- Table View
- List View
Two Storm Wood: A Novel
by Philip GrayThree months after the end of the Great War, a young woman sets out across the wastelands of the Western Front to learn the fate of the man she loved.On the desolate battlefields of northern France, the guns of the Great War are silent. Special battalions now face the dangerous task of gathering up the dead for mass burial.Captain Mackenzie is a survivor of the war, but still its prisoner. He cannot return home until his fallen comrades are recovered and laid to rest. His task is upended when a gruesome discovery is made beneath the ruins of a German strongpoint. Amy Vanneck’s fiancé is one soldier lost amongst many, but she cannot accept that his body may never be found. Defying convention, hardship, and impossible odds, she heads to France, determined to discover what became of the man she loved.It soon becomes clear that what Mackenzie has uncovered is a war crime of inhuman savagery. As the truth leaches out, both he and Amy are drawn into the hunt for a psychopath, one for whom the atrocity at Two Storm Wood is not an end, but a beginning.
The Last Summer of the World: A Novel
by Emily Mitchell"Absorbing…Mitchell's novel [is] the real thing." —Boston GlobeIn the summer of 1918, with the Germans threatening Paris, Edward Steichen arrives in France to photograph the war for the American army. There, he finds a country filled with poignant memories for him: early artistic success, marriage, the birth of two daughters, and a love affair that divided his family. Told with elegance and transporting historical sensitivity, Emily Mitchell’s first novel captures the life of a great American artist caught in the reckoning of a painful past in a world beset by war.A Finalist for the New York Public Library's Young Lion's Fiction Award and named a Best Book of the Year by the Providence Journal, the Austin-American-Stateman, and the Madison Capital Times.
The Book of Splendor: A Novel
by Frances SherwoodA historical novel about the most unlikely of lovers, interwoven with the mysticism of the Jewish occult. Frances Sherwood brings to life the experience of the Jewish community during a period of oppression and rebirth. Set in seventeenth-century Prague, The Book of Splendor is an adventure-filled romance stocked with court intrigue and political tension, including the machinations of the rival Ottoman Empire, the religious controversies of Protestantism, and the constant threat of violence to the Jewish community. At the heart of the novel is Rochel, a bastard seamstress who escapes poverty through an arranged marriage to the tailor Zev, but falls in love with Yossel, the Golem created by Rabbi Loew to protect the Jewish community. Meanwhile, Emperor Rudolph II puts the safety of all Prague at risk in his mad bid for an elixir of immortality. The Book of Splendor is an epic tale reminiscent of Anita Diamant's The Red Tent, and a love story as unlikely as Tracy Chevalier's Girl with a Pearl Earring. Reading group guide included.
If You Liked School, You'll Love Work
by Irvine WelshIrvine Welsh, the author of Trainspotting, is up to his old tricks with his new work of transgressive short fiction. Irvine Welsh's first short-story collection since his debut work The Acid House presents five extraordinary stories, which remind us that he is a master of the short form, a brilliant storyteller, and—unarguably—one of today's funniest and most subversive writers. In "Rattlesnakes" three young Americans, lost in the desert, are accosted by two armed Mexicans. A Korean chef and a Chicago socialite find themselves connected through the disappearance of a pooch named Toto in "The D.O.G.S. of Lincoln Park." And in the title story, Mickey Baker—an ex-pat English bar owner living on the Costa Brava—tries to keep all of his balls in the air: maintaining his barmaid's weight at the sexual maximum, attending to the youthful Persephone, and dodging his ex-wife and Spanish gangsters. In typically Welshian fashion, the characters and settings are anything but typical. These stories will make you laugh and gasp.
Stories of God: Rainer Maria Rilke's Geschichten Vom Lieben Gott
by Rainer Maria RilkeRilke's haunting images focus on the difficulty of communion with the ineffable in an age of disbelief, solitude, and profound anxiety. Rainer Maria Rilke felt that the world and all its joys most truly belonged to the young, and in Stories of God he captured for them the magic, charm and wisdom of fairy and folk tales.
Wild Dogs: A Novel
by Helen Humphreys“A perspective on love and loss [that] will haunt you for days.”—Entertainment Weekly Alice's boyfriend abandons her dog, which joins a feral pack. Every evening, Alice and five others gather at the forest's edge, trying to call their dogs back. Most have similar tales of jealousy or vengeance enacted upon them through their dogs: Jamie is rebelling against his stepfather; Lily, who has suffered brain damage, is considered irresponsible. Becoming more deeply involved, Alice moves out to a cabin on land owned by Malcolm, one of the group, whose motives in having her there are suspicious. As she falls in love with the wildlife biologist whose wolf has gained lead of the pack, she feels the tug between love's wild power and her desire to domesticate it. After a tragic accident, all members of the group must rethink their lives and find their places in an untamed world. Wild Dogs strips away the conventions of love and passion to reveal deeper, richer truths.
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.