Showing results by publisher "HarperAudio" in World Literature

One of Shakespeare's final works, Cymbeline uses virtuoso theatrical and poetic means to dramatize a story of a marriage endangered by mistrust and painfully rebuilt, in a context of international conflict. This edition emphasizes the play's theatrical impact and pays close attention to its complex, evocative language.

In Much Ado About Nothing, Shakespeare created one of the greatest verbal sparring matches in all of literature, echoes of which can be heard in the sophisticated dialogue of such late masters as George Bernard Shaw and Noel Coward. Throughout the play, would-be lovers Beatrice and Benedick circle each other warily, until their scathing witticisms and sly innuendoes reach a feverish intensity that befits the passionate longing they both vainly seek to deny.

He after honor hunts, I after love. He leaves his friends to dignify them more, I leave myself, my friends and all, for love....

For 15 years August Sitwell has worked for the Barclays, a well-to-do White family who plucked him from an orphan asylum and gave him a job. The groundskeeper is part of the household’s all-Black staff, along with “Miss Mamie”, the talented cook, pretty new maid Jennie Williams, and three young kitchen apprentices - the latest orphan boys Mr. Barclay has taken in to "civilize" boys like August.

Maya Jackson has worked for a renowned New York City bridal gown brand for years and dreams of becoming Head Designer. She has the talent, she just needs a chance to showcase her unique style. Due to an illness, she’s always prioritized her career over her personal life until Maya’s father fractures his hip and she returns to Charleston, SC. While home for only a few months, she’s thrilled to find an opportunity at the local bridal gown boutique, never expecting sparks to fly with its owner....

Joyce Carol Oates is one of our most insightful observers of the human heart and mind, and, with her acute social consciousness, one of the most insistent and inspired witnesses of a shared American history. Oates is perhaps best known for her prodigious output of novels and short stories, many of which have become contemporary classics. However, Oates has also always been a faithful writer of poetry. American Melancholy showcases some of her finest work of the last few decades.

The nine tales in Give My Love to the Savages illuminate the multifaceted Black experience, exploring the thorny intersections of race, identity, and Black life through an extraordinary cast of characters. From the absurd to the starkly realistic, these stories take aim at the ironies and contradictions of the American racial experience. Chris Stuck traverses the dividing lines, and attempts to create meaning from them in unique and unusual ways.

People love and remember the novels of Bobbie Ann Mason because they ring so true. This dazzling memoir has the same power. In it, Mason tells the story of her own family - a multilayered saga of three generations, their aspirations, their conflicts, and the ties that bound them to one another.

Un corazón puro puede iluminar aun la noche más oscura.

Y en el más terrible de los momentos de la historia.

Jocelyn es la guardiana de la Biblioteca de Saint-Malo, una mujer huérfana que se aferra a la literatura y a su marido Antoine. Pero ambos corren peligro: la llegada de las tropas alemanas a la ciudad, en especial aquella del comandante Adolf Bauman, empeñado en robar algunos de los incunables que tan celosamente guarda la bibliotecaria, quiere acabar con su felicidad.

A collection of poetry from the 2019 winner of the National Poetry Series, selected by Rosanna Warren. In her remarkable and assured debut, Alexandria Hall explores the boundaries and limits of language, place, and the self, as well as the complicated space between safety and danger, intimacy and isolation, playfulness and seriousness, home and away. With a keen eye for the importance of place, Hall shows us daily life in rural Vermont, illuminating the beauty and difficulty inherent in the dichotomies of human language and experience.

From the Great Depression through the post-World War II years, Joseph “Ziggy” Johnson has been the pulse of Detroit’s famous Black Bottom. A celebrated gossip columnist for the city’s African-American newspaper, the Michigan Chronicle, he is also the emcee of one of the hottest night clubs, where he’s rubbed elbows with the legendary black artists of the era, including Ethel Waters, Billy Eckstein, and Count Basie. Ziggy is also the founder and dean of the Ziggy Johnson School of Theater. But now the doyen of Black Bottom is ready to hang up his many dapper hats.

In the 15 years since their teenage son, Ray-Ray, was killed in a police shooting, the Echota family has been suspended in private grief. The mother, Maria, increasingly struggles to manage the onset of Alzheimer's in her husband, Ernest. Their adult daughter, Sonja, leads a life of solitude, punctuated only by spells of dizzying romantic obsession. And their son, Edgar, fled home long ago, turning to drugs to mute his feelings of alienation.

Sylvie Snow knows the pressures of expectations: a woman is supposed to work hard, but never be tired; age gracefully, but always be beautiful; fix the family problems, but always be carefree. Sylvie does the grocery shopping, the laundry, the scheduling, the schlepping, and the PTA-ing, while planning her son’s Bar Mitzvah and cheerfully tending her husband, Paul, who’s been lying on the sofa with a broken ankle.

The Olander family embodies the modern American Dream in a globalized world. Jaya, the cultured daughter of an Indian diplomat and Keith, an ambitious banker from middle-class Philadelphia, meet in a London pub in 1988 and make a life together in suburban California. Their strong marriage is built on shared beliefs and love for their two children: headstrong teenager Karina and young son Prem, the light of their home. But love and prosperity cannot protect them from sudden, unspeakable tragedy.

Victor Li is devastated by his father’s murder and shocked by a confessional letter he finds among his father’s things. In it, his father admits he was never just a restaurateur - he was part of a vast international crime syndicate that formed during China’s leanest communist years. Victor travels to Beijing, where he navigates his father’s secret criminal life, confronting decades-old grudges, violent spats, and a shocking new enterprise that the organization wants to undertake. Standing up against it is likely what got his father killed, but Victor remains undeterred.

Deeply personal but also expansive in its imaginative scope, Nouns & Verbs brings together 35 years of writing from Campbell McGrath, one of America’s most highly lauded poets. Offering a hint of where he’s headed while charting the territory already explored, McGrath gives us startlingly inventive new poems while surveying his previous work - lyric poems, prose poems, and a searing episodic personal epic, “An Odyssey of Appetite”, exploring America’s limitless material and spiritual hungers.

From the author of The Water Dancers and Good Family, an exquisitely crafted novel, set in Ohio in the decades leading to the Civil War, that illuminates the immigrant experience, the injustice of slavery, and the debts human beings owe to one another, witnessed through the endeavors of one Irish-American family.

From the vulnerable and disenfranchised to the educated and privileged, the characters in this extraordinary collection embody the diversity of the Chinese diaspora past and present. In these deeply affecting stories, Jack Wang subverts expectations as he captures the hope, pain, and sacrifices of the millions who journey into the unknown to create better lives, and he explores the shifting boundaries of morality, the intimacies and failings of love, and the choices circumstances force us to make.

An aging, A-list movie star lotteries off the entirety of his mega-million blockbuster salary to a member of the general viewing public before taking up with a much younger model. His non-famous best friend (and often lover) looks on impassively, while recollecting their twenty-odd years of unlikely connection. And an aspiring filmmaker, unknown to them both, labors over a script about best friends and lovers while longing for the financial freedom to make great art.

Isak works in home care in a small town in Småland. One day, he is contacted by his father, an internationally known artist, who left Isak when he was a child. His father is dying, and his only wish is to reconcile what remains of their relationship as father and son. He promises Isak his fortune, but Isak has certain reservations. Alongside his girlfriend, Madde, Isak decides to visit his father, but the line between nightmare and reality blurs as family secrets unravel.