Seventeen-year-old Thea lives a strange and sheltered life with her mother, Nalia, retired opera singer and Holocaust survivor. A virtual prisoner of her mother's obsessive love, Thea escapes with a mysterious and suave friend of her father's and is taken
In 1920, Agnes La Grange leaves a poor life in England for Durban, South Africa, to make her future. In the house of the Jewish family where she first works as a maid, the wife is dying--which doesn't keep the husband from sneaking to Agnes's room to make
At once a memoir of an exotic life, a meditation on the art and craft of writing, and a brilliant examination of the always complex relationship between fiction and life, Lynn Freed’s critically acclaimed Reading, Writing, and Leaving Home surprises, in
The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2011 contains twenty unforgettable stories selected from hundreds of literary magazines. The winning tales take place in such far-flung locales as Madagascar, Nantucket, a Midwestern meth lab, Antarctica, and a post-apocalyp