Vintage

Transparent Things revolves around the four visits of the hero--sullen, gawky Hugh Person--to Switzerland . . .As a young publisher, Hugh is sent to interview R., falls in love with Armande on the way, wrests her, aftermultiple humiliations, from a grinning Scandinavian and returns to NY with his bride. . . . Eight years later--following a murder,...

R. K. Narayan (19062001) witnessed nearly a century of change in his native India and captured it in fiction of uncommon warmth and vibrancy.In The Dark Room, Narayan's portrait of aggrieved domesticity, the docile and obedient Savitri, like many Malgudi women, is torn between submitting to her husband's humiliations and trying to escape...

EssaysFrom one of America's great literary figures, a new collection of essays on eminent writers and their work, and on the war between art and life. The perilous intersection of writers' lives with public and private dooms is the fertile subject of many of these remarkable essays from such literary giants as T.S. Eliot, Isaac Babel,...

StoriesAmy Bloom was nominated for a National Book Award for her first collection, Come to Me, and her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Story, Antaeus, and other magazines, and in The Best American Short Stories and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. In her new collection, she enhances her reputation as a true artist of the form.Here are...

By the author of A Lesson Before Dying and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, 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....

In the novels of R. K. Narayan (1906-2001), the forefather of modern Indian fiction, human-scale hopes and epiphanies express the promise of a nation as it awakens to its place in the world. In Waiting for the Mahatma, a young drifter meets the most beautiful girl he has ever seenan adherent of Mahatma Gandhiand commits himself to Gandhi's...