Showing results by narrator "Lorna Raver" in All Categories

In these nine tales, Margaret Atwood ventures into the shadowland earlier explored by fabulists and concoctors of dark yarns such as Robert Louis Stevenson, Daphne du Maurier and Arthur Conan Doyle - and also by herself, in her award-winning novel Alias Grace. In Stone Mattress, Margaret Atwood is at the top of her darkly humorous and seriously playful game.

Charity Royall, a young New England woman of humble origins, meets and falls in love with the worldly Lucius Harney, an architect from the city. In evocative and descriptive prose, Edith Wharton conveys the ecstasy of Charity's first experience in sexual and romantic love, and pulls her heroine through the throes of loving a man who ultimately cannot choose her. Wharton's tale elicits the passion and despair of all great but ill-fated love affairs and enthralls the contemporary audience with its pathos just as it did nearly 100 years ago.

Portia Kane is having a meltdown. After escaping her cheating husband and their posh Florida life, she finds herself transported back home and back to square one. In need of saving herself, she sets out to find and resurrect a beloved high-school English teacher who has retired after a violent incident in the classroom.But she quickly learns that it's not a one-woman job. Luckily she meets a few people on her journey.

Maddy Sprowls, newspaper librarian for the Hannawa Herald-Union, prefers to stay in the newspaper morgue and do her job. But one Saturday, she sees four elderly women get out of a taxicab at a garage sale. She figures that those women must hire that cabby every week to drive them from garage sale to garage sale, and wouldn't that make a great feature story for the paper? Shortly after the story runs, one of the four women, retired antiques dealer Violeta Bell, is murdered.

After the start of the Civil War, Emily Hudson - an orphan who lost her family to consumption and fever - finds herself the begrudged guest at the home of her relatives in Newport. Emily's longing to be an artist is dismissed by her puritanical uncle, who wants nothing more than to rid himself of her through marriage. Her only friend is her aesthete cousin, William, an ailing young writer.

Inspired by a true story, A Land More Kind Than Home is a spellbinding, heartbreaking tale about cruelty and innocence - and the failure of religion and family to protect a child. It is thick with stories and characters connected by faith, infidelity, and a sense of hope that is both tragic and unforgettable.

Portia Kane is having a meltdown. After escaping her ritzy Florida life and her cheating pornographer husband, she finds herself transported back to South Jersey, where things remain largely unchanged from her unhappy childhood. In need of saving herself, she sets out to find and resurrect a beloved high school English teacher who has retired after a horrific scandal.

From the up-and-coming young American writer who has contributed to McSweeney's and written for the New Yorker comes a masterful collection of short stories that has already received rave reviews from many of the most prominent writers working today. Some of the stories are comic masterpieces, some embody as dark a vision of the universe as you are likely to encounter, and all of them showcase a writer grappling with the great questions of modern life.

The year is 2050 and contrary to popular belief, Judy Garland did not die in 1969, but rather, after several liver transplants, she has lived to the grand old age of 138. Re-embracing her real name, Frances Gumm, she becomes a feminist scholar working on her PhD and writing her thesis on a little-known gay Canadian playwright Dash King, whose career ended in drugs and promiscuous sex. Frances is obsessed with King’s antiquated notion of gay politics.