When F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote THE GREAT GATSBY in the early 1920s, the American Dream was already on the skids. Originally based on the idea that the pursuit of happiness involves not only material success but moral and spiritual growth, the dream had by Fitzgerald's time become increasingly focused on money and pleasure--a phenomenon the high-liv...more
Everyone knows the fate of Anne Boleyn, but not many know the story of her rise to majesty and the part played by her rival and sister, Mary, who was Henry's mistress and mother to two of his bastard children before the dazzling older Boleyn girl even caught his eye. Philippa Gregory, whose own role as the Queen of historical romance grows more sec...more
In Alias Grace, bestselling author Margaret Atwood has written her most captivating, disturbing, and ultimately satisfying work since The Handmaid's Tale. She takes us back in time and into the life of one of the most enigmatic and notorious women of the nineteenth century.Grace Marks has been convicted for her involvement in the vicious murders o...more
I have been standing on the side of life, watching it float by. I want to swim in the river. I want to feel the current.So writes Mamah Borthwick Cheney in her diary as she struggles to justify her clandestine love affair with Frank Lloyd Wright. Four years earlier, in 1903, Mamah and her husband, Edwin, had commissioned the renowned architect to d...more
Set in Vietnam in the 1950s, during the last days of French colonial rule, THE QUIET AMERICAN was based partly on Graham Greene's own experiences in Vietnam as a correspondent for the London Times. The book's narrator is an English journalist named Fowler who lives in Saigon with his Vietnamese mistress, Phuong, but is unable to convince his Cathol...more
Under any name she's a #1 New York Times bestselling author. Eve Dallas must stop a serial bomber from igniting his ultimate weapon in New York City. This one's "a perfect balance of suspense, futuristic police procedural, and steamy romance" (Publishers Weekly).
Magical, tantalizing, and sensual, The Mistress of Spices is the story of Tilo, a young woman born in another time, in a faraway place, who is trained in the ancient art of spices and ordained as a mistress charged with special powers. Once fully initiated in a rite of fire, the now immortal Tilo--in the gnarled and arthritic body of an old woman-...more
Sister Carrie, by Theodore Dreiser, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics: New introductions comm...more
Walter Faber is an emotionally detached engineer forced by a string of coincidences to embark on a journey through his past. The basis for director Volker Schlšndorff’s movie Voyager. Translated by Michael Bullock. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book
Abandoned pregnant and penniless on the teeming streets of London, 16-year-old Amber St. Clare manages, by using her wits, beauty, and courage, to climb to the highest position a woman could achieve in Restoration England-that of favorite mistress of the Merry Monarch, Charles II. From whores and highwaymen to courtiers and noblemen, from events su...more