Showing results for "lillian" in Literary Fiction

It's the last day of 1984, and 85-year-old Lillian Boxfish is on her way to a party. It's chilly enough out for her mink coat, and Manhattan is grittier now - her son keeps warning her about a subway vigilante on the prowl - but the quick-tongued poetess has never been one to scare easily. On a walk that takes her over 10 miles around the city, she meets bartenders, bodega clerks, security guards, criminals, children, parents and parents-to-be while reviewing a life of excitement and adversity, passion and heartbreak.

This exciting novel about Dashiell Hammett, author of The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man, and Lillian Hellman, author of The Children’s Hour, reintroduces their larger-than-life personalities and the vicissitudes of their affair that spanned three decades.

Little Women is a novel by American author Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888) that was originally published in two volumes in 1868 and 1869. Alcott wrote the books rapidly over several months at the request of her publisher. The novel follows the lives of four sisters - Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy March - detailing their passage from childhood to womanhood and is loosely based on the author and her three sisters. This special edition celebrating the 150th year since publication includes excerpts from "Louisa May Alcott, Her Life, Letters, and Journals" and "Little Women" part one and two.

Virginia Woolf's 1925 novel takes place over the course of a single June day in the lives of some very different Londoners: wealthy society hostess Clarissa Dalloway, who is preparing for a party; her old friend Peter Walsh, recently returned from India, whose proposal of marriage Clarissa rejected years ago; Septimus Warren Smith, a WWI veteran suffering from shell shock; and his Italian-born wife, Rezia, who is trying to care for him as best she can. Woolf's beautiful prose captures the minds and souls of these vivid characters.

Writing to her only friend from her deathbed, Mathilda finally reveals the history that led to her isolated life of despairing melancholy. Of her mother dying in childbirth, her father's confession of his incestuous desire and subsequent suicide, and her relationship with a handsome young poet that fails to reverse Matilda's emotional withdrawal or prevent her lonely death. The haunting and relentlessly self-examining voice of Mary Shelley's protagonist is a bare narrative of trauma of a brave woman's failed search for love, atonement, and redemption.

During the Middle Ages, a peasant's superstition held that a mother mourning the death of her child could "sell her sorrow" by selling a nail from her child's coffin to a peddler. Lady Celeste is overwhelmed with grief when her infant son dies. Desperate to find relief, she escapes the convent where her husband has sent her to recover and begs a passing peddler to buy her sorrow. Jean, the cynical peddler she meets, is nobody’s fool; he does not believe in superstitions and insists Celeste include the valuable ruby ring on her finger along with the nail in return for his coin. 

Noah Fisher has worked for months to make Sky High the most prestigious charter airline in California. He's long overdue for a break - something involving ski slopes, cold beers, and hot ski bunny babes. The itinerary doesn’t include being hijacked by Bailey Sinclair, gorgeous widow of one of Sky High's wealthiest (ex-) clients. But here they are, and being crammed in a cockpit with the scared, stubborn, unbelievably sexy former model could get Noah in serious trouble….