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Second volume in the Rosy Crucifixion series. More about Henry and June, also chronicling the author's travels to the deep South, and his work as an encyclopedia salesmen (after he'd left personnel).

The dilettantes who frequent Lady Tantamount's society parties are determined to push forward the moral frontiers of the age. Marjorie has left her family to live with Walter; Walter is in love with the luscious but cold-hearted Lucy; Maurice deflowers young girls for the sake of entertainment, while the withdrawn writer, Philip, finds himself drawn to the dangerous political charm of Everard. As they all engage in dazzling and witty conversation, the din of the age - its ideas and idiocies - grows deafening.

Pulitzer award-winning author Philip Roth's iconic and sensational novel about sex, psychoanalysis and growing upPortnoy's Complaint n. [after Alexander Portnoy (1933-)]:A disorder in which strongly-felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a perverse nature. Portnoy's Complaint, arguably Philip Roth's best-known novel, tells the tale of young Jewish lawyer Alexander Portnoy and his scandalous sexual confessions to his psychiatrist. As narrated by Portnoy, he takes the reader on a journey through his childhood to adolescence to present day while articulating his sexual desire, frustration and neurosis in shockingly candid ways. Hysterically funny and daringly intimate, Portnoy's Complaint was an immediate bestseller upon its publication and elevated Roth to an international literary celebrity. `The most outrageously funny book about sex written...Portnoy's Complaint is still a masterclass in how to get beneath the skin of sexuality. Has any other novel managed it quite so well?' Guardian

The perfect gift for Valentine's DayPossession is an exhilarating novel of wit and romance, at once a literary detective novel and a triumphant love story. It is the tale of a pair of young scholars investigating the lives of two Victorian poets. Following a trail of letters, journals and poems they uncover a web of passion, deceit and tragedy, and their quest becomes a battle against time.

In his lifetime the great American playwright Arthur Miller published two highly regarded collections of stories, "I Don't Need You Any More" (1967) and "Homely Girl, a Life" (1995). Shortly after his death in 2005 a final collection, "Presence" (2007), appeared. Now, all eighteen of these stories are gathered together in one volume for the first time, including the six from "Presence", previously only published in the USA. In his plays Miller took on the big themes of the day, putting stories of the Depression, wartime deceit and the McCarthy era on stage with an energy and passion not seen before and rarely since. In these stories he turns his attention to smaller, more intimate themes, yet still brings to bear the profound insight, humanism, empathy and wit of his work for the theatre. Including the early, O. Henry Award-winning "I Don't Need You Anymore", the original story of "The Misfits" on which the film was based, and the beautiful late story "Presence", this collection offers a fresh perspective on the great writer and his work, here informed by an unusual sensuality and delicacy. When "Homely Girl, a Life" was published in America the critic for the "New York Times" wrote of those three stories: 'The ability to sum up in clear, unequivocal prose the essence of emotion, a situation, a theme - characteristic of Mr Miller's best writing - makes the reader wish that these stories were longer, and that there were more of them.' At last there are.

Ambrose Bierce was an American writer who is best known for his realism. Often compared to Poe for the dark, realistic nature of his short stories, Bierce drew upon his Civil War experience as a soldier to write on a wide variety of subjects, and stories like "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" are still widely read.

"So funny, so sage and above all so incandescently intelligent" (The Chicago Tribune), the New York Times bestseller Purity is a grand story of youthful idealism, extreme fidelity, and murder, a daring and penetrating book from "the most intelligent novelist of [his] generation" (The New Republic), Jonathan Franzen, the author of Crossroads

Young Pip Tyler doesn't know who she is. She knows that her real name is Purity, that she's saddled with $130,000 in student debt, that she's squatting with anarchists in Oakland, and that her relationship with her mother--her only family--is hazardous. But she doesn't have a clue who her father is, why her mother chose to live as a recluse with an invented name, or how she'll ever have a normal life.

A glancing encounter with a German peace activist leads Pip to an internship in South America with the Sunlight Project, an organization that traffics in all the secrets of the world--including, Pip hopes, the secret of her origins. TSP is the brainchild of Andreas Wolf, a charismatic provocateur. Now on the lam in Bolivia, Andreas is drawn to Pip for reasons she doesn't understand, and she is equally conflicted about her attraction to him.

The author of The Corrections and Freedom has imagined a world of vividly original characters, and he follows their intertwining paths through landscapes as contemporary as the omnipresent Internet and as ancient as the war between the sexes.

'Among the hottest books of this blazing summer' (Daily Telegraph): a bold, lushly written novel that will compel and disquiet in equal measure It is the 1970s and Ralph, an up-and-coming composer, is visiting Edmund Greenslay at his riverside home in Putney to discuss a collaboration. Through the house s colourful rooms and unruly garden flits nine-year-old Daphne dark, teasing, slippery as mercury, more sprite than boy or girl. From the moment their worlds collide, Ralph is consumed by an obsession to make Daphne his. But Ralph is twenty-five and Daphne is only a child, and even in the bohemian abandon of 1970s London their fast-burgeoning relationship must be kept a secret. It is not until years later that Daphne is forced to confront the truth of her own childhood and an act of violence that has lain hidden for decades. Putney is a bold, thought-provoking novel about the moral lines we tread, the stories we tell ourselves and the memories that play themselves out again and again, like snatches of song.

Now available for the first time as a trade paperback, QUETZALCOATL is the original 1923 version of D.H. Lawrence's great Mexican novel, THE PLUMED SERPENT--especially noted for its vivid evocation of Mexican culture and mythology, intensity of feeling, and psychological insight. This edition includes an illuminating Introduction and textual commentary by Sterling Professor of English at Yale, Louis L. Martz.