Books in the American Literature Series series

Now finally collected into a single volume, the Sherbrookes trilogy-Possession, Sherbrookes, and Stillness-is Nicholas Delbanco's most celebrated achievement. Centering upon one New England clan and their estate in southwestern Vermont-a full thousand acres, including the bleak and chilly Big House, from which the volatile Sherbrookes have such trouble escaping-these books form a virtuoso portrait of the love, pride, resentment, and even madness we inherit from our families. Written in his characteristically opulent, bravura prose, Delbanco is here revealed as a Henry James for our time: a passionate cataloger of human strength and frailty. Edited and revised by the author some thirty years after its first publication, the trilogy-"e;made new"e; as the single-volume Sherbrookes-can now be rediscovered by a new generation of readers.

Ava Klein, thirty-nine, lover of life, world traveler, professor of comparative literature, is dying. From her hospital bed on this, her last day on earth, she makes one final ecstatic voyage. People, places, offhand memories, and imaginary things drift in and out of Ava's consciousness and weave their way through the narrative. The voices of her three former husbands emerge: Francesco, a filmmaker from Rome; Anatole, lost in the air over France; Carlos, a teenager from Granada. The ways people she loved expressed themselves in letters or at the beach or at the moment of desire return to her. There is Danilo, her current lover, a Czech novelist, and others, lovers of one night, as she sings the endless, joyous, erotic song cycles of her life, because "Dusk and the moment right before shapes are taken back is erotic. And the dark". The voices of her literary loves as well are woven into the narrative: Woolf, Eliot, Nabokov, Beckett, Sarraute, Lorca, Frisch, among others. These writers comment on and help guide us through the text. We hear the voices of her parents, who survived the Treblinka death camp, and of her Aunt Sophie, who did not. War permeates the text, for on Ava Klein's last day Iraq has invaded Kuwait. And above all we hear Ava's voice. Hers is the voice of pleasure, of astonishment, the voice of regret, the voice of gratitude as she moves closer and closer to the "music that is silence". Ava is an attempt, in the words of French feminist philosopher Helene Cixous, "to come up with a language that heals as much as it separates". The fragments of the novel are combined to make a new kind of wholeness, allowing environments, states of mind, and rhythms not ordinarilyassociated with fiction to emerge. Ava's theme is the poignancy of mortality, the extraordinary desire to live, the inevitability of death - the things never done, never understood, the things never said, or said right, or said enough. Ava yearns and the reader yearns with her, struggling to hold on to all that slips away. "I came to celebrate. I came to praise", Ava says, and on every page she does just that - marveling at the mystery of her precious, disappearing life: the pressure of the tide, the sea-soaked steps, wild roses and rose hips, the finches at the feeder, the way the swing swung. "We took the overnight train", she says. "You kissed me everywhere. A beautiful, passing landscape. Imagined in the dark".

"No one is better than William H. Gass at communicating the sublime and rapturous excitement of reading." Washington Post

The denizens of Kelton, New York - a bedroom community some fifty miles from Manhattan - are a well-heeled bunch who spend an awful lot of time playing rummy. There is Alice, an unfulfilled cellist, and her complacent brother Marshall, who doesn't like his friends to confide in him. There are the bumbling and overindulged Fabia and Victor, another sibling duo, and their friend Irving, a meek mama's boy. Into their cloistered lives come Claire and Nadia Tosti, two sisters from Paris, whose take-charge tactics stir the winds of enterprise, romance, and change. Through them, Alice is led to a swarthy Italian who helps her orchestrate a successful restaurant business. Irving pairs up with Claire, finally winning freedom from his eccentric, cat-loving mother. Victor embraces Nadia and the antiques trade, while Fabia discovers a potential romance with Victor's French pen pal. Only Marshall finds himself eluded by love, a predicament that will lead him from the snug environs of Kelton to the crude energies of the Midwest. In bistros, galleries, bars, and theaters, the protagonists eat, drink, criticize each other, and debate the worlds of art, music, literature, life, and love.

Lines from a Canvas offers the public one of the best kept secrets in the world of poetry for years, the work of Jacob Miller. His poems uniquely traverse the cultural territory from Homer to the Grateful Dead, taking the reader from ancient Greece and Rome to the Holocaust to the Cold War to Vietnam to 9/11.

In The Circus of Trust, Mark Tardi implicates us all in a pastoral of detritus where "the same indifferent sun" unflinchingly tracks devastation as part of the most routine actions.

Considered by many to be Elkin's magnum opus, George Mills is, an ambitious, digressive and endlessly entertaining account of the 1,000 year history of the George Millses. From toiling as a stable boy during the crusades to working as a furniture mover, there has always been a George Mills whose lot in life is to serve important personages. But the latest in the line of true blue-collar workers may also be the last, as he obsesses about his family's history and decides to break the cycle of doomed George Millses. An inventive, unique family saga, George Mills is Elkin at his most manic, most comic and most poignant. First published by Random House (1982), most recent paperback by Avon (1996).

Published posthumously in 1995, Mrs. Ted Bliss tells the story of an eighty-two-year-old widow starting life anew after the death of her husband. As Dorothy Bliss learns to cope with the mundane rituals of life in a Florida retirement community, she inadvertently becomes involved with a drug kingpin trying to use her as a front for his operations. Combining a comic plot with a deep concern for character, Elkin ends his career with a vivid portrait of a woman overcoming loss, a woman who is both recognizable and as unique as Elkin's other famous characters.

From Museum of Modern Art editor Emily Hall, a debut novel in the first person about the place of art and the artist in the world.