A heartwarming novel about secrets of youth rediscovered, hometown memories, and everyday magic, from the beloved author of Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café Bud Threadgoode grew up in the bustling little railroad town of Whistle Stop, Alabama, with his mother Ruth, church going and proper, and his Aunt Idgie, the fun-loving hell-raiser. Together they ran the town's popular Whistle Stop Cafe, known far and wide for its friendly, fun, and famous "Fried Green Tomatoes." And as Bud often said to his daughter Ruthie, of his childhood, "How lucky can you get?"But sadly, as the railroad yards shut down and the town became a ghost town, nothing was left but boarded-up buildings and memories of a happier time.Then one day, Bud decides to take one last trip, just to see where his beloved Whistle Stop used to be. In so doing, he discovers new friends, new surprises about Idgie's life, and about Ninny Threadgoode, Evelyn... Views: 386
On an open-ended assignment for one of Hollywood’s mainline studios Raymond James, private investigator, and his partner Miss Suzuki develop an understanding of the communist conspiracy plaguing America. Her experiences lead Miss Suzuki to predict the future capture of our country through promotion of a cult-of-personality figurehead fronting for a shadowy cabal of entrenched domestic enemies.It’s 1947 in America. Enemies foreign and domestic working under explicit orders in service to the Soviet Union have infiltrated virtually every institution. In these times free Americans have not yet succumbed to the doctrines and deceits of political correctness. Engrained with common sense and rational thought, they could never foresee that so many would someday yield to such blatant manipulation after only a few decades of indoctrination and conditioning.Yet one among them does.Newly returned from the Pacific War and Japanese occupation, private detective Raymond James hangs out his shingle in Hollywood, hires on Miss Yuki Suzuki, ex-internee of Manzanar, and works his way onto the studio lots. Neither expects that an unusual assignment will plunge them deep into the heart of darkness of the American communist conspiracy. What starts as a simple case of mistaken identity grows into a cross-country odyssey of treason, murder, duty, honor, and courage before just one communist plot is discovered and run to ground.Join Ray as his adventures take him from the docks of Los Angeles Harbor through the studios of Hollywood and the defense industries of New Mexico to a nest of vipers hidden deep in the high society of Tampa-St. Petersburg. Obtain glimpses of the moral dangers inherent in an alien, inhuman system that brooks no dissent and relentlessly enforces its tenets by any means necessary. Share the vision of Ray’s partner Yuki who understands better than any what the future holds. Views: 386
The first novel in ten years from the author of the beloved New York Times bestseller THE PARTICULAR SADNESS OF LEMON CAKE, a luminous, poignant tale of a mother, a daughter, mental illness, and the fluctuating barrier between the mind and the world.On the night her single mother is taken to a mental hospital after a psychotic episode, eight year-old Francie is staying with her babysitter, waiting to take the train to Los Angeles to go live with her aunt and uncle. There is a lovely lamp next to the couch on which she's sleeping, the shade adorned with butterflies. When she wakes, Francie spies a dead butterfly, exactly matching the ones on the lamp, floating in a glass of water. She drinks it before the babysitter can see.Twenty years later, Francie is compelled to make sense of that moment, and two other incidents - her discovery of a desiccated beetle from a school paper, and a bouquet of dried roses from some curtains. Her recall is exact - she is sure... Views: 386
Charles Callahan is reading the Sunday paper when an alluring and oddly familiar photo catches his eye: it is Sian Richards, his first love, a face he has not seen for more than three decades. He is entranced by her image, flooded by memories of their teenage summer together, and utterly conpelled to make contact with her again. Charles sends Sian a letter, knowing all the while that "from the very first sentence of the very first note there was nothing innocent about it." Sian writes back - she is now a poet living with her husband and small child on an onion farm in Pennsylvania. She is intrigued that Charles has sought her out after so many years but wary of where their correspondence might lead. For Charles, troubled by financial woes, on the verge of losing his home, and concerned about the security of his family, the letters become a secret obsession and another source of instability in his already complicated life. Despite their reservations, the power of Charles and Sian's attraction leads them to meet again . . . and again. As Charles understands it, "for the two of them, eros is linked with time. It is the very urgency of time he dreads, the sense that their minutes together are short and numbered, that he must say what he has come to say before she leaves, that gestures and words cannot be wasted." Anita Shreve takes the classic theme of "Romeo and Juliet" and gives it an unusual twist: two lovers struggle against formidable odds, reaching across a lifetime to reclaim what they once lost. In doing so, they set in motion a tumultuous series of events that moves inexorably to a shocking conclusion. Views: 386
Stephen P. H Butler Leacock, FRSC (30 December 1869 – 28 March 1944) was a Canadian teacher, political scientist, writer, and humourist. Between the years 1910 and 1925, he was the most widely read English-speaking author in the world. He is known for his light humour along with criticisms of people\'s follies.The Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour was named in his honour. Views: 386
Lost Face is a collection of seven short stories by Jack London. It takes its name from the first short story in the book, about a European adventurer in the Yukon who outwits his (American) Indian captors\' plans to torture him. The book includes London\'s best-known short story, "To Build a Fire". Views: 386
A luxurious African safari turns deadly for a Hollywood starlet and her entourage in this riveting historical thriller from the New York Times bestselling author of The Flight Attendant. "The best possible combination of Hemingway and Agatha Christie — a gorgeously written story about the landscape and risks of Africa, whose edge-of-your-seat plot makes it impossible to put down.” —Jodi Picoult, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Wish You Were HereTanzania, 1964. When Katie Barstow, A-list actress, and her new husband, David Hill, decide to bring their Hollywood friends to the Serengeti for their honeymoon, they envision giraffes gently eating leaves from the tall acacia trees, great swarms of wildebeests crossing the Mara River, and herds of zebras storming the sandy plains. Their glamorous guests—including Katie’s best friend,... Views: 385
Dive into a world in which the ancient gods of Greece still rule in modern times. Thanatos meets seventeen-year-old Therese while she's in a coma hovering between the realm of the dead and the realm of dreams. A lucid dreamer, she takes control of her dream and kisses him, unaware that he is Death. It was his first kiss. No one, in his long existence, has ever wanted to kiss Death. After Therese awakens from her coma, Thanatos is desperate to find her. He makes a deal with Hades and goes to the Upperworld as a mortal to pursue her and to see where it might lead. The deal requires Therese to avenge the death of her parents. With the help of Than's fierce and exotic sisters, the Furies, she finds herself in an arena face to face with the murderer, and only one will survive. Formerly The Gatekeeper's Saga, this set is a complete series. It includes Thanatos, Challenge of Hades, A New Goddess, The House of Hades, The... Views: 385
As spring 1940 unfolds in Paris, war is inevitble. AP journalist Josephine Marlow is asked to undertake a dangerous journey back into the borders of the reich--just when the Fuhrer is gathering his forces for another invasion. If she is successful, a child will live. If not, he will die. And many other children, too.
French colonel Andre Chardon knows that the undefeated Fuhrer will not hold back his Blitzkrieg long from France. But the plan of attack revealed in a coded message is so audacious that no one believes Andre. Whom can he convince? Who will have the courage to act before thousands of innocents are slaughtered? And is a miracle at Dunkirk Harbor possible? Views: 385
Henry Wilt, tied to a daft job and a domineering wife, has just been passed over for promotion yet again. Ahead of him at the Polytechnic stretch years of trying to thump literature into the heads of plasterers, joiners, butchers and the like. And things are no better at home where his massive wife, Eva, is given to boundless and unpredictable fits of enthusiasm - for transcendental meditation, yoga or the trampoline.
But if Wilt can do nothing about his job, he realises he can do something about his wife - and as each day passes, his fantasies grow more murderous and more real. Views: 385
Well dressed and looked after, Wilmet is married to Rodney, a handsome army Major, working nine thirty to six at the Ministry. Wilmet's interest wanders to the nearby Anglo-Catholic church, where at last she can neglect her comfortable household in the company of three priests and engaging Piers Longridge who happens to be living with another man. Her limited life has its fragile "blessings." Views: 385
"'Close your eyes and slowly count backward from ten.'" America, the near future. A young spy on a mission logs her observations. The result is an intense thriller, and a minute dissection of the experience of a woman whose beauty is also her camouflage, for whom control relies on submission: a woman whose success - whose life - depends on being seen and not seen. Originally published online via Twitter by @NYerFiction, Jennifer Egan's first new fiction since the phenomenal success of "A Visit From the Goon Squad" is a taut, compulsive work of unrelenting genius. 'My working title for this story was "Lessons Learned" and my hope was to tell a story whose shape would emerge from the lessons the narrator "derived" from each step in the action, rather than from straightforward narration of the action itself. The atomised structure made this piece seem like a possible candidate for serialization on Twitter - something I'd long been interested in trying. Writing fiction for Twitter is not a new idea, of course, but it's a rich one - because of the intimacy of reaching people through their phones, and because of the odd poetry that can happen in 140 characters. 'Another impulse behind 'Black Box' was to take a character from a naturalistic story and travel with her into a different genre. Jon Scieszka first put this idea into my head with his spectacular meta-fictional picture book, "The True Story of the Three Little Pigs!," in which the three pigs move through books drawn in radically different styles, transforming visually into the style of each world they enter. I wondered whether I might do something analogous with a character from my novel, "A Visit From the Goon Squad" create a cartoon version of that person, for example - or, in this case, a spy thriller version. I wrote the story by hand in a Japanese notebook that had eight rectangles on each page, and it took me a year to control and calibrate that material into what is now "Black Box."' Views: 385
Paul Bowles had already established himself as an important American composer when, at the age of 38, he published The Sheltering Sky and became widely recognized as one of the most powerful writers of the postwar period. By the time of his death in 1999 he had become a unique and legendary figure in modern literary culture. From his base in Tangier he produced novels, stories, and travel writings in which exquisite surfaces and violent undercurrents mingle.
This Library of America volume, containing his first three novels, with its companion Collected Stories and Later Writings, is the first annotated edition of Bowles’s work, offering the full range of his literary achievement: the portrait of an outsider who was one of the essential American writers of the last half century.
The Sheltering Sky (1949), which remains Bowles’s most celebrated work, describes the unraveling of a young, sophisticated, and adventuresome married couple as they make their way into the Sahara. In a prose style of meticulous calm and stunning visual precision, Bowles tracks Port and Kit Moresby on a journey through the desert that culminates in death and madness.
In Let It Come Down (1952), Bowles plots the doomed trajectory of Nelson Dyar, a New York bank teller who comes to Tangier in search of a different life and ends up giving in to his darkest impulses. Rich in descriptions of the corruption and decadence of the International Zone in the last days before Moroccan independence, Bowles’s second novel is an alternately comic and horrific account of a descent into nihilism.
The Spider’s House (1955), the longest and most complex of Bowles’s novels, is set against the end of French rule in Morocco. Its characters—ranging from a Moroccan boy gifted with spiritual healing power to an American writer who regrets the passing of traditional ways—are caught up in the clash between colonial and nationalist factions, and are forced to confront cultural gulfs widened by political violence.
Bowles—who once told an interviewer, “I’ve always wanted to get as far as possible from the place where I was born”—charts the collisions between “civilized” exiles and unfamiliar societies that they can never really grasp. In fiction of slowly gathering menace, he achieves effects of horror and dislocation with an elegantly spare style and understated wit. Views: 385
The Brane Skip device may allow a spaceship to skip between layers of reality, bypass normal space, and avoid the universal speed limit—the speed of light. Lisa Chang, mission commander for its first crewed test, doesn't trust it. It seems like magic to her, and she doesn't believe in magic, not even after the ship skips to a fantasy version of Earth, complete with dragons, orcs, and wizards.The Brane Skip device designed in the twenty-second century is intended to move a spaceship between the membranes of reality in order to get around the universal speed limit: 'Thou shall not go faster than light'. The theory behind the device is unproven, the technology experimental, but if there are side paths through the universe of normal space, there should be short cuts where speed limits simply don't apply.The unmanned tests of the Brane Skip are inconclusive. The probes wink out and then back into existence, but all they record in between is a mysterious gray haze. No one knows where they go. But they must go somewhere. The automated systems can't say. It's time to send volunteers.The Brane Skip seems like magic to Lisa Chang, the young engineer in command the first crewed test flight, and Chang doesn't believe in magic. But she does believe in the mission. Humanity must explore space in order to survive and prosper, and she feels honored to be among the first to go where no one has gone before. She does not know what will happen when the Brane Skip device engages. She thinks it will do nothing. She fears it will explode. What she does not expect is popping out adrift in space and on a collision course with a fantasy version of Earth, complete with dragons, orcs, and wizards.Unfortunately, this is exactly what happens. Views: 385
