Literary Lives

Le jeune prince Marcus est encore un enfant lorsqu'il assiste impuissant au massacre de toute sa famille. Seul rescapé de cette boucherie fomentée par Ojsternig, ennemi héréditaire de la famille de Marcus qui va s'asseoir sur le trône, Marcus ne doit son salut qu'à la jeune Héloïse, fille d'Agnès, la lavandière du village qui l'accueillera sous son toit pour l'élever comme s'il était son fils. Luca Di Fulvio retrace l'ascension paradoxale d'un petit prince, un demi-dieu qui va devoir apprendre dans la douleur comment devenir un homme.

Mary Morrissey is living the life of her dreams. She has a loving husband, Tom, two daughters, and twin boys. But beneath the shiny veneer, Mary hasn’t taken a calm breath in 10 years. She lives in a constant state of panic, afraid the secret she’s kept hidden for so long will be revealed, shattering her perfect life. When addictively charismatic ex-boyfriend Landon James reappears during his high-profile Senate campaign, Mary’s fears become even more real.

Leigh Fielding wants a life. Seriously. Having spent the past five years on dialysis, she has one simple wish: to make it to her thirtieth birthday. Now, thanks to the generosity of the late Larry Resnick and his transplanted kidney, it looks like her wish may come true. With her newfound vitality (and Larry's kidney) in tow, Leigh hits the road for an excursion that will carry her from Wisconsin to California, with a few stops in between: Mount Rushmore, the Badlands, the Rockies, Las Vegas - and a memorable visit to thank Larry's family for the second chance.

A 39-year-old with Asperger’s syndrome and obsessive-compulsive disorder, Edward Stanton lives alone on a rigid schedule in the Montana town where he grew up. His carefully constructed routine includes tracking his most common waking time (7:38 a.m.), refusing to start his therapy sessions even a minute before the appointed hour (10:00 a.m.), and watching one episode of the 1960s cop show Dragnet each night (10:00 p.m.). But when a single mother and her nine-year-old son move in across the street, Edward’s timetable comes undone....

Performance artists Caleb and Camille Fang dedicated themselves to making great art. But when an artist's work lies in subverting normality, it can be difficult to raise well-adjusted children. Just ask Buster and Annie Fang. For as long as they can remember, they starred (unwillingly) in their parents' madcap pieces. But now that they are grown up, the chaos of their childhood has made it difficult to cope with life outside the fishbowl of their parents' strange world.

Hawaii was the last place Grace Christiansen ever imagined she'd vacation, much less fall in love. But when her family surprises her with a cooking retreat in paradise, she is pulled - or maybe yanked - away from her predictable, safe life and thrown headfirst into the adventure of a lifetime.

Jan needs this. She’s flying to Crete to reunite with friends she met there five years ago and relive an idyllic vacation. Basking in the warmth of the sun, the azure sea, and the aura of antiquity, she can once again pretend - for a little while - that she belongs. Her ex-boyfriend Marcus will be among them, but even he doesn’t know the secrets she keeps hidden behind a veil of lies. None of them really know her. Then again, how well does she know them? When Jan awakens in utter darkness, chained to a wall, she desperately tries to reconstruct what happened....

At the heart of Harriet E. Wilson’s autobiographical novel is Frado, the young daughter of a mixed-race couple, who is exploited first by a middle-class New England white family and then by an opportunistic husband on the abolitionist lecture circuit. In adopting the nineteenth-century conventions of both the sentimental novel and the narratives of enslaved people, Wilson delivered a scathing and ironic indictment of the racism of the antebellum North.

Harryboy Boas is a gambling man. An independent Jewish bachelor, he lives in a Hackney boarding house: reading Zola, betting on the dogs at the track, womanising, philosophising, and repressing his tortured wartime past. Until, that is, a new family moves in. As his life dramatically unravels—financially, emotionally, and existentially—Harryboy descends into a murky criminal underworld where debts, violence, gangsters and revenge are the inevitable payback for those who can't pay up ...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER ONE OF BARACK OBAMA’S FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR “A bracingly epic and imaginatively mythic journey across the American West” (Entertainment Weekly), from the celebrated author of The Tiger’s Wife and The Morningside “Obreht’s simple but rich prose...

In Hysteria, we meet a young woman an hour into yet another alcohol-fueled, masochistic, sexual bender at her local bar. There is a new bartender working this time, one she hasn't seen before, but who can properly make a drink. He looks familiar, and as she is consumed by shame from her behavior the previous week - hooking up with her parents' colleague and her roommate's brother - she also becomes convinced that her Brooklyn bartender is actually Sigmund Freud. They embark on a relationship, and she is forced to confront her past.

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER The middle-aged hero of Rabbit, Run, returns—from one of the most gifted American writers of the twentieth century. The hero of John Updike's Rabbit, Run (1960), ten years after the hectic events described in Rabbit Redux (1971), has come to enjoy considerable...

The inner workings of a writer’s life, the interplay between experience and writing, are brilliantly recounted by a master of the art. Gay Talese now focuses on his own life—the zeal for the truth, the narrative edge, the sometimes startling precision, that won accolades for his journalism...

In 1975 Paul and Roz Mellow wrote a best-selling Joy of Sex-type book that mortified their four school-aged children and ultimately changed the shape of the family forever. Thirty years later, as the now dispersed family members argue over whether to reissue the book, we follow the complicated lives of each of the grown children and their conflicts in love, work, marriage, parenting, and, of course, sex - all shadowed by the indelible specter of their highly sexualized parents.

In her 16th novel, Penelope Lively shows her extraordinary understanding of what makes us human as she delves into the mystery of family life.

Twelve-year-old Bo Bo lives with his uncle U Ba in Kalaw, a town in Burma. An unusually perceptive child, Bo Bo can read people’s emotions in their eyes. This acute sensitivity only makes his unconventional home life more difficult: His father comes to visit him once a year, and he can hardly remember his mother, who, for unclear reasons, keeps herself away from her son. Everything changes when Bo Bo discovers the story of his parents’ great love, which threatens to break down in the whirlwind of political events, and of his mother’s mysterious sickness.

“A wildly original novel that pulses with heart and truth . . . That this powerful exploration of friendship, desire, ambition, and secrets manages to be ebullient, gripping, heartbreaking, and deeply deeply funny is a testament to Kayla Rae Whitaker’s formidable gifts. I was so sorry to...

An interdisciplinary work that brings life writing scholarship into conversation with prison studies and law and literature studies, Prison Life Writing theorizes how life writing works in prison, explains literature’s complicated entanglements with institutional power, and demonstrates the political and aesthetic innovations of one of America’s most fascinating literary genres.

An dazzlingly inventive novel about modern family, from the author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time The set-up of Mark Haddon's brilliant new novel is simple: Richard, a wealthy doctor, invites his estranged sister Angela and her family to join his for a week at a vacation...

The daughter of a Danish immigrant and a black G.I., Rachel survives a family tragedy only to face new challenges. Sent to live with her strict African-American grandmother in a racially divided Northwest city, she must suppress her grief and reinvent herself in a mostly black community. A beauty with light brown skin and blue eyes, she attracts much attention in her new home. The world wants to see her as either black or white, but that's not how she sees herself.