Counterpoint: 634 books

“By turns earthy, reverent, poetic, and wry, these stories . . . make you feel what it feels like . . . to be fully alive in the world.” —Oprah.com   In the twenty years since her first short story collection, The Spectacle of the Body, Noy Holland has become a singular presence in American...

This is a novel about the persistence of longing in which the twin lives of the title character blur and overlap. Bird puts her child on the bus for school and passes the day with her baby. Interwoven into the passage of the day are phone calls from a promiscuous, unmarried friend, and Bird’s recollection...

You Play the Black and the Red Comes Up, a novel of luck and irony, follows the wayward meanderings of a Depression drifter (Dick) as he bums his way from Oklahoma to Los Angeles in search of his son and runaway wife. There he commits one crime, plans another, and gets arrested for something he didn't...

“Pulling from his epic A People’s History of the United States**, Smith creates a chronological history of Native Americans.” —**Library Journal During the last years of his life, Page Smith—one of America’s greatest historians—concentrated on composing a history of Native Americans...

Painter, musician, journalist, essayist, playwright, and composer, Alberto Savinio was one of the most gifted and singular Italian writers of the twentieth century. Italian critics rank him alongside Pirandello, Calvino and Sciascia, but he is hardly known to American readers. He was the younger brother...

Winner of the Booker Prize, this profound and powerful novel intertwines two stories of two Indias over half a century. Set in colonial India during the 1920s, Heat and Dust tells the story of Olivia, a beautiful woman suffocated by the propriety and social constraints of her position as the...

This observant and insightful novel reveals, in rich and poignant detail, the interior lives of three generations of people in their quest for love and beauty Louise, not content with her husband's gentle affection, strives to reclaim her youth in titillating social and spiritual adventures. Her daughter...

Hailed as one of the best books of 1998 by the Los Angeles Times, this group of twelve short stories was written over the past twenty years. From the steamy streets of New Delhi to New York's tony Upper East Side, Jhabvala's characters grapple with the universal quandaries of the human experience-jealousy,...

In Travelers, Jhabvala examines the unlikely convergence of four wanderers: Asha, an imperious Indian widow, Raymond, a curious Englishman, Lee, an American looking for her spiritual core, and Gopi, an impressionable young student. With a mixture of impassioned dialogue and subtle narrative, Jhabvala...

Three Continents is a tale of the clash between the easternized West and the westernized East. Twins Harriet and Michael-spoiled, quixotic, and extremely wealthy-have eschewed the vapid world of cocktail parties and adulteries that seems to be their inheritance. In constantly searching to complete themselves,...

From the Booker Prize-winning novelist and screenwriter of Howard’s End: “Cinematic” and “exquisite” stories of longing, loss, and redemption (Publishers Weekly). In this expansive story collection, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, author of Heat and Dust and the screenplays for The Remains...

A moving and intriguing book of invention and memory showcasing the genius of a Booker Prize-winning novelist and Academy Award-winning screenwriter. My Nine Lives is a book filled with invented memories—of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and the life she may have or may have wished to live. Nine vignettes...

**Long-listed for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence A New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice "Here in Berlin is one of the most interesting new works of fiction I've read . . . The voices are remarkably distinct, and even with their linguistic mannerisms . . . mark them out...

Stark, brooding, and enormously controversial when first published in 1905, this astonishing novel juxtaposes impressions of fin-de-siècle Stockholm against the psychological landscape of a man besieged by obsession. Lonely and introspective, Doctor Glas has long felt an instinctive hostility toward...