On his way to New York to celebrate his impending literary success, Simon Burchwood is the prototypical American careerist: arrogant, egotistical, narcissistic. But a quick detour to Montgomery, Alabama to visit a childhood friend sends Simon on a bizarre journey, challenging his hopes and dreams of becoming a famous writer. The Meteoric Rise of Simon Burchwood is a character study that delves into the psyche of a man who desperately tries to redefine himself.Simon is certain he is on the brink of literary stardom. Yet this brief sojourn in Montgomery challenges his haughty façade—and the "meteoric rise" that has continually eluded him. Expecting adulation from his childhood friends during his layover in Montgomery, he's instead met with indifference. Ready to finally leave his troubled past behind and move on to greater things, he invites his friend Jason—whose marriage is on the verge of divorce—to join him in New York. They quickly embark on a... Views: 20
Music was her whole life...until he came alongFormer child prodigy Kianti Lawrence has struggled hard to become a major force in the performing arts world. Music is her life...until the beloved, world-renowned pianist meets a man who shows her what she's been missing. Something about handsome, powerful ex-Ambassador Therin Rucker strikes a harmonious—and seductive—chord.When Therin connected with Kianti, all the notes suddenly came together. He's more in tune with her than with any other woman he's ever known. But first he has to persuade Kianti not to be afraid of life...or love. Can he make her see that the passion they're making is the truest music there is? Views: 20
Ranging from Texas to California on a young writer's journey in a car he calls El Chevy, All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers is one of Larry McMurtry's most vital and entertaining novels.Danny Deck is on the verge of success as an author when he flees Houston and hurtles unexpectedly into the hearts of three women: a girlfriend who makes him happy but who won't stay, a neighbor as generous as she is lusty, and his pal Emma Horton. It's a wild ride toward literary fame and an uncharted country...beyond everyone he deeply loves. All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers is a wonderful display of Larry McMurtry's unique gift: his ability to re-create the subtle textures of feelings, the claims of passing time and familiar place, and the rich interlocking swirl of people's lives. Views: 20
Retired to the English countryside, an eighty-nine-year-old man, rumored to be a once-famous detective, is more concerned with his beekeeping than with his fellow man. Into his life wanders Linus Steinman, nine years old and mute, who has escaped from Nazi Germany with his sole companion: an African gray parrot. What is the meaning of the mysterious strings of German numbers the bird spews out -- a top-secret SS code? The keys to a series of Swiss bank accounts? Or do they hold a significance both more prosaic and far more sinister? Though the solution may be beyond even the reach of the once-famous sleuth, the true story of the boy and his parrot is subtly revealed in a wrenching resolution. Views: 20
Helen and Desire, the best known and finest of Trocchi's erotic novels, is a highly compelling examination of sexuality. Written from the perspective of its eponymous heroine, Helen Smith, it follows the fortunes of this lady as she uses her alluring charms to take her through life. Inevitably she is also abused along the way by the men who cannot resist the appeal of sex incarnate and so Helen's existence fluctuates from one of liberation to one of imprisonment. Views: 20
Review“Murnane examines the nature of reading and writing and the construction of truths and fictions. And somehow, without the use of metaphor or simile, but simple transparency, he approaches the underside of these concepts, the heart of the matter, the magic of the thing that is storytelling.” (Smiljana Glisovic - *Readings* )“Murnane is quite simply one of the finest writers we have produced.” (Peter Craven )“[A] book about another, more perfect book never destined to be written . . . It is like a big, polished stone thrown into the babbling brook of ordinary novels.” (The Australian )“An obsessive, funny, wonderfully self-invented writer at the height of his powers.” (Michael Heyward ) About the AuthorGerald Murnane was born in Melbourne, Australia in 1939. He is the author of eight works of fiction, including Barley Patch, Inland, The Plains, and Tamarisk Row, as well as a collection of essays, Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs. Murnane has been a recipient of the Patrick White Award and the Melbourne Prize. Barley Patch won the 2010 Adelaide Festival Award for Innovation. Views: 20
From New York Times bestselling author James Rollins and award-winning suspense novelist Rebecca Cantrell comes a disturbing story of vengeance, bloodshed, and creatures that prowl the night. In the haunted, war-torn highlands of Afghanistan, amid the ruins of Shahr-e-Gholghol, an archaeology team is massacred in the night. Sergeant Jordan Stone and his crack forensic team are called in to examine the site, to hunt for the perpetrators of this horrific act. But the discovery of a survivor — a child of ten — will shatter all the team knows about life and death. Among the crumbling bones of dead kings, something hoary and murderous stirs out of the ancient past, lurching forward to claim vengeance on those still living. Views: 20
I was thirteen. Being thirteen is like being in the middle of nowhere. Which was accentuated by the fact that I was in the middle of nowhere. In a house that wasn't mine. In a city that wasn't mine, in a country that wasn't mine, with a one-man family that, in spite of the intersections and intentions (all very good), wasn't mine.When her mother dies, thirteen-year-old Vanja is left with no family and no sense of who she is, where she belongs, and what she should do. Determined to find her biological father in order to fill the void that has so suddenly appeared in her life, Vanja decides to leave Rio de Janeiro to live in Colorado with her stepfather, a former guerrilla notorious for his violent past. From there she goes in search of her biological father, tracing her mother's footsteps and gradually discovering the truth about herself.Rendered in lyrical and passionate prose, Crow Blue is a literary road trip through Brazil and America, and through dark... Views: 20
The lives of two women and the community that shelters them shatter in a single night of violence. Ex-gang member Mica Butler is running from a past that just may kill her if she’s ever caught. Paramedic and ordained priest Flynn Edwards struggles to recover her faith in herself and find absolution for her greatest failure. Sheriff Reese Conlon fights to embrace the joy of new life while a dark threat bears down on her partner, Doctor Tory King. In one explosive night, the destines of all involved change forever as a man with nothing to lose threatens to take anyone in his path with him to the grave. Seventh in the award-winning Provincetown Tales Views: 20
The acclaimed author of Seven, The Iceman, and the Gibbons and Tozzi series pens a chilling standalone thriller In the tradition of classics like The Silence of the Lambs.FBI profiler Trisha McCleery has been on a twenty-year personal search for the person who brutally murdered her mother. At the same time serial killer Gene Lassiter has been on an obsessive twenty-year search for the daughter of his first kill. If she finds him, justice can at last be served. If he finds her, one man's reign of terror can continue unabated. In a stunning life-or-death final act, the hunter and the hunted go head-to-head, with a shocking ending that bleeds justice dry. Views: 20
Amina Cain's Creature brings together short fictions set in the space between action and reflection, edging at times toward the quiet and contemplative, at other times toward the grotesque or unsettling. Like the women in Jane Bowles's work, Cain's narrators seem always slightly displaced in the midst of their own experiences, carefully observing the effects of themselves on their surroundings and of their surroundings on themselves. Other literary precursors might include Raymond Carver and John Cage, some unlikely concoction of the two, with Carver's lucid prose and instinct for the potency of small gestures and Cage's ability to return the modern world to elementary principles. These stories offer not just a unique voice but a unique narrative space, a distinct and dramatic rendering of being-in-the-world.From Publishers WeeklyCain's latest book, after I Go to Some Hollow, is a moody, enigmatic collection of 14 miniature stories, some as short as four pages. In one, a former cult victim recalls her abuse; in another, a woman enters into a three-way relationship with a married couple. Each narrator seems to have undergone trauma or something akin to it—unease, illness, adulthood—and so their streams of consciousness have the texture of recovery. Cain captures a particular kind of attempt at happiness: trying to be easy on oneself; praying at a Zen monastery; focusing on small pleasures like orchids and neatly folded towels. Perhaps that's why, in both form and content, so much here is microscopic, with a delicate sadness infusing mundane activities like bathing, spilling olive oil, and touching a wall. At times, this mélange of fragments produces the atmosphere of a whole, but at others the bits seem disconnected and the search for meaning desultory. But Cain's tone—unknowing, exhibiting the most awed reverence toward the smallest details of life and thought—remains wonderfully effective throughout, though one sometimes wishes she'd use it on richer content. It lingers after the pages are done, leaving an aftertaste that's somehow more pleasant than the experience itself. (Nov.) About the AuthorAmina Cain writes stories that revolve quietly around human relationality, landscape, and emptiness. She is also a curator and a teacher of writing/literature. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in publications such as 3rd Bed, DENVER QUARTERLY, La Petite Zine, THE ENCYCLOPEDIA PROJECT, and Action, Yes. She is the author of I GO TO SOME HOLLOW (Les Figues Press, 2009) and CREATURE (Dorothy, a publishing project, 2013). She lives and works in Los Angeles. Views: 20
