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The American Lover
by Rose Tremain“A collection of stylish daring, tonal mastery and smart, tough love.”—New York Times Book ReviewTrapped in a London apartment, Beth remembers a transgressive love affair in 1960s Paris. The most famous writer in Russia takes his last breath in a stationmaster’s cottage, miles from Moscow. A young woman who is about to marry a rich aristocrat instead begins a torrid relationship with a construction worker. A father, finally free of his daughter’s demands, embarks on a long swim from his Canadian lakeside retreat. A middle-aged woman cares for her injured mother at Christmas. And in the grandest house of all, Danni the Polish housekeeper catches the eye of an enigmatic visitor, Daphne du Maurier.Rose Tremain awakens the senses in this magnificent and diverse collection of short stories. In her precise yet sensuous style, she lays bare the soul of her characters—the admirable, the embarrassing, the unfulfilled, the sexy, and the adorable—to uncover a dazzling range of human emotions and desires.
Grand Ambition: A Novel
by Lisa Michaels"An absorbing, affecting and beautifully written novel."—New York Times Book Review In Lisa Michaels's enthralling debut novel, she weaves the tale of two young newlyweds, Glen and Bessie Hyde, who set out in 1928 to run the rapids of the Grand Canyon. The pair hoped to set a record: Bessie would be the first woman to negotiate that treacherous stretch of the Colorado River. When they failed to appear at their destination on time, Glen's father mounted a desperate search to find them. Based on the few known facts of a true story, Grand Ambition contemplates our need for risk and danger, and treats with great complexity the power of youthful passion. Reading Group Guide included.
The American Painter Emma Dial: A Novel
by Samantha Peale“Wicked, subversive, satirical, sophisticated, and deep.”—Kate Christensen Emma Dial is a virtuoso painter who executes the works of Michael Freiburg, a preeminent figure in the New York art world. She has a sensuous and exacting hand, hips like a matador, and long neglected ambitions of her own. She spends her days completing a series of pictures for Freiburg's spring exhibition and her nights drinking and dining with friends and luminaries. Into this landscape walks Philip Cleary, Emma's longtime painting hero and a colleague and rival of her boss. Philip Cleary represents the ideal artistic existence, a respected painter, fearless and undeterred by fashion. He is unmatched by anyone from Emma's generation. Except, just possibly, Emma herself. Emma Dial must choose between the security of being a studio assistant to a renowned painter and the unknown future as an artist in her own right. Samantha Peale writes with astonishing insight about a young woman who risks everything to fulfill her ambitions as an artist.
Fakes: An Anthology of Pseudo-Interviews, Faux-Lectures, Quasi-Letters, "Found" Texts, and Other Fraudulent Artifacts
by Edited by David Shields and Matthew VollmerContemporary short stories enacting giddy, witty revenge on the documents that define and dominate our lives. In our bureaucratized culture, we’re inundated by documents: itineraries, instruction manuals, permit forms, primers, letters of complaint, end-of-year reports, accidentally forwarded email, traffic updates, ad infinitum. David Shields and Matthew Vollmer, both writers and professors, have gathered forty short fictions that they’ve found to be seriously hilarious and irresistibly teachable (in both writing and literature courses): counterfeit texts that capture the barely suppressed frustration and yearning that percolate just below the surface of most official documents. The innovative stories collected in Fakes—including ones by Ron Carlson (a personal ad), Amy Hempel (a complaint to the parking department), Rick Moody (Works Cited), and Lydia Davis (a letter to a funeral parlor)—trace the increasingly blurry line between fact and fiction and exemplify a crucial form for the twenty-first century.
Trainspotting (Mark Renton)
by Irvine WelshTrainspotting is the novel that first launched Irvine Welsh's spectacular career—an authentic, unrelenting, and strangely exhilarating episodic group portrait of blasted lives. It accomplished for its own time and place what Hubert Selby, Jr.'s Last Exit to Brooklyn did for his. Rents, Sick Boy, Mother Superior, Swanney, Spuds, and Seeker are as unforgettable a clutch of junkies, rude boys, and psychos as readers will ever encounter. Trainspotting was made into the 1996 cult film starring Ewan MacGregor and directed by Danny Boyle (Shallow Grave).
The Hotel Eden: Stories
by Ron CarlsonPrepare to be amused, moved, disturbed. These stories by a master of idiosyncrasy visit a world where wit has heft, charm has shadow, and human beings act out all the complicated nuances of love. In the title story, a young man waiting in the Hotel Eden discovers—as others have—that Eden is not a permanent domicile. In "Zanduce at Second," a baseball player turned killer-by-accident undergoes a surprising transformation. We root for escaped felon Ray (“A Note on the Type”) as he carves his name on a culvert wall. We drive the sweltering summer streets of Phoenix as a nineteen-year-old narrator goes through an unsettling sexual awakening ("Oxygen"). In these and other stories, whether his characters are getting sabotaged by nightcaps or encountering nudists on a rafting trip, Carlson takes us to new places in a new way.
An Hour in Paradise: Stories
by Joan Leegant"Joan Leegant writes stories that last, stories that take root in the soul."—Bret Lott, author of Jewel Joan Leegant's collection takes its title from the Yiddish proverb "Even an hour in Paradise is worthwhile." In settings from Jerusalem to Queens, from Hollywood's outskirts to Sarasota, Florida, the characters in this mesmerizing debut collection are drawn to the seductions of religion, soldiering on in search of divine and human connection. A former drug dealer turned yeshiva student faces his past with a dying AIDS patient. A disaffected American in the ancient city of Safed ventures into Kabbalist mysticism and gets more than he bargained for. A rabbi whose morning minyan is visited by a pair of Siamese twins considers the possibility that his guests are not mere mortals. An aging Jerusalemite chronicles his country's changes during the biblical year of rest. By turns poignant and comic, unflinching and compassionate—with a dose of fabulist daring—An Hour in Paradise explores the dangers and unforeseen rewards of our most fundamental longings.
Waltzing the Cat
by Pam Houston"Self-assured and self-revealing, Waltzing the Cat will gratify Pam Houston’s many admirers, and it will lure plenty of new readers into her wild rivers" —Portland OregonianIn this remarkable follow-up to the best-selling Cowboys Are My Weakness, Pam Houston traces the story of peripatetic photographer Lucy O’Rourke through eleven linked fictions “full of memorable paragraphs and…sentences worth underlining” (Rocky Mountain News). Lucy is prone to the wrong decisions at critical times—not to mention natural disasters—but a surprise encounter with Carlos Castenada sends her back to her beloved Rocky Mountains, where she takes comfort in animals, the jagged landscape of Colorado, and the sage advice of women friends. Houston serves up her characteristic blend of relationships and adventure in this story of one woman’s struggle for balance in a world that keeps pitching and rolling under her feet.
Actress: A Novel
by Anne EnrightLonglisted for the 2020 Women's Prize for Fiction One of Time's 100 Must-Read Books of 2020 “A critique, a confession, a love letter—and another brilliant novel from Anne Enright.” —Ron Charles, Washington PostKatherine O’Dell is an Irish theater legend. Every moment of her life is a performance, with her daughter, Norah, standing in the wings. With age, alcohol, and dimming stardom, however, Katherine’s grip on reality grows fitful. Fueled by a proud and long-simmering rage, she commits a bizarre crime.As Norah’s role gradually changes to Katherine’s protector, caregiver, and finally legacy-keeper, she revisits her mother’s life of fiercely kept secrets; and Norah confronts in turn the secrets of her own sexual and emotional coming-of-age. With virtuosic storytelling, Actress weaves together two generations of women with difficult sexual histories, touching a raw and timely nerve.
All Things, All at Once: New and Selected Stories
by Lee K. AbbottThe long-awaited new collection from Lee K. Abbott, "Cheever's true heir, our major American short story writer" (William Harrison).Here are stories about fathers and sons, stories about men and women, and stories about the relationships between men by one of our most gifted story writers. The narrator of "The Who, the What and the Why," begins breaking into his own house as a sort of therapy after his daughter dies. In "The Human Use of Inhuman Beings," the main character realizes that his closest relationship is to an angel, who appears to him only to announce the death of loved ones. All Things, All at Once reminds us why Lee K. Abbott is to be treasured: his perfect pitch for tales of hapless Southwesterners, his way with sympathetic irony, his eye that skillfully notes the awkward humiliations—common heartbreak, fractured families—and records it all in lyrical, affectionate language. In tales new and from previous collections Abbott examines lived life and the lies we necessarily tell about it.
Your Father Sends His Love: Stories
by Stuart EversYour Father Sends His Love heralds the powerful American debut of a bold new literary talent.Stuart Evers writes with uncanny psychological acuity. The inventive, elegant stories in Your Father Sends His Love illuminate the precarious and electrifying connections between parents and children. Evers’s unforgettable characters long to repair relationships that have faltered or that never quite began. A single father goes to jail for avenging a hate crime perpetrated against his gay son; a mother returns home to her husband and children after an affair; an aging grandfather mediates between his quarreling son and granddaughter; a man waits at the pub, frantically listing things he might say to a suffering friend.With wit, subtlety, and uncommon sensitivity, Evers captures those pivotal moments between parents and children when emotions are urgently felt yet impossible to express. In this, he explores new realms of passion and estrangement. With his precise, energetic prose, Evers crafts a group of stories that explore familial love in all of its forms.
Serious Men: A Novel
by Manu JosephA poignant, bitingly funny Indian satire and love story set in a scientific institute and in Mumbai’s humid tenements. Ayyan Mani will not be constrained by Indian traditions. Despite working at the Institute of Theory and Research in Mumbai as the lowly personal assistant to a brilliant but insufferable astronomer, he dreams of more for himself and his family. Ever wily and ambitious, Ayyan weaves two plots: the first to cheer up his weary, soap-opera-addicted wife by creating outrageous fictions around their ten-year-old son; the other to sabotage the married director by using his boss’s seeming romance with the institute’s first female—and very attractive—researcher. Meanwhile, as the institute’s Brahmins wage a vicious war over theories about alien life, Ayyan sees his deceptions intertwining and setting in motion a series of extraordinary events he cannot stop. Unfailingly funny and irreverent, Serious Men is at once a hilarious portrayal of runaway egos and ambitions and a moving portrait of love and its strange workings. One of 2010’s “First Novels to Savor.” —Sunday Telegraph
Survivor: A Novel
by Chuck Palahniuk"Brilliantly satiric and savagely funny, Survivor is a wild amphetamine ride through the vagaries of fame and the nature of belief." —San Francisco ChronicleTender Branson—last surviving member of the Creedish Death Cult—is dictating his life story into the recorder of Flight 2039, cruising on autopilot at 39,000 feet somewhere over the Pacific Ocean. He is all alone in the airplane, which will crash shortly into the vast Australian outback. But before it does, Branson will unfold the tale of his journey from an obedient Creedish child and humble domestic servant to an ultra-buffed, steroid- and collagen-packed media messiah.
Beneath the Lion's Gaze: A Novel
by Maaza Mengiste"An important novel, rich in compassion for its anguished characters." —The New York Times Book ReviewThis memorable, heartbreaking story opens in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 1974, on the eve of a revolution. Yonas kneels in his mother’s prayer room, pleading to his god for an end to the violence that has wracked his family and country. His father, Hailu, a prominent doctor, has been ordered to report to jail after helping a victim of state-sanctioned torture to die. And Dawit, Hailu’s youngest son, has joined an underground resistance movement—a choice that will lead to more upheaval and bloodshed across a ravaged Ethiopia.Beneath the Lion’s Gaze tells a gripping story of family, of the bonds of love and friendship set in a time and place that has rarely been explored in fiction. It is a story about the lengths human beings will go in pursuit of freedom and the human price of a national revolution. Emotionally gripping, poetic, and indelibly tragic, Beneath The Lion’s Gaze is a transcendent and powerful debut.
A Life Apart: A Novel
by Neel Mukherjee"A brilliant first novel . . . shockingly good." —Rose Tremain, Daily Telegraph Ritwik Ghosh, twenty-two and recently orphaned, finds the chance to start a new life when he arrives in England from Calcutta. But Oxford holds little of the salvation Ritwik is looking for. Instead, he moves to London, where he drops out of official existence into a shadowy hinterland of illegal immigrants. The story that Ritwik writes to stave off his loneliness begins to find ghostly echoes in his own life. And, as present and past of several lives collide, Ritwik’s own goes into free fall.
Hawk Mountain: A Novel
by Conner HabibAn English teacher is gaslit by his charismatic high school bully in this tense story of deception, manipulation, and murder. Single father Todd is relaxing at the beach with his son, Anthony, when he catches sight of a man approaching from the water’s edge. As the man draws closer, Todd recognizes him as Jack, who bullied Todd relentlessly in their teenage years but now seems overjoyed to have “run into” his old friend. Jack suggests a meal to catch up. And can he spend the night?What follows is a fast-paced story of obsession and cunning. As Jack invades Todd’s life, pain and intimidation from the past unearth knife-edge suspense in the present. Set in a small town on the New England coast, Conner Habib’s debut introduces characters trapped in isolation by the expansive woods and the encroaching ocean, their violence an expression of repressed desire and the damage it can inflict. Both gruesome and tender, Hawk Mountain offers a compelling look at how love and hate are indissoluble, intertwined until the last breath.
New York, My Village: A Novel
by Uwem AkpanExuberant storytelling full of wry comedy, dark history, and devastating satire—by the celebrated and original author of the #1 New York Times bestseller, Say You’re One of Them.From a suspiciously cheap Hell’s Kitchen walk-up, Nigerian editor and winner of a Toni Morrison Publishing Fellowship Ekong Udousoro is about to begin the opportunity of a lifetime: to learn the ins and outs of the publishing industry from its incandescent epicenter. While his sophisticated colleagues meet him with kindness and hospitality, he is soon exposed to a colder, ruthlessly commercial underbelly—callous agents, greedy landlords, boorish and hostile neighbors, and, beneath a superficial cosmopolitanism, a bedrock of white cultural superiority and racist assumptions about Africa, its peoples, and worst of all, its food.Reckoning, at the same time, with the recent history of the devastating and brutal Biafran War, in which Ekong’s people were a minority of a minority caught up in the mutual slaughter of majority tribes, Ekong’s life in New York becomes a saga of unanticipated strife. The great apartment deal wrangled by his editor turns out to be an illegal sublet crawling with bedbugs. The lights of Times Square slide off the hardened veneer of New Yorkers plowing past the tourists. A collective antagonism toward the “other” consumes Ekong’s daily life. Yet in overcoming misunderstandings with his neighbors, Chinese and Latino and African American, and in bonding with his true allies at work and advocating for healing back home, Ekong proves that there is still hope in sharing our stories.Akpan’s prose melds humor, tenderness, and pain to explore the myriad ways that tribalisms define life everywhere, from the villages of Nigeria to the villages within New York City. New York, My Village is a triumph of storytelling and a testament to the life-sustaining power of community across borders and across boroughs.
No Roast for the Weary (A Coffeehouse Mystery)
by Cleo CoyleWhen the Village Blend opens a Writer&’s Block Lounge, a cold case crime turns up the heat on Clare and her crew in this gripping new entry in the beloved Coffeehouse Mystery series from New York Times bestselling author Cleo Coyle.As much as master roaster Clare Cosi adores coffee, the landmark shop she manages won&’t survive if she doesn&’t sell enough of it. So when the Village Blend&’s customer traffic grinds to a halt, she turns to her staff for creative ideas, and the Writer&’s Block Lounge is born.Madame, the eccentric octogenarian owner of the shop, is upset by this news. Years ago, a group of accomplished writers used the shop&’s second-floor lounge to inspire each other, but the group disbanded when something dark occurred. Though that history is shrouded in mystery, Clare presses forward…Soon the Village Blend tables are filled with aspiring novelists, playwrights, and poets, all happy to be coaxed, cajoled, and caffeinated by her coffeehouse crew. Clare admires the stamina of these scribes, many of them toiling at night jobs—driving taxis, tending bar, ushering for Broadway—while penning projects during the day.Then one of their fictions turns fatal when a shocking secret leads to a deadly end. Unless Clare can untangle this mystery, uncover the truth, and stop a desperate killer, she fears more of these weary writers may be marked for eternal rest.Includes a knockout menu of recipes!
Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife
by Mary RoachThe best-selling author of Stiff and Bonk trains her considerable wit and curiosity on the human soul. "What happens when we die? Does the light just go out and that's that—the million-year nap? Or will some part of my personality, my me-ness persist? What will that feel like? What will I do all day? Is there a place to plug in my lap-top?" In an attempt to find out, Mary Roach brings her tireless curiosity to bear on an array of contemporary and historical soul-searchers: scientists, schemers, engineers, mediums, all trying to prove (or disprove) that life goes on after we die.
All Other Nights: A Novel
by Dara HornA New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice "Slam-bang.…superb." —Washington PostHow is tonight different from all other nights? For Jacob Rappaport, a Jewish soldier in the Union army during the Civil War, it is a question his commanders have already answered for him—on Passover, 1862, he is ordered to murder his own uncle in New Orleans, who is plotting to assassinate President Lincoln. After this harrowing mission, Jacob is recruited to pursue another enemy agent, the daughter of a Virginia family friend. But this time, his assignment isn’t to murder the spy, but to marry her. Their marriage, with its riveting and horrifying consequences, reveals the deep divisions that still haunt American life today.Based on real personalities such as Judah Benjamin, the Confederacy’s Jewish secretary of state and spymaster, and on historical facts and events ranging from an African American spy network to the dramatic self-destruction of the city of Richmond, All Other Nights is a gripping and suspenseful story of men and women driven to the extreme limits of loyalty and betrayal. It is also a brilliant parable of the rift in America that lingers a century and a half later: between those who value family and tradition first, and those dedicated, at any cost, to social and racial justice for all.In this eagerly awaited third novel, award-winning author Dara Horn brings us page-turning storytelling at its best. Layered with meaning, All Other Nights reinvents the most American of subjects with originality and insight.
In the Valley of the Kings: Stories
by Terrence Holt“This is the secret book at the heart of American letters. Holt is one of the finest American writers alive.”—Junot DíazIn the Valley of the Kings marks the extraordinary debut of Terrence Holt, who fifteen years ago abandoned a promising writing career to practice medicine. Moved by his patients’ valor in the face of death, seeking to comprehend the mysteries revealed at their bedside, Holt has taken up fiction again. He emerges now with this astonishing collection of one novella and seven short stories that explore the farthest reaches of the imagination in a style that recalls the nineteenth-century American masters. Holt leaps across genres and millennia, from small-town America to deep space, daring his readers to journey with him into realms as mysterious as they are unforgettable. The opening story, “‘? ????s,” is a chilling account of the last days of the human race, as the hospitalization of a little girl in a New England town heralds a terrifying plague, transmitted not by a microbe but by a single word. The final story, “Apocalypse,” returns to small-town New England and another vision of the end, in an intimate account of how a couple struggles to live and love under the shadow of the Earth’s approaching doom. In between, these stories range from outer space, where—in “Charybdis”—an astronaut alone on a doomed NASA mission comes to terms with his fate, to the Egyptian desert of the title novella, where an archaeologist seeks a fabulous tomb that holds the secret of immortality. Painting with lurid colors and finely crafted prose, Holt offers his readers haunting visions of the reefs and abysses of the human imagination. In the Valley of the Kings redefines the art of the story, throwing aside the rules in search of the enduring truths that ultimately make stories worth reading.
The Watch: Stories
by Rick BassThese quirky, brilliant stories launched Rick Bass on his literary career. Set in the South and West, they pursue themes of friendship, loyalty, and freedom, of escape, where valiant holdouts refuse to grow up, or to grow old.
Disturbance: A Novel
by Jenna ClakeA spellbinding, genre-bending debut that follows a woman’s attempt to heal from an abusive relationship—with the help of black magic.As the sun sets on a feverishly hot July evening, a young woman spies on her teenage neighbor, transfixed by what looks like an occult ritual intended to banish an ex-boyfriend. Alone in a new town and desperate to expel the claustrophobic memories of her own ex, the narrator decides to try to hex herself free from her past. But when the creaks and hums of her apartment escalate into something more violent, she realizes that she may have brought her boyfriend’s presence—whether psychological or paranormal—back to haunt her. With astonishing emotional depth and clarity, Disturbance explores the fallout of abuse. Propulsive and wry, this razor-sharp debut twists witchcraft and horror into a powerful narrative of one woman’s struggle to return to herself.
Sight Hound: A Novel
by Pam HoustonThe long-awaited novel; a very special love story; from the best-selling author of Cowboys Are My Weakness. This is the story of a woman, Rae, and her dog, Dante, a wolfhound who teaches "his human" that love is stronger than fear (the dog has always known this). Dante is the catalyst for change in other characters as well, and they step forward with their narratives: Rae's house-tender; her therapist; two veterinarians; and an anxiety-ridden actor, Howard, who turns out to be as stalwart as Dante himself. As the "seer" who hunts by sight rather than smell, Dante has some things to add, as does Rose, another dog who lives at Rae's heels, and Stanley the cat. Among and above these myriad voices, Rae voices her own challenges. With the wit and dead-on candor we've come to expect from Pam Houston, Sight Hound unfolds a story that illuminates the intangible covenant between loved ones. Here, dogs and humans are simply equal creatures, looking to connect and holding on for dear life when they do. Reading group guide included.
Pascali's Island
by Barry Unsworth"A masterful tale of treachery and duplicity. . . . Spellbinding."--New York Times The year is 1908, the place, a small Greek island in the declining days of the crumbling Ottoman Empire. For twenty years Basil Pascali has spied on the people of his small community and secretly reported on their activities to the authorities in Constantinople. Although his reports are never acknowledged, never acted upon, he has received regular payment for his work. Now he fears that the villagers have found him out and he becomes engulfed in paranoia. In the midst of his panic, a charming Englishman arrives on the island claiming to be an archaeologist, and charms his way into the heart of the woman for whom Pascali pines. A complex game is played out between the two where cunning and betrayal may come to haunt them both. Pascali's Island was made into a feature film starring Ben Kingsley and Helen Mirren.