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The Frequency of Magic
Par Anthony Joseph. 2019
Raphael earns his living as a butcher in a hillside village in rural Trinidad. He is also a would-be author,…
but there have been so many distractions to the novel he has been writing for forty-one years that many of the characters have lost patience and gone off to do their own thing. But somehow, miraculously, the novel, as Raphael has planned it in one hundred chapters of a thousand words, seems to write itself... Multi-levelled and diverse in scene, The Frequency of Magic traverses an array of lives connected to the village of Million Hills. There's the gritty realism of hill-side life, the speculative imagination of Luke's travels through mythic landscapes pursued by his nemesis, the carnival figure of the Great Bandit. And there are the psychological odysseys of the musician, a jazz saxophonist, and Ella, an actor, both long separated from Million Hills, working their ways across the USA and Europe. When the paths of these exiles cross, a love affair begins. Ella, though, must wonder whether the saxophonist can love anything but his music. Time in this richly ambitious novel is both circular and simultaneous, but moving, as Raphael ages, towards a sense of dissolution both of persons and of the culture of the village. But if there is a tragic realism about the passage of time, there is also a constant aliveness in the novel's love affair with the language of Creole Trinidad with its poetic inventiveness and wit, with the improvisatory sounds of jazz and the undimmed urge of the villagers to create meaning in their lives. Above all, there is Raphael's belief that in the making of his fiction, however messy and disobedient its materials, art can both challenge the destructive passage of time and make us see reality afresh.In the Garden of the North American Martyrs: Stories
Par Tobias Wolff. 1981
Among the characters you'll find in this collection of twelve stories by Tobias Wolff are a teenage boy who tells…
morbid lies about his home life, a timid professor who, in the first genuine outburst of her life, pours out her opinions in spite of a protesting audience, a prudish loner who gives an obnoxious hitchhiker a ride, and an elderly couple on a golden anniversary cruise who endure the offensive conviviality of the ship's social director.Fondly yet sharply drawn, Wolff's characters stumble over each other in their baffled yet resolute search for the "right path."Like A Sister: A Novel
Par Janice Daugharty. 1999
It is 1956, and thirteeen-year-old Sister must raise her three siblings on her own, as her mother, Marnie, has a…
new boyfriend who isn't interested in kids. Taking charge of her life, Sister befriends a kindly neighbor named Willa, who appears to be everything a mother should be. But when a respected and powerful man in town notices that Sister is blossoming -- unsupervised -- into quite a young woman, trouble starts to brew. Willa soon steps in to intervene, and Sister thinks she may have found salvation. But within the pages of Like a Sister, things are never what they seem.Depicting a vulnerable, heartbreaking, and richly Southern world, Like a Sister allows readers to gaze through the eyes of a young whom they will not soon forget.The Accidentals: A Novel
Par Minrose Gwin. 2019
Following the death of their mother from a botched backwoods abortion, the McAlister daughters have to cope with the ripple effect of…
this tragedy as they come of age in 1950s Mississippi and then grow up to face their own impossible choices—an unforgettable, beautiful novel that is threaded throughout with the stories of mothers and daughters in pre-Roe versus Wade America.Life heads down back alleys, takes sharp left turns. Then, one fine day it jumps the track and crashes.”In the fall of 1957, Olivia McAlister is living in Opelika, Mississippi, caring for her two girls, June and Grace, and her husband, Holly. She dreams of living a much larger life--seeing the world and returning to her wartime job at a landing boat factory in New Orleans. As she watches over the birds in her yard, Olivia feels like an “accidental”—a migratory bird blown off course. When Olivia becomes pregnant again, she makes a fateful decision, compelling Grace, June, and Holly to cope in different ways. While their father digs up the backyard to build a bomb shelter, desperate to protect his family, Olivia’s spinster sister tries to take them all under her wing. But the impact of Olivia’s decision reverberates throughout Grace’s and June’s lives. Grace, caught up in an unconventional love affair, becomes one of the “girls who went away” to have a baby in secret. June, guilt-ridden for her part in exposing Grace’s pregnancy, eventually makes an unhappy marriage. Meanwhile Ed Mae Johnson, an African-American care worker in a New Orleans orphanage, is drastically impacted by Grace’s choices. As the years go by, their lives intersect in ways that reflect the unpredictable nature of bird flight that lands in accidental locations—and the consolations of imperfect return. Filled with tragedy, humor, joy, and the indomitable strength of women facing the constricted spaces of the 1950s and 60s, The Accidentals is a poignant, timely novel that reminds us of the hope and consolation that can be found in unexpected landings.The Other Valley: A Novel
Par Scott Alexander Howard. 2024
For fans of Emily St. John Mandel, David Mitchell, and Kazuo Ishiguro, an exquisite literary speculative novel set in an…
unnamed valley, where bereaved residents can petition to cross a forbidden border to see their lost loved ones again.Sixteen-year-old Odile Ozanne is an awkward, quiet girl, vying for a coveted seat on the Conseil. If she earns the position, she&’ll decree who among the town&’s residents may be escorted deep into the woods, who may cross the border&’s barbed wire fence, who may make the arduous trek to descend into the next valley over. It&’s the same valley, the same town. But to the east, the town is twenty years ahead in time. To the west, it&’s twenty years behind. The only border crossings permitted by the Conseil are mourning tours: furtive viewings of the dead in towns where the dead are still alive. When Odile recognizes two mourners she wasn&’t supposed to see, she realizes that the parents of her classmate Edme have crossed the border from the future to see their son while he&’s still alive in Odile&’s present. Edme—who is brilliant and funny, and the only person to truly know Odile—is about to die. Sworn to secrecy by the Conseil so as not to disrupt the course of nature, Odile finds herself drawing closer to her doomed friend—imperiling her own future. Masterful and original, The Other Valley is an affecting modern fable about the inevitable march of time and whether or not fate can be defied. Above all, it is about love and letting go, and the bonds, in both life and death, that never break.What Was Left
Par Barb Johnson. 2009
The lives of four unlikely friends intersect on the backstreets of New Orleans. Living amid poverty and violence, these fragile…
heroes of the American underclass redefine our notions of family, redemption, and love.Broke-Ass Women's Club
Par Sharon Sala. 2021
Four newly widowed women face the shock of their lives in this novel from a New York Times–bestselling &“consummate storyteller&”…
(Debbie Macomber). David Logan is a con man with four wives he plays like a deck of cards—until a car accident deals him a dead man&’s hand. Now the women he lied to—who thought they were happily settled down with the man of their dreams—have their lives turned upside down by a knock on their doors. All but one of them are left penniless and about to lose their homes, and all of them are too shocked to grieve. Finding out they&’d been deceived was bad enough, but coming face to face with each other at the funeral home wasn&’t quite what they&’d expected. Before the day was over, the first wife—the only legal one—made them an offer they couldn&’t refuse… From Sharon Sala, a winner of numerous honors including the Nora Roberts Lifetime Achievement Award, this is a poignant, funny story of four women wrestling with betrayal, grief, and anger—and finding hope for the future in their unexpected friendship. Praise for Sharon Sala&’s novels: &“A well-written, fast-paced ride.&” —Publishers Weekly &“There are not many authors who can write a story with such depth and emotion.&” —RT Book ReviewsEverything Here Is the Best Thing Ever: Stories
Par Justin Taylor. 2010
“This spare, sharp book—Taylor’s debut collection—documents a deep authority on the unavoidable confusion of being young, disaffected and human ……
the most affecting stories in Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever are as unpredictable as a careening drunk. They leave us with the heavy residue of an unsettling strangeness, and a new voice that readers—and writers, too—might be seeking out for decades to come.” — New York Times Book ReviewA collection of prophetic, provocative, and dazzlingly written stories by Justin Taylor, an important new voice in literary fiction and "a new literary beast." (Padgett Powell, author of The Interrogative Mood)Each story in this crystalline, spare, and moving collection cuts to the quick. Taylor’s characters are guided by misapprehensions that bring them to hilarious, often tragic impasses with reality. A high school boy's desire to win over a crush leads him to experiment with black magic. An assistant at a hedge fund is torn between the girl he loved in college and the older man whose attention he craves. A fast food employee preoccupied by Abu Ghraib grows obsessed with a co-worker. While his girlfriend sleeps, a Tetris player tries to beat his record, nevermind that out their window blazes the end of the world.Fearless and wild, the stories of Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever are held together by a thread of wounding humor and candid storytelling that marks Taylor as a distinct and emerging literary talent.Little Gods: A Novel
Par Meng Jin. 2020
LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/OPEN BOOK AWARD“Compellingly complex…Expands the future of the immigrant novel even as it holds us in uneasy…
thrall to the past.” – Gish Jen, New York Times Book ReviewCombining the emotional resonance of Home Fire with the ambition and innovation of Asymmetry, a lyrical and thought-provoking debut novel that explores the complex web of grief, memory, time, physics, history, and selfhood in the immigrant experience, and the complicated bond between daughters and mothers. On the night of June Fourth, a woman gives birth in a Beijing hospital alone. Thus begins the unraveling of Su Lan, a brilliant physicist who until this moment has successfully erased her past, fighting what she calls the mind’s arrow of time. When Su Lan dies unexpectedly seventeen years later, it is her daughter Liya who inherits the silences and contradictions of her life. Liya, who grew up in America, takes her mother’s ashes to China—to her, an unknown country. In a territory inhabited by the ghosts of the living and the dead, Liya’s memories are joined by those of two others: Zhu Wen, the woman last to know Su Lan before she left China, and Yongzong, the father Liya has never known. In this way a portrait of Su Lan emerges: an ambitious scientist, an ambivalent mother, and a woman whose relationship to her own past shapes and ultimately unmakes Liya’s own sense of displacement.A story of migrations literal and emotional, spanning time, space and class, Little Gods is a sharp yet expansive exploration of the aftermath of unfulfilled dreams, an immigrant story in negative that grapples with our tenuous connections to memory, history, and self.The Passing Bells: A Novel (The Passing Bells Trilogy)
Par Phillip Rock. 1981
Before Downton Abbey, there was Abingdon Pryory, the elegant country home of the Grevilles—a titled English family who, along with…
their servants, see their world turned upside down when England goes to war. Once their well-kept lawns and whirling social seasons give way to the horrors of World War I, no one, upstairs or downstairs, is left untouched. For fans of sweeping historical fiction, the reissue of Phillip Rock's New York Times bestseller The Passing Bells is a breathtaking family saga not to be missed.The Housekeepers: A Novel
Par Alex Hay. 2023
The night of London's grandest ball, a bold group of women downstairs plot a daring revenge heist against Mayfair society…
in this dazzling historical novel about power, gender, and classNamed a Best Book of Summer by The Washington Post * Good Housekeeping * Harper's Bazaar * Reader's Digest&“Rollicking fun and entirely original... Anyone who relishes a good party gone wrong will devour this.&”—Sarah Penner, New York Times bestselling author of The Lost ApothecaryMrs. King is no ordinary housekeeper. Born into a world of con artists and thieves, she&’s made herself respectable, running the grandest home in Mayfair. The place is packed with treasures, a glittering symbol of wealth and power, but dark secrets lurk in the shadows.When Mrs. King is suddenly dismissed from her position, she recruits an eclectic group of women to join her in revenge: A black market queen out to settle her scores. An actress desperate for a magnificent part. A seamstress dreaming of a better life. And Mrs. King&’s predecessor, with her own desire for vengeance.Their plan? On the night of the house&’s highly anticipated costume ball—set to be the most illustrious of the year—they will rob it of its every possession, right under the noses of the distinguished guests and their elusive heiress host. But there&’s one thing Mrs. King wants even more than money: the truth. And she&’ll run any risk to get it…After all, one should never underestimate the women downstairs.&“A deliciously clever novel... You&’ll never have so much fun cheering on grand larceny.&”—Nina de Gramont, New York Times bestselling author of The Christie Affair, a Reese&’s Book Club PickThe Orphans of Race Point: A Novel
Par Patry Francis. 2014
“Set against the coast of Provincetown, Patry Francis’s fierce, ravishing epic cuts deep to the bone about how love binds…
us together and breaks us apart, and how the past’s thumbprint rests on the present. Tender, violent, and alive, it’s also unforgettable.” — Caroline Leavitt, New York Times-bestselling author of Pictures of YouSet on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, a suspenseful page-turning saga of love, murder, and the true meaning of faith from the author of the acclaimed The Liar’s Diary.Set in the close-knit Portuguese community of Provincetown, Massachusetts, The Orphans of Race Point traces the relationship between Hallie Costa and Gus Silva, who meet as children in the wake of a terrible crime that leaves Gus parentless. Their friendship evolves into an enduring and passionate love that will ask more of them than they ever imagined.On the night of their high school prom, a terrible tragedy devastates their relationship and profoundly alters the course of their lives. And when, a decade later, Gus—now a priest—becomes entangled with a distraught woman named Ava and her daughter Mila, troubled souls who bring back vivid memories of his own damaged past, the unthinkable happens: he is charged with murder. Can Hallie save the man she’s never stopped loving, by not only freeing him from prison but also—finally—the curse of his past?Told in alternating voices, The Orphans of Race Point illuminates the transformative power of love and the myriad ways we find meaning in our lives.Lives of the Circus Animals: A Novel
Par Christopher Bram. 2003
Lives of the Circus Animals is a brilliant new comedy about New York theater people: actors, writers, personal assistants, and…
a drama critic for the New York Times. They are male, female, straight, gay, in love with their work or in love with each other, and one of them, British star Henry Lewse, "the Hamlet of his generation," is famous.Award-winning novelist Christopher Bram gives us ten days and nights in this small-town world in the heart of a big city, an engaging novel that is also a satiric celebration of the quest for sanity in the face of those two impostors, success and failure.Keeping Her Difficult Balance
Par Barb Johnson. 2009
The lives of four unlikely friends intersect on the backstreets of New Orleans. Living amid poverty and violence, these fragile…
heroes of the American underclass redefine our notions of family, redemption, and love.Perv: A Love Story
Par Jerry Stahl. 1999
Set in 1970, in the last, dark days of hippiedom, Perv -- A Love Story is the saga of Bobby…
Stark, a sixteen-year-old batch of desire and angst struggling to stay sane in a world gone Day-Glo.As the novel opens, Bobby loses his virginity in a drug-addled tryst with a one-armed barber's daughter. For his sins he's thrown out of school and dispatched to live with his mom, a festive electro shock aficionado, whose condo he flees to track down Michelle, the gorgeously damaged, lasped Hare Krishna-ette he's adored since kindergarten.Like the rest of their generation, the couple hit the road for California, only to be picked up in a hell-fueled Lincoln by a pair of Bad Hippies -- Meat and Varnish -- smacked-out spiritual cousins to Charles Manson. From here the trip gets vicious....Already an underground classic, Perv-A Love Story is relentlessly twisted, sexy, and savagely funny literary excursion, a novel of doomed youth in the era when Flower Power had begun to wilt.Shannon: A Poem of the Lewis and Clark Expedition
Par Campbell McGrath. 2009
“An unexpected story and a gem of a book.”—Pittsburgh Post-GazetteThe incomparable Campbell McGrath, whom Outside magazine calls, “A writer who…
could help save poetry from academia and get the rest of us reading it again,” delivers an astounding work: Shannon, an epic poem that traces the remarkable journey of the youngest member of the Lewis and Clark expedition. The Kansas City Star praises Shannon as, “A luminescent narrative…a myth of American character before its corruption,” and Campbell McGrath—Poet Laureate, Guggenheim Fellowship, Pushcart Prize, and three-time Academy of American Poets Prize winner—proves once again to be truly an “everyman poet” who channels the spirit of Walt Whitman in this lyrical adventure.The Tiny Book of Tiny Stories, Volume 3 (The tiny Book Of Tiny Stories Ser.)
Par Joseph Gordon-Levitt. 2012
The Collected Novels of Josè Saramago
Par José Saramago. 2010
This collection, available exclusively in e-book form, brings together the twelve novels (and one novella) of the great Portuguese writer José…
Saramago, with an introductory essay by Ursula Le Guin. From Saramago's early work, like the enchanting Baltasar & Blimunda and the controversial Gospel According to Jesus Christ, through his masterpiece Blindness and its sequel Seeing, to his later fables of politics, chance, history, and love, like All the Names and Death with Interruptions, this volume showcases the range and depth of Saramago’s career, his inimitable narrative voice, and his vast reserves of invention, humor, and understanding.The Yield: A Novel
Par Tara June Winch. 2020
Winner of the 2020 Miles Franklin Literary Award and 2021 Kate Challis RAKA Award! "A beautifully written novel that puts language…
at the heart of remembering the past and understanding the present."—Kate Morton“A groundbreaking novel for black and white Australia.”—Richard Flanagan, Man Booker Prize winning author of The Narrow Road to the Deep NorthA young Australian woman searches for her grandfather's dictionary, the key to halting a mining company from destroying her family's home and ancestral land in this exquisitely written, heartbreaking, yet hopeful novel of culture, language, tradition, suffering, and empowerment in the tradition of Louise Erdrich, Sandra Cisneros, and Amy Harmon. Knowing that he will soon die, Albert “Poppy” Gondiwindi has one final task he must fulfill. A member of the indigenous Wiradjuri tribe, he has spent his adult life in Prosperous House and the town of Massacre Plains, a small enclave on the banks of the Murrumby River. Before he takes his last breath, Poppy is determined to pass on the language of his people, the traditions of his ancestors, and everything that was ever remembered by those who came before him. The land itself aids him; he finds the words on the wind.After his passing, Poppy’s granddaughter, August, returns home from Europe, where she has lived the past ten years, to attend his burial. Her overwhelming grief is compounded by the pain, anger, and sadness of memory—of growing up in poverty before her mother’s incarceration, of the racism she and her people endured, of the mysterious disappearance of her sister when they were children; an event that has haunted her and changed her life. Her homecoming is bittersweet as she confronts the love of her kin and news that Prosperous is to be repossessed by a mining company. Determined to make amends and honor Poppy and her family, she vows to save their land—a quest guided by the voice of her grandfather that leads into the past, the stories of her people, the secrets of the river.Told in three masterfully woven narratives, The Yield is a celebration of language and an exploration of what makes a place "home." A story of a people and a culture dispossessed, it is also a joyful reminder of what once was and what endures—a powerful reclaiming of Indigenous language, storytelling, and identity, that offers hope for the future.Happy Mutant Baby Pills: A Novel
Par Jerry Stahl. 2013
Lloyd has a particular set of skills. He writes the small print for prescription drugs, marital aids, and incontinence products.…
The clients present him with a list of possible side effects. His job is "to recite and minimize"—sometimes by just saying them really fast and other times by finding the language that can render them acceptable. The results are ingenious. The methods diabolical.Lloyd has a habit, too. He cops smack during coffee breaks at his new job writing copy for Christian Swingles, an online dating service for the faithful. He finds a precarious balance between hackwork and heroin until he encounters Nora, a mysterious and troubled young woman, a Sylvia Plath with tattoos and implants, who asks for his help.Lloyd falls swiftly in love, but Nora bestows her affections at a cost. Before Lloyd clears his head from the fog of romance, he finds himself complicit in Nora's grand scheme to horrify the world and exact revenge on those who poison the populace in order to sell them the cure.