The three short novels in this collection, The Scorpion God, show Golding at his playful, ironic and mysterious best. In 'The Scorpion God' we see the world of ancient Egypt at the time of the earliest Pharaohs. 'Clonk Clonk' is a graphic account of...
In the spring of 1943, during a stint in the Merchant Marine, twenty-one-year old Jack Kerouac set out to write his first novel. Working diligently day and night to complete it by hand, he titled it The Sea Is My Brother. Now, nearly seventy...
The penultimate novel in the Strangers and Brothers series takes Goya's theme of monsters that appear in our sleep. The sleep of reason here is embodied in the ghastly murders of children that involve torture and...
Dean Jocelin has a vision: that God has chosen him to erect a great spire on his cathedral. His mason anxiously advises against it, for the old cathedral was built without foundations. Nevertheless, the spire rises octagon upon octagon, pinnacle by...
One of the world’s most celebrated authors, Margaret Atwood has penned a collection of smart and entertaining fictional essays, in the genre of her popular books Good Bones and Murder in the Dark, punctuated with wonderful illustrations by the...
The Swiss writer Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921–90) was one of the most important literary figures of the second half of the twentieth century. During the years of the cold war, arguably only Beckett, Camus, Sartre, and Brecht rivaled him as a...
"The Water Wheel recounts both the real and imagined-real adventures of one John B. Sanford in New York and London over a short period in 1927. The novel is completely dominated by Sanford, a self-assumed individualist—and self-styled 'lawclerk,...