Girl With a Pearl Earring tells the story of Griet, a 16-year-old Dutch girl who becomes a maid in the house of the painter Johannes Vermeer. Her calm and perceptive manner not only helps her in her household duties, but also attracts the...
A satirical fable with a rootless and helpless accountant as the protagonist. Alone in his apartment, he spends all his nights and weekends playing an intricate baseball game of his own invention. The author has won the William Faulkner Award and...
In the sixteenth century, Antinous Bellori, a boy of eleven, is lost in a dark forest and stumbles upon two glowing beings, one carrying a spear, the other a flaming torch. . This event is decisive in Bellori’s life, and he thereafter devotes...
Instead of the book he’s meant to write, Rudolph, a Viennese musicologist, produces this dark and grotesquely funny account of small woes writ large, of profound horrors detailed and rehearsed to the point of distraction. We learn of Rudolph’s...
Short, straightforward in narrative, and relatively linear in plot, The Crying of Lot 49 is considered by many to be Pynchon's most accessible novel, and is therefore the one most commonly read, whether to fulfill the syllabus of a literature...
In this “compelling, clever, and dark” (Heat magazine) thriller, a man’s shocking act of savagery stuns a local community—and the revelations that follow will keep you gripped until the very last page. This work of psychological suspense, a...
Twelve-year-old Sunny lives in Nigeria, but she was born American. Her features are African, but she's albino. She's a terrific athlete, but can't go out into the sun to play soccer. There seems to be no place where she fits. And then she...
Drive Your Plow…
DUSZEJKO IS IN HER SIXTIES, AN ECCENTRIC schoolteacher and caretaker of holiday homes who lives in a remote Polish village. Her two beloved dogs disappear, and then members of a local hunting club are found murdered; she...