Showing results by publisher "Valancourt Books" in Literary Fiction

Sir Charles Ravenstreet, in his mid-50s, is unmarried, childless, and lives only for his work in the fast-paced world of business. When he is forced out of his job to make room for someone younger, Sir Charles finds himself at a loose end and facing the dismal prospect of an empty future.

Gregory Dawson, a middle-aged and disillusioned writer, is holed up in a Cornish hotel working on a film script he must finish. A chance encounter with an old acquaintance in the bar sends him back to the England of 1913, when he was just 18 and longed to enter the seemingly magical world of the glamorous Alington family and its three lovely daughters.

Having escaped being burnt at the stake, the reluctant sorcerer Fursey is back in this sequel, trying to make a quiet life for himself as a grocer in the realm of King Ethelwulf. But when his old enemies seize his wife, Fursey resolves to embrace evil and return to Ireland to reclaim her. Along the way, he'll have to contend with bloodthirsty Vikings, a melancholy vampire, an alcoholic wizard, a lovesick cow, and Satan himself, who is more determined than ever to get his hands on Fursey's soul.

After Edward, a rising young author, pens a savage review of the new novel by the world-famous O.M. Tyrell, he is surprised to receive an invitation to visit the old man at his villa in the south of France. The night of their meeting, Tyrell dies, and soon after, Edward's career mysteriously starts to soar as he earns fame, fortune and critical acclaim. But despite his achievements, Edward seems haunted, even tormented.

Released from a prison sentence for manslaughter, Sidney De Lakes returns home to West Virginia, where, in order to exorcise the memory of the lover he killed, he must keep his appointment with destiny in the shape of the man known as “the Renderer”. In this story of the powerful, violent passions of four young men in the remote Appalachians, James Purdy has crafted one of his most haunting and memorable works.

Charles Lumley feels that he has been born in captivity - the captivity of his smugly conventional bourgeois upbringing. Now he has just graduated from university, only to make the discouraging discovery that his education has rendered him unfit for any kind of useful employment. Wondering what to do with the rest of his life and longing to escape, a chance remark overheard in a pub sets him off on a picaresque and hilarious tour of 1950s Britain. He undergoes a string of comic misadventures as he works as a window cleaner, a drug trafficker, a hospital orderly, and a chauffeur.