The stories in Black Vodka, by acclaimed author Deborah Levy, are perfectly formed worlds unto themselves, written in elegant yet economical prose. She is a master of the short story, exploring loneliness and belonging; violence and tenderness; the ephemeral and the solid; the grotesque and the beautiful; love and infidelity; and fluid identities national, cultural, and personal.In "Shining a Light," a woman's lost luggage is juxtaposed with far more serious losses. An icy woman seduces a broken man in "Vienna," and a man's empathy threatens to destroy him in "Stardust Nation." "Cave Girl" features a girl who wants to be a different kind of woman—she succeeds in a shocking way. A deformed man seeks beauty amid his angst in the title story.These are twenty-first century lives dissected with razor-sharp humor and curiosity. Published simultaneously with Things I Don't Want to Know: On Writing, Levy's stories will send you tumbling into a rabbit hole,... Views: 93
_Rarely has a young writer won a place among the major talents in fantasy fiction as quickly as James Clemens. In the first four novels of his breathtaking epic, The Banned and the Banished, Clemens has woven an ever-deepening spell of wonderment with his boundless imagination and matchless storytelling gifts. Now he brings his saga to a masterful and breathtaking climax as the wit’ch Elena faces the unmasked evil of the Dark Lord for the final time in a cataclysmic conclusion that will shatter her understanding of all that has gone before. . . ._The three deadly Weirgates are destroyed but the threat of the Dark Lord remains. And so Elena and her companions have gone their separate ways to prepare for what is yet to come. Elena herself has journeyed to the beautiful city of A’loa Glen, there to recover her strength and spirit. Enter Harlequin Quail.Some might call him a fool, but the little man in the jester’s suit claims to be a spy. And he comes fresh from the foul fortress of Blackhall itself, where the Dark Lord dwells. There he uncovered things that spell certain doom– for a final Weirgate remains, the most potent one of all. And with it, in just one moon’s time, the Dark Lord will avenge his earlier defeat, destroying the heart of the land and ushering in a reign of evil without end. Only Elena, with the awesome magicks of the Blood Diary, has the power to stop him.Blackhall is all but impregnable. And according to Quail, the Weirgate is well hidden, in a place known only to the Dark Lord himself.Thus begins a desperate quest like no other. Hunted by the Dark Lord’s minions and threatened by clandestine betrayals, Elena and her brave companions reunite in the effort to locate the last Weirgate and destroy it. Along the way, many questions will be answered and illusions will be smashed. Brother will turn against brother, and the strongest bonds of magic and love will be tested to the breaking point . . . and beyond. Views: 92
QUEER WE GO AGAIN!A follow-up to the critically acclaimed All Out anthology, Out Now features seventeen new short stories from amazing queer YA authors. Vampires crash prom...aliens run from the government...a president's daughter comes into her own...a true romantic tries to soften the heart of a cynical social media influencer...a selkie and the sea call out to a lost soul. Teapots and barbershops...skateboards and VW vans...Street Fighter and Ares's sword: Out Now has a story for every reader and surprises with each turn of the page!This essential and beautifully written modern-day collection features an intersectional and inclusive slate of authors and stories. Views: 92
Hell exists.In Tibet, while guiding trekkers to a holy mountain, Ike Crockett discovers a bottomless cave. When his lover disappears, Ike pursues her into the depths of the earth....In a leper colony bordering the Kalahari Desert, a nun and linguist named Ali von Schade unearths evidence of a proto-human species and a deity called Older-than-Old....In Bosnia, Major Elias Branch crash-lands his gunship near a mass grave and is swarmed by pale cannibals terrified of light....So begins mankind's realization that the underworld is a vast geological labyrinth riddling the continents and seabeds, one inhabited by brutish creatures who resemble the devils and gargoyles of legend. With all of Hell's precious resources and territories to be won, a global race ensues. Nations, armies, religions, and industries rush to colonize and exploit the subterranean frontier.A scientific expedition is launched westward to explore beneath the Pacific Ocean floor, both to... Views: 92
A fiercely independent divorce lawyer learns the power of family and connection when she receives a cryptic message from her estranged mother in this bittersweet, witty novel from the New York Times bestselling author of Someone Else’s Love Story and gods in Alabama—an emotionally resonant tale about the endurance of love and the power of stories to shape and transform our lives Born in Alabama, Paula Vauss spent the first decade of her life on the road with her free-spirited young mother, Kai, an itinerant storyteller who blended Hindu mythology with southern oral tradition to reinvent their history as they roved. But everything, including Paula’s birth name, Kali Jai, changed when she told a story of her own—one that landed Kai in prison and Paula in foster care. With the two of them separated, each holding her own secrets, the intense bond they once shared was fractured. These days, Paula has reincarnated herself as a tough-as-nails divorce attorney with a successful practice in Atlanta. While she hasn’t seen Kai in fifteen years, she’s still making payments on that karmic debt—until the day her last check is returned in the mail, along with a mystifying note: “I am going on a journey, Kali. I am going back to my beginning; death is not the end. You will be the end. We will meet again, and there will be new stories. You know how Karma works.” Then Kai’s most treasured secret literally lands on Paula’s doorstep, throwing her life into chaos and transforming her from only child to older sister. Desperate to find her mother before it’s too late, Paula sets off on a journey of discovery that will take her back to the past and into the deepest recesses of her heart. With the help of her ex-lover Birdwine, an intrepid and emotionally volatile private eye who still carries a torch for her, this brilliant woman, an expert at wrecking families, now has to figure out how to put one back together—her own. The Opposite of Everyone is a story about story itself, how the tales we tell connect us, break us, and define us, and how the endings and beginnings we choose can destroy us . . . and make us whole. Laced with sharp humor and poignant insight, it is beloved New York Times bestselling author Joshilyn Jackson at her very best. Views: 92
Candace Bushnell, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Sex and the City, and Katie Cotugno, New York Times bestselling author of 99 Days, team up to write a smart, feminist novel about a girl who fights to expose sexism at her school after a run-in with a predatory teacher. It starts before you can even remember: You learn the rules for being a girl. . . . Marin has always been good at navigating these unspoken guidelines. A star student and editor of the school paper, she dreams of getting into Brown University. Marin's future seems bright—and her young, charismatic English teacher, Mr. Beckett, is always quick to admire her writing and talk books with her. But when "Bex" takes things too far and comes on to Marin, she's shocked and horrified. Had she somehow led him on? Was it her fault? When Marin works up the courage to tell the administration what happened, no one believes her. She's forced to face Bex in class... Views: 92
Afternoon tea has never been so much fun! A bittersweet novel about life, living and the importance of cupcakes.Rotten things happen in threes in Florence's family, so when she's fired by her best friend and left by her husband in the space of a single afternoon, she knows there is yet more trouble brewing. And when her son Monty returns from his gap year Down Under it's only too clear what, or who, that trouble is. Then the plan to turn her crumbling home into a tea room hits a snag, the macram? at her sister's house starts to seriously unravel, and why is her doctor leaving so many messages? Enter Will, a mysterious handyman with a secret stash of chocolate truffles, and soon life - with all its hiccups - is just her cup of tea. Views: 92
A triumph of the imagination and a masterpiece of modern storytelling, Cloudsplitter is narrated by the enigmatic Owen Brown, last surviving son of America's most famous and still controversial political terrorist and martyr, John Brown. Deeply researched, brilliantly plotted, and peopled with a cast of unforgettable characters both historical and wholly invented, Cloudsplitter is dazzling in its re-creation of the political and social landscape of our history during the years before the Civil War, when slavery was tearing the country apart. But within this broader scope, Russell Banks has given us a riveting, suspenseful, heartbreaking narrative filled with intimate scenes of domestic life, of violence and action in battle, of romance and familial life and death that make the reader feel in astonishing ways what it is like to be alive in that time.Amazon.com ReviewThe cover of Russell Banks's mountain-sized novel Cloudsplitter features an actual photo of Owen Brown, the son of John Brown--the hero of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" whose terrorist band murdered proponents of slavery in Kansas and attacked Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in 1859 on what he considered direct orders from God, helping spark the Civil War. A deeply researched but fictionalized Owen narrates this remarkably realistic and ambitious novel by the already distinguished author of The Sweet Hereafter. Owen is an atheist, but he is as haunted and dominated by his father, John Brown, as John was haunted by an angry God who demanded human sacrifice to stop the abomination of slavery. Cloudsplitter takes you along on John Brown's journey--as period-perfect as that of the Civil War deserter in Cold Mountain--from Brown's cabin facing the great Adirondack mountain (called "the Cloudsplitter" by the Indians) amid an abolitionist settlement the blacks there call "Timbuctoo," to the various perilous stops of the Underground Railroad spiriting slaves out of the South, and finally to the killings in Bloody Kansas and the Harpers Ferry revolt. We meet some great names--Frederick Douglass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and a (fictional) lover of Nathaniel Hawthorne--but the vast book keeps a tight focus on the aged Owen's obsessive recollections of his pa's crusade and the emotional shackles John clamped on his own family. Banks, a white author, has tackled the topic of race as impressively as Toni Morrison in novels such as Continental Drift. What makes Cloudsplitter a departure for him is its style and scope. He is noted as an exceptionally thorough chronicler of America today in rigorously detailed realist fiction (he championed Snow Falling on Cedars). Banks spent half a decade researching Cloudsplitter, and he renounces the conventional magic of his poetical prose style for a voice steeped in the King James Bible and the stately cadences of 19th-century political rhetoric. The tone is closer to Ken Burns's tragic, elegiac The Civil War than to the recent crazy-quilt modernist novel about John Brown, Raising Holy Hell. A fan of Banks's more cut-to-the-chase, Hollywood-hot modern style may get impatient, but such readers can turn to, say, Gore Vidal's recently reissued Lincoln, which peeks into the Great Emancipator's head with a modern's cynical wit. Banks's narrator is poetical and witty at times--Owen notes, "The outrage felt by whites [over slavery] was mostly spent on stoking their own righteousness and warming themselves before its fire." Yet in the main, Banks writes in the "elaborately plainspoken" manner of the Browns, restricting himself to a sober style dictated by the historical subject. Besides, John Brown's head resembles the stone tablets of Moses. You do not penetrate him, and you can't declare him mad or sane, good or evil. You read, struggling to locate the words emanating from some strange place between history, heaven, and hell. From Library JournalAt first glance, aside from the setting, this massive novelized life of Abolitionist John Brown, told from the viewpoint of one of his sons, has nothing in common with Banks's book of outlaw excess, Rule of the Bone (HarperCollins, 1995). Yet both deal with single-mindedness, rebellion, and codes?except that Brown's versions of these are more honorable (he would have agreed with Dylan that "to live outside the law you must be honest"). This book has all the stark beauty of the Adirondacks setting and of Brown's religion, and the elderly, reclusive narrator's coming to terms with himself and his father is an achievement in its own right. Besides, like the works of Thomas Mallon and Thomas Gifford, this is not just a fine novel (and a wonderfully structured one at that) but a way to participate in history. Recommended, without hyperbole, for all collections.-?Robert E. Brown, Onondaga Cty. P.L., Oswego, N.Y.Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. Views: 92
Bestselling author Cathy Glass returns with her first novel. The Girl in the Mirror is a moving and gripping story of a young woman who tries to piece together her past and uncovers a dreadful family secret that has been buried and forgotten. When Mandy learns her much-loved Grandpa is dying, she is devasted and returns to the house where she spent so many wonderful summers as a child. But the childhood visits ended abruptly and those happy days are now long gone. Having lost touch with the rest of her family, Mandy returns as a virtual stranger to her aunt's house to nurse her grandfather. Mandy hardly recognises the house that she loved so much as a child and it is almost as though her mind has blanked it out. But as certain memories come back to her, Mandy begins to piece together the events that brought a sudden end to her visits that fateful summer. What she discovers is so painful and shocking that she understands why it was buried and never spoken of by the family for all... Views: 92
This is the second volume of classic true murder stories from the files and pen of world renowned true crime writer Alan Hynd (1903 - 1974). So get ready for another deliciously dark sampling of some of the most fascinating true murder cases of the first half of the 20th Century. These stories, the SECOND of three short collections, are unified by a single theme: they all involve physicians. And not for the autopsy, but as perpetrators or accused perpetrators. You may never see your family care giver again in the same light. Told in the characteristic wry, anecdotal reportorial style that made Alan Hynd famous in his day (two wartime best sellers in 1943, contributions to The Reader's Digest, Colliers, Coronet, The Saturday Evening Post, True, Liberty, The American Mercury and almost every true detective magazine in print) these tales will have you cringing one minute, laughing the next, and gasping in shock a moment later. Truly, no one could make up classics like these. Take for example, the case of the story of the chiropractor who dismembered one special patient, the notorious Dr. Petiot during World War Two, who promised people a trip out the country and possibly even farther, and the Great Swope poison case, where a man's in-laws just couldn't wait for their inheritance. As a bonus, consider "Pretty: Louie Amberg, the Brooklyn, N.Y., psychopath of the 1920s and '30s, as well as an unusual couple in Southern California kept the neighbors up at night --- and gossiping. Pulp non-fiction? Maybe. True crime is always more macabre than any novelist could imagine. So sit back and enjoy these forays into some of the darkest aspects of human nature. (With illustrations)** Views: 92
