Back to the roots

MABEY, Richard and GREENOAK, Francesca

Arena

A Perceptive novel about freedom and the will to live

The cupboard

ROSE TREMAIN

Literature & Fiction

What is V.S. Naipaul were a happy man?... What if Vladimir Nabokov had grown up in a small town in Western Nigeria and decided that politics were not unworthy of him?... Aké locates the lost child in all of us, underneath language, inside sound and smell, wide-eyed, brave and flummoxed. What Waugh made fun of and Proust felt bad about, Mr Soyinka celebrates.

Ake (Arena Books)

SOYINKA, Wole

World Literature

Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book

Lost in the cosmos: The last self-help book

Humor & Entertainment

Percy., Walker

Humor

Flowers in the Mirror

Li Ruzhen

Moccasin Telegraph and Other Stories

W.P. Kinsella

Short Stories & Anthologies

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. New Directions is excited to reissue the Gardner classics, beginning with October Light, a complex relationship rendered in a down-to-earth narrative.October Light is one of John Gardner's masterworks. The penniless widow of a once-wealthy dentist, Sally Abbot now lives in the Vermont farmhouse of her older brother, 72-year-old James Page. Polar opposites in nearly every way, their clash of values turns a bitter corner when the exacting and resolute James takes a shotgun to his sister's color television set. After he locks Sally up in her room with the trashy "blockbuster" novel that has consumed her (and only apples to eat), the novel-within-the-novel becomes an echo chamber providing glimpses into the history of the family that spawned these bizarre, sad, and stubborn people. Gardner uses the turbulent siblings as a stepping-off point from which he expands upon the lives of their extended families, and the rural community that surrounds them. He also engages larger issues of how liberals and conservatives define themselves, and considers those moments when life transcends all their arguments.

October Light (Arena Books)

JOHN GARDNER

Contemporary

Sombrero Fallout (Arena Books)

RICHARD BRAUTIGAN

Time of the Doves

Rodoreda, Merçè

The pastures of heaven

john-steinbeck

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Books by Arena