The acclaimed author of Into the Forest mines our fears and explores our capacity to love in this epic tale of modern motherhood.
Young and pregnant, Cerise and Anna make very different decisions about how to direct their lives. While teenaged Cerise struggles to support herself and her young daughter, Anna finishes college, marries, and later gives birth to two daughters of her own. After the birth of her second child, a tragic accident tears Cerise's life apart, and she loses her already tenuous position in society. As the story progresses--and Cerise's and Anna's lives interweave and inexorably approach each other--both women are dramatically, forever changed. Unforgettable, awe-inspiring, and grippingly honest, Windfalls is a daring and mesmerizing tale. Views: 678
In the Beauty of the Lilies begins in 1910 and traces God’s relation to four generations of American seekers, beginning with Clarence Wilmot, a clergyman in Paterson, New Jersey. He loses his faith but finds solace at the movies, respite from “the bleak facts of life, his life, gutted by God’s withdrawal.” His son, Teddy, becomes a mailman who retreats from American exceptionalism, religious and otherwise, into a life of studied ordinariness. Teddy has a daughter, Esther, who becomes a movie star, an object of worship, an All-American goddess. Her neglected son, Clark, is possessed of a native Christian fervor that brings the story full circle: in the late 1980s he joins a Colorado sect called the Temple, a handful of “God’s elect” hastening the day of reckoning. In following the Wilmots’ collective search for transcendence, John Updike pulls one wandering thread from the tapestry of the American Century and writes perhaps the greatest of his later novels. Views: 678
“Abbi Waxman is both irreverent and thoughtful.”—#1 New York Times bestselling author Emily Giffin
The author of Other People’s Houses and The Garden of Small Beginnings delivers a quirky and charming novel chronicling the life of confirmed introvert Nina Hill as she does her best to fly under everyone's radar.
Meet Nina Hill: A young woman supremely confident in her own...shell.
The only child of a single mother, Nina has her life just as she wants it: a job in a bookstore, a kick-butt trivia team, a world-class planner and a cat named Phil. If she sometimes suspects there might be more to life than reading, she just shrugs and picks up a new book.
When the father Nina never knew existed suddenly dies, leaving behind innumerable sisters, brothers, nieces, and nephews, Nina is horrified. They all live close by! They're all—or mostly all—excited to meet her! She'll have to Speak. To. Strangers. It's a disaster! And as if that wasn't enough, Tom, her trivia nemesis, has turned out to be cute, funny, and deeply interested in getting to know her. Doesn't he realize what a terrible idea that is?
Nina considers her options.
1. Completely change her name and appearance. (Too drastic, plus she likes her hair.)
2. Flee to a deserted island. (Hard pass, see: coffee).
3. Hide in a corner of her apartment and rock back and forth. (Already doing it.)
It's time for Nina to come out of her comfortable shell, but she isn't convinced real life could ever live up to fiction. It's going to take a brand-new family, a persistent suitor, and the combined effects of ice cream and trivia to make her turn her own fresh page.
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William Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun revisits Sanctuary’s Temple Drake, now married to Gowan Stevens and the mother of two young children. On the eve of an execution, Temple is forced to confront her past as she explores how earlier violent events influenced the murder of her infant child by its nurse, Nancy. Beginning with the judgement of Nancy’s death sentence, Faulkner’s taut narrative focuses on how one’s past can impact the future of an entire family.
Published in 1950, 19 years after Sanctuary, Requiem for a Nun is unique for Faulkner’s use of both prose and play narrative. It was adapted for theater in 1956 by Albert Camus, who also wrote the preface to the French translation of the novel.
HarperPerennial Classics brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in ebook production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperPerennial Classics collection to build your digital library. Views: 678
Robert Anderson has been a professional hitman his whole life. With his family believing he is a mobile phone salesman he travels around America carrying out his business. Now he wants to retire and signs up for one last job in Austin Texas that comes with a large pay check.Robert methodically plans and executes his last hit, covering every tiny detail, or does he miss something?Robert Anderson has been a professional hitman his whole life. With his family believing he is a mobile phone salesman he travels around America carrying out his work. However, Robert is getting tired of all the killing and the travelling and wants to retire. He signs up for one last job with a large pay check, big enough to send him into retirement.He arrives in Austin, Texas and checks in to Hotel 72 where he receives all the information he needs to carry out his last hit. Enjoy this thrilling action adventure as Robert methodically plans and executes his last hit, covering every tiny detail, or does he miss something? Views: 678
Lyman Frank Baum is one of America’s most read authors, and he is widely considered one of the premier authors of children’s books. Trot is near her home on the coast of southern California when she meets a strange little boy with a large umbrella. Button Bright has been using his family's magic umbrella to take long-range journeys from his Philadelphia home, and has gotten as far as California. After an explanation of how the magic umbrella works, the two children, joined by Cap'n Bill, decide to take a trip to a nearby island; they call it "Sky island," because it looks like it's "halfway in the sky" but the umbrella takes them to a different place entirely, a literal island in the sky. Views: 678
From the winner of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize come masterfully crafted narratives of protest, grief and love.Martín Espada is a poet who "stirs in us an undeniable social consciousness," says Richard Blanco. Floaters offers exuberant odes and defiant elegies, songs of protest and songs of love from one of the essential voices in American poetry.Floaters takes its title from a term used by certain Border Patrol agents to describe migrants who drown trying to cross over. The title poem responds to the viral photograph of Óscar and Valeria, a Salvadoran father and daughter who drowned in the Río Grande, and allegations posted in the "I'm 10-15" Border Patrol Facebook group that the photo was faked. Espada bears eloquent witness to confrontations with anti-immigrant bigotry as a tenant lawyer years ago, and now sings the praises of Central American adolescents kicking soccer balls over a barbed wire fence in an internment camp... Views: 678
From the wild and wonderful imagination of the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Dragons Love Tacos comes this hilarious, irresistible middle grade debut, a collection of six totally different stories with the same exact name.In these six stories, set in six distinct worlds, you’ll meet a boy and his robot nanny traveling the globe in search of the world’s tastiest treat, a child mechanical prodigy who invents the freshest dessert ever, and an evil ice cream truck driver who strikes fear in the heart of every kid in town. You’ll be transported to a beachside boardwalk with an ice cream stand run by a penguin, a hilltop realm ruled by a king with a sweet tooth, and a giant alien space lab with a lone human subject who longs for a taste of home. Each story features black-and-white interior illustrations from a different artist, including Daniel Salmieri, Charles Santoso, Liniers,... Views: 677
Reva Ewing, a former member of the Secret Service and a security specialist for Roarke Enterprises, is a prime suspect in a double homicide. She had every reason to want to kill her husband, the renowned artist Blair Bissel. Not only was he having an affair, he was having it with her best friend.
But Lieutenant Eve Dallas, who's on the case, believes Reva is innocent. Eve's instincts tell her that the murder scene looks too perfectly staged, the apparent answers too obvious. And when she digs for more, she discovers that at nearly the exact time a kitchen knife was jammed into the victim's ribs, the passcode to his art studio was changed - and all of the data on his computer deliberately corrupted.
To Roarke, it's the computer attack that poses the real threat. Signs show that this is the nightmare his company has secretly been preparing for. He and Reva have been under a code-red government contract to develop a program that would shield against a new breed of hackers, the Doomsday Group. These techno-terrorists with brilliant minds and plenty of financial backing hack into systems, steal data, and corrupt computer units on a large scale - and kill anyone who gets too close.
Eve and Roarke must infiltrate an extraordinarily secretive government agency to expose the corruption at its core, before the virus spreads from one office to a corporation to the entire country. Views: 677
Silas Leo and I have been so many things. We've been rivals, classmates, teammates. Friends. Friends you watch from afar each day, and dream of each night. Then we were... Well, we were just us. We didn't ask ourselves too many questions – not even when I pretended not to be hurt by the distance he placed between us. We made each other no promises. I waited, hoped, believed, right up until the day I realised that everything we had was merely an illusion. My illusion. My name is Silas Kylemore, and I've learned an important lesson: never fall in love with your best friend. Not if he'll never be able to love you back. Leo Silas and I have been through so many phases. We've been close, far, just a hair's breadth apart. Each bound to the other. I'm talking about that kind of bond you're never quite able to recreate. We were young, and we were... We were just us.... Views: 677
