Showing results by publisher "Phoenix Books" in Literary Fiction

This is the classic story of the young Theseus - Prince of Troizen, King of Eleusis and Athens, slayer of the Minotaur. Mary Renault's powerful novel captures the modern imagination by weaving myth, legend, history, and fiction into the story of a young hero's search for his destiny, or moira. If you like The King Must Die, try The Bull from the Sea.

Sita Dulip has missed her flight out of Chicago. But instead of listening to garbled announcements in the airport, she discovers a method of bypassing the crowds at the desks, a nasty lunch, whimpering children, their punitive parents, and the blue plastic chairs bolted to the floor: she changes planes—literally. Sita discovers entire planes of existence and visits societies not found on Earth—bizarre societies that share similarities with Earth's cultures and sometimes open doors into the alien.

In 1920s China, the Peking opera was luxurious entertainment for the privileged class—but only children from the poorest families were sent to opera schools to train as actors. Xiao Douzi is brought to an opera school—and abandoned there by his mother, a prostitute who can no longer care for him. With seeds of bitterness sown in his soul, the nine-year-old boy endures hardships and misery to learn and perfect his craft. The novel focuses on the all-consuming love Xiao Douzi holds for the boy he befriends, and the beautiful female courtesan who comes between them.

At the age of 48, film critic David Denby returned to his alma mater, Columbia University, to re-experience the core humanities courses he had taken as a freshman 30 years before. Facing the question of what he really knows, Denby re-examines the besieged Western classics, ranging from Homer, Sappho, and Sophocles to Dante, Nietzsche, and Woolf. What relevance do the writers and thinkers of the past have to our current life? The answer surprised Denby and will surprise and enlighten his listeners.

In vignettes both comic and sexy, the owner of a coffee shop recalls the day his first wife seemed to achieve a moment of simple perfection, while she remembers the women's softball game during which she was stricken by the beauty of the shortstop. A young couple spends hours at the coffee shop fueling the idea of their fierce love. A professor of philosophy, stopping by for a cup of coffee, makes a valiant attempt to explain what he knows to be the inexplicable workings of the human heart.

The Fall of the Sparrow is the story of a family's struggle to heal itself after the violent death of its oldest daughter. At the heart is Alan "Woody" Woodhall, a classics professor at a small mid-western college, whose beloved oldest daughter, Cookie, is killed during a terrorist bombing. Woody finds himself standing in the cemetery where Cookie is buried, convinced that life has taught him all the lessons he has to learn.

Beneath the twin shadows of Popocatepetl and Ixtaccihuatl in Mexico, the Consul is drunk. He staggers from bar to bar hoping to find salvation staining the bottom of the next glass. His lonely existence is disrupted when his former wife, Yvonne, returns with, Hugh, the Consul's half-brother. But the reunion turns sour when a local peasant turns up dead, beginning a series of events that will decide the Consul's fate. In the course of one day an entire life is chronicled, set against the backdrop of Europe during the Spanish Civil War.

Mid-19th century Britain—and America—come to life in this darkly humored classic by Charles Dickens. Martin Chuzzlewit the elder is an old man whose death will result in a vast inheritance—but for whom is the question. Though his avaricious and sycophantic relatives hope to benefit from his demise, Martin has other plans. He raises an orphan, Mary Graham, who looks after him and draws an income—so long as the old man lives. But young Martin—named for his grandfather who has raised him along with Mary—falls in love with the orphan, which threatens to spoil the elder Chuzzlewit's plans.

A 19th century novel that defied the repressive moral conventions of Victorian England. Young Tess Durbeyfield comes from an impoverished home. Her father, desperate to alleviate the family's financial plight, presses his daughter into work for the wealthy D'Urbervilles. But in doing so, Tess meets the manipulative Alec, who forces himself upon her. And though Tess later meets a kinder man who proposes marriage, her salvation is jeopardized when she reveals to him her troubled past.

In the year 2005, Sarah finds herself drawn into the tumultuous lives of her unconventional ancestors. Spanning a hundred years, she calls to memory her great-grandmother Sarah, propelled by a Russian pogrom to America in 1906; her grandmother Salome, who cavorted with Henry Miller in pre-war Paris; and finally, her mother, Sally, a famous folk singer and emblem of the 1960s. Through the paradoxical nature of memory, Sarah discovers the power and passion that is her matriarchal birthright and comes to understand and impart her own story.

During the course of a long summer, it becomes clear to two young, lost, and bored Korean War vets that their future lies outside Indianapolis—amid the gleaming towers of Manhattan, where they will find glory, fame, and lots of women. Set in the 1950s, this novel by acclaimed author Dan Wakefield seethes with pent-up frustration and confusion, and nearly every episode bubbles with hilarity.

A baffling series of incidents at the majestic Paris Opera sparks frightening rumors about a mysterious opera ghost. Performers are ill-at-ease when they sit alone in their dressing rooms, alleging to have seen the enigma in evening clothes moving about in the shadows. Then a young and beautiful prima donna is visited by a masked "Angel of Music" who teaches her to sing and jealously demands her devotion—but with a price. With an increasing pattern of fear and violence, the phantom of the opera begins to strike, but always with a beautiful young performer at the center of his deadly desires.

A pauper's child reared in a workhouse, young Oliver Twist serves an apprenticeship in a loveless house. Despairing, he runs away and is befriended by a gang of young pickpockets who offer him the only welcome home he has ever known. Falling under the influence of villainous company, the young orphan struggles to escape from a life of poverty and crime, in search of the love he longs for. Oliver Twist is one of Dickens' greatest achievements, a vivid depiction of London's outlaw society with an array of memorable characters.

The welfare of children—a theme of many novels by Charles Dickens—is central to Nicholas Nickleby, the story of a fatherless young man, his mother, and his sister who find themselves at the mercy of a greedy and unscrupulous relative. Nicholas Nickleby is both a vivid indictment of the exploitive, brutal boarding schools of the late 19th century and a celebration of a little family's resilient generosity of spirit. Actor Paul Scofield's performance captures the warmth and charm of this story and its array of colorful characters.

Sebastian Zollner's failure as a journalist is matched only by his personal failures. Searching for redemption in the eyes of his peers, he heads off into the mountains to interview the eccentric, legendary painter Manuel Kaminski with the hope of writing his biography. Going blind and living in seclusion with his daughter, Kaminski could be working on his next masterpiece or easing into his final days. His artistic reputation hinges on any number of factors, but most prominently on a definitive biography.

Life has always been a banquet for Sappho, one to be savored to the fullest. Following a magnificent destiny, her strange and sensual odyssey has carried her to the far corners of the ancient world, from Delphi to Egypt, to the Land of the Amazons, and the realm of Hades. For Sappho, it was always about love—love that seduced her into a plot to depose a dictator, and love that made her trade an unwanted marriage bed of a despised and drunken husband for a seemingly endless series of lovers, both male and female.

Winona Pathfinder, an elderly Lakota Sioux medicine woman, announces she intends to die in two months. For counseling, Winona is referred to Caucasian, middle-aged, and divorced psychologist Dr. Meggie O'Connor. A reluctant client, the feisty Winona decides to turn the tables and teach Dr. O'Connor a thing or two about life while steadfastly refusing to renounce her plans to die.

The novel traces the impact of a single, scandalous act on the lives of three community members: the tragic, defiant Hester Prynne, the tortured Reverend Dimmesdale and the vengeful Chillingsworth. A philosophical exploration of man's struggle with guilt, sin, and pride, Hawthorne's masterpiece remains a cornerstone of American literature.

"Isn't so and so a snob?" he asks. "She won't even admit she liked Grease." Looking for an author who ponders the imponderable, expresses the inexpressible, describes the indescribable, and leaves no burning issue of American popular culture or world concern unexamined? Well, you'll find him in Mark Leyner. On this recording, Leyner, one of the most gifted and original young American writers around, reads 6 prose pieces from his first published book.

More than any other writer, Alice McDermott exposes the vein of poetry, of profound joy and pain that transforms everyday experience into the heroic and universal. At Weddings and Wakes tells the bittersweet, lovable, human story of an Irish-Catholic family on Long Island as seen through the eyes of two sisters and a brother.