Callum Ferguson has grown up in the shadow of the sins of his father. The worst moment of his life came not at the age of sixteen, when he threw his father out of the house, but later in life, when he realised he was just like him. With a predilection for alcohol and violence, he sees his destiny every time he looks in the mirror. Sass Hathaway, hell-raiser and successful musician, thrived in the limelight – until one night she lost it all. Drowning in an ocean of uncertainty, nursing a crippling case of self-loathing, her brother offers her a chance to find herself again. His idea of salvation is a dilapidated bar. His proposal; she help him and his wife renovate and run it. However, when she and Callum cross paths, they both discover that salvation comes in many forms. You can’t escape your past, you can only come to terms with it so that you can move on – but accepting your past is only the beginning. Then you must decide whether you’re strong enough to follow your heart. This can be read as a stand-alone, but reading ‘Absolution’ is recommended in order to get the most out of this story.** Views: 57
Liz invites her sister, Roma, and two friends to dinner. The four women have something in common: they are hearing daughters of deaf parents. Each woman brings an old family picture to the table. Each tells a story about her picture. Roma has always felt alone and different. As a child, she had to "listen and tell." Roma became the listener because her mother could not hear. But by the end of the evening, Roma knows she is not alone. She and the other women learn that growing up with deaf parents has given them rare and special gifts. This novella is a quick and easy read for people on the go. Views: 57
Three generations. Seven days. One big secret. The author of The Coincidence of Coconut Cake unfolds a mother-daughter story told by three women whose time to reckon with a life-altering secret is running out.Gina Zoberski wants to make it through one day without her fastidious mother, Lorraine, cataloguing all her faults, and her sullen teenage daughter, May, snubbing her. Too bad there's no chance of that. Her relentlessly sunny disposition annoys them both, no matter how hard she tries. Instead, Gina finds order and comfort in obsessive list-making and her work at Grilled G's, the gourmet grilled cheese food truck built by her late husband. But when Lorraine suffers a sudden stroke, Gina stumbles upon a family secret Lorraine's kept hidden for forty years. In the face of her mother's failing health and her daughter's rebellion, this optimist might find that piecing together the truth is the push she needs to let go... Views: 57
A continent of permanent revolution, of marauding rebels and despotic governments, yet one of love and laughter, compassion and humanity: this is the Africa of today. Nine-year-old Kimo, wide-eyed witness to its brutality, is starved out of his home village by drought. Desperate for help, he sets out for the big city of Bader in the company of his resourceful friends, the visionary Matt, pagmatic Hena and dreaming Golam. Their journey takes them through a country paralysed by the horrors of civil war, horrors which soon tighten their grip around the frail hopes of the starving foursome... Buoyed up by laughter, weighed down by tragedy and violence, My Friend Matt and Hena the Whore is an impossibly touching, quite extraordinary accomplishment. Views: 57
Bestselling author and international political expert Joel C. Rosenberg tackles the question: Is America an empire in decline or a nation poised for a historic Renaissance? America teeters on a precipice. In the midst of financial turmoil, political uncertainty, declining morality, the constant threat of natural disasters, and myriad other daunting challenges, many wonder what the future holds for this once-great nation. Will history’s greatest democracy stage a miraculous comeback, returning to the forefront of the world’s economic and spiritual stage? Can America’s religious past be repeated today with a third Great Awakening? Or will the rise of China, Russia, and other nations, coupled with the US’s internal struggles, send her into a decline from which there can be no return? Implosion helps readers understand the economic, social, and spiritual challenges facing the United States in the 21st century, through the lens of biblical prophecy.** Views: 57
RetailMichael Chabon once said, “I scan the tables of contents of magazines, looking for Antonya Nelson's name, hoping that she has decided to bless us again.” And now she has blessed us again, with a bounty of the stories for which she is so beloved. Her stories are clear-eyed, hard-edged, beautifully formed. In the title story, “Funny Once,” a couple held together by bad behavior fall into a lie with their more responsible friends. In “The Village,” a woman visits her father at a nursing home, recalling his equanimity at her teenage misdeeds and gaining a new understanding of his own past indiscretions. In another, when a troubled girl in the neighborhood goes missing, a mother worries increasingly about her teenage son’s relationship with a bad-news girlfriend. In the novella “Three Wishes,” siblings muddle through in the aftermath of their elder brother’s too-early departure from the world. The landscape of this book is the wide open spaces of Kansas, Texas, New Mexico, and Colorado. Throughout, there is the pervasive desire to drink to forget, to have sex with the wrong people, to hit the road and figure out later where to stop for the night. These characters are aging, regretting actions both taken and not, inhabiting their extended adolescences as best they can. And in Funny Once, their flawed humanity is made beautiful, perfectly observed by one of America’s best short story writers.**From BooklistStarred Review Nelson’s run as one of the finest contemporary short story writers takes an exhilarating leap forward with her outrageously superb seventh collection. Her particular wizardry in the short form (Nelson is also the author of four novels) is found in her exceptional melding of pristine prose with a rampaging imagination and a comic’s perfect timing. Nelson is scandalously funny, her characters are royally screwed up and wildly inept, and their dire predicaments bust down the doors on the most painful of life’s cruel jokes, from betrayal to divorce, addiction, and old age. Nelson excels at multigenerational chaos, portraying with equal verve surprising children and ornery adults as well as neurotic dogs and places rife with hidden angst, namely Wichita, Telluride, and Houston. She traces the odd geometry of divorce that leads to one woman living with and caring for her ex-husband’s stepmother. Forced to bring their enraged, dementia-addled father, lashed with duct tape to his recliner, to a nursing home, the dysfunctional motherless siblings in “Three Wishes” continue to grieve over their older brother’s death long ago. Each of Nelson’s magnetizing stories generates atomic vibrancy and achieves the psychic mass of a novel. And who can resist lines like this—“Life is a series of lessons you don’t want to learn”? --Donna Seaman Review"Antonya Nelson’s gloriously debauched new collection, Funny Once, finds that conventions are made for flouting, from an eminent professor who sleeps with his young wife’s best friend to former college competitors who embark on a lost weekend." —Vogue "[Nelson shows] great talent in constructing each story in its own unique world . . . [She] makes sure that we see the silliness alongside the strife, and the heart within the hardships." —Time Out New York, four stars "In her rewarding new collection, Funny Once, Antonya Nelson expertly dissects the lives of her troubled Midwestern and mountain-time characters—frantic teens, finicky fathers, abandoned wives, know-it-all neighbors, sorrowful siblings, festering friendships—dosing their domestic dramas and existential hurts with splendid shots of unexpected whimsy, familiar pleasures, and incurable love." —Elle "Nelson’s run as one of the finest contemporary short story writers takes an exhilarating leap forward with her outrageously superb seventh collection. Her particular wizardry in the short form (Nelson is also the author of four novels) is found in her exceptional melding of pristine prose with a rampaging imagination and a comic’s perfect timing. Nelson is scandalously funny, her characters are royally screwed up and wildly inept, and their dire predicaments bust down the doors on the most painful of life’s cruel jokes, from betrayal to divorce, addiction, and old age. Nelson excels at multigenerational chaos, portraying with equal verve surprising children and ornery adults as well as neurotic dogs and places rife with hidden angst, namely Wichita, Telluride, and Houston . . . Each of Nelson’s magnetizing stories generates atomic vibrancy and achieves the psychic mass of a novel." —Booklist, starred review "[Nelson is] at the peak of her game." —Publishers Weekly "Graced with credible characters whose friendships, marriages, progeny, and divorces feel familiar and lived in, Nelson's supple stories have appeared in prestigious magazines and prize anthologies for two decades. This seventh short story collection (her tenth book of fiction) will delight longtime fans while likely propelling new readers to explore her earlier work. . . . The narratives are driven by characters whose crises and moments of insight take the reader by surprise, but Nelson herself is completely in control of her complex tales, in which infidelities are exposed or never quite happen and old friends surprise one another with new revelations that take 20 pages to unfold. . . . Nelson is one of the leading practitioners of the contemporary short story." —Library Journal, starred review Views: 57
In John Updike's second collection of assorted prose he comes into his own as a book reviewer; most of the pieces picked up here were first published in The New Yorker in the 1960s and early '70s. If one word could sum up the young critic's approach to books and their authors it would be "generosity": "Better to praise and share," he says in his Foreword, "than to blame and ban." And so he follows his enthusiasms, which prove both deserving and infectious: Kierkegaard, Proust, Joyce, Dostoevsky, and Hamsun among the classics; Borges, Nabokov, Grass, Bellow, Cheever, and Jong among the contemporaries. Here too are meditations on Satan and cemeteries, travel essays on London and Anguilla, three very early "golf dreams," and one big interview. Picked-Up Pieces is a glittering treasury for every reader who likes life, books, wit--and John Updike. Views: 57
