Set in Fez, Morocco, during that country's 1954 nationalist uprising, The Spider's House is perhaps Paul Bowles's most beautifully subtle novel, richly descriptive of its setting and uncompromising in its characterizations. Exploring once again the dilemma of the outsider in an alien society, and the gap in understanding between cultures-recurrent themes of Paul Bowles's writings-The Spider's House is dramatic, brutally honest, and shockingly relevant...

Seventeen-year-old Maile falls in love with Englishman John Harbottle, the navigator for Captain James Cook when they arrive in the Sandwich Islands. The two cultures clash after the death of Captain Cook in 1779, and Maile is forced to make an impossible decision: save John or save her people.

"A personal, provocative, informative, and entertaining study of the different idea Asians and Westerners have of the self and how this plays out in our differing approaches to art, learning, politics, business, and almost everything else"--

Raised in a remote seaside village, Thomas Witka Just marries Ruth, his beloved since infancy. But an ill-fated decision to fight in Vietnam changes his life forever: cut off from his Native American community, he fathers a child with another woman. When he returns home a hero, he finds his tribe in conflict over the decision to hunt a whale, both a symbol of spirituality and rebirth and a means of survival. In the end, he reconciles his two existences,...

"Traditionalist Christians who oppose same-sex marriage and other cultural developments in the United States wonder why they are being forced to bracket their beliefs in order to participate in public life. This situation is not new, says Steven D. Smith: Christians two thousand years ago faced very similar challenges. Picking up poet T. S. Eliot's World War II-era thesis that the future of the West would be determined by a contest between Christianity...

"In the republic of Georgia, the Communists are long gone, replaced by. well, by what? Something much more confusing, that's for sure. There are no jobs in the cities. And when there are jobs, employees aren't compensated. And when they are compensated, it's because the jobs are. not strictly scrupulous. In the village, life goes on much as it always did, but these days, the homemade farmers cheese is giving way to the oil pipeline. And as for romance...

When a sightseeing Soviet commander runs his submarine aground off the New England coast, his crew attempts to find a boat to dislodge the sub almost starts World War III. Russian Lt. Rozanov and his crew hit the beaches of Massachusetts unaware of the panic they're about to start. Despite the Russians' harmless intentions, the folks in town think a full-scale Soviet invasion has been launched! What's worse, their police chief has left his hysterical...

"In the beginning it is just a car trip through Africa. Two English people - Bobby, a civil servant with a guilty appetite for African boys, and Linda, a supercilious "compound wife"--Are driving back to their enclave after a stay in the capital. But in between lies the landscape of an unnamed country whose squalor and ethnic bloodletting suggest Idi Amin's Uganda. And the farther Naipaul's protagonists travel into it, the more they find themselves...

"Twenty-year-old Skyler saw the incident out her window: Some sort of metallic object hovering over the Golden Gate Bridge just before it collapsed and a mushroom cloud lifted above the city. Like everyone, she ran, but she couldn't outrun the radiation, with her last thoughts being of her beloved baby brother, Dorian, safe in her distant family home. Flash forward to a post-incident America, where the country has been broken up into territories and...