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When the Drumming Stops
By Steven Wishnia. 2012
Bass player and rapidly aging punk rocker Underend Vicodini is an unlikely hero. He loves New York City like nobody's…
business but does it still love him despite his lack of affluence and influence? His former band, The Gutter Astronomers, was riding high in the 1980s, releasing albums and touring across the country playing to packed nightclubs filled with eager fans, but the Great Recession finds the band members middle-aged and struggling not to drown in the seas of gentrification and disillusion. When lead singer Mickey gets an offer to reunite the band, he jumps at it. But can the old bandmates overcome their acrimonious break up? Can they get back into it without shredding their lives? Can Underend Vicodini find inner peace and, more importantly, a reasonably priced apartment below 14th Street or in Brooklyn? Steven Wishnia is a New York-based musician and journalist. Born on the Lower East Side, he grew up in Brooklyn, New England, Edinburgh, and Long Island. He has played in numerous bands, including the False Prophets, an eclectic punk group that recorded two albums released by Alternative Tentacles. After the False Prophets broke up in 1987, he earned an MA at New York University's School of Journalism, writing for failing newspapers before working for many years as news editor at High Times. Recipient of two New York City Independent Press Association awards, he currently works as a freelance writer and editor, most often for AlterNet.org and Junior Scholastic, and often performs musically with artist Mac McGill.The Uncannily Strange and Brief Life of Amedeo Modigliani
By Celia Hawkesworth, Velibor Colic. 1997
The life of the painter Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920) was chaotic and tragically brief. Consisting of a series of vignettes, mostly…
set in the painter's studio and peopled by his lover Jeanne Hébuterne (who ended her own life the day after Modigliani's death), the prostitutes who were his occasional models and several Bohemian visitors, the novel spans the last months of Modigliani's life, evoking the strange workings of the painter's troubled and often drug-fuelled mind and its expression in his paintings, ultimately succeeding in conveying something of the intense artistic life of Paris in the first decades of the twentieth century.Being Dead in South Carolina
By Jacob White. 2013
Stories of the modern South, of people who no longer recognize themselves, who have arrived, like the Sunbelt itself, to…
a strange day that seems disconnected from all the old days, the old stories. Yet it's on this day we must always answer for ourselves&emdash;right an overturned car, recover a brother's body, convince a son of our worth and his.Stray Decorum
By George Singleton. 2012
My dog Tapeworm Johnson needed legitimate veterinary attention. It had been two years since she received annual shots. I read…
somewhere that an older dog can overdose on all these vaccinations, and I have found--I share this information with every dog owner I meet--that if you keep your pet away from rabid foxes, raccoons, skunks, bats, and people whose eyes rotate crazy in their sockets, then the chances of your own dog foaming at the mouth diminishes drastically. I also believe that dogs don't need microchips imbedded beneath their shoulder blades if you keep the dog leashed or in the house, or with the truck windows rolled up when you drive around showing the dog farm animals living in pastures. I brought this up to Dr. Page one time, back four years earlier when Tapeworm Johnson was somewhere between eight and nine. Tapeworm showed up at my door one morning, her ribs as visible as anything you'd order down at Clem and Lyda's Barbecue Shack off Scenic Highway 11, her paw pads split open from, I assumed, days traveling from wherever her conscienceless owner dropped her off. Eleven stories, all previously published in journals like The Atlantic, The Oxford American, and The Georgia Review, in which George Singleton brings small-town South Carolina alive. Using everyday situations like a dog needing its annual vaccination and buckets of humorous observations, Singleton pokes and prods his readers into realizing we're all simply restless for a pat on the head.The Care and Feeding of Exotic Pets
By Diana Wagman. 2012
Winnie Parker, mother to an angst-ridden teenage daughter and ex-wife to a successful game show host who left her for…
a twenty-something contestant, begins a normal day in her hum-drum existence by dropping her car off at the repair shop. After accepting what she believes is a ride to pick up her rental car, Winnie realizes too late that she's been kidnapped.What follows is a riveting psychological game of cat and mouse set in the kidnapper's tropically heated house-kept that way for Cookie, a menacing seven-foot long Iguana headquartered in the kitchen. While desperately seeking to escape-which leads to several violent clashes with her increasingly unstable kidnapper-Winnie also tries to understand why she was taken captive. Is her kidnapper merely seeking a ransom or does he have something more sinister in mind? Does he know that Winnie's mother is an Oscar-winning actress? Or did he connect her with Jonathan, her famous ex-husband? When the truth reveals itself, Winnie is not only forced to fight for her life, but must also protect the lives of those she loves from the kidnapper's deranged master plan.An engrossing, darkly humorous, edge-of-your-seat story, The Care and Feeding of Exotic Pets explores the dynamic between kidnapper and kidnapped, bizarre reptile lore, and the absurdity of the celebrity lifestyle.Diana Wagman is the author of the novels Bump, Spontaneous-which won the PEN Center USA Award for Fiction-and Skin Deep. She is also a contributing writer to the Los Angeles Times.Chicago Stories: 40 Dramatic Fictions
By Rob Funderburk, Michael Czyzniejewski. 2012
For everyone who's always wondered what would happen if Roger Ebert had taken Oprah Winfrey to a critics' screening of…
Revenge of The Nerds for their second date..In Chicago Stories: 40 Dramatic Fictions by Michael Czyzniejewski, each story is told in the persona of a famous Chicagoan, from Mrs. O'Leary to Barack Obama.Illustrated by Chicago artist Rob FunderburkUna noche en el Orient Express
By Veronica Henry. 2013
Un recado misterioso una promesa hecha a un amigo moribundo una propuesta inesperada un secreto que…
se remonta toda una vida Seis historias cuyo rumbo cambiar en un extraordinario viaje de Londres a Venecia Mientras el tren marcha salen a la luz relaciones confesiones y revelaciones Cuando los pasajeros lleguen a su destino su vida no volver a ser la misma www sumadeletras comVertigo
By Michael Hulse, W. G. Sebald. 2001
The beguiling first novel by W. G. Sebald, one of the most enormously acclaimed European writers of our time. Vertigo,…
W. G. Sebald's first novel, never before translated into English, is perhaps his most amazing and certainly his most alarming. Sebald--the acknowledged master of memory's uncanniness--takes the painful pleasures of unknowability to new intensities in Vertigo. Here in their first flowering are the signature elements of Sebald's hugely acclaimed novels The Emigrants and The Rings of Saturn. An unnamed narrator, beset by nervous ailments, is again our guide on a hair-raising journey through the past and across Europe, amid restless literary ghosts--Kafka, Stendhal, Casanova. In four dizzying sections, the narrator plunges the reader into vertigo, into that "swimming of the head," as Webster's defines it: in other words, into that state so unsettling, so fascinating, and so "stunning and strange," as The New York Times Book Review declared about The Emigrants, that it is "like a dream you want to last forever."A Voyage to the Island of the Articoles
By Andre Maurois. 2012
"Dangerous, charming, and funny, this elegant miniature rediscovery will delight even brilliant minds."-Simon Van BooyAndré Maurois' novella, published in the…
same year as Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa, is about a couple who become shipwrecked on an uncharted South Seas Island and discover a race of literary zealots for whom every subject and feeling needs to be expressed as a form of literary art. As explained by Alberto Manguel, "An Articole will publish not only his Intimate Journal, but also his Journal of My Intimate Journal; and his wife will publish My Husband's Journal of His Intimate Journal."Any Deadly Thing
By Roy Kesey. 2013
Following the critical success of his debut collection, All Over, and of his debut novel, Pacazo, Roy Kesey now brings…
us a new gathering of short stories, Any Deadly Thing. These stories first appeared in magazines including McSweeney's, Subtropics, Ninth Letter and American Short Fiction, and have been widely anthologized; among them are winners of a Pushcart Prize special mention, an Honorable Mention in The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, and The Missouri Review's Jeffrey E. Smith Editors' Prize in Fiction. With story locales ranging across the Americas to Europe and Asia, Kesey once again makes the full strange world his stage. "Perfect, masterful portraits of an international cross-section of wise, broken souls--hopeful, brutal, funny as hell, and heart-crushing, every last one." -Elizabeth Crane, author of We Only Know So Much "Roy Kesey is one of my favorite contemporary writers, and Any Deadly Thing is another triumph. These stories, reminiscent of William Gass in the remarkable way they combine a virtuoso playfulness and wit with an atmosphere of grimness and grief and heartbreak, range the world over for their brilliantly realized locales, but they share a deeper setting in what Gass calls 'the only holiness we have,' human consciousness. Kesey demonstrates once again that he is a spectacularly deft and empathetic priest of that creed, which is the only one for me." -Michael Griffith, author of TrophyThe Legend's Daughter
By David Kranes. 2013
A 15 Bytes 2014 Book Award Winner"In this exceptional collection of stories set mostly in Idaho in the deep backwoods…
along river banks and lonely county roads, Kranes' characters are all thrown out of their comfort zones. And so is the reader. Richly drawn and complex, these stories challenge the intellect. Kranes has managed to somehow dam the river of souls these stories possess. They do not lie still, however, between the covers but rather spin in far-reaching whirlpools of genuine humanity and mortality."-15 Bytes"There's something to be said about a writer whose style is easily recognized, whose voice stands out, whose stories are readily identified. What's remarkable about David Kranes's writing and these stories, though, is that each story stands out on its own merit, while every story is well crafted and conceived. Nothing one-dimensional about his people, nothing one dimensional about his prose, either."-ForeWord Reviews"From rainbow trout jumping in the Salmon River to watering holes on the edge of McCall Lake, each of the ten stories in author and playwright David Kranes's The Legend's Daughter transports the reader to the wilderness of Eastern Idaho. While Kranes renders a common setting in each story, the collection is not simply a detailed portrait of Idaho, but an examination of the lives of restless people seeking to escape from their lives and find peace."-ZYZZYVA"The Legend's Daughter is a story collection of real people struggling with identity, with love, with time, rooted in the rugged and indifferent beauty of Idaho where each character finds his or her mirror in water, in stone, in place. David Kranes shows how our tenacious love of life can transform any situation, large or small, into alchemy. We are all living inside these raw and well-drawn pages."-Terry Tempest Williams, author of When Women Were Birds"These Idaho stories are vintage David Kranes. He, more than any other writer, is the one whose work spurs me to reconsider what fiction can do. He uses language like a knife and the worlds in his stories come off the page at me. We haven't seen this Idaho before. I'm thrilled to have these stories, every one of them provocative, riveting, and robust."-Ron Carlson, author of The Signal"In these times of disconnection, David Kranes lassoes us with the delicate tether of his multiple gifts and brings us home . . . a storyteller and an elegant craftsman."-Mary Sojourner"David Kranes has given us ten stories, entirely various, often splendid, sometimes hilarious or heartbreaking."-William Kittredge, author of The Willow FieldGrind
By Mark Maynard. 2012
Convicts round up wild mustangs, a schizophrenic homeless man wins the jackpot and disappears, a truck driver with a child's…
mind spends his last hours in the embrace of a prostitute's photos-disparate and vivid, Mark Maynard's characters intersect in the new wild west of Reno, Nevada."Throughout the volume's eight tenuously linked tales, lives and fortune are lost, and the city of Reno emerges as a locus of shattered souls. Maynard's debut collection bursts with idiosyncratic characters...packs a strong emotional punch...is strangely entertaining."-Publishers Weekly"In Grind, Maynard reveals a world the Nevada tourism board would rather you didn't see...A debut collection of stories that perfectly captures the seediness, desperation and sense of loss permeating the hot desert world of Reno."-Shelf Awareness"Mark Maynard's Reno is so sleazily appealing, so filled with convict cowboys, wild horses, racing pilots, truckers, snow bums, eco-terrorists, tattoo conventions, pawnshops and jackpots that you emerge from reading Grind dazed by this author's empathy for neglected quarters of humanity. You feel gritty all over-and more alive."-Carolyn Cooke, author of Daughters of the Revolution"The characters in these stories are as beautiful and broken as the desert itself. Mark Maynard explores the stony truths of lost lives with an unflinching eye for detail, an insider's sense of the place and its people, and an honest compassion. The heartbreaks here are real, as are the moments of uncommon grace and hard-won redemption."-Kim Barnes, author of In the Kingdom of Men"Mark Maynard's Grind is chock full of men and women who are desperate with want and full of spirit. Pawnbrokers. Truckers. Casino shills. Prison inmates. They're all here, and they're all gloriously alive. This is prime American fiction-tough, generous, and open-eyed."-Alyson Hagy, author of Boleto"Grind is exactly what I like in a locally based book. Plenty of those characters who make a visit to the environs of Reno both an exciting potential and an illicit affair...This is a Northern Nevada book."-D. Brian Burghart, Reno News & ReviewGrowing Up Amish
By Richard Ammon. 1989
Anna and her family live on a farm, but they don't have tractors or electricity. The "old fashioned" clothing of…
men and women, boys and girls doesn't have zippers or buttons. Anna is Amish, and here is the story of what her life is like day to day. Anna and other Amish children attend their own school, they raise farm animals and do farm chores without modern technology. They wear their distinctive clothing every day and attend long church services every other Sunday. Anna's life is a full and satisfying one. She and her family work hard, but they play, too. There are picnics, excursions, a trip to buy a new horse, school parties, and sports like hockey, volleyball, skating, sledding, baseball, and fishing. There are indoor games, books to read, songs to sing, and good food to eat. Along with Anna's story, this book includes recipes, songs, poems, and games so that the reader will better understand and appreciate the Amish--a group of very special people who only accept from the modern world those things that do not interfere with their way of life.Amazing Escapees - A Short eBook
By Charles Margerison. 2011
There are many forms of escape, and many reasons for needing to do it. In psychological terms, it's the 'fight…
or flight' response. Some, like Harry Houdini, turned escape into a death defying form of entertainment, but for others, escape was the only way of fleeing a miscarriage of justice or the brutality of a concentration camp. Henri Charrière attempted to escape from a penal colony in French Guiana nine times and was finally successful in 1941. Find out what happened! Mary Bryant was one of the first successful escapees from the fledgling Australian penal colony. Discover her amazing story. Hear about Rudolph Vrba's incredible escape from the Auschwitz concentration camp and his subsequent attempts to alert authorities about the atrocities there. Who can forget Bram van der Stok, the most decorated aviator in Dutch history, and one of only three men to escape from the German POW camp Stalag Luft III in "the Great Escape" of 1943. Discover more about the lives of these and others in this unique collection of eStories from the Amazing People Club. Each story comes to life through BioViews® which are short biographical narratives, similar to interviews. These inspirational stories provide a new way of learning about amazing people who made major contributions and changed our world.Daddy Played the Blues
By Michael Garland. 2017
*Notable Social Studies Trade Books Selection for Young People 2018* “I was six years old the day we left the…
farm in Mississippi,” remembers Cassie in this richly textured picture book. “Between the boll weevils, the floods, and the landlord, there was no way a family could scratch out a living there anymore.” Packing themselves into an old jalopy—with Daddy, Uncle Vern, and Mama in the front seat and Cassie and her two brothers in the back—they joined the Great Migration from the impoverished Deep South to Chicago, where there was work to be had in the stockyards. Across the kids’ laps lay Daddy’s prized possession, a six-string guitar. Daddy worked hard to put food on the table, but what he really loved was playing the blues. This evocative tale of the African-American odyssey in search of a better life is also a homage to the uniquely American music that developed from African music and American spirituals, work songs, and folk ballads. In the book’s backmatter, Garland relates how he first heard and fell in love with blues music, beginning a lifelong fandom. Portraits and thumbnail biographies of great blues musicians and landmark songs complete this tribute to the great American music and the yearnings that produced it. Fountas & Pinnell Level SVertigo
By Michael Hulse, W G Sebald. 2001
The beguiling first novel by W. G. Sebald, one of the most enormously acclaimed European writers of our time. Vertigo,…
W. G. Sebald's first novel, never before translated into English, is perhaps his most amazing and certainly his most alarming. Sebald--the acknowledged master of memory's uncanniness--takes the painful pleasures of unknowability to new intensities in Vertigo. Here in their first flowering are the signature elements of Sebald's hugely acclaimed novels The Emigrants and The Rings of Saturn. An unnamed narrator, beset by nervous ailments, is again our guide on a hair-raising journey through the past and across Europe, amid restless literary ghosts--Kafka, Stendhal, Casanova. In four dizzying sections, the narrator plunges the reader into vertigo, into that "swimming of the head," as Webster's defines it: in other words, into that state so unsettling, so fascinating, and so "stunning and strange," as The New York Times Book Review declared about The Emigrants, that it is "like a dream you want to last forever."Gonzo Girl
By Cheryl Della Pietra. 2015
"Long after the last drink is poured and the final gunshot fired, Cheryl Della Pietra's novel inspired by her time…
as Hunter S. Thompson's assistant will linger in your mind. This debut novel is raucous, page-turning, head-spinning, and side-splitting as it depicts a boss and mentor who is both devil and angel, and a young heroine who finds herself tested in the chaos that surrounds him. An intense story, Della Pietra's tale about writing, firearms, psychotropics, and the pros and cons of hot tubs will suck you in and take you on ride. Gonzo Girl is a ticket you want to buy." --Piper Kerman, author of Orange Is the New BlackAlley Russo is a recent college grad desperately trying to make it in the grueling world of New York publishing, but like so many who have come before her, she has no connections and has settled for an unpaid magazine internship while slinging drinks on Bleecker Street just to make ends meet. That's when she hears the infamous Walker Reade is looking for an assistant to replace the eight others who have recently quit. Hungry for a chance to get her manuscript onto the desk of an experienced editor, Alley jumps at the opportunity to help Reade finish his latest novel. After surviving an absurd three-day "trial period" involving a .44 magnum, purple-pyramid acid, violent verbal outbursts, brushes with fame and the law, a bevy of peacocks, and a whole lot of cocaine, Alley is invited to stay at the compound where Reade works. For months Alley attempts to coax the novel out of Walker page-by-page, all while battling his endless procrastination, vampiric schedule, Herculean substance abuse, mounting debt, and casual gunplay. But as the job begins to take a toll on her psyche, Alley realizes she's alone in the Colorado Rockies at the mercy of a drug-addicted literary icon who may never produce another novel--and her fate may already be sealed. A smart, rollicking ride told with heart, Gonzo Girl is a loving fictional portrait of a larger-than-life literary icon.Voy
By Gabi Mart nez. 2014
Literatura de viajes, nuevo periodismo, autoficción, parodia y metaliteratura en el nuevo libro de Gabi Martínez. «El convencimiento de estar…
donde debes y quieres es una de las grandes experiencias de la vida. Sentí que había llegado a un lugar que de alguna manera buscaba desde hacía mucho. Encontrar un lugar es bueno. Sí, es bueno.» Un joven periodista intenta localizar a Gabi Martínez, el escritor desaparecido en Nueva Zelanda cuando seguía la pista de un ave invisible tan real, o tan imaginaria, como las leyendas que la nombran. El reportero necesita entender qué motivos le llevaron a romper con su vida y desaparecer sin dejar rastro. Como hizo su propio padre, como ocurre con todos aquellos que no creen pertenecer a ningún lugar, los que se marchan mucho antes de emprender un viaje. Pero nunca existe una única versión de la historia. Por eso, la figura del viajero se va componiendo a medida que avanza la investigación, y las voces de su exmujer, alguno de sus amigos, varios guías de sus expediciones, compañeros de viaje o una de sus últimas amantes van perfilando al hombre en esencia, tan mezquino como espléndido, a medida que responden a las preguntas del periodista. No hay sólo una perspectiva, sino tantas como personas compartieron su vida. De la misma manera, Voy no es un único libro sino varios al tiempo. Es ficción, pero también literatura de viajes; es un relato de anhelos, pero también de desengaños; es comedia y a la vez drama. Una obra caleidoscópica que profundiza en el descubrimiento del yo a través de los otros, en la identidad como juego de espejos y en la utopía como final del viaje. Reseñas:«Desnudo literario integral que ve y sube la apuesta autoficcional de Coetzee en Verano.» Daniel Arjona, El Mundo «Un libro que se sale de lo común. Impecable e implacable. Un libro de búsquedas y sueños,de risas y quebrantos, de radical exploración personal a través del espejo que habitan los otros.» Tino Pertierra, La Nueva España «Deslumbrante (e impúdico) cruce entre el making of literario y la autobiografía. Imprescindible.» Jorge de Cominges, escritor «Gabi Martínez es un escritor de viajes introspectivo que encierra un pequeño Homero dentro mucho más revolucionario que en otros escritores. Ha sabido encontrar la manera de renovar la literatura viajera mediante enfoques inusuales, dejándose llevar por la misma osadía -y lucidez- que tuvo su precedente más claro y confeso: Bruce Chatwin, con quien comparte la capacidad de ruptura y de recreación. Literatura en vena.» Adolfo García Ortega, escritor, crítico y traductor, Club Cultura FNAC «Amplía el campo de acción del Verano de Coetzee (...) Me quito el sombrero: debe tenerse libertad y valentía para hacer un libro como éste. Da fuerza.» Mercè Ibarz, escritora «Martínez dista mucho de ser un escritor de viajes al uso y de manual (...). Podemos disfrutar de su originalidad, de un soberbio estilo de escritura y de muchas reflexiones sagaces de quien ha recorrido mundo y sabe de lo que habla. (...) Auténtico e intenso porque también en la vida, como demuestra Gabi en este libro, no debemos conformarnos con hacer turismo en los demás y en nosotros mismos.» Ángeles Prieto, La tormenta en un vaso «Una obra maestra.» La petita llibreriaPizza's Past
By Devorah Gurwitz. 2019
Discover which civilization made the first pizza. Was it the Egyptians, Babylonians, Greeks, or Romans? Also discover who made the…
first round, flat bread—considered to be the pizza we all eat today!Tren fantasma a la Estrella de Oriente
By Paul Theroux. 2008
«Theroux es el canon por el que todo escritor de viajes debe juzgarse.»Observer Hace treinta años, Paul Theroux partió de…
Londres en un viaje de ida y vuelta por Asia en tren. Aquel relato -El gran bazar del ferrocarril- se convirtió en punto de referencia y su nombre en el más célebre de entre los autores de libros de viaje de su generación. Theroux vuelve ahora sobre sus pasos, a través del oeste de Europa, la India y Asia, para desvelar la ola de cambios que ha barrido los continentes. Un largo viaje que nos transporta del laberinto de Estambul a las ruinas de Merv o al superpoblado Delhi, de los ashrams de Bangalore a las barridas marginales de Singapur, de los templos de Angkor a la renacida Saigón, de la Ciudad Prohibida de Hue al Barrio Viejo de Hanói, de un inmenso sex shop en Tokio a un balneario en Wakkanai, del parque de los Ciervos en Nara al gulag de Perm... Reseña:«Un libro maravilloso insuflado de la agudeza de la madurez, que consigue aquello que un libro de viajes no puede obviar: logra que el lector desee ponerse en camino.»Booklist