An excerpt from the poem, Wild Gratitude: "Tonight when I knelt down next to our cat, Zooey, And put my fingers into her clean cat's mouth, And rubbed her swollen belly that will never know kittens, And watched her wriggle onto her side, pawing the air, And listened to her solemn little squeals of delight, I was thinking about the poet, Christopher Smart, Who wanted to kneel down and pray without ceasing In everyone of the splintered London streets, And was locked away in the madhouse at St. Luke's With his sad religious mania, and his wild gratitude, And his grave prayers for the other lunatics, And his great love for his speckled cat, Jeoffry. All day today--August 13, 1983--I remembered how Christopher Smart blessed this same day in August, 1759, For its calm bravery and ordinary good conscience." Views: 17
On loan from the city... As Briman Island's only doctor, Dr. Christie Flemming works day and night to care for the isolated islanders. She knows that getting married would mean abandoning them...but one stormy night Christie saves a stranger's life—and her life changes forever... The stranger is Dr. Hugo Tallent! A specialist from Brisbane, he offers Christie the help she badly needs. Hugo loves the island, and it's not long before he loves Christie, too. But she won't leave—and there are reasons that he can't stay.... Views: 17
For readers of Jonathan Franzen and Richard Russo, Jonathan Dee’s novels are masterful works of literary fiction. In this sharply observed tale of self-invention and public scandal, Dee raises a trenchant question: what do we really want when we ask for forgiveness?Once a privileged and loving couple, the Armsteads have now reached a breaking point. Ben, a partner in a prestigious law firm, has become unpredictable at work and withdrawn at home—a change that weighs heavily on his wife, Helen, and their preteen daughter, Sara. Then, in one afternoon, Ben’s recklessness takes an alarming turn, and everything the Armsteads have built together unravels, swiftly and spectacularly.Thrust back into the working world, Helen finds a job in public relations and relocates with Sara from their home in upstate New York to an apartment in Manhattan. There, Helen discovers she has a rare gift, indispensable in the world of image control: She can convince arrogant men to admit their mistakes, spinning crises into second chances. Yet redemption is more easily granted in her professional life than in her personal one.As she is confronted with the biggest case of her career, the fallout from her marriage, and Sara’s increasingly distant behavior, Helen must face the limits of accountability and her own capacity for forgiveness.Praise for *A Thousand Pardons“A Thousand Pardons is that rare thing: a genuine literary thriller. Eerily suspenseful and packed with dramatic event, it also offers a trenchant, hilarious portrait of our collective longing for authenticity in these overmediated times.”—Jennifer Egan, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of A Visit from the Goon Squad“A page turner without sacrificing a smidgen of psychological insight. What a triumph.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)“Dee is adept at meshing the complexities of marriage and family life with the paradoxes of the zeitgeist. In his sixth meticulously lathed and magnetizing novel, he riffs on the practice of crisis management [and] the absurdities of a society geared to communicate in a thousand electronic modes while those closest to each other can barely make eye contact.”—Booklist*“[A] fast-moving, consistently entertaining story . . . a smart, witty look at the rites of apology in contemporary America.”—Shelf AwarenessFrom BookforumWhether Dee intended his plot turns to read as fantastical or not, they often feel rushed and un-thought-through. His awkward mix of narrative strategies—realistic on the surface, fantastical beneath—is the worst of both worlds, and ultimately bears only a passing resemblance to the one we actually live in. —David Haglund Review“A Thousand Pardons is that rare thing: a genuine literary thriller. Eerily suspenseful and packed with dramatic event, it also offers a trenchant, hilarious portrait of our collective longing for authenticity in these overmediated times.”—Jennifer Egan, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of A Visit from the Goon Squad“A page turner without sacrificing a smidgen of psychological insight. What a triumph.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)“Dee is adept at meshing the complexities of marriage and family life with the paradoxes of the zeitgeist. In his sixth meticulously lathed and magnetizing novel, he riffs on the practice of crisis management [and] the absurdities of a society geared to communicate in a thousand electronic modes while those closest to each other can barely make eye contact.”—Booklist“[A] fast-moving, consistently entertaining story . . . a smart, witty look at the rites of apology in contemporary America.”—Shelf Awareness Views: 17
Vanderbilt: the very name signifies wealth. The family patriarch, "the Commodore," built up a fortune that made him the world's richest man by 1877. Yet, less than fifty years after the Commodore's death, one of his direct descendants died penniless, and no Vanderbilt was counted among the world's richest people. Fortune's Children tells the dramatic story of all the amazingly colorful spenders who dissipated such a vast inheritance. Views: 17
John the Posthumous exists in between fiction and poetry, elegy and history: a kind of novella in objects, it is an anatomy of marriage and adultery, an interlocking set of fictional histories, and the staccato telling of a murder, perhaps two murders. This is a literary album of a pre-Internet world, focused on physical elements - all of which are tools for either violence or sustenance. Knives, old iron gates, antique houses in flames; Biblical citations, blood and a history of the American bed: the unsettling, half-perceived images, and their precise but alien manipulation by a master of the language will stay with readers. Its themes are familiar - violence, betrayal, failure - its depiction of these utterly original and hauntingly beautiful. Views: 17
