Elements of Style

Sample

Vanina Marsot

Anna has just had her heart broken in LA. But unlike most women who have been unlucky with love, she has an enviable backup plan - she uses her dual citizenship and moves to Paris to live in her aunt's empty (and free) apartment. Paris, the city of romance, might not seem like the easiest place to mend a broken heart, but Anna tries to find solace in the cobble-stoned streets, fresh bread, delectable pastries, and sexy Parisian men. While there, she finds a job translating a mysterious, erotic French novel by a famous French author who is staying anonymous. As she is intrigued by his story and taken in by the mystery behind the book, she learns more about herself and how to find the best parts of her French and American self.

Sample

Willa Cather

The first of three volumes presenting the writings of Willa Cather includes her early book of stories and first four novels. The troll garden: Cather's first short story collection, originally published in 1905, depicts characters who seek the realm of beauty and imagination, but are confronted by the vulgarity and brutality of American society. O pioneers!: In Nebraska at the end of the nineteenth century, Swedish immigrant Alexandra Bergson leads her family to success, but not without personal sacrifice. The song of the lark: Follows the life of Thea Kronberg from her childhood in 19th-century Colorado to her career as a renowned opera singer. My Antonia: The reminiscences of a New York lawyer, Jim Burden, about his boyhood in Nebraska, particularly a young Bohemian girl named Antonia Shimerda, are set against the backdrop of the American assimilation of the immigrant. One of ours: The son of a prosperous Nebraska farmer yearns to leave his prairie home.

Sample

Amy Bloom

"Amy Bloom gets more meaning into individual sentences than most authors manage in whole books."--The New YorkerA great short story has the emotional depth and intensity of a poem and the wholeness and breadth of a novel. Amy Bloom writes great short stories. Her first collection, Come to Me, was a finalist for the National Book Award, and here she deepens and extends her mastery of the form. Real people inhabit these pages, the people we know and are, the people we long to be and are afraid to be: a mother and her brave, smart little girl, each coming to terms with the looming knowledge that the little girl will become a man; a wildly unreliable narrator bent on convincing us that her stories are not harmless; a woman with breast cancer, a frightened husband, and a best friend, all discovering that their lifelong triangle is not what they imagined; a man and his stepmother engaged in a complicated dance of memory, anger, and forgiveness. Amy Bloom takes us straight to the center of these lives with rare generosity and sublime wit, in flawless prose that is by turns sensuous, spare, heartbreaking, and laugh-out-loud funny. These are transcendent stories: about the uncertain gestures of love, about the betrayals and gifts of the body, about the surprises and bounties of the heart, and about what comes to us unbidden and what we choose.From the Hardcover edition.

Sample

Wendy Wasserstein

"A dinner party in an ornate mansion on the fashionable Upper East Side of Manhattan provides the scene for this witty and incisive play. Set in two eras - the early 1900s and our own Gilded Age - the characters move effortlessly from one period to the other. The host, a contemporary master of high-risk arbitrage, steps in and out of character as a robber baron of an earlier time. His guests of today include a Hollywood director, a not-so-cutting-edge sculptor, an online lingerie designer, an aggressive publicist, and an aging historian. Their counterparts from the past are the great man's rebellious son, a grand dame of New York society, the architect who built the mansion originally, and the maids and servants who maintain it. In this dance of rich storytelling and social commentary, it becomes strikingly clear that while old money has become new, little else has changed over the years. Children still rebel against their controlling parents, women still hope for love, and greed, snobbery, and angst persist. Black-and-white photos within text."--BOOK JACKET.