Product Description: From acclaimed author Alan Cheuse comes a trio of provocative novellas. In the title piece, Paradise, or, Eat Your Face, we meet travel writer Susan Wheelis and follow her exotic journey to Bali, and into her own frustrated soul. Care centers on Rafe Santera, a recent stroke victim who was once a vibrant, intellectual romantic...read more

On Oprah's Summer Reading List for 2010 Howard Norman, widely regarded as one of this country's finest novelists, returns to the mesmerizing fictional terrain of his major books -- The Bird Artist, The Museum Guard, and The Haunting of L -- in this erotically charged and morally complex story set during WWII. Orphaned by the sudden suicides of both his parents (who discovered they were in love with the same woman), seventeen-year-old Wyatt Hillyer is taken in by his aunt and uncle in the small town of Middle Economy, Novia Scotia, where he is apprenticed to his uncle's toboggan business and falls in love with his ravishing adopted cousin, Tilda. Setting in motion the novel's chain of life-altering passions is the arrival of German student Hans Mohring, carrying only a satchel. Actual historical incidents, including a German U-boat's sinking of the Nova Scotia-Newfoundland ferry Caribou, lend intense narrative power to Norman's uncannily layered story of wartime perfidy and prejudice. Tilda's feelings for Hans stir up tensions that will test the bonds of love, family, and community to its limits. Wyatt's personal account of the astonishing events leading up to his fathering of a beloved daughter spills out twenty-one years later. It's a confession that speaks profoundly of the mysteries of human character in wartime and is directed, with both despair and hope, to an audience of one. An utterly stirring novel, this is Howard Norman at his celebrated best.

Folktales from the tribal peoples of Greenland, Canada, Russia, Alaska, and the polar region describe village life, the wisdom of the shamans, love and marriage, and menacing neighbors

An eloquent study of love, hate, human relationships, and emotional upheaval examines the causes of a violent quarrel between David Kozel and his new father-in-law, William, a gentle man who cares for a Nova Scotia estate and its swans, as well as David's new wife Maggie's belief that David has been unfaithful to her on their honeymoon. Reprint.

The author recalls his experiences among the Inuit of Alaska as he attempted to record and translate their 'flood' narratives into English, working with an Anglo-Japanese woman who had come to Alaska independently to accomplish the same task. Reprint. 25,000 first printing.

The creators of The Girl Who Dreamed Only Geese provide an illustrated collection of folktales from around the world, all of which have a bird as a main character.

When Peter Duvett accepts a job as assistant to esteemed photographer Vienna Linn, he finds himself falling in love with Linn's beautiful wife, Kala, and with her obsession with spirit pictures - photographs in which the faces of the long-dead mysteriously appear during the process of development.

An evocative portrait of the landscape and eccentric characters who have shaped his literary work by the critically acclaimed author of The Bird Artist and The Northern Lights captures the the world of Nova Scotia in a collection of folklore, poetry, reflections, anecdotes, stories, and essays based on his more than thirty years of visits to the island province.

Combining eight previously published stories, the author examines the lives of an unforgettable cast of characters who are confronted by loneliness and obsession, including an Eskimo woman who believes that her missing son's soul is trapped inside a jukebox, and a Japanese woman who walks the beach everyday in search of white pelicans, while her chauffeur falls in love with a zoologist. Original. 20,000 first printing.

After his friend drowns, fifteen-year-old Noah Krainik decides to leave his childhood and hometown in the frozen wilderness of Northern Manitoba and journey to a new life in the city of Toronto. Reprint. 10,000 first printing. (view table of contents)

A collection of seven Cree and Chippewa trickster tales

A rich portrait, set during World War II, of the seductions of danger and the vagaries of identity follows DeFoe Russett, a Nova Scotia museum guard, who steals a painting special to Imogen Linny, caretaker of the Jewish cemetery. Reprint. 35,000 first printing. Tour. NYT. PW. K.

The author of The Bird Artist, a finalist for the National Book Award, explores the darkening world of Europe in the 1930s through the story of a Jewish woman who comes under the spell of an unusual painting.

By turns tragic and comic, a collection of more than one hundred tales displays the cultural richness and diversity among more than thirty tribes of the arctic and subarctic regions and explores the relation of human and nature in the far North. Original.

A collection of stories of the Inuit people includes folktales about a seagull who learns to be human, an orphaned boy raised by giants, and a young girl with the power to dream geese down from the sky.

A painter of the birds of his remote village on the coast of Newfoundland, the narrator of this novel--a finalist for the 1994 National Book Award--recounts the passion and betrayal that led him to murder a lighthouse keeper. Reprint. Tour. NYT.