From the author of Romancing Spain, a novel about two fishing buddies and about home, family, and the stories we tell to keep the illusion alive.In his latest novel, award-winning writer Lamar Herrin highlights the art of storytelling and the value of friendship with a lush, outdoor landscape serving as a backdrop. Set over the course of a weekend spent fishing on an Adirondack lake, two middle-aged friends—Jim McManus and Walter Kidman—sip Jim Beam on the ...

Imagine a boy born in the last year of World War II to parents who before the war had become the darlings of their town. The father had been a four-letter man at the state university, an open and generous and engaging personality, and his spirited and beautiful bride had matched him stride for winning stride. The son knows his parents both through the legendary stories he has heard about them and, when the father returns from the Battle of the Bulge missing his left leg, as embittered post...

Imagine a boy born in the last year of World War II to parents who before the war had become the darlings of their town. The father had been a four-letter man at the state university, an open and generous and engaging personality, and his spirited and beautiful bride had matched him stride for winning stride. The son knows his parents both through the legendary stories he has heard about them and, when the father returns from the Battle of the Bulge missing his left leg, as embittered post...

Ben Williamson has lost a daughter. While studying abroad in Madrid, Michelle Williamson was caught in a bombing by Basque separatists, a bombing that killed her and several members of the Guardia Civil at a post in a park. For Ben, this act of violence has left only questions, and at a moment of despair he decides to seek out the reasons for Michelle’s death. As Ben begins to learn about the endless tensions beneath the surface of Spanish culture, he finds that he wants someone to answer ...

Does a man fall in love with a country first or the woman he finds there?And which love is finally the greatest?In this elegant account of his falling for the Spanish woman he married 30 years ago, Lamar Herrin opens his heart, his natural skepticism, and an American’s awe of history to a complex nation that is both rich in tradition and astoundingly foreign.Portraying himself as a Quixote in love with Romance, Herrin allows us to watch as he struggles to win the wo...

A Thousand Acres and Empire Falls meet during the present hydrofracking controversy as a beleaguered patriarch must decide the fate of his land and children in this enveloping family dramaThe Joyner family sits atop prime Marcellus Shale. When landmen for the natural gas companies begin to lease property all around the family's hundred acres, the Joyners start to take notice. Undecided on whether or not to lease the family land, Frank Joyner must w...

Bruno Cadogan has flown from New York to Buenos Aires in search of the elusive and legendary Julio Martel, a tango singer whose voice has never been recorded yet is said to be so beautiful it is almost supernatural. Bruno is increasingly drawn to the mystery of Martel and his strange and evocative performances in a series of apparently arbitrary sites around the city. As Bruno tries to find Martel, he begins to untangle the story of the singer's life, and to believe that Martel's increasin...

I’ve been a problem baby, a lousy son, a distant brother, an off-putting neighbor, a piss-poor student, a worrisome seatmate, an unreliable employee, a bewildering lover, a frustrating confidante and a crappy husband. Among the things I do pretty well at this point I’d have to list darts, re-closing Stay-Fresh boxes, and staying out of the way.This is the self-eulogy offered early on by the unwilling hero of the opening story in this collection, a dazzling array of work in...

An artist's sons hunt for their mysterious inheritance: "A pleasure to read . . . One of the most significant Argentine writers working today" (David Leavitt, author of The Lost Language of Cranes).At age nine, Juan Salvatierra became mute following a horse riding accident. At twenty, he began secretly painting a series of long rolls of canvas in which he minutely detailed six decades of life in his village on Argentina's river frontier with Uruguay.

Julio Ramón Ribeyro has been widely acclaimed Peru's master storyteller. Until now, however, few of his stories have been translated into English. This volume brings together fifteen stories written during the period 1952-1975, which were collected in the three volumes of La palabra del mudo. Ribeyro's stories treat the social problems brought about by urban expansion, including poverty, racial and sexual discrimination, class struggles, alienation, and violence. At the same time, elements of...

The author of the acclaimed memoir Mother and Son creates an intimate portrait of poet Elizabeth Bishop in this “sensitive and engrossing” debut novel (Publishers Weekly).“A portrait of the artist as a human—a woman of desire, contradiction, and need.” —A. M. Homes, author of The Mistress’s Daughter Artfully drawing from Elizabeth Bishop’s lifelong correspondences and biography, The More I Owe You explores the modernist poet’s intensely private world, incl...

In her father’s Peruvian family, Marie Arana was taught to be a proper lady, yet in her mother’s American family she learned to shoot a gun, break a horse, and snap a chicken’s neck for dinner. Arana shuttled easily between these deeply separate cultures for years. But only when she immigrated with her family to the United States did she come to understand that she was a hybrid American whose cultural identity was split in half. Coming to terms with this split is at the heart of this grace...