In an alternate Brooklyn, New York, Lorna flirts with the idea of love despite the fact that any boy a Devonairre Street girl falls in love with is destined to die.

In her prize-winning fourth collection, Mean Time, Carol Ann Duffy dramatizes scenes from childhood, adolescence and adulthood, finding moments of grace or consolation in memory, love and language amid the complexities of life. These are powerful poems of loss, betrayal and desire.

Whether writing of longing or adultery, seduction or simple homely acts of love, Carol Ann Duffy brings to her readers the truth of each experience. Her poetry speaks of tangled, heated passion; of erotic love; fierce and hungry love; unrequited love; and of the end of love. It recognizes too the way that love can make the everyday sacred. As with all her writing, these poems are alive to the sounds of modern life, but also attuned to – and rich with – the traditions of love poetry. Love Poems contains some of Carol Ann Duffy’s most popular poems. Always imaginative, heartfelt and direct, Duffy finds words for our experiences in love and out of love, and displays all the eloquence and skill that have made her one of the foremost poets of her time.

In eight stories, a master of the form extends and magnifies her great themes—the vagaries of love, the passion that leads down unexpected paths, the chaos hovering just under the surface of things, and the strange, often comical desires of the human heart. Time stretches out in some of the stories: a man and a woman look back forty years to the summer they met—the summer, as it turns out, that the true nature of their lives was revealed. In others time is telescoped: a young girl finds in the course of an evening that the mother she adores, and whose fluttery sexuality she hopes to emulate, will not sustain her—she must count on herself. Some choices are made—in a will, in a decision to leave home—with irrevocable and surprising consequences. At other times disaster is courted or barely skirted: when a mother has a startling dream about her baby; when a woman, driving her grandchildren to visit the lakeside haunts of her youth, starts a game that could have dangerous consequences. The rich layering that gives Alice Munro's work so strong a sense of life is particularly apparent in the title story, in which the death of a local optometrist brings an entire town into focus—from the preadolescent boys who find his body, to the man who probably killed him, to the woman who must decide what to do about what she might know. Large, moving, profound, these are stories that extend the limits of fiction.

A beautifully packaged edition of one of García Márquez's most beloved novels, with never-before-seen color illustrations by the Chilean artist Luisa Rivera and an interior design created by the author's son, Gonzalo García Barcha. In their youth, Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza fall passionately in love. When Fermina eventually chooses to marry a wealthy, well-born doctor, Florentino is devastated, but he is a romantic. As he rises in his business career he whiles away the years in 622 affairs—yet he reserves his heart for Fermina. Her husband dies at last, and Florentino purposefully attends the funeral. Fifty years, nine months, and four days after he first declared his love for Fermina, he will do so again.

Alonso, a dirt-poor teenager living in Peru, helps out at the public health clinic his mother, Magdalena, opened, so that he can see Rosa, the beautiful and wealthy daughter of the clinic’s doctor. Alonso and Rosa are both shattered when Magdalena is assassinated by a revolutionary terrorist organization. Left with no hope, Alonso might be seduced into becoming a guerrilla in the same organization that killed his mother. Rosa becomes disgusted with her father’s complacency and leaves wealth and safety behind to somehow help what is left of Alonso’s family. In this coming-of- age novel, C. A. Schmidt tells the story of how love can find its way through poverty and war.

Working in the maguey fields of the Southwest, Sarah Jac and James are in love but forced to start over on a ranch that is possibly cursed where the delicate balance in their relationship begins to give way.