Near the close of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel 'The Great Gatsby' the narrator, Carraway, believes Gatsby to be dead, but the death and funeral have been faked and Gatsby has escaped to Havana. There he builds a new career and some years later sets out to put the record straight and counter Carraway's misinterpretation of events and people. In the course of his story he expands on his early life, his experience in the War, his time at Oxford, his hoodlum years and his relationships with Arn...

Fiction can be a powerful force to educate students and employees in ways that lectures, textbooks, articles, case studies, and other traditional teaching approaches cannot. This anthology includes articles from a number of individuals from a range of different disciplines and perspectives. All of the contributors to Capitalism and Commerce in Imaginative Literature are committed to treating literary texts with integrity and believe that business should have a larger claim upon people’s li...

During the Great Depression there was little hope for a boy born into the slums of Cabbagetown, Toronto. But Jack Spayd is offered a ticket out in the form of a Hohner harmonica, won by his brutal drunken father in a late-night card game. Jack makes music as a way of escaping his surroundings, and his talent leads him to a jazz club and, eventually, to the jazz piano.Jack is a virtuoso and hits the road, enchanting audiences in Canada, wartime Europe and Las Vegas, where he is caugh...

Deep in a Northern Ontario forest live Tom and Charlie, two octogenarians determined to live out the rest of their lives on their own terms: free of all ties and responsibilities, their only connection to civilization two pot farmers who bring them whatever they can't eke out for themselves. But their solitude is disrupted by the arrival of two women. The first is a photographer searching for survivors of a series of catastrophic fires nearly a century earlier; the second is an elderly esc...

"Country Girl is Edna O'Brien's exquisite account of her dashing, barrier-busting, up-and-down life."-National Public RadioWhen Edna O'Brien's first novel, The Country Girls, was published in 1960, it so scandalized the O'Briens' local parish that the book was burned by its priest. O'Brien was undeterred and has since created a body of work that bears comparison with the best writing of the twentieth century. Country Girl brings us face-to-face with a life of high drama and...

Legendary writer Trevanian brings readers his most personal novel yet: a funny, deeply felt, often touching coming-of-age novel set in 1930s America.Six-year-old Jean-Luc LaPointe, his little sister, and his spirited but vulnerable young mother have been abandoned—again—by his father, a charming con artist. With no money and nowhere else to go, the LaPointes create a fragile nest in a tenement building at 238 North Pearl Street in Albany, New York.For the n...

What does a football hooligan firm do outside football? In the case of Mark Chester and the infamous Stoke City Naughty Forty, the answer was: live off their wits and burn the candle at both ends. Chester left Stoke in the mid-Eighties in search of something more than the buzz of terrace violence. He lived in North Africa with a pickpocket gang called The Hawks and dealt hash and coke in the Spanish coastal resorts, fighting off rival Moroccan dealers. After returning to London as a down-a...

From the international-bestselling author comes a “taut, entertaining archaeological murder-mystery-meets-spy-thriller” (Kirkus Reviews).When journalist Rivka Kleinberg is brutally murdered in a Jerusalem cathedral, it’s a complicated case for detective Arieh Ben-Roi. Kleinberg had racked up a wide array of enemies exposing corruption in the halls of power—from international corporations and the Russian mob to the Israeli government.Learning that K...

Will what happens on holiday ... stay on holiday? And can they learn to live with the consequences?Every year, a close-knit group of friends spend two sun-filled weeks in a Spanish villa. For Derek and Sharonne, Conor and Maeve, Rory and Trish, and Liam, it's the perfect way to end the summer and escape their high-pressured lives in Dublin. No children, no responsibilities, and no distractions.This year, however, the group befriends Agneta and Anna Maria, t...

A hilarious anthology of comic treasures written by Britain's "comic genius"—the former editor of Punch and beloved regular on BBC's Radio 4 ( The Times).Alan Coren was one of contemporary Britain's most prolific humorists. Over his forty-year career, Coren wrote comic and satirical pieces for The New Yorker, The Times, Observer, Tatler, Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday, and Punch, and publi...

With Star Over Bethlehem, the beloved Queen of Mystery Agatha Christie shines in a totally unexpected way, offering readers a wondrous collection of poems and holiday short stories.A retelling of the Christmas Story in a way you’ve never heard it before. . . . The fable of a donkey who carries a mother and child safely to Egypt. . . . The tale of a widow who dislikes people until she meets a stranger. . . .From the most popular writer of all time c...

S****honagh Koea exhibits her wonderful ability to combine the wry with the poignant in this finely observed short story. When asked which was her daughter, Alyssum's mother always used to say, 'The ugly one.' Alyssum has since made a life for herself, away from her old home. But her mother is now in hospital, suffering from dementia. Can Alyssum reach through the pain of the past or will her mother have the last word? Funny, touching, painful, this is quintessential Koea ...