Sociable Jimmy

prose; fiction
Views: 13

Glory O'Brien's History of the Future

In this masterpiece about freedom, feminism, and destiny, Printz Honor author A.S. King tells the epic story of a girl coping with devastating loss at long last—a girl who has no idea that the future needs her, and that the present needs her even more.Graduating from high school is a time of limitless possibilities—but not for Glory, who has no plan for what's next. Her mother committed suicide when Glory was only four years old, and she's never stopped wondering if she will eventually go the same way...until a transformative night when she begins to experience an astonishing new power to see a person's infinite past and future. From ancient ancestors to many generations forward, Glory is bombarded with visions—and what she sees ahead of her is terrifying: A tyrannical new leader raises an army. Women's rights disappear. A violent second civil war breaks out. And young girls vanish daily, sold off or interned in camps. Glory makes it her mission to...
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Bone Meal Broth

The world is full of horrors both real and imagined. Bone Meal Broth adds a few more. The nine stories in this collection vary in style and content, but all of them strive to unsettle. Inside Bone Meal Broth you'll meet a P.I. who works the dark streets of a post-biological-cataclysm New Orleans, a sleazy glamor photographer with a pest problem, and a misanthrope who's just made the most important (and deadly) purchase of his life. And those are the heroes. You'll visit the grotesque inhabitants of America's backwoods and shrink from the quiet terrors of suburbia. No matter your dark preference: a cup of Bone Meal Broth will hit the spot.
Views: 13
Views: 13

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

David Foster Wallace has made an art of taking readers into places no other writer ever gets near. In the pages of his novels INFINITE JEST and THE BROOM OF THE SYSTEM and the collections GIRL WITH CURIOUS HAIR and A SUPPOSEDLY FUN THING I'LL NEVER DO AGAIN, he had created as unique a voice and vies as any writer at work today, rendering a dazzling array of interior states with delicious insight and humor. In this new collection, the author extends his range and craft in twenty-two stories that intertwine hilarity with an escalating disquiet to create almos unbearable tensions. Three stories venture inside minds and landscapes that are at once recognizable and utterly strange: a boy paralyzed by fear atop a high diving board ("Forever Overhead"), a poet lounging contented beside his pool ("Death Is Not the End"), a young couple experiencing sexual uncertainties ("Adult World"), a depressed woman soliciting comfort from her threadbare support network ("The Depressed Person", chosen for Prize Stories 1999: The O. Henry Awards). The series of stories from which the book takes its title is a tour de force sequence of imagined interviews with men on the subject of their relations with women. These portraits of men at thier most self-justifying, loquacious, and benighted explore poignantly and hilariously the agonies of sexual connection. BRIEF INTERVIEWS WITH HIDEOUS MEN gives us men and women, celebrity and bitter loneliness, sexual posturing and naked honesty, erudition and apeman babble - a world whose emotional complexity and outright comedy closely resemble our own. In these remarkable stories, David Foster Wallace reaffirms his reputation a a "passionate and deeply serious wrtier" (San Francisco Chronicle) who again expands our ideas of the pleasures of fiction can afford.
Views: 13