American English Fiction

Esi Edugyan won wide acclaim for her stunning novel Half-Blood Blues - a Man Booker Prize finalist and winner of the Scotiabank Giller Prize. In it, 83-year-old Sid Griffiths remembers his time during WWII playing in a Berlin jazz band called the Hot Time Swingers. When jazz music was denounced by the Nazis, Sid and his bandmates fled to Paris - a move that put Hieronymous, the band's brilliantly talented trumpeter, in constant danger due to his Afro-German heritage.

Here is an entirely new side of Kurt Vonnegut, Vonnegut as a teacher of writing. Of course he's given us glimpses before, with aphorisms and short essays and articles and in his speeches. But never before has an entire book been devoted to Kurt Vonnegut the teacher. Here is pretty much everything Vonnegut ever said or wrote having to do with the writing art and craft, altogether a healing, a nourishing expedition.

It's the last chance for Cynthia Brightly, the town's most bewitching belle. Driven out of London by a secret scandal, she must find a grand husband at the Redmonds' house party before word of her downfall spreads all over England. Unfortunately, someone at Pennyroyal Green is already privy to the whispers of broken engagements and dueling lovers: Miles Redmond, renowned explorer and - thanks to his brother's disappearance - heir to the family's enormous fortune.

In the jungles of Southeast Asia, American sniper Mack Bolan honed his skills. After 12 years, with 95 confirmed hits, he returns home to Massachusetts. But it's not to reunite with his family, it's to bury them - victims in a mass murder/suicide. Even though Bolan's own father pulled the trigger, he knows the old man was no killer. He was driven to madness by Mafia thugs who have turned his idyllic hometown into a new kind of war zone.

I suppose some of us have to get really dirty before we can become truly clean. I was allegedly South Dakota's most famous Old Lady. Sixteen years ago, I had survived my Old Man's murder. Never again. Never again will I surrender my heart. Never again will I sacrifice to the Club. But that all changed in one night. I came home and crashed into him, and my past and present blew up in my face.

The Cuban Revolution took everything from sugar heiress Beatriz Perez - her family, her people, her country. Recruited by the CIA to infiltrate Fidel Castro's inner circle and pulled into the dangerous world of espionage, Beatriz is consumed by her quest for revenge and her desire to reclaim the life she lost. As the Cold War swells like a hurricane over the shores of the Florida Strait, Beatriz is caught between the clash of Cuban-American politics and the perils of a forbidden affair with a powerful man driven by ambitions of his own.

Rosalie Iron Wing has grown up in the woods with her father, Ray, a former science teacher who tells her stories of plants, of the stars, of the origins of the Dakhota people. Until, one morning, Ray doesn't return from checking his traps. Told she has no family, Rosalie is sent to live with a foster family in nearby Mankato - where the reserved, bookish teenager meets rebellious Gaby Makespeace, in a friendship that transcends the damaged legacies they've inherited.

"There's no way not to suffer. But you try all kinds of ways to keep from drowning in it." The men and women in these eight short fictions grasp this truth on an elemental level, and their stories, as told by James Baldwin, detail the ingenious and often desperate ways in which they try to keep their heads above water.

Contains the complete Fold series: Thou Shall Not Run, Thou Shall Not Hide, and Thou Shall Not Fear.

The beautiful Miss Alison Brooke is the envy of London's 18th-century royal society. When villainy occurs, an unexpected hero comes to her aid. But rumors result, and Miss Brooke finds herself in the center of tawdry gossip. Her rescuer, Robert Anderson, Viscount Charmaine, is preoccupied with troubled finances, an ill father, and defense of the Crown. Problematically, Charmaine's best friend, Marquis Anthony Farrington, is clandestinely helping fund the American Revolution. Miss Brooke's large dowry tempts both men. Her father, however, wants his daughter to marry for love, not money.

What do you do when the love of your life forgets? Not the good times. Not the love. Not the passion. But the pain and heartbreak and betrayal. He doesn't remember that he broke my heart. But I do. He doesn't remember the darkest parts of our marriage. He doesn't remember that six months ago, I said goodbye. What do you do when the love of your life remembers your marriage but not your divorce?

A collection of stories capturing what it means to be a cowboy.

A collection of stories from the most famous Western author of all time! Desert Death-Song is a compilation of some of Louis L’Amour’s greatest stories, many of which might otherwise be difficult to find. Whether he was writing under his early pen name, Jim Mayo, or his own, L’Amour’s stories are unforgettable, touching on rough and rugged American ideals, and set in the untamable frontier of the Western United States.

She is on something of a vision quest, looking for family, for home, for understanding. She is also driven by the leftover teenaged desire to meet Pat Johns - Jesse from The Beachcombers - because he is, as she says, a working, healthy Indian man. Birdie heads for Molly's Reach to find answers, but they are not the ones she expected. With the arrival in Gibsons of her Auntie Val and her cousin Skinny Freda, Birdie begins to draw from her dreams the lessons she was never fully taught in life.

Mac knows he's a dead man. His only hope is to join another cattle drive on the Goodnight-Loving Trail, deep in New Mexico Territory. The journey ahead is even deadlier than the hired guns behind him. His trail boss is an ornery cuss. His crewmate is the owner's spoiled son. And the route is overrun with kill-crazy rustlers and bloodthirsty Comanche. To make matters worse, Mac's would-be killers are closing in fast. But when the cattle owner's son is kidnapped, the courageous young cook has no choice but to jump out of the frying pan - and into the fire....

These wholly original and shiver-inducing tales introduce listeners to ghosts, curses, hauntings, monstrous creatures, complex family legacies, desperate deeds, and chilling acts of revenge. Introduced and contextualized by bestselling author Stephen Graham Jones, these stories are a celebration of Indigenous peoples’ survival and imagination, and a glorious reveling in all the things an ill-advised whistle might summon.

Patrick Bateman moves among the young and trendy in 1980s Manhattan. Young, handsome, and well educated, Bateman earns his fortune on Wall Street by day while spending his nights in ways we cannot begin to fathom. Expressing his true self through torture and murder, Bateman prefigures an apocalyptic horror that no society could bear to confront.

A haunting dream that will not relent pulls author Kent Nerburn back into the hidden world of Native America, where dreams have meaning, animals are teachers, and the "old ones" still have powers beyond our understanding. In this moving narrative, we travel through the lands of the Lakota and the Ojibwe, where we encounter a strange little girl with an unnerving connection to the past, a forgotten asylum that history has tried to hide, and complex, unforgettable characters.

Ever since his mother passed away two years ago, Caleb Pine has been stuck while the rest of his family seem to have moved on. Alone at Christmas, he finds himself drawn back to Martha’s Vineyard and the Gingerbread Inn, where his family spent a wonderful Christmas holiday when he was a teen. To his surprise, the local girl he almost kissed under the mistletoe all those years ago is now grown up and running the Inn.

Ethic has power, but love has always been evasive. After ordering the hit that mistakenly killed the love of his life, Ethic is haunted with guilt and refuses to love again. Focused on being a better man and keeping his family safe, he is raising three children, one of which is a defiant teenage girl, Morgan. No matter how hard he tries to keep Morgan away from the streets, she is determined to defy him. When Morgan finds herself in a vulnerable position, Ethic is pulled back into the deadly game where he was once king.