Literature and Fiction
Showing 97–102 of 102 results
-
Reef
$30.00Reef is the elegant and moving story of Triton, a talented young chef so committed to pleasing his master’s palate that he is oblivious to the political unrest threatening his Sri Lankan paradise. It is a personal story that parallels the larger movement of a country from a hopeful, young democracy to troubled island society. It is also a mature, poetic novel which the British press has compared to the works of James Joyce, Graham Greene, V. S. Naipaul, and Anton Chekhov.
With his collection of short stories Monkfish Moon—a New York Times Notable Book of 1993—Romesh Gunesekera quickly established himself as a leading literary voice. Reef earned universal praise from European critics and landed the young author on the short list for the 1994 Booker Prize, England’s highest honor for fiction.
Reef explores the entwined lives of Mr. Salgado, an aristocratic marine biologist and student of sea movements and the disappearing reef, and his houseboy, Triton, who learns to polish silver until it shines like molten sun; to mix a love cake with ten eggs, creamed butter, and fresh cadju nuts; to marinate tiger prawns; and to steam parrot fish. Through these characters and the forty years of political disintegration their country endures, Gunesekera tells the tragic, sometimes comic, story of a lost paradise and a young man coming to terms with his destiny.
-
Witness Against the Beast
William Blake and the Moral Law$17.00Witness Against the Beast is a groundbreaking interdisciplinary study in which the renowned social historian E.P. Thompson contends that most of the assumptions scholars have made about William Blake are misleading and unfounded. Brilliantly reexamining Blake’s cultural milieu and intellectual background, Thompson detects in Blake’s poetry a repeated call to resist the usury and commercialism of the “Antichrist” embodied by contemporary society—to “witness against the beast.” -
A Queer Reader
$25.00A Queer Reader is a rich and provocative collection of writings about male homosexuality—a gay version of Bartlett’s Quotations, with authors ranging from Plato to Andy Warhol. Arranging entries chronologically and drawing on sources from the Satyricon to Gay News, from Michelangelo&squo;s sonnets to a speech in the House of Lords, from sexually explicit graffiti found in Pompeii to a Playboy interview with David Bowie, Patrick Higgins uses novels, biographies, autobiographies, histories, and ephemera to present gay history as never before. -
The Traveler’s Tree
$20.00Bruno Bontempelli’s The Traveler’s Tree is a spellbinding and most unusual tale of desperation and suspense, which takes place in the eighteenth-century maritime setting Patrick O’Brian made so familiar to American readers. A modern fable reminiscent of Camus’s classic The Plague, The Traveler’s Tree is at its core an exploration of man’s nature.
Somewhere in the Caribbean Sea the French ship Entremetteuse lies stranded without a breeze, its crew racked by starvation and disease, its wood rotting, and its masts limp. An island and the dim outline of the fabled traveler’s tree appear on the horizon. Although only a gunshot away, the island’s sheer cliffs and coral reefs make it cruelly unreachable. The heat grows unbearable, the ship’s stores are nearly depleted, and the rats eagerly await the remains.
As listless as the ship and increasingly feeble with scurvy, the embattled crew dispatches one longboat after another against raging waves, barrier reefs, and poisonous fish in order to reach the island, but to no avail. As mutiny, rebellion, and utter starvation loom, they pin their last hopes on a direct charge of the ship across the reefs, in one last valiant effort to reach the traveler’s tree.
Hailed in France as “a superb allegory” (Le Monde), The Traveler’s Tree is an enthralling novel that tells a story of the human condition and man’s limitations. Writing with extraordinary realism and historical accuracy, Bruno Bontempelli lures us into this absorbing morality tale that will be remembered for years to come.
-
Growing Up Gay/Growing Up Lesbian
A Literary Anthology$14.95Growing up Gay, Growing up Lesbian is the first literary anthology geared specifically to gay and lesbian youth. It includes more than fifty coming-of-age stories by established writers and teenagers and has been hailed by writers, educators, activists, booksellers, and the press as an essential resource for young people—and not-so-young people—seeking to understand the gay and lesbian experience. The anthology includes selections by James Baldwin, Rita Mae Brown, David Leavitt, Jeanette Winterson, Audre Lorde, and others.
A free teaching guide is available.
-
Monkfish Moon
Short Stories$16.95The nine haunting stories of Monkfish Moon, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, announce the appearance of an extraordinary writing talent. Published to universal acclaim in England, these stories expertly reveal lives shaped by the luxuriant tropical surroundings of Sri Lanka and disoriented by that country’s resurgent violence.
Gunesekera describes a kind of paradise in which a sudden moment of silence in a city is cause for fear, where civil war disrupts a marriage thousands of miles away, and where “building up”—of businesses, homes, relationships—is more often than not swiftly and violently brought down.
Written with a startling grace, this first, hugely promising collection creates a vivid portrait of a largely unchronicled corner of the world.
Showing 97–102 of 102 results
