In one eponymous novella and ten stories, Pure Hollywood brings us into private worlds of corrupt familial love, intimacy, longing, and danger. From an alcoholic widowed actress living in desert seclusion to a young mother whose rejection of her child has terrible consequences, from a newlywed couple who ignore the violent warnings of a painter burned by love to an eerie portrait of erotic obsession, each story is an imagistic snapshot of what it...

In these stories, Dianne Nelson illuminates that vast territory of pleasure and pain created within modern families. Whether it is a father trying to kidnap his young son from his estranged ex-wife or a woman celebrating her ability to produce babies without any help from men, Nelson's characters reveal the dark, haunting and sometimes comic dilemmas of kinship. In the title story, seventeen-year-old April is an involuntary witness to the seemingly...

Caught in the muddle of modern life, eyes gazing at the middle distance, the characters in Silent Retreats search, down roads paved by custom and dotted by the absurd, for escape, refuge, or, at least, merciful diversion. Many of the men in Philip Deaver's stories, having drifted out of their native Illinois to the far corners, find comfort from empty jobs and blank relationships in healing, often hilarious, seductions. In "Why I Shacked Up With...

At the heart of this collection of five short stories and the title novella is the powerful interconnection between parents and children, nostalgia and memory, and the collective emotional intimacies and transactions that configure human behavior. Incisive and witty meditations on the disruptions and difficulties of family life, the stories in The Quarry focus on the precariously balanced world of anxious and awkward sons and painfully failed or...

There is a grand piano delivered to the wrong Sea Point address. There is Toby the dog whose casual disappearance leads to the discovery of a world as unlikely as a helpful man. There are Isabelle and Hester, both travelling on the same train, but moving in opposite directions. There are the school girls who smoke through Die Stem during a Republic Day Celebration. There is Adeela longing for OK Bazaars, Boxing Day, and groenboontjie bredie; Lilly...

First published in 1799, Charles Brockden Brown's "Edgar Huntly, Or Memoirs of a Sleep Walker" is the story of its title character, who upon learning of the death of the brother of his friend and love interest, Mary Waldegrave, visits where he died in the woods in rural Pennsylvania. There he discovers a man, Clithero, a servant from a nearby farm, suspiciously lurking about near the scene of Waldegrave's murder. Suspecting Clithero, Edgar begins...

A story of Americans living on the French Riviera in the 1930s is a portrait of psychological disintegration as a wealthy couple supports friends and hangers-on financially and emotionally at the cost of their own stability.

Celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of "The Adventures of Augie March," and reflects the mid-twentieth-century's psychological turmoil from more inhibited times in a volume that also includes "The Victim" and "Dangling Man."

"Twelve delightfully strange, haunting stories from the acclaimed, oracular author of Beautyland"-- Provided by publisher.