A book for people who like TV. Thirteen 'episodes' of political situation comedy, starring Elliot Vance, handsome millennial slacker and great-nephew of the former Secretary of State. Each episode takes 20-30 minutes to read. This one is Episode 1.It’s Scandal meets Seinfeld. A political comedy set in Washington, D.C.It’s a book for people who like TV. A serial novel structured like a television show, with 13 individual episodes that each also contribute to the ongoing story.In 2011, the Obama Administration embarrassed itself by mistaking Colorado for Wyoming on the map of a speaking tour in western states. Voila, the Fifty States Program!--fifty new federal patronage jobs, one for each state, all housed in cubicles at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building adjacent to the White House.The millennials in these jobs call each other by the name of their states, and none of them are exactly what you’d call on the ball. Wyoming--that’s our man Elliot Vance-- could qualify for the slacker Olympics. He’s the grand-nephew of former Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, but prior to being given a States job by his wealthy father he got kicked out of an English lit Ph.D. program for insisting on doing his dissertation on 1950s pulp author F. Bob Goddard. Elliot dates a WASP-American princess who’s pushing for marriage, and his two best friends are Delaware and Nebraska. His nemesis is Tara Travis, the slinky blonde Republican aide to Wyoming congressman Bull Wheeler.In Episode 1 Elliot is blackmailed by Tara into flying to Laramie to do some actual work. It’s the first time he’s ever been to The State of Wyoming. Views: 355
And then, just like that, a thought bubbles inside me. It's a beginning; a new beginning; my beginning. The beginning of the story I tell myself in order to survive.We choose to breathe, don't we?Twenty-one-year-old Olivia hears the world in colour, but her life is mottled grey. Estranged from her parents, and living with her grandfather who is drowning in sadness, Oli faces the reality of life beyond university alone.When she wakes on a boat with no recollection of how she got there, she accepts the help of two strangers who change the course of her future forever. With Mac and Maggie, Oli learns to navigate a life upon open ocean and the world flowers into colours she's never seen before.Four years later, Oli, fluent in the language of the sea, is the only woman among men on a yacht delivery from Noumea to Auckland. In the darkness below deck, she learns that at sea, no one can hear you scream.Moving to London, Oli's life at sea is buried. When... Views: 353
A frisky, feminine, funny, and profoundly genuine essay collection on relationships, sex, motherhood, and finding yourself, by the editor of New York Magazine's Sex Diaries.Alyssa Shelasky has a lot to tell you.In this hilarious and intimate essay collection, Alyssa navigates life as a wild-hearted woman and her thrilling career as a sex, relationship, and celebrity writer in New York City. From double-booking an interview with Sarah Jessica Parker and an abortion appointment and unsuccessfully quitting sex and men entirely to have a baby via an anonymous sperm donor, to hooking up with a hot musician while eight months pregnant and then finding her life partner but vowing to never get married, Alyssa's essays paint a deeply genuine, romantic, and uproarious portrait of a woman who craves both love and lust, and refuses to settle or sacrifice her fierce inner-spirit, sometimes to her own regret and detriment. And she's not afraid to give you every... Views: 352
An event happens on January 22 that changes the course of history forever. Two towns are destroyed, and there is one survivor, Pollock Drake, a 15 year old. He is taken into custody as a suspected terrorist. Another attack occurs during the interrogation. Drake escapes and fights to survive against a country that is after him while trying to kill what destroyed his home.An event happens on January 22 that changes the course of history forever. Two towns are destroyed, and there is one survivor, Pollock Drake, a 15 year old. He is taken into custody as a suspected terrorist. Another attack occurs during the interrogation. Drake escapes and fights to survive against a country that is after him while trying to kill what destroyed his home. Told in the curious narrative style of epistolary form. It takes information from different newspapers around the country, journal articles, "confidential presidential transcripts," and many more to tell a story about one man and how he affects the country around him. One question remains, though, what is the Dragon Cycle? Is it about a real dragon? Is this dragon even real? Is this dragon a person who belongs to a group called Dragon? Answers will be answered as we go on.Everything that is in this book is important to the plot of the book. That includes the date which is oddly written as ???3 for the year. Views: 351
This trilogy spanning World War II, based in part on Evelyn Waugh's own experiences as an army officer, is the author's surpassing achievement as a novelist. Its central character is Guy Crouchback, head of an ancient but decayed Catholic family, who at first discovers new purpose in the challenge to defend Christian values against Nazi barbarism, but then gradually finds the complexities and cruelties of war overwhelming. Though often somber, Sword of Honor is also a brilliant comedy, peopled by the fantastic figures so familiar from Waugh's early satires. The deepest pleasures these novels afford come from observing a great satiric writer employ his gifts with extraordinary subtlety, delicacy, and human feeling, for purposes that are ultimately anything but satiric. Sword of Honor comprises the three acclaimed novels Men at Arms, Officers and Gentlemen, and Unconditional Surrender. Views: 350
"A formidable mix of the personal and the political . . . The Way Things Were is a substantive contribution to new writing from the subcontinent." IndependentWhen Skanda's father Toby dies, estranged from Skanda's mother and from the India he once loved, it falls to Skanda to return his body to his birthplace. This is a journey that takes him halfway around the world and deep within three generations of his family, whose fractures, frailties and toxic legacies he has always sought to elude.Both an intimate portrait of a marriage and its aftershocks, and a panoramic vision of India's half-century - in which a rapacious new energy supplants an ineffectual elite - The Way Things Were is an epic novel about the pressures of history upon the present moment. It is also a meditation on the stories we tell and the stories we forget; their tenderness and violence in forging bonds and in breaking them apart. Set in modern Delhi and at flashpoints from... Views: 349
"A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses a moment of experience from which to look ahead..."
"This is a record of hate far more than of love," writes Maurice Bendrix in the opening passages of The End of the Affair, and it is a strange hate indeed that compels him to set down the retrospective account of his adulterous affair with Sarah Miles.
Now, a year after Sarah's death, Bendrix seeks to exorcise the persistence of his passion by retracing its course from obsessive love to love-hate. At first, he believes he hates Sarah and her husband, Henry. Yet as he delves deeper into his emotional outlook, Bendrix's hatred shifts to the God he feels has broken his life, but whose existence at last comes to recognize. Views: 348
A pair of lectures from one of the twentieth century’s most mesmerizing speakers
Lawrence Durrell was in his early twenties when, tired of the stiffness of London life, he took his family to live in Corfu. Interwar Greece, whose hard beds and mosquito swarms Durrell documented so tenderly in Prospero’s Cell, was no more. In the first of this pair of lectures, given during a 1970s visit to California, Durrell recalls those days, talking of family, poetry, and the joy of the islands as no other writer can.
When war came to the Mediterranean, Durrell was swept into diplomatic service, an adventure he recounts in his second lecture. Though a diplomat of the modern world, he served under men whose experience stretched back to the days before the telephone, when solutions for crises had to be devised by the ambassador, and not phoned in from London. These two lectures on long-vanished worlds are an elegant demonstration of the evocative power of Durrell’s unmatched storytelling. Views: 347
Garnet Bowen is a literary gent from Wales, author of one obscure book,
disconsolate husband, father and son-in-law. When he gets an offer that
requires travel to Portugal, he figures it can't be worse than London.
But it is."Kingsley Amis strikes again. Not only is he
funny--and he is very funny, as anyone who has read LUCKY JIM knows--his
very absurdities are profound." (B-O-T Editorial Review Board) Views: 345
A trucker lies dying. A soul goes riding. Someone sings amazing grace.As a man lays dying in a rickety shack in Alabama, his nephew's soul does a fact check on his most famous story and finds out it's true. Views: 345
This shockingly frank and irreverent memoir of a young woman's life with a heart transplant "will inspire and choke you up with tears and laughter" (Larry King). At twenty-four, Amy Silverstein was your typical type-A law student: smart, driven, and highly competitive. With a full course load and a budding romance, it seemed nothing could slow her down. Until her heart began to fail. With a grace and force reminiscent of Lucy Grealy's Autobiography of a Face or Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted, Amy chronicles her medical saga from the first misdiagnosis to her astonishing and ongoing recovery. Her memoir is made all the more dramatic by the deliriously romantic bedside courtship with her future husband, and her uncompromising desire to become a mother. Distrustful of her doctors and insistent in her refusal to be the "grateful heart patient" she is expected to be, Amy presents a patient's perspective that is truly eye-opening and... Views: 343
A madman is holding Vitoria hostage, killing its citizens in brutal ways and staging the bodies. The city's only hope is a brilliant detective struggling to battle his own demons.Inspector Unai López de Ayala, known as "Kraken," is charged with investigating a series of ritualistic murders. The killings are eerily similar to ones that terrorrized the citizens of Vitoria twenty years earlier. But back then, police were sure they had discovered the killer, a prestigious archaeologist who is currently in jail. Now Kraken must race to determine whether the killer had an accomplice or if the wrong man has been incarcerated for two decades. This fast-paced, unrelenting thriller weaves in and out of the mythology and legends of the Basque country as it hurtles to its shocking conclusion. Views: 342
Alice Taylor brings the reader with her on her 80th birthday year. Alice had a big birthday on the horizon, the village was about to celebrate many milestones, and she had just received the gift of a book focusing her on the art of living well. So she decided to write about her year as it unfolded, to keep a journal of the big events, and record the twists and turns normal life brings to all of us in just one year. But 2018 turned out to be far from normal, with storms, snow blizzards, blistering sun, severe drought and water shortages. She describes the challenges of all these dramatic weather changes. Alice began the year wondering how she would feel about reaching eighty. She was pleasantly surprised to discover that it was just another milestone on a journey that is still varied and interesting. Here she writes about these feelings, and the many pleasant and challenging events of her eightieth year. Views: 339
