgeously written, The Grief of Others asks how we balance personal autonomy with the intimacy of relationships, how we balance private decisions with the obligations of belonging to a family, and how we take measure of our own sorrows in a world rife with suffering. This novel shows how one family, by finally allowing itself to experience the shared quality of grief, is able to rekindle tenderness and hope.

Two decades later after Those who Save Us, Karena gets a call from a psychiatric ward in Wichita, Kansas, to come pick up her brother, whom she hasn't seen or spoken to for twenty years. She soon discovers that Charles has lied to the doctors, taken medication that could make him dangerously manic, and disappeared again. Having exhausted every resource to try and track him down, Karena realizes she has only one last chance of finding him: the storms. Wherever the tornadoes are, that's where he'll be. Karena joins a team of professional stormchasers-passionate adventurers who will transform her life and give her a chance at love and redemption--and embarks on an odyssey to find her brother before he reveals the violent secret from their past and does more damage to himself . . . or to someone else.

After a long and heartbreaking journey to Dimitri's birthplace in Siberia, Rose Hathaway has finally returned to St. Vladimir's - and to her best friend, Lissa. It is at long last graduation, and the girls can't wait for their real lives beyond the Academy's iron gates to begin. But Rose's heart still aches for Dimitri, and she knows he's out there, somewhere. She failed to kill him when she had the chance. And now her worst fears are about to come true. Dimitri has tasted her blood, and now he is hunting her. And this time he won't rest until Rose joins him . . .

At the heart of this panoramic, multidimensional narrative is the compelling struggle of a young woman to lift her body and soul out of the gutter. Faber leads readers back to 1870s London, where Sugar, a 19-year-old whore in the brothel of the terrifying Mrs. Castaway, yearns for escape to a better life.

Features anti-personnel mines, Africa, and the journey one woman makes to find the person responsible for the death of her son in Angola. This book is both an examination of what bereavement means to one character and an indictment of the arms trade.

Set in Northern Ireland, this thriller, shortlisted for the Booker Prize 1990, is about a man who faces a dramatic moral choice just when he's looking for happiness. B. Moore won the W.H.Smith Literary Award for Catholics and the J.Tait Black Memorial Prize for The Great Victorian Collection.

The ruins of the Forum in Rome are one of the best known wonders of antiquity and a highpoint of the tourist route round the Eternal City; but the Forum remains for many visitors a baffling and unwelcoming place. In this book, David Watkins discusses this topic.

I was living in a fairy story - the kind with sinister overtones and not always a happy ending - in which a young man loves a beautiful maiden who returns his love but is always disappearing into some unknown and mysterious world, about which she will reveal nothing," So writes John Bayley about his wife, Iris Murdoch, considered by many to be one of the greatest living writers in the English-speaking world. In dreamlike passages, he recalls both his youthful love for an entrancing philosopher who stole his heart at Oxford's St. Antony's Dance in 1954, as well as their marriage, a union of two great minds, which resulted two years later.

'Away' is the story of young Lillian Leyb. Her family murdered in a Russian pogrom, Lillian comes to America alone, determined to make her way. In 1920s New York she is taken under the wing of Mr Reuben Burstein, the famous Impresario and his matinee-idol son. But then she finds out that her daughter, Sophie, may still be alive.

Everymans Library no. 25

A witty and entertaining guide to the use of Latin expressions for one's own advantage in the modern world.

See America with 50 of Our Finest, Funniest, and Foremost Writers Anthony Bourdain chases the fumigation truck in Bergen County, New Jersey. Dave Eggers tells it straight: Illinois is Number 1. Louise Erdrich loses her bikini top in North Dakota. Jonathan Franzen gets waylaid by New York's publicist...and personal attorney...and historian...and geologist. John Hodgman explains why there is no such thing as a "Massachusettsean". Edward P. Jones makes the case: D.C. should be a state! Jhumpa Lahiri declares her reckless love for the Rhode Island coast. Rick Moody explores the dark heart of Connecticut's Merritt Parkway, exit by exit. Ann Patchett makes a pilgrimage to the Civil War site at Shiloh, Tennessee. William T. Vollmann visits a San Francisco S&M club and Many More!

One Sunday afternoon in Southern California, Bert Cousins shows up at Franny Keating's christening party uninvited. Before evening falls, he has kissed Franny's mother, Beverly--thus setting in motion the dissolution of their marriages and the joining of two families.

Spanning five decades, Commonwealth explores how this chance encounter reverberates through the lives of the four parents and six children involved. Spending summers together in Virginia, the Keating and Cousins children forge a lasting bond that is based on a shared disillusionment with their parents and the strange and genuine affection that grows up between them.

When, in her twenties, Franny begins an affair with the legendary author Leon Posen and tells him about her family, the story of her siblings is no longer hers to control. Their childhood becomes the basis for his wildly successful book, ultimately forcing them to come to terms with their losses, their guilt, and the deeply loyal connection they feel for one another.

Told with equal measures of humor and heartbreak, Commonwealth is a meditation on inspiration, interpretation, and the ownership of stories. It is a brilliant and tender tale of the far-reaching ties of love and responsibility that bind us together.

A new narrative history of the Viking Age, interwoven with exploration of the physical remains and landscapes that the Vikings fashioned and walked: their rune-stones and ship burials, settlements and battlefields.

"This revised Norton Critical Edition, like its predecessor, is the only edition available that includes both the 1890 Lippincott's and the 1891 book version of The Picture of Dorian Gray. Under the editorial guidance of Wilde scholar Michael Patrick Gillespie, students have the opportunity to read comparatively both published versions of this controversial novel." ""Backgrounds" and "Reviews and Reactions" allow readers to gauge The Picture of Dorian Gray's sensational reception when the 1890 version appeared and to consider the heated public debate over art and morality that followed its publication. Joris-Karl Huysmans, Walter Pater, and Oscar Wilde offer a sense of the diverse opinions on these topics. Eight contemporary reviews and comments on the novel are reprinted, among them four opinions from the St. James's Gazette immediately after publication in 1890, each followed by Oscar Wilde's vehement reply." ""Criticism" includes seven new essays on the novel that reflect key changes in interpretive theory in recent years and reveal the broad range of perspectives associated with Wilde and The Picture of Dorian Gray. Simon Joyce, Donald L. Lawler, Sheldon W. Liebman, Maureen O'Connor, Ellie Ragland-Sullivan, John Paul Riquelme, and Michael Patrick Gillespie provide their varied assessments. A Chronology and a Selected Bibliography are also included."--BOOK JACKET.

Detailed essays, extensive photos, and informative sidebars describe life in ancient Aztec civilization, showing the results of significant archaeological digs; also includes a time line and a bibliography.

The story of Celie, a poor black woman from the south, whose friendship with two women helps her overcome the brutality of her father and husbandSteven Spielberg, proving he's one of the few modern filmmakers who has the visual fluency to be capable of making a great silent film, took a melodramatic, D.W. Griffith-inspired approach to filming Alice Walker's novel. His tactics made the film controversial, but also a popular hit. You can argue with the appropriateness of Spielberg's decision, but his astonishing facility with images is undeniable--from the exhilarating and eye-popping opening shots of children playing in paradisiacal purple fields to the way he conveys the brutality of a rape by showing hanging leather belts banging against the head of the shaking bed. In a way it's a shame that Whoopi Goldberg, a stage monologist who made her screen debut in this movie, went on to become so famous, because it was, in part, her unfamiliarity that made her understated performance as Celie so effective. (This may be the first and last time that the adjective understated can be applied to Goldberg.) Nominated for 11 Academy Awards, including best picture and actress (supporting players Oprah Winfrey and Margaret Avery were also nominated), it was quite a scandal--and a crushing blow to Spielberg--when it won none.