Ask The Parrot

Together at last. Under the pseudonym Richard Stark, Donald E. Westlake, one of the greats of crime fiction, wrote twenty-four fast-paced, hard-boiled novels featuring Parker, a shrewd career criminal with a talent for heists and a code all his own. With the publication of the last four Parker novels Westlake wrote-Breakout, Nobody Runs Forever, Ask the Parrot, and Dirty Money-the University of Chicago Press pulls the ultimate score: for the first time ever, the entire Parker series will be available from a single publisher. In Ask the Parrot, Parker's back on the run, dodging dogs, cops, and even a helicopter. Forced to work with a small-town recluse and a group of fools at a gun club in rural Massachusetts, Parker focuses on getting the cash and getting out. It'll be a deadly day at the races. Featuring new forewords by Chris Holm, Duane Swierczynski, and Laura Lippman-celebrated crime writers, all-these masterworks of noir are the capstone to an extraordinary literary run that will leave you craving more. Written over the course of fifty years, the Parker novels are pure artistry, adrenaline, and logic both brutal and brilliant. Join Parker on his jobs and read them all again or for the first time. But don't talk to the law.

In this follow-up to his acclaimed "Nobody Runs Forever," Stark bring back master criminal Parker, who's now on the run from a heist gone terribly wrong.

An account of the work of two ornithologists in the Peruvian rainforest.

Together at last. Under the pseudonym Richard Stark, Donald E. Westlake, one of the greats of crime fiction, wrote twenty-four fast-paced, hard-boiled novels featuring Parker, a shrewd career criminal with a talent for heists and a code all his own. With the publication of the last four Parker novels Westlake wrote-Breakout, Nobody Runs Forever, Ask the Parrot, and Dirty Money-the University of Chicago Press pulls the ultimate score: for the first time ever, the entire Parker series will be available from a single publisher. Nobody Runs Forever opens a three-part saga with a job at a poker game that sours into a necktie party. When Parker goes in on a messy scam-stealing an armored car-with someone he barely knows, as usual the amateurs get in the way of the job. Featuring new forewords by Chris Holm, Duane Swierczynski, and Laura Lippman-celebrated crime writers, all-these masterworks of noir are the capstone to an extraordinary literary run that will leave you craving more. Written over the course of fifty years, the Parker novels are pure artistry, adrenaline, and logic both brutal and brilliant. Join Parker on his jobs and read them all again or for the first time. But don't talk to the law.

BOOKER PRIZE NOMINEE • From the internationally bestselling author of The Sense of an Ending comes a literary detective story of a retired doctor obsessed with the 19th century French author Flaubert—and with tracking down the stuffed parrot that once inspired him. • “A high literary entertainment carried off with great brio.” —The New York Times Book Review Julian Barnes playfully combines a detective story with a character study of its detective, embedded in a brilliant riff on literary genius. A compelling weave of fiction and imaginatively ordered fact, Flaubert's Parrot is by turns moving and entertaining, witty and scholarly, and a tour de force of seductive originality.

From the two-time Booker Prize-winning author: an irrepressible, audacious, trenchantly funny new novel set in the 19th century and inspired in part by the life of Alexis de Tocqueville. With dazzling exuberance and all the richness of characterization, story, and language that we have come to expect from this superlative writer, Peter Carey explores the birth of democracy, the limits of friendship and whether people really can remake themselves in a New World. The two men at the heart of the novel couldn't be any more different: Olivier is the son of French aristocrats who (barely) survived the French Revolution. Parrot is the motherless son of an itinerate English printer. But when young Parrot is separated from his father (after a stupendous conflagration at a house of forgery) he runs into the powerful embrace of a one-armed marquis who will be his conduit - like it or not - into a life as closely (mis)allied with Olivier's as if they were connected by blood. And when Olivier sets sail for America - ostensibly to make a study of the American penal system, but more precisely to save his neck from the latest guillotineurs - Parrot, unable to loosen the Marquis's grip, is there too: as spy, scribe, comptroller, protector, foe and foil. As the narrative unfurls, shifting between the perspectives of Olivier and Parrot, between their picaresque adventures apart and together, in love and politics, prisons and finance, homelands and brave new lands - a most unlikely friendship begins to take hold.

Even Parker makes mistakes. Locked up in a prison from which no one has ever escaped, it's only a matter of time before the law uncovers his real name - and his extensive criminal past. To get out, Parker must take on the only accomplices he can find - yet his fellow convicts demand a price: help with another job. Their plan has too many weak links. And Parker isn't a man who likes complications. But with a big potential payoff and no other options, Parker is willing to chance it, just this once.

Exploring the presence and meanings of these birds in the art, literature, and history of Western civilization, Parrot Culture traces the unusual history of parrots from their introduction in the Graeco-Roman world, through the great age of New World exploration, to the contemporary ecological crisis of globalism.