Twelve stories deal with loneliness, loss, the tragic banality of everyday life, and redemption.

Recounts the triumphs and tragedies of the characters in a small-town in upstate New York.

No discussion of great modern authors is complete without mention of Cormac McCarthy, whose rare and blazing talent makes his every work a true literary event. A grand addition to the American literary canon, Suttree introduces readers to Cornelius Suttree, a man who abandons his affluent family to live among a dissolute array of vagabonds along the Tennessee river. "Suttree contains a humor that is Faulknerian . and a freakish imaginative flair reminiscent...

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.

In his startling, witty, and inexhaustibly inventive first novel first published in 1986 and now reissued as a Grove Press paperback the author of Vox and The Fermata uses a one-story escalator ride as the occasion for a dazzling reappraisal of everyday objects and rituals. From the humble milk carton to the act of tying one's shoes, The Mezzanine at once defamiliarizes the familiar world and endows it with loopy and euphoric poetry. Nicholson Baker's...

"In 1949 four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, begin meeting to eat dim sum, play mahjong, and talk. United in shared unspeakable loss and hope, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. With wit and sensitivity, Amy Tan's debut novel--now widely regarded as a modern classic--examines the sometimes painful, often tender, and always deep connection between these four women and their American-born daughters."--Publisher's description....

This is the story of love-smitten Charles, his friend Sam, and Charles' mother, who spends much of her time in the bathtub feeling depressed.

This volume is a collection of short stories originally published in 1991 that reflect the author's experience of being surrounded by American influences while still being familiarly bound to her Mexican heritage as she grew-up north of the Mexico-US border. The short vignettes focus on the social role of women and their relationships with the men and other women in their lives. The majority of the characters are stereotypes: men embody machismo while...