Fathers never forget seeing their kids for the first time. But Evan is greeting his son, Dean, fourteen years late. The boy had been shuttled secretly to another city, along with his teenaged mother, while still a newborn. Now his mother has passed away, and Evan is it—Dad. An instant single parent.
Evan was once lead guitarist for a hot band with a hit single; now 31, he gets by as a guitar instructor to middle-aged guys, and does menial work in a music shop. With Dean in the picture he has to change fast, which means facing up to the past, to his own father, and to the epilepsy that haunts him and threatens his every moment. Views: 857
Lily Lang has just discovered at the age of forty that she can't have it all. Her career with Doctors Without Borders is rewarding but consuming, and her recent divorce proves it. Will a chance encounter on the roof just restore her faith in finding the yin to her yang? Handsome Simon certainly hopes so.It's New Year's Eve, and Lily is feeling anything but festive. Lily Lang has just discovered at the age of forty that she can't have it all. Her career with Doctors Without Borders is rewarding but consuming, and her recent divorce proves it. As she announces the bad news to her best friends over dinner on New Year's Eve, she's on the verge of giving up on love forever.Will a chance encounter on the roof just restore her faith in finding the yin to her yang? Handsome Simon certainly hopes so.This is a Late Bloomers Series short story and includes all five main characters from the series.About The Late Bloomers Series: After a lifetime of friendship bordering on sisterhood, five 40-something women from Arizona each embark on their own adventures in love, travel, and discovery around the globe. Knowing themselves far better than they did in their 20s and 30s, these seasoned women are ready to take on the world. If 40 is the new 20, these women are just getting started. Views: 857
Cora discovers her father is in trouble… and the only person who can help her is the enemy’s son, Nick Holloway.Her father couldn’t have stolen a million dollars, so how is he going to replace it? In one week?Cora discovers her father is in trouble… and the only person who can help her is the enemy’s son, Nick Holloway.Her father couldn’t have stolen a million dollars, so how is he going to replace it? In one week?Nick is ordered to take Cora out into the wilderness to a remote cabin to keep her father in line. He claims he wants to help Cora and says he’s deceiving the Hollways to keep her safe…but what if he’s playing both sides? He could be using her attraction to him against her. Cora can’t allow herself to trust Nick, no matter how sexy he is.Nick isn’t the only one offering to help. Alexander Pierce could scare the devil but he can also track down anyone in a day. He warns Cora that if she wants to find her father alive, he’s the way. Is it possible both Nick and Alexander have secret feelings for her? With her dad's life on the line, she might have to play her own little game.Soon she’s running from her feelings for Nick, running from creepy Alexander and the rest of the Holloways, and trying to find her father somewhere in the city of Eugene. To make matters worse, everyone thinks she has access to the missing money.The clock is ticking…***Teaser:This could be dangerous. She broke away from Nick’s intense look and scanned the trees around them. “We’re not safe here.”“These mountains are huge. It’d take a miracle to find us.” He ran his finger down her jaw line and backtracked to trace just under her lip. “I’m certain they headed back by now, thinking they’re behind us or missed us.”While speaking, he looked into her eyes like she was the only thing in the universe. His brown eyes reflected the greens and blues around them while showing a wild display of primal desire and promise. She saw it coming this time, but didn’t swim away. Their lips met in urgency and picked up where they had left off before.She felt lost, and there wasn’t anything but Nick, his arms around her, his hands melding to the curves of her body, his kiss awakening her feminine side. His hands ran down her hips and shock waves washed through her. For several blissful minutes, she didn’t have a care in the world. She only wanted more and more of him.Then, she remembered her dad. The money. Alexander. Views: 857
The first book after Doris' Nobel Prize takes her back to her childhood in Southern Africa and the lives, both fictional and factual, that her parents lead. 'I think my father's rage at the trenches took me over, when I was very young, and has never left me. Do children feel their parents' emotions? Yes, we do, and it is a legacy I could have done without. What is the use of it? It is as if that old war is in my own memory, my own consciousness.' In this extraordinary book, the new Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing explores the lives of her parents, both of them irrevocably damaged by the Great War. Her father wanted the simple life of an English farmer, but shrapnel almost killed him in the trenches, and thereafter he had to wear a wooden leg. Her mother Emily's great love was a doctor, who drowned in the Channel, and she spent the war nursing the wounded in the Royal Free Hospital. In the first half of this book, Doris Lessing imagines the lives her parents might have made for themselves had there been no war at all, a story that has them meeting at a village cricket match outside Colchester as children but leading separate lives. This is followed by a piercing examination of their lives as they actually came to be in the shadow of that war, their move to Rhodesia, a damaged couple squatting over Doris's childhood in a strange land. 'Here I still am,' says Doris Lessing, 'trying to get out from under that monstrous legacy, trying to get free.' With the publication of Alfred and Emily she has done just that. Views: 856
“The devil killed my body. I cannot fight, I cannot find. I cannot free her. You must. You are the one. We speak to the dead.”
Immediately after hearing these words, uttered to her by an old Romanian woman bleeding to death in the street, detective Eve Dallas begins to notice that her latest case has come with a number of interesting side-effects: visions of the deceased, instant familiarity with rooms she’s never seen before, and fluency in Russian. Likewise, there appears to be a force inside of her, a spirit other than her own, that won’t let her rest until she’s found Beata, the old woman’s great-granddaughter, whose disappearance two months prior remains a mystery. Desperate to be free of her new “gifts”, Eve pursues the facts until she discovers a link between Beata’s disappearance and the disappearance of eight other young women, all of whom attended the same dance classes, none of whom were ever heard from again.
Unabridged, 3 audio discs, 3 hours 14 minutes Views: 856
Two realms collide in this epic introduction of Dragon Wars: A Dragon Novella. Bryce, has always believed to himself that he was just a typical teenage boy, until one day he is attacked in the school court yard and his attacker wants to kidnap him. Bryce's world is turn upside down when he is told that he may be the key to opening up another world. A world that he didn't knew existed...Dragon Wars: A Dragon Novella.This is the first Novella in the Dragon Wars series.The series will have a word count from 20,000-35,000Word Count: 21,582.Two realms collide in this epic introduction of Dragon Wars: A Dragon Novella. Bryce, has always believed himself to be average with one slight exception: he’s a genius. He doesn’t think this makes him special. At times he feels like a social out-cast. Yet he could do anything he puts his mind to, except talk to his neighbor, Ziora. The exceedingly pretty cheerleader captivates him, and ties his tongue in knots. By a convenient twist of fate Bryce is assigned to help Ziora with her final assignment for English.Bryce dares to be cautiously optimistic until he starts receiving anonymous emails warning that his life is in danger. At first he thinks it is a fellow classmate playing a prank on him, but he quickly finds out that it isn’t. Bryce processes the gravity of the situation, but then he is attacked at school by a stranger. A figure that is glowing red at the arms that shoots fire balls from his hands.Bryce hopes that this is all a bad dream, but soon realizes that it isn’t. What he is told is the ‘truth’ is beyond even his elevated comprehension. Now he must learn about a place he doesn’t even know about, and try to save the world that he knows and loves Views: 856
Set in Virginia during the Civil War and a century beyond, this novel by the award-winning author of THE YELLOW BIRDS explores the brutal legacy of violence and race in American society.
Spanning over one hundred years, from the antebellum era to the 1980's, A Shout in the Ruins examines the fates of a diverse cast of characters connected to Beauvais Plantation in Chesterfield County, Virginia. When war arrives, the master of Beauvais, Anthony Levallios, foresees that mastery in a new America will be measured not in acres of tobacco under cultivation by his slaves, but in industry and capital. A grievously wounded Confederate veteran loses his grip on a world he no longer understands, and his daughter finds herself married to Levallois, an arrangement that feels little better than imprisonment. And two people enslaved at Beauvais plantation, Nurse and Rawls, overcome impossible odds to be together, only to find that the promise of coming freedom may not be something they will live to see.
Seamlessly interwoven is the story of George Seldom, a man orphaned by the storm of the Civil War, looking back from the 1950s on the void where his childhood ought to have been. Watching the government destroy his neighborhood to build a stretch of the interstate highway system through Richmond, Virginia, and recognizing that his days on earth are coming to an end, he travels south to try to fill in that void. With the help of a young woman, he goes in search of his beginnings, all the while remembering the life that witnessed so much change during the 20th century, and so much that didn't. As the narrative finds that young woman farther in the future, now in her middle age, the questions remain: How do we live in a world built on the suffering of others? And can love exist in a place where for 400 years violence has been the strongest form of intimacy?
Written with the same emotional intensity, harrowing realism, and poetic precision that made THE YELLOW BIRDS one of the most celebrated novels of the past decade, A SHOUT IN THE RUINS cements Powers' place in the forefront of American letters and demands that we reckon with the moral weight of our troubling history. Views: 856
Mr. Destructo-Feet
Roscoe's friend Gus wants a pair of cool new shoes. But Gus's parents won't buy them until his old, boring ones are worn out—and that could take forever. Luckily, if there's one thing Roscoe is good at, it's destroying things. . . . Views: 856
First published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction - March, 1959 - the story involves a number of paradoxes caused by time travel. It further develops themes explored by the author in a previous work, "By His Bootstraps", published some 18 years earlier. Views: 856
The Fan Man is a comic novel published in 1974 by the American writer William Kotzwinkle. It's told in the 1st-person by the narrator, Horse Badorties, a down-at-the-heels hippie living a life of drug-fueled befuddlement in New York City c. 1970. The book is written in a colorful, vernacular "hippie-speak" & tells the story of the main character's hapless attempts to put together a benefit concert featuring his own hand-picked choir of 15-year-old girls.
Horse is a somewhat tragic, tho historically humorous, character with echoes of other famous characters in popular culture such as Reverend Jim Ignatowski of Taxi fame. In his inability to follow anything thru to completion he displays symptoms of attention-deficit disorder tho this could equally be drug-induced. His defining characteristic is his joy in renting or commandeering apartments which he fills with street-scavenged junk articles until full to bursting he moves on to his next "pad". The name "fan man" is a reference to another of his traits; the collecting of fans of all shapes & sizes. Views: 855
That Mad Ache, set in high-society Paris in the mid-1960’s, recounts the emotional battle unleashed in the heart of Lucile, a sensitive but rootless young woman who finds herself caught between her carefree, tranquil love for 50-year-old Charles, a gentle, reflective, and well-off businessman, and her sudden wild passion for 30-year-old Antoine, a hot-blooded, impulsive, and struggling editor. As Lucile explores these two versions of love, she vacillates in confusion, but in the end she must choose, and her heart’s instinct is surprising and poignant. Originally published under the title La Chamade, this new translation by Douglas Hofstadter returns a forgotten classic to English.
In Translator, Trader, Douglas Hofstadter reflects on his personal act of devotion in rewriting Françoise Sagan’s novel La Chamade in English, and on the paradoxes that constantly plague any literary translator on all scales, ranging from the humblest of commas to entire chapters. Flatly rejecting the common wisdom that translators are inevitably traitors, Hofstadter proposes instead that translators are traders, and that translation, like musical performance, deserves high respect as a creative act. In his view, literary translation is the art of making subtle trades in which one sometimes loses and sometimes gains, often both losing and gaining at the same time. This view implies that there is no reason a translation cannot be as good as the original work, and that the result inevitably bears the stamp of the translator, much as a musical performance inevitably bears the stamp of its artists. Both a companion to the beloved Sagan novel and a singular meditation on translation, Translator, Trader is a witty and intimate exploration of words, ideas, communication, creation, and faithfulness. Views: 855
Set in Los Angeles, in the recent past. The birthplace and graveyard of American myths and dreams, the city harbours a group of people trapped between the beauty of their surroundings and their own moral impoverishment. This novel is a chronicle of their voices. Views: 855
The most celebrated and controversial French novelist of our time now delivers his magnum opus—about art and money, love and friendship and death, fathers and sons.
The Map and the Territory is the story of an artist, Jed Martin, and his family and lovers and friends, the arc of his entire history rendered with sharp humor and powerful compassion. His earliest photographs, of countless industrial objects, were followed by a surprisingly successful series featuring Michelin road maps, which also happened to bring him the love of his life, Olga, a beautiful Russian working—for a time—in Paris. But global fame and fortune arrive when he turns to painting and produces a host of portraits that capture a wide range of professions, from the commonplace (the owner of a local bar) to the autobiographical (his father, an accomplished architect) and from the celebrated (Bill Gates and Steve Jobs Discussing the Future of Information Technology) to the literary (a writer named Houellebecq, with whom he develops an unusually close relationship).
Then, while his aging father (his only living relative) flirts with oblivion, a police inspector seeks Martin’s help in solving an unspeakably gruesome crime—events that prove profoundly unsettling. Even so, now growing old himself, Jed Martin somehow discovers serenity and manages to add another startling chapter to his artistic legacy, a deeply moving conclusion to this saga of hopes and losses and dreams. Views: 855
Screams from the Balcony is a collection of letters chronicling Charles Bukowski's life as he tries to get published and work at a postal office, all while drinking and gambling. Views: 855
