Showing results for "Faces" in Literary Fiction

Set in the pre-Christian world of Glome on the outskirts of Greek civilization, it is a tale of two princesses: the beautiful Psyche, who is loved by the god of love himself, and Orual, Psyche's unattractive and embittered older sister, who loves Psyche with a destructive possessiveness. Her frustration and jealousy over Psyche's fate sets Orual on the troubled path of self-discovery. Lewis's last work of fiction, this is often considered his best by critics.

The founder of a skincare line teeters on career-defining success when a bullish journalist sets out to write her inaugural profile, threatening to unearth her darkest secret—that she's not the wealthy socialite she portrays, but an immigrant of modest means who built a life on someone else's...

Vernon Rand is a charismatic figure whose great love - whose life, in fact - is climbing. He lives alone in California, where he combats the drudgery of a roofing job with the thrill of climbing in the nearby mountain ranges. Sure of only his talent and nerve, Rand decides to test himself in the French Alps, with their true mountaineering and famed, fearsome peaks. He soon learns that the most perilous moments are, for him, the moments when he feels truly alive.

A young mother in Mexico City, captive to a past that both overwhelms and liberates her, and a house she cannot abandon or fully occupy, writes a novel of her days as a translator living in New York. A young translator, adrift in Harlem, is desperate to translate and publish the works of Gilberto Owen, an obscure Mexican poet who lived in Harlem during the 1920s and whose ghostly presence haunts her in the city's subways. And Gilberto Owen, dying in Philadelphia in the 1950s, convinced he is slowly disappearing, recalls his heyday decades before.

Egypt, 1914. It is the beginning of the war and Gareth Owen, Mamur Zapt and Head of Cairo’s Secret Police, is given the unhappy task of rounding up enemy aliens. But, in a land where adoption of foreign nationality is a popular means of avoiding trial by an Egyptian court, determining who counts as German proves contentious. And then there’s the face in the cemetery.

In a style reminiscent of John Cheever and Alice Munro, Michael Nye's second collection of stories, Until We Have Faces, contends with transfixing themes: marital and familial estrangement, ways of trespass, the intractable mysteries and frights of modern life, the uncertainty of knowledge and truth, the gulfs between people and the technology we use, the frailty of our economic lives - while underlining throughout the persistency of love. His consummate skill, penetrating wit, and unfailing emotional generosity are on full display in this fine new collection.

After sending their only daughter off to boarding school, Cookson Selway and his wife, Ellen, travel to London to escape their empty house. But their quiet hotel has guests other than those on the register, and the vacation turns into a journey not only to another city but to another time. As Selway is drawn into a series of mysterious encounters with a young girl who died in a fall from his hotel window sixty years earlier, the characters of her life become more real to him than those of his own.

"The Yellow Face", one of the 56 short Sherlock Holmes stories written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, is the third tale from The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. It was first published in Strand Magazine in 1893 with original illustrations by Sidney Paget. Sherlock Holmes, suffering from boredom due to a want of cases, returns home from a walk with Dr. Watson early in spring to find he has missed a visitor but that the caller has left his pipe behind.

Thaisa Frank works with what the New York Times has called "a tantalizing sense of indirection," in this short work of surrealistic fiction, as she writes about a couple who begin to spin the most mundane topics into fantastical bedtime stories for one another. Their narratives reveal what neither will say to each other directly and end in a surprising admission of truth.