"'Take my camel, dear,' said my aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass." So begins The Towers of Trebizond , the greatest novel by Rose Macaulay, one of the eccentric geniuses of English literature. In this fine and funny adventure set in the backlands of modern Turkey, a group of highly unusual travel companions makes its way from Istanbul to legendary Trebizond, encountering potion-dealing sorcerers, recalcitrant policemen, and Billy Graham on tour with a busload of Southern evangelists. But though the dominant note of the novel is humorous, its pages are shadowed by heartbreak—as the narrator confronts the specters of ancient empires, religious turmoil, and painful memories of lost love.
“In the home of my childhood there was a room we called ‘The Little Bookroom.’ . . . That dusty bookroom, whose windows were never opened . . . opened magic casements for me through which I looked out on other worlds . . . worlds filled with poetry and prose and fact and fantasy. . .” —Eleanor Farjeon In The Little Bookroom , Eleanor Farjeon mischievously tilts our workaday world to reveal its wonders and follies. Her selection of her favorite stories describes powerful—and sometimes exceedingly silly—monarchs, and commoners who are every bit their match; musicians and dancers who live for aft rather than earthly reward; and a goldfish who wishes to "marry the Moon, surpass the Sun, and possess the World."
Set on a Mediterranean cruise, the novel follows a fifteen-year-old girl as she measures the distance from her ailing father and the pull of a world she has not yet known. As memory overlaps with the present, family estrangement and the pain of growing up emerge with a cool, exacting force.
“He is a religious writer; he is a comic realist; he knows what everything feels like, how everything works. He is putting together a body of work which in substantial intelligent creation will eventually be seen as second to none in our time.” —William H. Pritchard, The Hudson Review, reviewing Museums and Women (1972) A harvest and not a winnowing, The Early Stories preserves almost all of the short fiction John Updike published between 1954 and 1975. The stories are arranged in eight sections, of which the first, “Olinger Stories,” already appeared as a paperback in 1964; in its introduction, Updike described Olinger, Pennsylvania, as “a square mile of middle-class homes physically distinguished by a bend in the central avenue that compels some side streets to deviate from the grid pattern.” These eleven tales, whose heroes age from ten to over thirty but remain at heart Olinger boys, are followed by groupings titled “Out in the World,” “Married Life,” and “Family Life,” tracing a common American trajectory. Family life is disrupted by the advent of “The Two Iseults,” a bifurcation originating in another small town, Tarbox, Massachusetts, where the Puritan heritage co-exists with post-Christian morals. “Tarbox Tales” are followed by “Far Out,” a group of more or less experimental fictions on the edge of domestic space, and “The Single Life,” whose protagonists are unmarried and unmoored. Of these one hundred three stories, eighty first appeared in The New Yorker, and the other twenty-three in journals from the enduring Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s to the defunct Big Table and Transatlantic Review . All show Mr. Updike’s wit and verbal felicity, his reverence for ordinary life, and his love of the transient world.
Set in the town of Woodhouse, the novel follows the commercial dreamer James Houghton and his daughter Alvina. Within a class-conscious community, Alvina's movement toward the outside world unfolds as a story of desire, love, and the search for freedom.
A peaceful valley protected by an enchanted forest faces danger as the forest’s power fades, and Tilja sets out with her companions to find the magician who can save them. The fantasy joins the weakening of magic with acts of courage.
