The Portable Promised Land Read online

Page 23


  “A vital and astonishing writer.... Matthew Derby stages a wagon circle around everything dull and earthbound in American fiction.” — Ben Marcus, author of Notable American

  Women and The Age of Wire and String

  The Evidence Against Her

  A novel by Robb Forman Dew

  “A gorgeous, important book.... Dew’s characters are fiercely imagined, fiercely alive on the page.”

  — Beth Kephart, Chicago Tribune

  “Gracefully told and luminously inventive.... The emotional complexities of love, envy, guilt, desire, and jealousy that in the hands of a lesser writer might melt into melodrama are handled by Robb Forman Dew with an existential and curiously amoral grace.”

  —Norah Labiner, Minneapolis Star-Tribune

  Available wherever books are sold

  NEW IN PAPERBACK • GREAT FOR READING GROUPS

  House of women

  A novel by Lynn Freed

  “Riveting, right from the start.... Passion, blood, history — whatever the components of fate — are the driving forces....A strange, compelling story of obsessive love.”

  — Colleen Kelly Warren, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  “ House of Women is surprising and inevitable, often in the same sentence. It illuminates and, at the same time, deepens the human mystery. I don’t ask for more from a book.”

  — Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours

  The Black Veil

  by Rick Moody

  “Compulsively readable....A profound meditation on madness, shame, and history.... One of the finest memoirs in recent years.”

  — Jeffery Smith, Washington Post Book World

  “A gripping memoir... intriguing and unforgettable....A searing work of family history.”

  — Dylan Foley, Philadelphia Inquirer

  Available wherever books are sold

  NEW IN PAPERBACK • GREAT FOR READING GROUPS

  The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake

  “A young writer of such extraordinary gifts that one is tempted to compare his debut to Hemingway’s.”

  — Joyce Carol Oates, New York Times Book Review

  “Powerful, elegiac....Mr. Pancake has a sharp, writerly eye for detail, and he uses those details to build a picture, layer by layer, of life in the barren hills and hollows of his native West Virginia.”

  — Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

  Martin Sloane

  A novel by Michael Redhill

  “A deeply moving first novel that reveals human truths with grace and humor. It is a book of constant surprises.”

  — Michael Ondaatje, author of The English Patient and Anil’s Ghost

  “A striking first novel.... Reading Martin Sloane made me feel melancholic, hopeful, amused, energized, enlightened, unnerved, touched and finally grateful that occasionally a writer comes along who gets real life just right.”

  — Bliss Broyard, New York Times Book Review

  Available wherever books are sold

  NEW IN PAPERBACK • GREAT FOR READING GROUPS

  Sea Glass

  A novel by Anita Shreve

  “A helluva read....Shreve simply has the Gift — the ability to hook you from the first page and not let go until the final word.”

  — Zofia Smardz, Washington Post Book World

  “An intriguing Faulkner-esque tapestry of voices....Shreve’s language is fast, propelling us forward into an ever-intensifying web of complex human relations.”

  — Jennie A. Camp, Rocky Mountain News

  All the Finest Girls

  A novel by Alexandra Styron

  “An impressive, highly charged novel about a virtually taboo subject — nannying — displaying keen insight into the burdens of inheritance in its many forms: money, love, creative temperament.”

  — Benjamin Anastas, New York Observer

  “Haunting.... Styron’s finest achievement is her ability to glide seamlessly between the dialect of St. Clair and the cultured language of Connecticut as she pieces together the fragments of each of these women’s lives.”

  — Amy Ephron, Los Angeles Times

  Available wherever books are sold

  NEW IN PAPERBACK • GREAT FOR READING GROUPS

  Simple Recipes

  Stories by Madeleine Thien

  “This is surely the debut of a splendid writer. I am astonished by the clarity and ease of the writing, and a kind of emotional purity.”

  — Alice Munro, author of Hateship, Friendship,Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

  “In graceful counterbalance to the restraint of her prose, Thien’s portraits of these painful, guilt-ridden, love-drenched relationships are remarkably rich.”

  — Donna Rifkind, Baltimore Sun

  Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

  Stories by David Foster Wallace

  “A supersonic delight, a full-scale harassment of the short story form.... David Foster Wallace is one badass fiction writer.”

  — Benjamin Weissman, LA Weekly

  “A prodigiously inventive, hugely funny writer whose best work challenges and reinvents the art of fiction.”

  — Greg Johnson, Atlanta Journal-Constitution

  Available wherever books are sold