Having suffered abuse and misfortune for much of her life, a young child searches for a better life and finally gets a break in the home of a loving woman with several foster children.

"From the acclaimed and award-winning author of Anywhere But Here and My Hollywood, a powerful new novel about a young boy's quest to uncover the mysteries of his unraveling family. What he discovers turns out to be what he least wants to know: the inner workings of his parents' lives. And even then he can't stop searching. Miles Adler-Hart starts eavesdropping to find out what his mother is planning for his life. When he learns instead that his parents...

Anthropologist Jonathan Brand arrives in the Faroe Islands to conduct his fieldwork, and discovers the complexities of the so-called simple life.

Dinah Sachs and Asa Thayer have had a love affair, conducted in afternoons stolen from the office of the magazine where they work. But now that the affair is over, Dinah, in an act of lingering passion, invents a narrative of Asa's youth, imagining the events that shaped the "happy, handsome man" who, in her words, "was born to stomp on my heart."
Witty and sexy, funny and immediate, Asa, As I Knew Him is a a seductive...

Gathers the nine stories that were the basis for the Robert Altman motion picture.

Mr. Exley, a schoolteacher in a dismal rural New York town, finds pleasure in rooting for the Giants as he tries to make it on his own in modern American society.

"An enchanting story about a writer remembering her short time in Paris and her reflections on friendships, relationships, and her younger self in a beautiful dual-language edition. Paris has long been romanticized as the city of light. A city with a vibrant literary and artistic expatriate community. Corina--nicknamed Puffina--is a young writer hoping to find that idealized community, but when her money runs out sooner than expected, she finds a...

"Ernest J. Gaines's new novella revolves around a courthouse shooting that leads a young reporter to uncover the long story of race and power in his small town and the relationship between the white sheriff and the black man who "whipped children" to keep order. After Brady Sims pulls out a gun in a courtroom and shoots his own son, who has just been convicted of robbery and murder, he asks only to be allowed two hours before he'll give himself up...

This volume of previously uncollected work represents the final legacy of one of the great and truly American writers of our time. It includes five of Raymond Carver's early stories (including the first one he ever published), a fragment of an unpublished novel, poems that have previously appeared only in small-press editions, and all of his uncollected nonfiction. Included here as well is Carver's last essay, "Friendship" about a London reunion with...

"After ten years of marriage and acclaim, the great Clea and Zeus are divorcing -- and since all their life together has been turned into art, so will they dramatize their divorce. In their last TV special, they enact their glittering history and stage their final breakup..."