Dating Kundiman

2007-04-01T23:56:00.001-07:00

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Complete List of Available Titles

2004-11-30T22:56:00.000-08:00

This list is now updated daily! Reserved books are now marked, and removed from the list as soon as they are bought. New titles are added regularly. Visit us more often. (*=hardcover)

Latest Update: 20 March 2007, 4:46 p.m.

1996 Children's Writer's & Illustrator's Market (PhP 100.00)*
Darrel Abel, American Literature: Literature of the Atlantic Culture (PhP 100.00)
Peter Ackroyd, First Light (PhP 180.00)
Mortimer J. Adler, Adler's Philosophical Dictionary (PhP 120.00)
James Agee, A Death in the Family (PhP 100.00)
Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim (PhP 80.00)
Aristophanes, The Complete Plays of Aristophanes (PhP 120.00)
Isaac Asimov, Second Foundation (PhP 80.00)
Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye (PhP 120.00)
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale (PhP 120.00) *Reserved*
Paul Auster, City of Glass (PhP 100.00)
Virginia M. Axline, Play Therapy (PhP 120.00)
Richard Bach, A Gift of Wings (PhP 100.00)
Richard Bach, Running from Safety (PhP 100.00)
James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work (PhP 120.00) *Reserved*
John Barth, The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor (PhP 180.00)
John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor (PhP 180.00)
Donald Barthelme, Snow White (PhP 140.00) *Reserved*
Frederick Barthelme, Painted Desert (PhP 120.00)
Ann Beattie, The Burning House: Short Stories (PhP 80.00)
Stephen Behrendt, editor, History & Myth (PhP 190.00)
Saul Bellow, Henderson the Rain King (PhP 140.00)
Saul Bellow, Herzog (PhP 80.00)
Saul Bellow, To Jerusalem and Back (PhP 100.00)
John Bennett, Master Skylark (PhP 80.00)
John Berger, To the Wedding (PhP 140.00)
Alexis Bespaloff, The Signet Book of Wine (PhP 60.00)
Bhaktivedante Institute, Consciousness: The Missing Link (PhP 80.00) *Reserved*
Cyril Birch, editor, Anthology of Chinese Literature (PhP 190.00) * *Reserved*
John Boardman, Greek Art (PhP 180.00)
William Boyd, Armadillo (PhP 160.00)
Paul Boyer & Stephen Nissenbaum, Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft
(PhP 180.00) *Reserved*
Malcolm Bradbury, Dangerous Pilgrimages (PhP 190.00)*
Breyten Breytenbach, A Season in Paradise (PhP 160.00)
Breyten Breytenbach, The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist (PhP 180.00)
Andre Brink, On the Contrary (PhP 180.00)
Joseph Epes Brown, The Sacred Pipe (PhP 60.00)
Pearl S. Buck, The Story Bible, Vol II: The New Testament (PhP 100.00)
Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France/& Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man (PhP 160.00)
Edgar Rice Burroughs, Pirates of Venus (PhP 80.00)
Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan Triumphant (PhP 80.00)
A. S. Byatt, Babel Tower (PhP 190.00)*
A. S. Byatt & Ignes Sodre, Imagining Characters (PhP 180.00)
Peter Carey, My Life as a Fake (PhP 180.00) *Reserved*
Peter Carey, Oscar and Lucinda (PhP 180.00)

Carlos Castaneda, Tales of Power (PhP 100.00)
A. C. Cawley, Everyman and Medieval Miracle Plays (PhP 120.00)
Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, a new modern English prose translation by R. M. Lumiansky with a preface by Mark Van Doren (120.00)
John Cheever, The Brigadier and the Golf Widow (PhP 60.00)
John Cheever, The Wapshot Chronicle (PhP 80.00)
Caryl Churchill, Plays: One (PhP 100.00)
Arthur C. Clarke, 2010: Odyssey Two (PhP 80.00)
Arthur C. Clarke, A Fall of Moondust (PhP 100.00)
Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood's End (PhP 100.00)
Arthur C. Clarke, The Fountains of Paradise (PhP 100.00)
Samuel L. Clemens, Tom Sawyer Abroad/Tom Sawyer Detective (PhP 60.00)
J. M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals (PhP 180.00)
Joseph Conrad, An Outcast of the Islands (PhP 80.00)
Joseph Conrad, Nostromo (PhP 100.00)
Stephen Crane, Maggie and Other Stories (PhP 100.00)
Frederick Crews, editor, Unauthorized Freud: Doubters Confront a Legend (PhP 180.00)
Ann Cummins, Red Ant House: Stories (PhP 180.00)
Michael Cunningham, Flesh and Blood (PhP 190.00)*
Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden (PhP 180.00)
Louis De Bernieres, Corelli's Mandolin (PhP 180.00)
Duc De Saint-Simon, The Age of Magnificence (PhP 60.00)
The Dead Sea Scriptures, with an introduction and notes by Theodor H. Gaster (PhP 160.00) *Reserved*
The Dialogues of Plato, with an introduction by Erich Segal (PhP 140.00)
Philip K. Dick, Dr. Bloodmoney (PhP 120.00)
Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle (PhP 180.00)
Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Betlehem (PhP 100.00)
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sherlock Holmes Mysteries (PhP 120.00)
Roddy Doyle, A Star Called Henry (PhP 190.00)*
Patricia Duncker, Hallucinating Foucault (PhP 140.00)
Gerald Durrell, My Family and Other Animals (PhP 140.00)
Harlan Ellison, Isaac Asimov's I, Robot: The Illustrated Screenplay (PhP 160.00) *Reserved*
Steve Erickson, Rubicon Beach (PhP 120.00)
William Faulkner, The Wild Palms (PhP 100.00)
Sebastian Faulks, The Girl at the Lion D'or (PhP 140.00)
Penelope Fitzgerald, The Book Shop (PhP 140.00)
John Fowles, The Magus (PhP 60.00)
Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning (PhP 100.00)
Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain (PhP 160.00)
Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (PhP 160.00) *Reserved*
Erich Fromm, The Sane Society (PhP 140.00)
John Gardner, Grendel (PhP 140.00)
John Gardner, The Sunlight Dialogues (PhP 140.00)
Frederick Gentles & Melvin Steinfield, eds., Hangups from Way Back: Historical Myths and Canons (PhP 190.00)
Jean Craighead George, Julie of the Wolves (PhP 60.00)
Dr. Haim G. Ginott, Between Parent & Child (PhP 60.00)
Dr. Haim G. Ginott, Between Parent & Teenager (PhP 60.00)
Maxim Gorky, The Lower Depths & Other Plays (PhP 180.00)
Melissa Fay Greene, Praying for Sheetrock (PhP 180.00)
Edith Hamilton, Mythology (PhP 180.00)
Jonathan Harr, A Civil Action (PhP 140.00)
Jim Haskins, Outward Dreams: Black Inventors and Their Inventions (PhP 80.00)
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (PhP 100.00)
Torey L. Hayden, One Child (PhP 80.00)
Hermann Hesse, Magister Ludi/ The Glass Bead Game (PhP 140.00)
Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha (PhP 140.00) *Reserved*
Oscar Hijuelos, The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien (PhP 120.00)
Alan Hollinghurst, The Swimming-Pool Library (PhP 180.00)
Marjorie Holmes, Two From Galilee (PhP 80.00)
Maxine Hong Kingston, Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (PhP 160.00)
Jerry Hopkins & Danny Sugerman, No One Here Gets Out Alive: The Biography of Jim
Morrison (PhP 160.00)
L. Ron Hubbard, Scientology: A New Slant on Life (PhP 160.00)
L. Ron Hubbard, Self Analysis (PhP 140.00)
Keri Hulme, The Bone People (PhP 160.00)
James Huneker, Chopin: The Man and His Music (PhP 180.00) *Reserved*
John Irving, Setting Free the Bears (PhP 120.00)
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (PhP 60.00)
Mark Kharitonov, Lines of Fate (PhP 180.00)
Clyde Kluckhohn & Dorothea Leighton, The Navaho (PhP 120.00)
Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation (PhP 120.00)
S. Korner, Kant (PhP 180.00)
Jerzy Kosinski, Being There (PhP 100.00)
Jerzy Kosinski, Blind Date (PhP 80.00)
Jerzy Kosinski, The Hermit of 69th Street (PhP 190.00)*
David Leavitt, Equal Affections (PhP 190.00)*
C. Y. Lee, Lover's Point (PhP 120.00)
Ursula K. LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness (PhP 100.00)
Doris Lessing, African Stories (PhP 180.00)
Doris Lessing, Children of Violence: A Proper Marriage (PhP 120.00)
Doris Lessing, The Four-Gated City (PhP 180.00)
Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook (PhP 160.00)
Doris Lessing, The Grass Is Singing (PhP 100.00)
Primo Levi, The Monkey's Wrench (PhP 160.00)
C. S. Lewis, Perelandra (PhP 100.00)
Sinclair Lewis, Arrowsmith (PhP 100.00)
Sinclair Lewis, Main Street (PhP 180.00)
Gordon Lish, editor, The Quarterly: 24 (PhP 120.00)
Penelope Lively, Moon Tiger (PhP 180.00)
David Lodge, Small World (PhP 120.00)
Lois Lowry, The Giver (PhP 100.00)
Richard Lucas, Nature's Medicines (PhP 60.00)
Archibald MacLeish, JB (PhP 180.00)
Bernard Malamud, The Fixer (PhP 120.00)
Robert W. Marks, editor, Great Ideas in Pyschology: The Most Significant Writings of the Founders of Modern Psychology (PhP 140.00) *Reserved*
Armistead Maupin, Tales of the City (PhP 80.00)
Colleen McCullough, The Ladies of Missalonghi (PhP 100.00)
Ian McEwan, Atonement (PhP 180.00)
Ian McEwan, Black Dogs (PhP 190.00)*
Patrick McCabe, Mondo Desperado (PhP 160.00)
Patrick McGrath, Martha Peake (PhP 100.00)
Herman Melville, Typee (PhP 80.00)
Yukio Mishima, Sun and Steel (PhP 120.00)
Rohinton Mistry, A Fine Balance (PhP 180.00)
N. Scott Momaday, House Made of Dawn (PhP 80.00)
Alebrt H. Morehead, et. al., editors, 100 Great American Novels: Plot Outlines, Author Biographies, & Critical and Historical Data (PhP 140.00)
Toni Morrison, Beloved (PhP 140.00)
Toni Morrison, Paradise (PhP 190.00)*
John Mortimer, In Character (PhP 80.00)
Ferdinand Mount, The Liquidator (PhP 160.00)
Iris Murdoch, The Good Apprentice (PhP 190.00)*
V. S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River (PhP 120.00)
V. S. Naipaul, A Way in the World (PhP 180.00)
Lawrence Naumoff, Taller Women: A Cautionary Tale (PhP 120.00)
Andre Norton, Judgment on Janus (PhP 80.00)
Andre Norton, Sorceress of the Witch World (PhP 80.00)
Andre Norton, The Book of Andre Norton (PhP 100.00)
Andre Norton, Three Against the Witch World (PhP 80.00)
Tim O'Brien, Going After Cacciato (PhP 80.00)
Joyce Carol Oates, Crossing the Border (PhP 120.00)
Grace Paley, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (PhP 160.00)
Christ Paling, After the Raid (PhP 120.00)
Seymour M. Pitcher, The Case for Shakespeare's Authorship of "The Famous Victories" (PhP 160.00)*
Norman Holmes Pearson, editor, Decade: A Collection of Poems from the First Ten Years of The Wesleyan Poetry Program (PhP 160.00)
Plutarch, Lives of the Noble Greeks (PhP 100.00)
Terry Pratchett, The Color of Magic (PhP 120.00)
Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon (PhP 190.00)*

Mary Rakow, The Memory Room (PhP 190.00)*
Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (PhP 180.00)
Lati Rinbochay, et. al., Death, Intermediate State and Rebirth, Foreword by H. H. the Dalai Lama (PhP 120.00)
Paul Roche, translator, The Oedipus Plays of Sophocles: Complete Texts of Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, & Antigone (PhP 80.00)
Leo Rosten, The Joys of Yiddish (PhP 100.00)
Philip Roth, Goodbye, Columbus (PhP 80.00)
Philip Roth, Portnoy's Complaint (PhP 100.00)
Anatoioli Rybakov, Children of the Arabat (PhP 140.00)
Roger Sale, On Writing (PhP 140.00)
J. D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters & Seymour: An Introduction
(PhP 80.00)
William Saroyan, The Human Comedy (PhP 100.00)
Newt Scamander, Fantastic Beasts & Where To Find Them (PhP 120.00) *Reserved*
Paul Scott, The Jewel in the Crown (PhP 100.00)
Harumi Setouchi, Beauty in Disarray (PhP 160.00)
Beppe Severgnini, Ciao, America (PhP 190.00)*
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night (PhP 80.00)
Bernard Shaw, Arms and the Man (PhP 80.00)
Bernard Shaw, Heartbreak House (PhP 80.00)
Bernard Shaw, Major Barbara (PhP 80.00)
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (PhP 80.00)
Neal Shusterman, Speeding Bullet (PhP 80.00)
John D. Sinclair, Dante's Paradiso (Italian Text with English Translation and
Commentary) (PhP 140.00) *Reserved*
Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (PhP 80.00)
Isaac Bashevis Singer, Enemies, A Love Story (PhP 100.00)
Isaac Bashevis Singer, Shadows on the Hudson (PhP 190.00)*
Isaac Bashevis Singer, Shosha (PhP 120.00)
Isaac Bashevis Singer, The Slave (PhP 120.00)
Peter Singer, Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals (PhP
140.00)
Six Great Modern Short Novels (PhP 80.00)
Jane Smiley, A Thousand Acres (PhP 100.00)
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (PhP 80.00)
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Cancer Ward (PhP 120.00)
Susan Sontag, Death Kit (PhP 190.00)
Chris Stroffolino, Speculative Primitive (PhP 120.00)

John Stockwell, In Search of Enemies (PhP 60.00)
The Nation's Favorite Children's Poems (PhP 120.00)*
J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit (PhP 180.00)
Jeff Torrington, Swing Hammer Swing! (PhP 180.00)
Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi (PhP 100.00)
Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (PhP 120.00)
John Updike, Rabbit Redux (PhP 100.00)
John Updike, The Centaur (PhP 80.00)
Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism (PhP 120.00)
Sheldon Vanauken, A Severe Mercy: With Eighteen Letters by C. S. Lewis (PhP 160.00)
Guy Vanderhaeghe, Man Descending: Stories (PhP 140.00)
Jose Antonio Villareal, Pocho (PhP 100.00)
Richard Wagner, The Ring of the Nibelung (PhP 160.00) *Reserved*

Frank Waters, Book of the Hopi (PhP 120.00) *Reserved*
Sir Mortimer Wheeler, Archaeology from the Earth (PhP 120.00) *Reserved*
E. B. White, The Great Controversy (PhP 80.00)
Stewart Edward White, The Betty Book (PhP 120.00)
Patrick White, A Fringe of Leaves (PhP 160.00)
Patrick White, Riders in the Chariot (PhP 120.00)
Patrick White, The Aunt's Story (PhP 120.00)
Patrick White, The Burnt Ones (PhP 180.00)
Patrick White, The Cockatoos: Short Novels and Stories (PhP 140.00)
Lex Williford, Macauley's Thumb (PhP 180.00)*
William Butler Yeats, Selected Poems and Three Plays (PhP 180.00)
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, On The Bhagavad-Gita: A New Translation and Commentary,
Chapters 1-6 (PhP 120.00) *Reserved*

Author of the Week

2004-11-19T22:02:00.000-08:00

SAUL BELLOW
Saul Bellow (born June 10, 1915), acclaimed North American-Jewish writer, won the Nobel prize for literature in 1976 and is best known for writing novels which investigate isolation, spiritual dissociation and the possibilities of human awakening. While on a Guggenheim fellowship in Paris, he wrote most of his best-known novel, The Adventures of Augie March. After his parents emigrated from St. Petersburg, he was born in Lachine, Quebec and then schooled in the United States. Bellow has taught at the University of Minnesota, New York University, Princeton, the University of Chicago and Boston University. He currently (March, 2004) is University Professor and Professor of English at Boston University. [Read more]

Dangling Man
Penguin Books, 1994 (PhP 100.00)
Expecting to be inducted into the army, Joseph has given up his job and carefully prepared for his departure to the battlefront. When a series of mix-ups delays his induction, he finds himself facing a year of idleness. "Dangling Man" is his journal, a wonderful account of his restless wanderings through Chicago's streets, his musings on the past, his psychological reaction to his inactivity while war rages around him, and his uneasy insights into the nature of freedom and choice.

Herzog
Fawcett Crest, 1970 (PhP 80.00)
Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction. Winner of the $1,000 International Literary Prize. Herzog is the story of Moses Herzog, great sufferer, joker and moaner, cuckold, charmer, a man of our time. Seeing himself as a survivor, not only of his private disasters but also those of the age, Herzog cannot keep from asking what he calls the "piercing" questions. The answers he finds will matter not only to him but to readers of Saul Bellow's magnificent novel.

Mosby's Memoirs and Other Stories
Penguin Books, 1969 (PhP 80.00)
This is an unusually fine collection, often deeply moving, written by one of the greatest literary artists that America has produced. The human comedy--preposterous, affecting, and pathetic--is brilliantly portrayed in six stories that center on individuals contending with their intractable and capricious fates.

The Dean's December
Pocket Books, 1983 (PhP 80.00)
"The Dean's December" is renewed testament to a grand career, our greatest since Faulkner's and Frost's, at an age when most writers are hopelessly repeating themselves, Bellow is still finding good new things to do. This is his first novel since receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1976.

The Victim
Penguin Books, 1988 (PhP 100.00)
With his wife away visiting her mother, Asa Leventhal is left alone to cope with a hot New York summer and the paranoia brought on by the return of an old acquaintance. On the surface this is a competent little story about a solemn and touchy Jew accused by a fantastic Gentile of having ruined him. But it has a troubling depths of meaning which make it unusual among new novels. "The Victim" rates as a subtle and thoughtful contribution to the literature of twentieth-century anti-Semitism.

To Jerusalem and Back: A Personal Account
Avon Books, 1976 (PhP 80.00)
Among the most memorable characters ever portrayed by Saul Bellow are Israel's Prime Minister Rabin, Jerusalem's Mayor Teddy Kollek, Henry Kissinger, and Bellow's wife, Alexandra. Each is seen through the eyes of America's premier novelist in his first work of nonfiction, "To Jerusalem and Back." It is the engrossing story of several months pent in a land of cultural and spiritual wealth, of social elegance and ceremonial pageantry, of lush beauty in a once-barren desert, a land where battle rages over the horizon, and where even the most basic right, the right to survive, cannot be taken for granted.

9 Reasons To Buy Books From DK

2004-11-08T02:29:00.000-08:00

In DK, owning good books does not mean you have to spend much money. Book price ranges from PhP 60.00 to PhP 190.00, including hardbound books.
While most secondhand bookstores are several traffic hours away, DK lets you browse our selections through the net, even if you're at home or while working in the office.
DK sells only good (and mostly rare) literary and general interest titles. You can find the popular ones somewhere else.
You can reserve books for one week, and pick them up on your own assigned date.
You can browse our DK shelf when you get your reserved books, and instantly add other books in your to-buy list.
DK allows you to request for books, and we hunt them for you.
DK gives away a free classic book of your choice for every: a) PhP 500.00 single purchase, or b) PhP 1,000.00 cumulative purchases.
You want to give DK a try, and see if it's for real.
You are one of my 700+ friendsters, and you love books.

Nobel Prize-Winning Authors

2004-11-06T01:51:00.000-08:00

(The Nobel Prize in Literature has recognized the whole spectrum of literary works including poetry, novels, short stories, plays, essays and speeches. Starting off with the first prize in 1901 to the poet and philosopher Sully Prudhomme, author of Stances et Poèmes (1865), the Prize has distinguished the works of authors from different languages and cultural backgrounds. It has been awarded to unknown masters as well as authors acclaimed worldwide. Visit their site here.)

Man Booker Prize-Winning Authors

2004-11-05T20:37:00.000-08:00

(The Man Booker Prize for Fiction represents the very best in contemporary fiction. One of the world's most prestigious awards, and one of incomparable influence, it continues to be the pinnacle of ambition for every fiction writer. Visit their site here.)

SALMAN RUSHDIE

Haroun and the Sea of Stories: A Novel
Penguin Books, 1990 (PhP 100.00)
In his most humorous novel, Salman Rushdie gives us an imaginative work of extraordinary intensity and power that is, at its heart, an illumination of the necessity of storytelling in our lives.

National Book Award-Winning Authors

2004-11-04T20:50:00.000-08:00

(The National Book Awards are given to recognize achievements in four genres: Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, and Young People's Literature. The Winners, selected by five-member, independent judging panels for each genre, receive a $10,000 cash award and a crystal sculpture. Visit their site here.)

PETE DEXTER

Paris Trout
Penguin Books, 1988 (PhP 100.00)
Winner of the National Book Award, Paris Trout is the mesmerizing story of a shocking crime that eats away at the fabric of a small town, exposing its hypocrisies and shattering the lives of its citizens.

Saul Bellow

2004-11-01T23:09:00.000-08:00

Authors List U-Z

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Authors List P-T

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Authors List K-O

2004-11-01T22:47:00.000-08:00

Authors List F-J

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Authors List A-E

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Thornton Wilder

2004-11-01T22:41:00.000-08:00

American writer and playwright, best known for the Pulizer Prize awarded play OUR TOWN (1938), which was seen by the critic Brendan Gill as "a nightmare of passive awareness felt through all eternity", misinterpreted as a slice of Normann Rockwell-like Americana. Wilder's breakthrough novel was THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY (1927), an examination of justice and altruism in the fates of five travelers in the 18-century Peru, who happen to be crossing the finest bridge in the land when it breaks and throws them into the gulf below. A priest interprets the story of each victim in an attempt to explain the working of divine providence. [Read more]

Our Town
Bard Books, 1975 (PhP 20.00)
winner of the Pulitzer Prize. "Our Town" is a vision of the enduring truths of human existence, played out with simplicity and great beauty on an almost-bare stage. It represents, in its author's own words, "an attempt to find a value above all price for the smallest events in our daily life." The play's success was immediate and stunning, for it conveyed a profoundly touching universal message in a dramatic form more akin to the traditions of Oriental theater than to those of the West, and created a fresh, exciting theatrical experience.

The Bridge of San Luis Rey
Washington Square Press, 1969 (PhP 40.00)
"The Bridge of San Luis Rey" can be called the novel that firmly established Thornton Wilder in his prominent spot in American literature. This exquisite work, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Wilder in 1928, embodies writing of a very special sort. The gentle philosophy, as woven from the story of the five who fell from the bridge 200 years ago in Peru, is handled with such meticulous care in construction that the novel is still regarded as a model in contemporary letters. The faith of another era, another world, lives for today's reader.

Robert Bolt

2004-11-01T22:40:00.000-08:00

Over his lengthy, distinguished career, British screenwriter and playwright Robert Bolt has been thrice nominated for Academy Awards and has won twice for Doctor Zhivago (1965) and A Man for All Seasons(1966). Born and raised in Manchester, Bolt served in the British Air Force during WWII and afterward attended Manchester University. Following graduation, Bolt became a teacher of English at the prestigious Millfield private school in Somerset. He remained there between 1950-58. [Read more]

A Man for All Seasons
Vintage Books, 1960 (PhP 40.00)
Robert Bolt has written a play that is luminous with intelligence and steely with conviction. It combines in equal measure the dancing, ironic wit of detachment and the steady blue flame of commitment. With its commingling of literary grace, intellectual subtlety and human simplicity, it challenges the mind and, in the end, touches the heart. For it is not only about a man for all seasons but also about an inspiration for all time.

Barbara Lazear Ascher

2004-11-01T22:39:00.000-08:00

Barbara Lazear Ascher is a former attorney and the author of four books of non-fiction, Playing After Dark (Doubleday), The Habit of Loving (Random House), Landscape Without Gravity: A Memoir of Grief (Viking Penguin), and most recently, Dancing in the Dark: Romance, Yearning, and the Search for the Sublime (Harper Collins). She has been a columnist for The New York Times and Elle Magazine, a Contributing Editor at Self Magazine, book reviewer for The Washington Post Book World, NPR essayist, and contributor to The Yale Review, The New York Times Book Review, The New York Times Sophisticated Traveler, Travel and Leisure, Gourmet, Vogue, Modern Maturity, and numerous other national journals.

Landscape Without Gravity
Penguin Books, 1993 (PhP 80.00)
In July 1989 Barbara Lazear Ascher learned that her brother, Bobby, had died of AIDS at the age of thirty-one. With an older sister's efficiency, she notified her parents and arranged Bobby's cremation; then, almost against her will, she began to grieve. this extraordinary book is a record of what she encountered in that "landscape without gravity." Here is a bold account of a sister coming to terms with her brother's death and with the type of grief that arises only when one sibling loses another--a grief that is all too often unacknowledged and borne in silence. Here too is a mapfor that "hero's journey" we call mourning. Ascher locates the moments of healing inside the kind of hurt that seems to last forever, making this profoundly comforting, invaluable reading for anyone--especially brothers and sisters faced with loss.

William Golding

2004-11-01T22:06:00.001-08:00

William Golding was born in Cornwall in 1911 and was educated at Marlborough Grammar School and at Brasenose College, Oxford. Apart from writing, his past and present occupations include being a schoolmaster, a lecturer, an actor, a sailor, and a musician. His father was a schoolmaster and his mother was a suffragette. He was brought up to be a scientist, but revolted. After two years at Oxford he read English literature instead, and became devoted to Anglo-Saxon. He spent live years at Oxford. [Read more]

Free Fall
Harbinger Books, 1962 (PhP 100.00)
Samuel Mountjoy, artist, is promised torture in a prisoner-of-war camp, then locked in a cell in total darkness to wait. Sammy comes from his cell like Lazarus from the tomb, seeing infinity in a grain of and and eternity in an hour. He sees, too, and here begins his purgation, what men might be, and what he for one has made of himself by gradual progressive choice. It sends him on a pilgrimage back through his life, seeking its point of departure.

Willa Cather

2004-11-01T22:06:00.000-08:00

Willa Sibert Cather was born in Back Creek Valley, Virginia., on December. 7, 1873. She died on April. 24, 1947. Cather's work made her one of the most important American novelists of the first half of the 20th century. When Cather was nine, her family homesteaded in pioneer Nebraska. She was a tomboy at home in the saddle. enjoyed distinguished careers as journalist, editor, and fiction writer. Cather is most often thought of as a chronicler of the pioneer American West. Critics note that the themes of her work are intertwined with the universal story of the rise of civilizations in history, the drama of the immigrant in a new world, and views of personal involvements with art. Cather's fiction is characterized by a strong sense of place, the subtle presentation of human relationships, an often unconventional narrative structure, and a style of clarity and beauty. [Read more]

Obscure Destinies
Vintage Books, 1930 (PhP 40.00)
In the three stories that make up this volume Willa Cather returned with fresh enthusiasm to the Western scene of her earlier novels. In "Neighbour Rosicky" admirers of "My Antonia" will discover a story that is almost like a pendant to that remarkable book. Anton Rosicky is a Bohemian exile who, after many experiences in London and New York, lives out his life on a prairie farm. Either of the "Two Friends" might have stepped out of the pages of "A Lost Lady," and might have belonged to the circle of Marian Forrester;s chivalrous admirers. They are American businessmen of the Old West, the age of railroad-building, large outlook, liberal methods, romantic feeling, "when business was still a personal adventure." "Old Mrs. Harris" stands alone. Willa Cather never wrote anything else in the least like it. Tragic human meanings underlie its apparently careless and light-hearted mood. The scene is a Colorado town in the brilliant sand-hill countryl the story is the old riddle of human relationships, the struggle of three women under one roof, each living her own life and following her own destiny.

Will Christopher Baer

2004-11-01T22:05:00.001-08:00

Born in Mississippi in 1966. Old southern family. Lived in Montreal and Italy as a child. Spent high school years in Memphis, TN. Attended college in New Orleans, LA (Tulane) but soon dropped out. Finished B.A. at Memphis State. Headed west in 1990 and lived in Oregon for several years (Portland & Eugene). Received MFA 1995 from Jack Kerouac School at Naropa Institute in Boulder, CO. Has lived in California since '96, primarily in Bay Area and L.A. Worked as homeless counselor, taxi driver, bartender, video store geek, college professor (Evergreen State, Olympia, WA) screenwriter and journalist. Short stories have been published in numerous places, notably Nerve and Bomb. First of the Phineas Poe novels, Kiss Me, Judas originally pub. in '99, selected as Barnes & Noble best new voice, translated into five languages. Penny Dreadful was pub. in 2001. Married, one child by previous marriage. One brother, parents still living. [Read more]

Kiss Me, Judas
Penguin Books, 1998 (PhP 100.00)
"Dont worry," a voice whispers. "You really only need one." Phineas Poe, disgraced cop turned psychiatric case, turned murder suspect, turned reluctant kidney donor. Gives $200 to a beautiful woman in a red dress, a scar at the edge of her mouth and a body like a knife. Wakes up in a bath of melting ice, blood on his fingers and staples in his side. Now she haunts his dreams and his days. She's got his kidney onice and her teeth in his heart. Finding her means throwing himself into a drug-blurred underworld. Falling in love with her means fighting to avoid her becoming her accomplice as well as her victim. Fast, corrosive wit. Glittering, razor-sharp images. A cast of comic and sister characters. Part love story, part mystery, part hallucination, "Kiss Me, Judas" is a startling novel of modern noir.

Vikram Seth

2004-11-01T22:05:00.000-08:00

Born in 1952 in Calcutta, India, Vikram Seth was educated at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, Stanford University and Nanjing University. He has travelled widely and lived in Britain, California, India and China. His first novel, The Golden Gate: A Novel in Verse (1986), describes the experiences of a group of friends living in California. His acclaimed epic of Indian life, A Suitable Boy (1993), won the WH Smith Literary Award and the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Overall Winner, Best Book). Set in India in the early 1950s, it is the story of a young girl, Lata, and her search for a husband. An Equal Music (1999), is the story of a violinist haunted by the memory of a former lover. [Read more]

A Suitable Boy
Phoenix, 1995 (PhP 150.00)
Winner of the 1994 Commonwealth Writers Prize. Vikram Seth's novel is, at its core, a love story: the tale of Lata's--and her mother's--attempts to find a suitable biy, through love or through exacting maternal appraisal. At the same time, it is the story of India, newly independent and struggling through a time of crisis as a sixth of the world's population faces its first great General Election and the chance to map its own destiny.

An Equal Music
Broadway Books, 1999 (PhP 100.00)
A tour de force of poetic, impassioned writing, An Equal Music is an unforgettable tale of love lost and nearly regained, its events unfolding in the dramatic settings of contemporary London, Vienna, and Venice. Brilliantly interweaving themes of loss, longing, and the power of music, Vikram Seth has created a deeply moving story about the strands of passion that run through all our lives.

Truman Capote

2004-11-01T22:04:00.001-08:00

American novelist, short story writer, and playwright. Capote gained international fame with his "nonfiction novel" IN COLD BLOOD (1966), an account of a real life crime in which an entire family was murdered by two sociopaths. The Louisiana-Mississippi-Alabama area provided the setting for much of Capote's fiction. [Read more]

In Cold Blood
Signet, 1965 (PhP 80.00)
No book in recent history has excited such enthusiasm as the spectacular bestseller "In Cold Blood." In his recreation of the brutal slaying of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansan--the police investigation that followed--the capture, the trial and execution of the two young murderers Richard Hickock and Perry Smith, Truman Capote plumbed the minds and souls of real-life characters.

The Grass Harp
Vintage International, 1980 (PhP 120.00)
Set on the outskirts of a small Southern town, "The Grass Harp" tells the story of three endearing misfits--an orphaned boy and two whimsical old ladies--who one day take up residence in a tree house. As they pass sweet yet hazardous hours in a china tree, "The Grass Harp" manages to convey all the pleasures and responsibilities of freedom. But most of all it teaches us about the sacredness of love, "that love is a chain of love, as nature is a chain of life." This volume also includes Capote's "A Tree of Night and Other Stories," which the Washington Post called "unontrusively beautiful, a superlative book."

Tracy Kidder

2004-11-01T22:04:00.000-08:00

Tracy Kidder was born in New York City in 1945. Kidder attended Harvard College where he earned an AB in 1967. From 1967 until 1969, he served as first lieutenant in Vietnam and was awarded a bronze star. After his tour of duty, Kidder obtained an MFA from the University of Iowa, where he participated in the Writers' Workshop, a program known for the literary luster of both its staff and alumni. At the workshop, Kidder met Atlantic Monthly contributing editor Dan Wakefield, who helped him get his first assignment for the magazine in 1973, beginning a long-term association with the publication. Kidder's articles in The Atlantic have covered a broad range of topics, ranging from railroads, to energy, architecture, the environment, and more. [Read more]

The Soul of a New Machine
Avon Books, 1990 (PhP 100.00)
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize. From the bestselling author of "House" and "Among Schoolchildren" comes the astonishing true story of the "Hardy Boys" and "Microkids" of Data General Corporation--dedicated technological wizards who envisioned the impossible, then battled time, corporate intrigue and the odds to bring their dream to breathtaking life. A momentous achievement, "The Soul of a New Machine" is an epic and unforgettable human adventure--an enthralling celebration of the eternal spirit of American invention.

Toni Morrison

2004-11-01T22:03:00.000-08:00

American author, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. In her works Toni Morrison has explored the experience of black women in a racist culture. She has been a member of both the National Council on the Arts and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Morrison has actively used her influence to defend the role of the artist and encouraged the publication of other black writers. [Read more]

Paradise
Alfred A. Knopf, 1998, hardcover (PhP 150.00)
In "Paradise"--her first novel since she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature--Toni Morrison gives us a bravura performance. As the book begins deep in Oklahoma early one morning in 1976, nine men from Ruby (pop. 360), in defense of "the one all-black town worth the pain," assault the nearby Convent and the women in it. From the town's ancestral origins in 1890 to the fateful day of the assault, "Paradise" tells the story of a people ever mindful of the relationship between their spectacular history and a void "Out There... where random and organized evil erupted when and where it chose." Richly imagined and elegantly composed, "Paradise" weaves a powerful mystery.

Song of Solomon
Signet Books, 1978 (PhP 80.00)
Morrison creates a black community strangely unto itself yet never out of touch with the white world. With an ear as sharp as glass she has listened to the music of black talk and uses it as a palette knife to create black lives and to provide some of the best fictional dialogue around today: a beautiful balance between language and thought.

Sula
Plume Books, 1982 (PhP 100.00)
This rich and moving novel traces the lives of two black heroines from their close-knit childhood in a small Ohio town, through their sharply divergent paths of womanhood, to their ultimate confrontation and reconciliation. New Wright has chosen to stay in the place where she was born, to marry, raise a family, and become a pillar of the black community. Sula Peace has rejected the life Nel has embraced, escaping to college, and submerging herself in city life. When she returns to her roots, it is as a rebel and a wanton seductress. Eventually, both women must face the consequences of their choices. Together, they create an unforgettable portrait of what it means and costs to be a black woman in America.

Sebastian Faulks

2004-11-01T22:02:00.000-08:00

Sebastian Faulks was born on 20 April 1953 and was educated at Wellington College and Emmanuel College, Cambridge. He was the first literary editor of The Independent and became deputy editor of the Independent on Sunday before leaving in 1991 to concentrate on writing. He has been a columnist for The Guardian (1992-8) and the Evening Standard (1997-9). He continues to contribute articles and reviews to a number of newspapers and magazines. He wrote and presented the Channel 4 Television series 'Churchill's Secret Army', screened in 1999. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. [Read more]

The Girl at the Lion D'Or
Vintage Books, 1989 (PhP 100.00)
With the same romantic sweep and vibrant historical detail that he brought to his bestsellers, "Birdsong" and "Charlotte Gray", Sebastian Faulks gives us a haunting novel of passion, courage and loss set in France between the wars. On a rainy night in the 1930s a young girl appears at the run-down Hotel du Lion d'Or in the seaside village of Janvilliers. She calls herself Anne Louvet; she is looking for work. And although her open-heartedness charms everyone but the inn's forbidding proprietress, it is clear that she has a secret. Soon Anne falls in love with Charles Hartmann, a married veteran of the Great War who harbors his own burden of tragedy. As it follows their torrential affair, "The Girl at the Lion d'Or" weaves an unbreakable spell of narrative, mood, and character that evokes French masters from Falubert to Renoir. This Vintage edition marks its first publication in the United States.

Roddy Doyle

2004-11-01T22:01:00.000-08:00

Roddy Doyle was born in 1958. He attended St. Fintan's Christian Brothers School in Sutton and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts and continued his education at University College, Dublin. He worked for fourteen years as an English and Geography teacher at Greendale Community School, in Kilbarrack, North Dublin. Since 1993 he has been dedicated to writing full-time. He is married to Belinda and has two sons, Rory and Jack. Roddy Doyle achieved widespread recognition when his novel The Commitments (1987) was made into a motion picture in 1991. Doyle's novel Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha won the Booker Prize, Britain's highest literary award in 1993. This novel established Doyle as a leading comic writer, earning comparisons to Irish humorists such as Sean O'Casey and Brendan Behan. [Read more]

A Star Called Henry
Jonathan Cape, 1999, hardcover (PhP 150.00)
Born in the slums of Dublin in 1901, his father a one-legged whorehouse bouncer and settler of scores. Henry Smart has to grow up fast. By the time he can walk he's out robbing, begging, often cold, always hungry, but a prince of the streets. At fourteen, already six foot two, Henry's in the General Post Office on Easter Monday 1916, a soldier in the Irish Citizen Army, fighting for freedom. A year later he's ready to die for Ireland again, a rebel, a Fenian and soon, a killer. With his father's wooden leg as his weapon, Henry becomes a republican legend--one of Michael Collins' boys, a cop killer, an assassin on a stolen bike. An historical novel like none before it, "A Star Called Henry" marks a new chapter in Roddy Doyle's writing. It is a vastly more ambitious book than any he has written before. A subversive look behind the legends of Irish republicanism, at its centre a passionate love story, this is a triumphant work of fiction.

Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha
Minerva Books, 1994 (PhP 120.00)
Winner of the Booker Prize 1993. It is 1968. Paddy Clarke is ten years old, breathless with discovery. He reads with a child's voraciousness, collecting facts the way adults collect grey hairs and parking tickets. Doyle captures the speech patterns of childhood brilliantly, the weird logic of the incessant questions, the non-sequiturs and wonderments. Like all great comic writers, Roddy Doyle has become an explorer of the deepest places of the heart, of love and pain and loss. This is one of the most compelling novels I've read in ages, a triumph of style and perception.

Richard Bach

2004-11-01T22:00:00.000-08:00

Author of Jonathan Livingston Seagull (1970), Illusions (1977), The Bridge Across Forever (1984), One (1989), Out of My Mind (1999), as well as other books that are not novels. Bach's early experiences included being an Air Force reserve pilot and nearly all of his books revolve around flight in some way, from the early stories which are straightforwardly about flying aircraft to the later books in which flight is a complex philosophical metaphor. Bach had a huge success with Jonathan Livingston Seagull which has not been equalled by his later books: nevertheless his work remains popular with readers. [Read more]

Running from Safety
Dell Books, 1994 (PhP 60.00)
A half-mile up, suspended by nylon wings and the promise of good lift, life hangs on a pledge. Richard Bach made that pledge, fifty years before, to return to the frightened child he used to be and teach him everything he had learned from living. His promise went unfulfilled until one day, hovering between earth and sky, Richard encounters Dickie Bach, age nine--irrepressible challenger of every notion Richard embraces. In this exhilarating adventure, Richard and Dickie probe the timeless questions both need answered if either is to be whole: Why does growing spiritually mean never growing up? Can we peacefully coexist with the consequences of our choices? Why is it that only by running from safety can we make our wildest dreams take flight?

Philip Roth

2004-11-01T21:51:00.000-08:00

American novelist and short story writer. Philip Roth first achieved fame with GOODBYE, COLUMBUS (1959). It consisted of a novella and five short stories and described the life of a of Jewish middle-class family. Ten years later appeared PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT. In this "masturbation story" the narrator searches for freedom by using sex as his way of escape. The book gained a great international success. [Read more]

Goodbye, Columbus
Bantam Books, 1959 (PhP 60.00)
"A masterpiece." Thus "Newsweek" hailed the appearance of "Goodbye, Columbus." Soon afterward, the National Book Award for fiction seconded this judgment. On the surface, the novella and five stories that comprise this extraordinary work deal with the intermingled comedy and tragedy, hilarity and heartbreak of modern Jewish-American life; on a more profound level, their wit, insight and truth strike a universal nerve of recognition. Whether dissecting a passionate, youthful love affair or the divided loyalties of a Jewish top sergeant; whether portraying the desperate alienation of a middle aged man or the wild flights of a weirdly imaginative young boy, Philip Roth demonstrates the amazing talents that have made him one of the foremost writers of his generation--and this, his first great success, a classic of our time.

The Ghost Writer
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979, hardcover (PhP 120.00)
Exactly twenty years ago, Philip Roth made his debut with "Goodbye, Columbus," a book that immediately announced the presence of a major new talent. "The Ghost Writer," his eleventh book, begins with a young writer's search, twenty years ago, for the spiritual father who will comprehend and validate his art, and whose support will justify his inevitable flight from a loving but conventionally constricting Jewish middle-class home. Nathan Zuckerman's quest brings him to E. I. Lonoff, whose work--exquisite parables of desire restrained--Nathan much admires. Recently discovered by the literary world after decades of obscurity, Lonoff continues to live as a semi-recluse in rural Massachusetts with his wife, Hope, scion of an old New England family, whom the young immigrant married thirty-five years before. Nathan, although in a state of youthful exultation over his early successes, is still troubled by the conflict between two kinds of conscience: tribal and family loyalties, on the one hand, and the demands of fiction, as he sees them, on the other. A startling imaginative leap and then a final confrontation lead to the beginnings of a kind of wisdom about the unreckoned consequences of art. Shocking, comic, and sad by turns, "The Ghost Writer" is the work of a major novelist in full maturity.

Norman Mailer

2004-11-01T21:50:00.001-08:00

American author, innovator of the nonfiction novel. Mailer developed in the 1960s and 1970s a form of journalism, that combines actual events, autobiography, and political commentary with the richness of the novel. Mailer's works have aroused controversy - because of both their stylish nonconformity and his controversial views of American life. The poet Robert Lowell praised him as "the best journalist in America" but what he thought of Mailer's fiction was left open. [Read more]

The Short Fiction of Norman Mailer
Dell Books, 1967 (PhP 60.00)
Love and war, death and regeneration--the great themes of life explored in stories that spark with excitement, amaze and delight with their brilliance, selected and with a preface by the author. The 19-story selection includes "Truth and Being, Nothing and Time," "A Calculus at Heaven," "The Language of Men," and "The Shortest Novel of Them All."

Nina Berberova

2004-11-01T21:50:00.000-08:00

The versatile Nina Berberova (1901-93) wrote in many genres, including poetry, prose, biography, literary criticism, translations, and plays. Her 1969 autobiography Kursiv mo| (Eng. The Italics Are Mine), in which she recorded her experiences of life in Russia during the Revolution and in emigration, is highly regarded as an eyewitness account of historic events. In 1922 she left St. Petersburg, eloping with the poet Vladislav Khodasevich. The couple wandered around Europe and finally settled in Paris. Eventually, Berberova emigrated to the United States, where she taught at Yale and Princeton. Her peripatetic life made her a valuable observer of the emigre's reaction of loneliness and rootlessness in response to change. [Read more]

The Tattered Cloak and Other Novels
Vintage, 1991 (PhP 100.00)
First published in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s and now translated into English for the first time, these powerfully evocative short novels by a Russian emigre now in her nineties resurrect the wistful, shabby-genteel society that a generation of Russians created in Parisian exile. Whether they are intellectuals or laundresses, whether they construct philosophies in country houses or get drunk at rickety kitchen tables, pursue shady business deals or a parade of disappointing lovers, Nina Berberova's characters are wry, eloquent, and unforgettable. Translated from the Russian by Marian Schwartz.

Nadine Gordimer

2004-11-01T21:49:00.000-08:00

South African novelist and short-story writer, who received Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991. Most of Nadine Gordimer's works deal with the moral and psychological tensions of her racially divided home country. She was a founding member of Congress of South African Writers, and even at the height of the apartheid regime, she never considered going into exile. [Read more]

July's People
Penguin Books, 1984 (PhP 100.00)
For years, it had been what is called a "deteriorating situation." Now all over South Africa the cities are battlegrounds. The members of the Smales family--liberal whites--are rescued from the terror by their servant, July, who leads them to refuge in his native village. What happens to the Smales and to July--the shifts in character and relationships--gives us an unforgettable look into the terrifying, tacit understandings and misunderstandings between blacks and whites.

Contemporary Writers: Nadine Gordimer
A Critical Study by Judie Newman
Routledge, 1988 (PhP 80.00)
International in her appeal, Nadine Gordimer is both a vociferous opponent of apartheid, and an original and accomplished novelist whose works have found literary and popular recognition. In this critical study, the first by a woman, Judie Newman discusses all Gordimer's novels, including the most recent, "A Sport of Nature." Gordimer's writing is both politically committed and formally innovative, confronting subject matter of great contemporary interest and at the same time seeking out narrative forms which combine European and indigenous cultures. Her novels are sensitive to their context, in a divided society, while also offering an important contribution to postmodernist reassessments of narrative poetics, and a conscious challenge to European conceptions of the novel. Judie Newman places particular emphasis upon Gordimer's searching investigation of the relation of gender to genre, and explores other major concerns such as the crisis of liberal values, the nature of historical consciousness, racism, sexual politics, and the psychopathology of power. Her study combines close literary analysis with a wide-ranging exploration of ideas, showing clearly how the artist can contribute to contemporary debate.

Melissa Fay Greene

2004-11-01T21:48:00.001-08:00

Melissa was born in Macon, Georgia, December 30, 1952, moved to Dayton, Ohio, in childhood, and graduated from Oberlin College in 1975. She returned to Georgia in â75 to work for the Savannah office of Georgia Legal Services and was a witness to most of the events about which she later would write in Praying for Sheetrock. [Read more]

Praying for Sheetrock
Minerva, 1992 (PhP 100.00)
Winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. Shortlisted for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Set in the Deep South of the 1970s, this superb book tells the true story of the political awakening of a tiny black community. Here the people of McIntosh County, Georgia tell of their own experiences--stories that are outrageous, funny, eloquent and touching--in a historic struggle for civil equality.

Margaret Atwood

2004-11-01T21:48:00.000-08:00

Margaret Atwood was born in 1939 in Ottawa and grew up in northern Ontario and Quebec, and Toronto. She received her undergraduate degree from Victoria College at the University of Toronto and her master's degree from Radcliffe College. Throughout her thirty years of writing, Margaret Atwood has received numerous awards and several honorary degrees. She is the author of more than twenty-five volumes of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction and is perhaps best known for her novels, which include The Edible Woman (1970), The Handmaid's Tale (1983), The Robber Bride (1994), Alias Grace (1996). Her newest novel, The Blind Assassin, which won the prestigious Booker Prize, was published in the fall of 2000. Negotiating With the Dead: A Writer on Writing (2002), published by Cambridge University Press in March 2002, is her latest book and her next novel, Oryx and Crake, was published in April 2003. She has an uncanny knack for writing books that anticipate the popular preoccupations of her public. [Read more]

Alias Grace
Nan A. Talese, 1996, hardcover (PhP 150.00)
"Alias Grace" is a beautifully crafted work of the imagination that reclaims a profoundly mysterious and disturbing story from the past century. With compassion, an unsentimental lyricism, and her customary narrative virtuosity, Margaret Atwood mines the often convoluted relationships between men and women, and between the affluent and those without position. The result is her most captivating, disturbing, and ultimately satisfying work since "The Handmaid's Tale"--in short, vintage Atwood.

Bodily Harm
Bantam Books, 1981 (PhP 80.00)
A powerful and brilliantly crafted novel from the author of "Surfacing," "Life Before Man," "The Edible Woman," and "Lady Oracle," "Bodily Harm" is the story or Rennie Wilford, a young journalist whose life has begun to shatter around the edges. Rennie Wilford flies to the Caribbean to recuperate, and on the tiny island of St. Antoine, she is confronted by a world where her rules for survival no longer apply. By turns comic, satiric, relentless, and terrifying, Margaret Atwood's new novel is ultimately an exploration of the lust for power both sexual and political, and the need for compassion that goes beyond what we ordinarily mean by love.

Cat's Eye
Bantam Books, 1989 (PhP 80.00)
Margaret Atwood follows her international bestseller "The Handmaid's Tale" with a breathtaking contemporary novel of a woman grappling with the tangled knot of her own life. Returning to the city of her youth for a retrospective of her art, controversial painter Elaine Risley is engulfed by vivid images of the past. Strongest of all is the figure of Cordelia, leader of the trio of girls who initiated her into the fierce politics of childhood and its secret world of friendship, longing, and betrayal. Elaine must come to terms with her own identity as a daughter, a lover, an artist, and a woman--but above all, she must seek release from Cordelia's haunting memory. Disturbing, hilarious, and compassionate, "Cat's Eye" is Margaret Atwood's most deeply felt work of fiction to date.

The Edible Woman
Warner Books, 1969 (PhP 80.00)
Her name is Marian. She's a very proper young woman. The only man she sleeps with is the one she's going to marry. The only thing she wants from her work is to leave it as soon as possible. The only future she has to look forward to is the same kind that all her friends have settled for: tied to a home and children. Then something happens. It begins with a sexual encounter as exhilarating as it is unexpected. And it keeps getting wilder and wilder.

The Robber Bride
Bantam Books, 1993 (PhP 80.00)
Roz, Charis, and Tony all share a wound, and her name is Zenia. Beautiful, smart, and hungry, by tyrns manipulative and vulnerable, needy and ruthless, Zenia is the turbulent center of her own neverending saga. She entered their lives in the sixties, when they were in college. Over the three decades since, she has damaged each of them badly, ensnaring their sympathy, betraying their trust, and treating their men as loot. Then Zenia dies, or at any rate the three women--with much relief--attend her funeral. But as "The Robber Bride" begins, Roz, Charis, and Tony have come together at a trendy restaurant for their monthly lunch when in walks the seemingly resurrected Zenia. In this consistently entertaining and profound new novel, Margaret Atwood reports from the farthest reaches of the war between the sexes with her characteristic well-crafted prose, rich and devious humor, and compassion.

Louis de Bernieres

2004-11-01T21:46:00.000-08:00

Novelist Louis de BerniÃ¨res was born in London in 1954. He joined the army at 18 but left after spending four months at Sandhurst. After graduating from the Victoria University of Manchester, he took a postgraduate certificate in Education at Leicester Polytechnic and obtained his MA at the University of London. Before writing full-time, he held many varied jobs including landscape gardener, motorcycle messenger and car mechanic. He also taught English in Colombia, an experience which determined the style and setting of his first three novels, The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts (1990), SeÃ±or Vivo and the Coca Lord (1991) and The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman (1992), each of which was heavily influenced by South American literature, particularly 'magic realism'. [Read more]

Corelli's Mandolin
Vintage Books, 1994 (PhP 120.00)
Extravagant, inventive, emotionally sweeping, "Corelli's Mandolin" is the story of a timeless place that one day wakes up to find itself in the jaws of history. The place is the Greek island of Cephallonia, where gods once dabbled in the affairs of men and the local saint periodically rises from his sarcophagus to cure the mad. Then the tide of World War II rolls onto the island's shores in the form of the conquering Italian army. Caught in the occupation are Pelagia, a willful, beautiful young woman, and the two suitors vying for her love: Mandras, a gentle fisherman turned ruthless guerrilla, and the charming, mandolin-playing Captain Corelli, a reluctant officer of the Italian garrison on the island. Rich with loyalties and betrayals, and set against a landscape where the factual blends seamlessly with the fantastic, "Corelli's Mandolin" is a passionate novel as rich in ideas at it is genuinely moving.

John Updike

2004-11-01T21:45:00.000-08:00

Updike has received several awards, among them Guggenheim Fellow (1959), Rosenthal Award, National Institute of Arts and Letters (1959), National Book Award in Fiction (1964), O. Henry Prize (1967-68), American Book Award (1982), National Book Critics Circle Award, for fiction (1982, 1990), Union League Club Abraham Lincoln Award (1982), National Arts Club Medal of Honor (1984); National Medal of the Arts (1989). In 1976 he became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In November 2003 Updike received the National Medal for Humanites at the White House, joining a very small group of notables who have been honored with both the National Medal of Art and the National Medal for the Humanites. His novels Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest have won Pulitzer Prizes. [Read more]

Rabbit at Rest
Fawcett Crest, 1990 (PhP 80.00)
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. In John Updike's fourth and final novel about ex-basketball player Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, the hero has acqired heart trouble, a Florida condo, and a second grandchild. His son, Nelson, is behaving erratically; his daughter-in-law, Pru, is sending out mixed signals; and his wife, Janice, decides in mid-life to become a working girl. As, through the winter, spring, and summer of 1989, Reagan's debt-ridden, AIDS-plagued America yields to that of George Bush, Rabbit explores the bleak terrain of late middle-age, looking for reasons to live.

Rabbit is Rich
Fawcett Crest, 1981 (PhP 80.00)
The hero of John Updike's "Rabbit, Run" (1960), ten years after the hectic events described in "Rabit Redux" (1971), has come to enjoy considerable prosperity as Chief Sales Representative of Springer Motors, a Toyota agency in Brewer, Pennsylvania. The time is 1979. Skylab is falling, gas lines are lengthening, the President collapses while running in a marathon, and double-digit inflation coincides with a deflation of national confidence. Nevertheless, Harry Angstrom feels in good shape, ready to enjoy life at last--until his son, Nelson, returns from the West, and the image of an old love pays a visit to his lot. New characters and old populate these scenes from Rabbit's mid-life, as he continues to pursue, in his erratic fashion, the rainbow of happiness.

John Steinbeck

2004-11-01T21:44:00.001-08:00

John Steinbeck was born in the farming town of Salinas, California on February 27, 1902. His father, John Ernst Steinbeck, was not a terribly successful man; at one time or another he was the manager of a Sperry flour plant, the owner of a feed and grain store; the treasurer of Monterey County. His mother, the strong-willed Olive Hamilton Steinbeck, was a former teacher. As a child growing up in the fertile Salinas Valley-called the "Salad Bowl of the Nation"-Steinbeck formed a deep appreciation of his environment, not only the rich fields and hills surrounding Salinas, but also the nearby Pacific coast where his family spent summer weekends. "I remember my childhood names for grasses and secret flowers," he wrote in the opening chapter of East of Eden. [Read more]

The Grapes of Wrath
Bantam Books, 1946 (PhP 70.00)
The way of life it describes is no more, but the book still lives on, as it always will--the epic chronicle of man's struggle against injustice and inhumanity. With the passage of the years, the story it tells of the Joads and their journey to "the golden land" is not so much just the story of one family and one time, but the story of the courage and passion of all men throughout history.

John Irving

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b. Exeter, N.H., Mar. 2, 1942, is an author whose sprawling fourth novel, The World According to Garp (1978; film, 1982), earned him a huge following and a National Book Award nomination. The story of an eccentric feminist and her writer son, it displays the same delight in language and narrative exuberance that characterized his previous novels, Setting Free the Bears (1968), The Water Method Man (1972) and The 158-Pound Marriage (1974). The Hotel New Hampshire (1981; film, 1984) is, like Garp, a family saga. The Cider House Rules (1985) is ranked by many as Irving's best novel. A Prayer for Owen Meany was published in 1989. [Read more]

The Cider House Rules
Bantam Books, 1985 (PhP 80.00)
The visited-upon characters in "The Cider House Rules" are Wilbur Larch, an abortionist-obstetrician addicted to ether; Homer Wells, an unadoptable orphan; an odd couple of nurses at an orphanage in St. Clouds's, Maine; a wealthy family of apple farmers and a band of migrant pickers. Close readers of "The Cider House Rules" will notice that Irving studied the real world closely to inform the book with authenticity. His grim "history" of St. Cloud's doesn't focus only on the more realistic sadness and tragedy of the characters' condition. Iriving breaks the rules by allowing his characters' uniquely ironic and humorous routines and responses to endear them to us, which eventually forces us to see ourselves in a new way. For almost every main character there is at least a moment of shared understanding, of connection, of love.

Jerzy Kosinski

2004-11-01T21:43:00.001-08:00

(1933-1991) Since his suicide in 1991, the literary reputation of Jerzy Kosinski has continued to sink. At one time he was one of the most promising writers on the American scene, pounding out three hits in a row-the cult classic The Painted Bird, Steps (winner of the 1969 National Book Award), and Being There (filmed in 1980 with Peter Sellers in the starring role). With their grisly violence and a sexuality bordering upon the sadomasochistic, the books raised Kosinski into the ranks of America's celebrity class. He appeared repeatedly on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, played the role of Lenin's stooge Grigory Zinoviev in Warren Beatty's film Reds, posed for the cover of the New York Times Magazine, and presented the Oscar for screenwriting in the spring of 1982, watched by 600 million people. [Read more]

Steps
Bantam Books, 1969 (PhP 60.00)
Winner of the National Book Award. A portrayal of men and women both aroused and desensitized by an environment that disdains the individual and seeks control over the imagination.

Jean Craighead George

2004-11-01T21:43:00.000-08:00

Jean Craighead George was born in a family of naturalists. Her father, mother, brothers, aunts and uncles were students of nature. On weekends they camped in the woods near their Washington, D.C. home, climbed trees to study owls, gathered edible plants and made fish hooks from twigs. Her first pet was a turkey vulture. In third grade she began writing and hasn't stopped yet. She has written over 100 books. Her book, Julie of the Wolves won the prestigious Newbery Medal, the American Library Association's award for the most distinguished contribution to literature for children, l973. [Read more]

Julie of the Wolves
The Trumpet Club, 1972 (PhP 40.00)
Winner of the Newberry Medal. Alone and lost--on the North Slope of Alska Miyax rebels against a home situation she finds intolerable. She runs away toward San Francisco, toward her penpal, who calls her Julie. But soon Miyax is lost in the Alaskan wilderness without food, without even a compass. Slowly she is accepted by a pack of Arctic wolves, and she comes to love them as if they were her brothers. With their help, and drawing on her father's taining, she struggles day by day to survive. In the process, she is forced to rethink her past and to define for herself the traditional riches of Eskimo life: intelligence, fearlessness, and love.

Jane Smiley

2004-11-01T21:42:00.001-08:00

Jane is the author of ten works of fiction, including The Age of Grief, The Greenlanders, Ordinary Love and Good Will, A Thousand Acres, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992 and Moo, as well as many essays for such magazines as Vogue, The New Yorker, Practical Horseman, Harper's, the New York Times Magazine and the New York Times travel section, Victoria, Mirabella, Allure, The Nation and others. She has written on politics, farming, horse training, child-rearing, literature, impulse buying, getting dressed, Barbie, marriage, and many other topics. She is also the author, from Crown, of a book on craftspeople living in the Catskills. [Read more]

A Thousand Acres
Fawcett Columbine, 1992 (PhP 100.00)
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. A thousand acres, a piece of land of almost mythic proportions. Upon this fertile, nourishing earth, Jane Smiley has set her rich, breathtakingly dramatic novel of an American family whose wealth cannot stay the hand of tragedy. It is the intense, compelling story of a father and his daughters, of sisters, of wives and husbands, and of the human cost of a lifetime spent trying to subdue the land and the passions it stirs. The most critically acclaimed novel of the literary season, a classic story of contemporary American life, "A Thousand Acres" is destined to be read for years to come.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

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Polish-born American journalist, novelist, short-story writer, and essayist, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978. Singer's chief subject is the traditional Polish life in various periods of history, largely before the Holocaust. He has especially examined the role of the Jewish faith in the lives of his characters, who are pestered with passions, magic, asceticisms and religious devotion. According to Singer, "A good writer is basically a story-teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind." [Read more]

A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories
Fawcett Crest, 1970 (PhP 100.00)
These richly hypnotic tales enfold the reader into Isaac Bashevis Singer's special world of imps, demons, lovers, and other mischievous creatures. His world is a world of feelings, driven by lust, lechery, greed, madness, and love. All of his creatures are seen with a clear but loving eye; all seem and are in fact possessed by good and evil, caught in fascinating dilemmas, now terrible, now wryly comic.

Honore de Balzac

2004-11-01T21:41:00.000-08:00

(1799-1850) French journalist and writer, one of the creators of realism in literature. Balzac's huge production of novels and short stories are collected under the name La ComÃ©die humaine, which originated from DanteÂ´s The Divine Comedy. Before his breakthrough as an author, Balzac wrote without success several plays and novels under different pseudonyms. [Read more]

Balzac: A Reader (Five Stories, edited and with an introduction by Edmund Fuller)
A Laurel Reader, 1960 (PhP 50.00)
The genius of Balzac is seen in some of its sharpest flashes in the brilliant short novels which, though they are less massive stones than "Pere Goriot" or "Cesar Birotteau," are equally essential parts of the vast structure of "La Comedie Humaine." This volume presents five of the finest of these novelettes, arranged in the order in which they were writen.

Gunter Grass

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German poet, novelist, playwright, sculptor, and printmaker, who, with his extraordinary first novel die BLECHTROMMEL (1959, The Tin Drum) became the literary spokesman for the German generation that grew up in Nazi era. Grass received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999. The author has described himself as "SpÃ¤taufklÃ¤rer", a belated apostle of enlightenment in an era that has grown tired of reason. He has once said, that writers, by giving us ''mouth-to-ear artificial respiration,'' help keep humanity alive. [Read more]

Dog Years
Fawcett Crest, 1963 (PhP 80.00)
In this ferocious novel of the Hitler years and their aftermath, the author of "The Tin Drum" tells a brilliant, bizarre and savage tale of "the love-hate and blood brotherhood of Nazi and Jew. Grass is the strongest, most inventive writer to have emerged in Germany since 1945, and much of what is active conscience in the Germany of Krupp and the Munich beer halls lies in this man's ribald keeping.

Headbirths or The Germans Are Dying Out
Fawcett Crest, 1983 (PhP 80.00)
It is Summer 1980. A quintessential German couple, both high school teachers, take a vacation trip to Asia. But wherever they are, they can't get away from problems at home, both personal and political. Here is wicked fun in the superior new novel by Germany's most distinguished contemporary writer.

The Call of the Toad
Harvest Book, 1992 (PhP 120.00)
In what many have called his most accessible satire since "The Tin Drum," Gunter Grass tells the poignant, irreverent story of two people who find adventure in love and business. The love is late-middle-aged; the business is the cemetery business. The couple's vision is to offer plots in Gdansk to those Germans who had been exiled after World War II. He, the German, will provide the bodies, cash, and know-how; she, the Pole, will provide the human warmth and political fervor. "The Call of the Toad is a take of entrepreneurship taken to absurd extremes as both the German and the Polish characters are skewered with style, tenderness, and baroque inventiveness.

The Tin Drum
Vintage Books, 1964 (PhP 100.00)
The Greatest German novel written since World War II, "The Tin Drum" is the autobiography of thirty-year-old Oscar Matzerath, who has lived through the long Nazi nightmare and who, as the novel begins, is detained in a mental institution. Willfully stunting his growth at three feet for many years, wielding his tin drum and piercing scream as anarchistic weapons, he provides a profound yet hilarious perspective on both German history and the human condition in the modern world. Translated into all major languages, "The Tin Drum"--Gunter Grass' first novel--is an internationally acclaimed work of literature.

Franz Kafka

2004-11-01T21:39:00.001-08:00

(1883-1924) Franz Kafka, b. Prague, Bohemia (then belonging to Austria), July 3, 1883, d. June 3, 1924, has come to be one of the most influential writers of this century. Virtually unknown during his lifetime, the works of Kafka have since been recognized as symbolizing modern man's anxiety-ridden and grotesque alienation in an unintelligible, hostile, or indifferent world. Kafka came from a middle-class Jewish family and grew up in the shadow of his domineering shopkeeper father, who impressed Kafka as an awesome patriarch. The feeling of impotence, even in his rebellion, was a syndrome that became a pervasive theme in his fiction. Kafka did well in the prestigious German high school in Prague and went on to receive a law degree in 1906. [Read more]

The Penal Colony: Stories and Short Pieces
Schocken Books, 1976 (PhP 140.00)
This powerful collection brings together all the stories Kafka allowed to be published during his lifetime, including "The Metamorphosis," "A Hunger Artist," "The Judgment," "Jackals and Arabs," "A Country Doctor," and the celebrated title story. Kafka is important to us because his predicament is the predicament of modern man.

The Trial (Definitive Edition)
Schocken Books, 1968 (PhP 120.00)
This paperback edition includes excerpts from Kafka's "Diaries," from the period in which he worked on "The Trial." According to Albert Camus: "Here we are taken to the limits of human thought. Indeed, everything in this work is, in the true sense of the word, essential. It states the problem of the absurd in its entirety... It is the fate, and perhaps also the greatness, of this work that it leaves open all possibilities and confirms none." Translated from the German by Willa and Edwin Muir; revised, and with additional materials translated by E.M. Butler.

Erich Maria Remarque

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(1898-1970) German writer, who became famous with his novel IM WESTEN NICHTS NEUES (tr. All Quiet on the Western Front, 1929), which depicted the horrors of war from the point of view of the ordinary soldiers. In his works Remarque focused largely on the collapse of the old European world and values. Although his later novels also were successful, Remarque lived in the shadow of his "big" first book. [Read more]

All Quiet on the Western Front
Fawcett Crest, 1989 (PhP 40.00)
This is the testament of Paul Baumer, who enlists with his classmates in the German army of World War I. They become soldiers with youthful enthusiasm. But the world of work, duty, culture, and progress they had been taught breaks into pieces under the first bombardment in the trenches. Through years of vivid horror, Paul holds fast to a single vow: to fight against the principle of hate that meaninglessly pits young men of the same generation but different uniforms against each other, if only he can come out of the war alive.

Elie Wiesel

2004-11-01T21:38:00.000-08:00

Elie Wiesel was born in 1928 in Sighet, Transylvania, now a part of Romania. He was fifteen years old when he and his family were deported by the Nazis to Auschwitz. His mother and younger sister perished, his two older sisters survived. Elie and his father were later transported to Buchenwald, where his father died shortly before the camp was liberated in April 1945. For his literary and human rights activities, he has received numerous awards including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the U.S. Congressional Gold Medal and the Medal of Liberty Award, and the rank of Grand-Croix in the French Legion of Honor. In 1986, Elie Wiesel won the Nobel Prize for Peace. [Read more]

Night
Bantam Books, 1960 (PhP 60.00)
A terrifying account of the Nazi death camp horror that turns a young Jewish boy into an agonized witness to the death of his family, the death of his innocence, and the death of his God. Penetrating and powerful, as personal as "The Diary of Anne Frank," "Night" awakens the shocking memory of evil at its absolute and carries with it the unforgettable message that this horror must never be allowed to happen again.

E. Annie Proulx

2004-11-01T21:37:00.000-08:00

Although she didn't start her career as a writer until she was in her 50s, in 1993 E. Annie Proulx became the first woman to win the prestigious PEN/Faulkner book award, for her debut novel Postcards. The following year she won a Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for her novel The Shipping News. She is also the author of Accordion Times and several short stories. [Read more]

The Shipping News
Scribner Paperback Fiction, 1993 (PhP 120.00)
Winner of the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Winner of the 1993 National Book Award for Ficiton. Winner of the Irish Times International Fiction Prize. Winner of the Chicago Tribune Heartland Award. At thirty-six, Quoyle, a third-rate newspaperman, is wrenched violently out of his workaday life when his two-timing wife meets her just deserts. He retreats with his two daughters to his ancestral home on the starkly beautiful Newfoundland coast, where a rich cast of local characters all play a part in Quoyle's struggle to reclaim his life. As three generations of his family cobble up new lives, Quoyle confronts his private demons--and the unpredictable forces of nature and society--and begins to see the possibility of love without pain or misery. A vigorous, darkly comic, and at times magical portrait of the contemporary American family, "The Shipping News" shows why E. Anni Proulx is recognized as one of the most gifted and original writers in America today.

Colette

2004-11-01T21:36:00.000-08:00

(1873-1954) French novelist, belonging, in time, to the generation of authors that includes Marcel Proust, Paul ValÃ©ry, AndrÃ© Gide, and Paul Claudel. Colette's career as a writer spanned from her early 20s to her mid-70s. Her main themes were joys and pains of love and female sexuality in the male-dominated world. All her works are more or less autobiographical - Colette intentionally blurred the boundaries between fiction and fact in her life. She wrote over 50 novels and scores of short stories. [Read more]

The Ripening Seed
Translated by Roger Senhouse
Farrar, Straus, & Cudahy, 1955 (PhP 100.00)
There are just three characters in "The Ripening Seed": Philippe and Vinca, two young friends, and Madame Dallery, their neighbor, who, during the long sweet summer nights, initiates the boy into the world of sexual mysteries and pleasures. The scene is Britanny, and the seacoast pervades every page, as it does the lives of the two friends, who have visited it every year since they were small children. In the few weeks of their summer holiday Philippe and Vinca see the death of their childhood and learn the true significance of their new and uneasy feelings for each other.

A.S. Byatt

2004-11-01T21:35:00.000-08:00

One of England's foremost writers, A. S. Byatt was educated at York and at Newnham College, Cambridge. She taught at the Central School of Art and Design and was Senior Lecturer in English and American Literature at University College, London, before returning to full-time writing in 1983. A distinguished critic as well as a novelist, she was appointed a C.B.E. in 1990. Her novel Possession won the Booker Prize and Irish Times/Aer Lingus International Fiction Prize in 1990. [Read more]

Sugar and Other Stories
Vintage International, 1992 (PhP 100.00)
It should come as no surprise that short stories by the author of the magical "Possession" are populated by erudite paranoiacs, witches, changelings, and the ghost of a dead child. But these otherworldly beings move through landscapes that are as recognizable as a London square and as tangible as the well-furnished drawing room of an English country house. A. S. Byatt's short fictions, collected in paperback for the first time, explore the fragile ties between generations, the dizzying abyss of loss and the elaborate memories we construct against it, resulting in a book that compels us to inhabit other lives and returns us to our own with new knowledge, compassion, and a sense of wonder.

The Matisse Stories
Vintage International, 1996 (PhP 100.00)
These three stories by the flamboyantly gifted author of "Possession" celebrate the eye even as they reveal its unexpected proximity to the heart. For if each of A.s. Byatt's narratives is in some way inspired by a painting of Henri Matisse, each is also about the intimate connection between seeing and feeling--about the ways in which a glance we meant to be casual may suddenly call forth the deepest reserves of our being. A neglected wife watching her reflection in the gleaming surfaces of a trendy beauty parlor; a housekeeper whose passion for knitting may not be as naive as her employers think it is; two academics weighing a young girl's future over the eqxquisite palette of a Chinese lunch--as executed by Byatt, these tableaux come to life, exposing the unruliness of grief, desire, and creativity. Beautifully written, intensely observed, "The Matisse Stories" is fiction of spell-binding authority.

Amos Oz

2004-11-01T21:33:00.000-08:00

(b. 1939-) Born in Jerusalem, Amoz Oz left the capital and was educated on Kibbutz Hulda where he stayed for many years. Many of his stories are set either on a kibbutz or in Jerusalem, both of which he presents as microcosms of Israeli society. His stories are known to challenge the notion of order and decency in both locations. In 1991 he was elected a full member of the Academy of the Hebrew Language. Amos was awarded his countryâs most prestigious prize: the Israel Prize for Literature in 1998, the fiftieth anniversary year of Israelâs independence. [Red more]

Where the Jackals Howl
Vintage, 1992 (PhP 100.00)
From one of Israel's finest living writers, and the author of the award-winning "Black Box" and "My Michael," "Where the Jackals Howl" is a collection of short stories in which the lives of individual Israelis are set against the background of community life in a Kibbutz. Translated from the Hebrew by Nicholas de Lange and Philip Simpson.

Amy Tan

2004-11-01T21:32:00.000-08:00

(b. February 19, 1952) Amy Tan was born in Oakland, California. Her family lived in several communities in Northern California before settling in Santa Clara. Both of her parents were Chinese immigrants. Upon The Joy Luck Club's publication in 1989, Tan's book won enthusiastic reviews and spent eight months on the New York Times best-seller list. paperback rights sold for $1.23 million. The book has been translated in 17 languages, including Chinese. Her subsequent novel, The Kitchen God's Wife (1991) confirmed her reputation and enjoyed excellent sales. [Read more]

The Kitchen God's Wife
Ivy Books, 1991 (PhP 80.00)
What fascinates in "The Kitchen God's Wife" is not only the insistent storytelling, but the details of Chinese life and tradition; not only how people lived, but how their sensibility shines through, most notably in their speech. For Amy Tan has command of a language in which event and concrete perception jump into palpable metaphor, and images from the daily world act like spiritual agents.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

2004-11-01T21:25:00.000-08:00

(b. Dec. 11, 1918, Kislovodsk, Russia/USSR), Russian novelist and historian, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for 1970 and was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1974. Solzhenitsyn was born into a family of Cossack intellectuals and brought up primarily by his mother (his father was killed in an accident before his birth). He attended the University of Rostov-na-Donu, graduating in mathematics, and took correspondence courses in literature at Moscow State University. He fought in World War II, achieving the rank of captain of artillery; in 1945, however, he was arrested for writing a letter in which he criticized Joseph Stalin and spent eight years in prisons and labour camps, after which he spent three more years in enforced exile. Rehabilitated in 1956, he was allowed to settle in Ryazan, in central Russia, where he became a mathematics teacher and began to write. [Read more]

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Bantam Books, 1963 (PhP 60.00)
From the icy blast of reveille through the sweet release of sleep, Ivan Denisovich endures. A common carpenter, he is one of millions viciously imprisoned for countless years on baseless charges, sentenced to the waking nightmare of the Soviet work camps in Siberia. Even in the face of degrading hatred, where life is reduced to a bowl of gruel and a rare cigarette, hope and dignity prevail. This powerful novel of fact is a scathing indictment of Communist tyranny, and an eloquent affirmation of the human spirit.

Classic Book Authors

2004-11-01T21:02:00.000-08:00

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

The Tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra
Edited by George Lyman Kittredge, Revised by Irving Ribner
Blaisdell Publishing, 1966 (PhP 50.00)
Kittredge's editing of the Shakespeare plays represent a landmark of American scholarship. In this edition, Ribner has augmented them and and brought them up to date in the light of textual, literary, and historical research of the past thirty years, during which time our knowledge of the dates, sources, and general historical background of Shakespeare's plays has vastly increased.