In Sacrifices, we meet Sisters Cil, Deborah, Ruth and Sarah. They are four sisters descended from the coupling of angels and humans. And as such they have been embodied with fantastical abilities which they use to defend the world from those who would harm it, be they flesh or spirit. If they are to prevail, there will certainly be sacrifices.Sacrifices is the part two of Alan's To Wrestle with Darkness trilogy. In Sacrifices, we meet Cil, Deborah, Ruth and Sarah. They are four sisters descended from the coupling of angels and humans. And as such they have been embodied with fantastical abilities which they use to defend the world from those who would harm it, be they flesh or spirit. They find themselves tested, as they must contest the forces of darkness who are intent on ending all of creation. If they are to prevail, there will certainly be sacrifices. Views: 406
Denis Johnson's The Laughing Monsters is a high-suspense tale of kaleidoscoping loyalties in the post-9/11 world that shows one of our great novelists at the top of his game.
Roland Nair calls himself Scandinavian but travels on a U.S. passport. After ten years' absence, he returns to Freetown, Sierra Leone, to reunite with his friend Michael Adriko. They once made a lot of money here during the country's civil war, and, curious to see whether good luck will strike twice in the same place, Nair has allowed himself to be drawn back to a region he considers hopeless.
Adriko is an African who styles himself a soldier of fortune and who claims to have served, at various times, the Ghanaian army, the Kuwaiti Emiri Guard, and the American Green Berets. He's probably broke now, but he remains, at thirty-six, as stirred by his own doubtful schemes as he was a decade ago.
Although Nair believes some kind of money-making plan lies at the back of it all, Adriko's stated reason for inviting his friend to Freetown is for Nair to meet Adriko's fiancée, a grad student from Colorado named Davidia. Together the three set out to visit Adriko's clan in the Uganda-Congo borderland—but each of these travelers is keeping secrets from the others. Their journey through a land abandoned by the future leads Nair, Adriko, and Davidia to meet themselves not in a new light, but rather in a new darkness. Views: 406
Camilla Fox is alive. The last thing she remembers is being lost in the snow after leaving her home to escape the Mormon faith she no longer calls her own. She's been taken in by the 5th Infantry Regiment of the US Army and given over to the personal care of Captain Charles Brandon. As she regains her strength, memories of her two children she had to leave behind come flooding back, threatening to break her heart. Camilla is determined to reunite with her daughters. But when news of her father's grave illness reaches her, she knows she must return to the family farm to reconcile with her father. As spring arrives, Camilla returns to Salt Lake City a changed woman, but nothing could prepare her for the changes to the city, to the Mormon church, and to the family she left behind. Views: 406
This is the dramatic story of J. P. Donleavy's personal struggle to create and publish a book that became a twentieth-century masterpiece: The Ginger Man . It is literally history combined with Donleavy's autobiography -- from his childhood in the Bronx, education at Catholic schools, service in the U.S. Navy, and travels, to his current life as proprietor of a landed estate in the midlands of Ireland. Trinity College in Dublin after World War II was a mecca for adventurous Americans who used the G.I. Bill as a passport to higher education, . Among them were able-bodied seamen, second class J.P. 'Mike' Donleavy, fighter pilot George Roy Hill (now a celebrated Hollywood actor), and a naval yeoman Gainor Stephen Crist, a Midwestern rara avis and model for the Ginger Man. Student life included degrees in debauchery; drunken brawls in Dublin pubs; comic capers with the playwright Brendan Behan; eccentric Anglo-Irish aristocrats; living on miraculous credit and in constant debt with plenty of time for the seduction of nice Catholic girls. Donleavy, impecunious and newly married, began to write The Ginger Man in a primitive isolated cottage at Kilcoole. He completed the book over a period of four years on two continents. The Ginger Man was rejected by nearly thirty-five American and British publishers. The book was finally published in Paris in 1955 by Maurice Girondias of the Olympia Press as a work of pornography. Twenty-five years of biter litigation between Donleavy and Girodias followed, with Donleavy emerging triumphant as sole owner of Olympia and its copyrights, including that of The Ginger Man. Views: 406
"Portrait in Sepia is the best book Allende has published in the United States since her first novel of nearly two decades ago, The House of the Spirits.”
—Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World
“Portrait in Sepia tightens the weave of a multigenerational fantasy as complete and inspiring as the real world it parallels … Allende’s enchanting historical universe keeps expanding and Portrait in Sepia is a new galactic jewel.”
—Chicago Tribune
A richly imagined historical novel about memory and family secrets from the New York Times bestselling author of Island Beneath the Sea, Inés of My Soul, Daughter of Fortune, Zorro, and House of the Spirits. Views: 406
One of the world's most celebrated authors, Margaret Atwood has penned a collection of smart and entertaining fictional essays, in the genre of her popular books *Good Bones* and *Murder in the Dark*, punctuated with wonderful illustrations by the author. Chilling and witty, prescient and personal, delectable and tart, these highly imaginative, vintage Atwoodian mini-fictions speak on a broad range of subjects, reflecting the times we live in with deadly accuracy and knife-edge precision.
In pieces ranging in length from a mere paragraph to several pages, Atwood gives a sly pep talk to the ambitious young; writes about the disconcerting experience of looking at old photos of ourselves; gives us Horatio's real views on Hamlet; and examines the boons and banes of orphanhood. *Bring Back Mom: An Invocation*; explores what life was really like for the "perfect" homemakers of days gone by, and in *The Animals Reject Their Names* she runs history backward, with surprising results.
Chilling and witty, prescient and personal, delectable and tart, *The Tent* is vintage Atwood, enhanced by the author's delightful drawings. Views: 405
Meet Bob Clayborn, a man whose dreams have long been trampled beneath the feet of his elephant-sized wife. Now the long-suffering husband of Clarisse Clayborn has learned the worst: his mother-in-law will soon be moving in with them. But wait! What’s that glow up ahead? Why, it’s the old Zodiac. Abandoned years ago, it’s lit up like a neon lollipop, and Clarisse is eager to join the fun.Rid is not your average thief, he was once a proud and arrogant prince of a nation called Rogue. However, Rid lost everything he held dear when his step brother framed him for a heinous crime, causing him to get banished far away into the outside cruel world. Thanks to two new friends he makes on the way, he learns to become deceitful, lying, dirty minded, and cunning as a way to survive his new environment. On a fateful day, the three ambush a merchant caravan carrying three sacred and powerful weapons, only to fall into a dangerous trap. Rid’s friends get captured by an evil tyrant woman named Katarina Fox and he must venture into oblivion to rescue them. Legions among legions of terrible monsters, evil humans, and treacherous cities await him, threatening to engulf him completely. Despite his many flaws, destiny has chosen him to be the one to shed light into his dark and madness consumed world. Views: 405
“One of our most exquisite storytellers” (Esquire) gives us his first collection in over a decade: ten potent new stories that, along with twenty-one classics, display his mastery over a quarter century.
Tobias Wolff’s first two books, In the Garden of the North American Martyrs and Back in the World, were a powerful demonstration of how the short story can “provoke our amazed appreciation,” as The New York Times Book Review wrote then. In the years since, he’s written a third collection, The Night in Question, as well as a pair of genre-defining memoirs (This Boy’s Life and In Pharaoh’s Army), the novella The Barracks Thief, and, most recently, a novel, Old School.
Now he returns with fresh revelations—about biding one’s time, or experiencing first love, or burying one’s mother—that come to a variety of characters in circumstances at once everyday and extraordinary: a retired Marine enrolled in college while her son trains for Iraq, a lawyer taking a difficult deposition, an American in Rome indulging the Gypsy who’s picked his pocket. In these stories, as with his earlier, much-anthologized work, he once again proves himself, according to the Los Angeles Times, “a writer of the highest order: part storyteller, part philosopher, someone deeply engaged in asking hard questions that take a lifetime to resolve.” Views: 405
An allegorical piece of fluff combining a yearning for transcendence with screwball comedy. After inheriting his grandfather's plantation and all the kooky relatives that come with it, a would-be poet falls in love with a girl no one else can see. Readers in search of realism and fully developed characters are advised to look elsewhere.An allegorical piece of fluff combining a yearning for transcendence with screwball comedy. After inheriting his grandfather's plantation and all the kooky relatives that come with it, a would-be poet falls in love with a girl no one else can see. Readers in search of realism and fully developed characters are advised to look elsewhereThe fact that the text requires an active imagination in the reader to fill in all the holes and spackle over all the cracks is regarded by its author as a feature rather than a bug. If the pastel sketch fails to inspire appropriately philosophical fantasies, there is still the hope of sharing some small portion of the delight stuffed into an occasional turn of phrase. Views: 405
What if — whoosh, right now, with no explanation — a number of us simply vanished? Would some of us collapse? Would others of us go on, one foot in front of the other, as we did before the world turned upside down? That's what the bewildered citizens of Mapleton, who lost many of their neighbors, friends and lovers in the event known as the Sudden Departure, have to figure out. Because nothing has been the same since it happened — not marriages, not friendships, not even the relationships between parents and children.
Kevin Garvey, Mapleton's new mayor, wants to speed up the healing process, to bring a sense of renewed hope and purpose to his traumatized community. Kevin's own family has fallen apart in the wake of the disaster: his wife, Laurie, has left to join the Guilty Remnant, a homegrown cult whose members take a vow of silence; his son, Tom, is gone, too, dropping out of college to follow a sketchy prophet named Holy Wayne. Only Kevin's teenaged daughter, Jill, remains, and she's definitely not the sweet "A" student she used to be. Kevin wants to help her, but he's distracted by his growing relationship with Nora Durst, a woman who lost her entire family on October 14th and is still reeling from the tragedy, even as she struggles to move beyond it and make a new start.
With heart, intelligence and a rare ability to illuminate the struggles inherent in ordinary lives, Tom Perrotta has written a startling, thought-provoking novel about love, connection and loss. Views: 405
On vacation from school, Denis goes to stay at Crome, an English country house inhabitated by several of Huxley’s most outlandish characters–from Mr. Barbecue-Smith, who writes 1,500 publishable words an hour by “getting in touch” with his “subconscious,” to Henry Wimbush, who is obsessed with writing the definitive History of Crome. Denis’s stay proves to be a disaster amid his weak attempts to attract the girl of his dreams and the ridicule he endures regarding his plan to write a novel about love and art. Aldous Huxley’s first novel, Crome Yellow, was published in 1921, and, as a comedy of manners and ideas, its relatively realistic setting and format may come as a surprise to fans of his later works such as Point Counter Point and Brave New World. Some who know only Brave New World may not know that as a 16-year-old planning to enter medicine, Aldous Huxley was stricken by a serious eye disease which left him temporarily blind, and which derailed what certainly would have been a prominent career as a physician or scientist. Crome Yellow has often been called “witty,” as well as “talky,” and it certainly owes as much to Vanity Fair as it may, surprisingly to some, owe to Tristram Shandy, although one might think that characters such as Mr. Barbecue-Smith and his remarkable writing theories could have some literary antecedents in Lawrence Sterne. Lambasting the post-Victorian standards of morality, Crome Yellow is a witty masterpiece that, in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s words, “is too irnonic to be called satire and too scornful to be called irony.”Aldous Huxley was an English writer and one of the most prominent members of the famous Huxley family. He spent the later part of his life in the United States, living in Los Angeles from 1937 until his death in 1963. Best known for his novels and wide-ranging output of essays, he also published short stories, poetry, travel writing, and film stories and scripts. Huxley was a humanist and pacifist, but was also latterly interested in spiritual subjects such as parapsychology and philosophical mysticism. He was also well known for advocating and taking psychedelics. By the end of his life Huxley was considered, in some academic circles, a leader of modern thought and an intellectual of the highest rank. Views: 405
Faber Stories, a landmark series of individual volumes, presents masters of the short story form at work in a range of genres and styles. You try every trick in the book to keep her. You write her letters. You drive her to work. You quote Neruda ... You try it all, but one day she will simply sit up in bed and say, No more.In Yunior, a Dominican-American writer and Harvard professor, Junot Díaz has created an irresistibly erratic protagonist, who sweeps you up in the poetic energy of his speech as he rehearses a broad repertoire of bad behaviour.Originally the climactic tale in the chain-linked This is How You Lose Her, 'The Cheater's Guide to Love' is a superb standalone song of decadence and experience. Views: 405
Bestselling author Tiffany Reisz returns with an imaginative tale of lust and magic, and the dangers unleashed when the two are combined...On the day of Lia's university graduation party, her parents—wealthy art collectors with friends in high places—gift her a beautiful wine cup, a rare artifact decorated with roses. It's a stunning gift, and one that August Bowman, a friend of her parents and a guest at Lia's party, also has his eye on. The cup, August tells her, is known as the Rose kylix, and it's no ordinary cup. It was used in the temple ceremonies of Eros, Greek god of erotic love, and has the power to bring the most intimate sexual fantasies to life.But Lia is skeptical of August's claims of the cup's mythology and magic—after all, he's a collector himself, and she suspects he just wants to get his hands on this impressive piece of art. So he dares her to try it for herself, and when Lia drinks from the Rose kylix she is suddenly immersed in an... Views: 405
