"The Door is an unsettling exploration of the relationship between two very different women. Magda is a writer, educated, married to an academic, public-spirited, with an on-again-off-again relationship with Hungary's Communist authorities. Emerence is a peasant, illiterate, impassive, abrupt, seemingly ageless. She lives alone in a house that no one else may enter, not even her closest relatives. She is Magda's housekeeper and she has taken control...

"Winner of the 1973 National Book Award. In Augustus, the third of his great novels, John Williams took on an entirely new challenge, a[n] historical novel set in classical Rome, exploring the life of the founder of the Roman Empire, whose greatness was matched by his brutality. To tell the story, Williams also turned to a genre, the epistolary novel, that was new to him, transforming and transcending it just as he did the western in Butcher's Crossing...

"No history of the American uncanny tale would be complete without mention of Edith Wharton, yet many of Wharton's most dedicated admirers are unaware that she was a master of the form. In fact, one of Wharton's final literary acts was assembling Ghosts, a personal selection of her own most chilling stories, written between 1902 and 1937. In 'The Lady's Maid's Bell,' the earliest tale included here, a servant's dedication to her mistress continues...

"Though written at the end of the first half of the twentieth century this is essentially a nineteenth century novel written with a twentieth century sensibility. A few things give it away as a twentieth century novel - regular trains, even to remote rural areas, and a gramophone as well as the fact that, unlike most nineteenth century novels, none of the main characters survives unscarred. Indeed, most of them die, usually relatively unpleasant deaths....

"From the fictional land of Carcosa that inspired the HBO show True Detective to H.P. Lovecraft's accursed New England hills, this collection features some of the most legendary landscapes of the cosmic horror genre. The collection includes the following twelve stories: Edgar Allan Poe, "MS. Found in a Bottle" Bram Stoker, "The Squaw" Ambrose Bierce, "Moxon's Master" Ambrose Bierce, "The Damned Thing" Ambrose Bierce, "An Inhabitant of Carcosa" R.W....

"Alone at dawn, in the heat of midsummer, a young woman named Takiko departs on foot for the hospital to give birth to a baby boy. Her pregnancy, the result of a casual affair with a married man, is a source of sorrow and shame to her abusive parents. For Takiko, however, it is a cause for reverie. Her baby, she imagines, will be hers and hers alone, a challenge but also an instrument for her long-wished-for independence. Takiko's first year as a...