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Title	Author	Description
The Pumpkin Eater Pumpkin Eater	Penelope Mortimer Mortimer	An exquisitely surreal black comedy about marriage, motherhood, and the madness of modern life. "(Mortimer) is the family historian of the smart, go ahead, two-car household which has a double load of private misery packed in each boot." —Robert Pitman, Sunday Express Contributors: Daphne Merkin
Pitch Dark Pitch Dark	Renata Adler Adler	“What’s new. What else. What next. What’s happened here.” Pitch Dark, Renata Adler’s follow-up to her prize-winning novel Speedboat, is a book of questions, questions that bedevil Kate Ennis as she considers her relationship with her married lover. “A moving, infuriating, tantalizing book.”—The Boston Globe Contributors: Muriel Spark
The Outward Room Outward Room	Millen Brand Brand	The Outward Room was a sensation when first published in 1937. It is the story of a young woman’s path from suffering to deep fulfillment, set in Depression-era New York City. “One of those firmly painted, exquisite miniatures of life...that contrive to be unsparing and honest, and at the same time refreshing and lovely.” —Theodore Dreiser Contributors: Peter Cameron
The Old Devils Old Devils	Kingsley Amis Amis	Winner of the 1986 Booker Prize, and considered by his son Martin to be Kingsley Amis’s greatest achievement, The Old Devils is delightful proof that neither Amis nor his characters mellowed in old age. In fact, a placid life is just the thing that Amis denies his old devils, whose routines of nattering, complaining, and drinking, are thrown into chaos when an old friend and rival (now a successful writer) returns to town with a new and entrancing wife. Contributors: John Banville
Nightmare Alley Nightmare Alley	William Lindsay Gresham Gresham	Nightmare Alley begins with an extraordinary description of a freak-show geek— the object of the voyeuristic crowd's gleeful disgust—going about his work at a county fair. Young Stan Carlisle is working as a carny, and he wonders how a man could fall so low. There's no way that anything like that will ever happen to him. Contributors: Nick Tosches
The New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick	Elizabeth Hardwick Hardwick	Celebrated stories of living, loving, and surviving in New York's bohemian and literary circles. This collection is the first to gather the short fiction of Elizabeth Hardwick, one of the leading figures of twentieth-century American letters. Contributors: Darryl Pinckney
The Mountain Lion Mountain Lion	Jean Stafford Stafford	“The Mountain Lion remains a brilliant achievement, an exploration of adolescence to set beside Carson McCullers’s masterwork The Member of the Wedding.” —Joyce Carol Oates Contributors: Kathryn Davis
Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain Masscult and Midcult	Dwight Macdonald Macdonald	Essayist and provocateur Dwight Macdonald was not afraid to slay sacred cows, and he did so with glee. In this newly gathered collection, Macdonald takes on Ernest Hemingway, James Agee, Tom Wolfe, Webster’s Dictionary, the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, and, most famously, the possibly pernicious ascendancy of popular culture. Contributors: John Summers , Louis Menand
The Mangan Inheritance Mangan Inheritance	Brian Moore Moore	After his movie-star wife dispenses with him, Jamey Mangan decamps to Ireland in search of his roots. After all, he bears an uncanny resemblance to the only known photograph of the famous Irish poète maudit James Clarence Mangan. Filled with pathos and humor, The Mangan Inheritance is a cautionary tale for those seeking their presents in their pasts. Contributors: Christopher Ricks
Lucky Jim Lucky Jim	Kingsley Amis Amis	This campus comedy launched Kingsley Amis's career and made him the reluctant voice of a generation. Neither its vitriol nor its wit has dulled with the years. "Remarkable for its relentless skewering of artifice and pretension, Lucky Jim also contains some of the finest comic set pieces in the language." —Olivia Laing, The Observer Contributors: Keith Gessen