A MESMERIZING DEBUT NOVEL ABOUT A YOUNG WOMAN, HAUNTED BY LOSS, WHO REDISCOVERS PASSION AND POSSIBILITY WHEN SHE'S DRAWN INTO THE TANGLED LIVES OF HER NEIGHBORSFive years after her young husband’s death, Celia Cassill has moved from one Brooklyn neighborhood to another, but she has not moved on. The owner of a small apartment building, she has chosen her tenants for their ability to respect one another’s privacy. Celia believes in boundaries, solitude, that she has a right to her ghosts. She is determined to live a life at a remove from the chaos and competition of modern life. Everything changes with the arrival of a new tenant, Hope, a dazzling woman of a certain age on the run from her husband’s recent betrayal. When Hope begins a torrid and noisy affair, and another tenant mysteriously disappears, the carefully constructed walls of Celia’s world are tested and the sanctity of her building is shattered—through violence and sex, in turns tender and dark. Ultimately, Celia and her tenants are forced to abandon their separate spaces for a far more intimate one, leading to a surprising conclusion and the promise of genuine joy. Amy Grace Loyd investigates interior spaces of the body and the New York warrens in which her characters live, offering a startling emotional honesty about the traffic between men and women. The Affairs of Others is a story about the irrepressibility of life and desire, no matter the sorrows or obstacles. Views: 5
Prose; fiction, Masculine Views: 5
A richly textured, diverse collection of stories that illuminate the heartland and America itself, exploring questions of history, race, and identity.Grounded in place, spanning the Civil War to the present day, the stories in I Was a Revolutionary capture the roil of history through the eyes of an unforgettable cast of characters: the visionaries and dreamers, radical farmers and socialist journalists, quack doctors and protestors who haunt the past and present landscape of the state of Kansas.In these stories—which have appeared in Zoetrope: All-Story, The Best New American Voices, FiveChapters, Story, American Short Fiction, and Ninth Letter—the award-winning writer Andrew Malan Milward crafts an epic mosaic of the American experience, tracing how we live amidst the inconvenient ghosts of history. "The Burning of Lawrence" vibrates with the raw terror of a town pillaged by pro-Confederate raiders. "O Death" recalls the desperately hard journey of... Views: 5
The long-awaited conclusion of Adamsons stunning Marketplace Trilogy! The ultimate underground sexual realm includes not only willing slaves, but the exquisite and demanding trainers who take submissives firmly in hand. And it is now the time for these mentors to divulge their own secrets, to lay bare the desires that led them to become the ultimate figures of erotic authority. Only Sara Adamson could conjure so complete and bewitching a portrait of punishing pleasure. Views: 5
Thomas Connor, through horrendous tragedy, hones his body and mind to accomplish the incredible. American Mutant follows the course of Connor’s journey to attain a violent and unrelenting brand of justice. On the way, he assembles a cast of characters, who join him on his quest to reshape a treacherous world into his vision of the future. Washington D.C. becomes a backdrop for Connor’s rise from incarcerated enforcer in a branch of the National Security Agency, to the head of a complex intelligence network, owing allegiance to Connor alone. An old friend from his CIA past assists him in his goal to make a difference. Connor gathers a cadre of inner city young black men capable of turning their lives around to build a business front and house his intelligence gathering aspirations. With the help of Nate Johnson, a CIA assassin, Connor takes on a web of Russian Mafia and Red Chinese intelligence gangs, to break a slave ring kidnapping young girls for foreign sources. With his growing extraordinary powers, Connor takes the murder capitol of the country to a new level of violence, frightening in its scope. After meeting Connor, his unruly band learns fear, discipline, and a terrifying way to make dreams come true. In return for their loyalty, Connor provides them with an escape hatch from oblivion. Views: 5
"What a debut! Early Work is one of the wittiest, wisest (sometimes silliest, in the best sense), and bravest novels about wrestling with the early stages of life and love, of creative and destructive urges, I’ve read in a while. The angst of the young and reasonably comfortable isn’t always pretty, but Andrew Martin possesses the prose magic to make it hilarious, illuminating, moving." ―Sam Lipsyte, author of The Ask and *The Fun Parts*
For young writers of a certain temperament―if they haven’t had such notions beaten out of them by MFA programs and the Internet―the delusion persists that great writing must be sought in what W. B. Yeats once called the “foul rag and bone shop of the heart.” That’s where Peter Cunningham has been looking for inspiration for his novel―that is, when he isn’t teaching at the local women’s prison, walking his dog, getting high, and wondering whether it’s time to tie the knot with his college girlfriend, a medical student whose night shifts have become a standing rebuke to his own lack of direction. When Peter meets Leslie, a sexual adventurer taking a break from her fiancé, he gets a glimpse of what he wishes and imagines himself to be: a writer of talent and nerve. Her rag-and-bone shop may be as squalid as his own, but at least she knows her way around the shelves. Over the course of a Virginia summer, their charged, increasingly intimate friendship opens the door to difficult questions about love and literary ambition.
With a keen irony reminiscent of Sam Lipsyte or Lorrie Moore, and a romantic streak as wide as Roberto Bolaño’s, Andrew Martin’s Early Work marks the debut of a writer as funny and attentive as any novelist of his generation.
“Beautifully executed and very funny, Early Work is a sharp-eyed, sharp-voiced debut that I didn’t want to put down.” ―Julia Pierpont, author of Among the Ten Thousand Things and *The Little Book of Feminist Saints*
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Against a backdrop of racial tensions and spanning four decades, Joshua: A Brooklyn Tale explores the entanglements of three lives: Joshua Eubanks, a young black man struggling to overcome the crime, drugs, and despair of the streets; Rachel Weissman, daughter of a Hassidic rabbi, wrestling pangs of rebelliousness against the insular and restrictive practices of her religion; and Paul Sims, the product of a privileged Long Island Jewish family, yearning to escape his troubled past. Joshua first encounters Rachel in the local synagogue, where he works as an assistant to the custodian. Over the years their bond intensifies, though their lives diverge. Rachel aspires to be a doctor, but surrenders to a strict Hasidic life, thus leaving her unfulfilled. Paul leaves his home to find solace in the Hasidic enclave of Crown Heights. Views: 5
The Cricket on the Hearth is a novella by Charles Dickens, written in 1845. It is the third of Dickens' five Christmas books, the others being A Christmas Carol (1843), The Chimes (1844), The Battle of Life (1846), and The Haunted Man (1847). Views: 5
