The public face of Washington-the gridiron of L'Enfant's avenues, the buttoned-down demeanor Sloan Wilson's archetypal "Man in the Grey Flannel Suit," the monumental buildings of the Triangle-rarely gives up the secrets of this city's rich life. But, beneath the surface there are countless stories to be told. From the early swamp days to the Civil War, the "gilded age" to the New Deal and McCarthy eras, as the center of world power to its underlying multicultural social fabric, Washington ...

Lyrically told and impeccably researched, Song of Slaves in the Desert traces the story of Nathaniel Pereira, a young New Yorker who's called to revive his uncle's South Carolina plantation. Nathaniel is struck by the sobering reality of slavery as he becomes captivated by the young slave Liza. Liza's never known the meaning of freedom, and as Nathaniel plunges into the murky mysteries of slavery, she can see how he might change her life forever. A masterful writer, Cheuse traces the threa...

Following a military mutiny on a Caribbean island that takes the life of his commander, young Lieutenant Sulgrave returns to the United States and becomes embroiled in a turbulent love affair with the man's widow.

When he sold his first short story to The New Yorker in 1979, Alan Cheuse was hardly new to the literary world. He had studied at Rutgers under John Ciardi, worked at the Breadloaf Writing Workshops with Robert Frost and Ralph Ellison, written hundreds of reviews for Kirkus Reviews, and taught alongside John Gardner and Bernard Malamud at Bennington College for nearly a decade. Soon after the New Yorker story appeared, Cheuse wrote a freelance magazine piece abou...

Finely-honed portraits of hope and change, these two novellas are linked so skillfully that they achieve the intensity of a single novel in which some characters succeed and others fail on separate but equally compelling quests. In "The Fires," Gina Morgan makes a pilgrimage to Uzbekistan to carry out her husband's final wish—to be cremated—only to find herself entirely at sea in the strange new reality of the former Soviet republic, while in "The Exorcism," Tom Swanson begins to make sens...

Back in print after nearly fifty years–the acclaimed fiction debut of novelist H. L. Humes, co-founder of The Paris Review“Immensely intelligent and energetic, intensely dramatic and melodramatic, heroically overwritten yet sharp, insightful, and precise, The Underground City is an astonishing book by a writer of abundant gifts whose resurrection is long overdue.”–Peter MatthiessenIt is the late 1940s and Paris is in turmoil. A man named Dujardin is...

On the assumption that John Updike was correct when he asserted, in a 1978 letter to Joyce Carol Oates, that "Nobody can read like a writer," Why I Like This Story presents brief essays by forty-eight leading American writers on their favorite American short stories, explaining why they like them. The essays, which are personal, not scholarly, not only tell us much about the story selected, they also tell us a good deal about the author of the essay, about what elements of fiction...

The first-ever collection of 50+ writings from the 20th-century critic who “redefined the possibilities of the literary essay”—including works not seen in print for decades (The New Yorker)Elizabeth Hardwick wrote during the golden age of the American literary essay. For Hardwick, the essay was an imaginative endeavor, a serious form, criticism worthy of the literature in question.In the essays collected here, she covers civil rights demonstrations...

In this collection of nonfiction pieces, John Updike gathers his responses to nearly two hundred invitations into print, each “an opportunity to make something beautiful, to find within oneself a treasure that would otherwise remain buried.”Introductions, reviews, and humorous essays, paragraphs on New York, religion, and lust—here is “more matter” commissioned by an age that, as the author remarks in his Preface, calls for “real stuff . . . not for the obliquities...

The Striker is the sixth novel in Clive Cussler's Isaac Bell series.It is 1902, and a bright, inexperienced young man named Isaac Bell, only two years out of his apprenticeship at the Van Dorn Detective Agency, has an urgent message for his boss. Hired to hunt for radical unionist saboteurs in the coal mines, he is witness to a terrible accident. And it begins to become clear that the trouble doesn't stop with the men he's looking for. Much bigger stakes a...

Thoroughly revised and expanded for a new generation of readers, this classic guide to enjoying literature to its fullest—a lively, enlightening, and entertaining introduction to a diverse range of writing and literary devices that enrich these works, including symbols, themes, and contexts—teaches you how to make your everyday reading experience richer and more rewarding.While books can be enjoyed for their basic stories, there are often deeper literary meanings beneath the surfac...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Maya Angelou shares her path to living well and with meaning in this absorbing book of personal essays.Dedicated to the daughter she never had but sees all around her, Letter to My Daughter transcends genres and categories: guidebook, memoir, poetry, and pure delight.Here in short spellbinding essays are glimpses of the tumultuous life that led Angelou to an exalted place in American letters and taught her lesso...