Showing results by publisher "Dreamscape Media, LLC" in Literary Fiction

In this classic novel, Gabriel Oak is a shepherd struggling to get ahead when Bathsheba Everdene moves next door. Although he loves her, she sees him as a friend and rejects him for two other suitors. After she leaves town, she and Gabriel are reunited years later, once everything has changed.

The first novel by James Joyce, this semi-autobiographical narrative depicts the life of Stephen Dedalus, a character created as an allusion to Daedalus, a craftsman in Greek mythology. Beginning by depicting the early stages of Stephen's life, the language of the novel grows with the main character as he awakens sexually and rebels against religion. When he realizes that Ireland is restricting him, he commits to a self-imposed exile and travels elsewhere to grow as an artist - but not before declaring Ireland his homeland.

After a ferocious early-springtime storm, young Norwegian sailor Hans Lyngstrand is shipwrecked in the English Channel near the coastal Kent town of Dengate - he is one of few survivors. Soon after, aspiring journalist Martin Bridges takes a job as a reporter at the local newspaper. A loner by nature, he’s a curiosity to the nosy townspeople, the gregarious editor of the paper, and his melodramatic landlady, whose own private life is fraught by the unexplained absence of her son and suspicious disappearance of her husband.

In 1797, young Billy Budd is impressed into naval service. It is a perilous time for a British Royal Navy still reeling from mutinies and marauding French ships. When Billy is forcibly transferred to HMS Bellipotent, he evokes the wrath of John Claggart, the ship's Master-at-arms. Claggart falsely accuses Billy of conspiracy to mutiny, a charge that will have a profound effect on the fates of both seamen.

In New York's Catskill Mountains before the American Revolution, a Dutch American villager named Rip Van Winkle falls asleep and wakes up 20 years later without realizing how much time has passed. Unaware that the Revolutionary War has taken place, he must come to terms with the changes he encounters.

After studying piano as a child, Thea Kronborg leaves her family and their frontier town of Moonstone, Colorado, to pursue music in Chicago. There, her instructor insists that her singing voice is her greater gift, and she begins to work on mastering her craft. Seeking to become one of the world's greatest opera singers, she embarks on a journey of self-discovery and fulfillment that takes her across the world.

In this robust, elegantly plotted, and ultimately life-affirming novel, Zoe Whittall presents a dazzling portrait of the Millennial Generation - the 25-year-olds who grew up on anti-anxiety meds, text-messaging each other truncated emotional reactions, unsure of what's public and what's private. Holding Still explores an unusual love triangle involving Billy, a former teen idol, now an anxiety-ridden agoraphobic; Josh, a shy transgendered paramedic who travels the city patching up damaged bodies; and Amy, a fashionable filmmaker coping with her first broken heart.

Stevie, a recovering alcoholic and kitchen manager of Chappy’s, a small-chain restaurant, is frantically trying to prevent the people around her from going supernova: her PTSD-suffering veteran son, her uproariously demented parents, the polyglot eccentrics who work in her kitchen, the blind geriatric dog she inherits, and a damaged 5-year-old who landed on her doorstep and might just be her granddaughter. In the tight grip of new corporate owners, Stevie battles corporate’s “restructuring” to save her kitchen.

Joe Keen and Ana Urbanek have been a couple for a long time, with all the requisite lulls and temptations, yet they remain unmarried and without children or a mortgage, as their Midwestern values (and parents) seem to require. Now on the cusp of 40, they are both working jobs that they're not even sure they believe in anymore, but with significantly varying returns. Ana is successful; Joe is floundering; both are in limbo, caught somewhere between mainstream and alternative culture, sincerity and irony, achievement and arrested development.

Letting no good deal go undone, the Good Buy Girls are ready to pounce on the St. Stanley flea market, where wealthy Vera Madison is selling off her vintage clothing. The widow’s wardrobe is just what Maggie Gerber needs to give her second-hand shop, My Sister’s Closet, the edge over vindictive rival Summer Phillips, who’s opened her own second-hand shop across the street. But when Vera is found dead, it turns out that she collected enemies like Dior gowns - and had more than a few skeletons in her walk-in closet. Now it’s up to Maggie and the Good Buy Girls to find the killer.

Set in Iran and New York City, Dalia Sofer's second novel, Man of My Time, tells the story of Hamid Mozaffarian, who is as alienated from himself as he is from the world. After decades of ambivalence about his work for the Iranian, Hamid travels to New York, where he encounters his estranged family and retrieves the ashes of his father - who was cremated despite his religion - to honor his dying wish to be buried in Iran.

When Tyron Shaw returns to his hometown of Las Vegas after 11 years in the Marines, he’s surprised to discover that two of his best friends from childhood are all anyone is talking about: Antoine Deco, three years out of prison, hasn’t lost a boxing match since his release and is fighting tonight in the undercard to the fight of the decade; and Keenan Quinn, a police officer who killed an unarmed teenager and escaped punishment from the courts, is the subject of a protest tomorrow morning.

A mysterious beachcomber appears one day on the coastal bluffs near the small town of Carverville, a place whose best days are long behind it. Who is he, and why has he returned after nearly 40 years? Carverville's prodigal son, James, serendipitously finds work at a gentrified motel, but his homecoming soon takes a sinister turn when he and a local teenager make a gruesome discovery on the beach. It forces him to reckon with the ghosts of his past‚ and the dangers of the present.

An unidentified body is discovered in New York City, with numbers and symbols written in blood near the corpse. Gilmo, a North Korean national who interprets the world through numbers, formulas, and mathematical theories, is arrested on the spot. Angela, a CIA operative, is assigned to gain his trust and access his unique thought-process.

The interwoven tales of three women unfold in the voices of Sarah, Miriam, and Beth, whose unshakable friendship takes root in a Buffalo college dorm in the late 1960s. Fueled by the optimism and bravado of that era, they charge into adulthood with high expectations and lofty ideas. They were, as Beth would later observe, the first generation of women to feel entitled to interesting lives. At times, they find themselves living long distances from each other as each of them seeks new directions and new locales. Nonetheless, they remain deeply connected in the decades after college.

The year is 1922, and young Nick Carraway moves to the village of West Egg, where he discovers that his neighbor is the eclectic millionaire Jay Gatsby. As he and Gatsby become acquainted, Nick is thrown into a world full of dazzling parties, unrequited love, and unchecked idealism. Gatsby, surrounded by riches, yearns for the love of a woman who chose another man. He waits for her every night, using a green light at the end of his dock to call out to her from across the water.

With the rapidly cascading Asian Financial Crisis threatening to go global and Korea in imminent meltdown, investment banker Dae Joon finds himself back in his native Seoul as part of an international team brought in to rescue the country from sovereign default. For Dae Joon - also known by his American name of Shane, after the cowboy movie his father so loved - the stakes are personal. Raised in the US and Harvard Business School - educated, Dae Joon is a jangnam, a firstborn son, bound by tradition to follow in the footsteps of his forebears.

In a city teeming with stories, how do lost souls find one another? It’s a question Meg Rhys doesn’t think she’s asking. Meg is a self-identified spinster librarian, satisfied with living with her cat, stacks of books, and her dead sister’s ghost in her New York City apartment. Then she becomes obsessed with an intriguing library patron and the haunted house he’s trying to research. The house has its own story to tell too, of love and war, of racism’s fallout and the ghost story that is gentrification, and of Brooklyn before it was Brooklyn.

A French teacher on the verge of retirement is invited to a glittering opening that showcases the artwork of his former student, who has since become a celebrated painter. This unexpected encounter leads to the older man posing for his portrait, possibly in the nude. Such personal exposure at close range entails a strange and troubling pact between artist and sitter that prompts both to reevaluate their lives.

Four children live on an island that serves as the repository for all the world’s garbage. Trash arrives, the children sort it, and then they feed it to a herd of insatiable pigs: a perfect system. But when a barrel washes ashore with a boy inside, the children must decide whether he is more of the world’s detritus, meant to be fed to the pigs, or whether he is one of them.