A selection of short stories from a twentieth-century "American master" (Dan Cryer, Newsday).A contemporary of Ann Beattie and Tobias Wolff, Frederick Busch was a master craftsman of the form; his subjects were single-event moments in so-called ordinary life. The stories in this volume, selected by Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout, are tales of families trying to heal their wounds, save their marriages, and rescue their children. In "Ralph the Duck,"...

America and the catastrophic world of twentieth-century war, mass murder, and horror are the backdrop of this story of Annie Gianfala, a young woman who finds herself cast adrift in Hollywood with World War II looming.Defending herself with despairing stubbornness against personal catastrophe, she is able to save her life and escape. "Enormously touching and wholly believable."— Washington Post Book World

A New York Times Notable BookIn the unrelenting cold and bitter winter of upstate New York, Jack and his wife, Fanny, are trying to cope with the desperate sorrow they feel over the death of their young daughter. The loss forms a chasm in their relationship as Jack, a sardonic Vietnam vet, looks for a way to heal them both.Then, in a nearby town, a fourteen-year-old girl disappears somewhere between her home and church. Though she is just one of the hundreds of chi...

Frederick Busch has an enduring love affair with great books, and here he brilliantly communicates his passion to us all. Whether expounding on Melville or Dickens, or celebrating Hemingway or O'Hara, he explains what literature can ineffably reveal about our own lives. For Busch, there was no other recourse save the "dangerous profession;" it was to be his calling, and in these piercing essays, he demonstrates that we as a culture ignore the fundamental truths about fiction only at our ow...

An immensely powerful story, The Night Inspector follows the extraordinary life of William Bartholomew, a maimed veteran of the Civil War, as he returns from the battlefields to New York City, bent on reversing his fortunes. It is there he meets Jessie, a Creole prostitute who engages him in a venture that has its origins in the complexities and despair of the conflict he has left behind. He also befriends a deputy inspector of customs named Herman Melville who, largely forgotten as a writ...

The French Revolution comes to vivid life in Charles Dickens's famous novel about the best of times and the worst of times...The storming of the Bastille…the death carts with their doomed human cargo…the swift drop of the guillotine blade—this is the French Revolution that Charles Dickens vividly captures in his famous work A Tale of Two Cities. With dramatic eloquence, he brings to life a time of terror and treason, a starving people rising in frenzy and ...

One of the great novelist’s most popular works, Oliver Twist is also the purest distillation of Dickens’s genius.This tale of the orphan who is reared in a workhouse and runs away to London is a novel of social protest, a morality tale, and a detective story. Oliver Twist presents some of the most sinister characters in Dickens: the master thief, Fagin; the leering Artful Dodger; the murderer, Bill Sikes…along with some of his most sentimental and...

Dickens’s scathing portrait of Victorian industrial society.Coketown, the depressed mill town that is the setting for one of Charles Dickens’s most powerful and unforgettable novels, is all brick, machinery, and smoke-darkened chimneys. Its emblematic citizen, the schoolmaster Thomas Gradgrind, lives to impose his version of education: facts and statistics that feed the mind while starving the soul and spirit. Inflexible and unyielding, he places conformity above c...

On the assumption that John Updike was correct when he asserted, in a 1978 letter to Joyce Carol Oates, that "Nobody can read like a writer," Why I Like This Story presents brief essays by forty-eight leading American writers on their favorite American short stories, explaining why they like them. The essays, which are personal, not scholarly, not only tell us much about the story selected, they also tell us a good deal about the author of the essay, about what elements of fiction...

The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit (commonly known as Martin Chuzzlewit) is a novel by Charles Dickens, considered the last of his picaresque novels. It was originally serialised in 1843 and 1844. Dickens thought it to be his best work, but it was one of his least popular novels.[2] Like nearly all of Dickens' novels, Martin Chuzzlewit was released to the public in monthly instalments. Early sales of the monthly parts were disappointing, compared to previous works, so Dickens cha...

"Little Dorrit" is a novel written by Charles Dickens, published serially from 1855 to 1857 and in book form in 1857. The novel attacks the injustices of the contemporary English legal system, particularly the institution of debtors’ prison.Dickens's masterpiece about prison life is set in an English debtors' prison where his own father had been imprisoned. Amy Dorrit, the heroine, has spent her entire life caring for her imprisoned father. The novel portrays both the physical and p...

Charles Dickens's last completed novel, “Our Mutual Friend” is the story of “Noddy” Boffin, a common clerk who becomes “the Golden Dustman” after he inherits a dust-heap where the aristocracy throw their refuge. A brutal satire and social analysis, “Our Mutual Friend” is a masterpiece that explores the allure and curse of money while demonstrating all the themes the author is famous for. Charles John Huffam Dickens (1812–1870) was an English writer and social critic famous for having creat...