The 158-Pound Marriage ![]() Avenue of Mysteries ![]() In Avenue of Mysteries, Juan Diego—a fourteen-year-old boy, who was born and grew up in Mexico—has a thirteen-year-old sister. Her name is Lupe, and she thinks she sees what’s coming—specifically, her own future and her brother’s. Lupe is a mind reader; she doesn’t know what everyone is thinking, but she knows what most people are thinking. Regarding what has happened, as opposed to what will, Lupe is usually right about the past; without your telling her, she knows all the worst things that have happened to you. Lupe doesn’t know the future as accurately. But consider what a terrible burden it is, if you believe you know the future—especially your own future, or, even worse, the future of someone you love. What might a thirteen-year-old girl be driven to do, if she thought she could change the future? As an older man, Juan Diego will take a trip to the Philippines, but what travels with him are his dreams and memories; he is most alive in his childhood and early adolescence in Mexico. As we grow older—most of all, in what we remember and what we dream—we live in the past. Sometimes, we live more vividly in the past than in the present. Avenue of Mysteries is the story of what happens to Juan Diego in the Philippines, where what happened to him in the past—in Mexico—collides with his future. The Cider House Rules: A Novel ![]() The Hotel New Hampshire ![]() So says John Berry, son of a hapless dreamer, brother to a cadre of eccentric siblings, and chronicler of the lives lived, the loves experienced, the deaths met, and the myriad strange and wonderful times encountered by the family Berry. Hoteliers, pet-bear owners, friends of Freud (the animal trainer and vaudevillian, that is), and playthings of mad fate, they "dream on" in a funny, sad, outrageous, and moving novel by the remarkable author of A Widow for One Year and The Cider House Rules. The Last Chairlift ![]() Prayer for Owen Meany ![]() This is John Irving's most comic novel, yet Owen Meany is Mr. Irving's most heartbreaking character. "Roomy, intelligent, exhilarating and darkly comic...Dickensian in scope....Quite stunning and very ambitious." LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK REVIEW "John Irving is an abundantly and even joyfully talented storyteller." THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOKR EVIEW Setting Free the Bears ![]() From the Paperback edition. The Water-Method Man (Export Ed) ![]() Trying to Save Piggy Sneed: 20th Anniversary Edition ![]() The middle portion of the book is fiction. Over a career that spans thirteen novels, these are the six stories that Mr. Irving considers finished. Among them is "Interior Space," for which he won the O. Henry Award. In the third and final section are three homages: one to Günter Grass and two to Charles Dickens. To each of the twelve pieces, he has contributed author's notes, which provide some perspective on the circumstances surrounding the writing of each piece. For readers who prefer a hardcover, this commemorative edition is a book to treasure. For new readers, it is a perfect introduction to the author of works as moving and mischievous as The World According to Garp,A Prayer for Owen Meany, and In One Person. The Water-Method Man ![]() "Three or four times as funny as most novels." THE NEW YORKER From the Paperback edition. The World According to Garp ![]() since its publication in 1978, Irving's classic is filled with stories inside stories about the life and times of T. S. Garp, novelist and bastard son of Jenny Fields—a feminist leader ahead of her time. Beyond that, The World According to Garp virtually defies synopsis. ——"Nothing in contemporary fiction matches it," said critic Terrence Des Pres. "Irving's blend of gravity and play is unique, audacious, almost blasphemous. . . . Friendship, marriage and family are his primary themes, but at that blundering level of life where mishap and folly—something close to joyful malice—perpetually intrude and disrupt, often fatally. Life, in Irving's fiction, is always under siege." Time magazine commented: "Irving's popularity is not hard to understand. His world is really the world according to nearly everyone." ——This Modern Library edition includes a new Introduction by the author. The Modern Library has played a significant role in American cultural life for the better part of a century. The series was founded in 1917 by the publishers Boni and Liveright and eight years later acquired by Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer. It provided the foundation for their next publishing venture, Random House. The Modern Library has been a staple of the American book trade, providing readers with affordable hardbound editons of impor-tant works of literature and thought. For the Modern Library's seventy-fifth anniversary, Random House redesigned the series, restoring as its emblem the running torchbearer created by Lucian Bernhard in 1925 and refurbishing jackets, bindings, and type, as well as inaugurating a new program of selecting titles. The Modern Library continues to provide the world's best books, at the best prices. |