Linda Fallon travels to a literary festival to give a reading from her latest work, but while she is there she encounters her former lover, Thomas James, and together, the couple share memories of their past affair.

"A contemporary story about the insular world of writers, centering on a notable female poet and the young woman to whom she reveals her long-guarded secret about a famous manuscript"--

Adam Gordon is a brilliant, if highly unreliable, young American poet on a prestigious fellowship in Madrid, struggling to establish his sense of self and his relationship to art. What is actual when our experiences are mediated by language, technology, medication, and the arts? Is poetry an essential art form, or merely a screen for the reader's projections? Instead of following the dictates of his fellowship, Adam's "research" becomes a meditation...

Life has always been a banquet for Sappho, one to be savored to the fullest. Following a magnificent destiny, her strange and sensual odyssey has carried her to the far corners of the ancient world, from Delphi to Egypt, to the Land of the Amazons, and the realm of Hades. For Sappho, it was always about love - love that seduced her into a plot to depose a dictator, and love that made her trade an unwanted marriage bed of a despised and drunken husband...

Peter Carey's My Life as a Fake is a moral labyrinth constructed around the uneasy relationship between literature and lying. In steamy, fetid Kuala Lumpur in 1972, Sarah Wode-Douglass, the editor of a London poetry journal, meets a mysterious Australian named Christopher Chubb. Chubb is a despised literary hoaxer, carting around a manuscript likely filled with deceit. But in this dubious manuscript, Sarah recognizes a work of real genius. But whose...