After an absence of some seven years, Greg Bowman returns from America to find his father lying in a bamboo coffin, his estranged brother Billy stalking a woman with no feet and his seventy-nine-year-old Uncle Frank planning to rob a bank……
Robert Olen Butler’s lyrical and poignant collection of stories about the aftermath of the Vietnam War and its impact on the Vietnamese was acclaimed by critics across the nation and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993. A contemporary classic by one of America’s most important living writers, this edition of A Good Scent from a…
The human head is believed to remain in a state of consciousness for one and one-half minutes after decapitation. In a heightened state of emotion, people speak at the rate of 160 words per minute. Inspired by the intersection of these two seemingly unrelated concepts, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert Olen Butler wrote sixty-two…
What goes through the mind of a person while having sex? Acclaimed story teller Robert Olen Butler turns his daring imagination to the intimate in his latest collection that both dazzles and probes. He lays bare the most flagrant, personal thoughts and feelings of fifty often surprsing couples. The author’s meitculous research reveals…
Nancy Skidmore has Alzheimer’s and her oldest friend Eugene Chaney III once more a purpose in life – to end hers. When the moment for Gene to take Nancy to her desired death in Coffeeville arrives, she is unexpectedly admitted to the secure unit of a nursing home and he has to call upon his two remaining friends to help break her out…
At age eight, Jenny Rowan was abducted and kept for two years in a box beneath her captor’s bed. Eventually she escaped and, after living for eighteen months on cast-offs at the local mall, was put into the child-care system. Suing for emancipation, at age sixteen she became a legal adult. Nowadays she works as a production editor for…
Fred, Nickel and Annette share a dream, to escape to Canada, away from the crushing boredom of provincial Germany. Canada – where you can live free, rent a house on the lake, go fishing, become a famous photographer. But such dreams cost money and money comes from… banks. But the great bank robbery goes horribly wrong……
In a time of anger, activism, and bitter racial tensions, a sniper has appeared to heat up an already sweltering New Orleans summer – by tearing up innocent people like paper targets. The shooter’s sixth fatality is cut down while she is walking at Lew Griffin’s side….
‘Somewhere, among the wastes of the world, is the key that will bring us back, restore us to our Earth and to our freedom,’ Pynchon wrote in Gravity’s Rainbow. Never has a man’s search among those wastes, for that freedom, been better represented than in this stunning conclusion to the Lew Griffin cycle….
One of the very few lights from Lew Griffin’s dark and violent past has flickered out. His one-time lover, La Verne Adams is dead – and her daughter, Alouette, has vanished into a seamy, dead-end world of users and abusers… leaving behind a crack-addicted infant and a mystery….
David (as he’s currently known) was one of an elite corps of spies trained during the chilliest days of the Cold War. But those days are long gone and for nine years he has been an ordinary, upstanding citizen. Until, that is, a phone call in the middle of the night awakens him…
Lew Griffin is a survivor, a black man in New Orleans, a detective, a teacher, a writer. And he is a man subject to all of the frailties to which we are heir. Having spent years finding others, he has lost his son…and himself in the process….