A Sudanese writer begins to suspect that one of his most idiosyncratic characters from a recent novel resembles—in an uncanny, terrifying way—a real person he has never met. Since he condemned this character to an untimely death in the novel, should he attempt to save this real man from a similar fate?Set in both sides of Khartoum—the bustling capital city and the neglected, poverty-stricken underbelly—this is a novel of unreliable narrators, of insane asylums and of the (dubious?) relationship between imagination and reality. Views: 44
[b]The Under Dogs[/b] is the first novel of the Madame Rosika Storey detective series (she had already appeared in short story form); it first appeared as a six-part serial in [i]Argosy[/i], Jan 3 to Feb 7, 1925. There are distinct fingerprints of Frank Packard's 1914 novel [i]Jimmie Dale[/i], although the criminals are both more believable and less vicious in Footner's variation on a theme.
Robert Sampson, in Yesterday's Faces: The Solvers, provides several pages of background on Madame Storey. For this novel he writes: "Matters begin with violence. A girl, promising sensational revelations, is on her way to Madame Storey's office. Before she arrives there, she is clubbed down and kidnapped. Attempting to search out the girl, Rosika and Bella (Storey's secretary cum companion — who is horrified by the idea) move into the underworld. The cool, high-fashion Rosika suddenly shows a genius for disguise and an ability to shine in low company, down among the East-side gin mills. Her investigation gradually narrows to a house on Varick Street, populated by very hard cases, male and female. There are dead men under the basement floor, a chained prisoner in the attic, and a reluctant gang of crooks being blackmailed to work the will of a master mind, dimly seen." Views: 37
Winner of The 1963 National Book Award for Fiction.The hero of J.F. Powers’s comic masterpiece is Father Urban, a man of the cloth who is also a man of the world. Charming, with an expansive vision of the spiritual life and a high tolerance for moral ambiguity, Urban enjoys a national reputation as a speaker on the religious circuit and has big plans for the future. But then the provincial head of his dowdy religious order banishes him to a retreat house in the Minnesota hinterlands. Father Urban soon bounces back, carrying God’s word with undaunted enthusiasm through the golf courses, fishing lodges, and backyard barbecues of his new turf. Yet even as he triumphs his tribulations mount, and in the end his greatest success proves a setback from which he cannot recover.First published in 1962, Morte D’Urban has been praised by writers as various as Gore Vidal, William Gass, Mary Gordon, and Philip Roth. This beautifully observed, often hilarious tale of a most unlikely Knight of Faith is among the finest achievements of an author whose singular vision assures him a permanent place in American literature. Views: 36
The town of New Eden, peopled with hereditary oddities, has arrived at its last days. As two near-centenarian citizens prepare for their annual birthday tea, a third vows to interrupt the proceedings with a bold declaration. The Remnants cartwheels rambunctiously through the lives of wood-splitters, garment-menders, and chervil farmers, while exposing an electrical undercurrent of secrets, taboos, and unfulfilled longings. With his signature wit and wordplay, Robert Hill delivers a bittersweet gut-buster of an elegy to the collective memory of a community. Views: 36
How to Think is a contrarian treatise on why we're not as good at thinking as we assume - but how recovering this lost art can rescue our inner lives from the chaos of modern life.Most of us don't want to think, writes the American essayist Alan Jacobs. Thinking is trouble. It can force us out of familiar, comforting habits, and it can complicate our relationships with like-minded friends. Finally, thinking is slow, and that's a problem when our habits of consuming information (mostly online) leave us lost in the echo chamber of social media, where speed and factionalism trump accuracy and nuance.In this clever, witty book, Jacobs diagnoses the many forces that prevent thought - forces that have only worsened in the age of Twitter, such as "alternative facts," and information overload. He also dispels the many myths we hold about what it means to think well. (For example: it's impossible to "think for yourself.")Drawing on sources as far-flung... Views: 34
Angelica Garnett may truly be called a child of Bloomsbury. Her Aunt was Virginia Woolf, her mother Vanessa Bell, and her father Duncan Grant, though for many years Angelica believed herself, naturally enough, the daughter of Vanessa's husband Clive. Her childhood homes, Charleston in Sussex and Gordon Square in London, were both centres of Bloomsbury activity, and she grew up surrounded by the most talked-about writers and artists of the day - Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry, the Stracheys, Maynard Keynes, David Garnett (whom she later married), and many others. But Deceived with Kindness is also a record of a young girl's particular struggle to achieve independence from that extraordinary and intense milieu as a mature and independent woman. With an honesty that is by degrees agonising and uplifting, the author creates a vibrant, poignant picture of her mother, Vanessa Bell, of her own emergent individuality, and of the Bloomsbury... Views: 33
Madame Rosika Storey is a detective living near Gramercy Park, NY, created in the mid-1920s by Canadian born Hulbert Footner. Storey's secretary, companion and gushing admirer, Bella Brickley narrates through five novels and thirty short stories as her hero solves crimes and straightens out people's problems. The Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection calls her, "a stunningly beautiful young woman who describes herself as 'a practical psychologist--specializing in the feminine."
Mike Grost wrote: "Hulbert Footner's tales of Madame Rosika Storey have a period charm. They tend not to be overwhelmingly brilliant as puzzle plots. Footner's tales, from the 1920's and 30's seem oddly old-fashioned for their era. His detective technique would have seemed familiar to Émile Gaboriau in the 1860's: footprints, rooms searched for hidden clues, an obvious suspect and a hidden suspect, mild sorts of financial skullduggery lurking in the background. Footner was good at describing every sort of romantic attraction. He was alert to the emotional feelings of his characters. His characters are oddly, rawly sexual for their eras: one is especially startled by the gigolos in "Wolves of Monte Carlo", but Footner liked to include really handsome, seductive young men in many of his tales. Footner is perhaps a bit influenced by the Jazz Age tradition of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and its emphasis on both romance and sexuality. Madame Rosika in Madame Storey is somewhat unusual as a great detective of the era who happens to be a woman. She works as a paid professional, uses her brains, is universally respected for her skill, and basically plays the same role in her world that Hercule Poirot does in his." Views: 22
It's December and there is one foot of snow. Paul, the narrator, is driving east to the seaside in the imaginary company of his son, Euan, whose sixth birthday this would have been. As he drives, and later as he wanders the coast, Paul assembles in detail the fragments of a life that seemed to have ended with Euan's. In this beautifully modulated, heart-rending novel, Andrew Cowan fathoms the relationship between a parent and child, as seen through the eyes of a man struggling to come to terms with his life and losses as both father and son. All the more powerful for its delicacy and restraint, this is a novel that resonates in the mind long after the last page. Views: 22
Three savage murders have occured in the parish, two at the hands of an assassin and one victims identity and death still a mystery. Could the deaths be related to one of Brother Athelstan's parishioners, accused of multiple murders in "the field of blood"? Views: 21
It is 1953, a heat wave is sweeping across America and the Grossmans - Ben, Addie and their two children - are moving their lives from the political heart of Washington DC to suburban Long Island. Benny was a successful lawyer in the Department of Justice, but all that has come tumbling down. With the McCarthy era of paranoia, persecution, and propaganda at its height, his past has come back to haunt him, forcing him to pack up his family and leave the capital behind. With their future uncertain, life in Long Island starts to open old wounds for Ben and Addie, both start to wonder if they were meant for more, whether their future might look different than they planned, and whether their marriage - their family - is worth fighting for . . . A Long Island Story is a portrait of a marriage in crisis, of a unique and fascinating period in US history and of a seemingly perfect family fighting their demons behind closed doors. Views: 21
