Title Search Results

Welcome to Angel Island. Its captivating spirit can be felt from the shores of its windswept beaches to the heights of the spectacular Angel Wings Cliffs. The island is said to harbor angels who help guide the lost, delivering them from despair and darkness into the golden light of love and faith.The inn is officially open for business, and owner Liza Martin has booked her first major event-a June wedding-even though renovations have not yet been completed. The good news is that this brings more of Daniel Merritt, the island's attractive handyman, into her life. But as Liza finds herself falling for him, she learns that Daniel is a man with secrets.Liza doesn't have much time to dwell on Daniel's secrets with all the wedding preparations. The bride met her fiancé on the island when they were teenagers, and she's always dreamed of being married at the inn. Liza wants to make the event perfect, but the tension between the bride and groom makes her worry. On the day of the wedding a storm rolls in-and the groom is nowhere to be found. Everything is going wrong. Liza needs a miracle. Then again, if you have faith and love, Angel Island is just the sort of place where miracles can happen...

This spectacular novel established Thomas M. Disch as a major new force in science fiction. First published in 1965, it was immediately labeled a masterpiece reminiscent of the works of J.G. Ballard and H.G. Wells In this harrowing novel, the world's cities have been reduced to cinder and ash and alien plants have overtaken the earth.  The plants, able to grow the size of maples in only a month and eventually reach six hundred feet, have commandeered the world's soil and are sucking even the Great Lakes dry. In northern Minnesota, Anderson, an aging farmer armed with a Bible in one hand and a gun in the other, desperately leads the reduced citizenry of a small town in a daily struggle for meager existence. Throw into this fray Jeremiah Orville, a marauding outsider bent on a bizarre and private revenge, and the fight to live becomes a daunting task.

Acclaimed biographer Peter Ackroyd vibrantly resurrects the legendary epic of Camelot in this modern adaptationThe names of Arthur, Merlin, Lancelot, Guinevere, Galahad, the sword of Excalibur, and the court of Camelot are as recognizable as any from the world of myth. Although many versions exist of the stories of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, Le Morte d'Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory endures as the most moving and richly inventive.In this abridged retelling the inimitable Peter Ackroyd transforms Malory's fifteenth-century work into a dramatic modern story, vividly bringing to life a world of courage and chivalry, magic, and majesty. The golden age of Camelot, the perilous search for the Holy Grail, the love of Guinevere and Lancelot, and the treachery of Arthur's son Mordred are all rendered into contemporary prose with Ackroyd's characteristic charm and panache. Just as he did with his fresh new version of Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, Ackroyd now brings one of the cornerstones of English literature to a whole new audience.For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

A haunting novella, Death in Venice tells the story of a man who falls into foolish love, only to reap his own ruin. Gustav von Aschenbach, a dignified but lonely writer in the twilight of his life, is enjoying a Venetian vacation when he notices the taut, lean figure of a Polish boy. His name is Tadzio—and he embodies the sleek perfection of youth. Aschenbach finds himself completely and hopelessly obsessed with this ideal. Death in Venice brims with mythical imagery, exploring the themes of beauty and decay, passion and pestilence. This translation of Nobel laureate Thomas Mann’s work by Jefferson S. Chase includes an additional novella, Tonio Kröger, and the short stories “Tristan,” “Man and Dog: An Idyll,” “Hour of Hardship,” “Tobias Mindernickel,” and “The Child Prodigy.” Translated and with an Introduction by Jefferson S. Chase and an Afterword by Martin Swales 

 This remarkable new translation of the Nobel Prize-winner’s great masterpiece is a major literary event. Thomas Mann regarded his monumental retelling of the biblical story of Joseph as his magnum opus. He conceived of the four parts–The Stories of Jacob, Young Joseph, Joseph in Egypt, and Joseph the Provider–as a unified narrative, a “mythological novel” of Joseph’s fall into slavery and his rise to be lord over Egypt. Deploying lavish, persuasive detail, Mann conjures for us the world of patriarchs and pharaohs, the ancient civilizations of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Palestine, and the universal force of human love in all its beauty, desperation, absurdity, and pain. The result is a brilliant amalgam of humor, emotion, psychological insight, and epic grandeur. Now the award-winning translator John E. Woods gives us a definitive new English version of Joseph and His Brothers that is worthy of Mann’s achievement, revealing the novel’s exuberant polyphony of ancient and modern voices, a rich music that is by turns elegant, coarse, and sublime.(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)

From a Nobel Prize for Literature winner and one of the most iconic German writers of the 20th century, Transposed Heads is a beautiful story that explores the complex relationship between the spirit, body, and mind. Inspired by an ancient Hindu legend, Mann’s writes about two Indian friends, Shridaman and Nanda, whom together, decide to decapitate themselves. However, they awaken from their attempted suicides to find their heads restored, but to the wrong body. Now, Sita, the wife of Shridaman must determine the true meaning of identity as she navigates her own feelings as to which representation is her actual husband. As the love-triangle carries on, Mann shows just how entwined our mind, body, and spirit are.   “The Transposed Heads is altogether delightful . . . It is certainly the most charming of Mann's works . . . in short, a restatement in parable form of Mann's intransigent faith in the human intellect. It is also a rich and subtle analysis of the psychology of friendship and love.”—Sewanee Review

From one of America’s most acclaimed literary figures (“an important as well as brilliant novelist”—The New York Times Book Review) a major new novel that hilariously takes the pulse of our times.The unforgettable voyager of this dark comic journey is I. B. “Berl” Pickett, M.D., the die of whose uncharmed life was probably cast as soon as his mother got the bright idea to name him after Irving Berlin. The boyhood insults to any chance of normalcy piled on apace thereafter: the traumatizing, spasmodic spectacle of Pentecostalist Sunday worship; the socially inhibitory accompaniment of his parents on their itinerant rug-shampooing business; the undue technical advancement and emotional retardation that ensued from his erotic initiation at the hands of his aunt. What would have become of this soul had he not gone to medical school, thanks to the surrogate parenting of a local physician and solitary bird hunter? But there is meaning to life beyond professional accreditation, even in the noblest of callings. Berl’s been on a mission to find it these past few years, though with scant equipment or basis for hope. Hard to say (for the moment anyway) whether his mission has been aided or set back by his having fallen under suspicion of negligent homicide in the death of his former lover. All the same, being ostracized by virtually all his colleagues at the clinic gives him something to chew on: the reality of small-town living as total surveillance more than any semblance of fellowship, even among folks you’ve known your whole life.Fortunately, for Berl, it doesn’t take a village. And he will find his deliverance in continuing to practice medicine one way or another, as well as in the few human connections he has made, wittingly or not, over the years. The landscape, too, will furnish a hint in what might yet prove, if not a certifiable epiphany, a semi-spiritual awakening in I. B. Pickett, M.D., the inglorious but sole hero of Thomas McGuane’s uproarious and profound exploration of the threads by which we all are hanging.From the Hardcover edition.

Joe Starling, a man teetering on the edge of spectacular failures--as an artist, rancher, lover, and human being--is also a man of noble ambitions. His struggle to right himself is mesmerizing, hilarious, and profoundly moving.

Tiring of the company of junkies and burn-outs, Thomas Skelton goes home to Key West to take up a more wholesome life. But things fester in America's utter South. And Skelton's plans to become a skiff guide in the shining blue subtropical waters place him on a collision course with Nichol Dance, who has risen to the crest of the profession by dint of infallible instincts and a reputation for homicide. Out of their deadly rivalry, Thomas McGuane has constructed a novel with the impetus of a thriller and the heartbroken humor that is his distinct contribution to American prose.

As a citizen, Nicholas Payne is not in the least solid. As a boyfriend, he is nothing short of disastrous, and his latest flame, the patrician Ann Fitzgerald, has done a wise thing by dropping him. But Ann isn't counting on Nicholas's wild persistence, or on the slapstick lyricism of Thomas McGuane, who in The Bushwhacked Piano sends his hero from Michigan to Montana on a demented mission of courtship whose highlights include a ride on a homicidal bronco and apprenticeship to the inventor of the world's first highrise for bats. The result is a tour de force of American Dubious.