Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award

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  My Movie Business

  John Irving

  This edition contains an excerpt from John Irving's -- My Movie Business were taken by Stephen Vaughan, the still photographer on the set of The Cider House Rules--a Miramax production directed by Lasse Hallstrom, with Michael Caine in the role of Dr. Larch. Concurrently with the November 1999 release of the film, Talk Miramax Books will publish John Irving's screenplay.

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  Setting Free the Bears

  John Irving

  Modern-day Quixote, to whom zoo animals' imprisonment symbolizes the persecution of his ancestors, climaxes his wanderings with the dramatic freeing of all the animals of Vienna's Hietzinger Zoo.

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  The 158-Pound Marriage

  John Irving

  The darker vision and sexual ambiguities of this sensual, ironic tale about a ménage a quatre in a New England university town foreshadow those of The World According to Garp; but this very trim and precise novel is a marked departure from the author's generally robust, boisterous style. Though Mr. Irving's cool eye spares none of his foursome, he writes with genuine compassion for the sexual tests and illusions they perpetrate on each other; but the sexual intrigue between them demonstrates how even the kind can be ungenerous, and even the well-intentioned, destructive.

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  The Cider House Rules

  John Irving

  Set in rural Maine in the first half of this century, it tells the story of Dr. Wilbur Larch--obstetrician and director of the orphanage in the town of St. Clouds. It is also the story of his favorite orphan, Homer, who is never adopted.

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  The Cider House Rules: A Screenplay

  John Irving

  Set in the rural town of Maine, this tale follows the story of Hormer Wells, from his apprenticeship in the orphanage surgery to his adult life running a cider-making factory and the relationship he has with his wife's best friend.

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  The Fourth Hand

  John Irving

  While reporting a story from India, a New York television journalist has his left hand eaten by a lion; millions of TV viewers witness the accident. A well-known Boston hand surgeon wants to perform the first hand transplant on the reporter, but the problem is there is no hand available. A married woman from Wisconsin wants to give the reporter her husband's left hand--that is, after her husband dies.

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  The Hotel New Hampshire

  John Irving

  The first of my father’s illusions was that bears could survive the life lived by human beings, and the second was that human beings could survive a life led in hotels.” 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 Son of the Circus and A Prayer for Owen Meany.

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  The Imaginary Girlfriend

  John Irving

  The Imaginary Girlfriend is a candid memoir of the writers and wrestlers who played a role in John Irving’s development as a novelist and as a wrestler. It also portrays a father’s dedication — Irving coached his two sons to championship titles. It is an illuminating, concise work, a literary treasure.

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  The Water-Method Man

  John Irving

  Fred Trumper, a floundering late-twenty-something graduate student with serious commitment and honesty issues that earn him the nickname "Bogus," humorously recounts his various failures in life and love, from his New England childhood through his experiences on foreign study in Vienna, Austria, and as a graduate student in Iowa, leading up to the present-day, early-1970s New York.

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  The World According to Garp

  John Irving

  This is the life of Garp, the bastard son of Jenny Fields—a feminist leader ahead of her times. This is the life and death of a famous mother and her almost-famous son; theirs is a world of sexual extremes. Rich with "lunacy and sorrow"; yet the dark, violent events of the story do not undermine a comedy both ribald and robust.

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  Trying to Save Piggy Sneed

  John Irving

  A treat for John Irving addicts, and a perfect introduction to his work for the uninitiated. In his spirited opening piece, Irving explains how he became a writer: “A fiction writer’s memory is an especially imperfect provider of detail; we can always imagine a better detail than the one we can remember. The correct detail is rarely exactly what happened; the most truthful detail is what could have happened, or what should have.” There follow six scintillating stories written over the last twenty years. The collection ends with a homage to Charles Dickens.

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  Until I Find You

  John Irving

  John Irving's eleventh novel: set in Canada and New England, as well as Hollywood and the North Sea ports of Europe, it is epic in scope, and Irving's most ambitious and moving work to date.

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  Animal Dreams: A Novel

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Hallie Nodine fights for justice in Nicaragua while her sister, Codi, returns to Arizona to confront her dying father, as myths, dreams, and flashbacks blend to examine life's commitments.

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  Another America/Otra America

  Barbara Kingsolver

  This powerful collection of poetry deals with protest against political and social repression experienced by ordinary people, particularly women, under military regimes in Central and South America during the last 20 years. Through vivid imagery and compelling messages, Kingsolver makes a passionate appeal to end the suffering of victims of revolution, oppression, and war. The face-to-face bilingual presentation makes for an exciting language comparison for students who speak Spanish, but the poems, charged with emotion, stand by themselves in English.

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  Flight Behavior: A Novel

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Set in the present day in the rural community of Feathertown, Tennessee, this novel tells the story of Dellarobia Turnbow, a petite, razor-sharp 29-year-old who nurtured worldly ambitions before becoming pregnant and marrying at seventeen. Now, after more than a decade of tending to small children on a failing farm, oppressed by poverty, isolation and her husband's antagonistic family, she has mitigated her boredom by surrendering to an obsessive flirtation with a handsome younger man. In the opening scene, Dellarobia is headed for a secluded mountain cabin to meet this man and initiate what she expects will be a self-destructive affair. But the tryst never happens. Instead, she walks into something on the mountainside she cannot explain or understand: a forested valley filled with a lake of silent red fire that appears to her a miracle. In reality, the forest is ablaze with millions of butterflies. Their usual migratory route has been disrupted, and what looks to be a stunningly beautiful view is really an ominous sign, for the Appalachian winter could prove to be the demise of the species. Her discovery of this phenomenon ignites a media and religious firestorm that changes her life forever. After years lived entirely in the confines of one small house, Dellarobia finds her path suddenly opening out, chapter by chapter, into blunt and confrontational engagement with her family, her church, her town, her continent, and finally the world at large.

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  High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never

  Barbara Kingsolver

  With the eyes of a scientist and the vision of a poet, Barbara Kingsolver writes about notions as diverse as modern motherhood, the history of private property, and the suspended citizenship of humans in the animal kingdom. Kingsolver's canny pursuit of meaning from an inscrutable world compels us to find instructions for life in surprising places: a museum of atomic bomb relics, a West African voodoo love charm, an iconographic family of paper dolls, the ethics of a wild pig who persistently invades a garden, a battle of wills with a two-year-old, or a troop of oysters who observe high tide in the middle of Illinois.

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  Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Hundreds of families held the line in the 1983 strike against Phelps Dodge Copper in Arizona. After more than a year the strikers lost their union certification, but the battle permanently altered the social order in these small, predominantly Hispanic mining towns. At the time the strike began, many women said they couldn't leave the house without their husband's permission. Yet, when injunctions barred union men from picketing, their wives and daughters turned out for the daily picket lines. When the strike dragged on and men left to seek jobs elsewhere, women continued to picket, organize support, and defend their rights even when the towns were occupied by the National Guard. "Nothing can ever be the same as it was before," said Diane McCormick of the Morenci Miners Women's Auxiliary. "Look at us. At the beginning of this strike, we were just a bunch of ladies."

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  Homeland and Other Stories

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Spreading her memorable characters over numerous landscapes, Kingsolver tells stories of hope, momentary joy, and powerful endurance.

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  How to Fly (In Ten Thousand Easy Lessons)

  Barbara Kingsolver

  In her second poetry collection, Barbara Kingsolver offers reflections on the practical, the spiritual, and the wild. She begins with "how to" poems addressing everyday matters such as being hopeful, married, divorced; shearing a sheep; praying to unreliable gods; doing nothing at all; and of course, flying. Next come rafts of poems about making peace (or not) with the complicated bonds of friendship and family, and making peace (or not) with death, in the many ways it finds us. Some poems reflect on the redemptive powers of art and poetry itself; others consider where everything begins. Closing the book are poems that celebrate natural wonders--birdsong and ghost-flowers, ruthless ants, clever shellfish, coral reefs, deadly deserts, and thousand-year-old beech trees--all speaking to the daring project of belonging to an untamed world beyond ourselves.

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  Pigs in Heaven: A Novel

  Barbara Kingsolver

  When a six-year-old child named Turtle is the sole witness to a freak accident at the Hoover Dam, she and her adoptive mother Taylor have a moment of celebrity that will change their lives forever. Turtle is claimed by Annawake Fourkiller, a Cherokee activist, to have been wrongly taken from the Cherokee nation. Fear of losing Turtle sends Taylor fleeing across the country with her mother Alice, pursued by Annawake. In the course of their journey, the three find love and wisdom in surprising places.

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  Prodigal Summer: A Novel

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Wildlife biologist Deanna is caught off guard by an intrusive young hunter, while bookish city wife Lusa finds herself facing a difficult identity choice, and elderly neighbors find attraction at the height of a long-standing feud.

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  Small Wonder: Essays

  Barbara Kingsolver

  In 22 wonderfully articulate essays, Kingsolver raises her voice in praise of nature, family, literature, and the joys of everyday life while examining the genesis of war, violence and poverty in the world. Illustrations.

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  The Bean Trees: A Novel

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Young, bright Taylor Greer leaves her poverty-stricken life in Kentucky and heads west, picking up an abandoned Native American baby girl whom she names Turtle and finds a new home in Tucson with Mattie, an old woman who takes in Central American refugees.

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  The Lacuna: A Novel

  Barbara Kingsolver

  The story of Harrison William Shepherd, a man caught between two worlds -- Mexico and the United States in the 1930s, '40s, and '50s -- and whose search for identity takes readers to the heart of the twentieth century's most tumultuous events.

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  The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel

  Barbara Kingsolver

  The drama of a U.S. missionary family in Africa during a war of decolonization. At its center is Nathan Price, a self-righteous Baptist minister who establishes a mission in a village in 1959 Belgian Congo. The resulting clash of cultures is seen through the eyes of his wife and his four daughters.