Literary Mind

On her 49th birthday, Anna Fergusson, Boston neuroscientist and dedicated introvert, arrives at an unwanted crossroads when the funding for her research lab is cut. With her confidence shattered and her future uncertain, on impulse she rents a cabin for a year on Australia's Great Barrier Reef. However Turtle Island, alive with sea birds and nesting Green turtles, is not the retreat she expected.

"Hold tight. The way to go mad without losing your mind is sometimes unruly." So begins La Marr Jurelle Bruce's urgent provocation and poignant meditation on madness in black radical art. Bruce theorizes four overlapping meanings of madness: the lived experience of an unruly mind, the psychiatric category of serious mental illness, the emotional state also known as "rage," and any drastic deviation from psychosocial norms.

One of the most beloved and best-selling novels of spiritual adventure ever published, Ishmael has earned a passionate following. This special 25th anniversary edition features a new foreword and afterword by the author.

Follow the bank of the Koitogawa river until you reach the beach. From there a path of white seashells will lead you to the Chibineko Kitchen. Step inside, they'll be expecting you. These are the directions Kotoko has been given. She arrives at the tiny restaurant, perched right by the water, early in the morning. Still reeling from the sudden death of her brother, she's been promised that the food served there will bring him back to her, for one last time.

When Hannah is invited into the First-Class carriage of the London to Penzance train by Jinni, she walks into a spider's web. Now a poor, young single mother, Hannah once escaped Cornwall to go to university. But once she married Jake and had his child, her dreams were crushed into bitter disillusion. Her husband has left her for Eve, rich and childless, and Hannah has been surviving by becoming a cleaner in London. Jinni is equally angry and bitter, and in the course of their journey the two women agree to murder each other's husbands.

At his mother’s family house in the south of France, Patrick Melrose has the run of a magical garden. Bravely imaginative and self-sufficient, five-year-old Patrick encounters the volatile lives of adults with care. His father, David, rules with considered cruelty, and Eleanor, his mother, has retreated into drink. They are expecting guests for dinner. But this afternoon is unlike the chain of summer days before, and the shocking events that precede the guests’ arrival tear Patrick's world in two.

Driving to the cottage she's newly inherited, Ellie is so excited that she barely notices when the car bumps against something. That evening Ellie hears a news flash; a man was seriously injured in a hit and run. Could she have been responsible for putting a man in hospital? Unable to hold the doubts at bay, she decides to visit the victim, little knowing that the consequences of this decision will change her life forever.

Charles Dickens' masterful historical novel, set in Paris and London during the French Revolution, combines life-and-death adventure with a moving personal story. Lucie Manette, daughter of a revolutionary hero, and Charles Darnay, an aristocrat sympathetic to the poor, are in love. When vengeful revolutionaries seize Charles, can Lucie's friend, Sydney Carton, save him - and at what cost?

Tea with a hedgehog and supper with a rabbit? Beatrix Potter entertained guests that most people—certainly Beatrix Potter's proper Victorian parents—would have thought belonged in a meadow, not in a London nursery. Such unlikely companions were company for lonely Beatrix, and she spent much of her time sketching and making up stories about these small creatures. Beatrix was so well acquainted with the characters of her various animal friends that when she was older it seemed natural to write and illustrate small books about their delightful adventures.

Zizzle Literary Audio Edition 2 contains stories selected from our hardback editions. Zizzle Literary is an anthology audiobook series that aims to bring parents and kids together to foster a lifelong love of listening to stories. We publish literary fiction that kids from age 11, teens, and adults will all enjoy. We focus on short and flash fiction - the door opener to the world of literature.

I’ve always felt like the main character in a movie… but never in a good way. Selena Holmes spent her life watching herself from the outside, as if she were just a character playing a role—trapped in a script she never wrote. Raised by a distant father and an absent mother, she longed for love but only found it in the wrong places. Heartbreak, betrayal, and self-doubt became the soundtrack of her life. She tried to fix people who didn’t want to be saved. She fought for love that was never enough. She kept running—toward something, away from something, she was never sure which.

When Jules Verne was born in 1828, his family had his future planned out for him. They expected him to become a lawyer, but he dreamed of writing. He started out writing more traditional poetry and plays, but then he began to create a new, unconventional kind of fiction. It combined adventure, the modern world of science and invention, and his personal view of the future. With fantastical characters, spaceships to the moon, and deep-sea submarines, his books told of things that would not actually occur for decades.

After a failed dig in Honduras, aspiring archaeologist Casper Christiansen heads home to Minnesota to face his unresolved feelings for Raina Beaumont, the woman of his dreams. But when he arrives unannounced on her doorstep, he receives the shock of a lifetime: Raina is pregnant with someone else's baby.

Told through the voice of a woman with a powerful intellect that is maddeningly slipping away, Turn of Mind is not only a suspenseful psychological thriller that pulses with intensity but also a brilliant portrayal of the fragility of consciousness and memory, and of a mind finally turning on itself.

The setting is October 1879. The stage is New Georgetown, West Virginia. A mysterious figure by the name of The Maker has entered this small community and, almost immediately upon doing so, started entering the minds of the townsfolk. Townsfolk who are as curious as The Maker himself. Like Dr Umbründ, the pint-sized physician with a prodigious capacity for sin; like the three sisters in the house on the hill - one stern, one wild, one mysterious; like the tavern's semimythical siren....

In this utterly unconventional autobiographical novel, Mark Leyner gives a reading in the food court of a mall. Besides Mark's mother, who's driven him to the mall and introduces him before he begins, and a few employees of fast food chain Panda Express who ask a handful of questions, the reading is completely without audience. The action of Gone with the Mind takes place exclusively at the food court, but the territory covered in this audio has no bounds.

Brooke Kincaid knows second chances don't come cheap. She's spent five years repairing past mistakes and making her life in Caribou Crossing steady and predictable. But now a stranger's Harley has shattered her fence and her peace of mind in one swoop. Brooke is drawn to everything about wounded undercover cop Jake Brannon - his raw masculinity, his tenderness, and the undisguised desire that makes her feel more alive than she's ever been.

In fifteenth-century Italy, Paolo Uccello recognizes the artistic talent of his young daughter, Antonia, and teaches her how to create a masterpiece. The girl composes a painting of her mother and inadvertently sparks an enduring mystery. In the present day, a copyist painter receives a commission from a wealthy Chinese businessman to duplicate a Paolo Uccello painting. Together, the painter and his teenage daughter visit China, and in doing so they begin their escape from a tragic family past.

Clive and Martha have been together since they met at university; they have a young daughter, Eliza. Their marriage appears serene and content but when Eliza's adored new piano teacher turns out to be a woman from Clive and Martha's past, the enigmatic Eliot Fox, Clive becomes desperate to keep Eliot - and what she knows - away from his family.

Seventy-one and a man used to controlling those around him, Saul finds himself slipping into what he describes as his slow dance with death. His ramblings, humor, emotions, lucid moments, and confusion are laid bare as well as the thoughts and feelings of his loved ones: his wife, Monique, conflicted and depressed, caring yet angry; his daughter, Florence, compassionate yet proper and reserved; his son, Joey, self-centered and narcissistic, seemingly indifferent to his family's challenges.