Product Description: The twelve stories in this essential collection comprise the best of Valerie Martin’s long and distinguished career. Celebrated for her unflinching exploration of human morality and her astonishing insights into our shared losses and joys, Martin draws on an extraordinary range of genres and settings, shifting from realism to myth, from past to present, from the Louisiana bayou to the streets of Rome and beyond...read more

Cat brothers Cecil and Anton are as different in personality as they are in looks. Cecil, stocky and black with white patches, thirsts for seafaring adventure as he roams the docks of his harborside home, taking day trips on fishing boats when the chance comes along. Slim, gray Anton prefers listening to the sailors' shanties at the town saloon. But one day when Anton does venture to port, he's stolen off the dock, and the next thing he knows, he's at sea.Knowing little of the wide open ocean that lies beyond the harbor, Cecil boards another ship in hopes of finding Anton. But what begins as a rescue mission turns into a pair of high seas adventures, with thrills and danger bubbling under every wave.Anton takes on a fierce rat, outwits hungry birds, and forges a forbidden friendship, while Cecil encounters dolphins and whales and finds himself in the middle of a pirate raid. On an ocean as vast as the one Anton and Cecil have discovered, will they see home-or each other-ever again?

Product Description: Play games, build towers, move to the beat, and go on a pretend picnic—all with math   Developed by the Mixing in Math group at TERC, an education nonprofit, and based on research funded in part by the National Science Foundation, this book is packed with all kinds of math games for matching colors with numbers, comparing and counting, and simple addition and subtraction...read more

Product Description: Are universal rights bound to colonialism? Are they culturally imperialistic? By juxtaposing Morocco's practice of torture with its discourse of cultural relativism, this study links popular resistance to universal rights to a deliberate politics that delegitimizes those very same rights, requiring a new, more inclusive system of universalism...read more

Acclaimed author Valerie Martin returns with a dark comedy about love, sex, an actor's ambition, and the perils of playing a role too well. In this fictional memoir, Valerie Martin brilliantly re-creates the seamy theater world of 1970s New York, when rents were cheap, love was free, and nudity on stage was the latest craze. Edward Day, a talented and ambitious young actor finds his life forever altered during a weekend party on the Jersey Shore, where he seduces the delicious Madeleine Delavergne and is saved from drowning by the mysterious Guy Margate, a man who bears an eerie physical resemblance to Edward. Forever after, Edward is torn between his desire for Madeleine and his indebtedness to Guy, his rival in love and in art, on stage and off.

Product Description: Two women, Chloe Dale, an artist comfortably ensconced in bucolic suburbia, and Salome Drago, a wily, seductive refugee from a country that no longer exists, confront each other in a Manhattan restaurant, and the battle lines are drawn...read more

Product Description: Two women, Chloe Dale, an artist comfortably ensconced in bucolic suburbia, and Salome Drago, a wily, seductive refugee from a country that no longer exists, confront each other in a Manhattan restaurant, and the battle lines are drawn...read more

Chloe Dales's growing dislike of her college-age son Toby's romantic relationship with Salome Drago, a Croatian refugee who is a seductive but somehow toxic blend of the old world and the new, threatens to alienate her from her tolerant husband and besotted son, just as the dangerous secrets of Salome's past bring darkness into all of their lives. 40,000 first printing.

Prize-winning author's new collection of stories of art and torn emotions.

A collection of six stories explores the essential nature of art and depictes the contradictions and compromises of artistic life, as the artist struggles to reconcile his audience with his muse.

A tale of murder and passion set deep in the bayou from the author of 'Property'.

This title provides a biography of a man who is both the most radical and the most universally beloved of all Christian saints - Francis.

A flavorful assortment of seventy low-carbohydrate recipes for the sophisticated palate presents a variety of tasty but healthful dishes including Gratin-Style Spinach and Aged-White Cheddar Soufflé, Hazelnut-Crusted Freshwater Trout with Preserved Lemon Relish, and Star Anise Flan with Blackberries. Original.

Set in Phoenix, this is a tale of sex, betrayal and the wilder side of human nature.

The events, tragedies, and emotional repercussons of slavery and a slave revolt in the antebellum South are seen through the eyes of Manon Gaudet, a pretty, petulant, self-absorbed slave owner, who marries the wealthy owner of a sugar planation near New Orleans, only to see her own prized slave, Sarah, become her husband's mistress. Reprint. 25,000 first printing.

A biography of the great saint inspired by frescoes in Italy offers a window into the medieval world that influenced the teachings and mission of St. Francis of Assisi.

Product Description: The startling arrival of Valerie Martin's first novel brought rave reviews and sounded the themes that would inform such later major works as MARY REILLY, THE GREAT DIVORCE, and SALVATION: the fragility of the physical world, the gritty details of employment, and the possibilities, however slim, of transformation and liberty...read more

Product Description: Valerie Martin's third novel is the story of a deadly love triangle set in New Orleans. Emma Miller, married and the mother of a five-year-old daughter, is obsessed by her increasingly sadomasochistic relationship with Pascal Toussaint, who is himself fixated upon Clarire D'Anjou, a young novice with a passion for God so powerful that she has been sent home to New Orleans by the convent for a year's test of her vocation...read more

Escaping a life of brutal childhood abuse, Mary Reilly takes a position in the employ of Dr. Jekyll, but the arrival of a new 'assistant' marks the beginning of a series of strange events, in a retelling of the classic horror story, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Reprint. 10,000 first printing.

Just as Lucy Stark, employed by a best-selling if untalented writer named DV, begins to read her employer's latest manuscript, she receives word that he has died under suspicious circumstances and journeys to Italy to search for the rest of DV's manuscript and to uncover the truth about his death. Reprint. 35,000 first printing.

Product Description: Ms. Martin's trademarks: a preoccupation with the dark underside of life, a taste for disturbing, even macabre imagery… excursions into an unseen realm [of] strange and magical events… Martin possesses a sure storytelling gift, [an] ability to transform a myriad of specific details into larger, symbolic shapes...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)