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Brilliantly written, erotically charged, My Secret History is Paul Theroux's tour de force. It is the story of Andre Parent, a writer, a world traveller, a lover of every kind of woman he chances to meet in a life as varied as a man can lead.It begins with his days as a Massachusetts altar boy, when his first furtive sexual encounter introduces him to the thrills of leading a double life. As a teenaged lifeguard, Andre finds himself caught between the attentions of a beautiful young student and an amorous older woman. Soon he is in Africa, where the local women are numerous, easy, and free. And as the boy becomes a man he turns his attention to writing, which brings him fame, and a wife, who may finally cause him to know himself.But not before he sets up his most dangerous secret life, one that any man might envy, but that could cost Andre Parent the delicate balance that makes him who he is.

In the Washington Post Book World, Sven Birkerts called this exuberant novel "a complex and gripping work of invention and confession . . . I understood again how the prose of a true writer can bring us to a world beyond." The book spans almost thirty years in the life of a fictional "Paul Theroux," who moves through young bachelorhood in Africa, in and out of marriage, affairs, and employment, and between continents. It's a wry, worldly, erotic, and deeply moving account of one man's first half century - "among the strongest things Theroux has ever written" (New York Times Book Review).

Fourteen-year-old Jilly Farina was mesmerized by Millroy the Magician at the Barnstable County Fair. After all, he once turned a girl from the audience into a glass of milk and drank her. But when Jilly stepped into the wickerwork coffin during a performance, she had no idea he would transform her dreary life into something truly magical, and a touch bizarre.For Millroy was no ordinary magician. He could smell the future, and Jilly was going to be part of it. Yet not even Millroy could foresee how far determination and a dream could take him, as he and his new young assistant hit the road--and the airwaves—to save America's unhealthy appetite and floundering soul....

It's New Year in paranoid, computer-rich New York, and a group of Owners has jet-rotored out to party in O-Zone.New York is a sealed city. Visits to the eerie, radioactive wasteland of O-Zone are now rarer than moon landings. The people dumped there, 'aliens', officially do not exist. For Hooper Allbright and Fizzy, Theroux's futuristic Robinson Crusoes, the trip sets in motion an adventure of undreamed-of desire and terror.

In a breathtaking adventure story, the paranoid and brilliant inventor Allie Fox takes his family to live in the Honduran jungle, determined to build a civilization better than the one they've left. Fleeing from an America he sees as mired in materialism and conformity, he hopes to rediscover a purer life. But his utopian experiment takes a dark turn when his obsessions lead the family toward unimaginable danger.

Through shipwreck and hurricane, in the ice of the Antarctic and the thundering surf of the African coast, Nick Berg is a man in his element, fighting back against the ruthless ambition of the arch-rival who stole his wife and son and robbed him of an empire.The "Golden Prince" is deposed; once the flamboyant chairman of a huge shipping consortium, now the captain of a salvage tug. Then a cruise ship, stranded with 600 people in the frozen wastes of the Antarctic, could be his chance to fight back. His heroic salvage of the liner sweeps him back to even greater power and even more deadly conflict with the man who has supplanted him as chairman.

For Tanus, the fair-haired young lion of a warrior, the gods have decreed that he will lead Egypt's army in a bold attempt to reunite the Kingdom's shared halves. But Tanus will have to defy the same gods to attain the reward they have forbidden him, an object more prized than battle's glory: possession of the Lady Lostris, a rare beauty with skin the color of oiled ceder--destined for the adoration of a nation, and the love of one extraordinary man.

Cornell Woolrich published his first novel in 1926, and for four decades his fiction riveted the reading public with mystery, suspense, and horror. America's most popular pulps--Dime Detective, Black Mask, and Detective Fiction Weekly--published hundreds of his stories. Classic films like Hitchcock's Rear Window, Truffaut's The Bride Wore Black and Mississippi Mermaid, Tournier's Black Alibi, and Siodmak's Phantom Lady, as well as dozens of other movies, were based on his work. Novels like Deadline at Dawn, Rendezvous in Black, and Night Has a Thousand Eyes have won him the epithet "father of noir." Every one of the countless many who have read and loved the work of Cornell Woolrich will welcome and applaud this publication of a new collection of tales--the first in nearly two decades--by the greatest writer of suspense fiction in the twentieth century. Woolrich lived a life of such deep despair and utter terror that he could do little except put those fears onto the printed page. In the masterfully wrought suspense of this volume's twenty stories, readers can enjoy works written at the height of Woolrich's powers, as well as many never before published in book form before now.

Ethan Allen Hawley, the protagonist of Steinbeck’s last novel, works as a clerk in a grocery store that his family once owned. With Ethan no longer a member of Long Island’s aristocratic class, his wife is restless, and his teenage children are hungry for the tantalizing material comforts he cannot provide. Then one day, in a moment of moral crisis, Ethan decides to take a holiday from his own scrupulous standards.Set in Steinbeck’s contemporary 1960 America, the novel explores the tenuous line between private and public honesty that today ranks it alongside his most acclaimed works of penetrating insight into the American condition. This edition features an introduction and notes by Steinbeck scholar Susan Shillinglaw.

In Monterey, on the California coast, Sweet Thursday is what they call the day after Lousy Wednesday, which is one of those days that are just naturally bad. Returning to the scene of Cannery Row, the weedy lots and junk heaps and flophouses of Monterey, John Steinbeck once more brings to life the denizens of a netherworld of laughter and tears from Fauna, new headmistress of the local brothel, to Hazel, a bum whose mother must have wanted a daughter.

Cannery Row is a book without much of a plot. Rather, it is an attempt to capture the feeling and people of a place, the cannery district of Monterey, California, which is populated by a mix of those down on their luck and those who choose for other reasons not to live "up the hill" in the more respectable area of town. The flow of the main plot is frequently interrupted by short vignettes that introduce us to various denizens of the Row, most of whom are not directly connected with the central story. These vignettes are often characterized by direct or indirect reference to extreme violence: suicides, corpses, and the cruelty of the natural world.The "story" of Cannery Row follows the adventures of Mack and the boys, a group of unemployed yet resourceful men who inhabit a converted fish-meal shack on the edge of a vacant lot down on the Row.Sweet Thursday is the sequel to Cannery Row.

"There are crazy people all over, you know that, don't you?"Spring was intoxicating the city air, but the harassing anonymous telephone calls planting seeds of fear around town were no April Fool's joke. Crank calls and crackpot threats reported to the 87th Precinct by a respected businessman were not exactly top priority for detectives Carella and Meyer -- until a brutal homicide hits the papers. Connections are getting made fast and furious, and there's a buzz in the air about the Deaf Man, a brilliant criminal mastermind. Now, the 87th Precinct is buying time to reveal the voice on the other end of the line -- as the level of danger rises from a whisper to a scream....

A killer is out for blood, and it's up to Detective Steve Carella to bring him in ? but a shocking surprise awaits when a survivor fingers the suspect in a lineup. McBain has the ability to make every character believable?which few writers these days can do.? ? Associated Press McBain forces us to think twice about every character we meet?even those we thought we already knew.? ? New York Times Book Review

The criminals who invade the 87th Precinct aren't particularly known for their intelligence. Their crimes are usually brutal, stupid, and rash. But every once in a while, the 87th gets a good bad guy to hunt down."WITH YOUR ASSISTANCE, I'M GOING TO STEAL $500,000 ON THE LAST DAY OF APRIL." So wrote the Deaf Man, the 87th Precinct's own private nemesis. Carella, Kling, Hawes, and Brown know the Deaf Man is trying to make them look stupid. Unfortunately, they have to deal with crimes already committed -- including one that introduces Kling to the most beautiful woman he's ever seen. But the last of April is fast approaching, and the men of the Eight-Seven can't deny that they're dying to find out what the Deaf Man has cooked up this time...

The beautiful blonde in the penthouse apartment was dead, her face and body laced with slashes from a paring knife -- grisly evidence of the terrible things the city can do to pretty young women. What sordid web of money, sex, and greed had ensnared Susan Brauer? The stack of unsigned erotic letters in her possession was the first clue. Then the murder of Susan's lover, a married lawyer in his sixties, leads the cops of the 87th to the women left behind: the lawyer's wife, his ex, his daughters. And for Detective Carella, his own father's senseless death in a bakery holdup sears through the intense summer heat -- and sends him on a fevered hunt for the one who made his mother a widow and shrouded his family in grief.

Gritty, lean, and at times surprisingly romantic, the first entry in the 87th Precinct series remains one of the best. Evan Hunter, author of The Blackboard Jungle and screenwriter for Hitchcock’s, The Birds, is better known today as Ed McBain because of the 87th Precinct series. He wrote Cop Hater in 1955 in hopes of filling a void being created at Pocket Books by the slightly diminishing output of the prolific Erle Stanley Gardner. The 87th Precinct novels not only filled that void, they broke new ground, creating the first and finest of all police procedurals.It seems old-hat today, tagging along with Carella, Kling, Meyer Meyer, Hawes and the rest of the 87th Precinct cops as they try to solve multiple crimes so they can make it home to their sweethearts or go find one, but when Cop Hater was written, it stood alone as something unique. Elizabeth Linington, writing as Dell Shannon, took a different approach to the police procedural a couple of years later, and they became the King and Queen of police procedurals. Despite McBain's gritty approach and Dell Shannon's more domestic approach, both Ed McBain and Dell Shannon still stand out in the genre many decades later. Reading Cop Hater now, one needs to judge it from the perspective of how groundbreaking it was at the time, and how it influenced everything to come in the much lauded series. When you read it with that context in mind, Cop Hater really shines.In Cop Hater we are introduced for the first time to Detective Steve Carella, a mainstay of the revolving rotation of cops working out of the 87th Precinct that we would come to know over the next few decades. Carella was in love with the deaf Teddy in this one, and she’ll end up playing a major role as the search for a cop killer turns very deadly and perhaps fatal for some members of the 87th Precinct.Set in the fictional Isola, which mirrored New York City, Isola is its own character here, McBain giving it a pulse and a heartbeat. When one of their own is slain, the boys of the 87th doggedly pursue every avenue they can to discover who is out there killing cops. The tawdry and seedier aspects of Isola’s underbelly is shown while we follow Carella and the boys as they augment police procedures with hunches and persistence. But two more cops are slain before Carella figures out almost too late, that this particular cop hater is hiding a lot more than a .45.McBain doesn’t cheat the reader during the fast and involving narrative. We see everything the cops do, including an intimate scene we read as wrong as one of the cops does. Filled with humor and grit, and more than a bit of tenderness, Cop Hater is one of McBain’s finest, despite some outdated police techniques. Like John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee series and Donald Hamilton’s Matt Helm series, McBain always gets right into the story, and in no time you’re in Isola with Carella and the boys. You don’t have to start with Cop Hater to enjoy this series, but you don’t want to miss it either. A real winner.

George Chadderton is a musician who bills himself as the "Calypso King." Late one rainy September night, he leaves a gig with his manager and as the two are walking down the street someone comes up from behind them and shoots George to death. The killer also wounds George's manager in the shoulder. The manager falls to the ground and the killer stands over him and fires directly at his head. But the gun is empty and the killer is forced to flee, leaving the manager still alive.A few hours later, it's still pouring rain, and a hooker who's looking for one last trick is shot to death with the same gun that killed Chadderton. Chadderton's murder took place in Isola's 87th Precinct and the case falls to veteran detectives Steve Carella and Meyer Meyer. They wake up the newly-widowed Mrs. Chadderton to give her the bad news while surreptitiously checking to see if she might have been the shooter herself. (They don't yet know that there is a second victim because the hooker was killed in another precinct and it will take a while before anyone realizes that the ballistics match.)Mrs. Chadderton is a very attractive woman who works at a topless club. She appears to be devastated by her husband's death and has no idea who might have wanted to kill him. Sadly, there appear to be no leads at all, and in investigating the victim's background, the detectives discover nothing of interest save for the fact that Chadderton's brother, Santo, seems to have disappeared into thin air seven years earlier.That's neither here nor there, and the case presents one of the toughest challenges to confront Carella and friends in any of the first thirty-three books in this series. This is also one of the best books in the series, and it first appeared in 1979. By then, McBain had really hit his stride and this is one that any fan of the series will not want to miss.

There’s a hilarious skit from the Monty Python boys where Graham Chapman is wearing the peaked cap and uniform of an army colonel from the waist up along with a ballerina’s tutu and pink leotards. The comedy is all in the contrast. Likewise, in Tom Sharpe's 1977 novel The Great Pursuit, the fun and funniness derive from stark contrasts, the disparity of opposites brought together in outrageous and ingenious combinations. The story revolves around the publishing industry, novel writing and literary theory. Like so many novelists from Henry James to Vladimir Nabokov, from Mario Vargas Llosa to John Gardner and Milan Kundera, in The Great Pursuit, Tom Sharpe likewise turns his attention to the process of writing itself. Of course, we are taking about the king of extreme Monty Pythonesque British satire here, so all the many unexpected shifts and sudden reversals are best left to the reader to discover. Thus I’ll say nary a word about plot development; rather, here's a quartet of ingredients that makes Tom Sharpe's stinging stew delectable: PRUDE AND PORNOGRAPHYLondon literary agent Frensic seizes an opportunity to make a fortune by pushing a pornographic trash novel about a love and lust affair between a seventeen-year-old boy and an eighty-year-old woman a la Harold and Maude. Alack, a dilemma: the author of this piece of commercial crap doesn’t want to be identified. But the London and especially the American publisher need a writer to take a blockbuster publicity tour to launch the book which could sell copies in the millions. Frensic knows just the man for the job - prudish, mousy, no talent novelist wannabe Peter Piper who has been slugging away for years on his own turgid, unpublishable autobiographical tome, Search for a Lost Childhood, featuring “significant relationships” and high-minded morals. Piper reluctantly agrees to go along with this charade since Frensic will have Search published after Piper's successful tour as author of pornographic Pause O Men For The Virgin. STRANGLE HOLD ON ARTA Tom Sharpe major spoof is on the literary theory of F.R. Leavis, an early to mid-20th century British critic proscribing harsh moral codes and proposing "The Great Tradition" of Jane Austen, Henry James, and Joseph Conrad, meanwhile judging Charles Dickens, Laurence Sterne and Thomas Hardy as "mere entertainers." And what where some of the reactions of creative writers and thinkers at the time? Poet Edith Sitwell described Leavis as "a tiresome, whining, pettyfogging little pipsqueak." Stephen Fry called him a "sanctimonious prick of only parochial significance." Meanwhile, for Peter Piper, Leavis is a god worthy of veneration. Piper's guide for writing is The Moral Novel by Sydney Louth based on Leavis' theory.Tom Sharpe has a merry old time exposing the ways in which such moralizing and uppity intentions ring the death toll for the imagination and smother vitality both in writing and in life. One can imagine F.R. Leavis (1895-1978) wrinkling his nose and shaking his head if he ever read a Tom Sharpe novel. PIFFLING POOPSTICK PUBLISHING PEOPLEPublishing houses on both sides of the Atlantic are targets for the author's lampoon-harpoons. The disregard for literary standards in favor of moneymaking is chiefly personified by an American (of course!) - Hutchmeyer, a semi-illiterate, bigmouth, blustering mogul, a sort of cross between Donald Trump and Bozo the Clown with a reputation as "the Al Capone of publishing." One of the more rollicking parts of the novel is Piper's interactions with Hutchmeyer. "Inflame their sexual fantasies?" yelled Hutchmeyer, interrupting this quotation from The Moral Novel. "You sit there and tell me you don't hold with books that inflame their readers' sexual fantasies when you've written the filthiest book since Last Exit?"LAND OF THE FREE AND SLEEZY In addition to poking a finger in the eye of America’s crude commercialism, many are the zingers hurled at the people living in the USA - an uncouth, shallow, violent, philistine, bigoted lot we are to be sure and Tom Sharpe takes no Yankee prisoners. The cheapness and tawdriness of Americans is personified by Hutchmeyer’s wife, Baby. Baby has had every square inch of her face, chin, boobs and sundry parts of her aging body treated to plastic surgery and other rejuvenating arts. At one point Baby has to admit: “All that was gone now, the longing to be young again and the sense of knowing she was still sexually attractive. Only death remained and the certainly that when she died there would be no call for the embalmer. She had seen to that in advance.” And Tom Sharpe’s needle even travels to the American Deep South. The Great Pursuit rivals Dickens’ Martin Chuzzlewit in performing a literary scorching of the land of Dixie. The Great Pursuit doesn't possess the blistering mockery of his two earlier novels about the South African police force, Riotous Assembly and Indecent Exposure, probably because the publishing world does have some people with brains as opposed to the nitwit police he portrays. But still, The Great Pursuit makes for a lively, laugh-out-loud read. And you certainly will not want to miss Piper's catastrophe when interviewed for British television or Piper being attacked by Americans from groups left and right when he lands in New York City, or Piper's romance (believe it or not) with Baby. British novelist Tom Sharpe, 1928-2013"Listen," he said, "you try promoting a foreign writer. He's got to have a gimmick like he's won the Nobel Prize or been tortured in the Lubianka or something. Charisma. Now what's this Piper got? Nothing. So we build him up. We have ourselves a little riot, a bit of blood and all and overnight he's charismatic. And with those bandages he's going to be in every home tonight on TV. Sell a million copies on that face alone." - Tom Sharpe, The Great Pursuit

Peregrine Roderick Clyde-Brown, a bumbling British public schoolboy, has a penchant for taking the most innocent commands literally. His adventures whisk him to a French castle, where he commits murder and mayhem. British humor is rarely captured as effectively as this. Fry accomplishes an incredible range of accents and distinctions of age, occupation and sex. If hearing an imitation of a man with a missing lower denture tickles you, then Vintage Stuff is right up your alley. "When Tom Sharpe turns his attention to a very minor public school…the result is predictably savage. Hoaxes, chases, car crashes, shootings, and general mayhem. Wicked, riotous humour.” —Daily Telegraph

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