Asphodel

Author	Marina Warner
ISBN	0671701568

Indigo is a shimmering, lyrical novel about power and transformation. Inspired by Shakespeare's magic play The Tempest, prizewinning writer Marina Warner refashions the drama to explore the restless conflicts between the inhabitants of a Caribbean island and the English family who settled it....

Author	Edmund White
ISBN	0679755403

When the narrator of White's poised yet scalding autobiographical novel first embarks on his sexual odyssey, it is the 1950s, and America is "a big gray country of families on drowsy holiday." That country has no room for a scholarly teenager with guilty but insatiable stirrings toward other men. Moving...

Author	Bessie Head
ISBN	0435907204

"Your mother was insane. If you're not careful you'll get insane just like your mother. Your mother was a white woman. They had to lock her up, as she was having a child by the stable boy who was a native." It is never clear to Elizabeth whether the mission school principal's cruel revelation of her origins...

Author	May Sinclair
ISBN	0860681068

Harriett is the Victorian embodiment of all the virtues then viewed as essential to the womanly ideal: a woman reared to love, honour and obey. Idolising her parents, she learns from childhood to equate love with self-sacrifice, so that when she falls in love with the fiance of her closest friend, there...

Author	Heather McGowan
ISBN	0385501382

So Heather McGowan was my grad student professor at Brown in a creative writing class that I adored. I think she had a short story of the same character published in an anthology prior to the release of this novel.
Prepare yourself. She is a tough writer, and this was a crazy read. The narrator is this...

Author	Donald Barthelme
ISBN	0374103798

322. Amateurs (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976), Donald Barthelme
Donald Barthelme (April 7, 1931 – July 23, 1989) was an American short story writer and novelist known for his playful, postmodernist style of short fiction. Barthelme also worked as a newspaper reporter for the Houston Post,...

Author	Adrienne Rich
ISBN	0393323773

In this volume, Adrienne Rich pursues her signature themes and takes them further: the discourse between poetry and history, interlocutions within and across gender, dialogues between poets and visual artists, human damages and dignity, and the persistence of utopian visions. Here Rich continues...

Author	Padgett Powell
ISBN	0805071229

Willie Stargell, prodigious hitter of home runs and occasional philosopher, once considered that every baseball game begins with the home plate umpire reaching an arm over the shoulder of a squatting catcher, pointing toward the pitcher, and ordering, in a melodic voice, "PLAAAAAAAAY BALL!" "He...

Author	Leo Bersani
ISBN	0674406206

Acclaimed for his intricate, incisive, and often controversial explorations of art, literature, and society, Leo Bersani now addresses homosexuality in America.

Hardly a day goes by without the media focusing an often sympathetic beam on gay life--and, with AIDS, on gay death. Gay plays...

Author	Virginia Woolf
ISBN	0156290545

LOVE HER ESSAYS!!! Virginia Woolf published many essays throughout her lifetime. After her death, her husband, Leonard Woolf, collected all her published essays and put them into four uniform volumes, this being Volume One. In each of these essays, Mr. Woolf believes, have stood the test of time and...

Author	Paul Monette
ISBN	0758201893

Paul Monette
* 16. Oktober 1945
† 10. Februar 1995

Dying was nothing to losing.

All my death watches having taught me that the thing itself when it finally came was beyond feeling.

This book is so eloquent, I would have to highlight the whole book to...

Author	Essex Hemphill
ISBN	0978625110

Literary Nonfiction. African American Studies. LGBT Studies. Winner of a Lambda Literary Award. BROTHER TO BROTHER, begun by Joseph Beam and completed by Essex Hemphill after Beam's death in 1988, is a collection of now-classic literary work by black gay male writers. Originally published in 1991...

Author	Shashi Deshpande
ISBN	0670892513

Shashi Deshpande's latest novel explores the lives of two women, one obsessed with music and the other a passionate believer in Communism, who break away from their families to seek fulfilment in public life. Savitribai Indorekar, born into an orthodox Hindu family, elopes with her Muslim lover and...

Author	Gillian Rose
ISBN	0805210784

A devastating confrontation with mortality leads Gillian Rose, one of England's most distinguished thinkers, to illuminate the deepest issues of our lives: love, friendship, sex, illness, and death. Rose's crisis gives her search the force of immediacy and intimacy; her willingness to face life...

Author	Jim Crace
ISBN	0140276009

Victor, an eighty-year-old multimillionaire, surveys his empire from the remoteness of his cloud-capped penthouse. Expensively insulated from the outside world, he nonetheless finds that memories of his impoverished childhood will not be kept so easily at bay. Focusing on the one area of vitality...

Author	Jáchym Topol
ISBN	0945774451

Winner of the Egon Hostovský Prize as the best Czech book of the year, this epic novel powerfully captures the sense of dislocation that followed the Czechs’ newfound freedom in 1989. More than just the story of its young protagonist—who is part businessman, part gang member, part drifter—it...

Author	Storm Jameson
ISBN	0706608429

This outstanding collection is made up of two short novels, A Day Off and The Single Heart, and three long stories which show the variety of the author's great writing skills that make her one of the most distinguished of women writers.

In A Day Off, Jameson tells of a day in the life of a middle-aged...

Author

Elizabeth Taylor

A finely nuanced exploration of responsibility, snobbery and culture clash from one of the twentieth centrury's finest novelists.

When Amy's husband dies on holiday in Istanbul, she is supported by the kindly but rather slovenly Martha, a young American novelist who lives in London. Upon...

Author	Stephen Spender
ISBN	0802135242

The story behind this novel by one of twentieth-century Britain's greatest poets and men of letters is nearly as remarkable as the book itself. Not long ago, a friend just returned from America told the author that he had read in the Spender manuscript collection of the University of Texas a novel called...

Author	Rebecca West
ISBN	0140073213

Isabelle, a wealthy American widow, arrives in France to restart her life and discovers she has her choice of eligible suitors. Torn between a placid liaison with a southerner and a tortuous affair with a Frenchman, Isabelle's plans suddenly take an unexpected turn that will ultimately lead her to...

Author	Nancy Toder
ISBN	1555830617

I first read this book in 1994 and still have the 10th anniversary edition I bought at the time. It is a very well written story about two young women who meet at college and become lovers. As the title suggests they make different choices when they leave college. The story is set in the 1970s. One of them lives...

Author	Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
ISBN	0393008517

According to the synopsis of this novel on Goodreads – this is a witty novel. There is certainly a kind of bittersweet comedic quality to some of it – but I’m not sure I’d call it witty exactly. I’m just being pedantic perhaps – for me, while The Householder is a comedy of manners – I found...

Author	Slavenka Drakulić
ISBN	0140298444

Set in 1992, during the height of the Bosnian war, S. reveals one of the most horrifying aspects of any war: the rape and torture of civilian women by occupying forces. S. is the story of a Bosnian woman in exile who has just given birth to an unwanted child—one without a country, a name, a father, or a language....