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From Sue Miller, author of the bestselling THE GOOD MOTHER and FAMILY PICTURES, this collection of short stories, INVENTING THE ABBOTTS, explores the treacherously shifting ground of erotic and family relationships with deftness and depth. The title story is about a young man who takes up successively with three daughters of the most fashionable family in town. In other stories, whose characters range from a young girl in the first blush of sexual curiosity to a stricken dowager whose seizures release a brutal and sometimes obscene candor, Sue Miller presents a compelling gallery of contemporary men and women with hungry hearts and dismayed consciences.

Vinyl LP repressing. From the opening bars of the title track of this beautiful album, Oscar Peterson lays down the kind of piano playing for which he had been famous for well over a decade; the deftness of touch, the almost sleight of hand, as he beguiles the listener into making it sound all too easy. Peterson talks through the piano and at his best he makes the piano sing. Just listen to 'Georgia On My Mind' who needs a vocal? While Peterson has at times, unfairly, been called an unemotional

Pet deaths and parenting, embarrassing childhood memories and mental illness, Roberts documents her daily life’s minutiae, its up and downs, with the deftness of an observational comedian. Her comics demonstrate that sometimes life can deal you a punch to the gut, but it doesn’t have to be devoid of a punch line.

Emotional Intelligence Does IQ define our destiny? Daniel Goleman argues that our view of human intelligence is far too narrow, and that our emotions play a major role in thought, decision making and individual success. Self-awareness, impulse control, persistence, motivation, empathy and social deftness are all qualities that mark people who excel: whose relationships flourish, who are stars in the workplace. With new insights into the brain architecture underlying emotion and rationality, Goleman shows precisely how emotional intelligence can be nurtured and strengthened in all of us. Working with Emotional Intelligence Do you want to be more successful at work? Do you want to improve your chances of promotion? Do you want to get on better with your colleagues? Daniel Goleman draws on unparalleled access to business leaders around the world and the thorough research that is his trademark. He demonstrates that emotional intelligence at work matters twice as much as cognitive abilities such as IQ or technical expertise in this inspiring sequel.

Ernest Ralph Gorse's heartlessness and lack of scruple are matched only by the inventiveness and panache with which he swindles his victims. With great deftness and precision Hamilton exposes how his dupes' own naivete, snobbery or greed make them perfect targets. These three novels are shot through with the brooding menace and sense of bleak inevitability so characteristic of the author. There is also vivid satire and caustic humour. Gorse is thought to be based on the real-life murderer Neville Heath, hanged in 1946.

Herman Melville (1819-91) brought as much genius to the smaller-scale literary forms as he did to the full-blown novel: his poems and the short stories and novellas collected in this volume reveal a deftness and a delicacy of touch that is in some ways even more impressive than the massive, tectonic passions of Moby-Dick. In a story like "Bartleby, the Scrivener" -- one of the very few perfect representatives of the form in the English language -- he displayed an unflinching precision and insight and empathy in his depiction of the drastically alienated inner life of the title character. In "Benito Cereno," he addressed the great racial dilemmas of the nineteenth century with a profound, almost surreal imaginative clarity. And in Billy, Budd, Sailor, the masterpiece of his last years, he fused the knowledge and craft gained from a lifetime's magnificent work into a pure, stark, flawlessly composed tale of innocence betrayed and destroyed. Melville is justly honored for the epic sweep of his mind, but his lyricism, his skill in rendering the minute, the particular, the local, was equally sublime.

“An extraordinary debut, a deeply lovely novel that evokes with uncommon deftness the terrible, heartbreaking beauty that is life in wartime. Like the glorious ghosts of the paintings in the Hermitage that lie at the heart of the story, Dean’s exquisite prose shimmers with a haunting glow, illuminating us to the notion that art itself is perhaps our most necessary nourishment. A superbly graceful novel.”  — Chang-Rae Lee, New York Times Bestselling author of Aloft and Native SpeakerBit by bit, the ravages of age are eroding Marina's grip on the everyday. An elderly Russian woman now living in America, she cannot hold on to fresh memories—the details of her grown children's lives, the approaching wedding of her grandchild—yet her distant past is miraculously preserved in her mind's eye. Vivid images of her youth in war-torn Leningrad arise unbidden, carrying her back to the terrible fall of 1941, when she was a tour guide at the Hermitage Museum and the German army's approach signaled the beginning of what would be a long, torturous siege on the city. As the people braved starvation, bitter cold, and a relentless German onslaught, Marina joined other staff members in removing the museum's priceless masterpieces for safekeeping, leaving the frames hanging empty on the walls to symbolize the artworks' eventual return. As the Luftwaffe's bombs pounded the proud, stricken city, Marina built a personal Hermitage in her mind—a refuge that would stay buried deep within her, until she needed it once more. . . .

Volume II of the five-volume Collected Letters begins with Mansfield's stay at Bandol in the early months of 1918 and follows her until she leaves for the Continent in September 1919. This volume, like the first, demonstrates her brilliance as a correspondent--her wit as well as her warmth, her deftness in conveying places and personalities, the vitality of her tastes and enthusiasms--and it also reveals the wide swings and dark alternations of her moods. The letters here are dominated by her love for Middleton Murry, her response to the First World War, and the ways in which she accepted the inevitable advance of her tuberculosis. They are as courageous as they are frank, and shot through with the intelligence and flair that would prompt Virginia Woolf, a few years later, to write that with Mansfield's death she had lost her greatest rival, and the person whose literary opinion she most valued.

WINNER OF THE ARTHUR C. CLARKE AWARD · “A stunning novel and a beautiful evocation of a truly alien world.”—Sunday Times (UK)“Beckett renders the terror of the darkness beyond the forests with a riveting deftness that evokes all primordial fears of the unknown.”—N. K. Jemisin, The New York Times Book Review On the alien, sunless planet they call Eden, the 532 members of the Family take shelter beneath the light and warmth of the Forest’s lantern trees. Beyond the Forest lie the mountains of the Snowy Dark and a cold so bitter and a night so profound that no man has ever crossed it. The Oldest among the Family recount legends of a world where light came from the sky, where men and women made boats that could cross the stars. These ships brought us here, the Oldest say—and the Family must only wait for the travelers to return. But young John Redlantern will break the laws of Eden, shatter the Family and change history. He will abandon the old ways, venture into the Dark . . . and discover the truth about their world.Already remarkably acclaimed in the United Kingdom, Dark Eden is science fiction as literature: part parable, part powerful coming-of-age story, set in a truly original alien world of dark, sinister beauty and rendered in prose that is at once strikingly simple and stunningly inventive. Praise for Dark Eden“A linguistic and imaginative tour de force.”—The Guardian (UK)“Captivating and haunting . . . human plight and alien planet are both superbly evoked.”—Daily Mail (UK)“Pure astonishment and pleasure, a storytelling ride full of brio and wonder.”—Locus 

The Last Butterfly: Beautiful and heartbreaking ... It is in the changing of one man ... that one finds the most moving movements of the novel, as Antonin, the hasbeen clown, becomes a kind of hero of the human spirit. (Publisher's Weekly)There is a deftness and economy in Mr. Jacot's characterizations, and a sense of dread of such immediacy as to render the novel all too memorable. (Saturday Review/World).A simple unforgettable film unrolls before you as you read The Last Butterfly ... the horrors are implicit but hidden ... The happiness, the laughter, is as real as the despair. Ane more lasting. (Atlantic Monthly)

At the outbreak of the War of 1812, America's prospects looked dismal. It was clear that the primary battlefield would be the open ocean—but America's war fleet, only twenty ships strong, faced a practiced British navy of more than a thousand men-of-war. Still, through a combination of nautical deftness and sheer bravado, the American navy managed to take the fight to the British and turn the tide of the war: on the Great Lakes, in the Atlantic, and even in the eastern Pacific. In 1812: The Navy's War, prizewinning historian George C. Daughan tells the thrilling story of how a handful of heroic captains and their stalwart crews overcame spectacular odds to lead the country to victory against the world's greatest imperial power. A stunning contribution to military and national history, 1812: The Navy's War is the first complete account in more than a century of how the U.S. Navy rescued the fledgling nation and secured America's future.

Poetry. This new collection of poems from George Stanley includes his acclaimed "White Matches" and "Paradise Shelter" as well as other selections spanning his remarkable oeuvre. "From the first, George Stanley was one of those great natural talents of whom all other poets are jealous. There is an ease and deftness to his line, his sense of tone, the acuity of his vision that is so constantly on target as to be eerie"—Ron Silliman.

With customary charm and deftness, Alexander McCall Smith gives us another installment in this popular series, now running in its eighth season in 'The Scotsman'. Anything could happen to Bertie and the gang, especially with an invitation to one of Scotland's premier jazz festivals -

With absorbing detail and deftness, Kantor gives clinical descriptions of the dynamics in this overlooked syndrome: Passive-Aggressive Personality Disorder. It is a syndrome rooted in poorly suppressed, thinly disguised, and indirectly unleashed anger. This volume presents a scientifically based approach to the patient that will help him or her deal with anger in a healthier, and sometimes life-saving, way.An eclectic approach―including psychodynamic, cognitive-behavioral, and interpersonal techniques―is used to answer the two most important questions of passive-aggression: Why is the passive-aggressive so angry? And why cannot he or she express the anger more directly? Therapists can also use this approach to help the victims of passive-aggression and minimize the suffering that occurs in relationships with these difficult people.