Literary Works

In 1927, as a twenty-three-year-old postgraduate scholar in Paris, Joseph Campbell first encountered James Joyce’s Ulysses. Known for being praised and for kicking up controversy (including an obscenity trial in the United States in 1920), the novel left Campbell both intrigued and confused, as it had many others. Because he was in Paris, he was able to visit the Shakespeare & Company bookstore - the outpost of the original publisher of Ulysses, Sylvia Beach. She gave him “clues” for reading Ulysses, and that, Campbell attested, changed his career.

Widely known as the master of horror, Edgar Allan Poe has held the world enraptured for more than 150 years with his dark and powerful works. This collection will sweep you away into a world of literary brilliance.

A cowboy returning to his hometown - and the best friend he left a dozen years before. She's divorced with a child now...can they build a family and find their happily ever after? Graham Whittaker returns to Coral Canyon a few days after Christmas - after the death of his father. He's just found out his longtime girlfriend in Seattle has been cheating on him, and while Coral Canyon isn't his first choice of where to live, it's certainly the friendliest.

Yumi Parr is the new project coordinator of a Manhattan design agency. Set apart from her coworkers by their race, salaries, alma maters, perfect teeth, and waistbands, Yumi bears their grunt work. After one microaggression too many, she decides to implement a change. Either senior white employees with their mouthfuls of wokespeak will comply or Yumi will learn a difficult lesson about the realities of modern business culture.

For archaeologist and TV host Annja Creed, a late-night phone call from the NYPD means one thing: there's been a murder and the police need her expertise. The only link between a dead body and the killer is a small elephant of white jade. An artifact that's gone missing. Once belonging to Catherine the Great of Russia, the elephant was key in a risky political gambit all those years ago. But there is another story attached to the artifact - a rumor of an ancient hidden treasure.

The first new Darkover anthology in almost two decades, this volume focuses on the music of Darkover: stories with musical elements; the songs in the books; and the filk songs inspired by them, from "The Horsetamer's Daughter" by Leslie Fish to eight songs by Cynthia McQuillin. Original stories included are by India Edghill, Leslie Fish, Raul S. Reyes, Michael Spence, and Elisabeth Waters. There are also reprints of stories by Mercedes Lackey and Vera Nazarian.

Sybil Ellis was a 17-year-old orphan with very few options: If she didn't want to be a governess or a companion - and she didn't - she had to marry. So she married Dr. Philip Maynard, who was old enough to be her grandfather and treated her like a daughter. In fact, he treated her like Judith, the daughter he had lost, even to calling her by that name and having all of his new servants do likewise.

Roscoe T. Martin, the son of an Alabama coal foreman, set his sights on a new type of power spreading at the start of the 20th century: electricity. It became his training, his life's work. But when his wife, Marie, inherits her father's failing farm, Roscoe has to give it up, with great cost to his pride and sense of self, to rescue the farm for the sake of his marriage and his family.

From ancient times to the present day, The World in Books offers a wide-ranging historical education through pleasure reading—and a fantastic introduction to some of the most thought-provoking, profound, and interesting nonfiction works of all time. From Sun Tzu’s The Art of War to bell hooks’s All About Love, as well as such recent classics as Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s We Should All Be Feminists, Davis’s guide suggests a world of nonfiction books and explains just why they’re so historically meaningful and culturally relevant today.

Beasts from Before recounts an anthology of seven characters, each plagued by a desire for abundance. This desire draws them into a life of excess, resulting in their eventual and painful downfall.

Thirty years have passed since Cornel West's book Race Matters rose to the top of the bestseller lists in 1993. Yet his book remains as relevant as ever to American culture-even more so, if one considers its influence on contemporary racial justice movements such as Black Lives Matter, prison justice, and the fight for police reform. Prophetic Leadership and Visionary Hope looks back to the original 1993 text and forward into the future of racial understanding and healing in our current century.

Eli Tremaine has had one great regret in his life. When she walks into his shop one day looking for a grave stone for her daughter, their long buried but unresolved past asserts itself amidst her grief and failing marriage. Eli, a stone mason, is sure of only one thing, a fundamental truth he has learned working stone: You can spend days or weeks whittling a block down toward the essence of what you want from it and lose it all at the crucial moment by giving in to the temptation of the quick and easy stroke.

Summer vacation on the island was supposed to be a restorative time for Kate, who'd lost her close friend Elizabeth in a sudden accident. But when she inherits a trunk of Elizabeth's journals, they reveal a woman far different than the cheerful wife and mother Kate had known. The complicated portrait of Elizabeth--her upbringing, her marriage, and journey to motherhood--makes Kate question not just their friendship, but her most fundamental beliefs about loyalty and deception at a time when she is uncertain in her own marriage.

Jonas Anderson might be an excellent teacher if he weren’t addicted to drugs. Instead, at age 28, he’s been fired from yet another creative writing position after assigning homework like visit a stranger’s funeral and write about it. Jonas needs to do something drastic and, as a dual American-Swedish citizen, he knows Sweden is an easy place to be a graduate student and a difficult place to be a drug addict. The year is 2015 when he arrives in Malmö, a city trying to cope with the arrival of tens of thousands of Middle Eastern refugees.

Playing three roles with verve, Philip Roth gives a hilariously comic performance of two old men living in a cheap rooming house who pay a visit to a diffident graduate student to ask a convoluted and unusual favor.

In After the Fireworks, three of Aldous Huxley's lost classic pieces of short fiction are collected for the first time. In the title novella, Rome is the stunning backdrop where internationally famous novelist Miles Fanning is setting out on a walk down Via Condotti toward the Spanish Steps when he encounters the mysterious Pamela Tarn - a beautiful young American admirer of his work who shares a name, as well as conspicuous personality traits, with a character from his most celebrated book.

Books are one of humankind's greatest forms of expression, and now Book, in a witty, idiosyncratic voice, tells us the inside story. A wonderfully eccentric character with strong opinions and a poetic turn of phrase, Book tells of a journey from papyrus scrolls to medieval manuscripts to printed paper and beyond - pondering, along the way, many bookish things, including the evolution of the alphabet, the library (known to Egyptians as "the healing place of the soul"), and even book burning.

After George McWhirter Fotheringay discovers that he is able to perform miracles in a local bar after he professes not to believe in them, he experiments in his home with whimsical results. He seeks the advice of local clergyman, Mr. Maydig, who decides to begin a campaign of using Fotheringay's powers to reform the world. But with best of intentions, Mr. Fotheringay has little knowledge and less foresight. Before long a miracle backfires and he must use his power one last time to undo the cataclysm.

This humorous story was "a flight of fancy" for H. G. Wells. A man is given the power to perform miracles but with very unexpected results.

Nobody alive knew how the feud between Storn and Hammerfell had begun, but that didn't stop the fighting. When Storn's men burned Hammerfell's castle, his infant twin sons were separated, and each grew up thinking himself the rightful Duke of Hammerfell. Conn, raised in the mountains by his father's paxman, continued to fight the Storns. Alastair grew up with his mother in Thendara and planned to marry his cousin, Floria. But when Conn came to Thendara to seek King Aiden's help, and the twins encountered each other, it changed all their lives.