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In Union
By Raewyn Caisley. 2005
Twelve-year-old Christian Phillips doesn?t think he will make the junior rugby team. When his parents give him a pair of…
footy boots before the trial ? a gift from his late grandfather, a staunch Wallabies fan ? Christian is still not convinced. Shocked when he makes the team, and relegated to the wing, Christian soon realises his idea of teamwork is a little different from that of the coach and other boys. Christian spends most games waiting for a pass and decides conforming is easier than challenging the culture of the team. But when they have to face the brutal Scots team on their home turf, a new leader emerges ? From Raewyn Caisley, the acclaimed and established author of TOP MARKS, NOT CRICKET, HOT SHOT, TENNIS STAR, QUEEN?S CUBBY, FREE STYLE and GREAT LEAD, comes another book in the popular Junior Sports Series.Still Kicking
By Cheryl Critchley. 2006
Sam Scott is not your average 13-year-old girl. When Sam?s friends are off chasing boys, she?s on the local footy…
oval training for Richmond Juniors? upcoming matches. Her mother and father desperately want her to give up her obsession with football and get serious about law or medicine like her sister Kate. Sam is blitzing her junior Aussie Rules competition when two major disasters threaten to upset her season. First, she almost quits when the class snob calls her butch. Then, when she turns fourteen on the eve of the finals, red tape looks like forcing Sam out of the game she loves. Her battle to play makes her a public hero, but Sam soon realises that being a winner in the money-fuelled AFL world comes at a big price. From Cheryl Critchley, the author of UNSPOIL YOUR KIDS, ESCAPE THE PARENT TRAP, OUR FOOTY and REAL FANS VS BIG BUCKS, comes another book in the popular Junior Sports Series.Zone
By Charlotte Mandell, Brian Evenson, Mathias Énard. 2010
One of the truly original books of the decade--written as a single, hypnotic, propulsive, physically irresistible sentence--Zone tells the story…
of a French Intelligence agent on his way to the Vatican to sell a briefcase of secrets. Over the course of his train ride, he thinks back over his life and all the damage he's caused in this violent century.18% Gray
By Angela Rodel, Zachary Karabashliev. 2008
After Stella disappears, Zack sets off on a trip across America with his memories, a camera, and a duffle bag…
of dope. Through the lens of the old camera, he starts rediscovering himself by photographing an America we rarely see. His journey unleashes a series of erratic, hilarious, and life-threatening events interspersed with flashbacks to his relationship with Stella.Season of Gene
By Dallas Hudgens. 2007
Somewhere between incarceration and sainthood stands Joe Rice, a man who relishes peace, painkillers, and his Friday-night baseball league. When…
his shady business partner Gene dies rounding the bases, Joe knows this isn't going to be an ordinary season. Soon enough, a suburban ex-mobster, his entrepreneurial son, and a gun-toting minister have Tasered, maced and harassed Joe over the location of a three-million-dollar Babe Ruth baseball bat he doesn't know anything about. Joe just wants to save his car-detailing/ticker brokerage business from Gene's mountain of debt, crime and craziness. (Winning a game of Madden NFGL against his ex-girlfriend's twelve-year-old son would also be a relief. ) But first, he must confront the ghosts of his past - namely, his murdered uncle and his mentally unstable mother. He must also deal with the present, navigating the space between the two women he cares about. And finally, he must face the future, every man's least favorite obstacle. Dallas Hudgens, the acclaimed author ofDrive Like Hell, blends Guatemalan chicken, online pharmaceuticals, and unforgettable characters in a raucous but moving story of love and baseball. Season of Geneis a wild ride of a novel about a troubled man, the troubled women who love him and a legendary baseball bat that could either save their lives or get them killed.The Walk Home
By Rachel Seiffert. 2014
Stevie comes from a long line of people who have cut and run. Just like he has. Only he's not…
so sure he was right to go. He's been to London, taught himself to get by, and now he's working as a laborer not so far from his childhood home in Glasgow. But Stevie hasn't told his family--what's left of them--that he's back. Not yet. He's also not far from his uncle Eric, another one who left--for love this time. Stevie's toughened himself up against that emotion. And as for his mother, Lindsey . . . well, she ran her whole life. From her father and Ireland, from her husband, and eventually from Stevie, too. Moving between Stevie's contemporary Glaswegian life and the story of his parents when they were young, The Walk Home is a powerful novel about the risk of love, and the madness and betrayals that can split a family. Without your past, who are you? Where does it leave you when you go against your family, turn your back on your home; when you defy the world you grew up in? If you cut your ties, will you cut yourself adrift? Yearning to belong exerts a powerful draw, and Stevie knows there are still people waiting for him to walk home. An extraordinarily deft and humane writer, Rachel Seiffert tells us the truth about love and about hope.Sammy Wong, All-American
By Charley Rosen. 2014
Sammy Wong, All-American tells the tale of a very talented Asian basketball player's rise and stumble in the all-American sport…
of basketball--among the most international of team sports, yet one where until very recently Asians were completely unrepresented. The novel unwinds in spectacular fashion. On his high school, college, and professional teams, Sammy isn't given much of a chance. Then when he does get into games, he turns out to be the kind of player who can turn a losing team into a winning one. Wong's career turns on chance opportunities and unexpected twists as much as on talent, persistence and hard work. There are great scenes describing pivotal plays on the hardwood floor as only Charley Rosen can. Like all Rosen's novels, this is about more than basketball. Sammy Wong, All-American is a book about identity in multi-ethnic American culture and the cost of innocence in the modern world. Sammy Wong, All-American will delight basketball fans and fiction readers alike, a sports novel that delivers on multiple levels.Billy Boy
By Bud Shrake. 2001
Not since Larry McMurtry's The Last Picture Show has a novelist captured the poignant contradictions of young manhood in the…
American West the way Bud Shrake does in Billy Boy. And no novel has ever combined history, spirituality and golf into so potent a triumph of the human spirit. There are tough times ahead for sixteen-year-old Billy. He's just come to Fort Worth with his father, Troy, after the death of his mother back in Albuquerque. Troy's drinking and gambling will leave them all but penniless, and he'll soon move on and abandon Billy in this strange town to fend for himself. With only a vague idea of how he's going to live, Billy heads over to Colonial Country Club, where he hopes he can get work as a caddie and where he just might see his hero, Ben Hogan. What he finds there, under the watchful eye of his guardian spirit, teaches him unforgettable lessons about golf, life, love and honor. In Billy Boy, longtime novelist and screenwriter Bud Shrake takes us back to the early 1950s, in a story thick with the Texas dust. Hardscrabble Billy, tough as he thinks he is and smarter than he knows, makes a place for himself behind the walls of privilege at Colonial. He first draws the approval, then the ire, of the club's most eccentric millionaire member, while his looks and manner draw the attention of the millionaire's beautiful granddaughter -- to the displeasure of her boyfriend, the club champion. Billy survives a fierce initiation and a dreadful scene with his drunken father -- but most important, he comes in contact with two of the greatest figures in the history of golf in Texas, Ben Hogan and John Bredemus, each of whom takes Billy under his wing for different reasons and with different results. Shrake skillfully weaves these historical figures and his richly drawn characters into the fabric of the town and the tenor of the time. Billy must face down his fears and doubts, and he does so in a climactic confrontation that combines the yearnings of youth with the redemption of the spirit. Billy Boy is an unforgettable novel of coming of age in a time and a place filled with mythic echoes and frontier dreams.War, So Much War
By Martha Tennent, Mercè Rodoreda, Maruxa Relaño. 2015
We first meet its young protagonist, Adrià Guinart, as he is leaving Barcelona out of boredom and a thirst for…
freedom, embarking on a long journey through the backwaters of a rural land that one can only suppose is Catalonia, accompanied by the interminable, distant rumblings of an indefinable war. In vignette-like chapters and with a narrative style imbued with the fantastic, Guinart meets with numerous adventures and peculiar characters who offer him a composite, if surrealistic, view of an impoverished, war-ravaged society and shape his perception of his place in the world.As in Rodoreda's Death in Spring, nature and death play an fundamental role in a narrative that often takes on a phantasmagoric quality and seems to be a meditation on the consequences of moral degradation and the inescapable presence of evil.Mercè Rodoreda (1908-1983) is widely regarded as the most important Catalan writer of the twentieth century. Exiled in France and Switzerland following the Spanish Civil War, Rodoreda began writing the novels and short stories--Twenty-Two Short Stories, The Time of the Doves, Camellia Street, Garden by the Sea--that would eventually make her internationally famous.The Hotel Years
By Joseph Roth, Michael Hofmann. 2015
The first overview of all Joseph Roth's journalism: traveling across a Europe in crisis, he declares,"I am a hotel citizen,…
a hotel patriot." The Hotel Years gathers sixty-four feuilletons: on hotels; pains and pleasures; personalities; and the deteriorating international situation of the 1930s. Never before translated into English, these pieces begin in Vienna just at the end of the First World War, and end in Paris near the outbreak of the Second World War. Roth, the great journalist of his day, needed journalism to survive: in his six-volume collected works in German, there are three of fiction and three of journalism. Beginning in 1921, Roth wrote mostly for the liberal Frankfurter Zeitung who sent him on assignments throughout Germany - the inflation, the occupation, political assassinations - and abroad, to the USSR, Italy, Poland and Albania. And always: "I celebrate my return to lobby and chandelier, porter and chambermaid."Marion Jones
By Bill Gutman. 2000
Race for the record! At the Sydney Games, Marion Jones strove to become the first person ever to win five…
gold medals in track and field at a single Olympics, making headlines for simply believeing she could do it. Driven to succeed at a very early age, Marion won multiple titiles at the Junior National Championships and set a junior record in the 200 meters. A multisport athlete, she helped lead the University of North Carolina women's basketball team to a national championship during her freshman year and also competed in track and field, until an injury forced her to reevaluate her priorities. Refocused on her track career, Marion quickly became the woman to beat, racking up an impressive thirty-five wims of the thiry-six events she entred in 1998. And after another injury sidelined her hopes of winning four gold medal at the 1999 World Championships, marion fought back in the 2000 season and is once again dominating the field. Get the full story of this amazing runner's race for the record, from her childhood dreams of gold medals to her tough choice between two sports and her determined drive to become the fastest woman in the world.Abahn Sabana David
By Marguerite Duras, Kazim Ali. 2016
"Duras's language and writing shine like crystals."--The New Yorker"A spectacular success. . . . Duras is at the height of…
her powers."--Edmund WhiteAvailable for the first time in English, Abahn Sabana David is a late-career masterpiece from one of France's greatest writers.Late one evening, David and Sabana--members of a communist group--arrive at a country house where they meet Abahn, the man they've been sent to guard and eventually kill for his perceived transgressions. A fourth man arrives (also named Abahn), and throughout the night these four characters discuss existential ideas of understanding, capitalism, violence, revolution, and dogs, while a gun lurks in the background the entire time.Suspenseful and thought-provoking, Duras's novel calls to mind the plays of Samuel Beckett in the way it explores human existence and suffering in the confusing contemporary world.Marguerite Duras wrote dozens of plays, film scripts, and novels, including The Ravishing of Lol Stein, The Sea Wall, and Hiroshima, Mon Amour. She's most well-known for The Lover, which received the Goncourt Prize in 1984 and was made into a film in 1992. This is her third book to be published by Open Letter. Kazim Ali is a poet, essayist, and novelist, and has published a translation of Water's Footfall by Sohrab Sepehri in addition to co-translating Duras's L'Amour. He teaches at Oberlin College and the University of Southern Maine.The Physics of Sorrow
By Angela Rodel, Georgi Gospodinov. 2011
"Georgi Gospodinov wants to blow your mind--or maybe just provide the ultimate bathroom reader. . . . The formal playfulness…
suggests Kundera with A.D.D. and potty jokes."--Ed Park, The Village VoiceA finalist for both the Strega Europeo and Gregor von Rezzori awards (and winner of every Bulgarian honor possible), The Physics of Sorrow reaffirms Georgi Gospodinov's place as one of Europe's most inventive and daring writers.Using the myth of the Minotaur as its organizing image, the narrator of Gospodinov's long-awaited novel constructs a labyrinth of stories about his family, jumping from era to era and viewpoint to viewpoint, exploring the mindset and trappings of Eastern Europeans. Incredibly moving--such as with the story of his grandfather accidentally being left behind at a mill--and extraordinarily funny--see the section on the awfulness of the question "how are you?"--Physics is a book that you can inhabit, tracing connections, following the narrator down various "side passages," getting pleasantly lost in the various stories and empathizing with the sorrowful, misunderstood Minotaur at the center of it all.The Physics of Sorrow will appeal to fans of Dave Eggers, Tom McCarthy, and Dubravka Ugresic for its unique structure, humanitarian concerns, and stunning storytelling.Georgi Gospodinov's Natural Novel was published by Dalkey Archive Press in 2005 and was praised by the New Yorker, New York Times, and several other prestigious review outlets.Angela Rodel won a PEN Translation Fund Grant in 2010 for Georgi Tenev's short story collection. She is one of the most prolific translators of Bulgarian literature working today and received an NEA Fellowship for her translation of Gospodinov's The Physics of Sorrow.The Cyclist Conspiracy
By Randall A. Major, Svetislav Basara. 2008
Told through a series of "historical documents"--memoirs, illustrations, letters, philosophical treatises, blue prints, maps--the novel details the tale of a…
secret Brotherhood who meet in dreams, gain esoteric knowledge from contemplation of the bicycle, and seek to move in and out of history, manipulating events.The Contest
By James Hurley. 2013
"The only constant passion in my life was my love of fly fishing and all that went with it. I…
coveted the escape I could find sitting at my vise for hours, tying deceitful little flies. I loved to be in the world where trout lived--the rivers and mountains and forests and meadows, away from people and the demands and requirements that created stress in my life."Meet Benedict Salem, whose friends call him BS, a frustrated writer and teacher looking to find himself. Middle-aged and blocked creatively, his dreams are filled with those magical moments when the weather, the lay of the cast, the fly, and the water converge with the fish in one fluid arc of perfection. The desire to perpetuate these moments takes BS to a small town in Maine, home to the crossing house inn, behind which lies a tract of virtual wilderness, a clean-running river, and a bounty of large, smart, and mostly fearless trout.BS soon befriends the owner of the inn, Bill Cahill, and together they and a group of fellow anglers found the Samuel Tippett Fly Fishers club. They soon devise a fishing contest between them, but what starts out as a friendly game to determine the best trout fly to represent their new club, quickly descends into a bitter rivalry that threatens to overtake reason. Feelings and friendships are forgotten as a fight over rules and the hunger to win takes hold of the men.In a deftly interwoven tale that explores the camaraderie and sportsmanship among anglers, The Contest challenges the wisdom of chasing perfection, and instead, encourages the reader to revel in life's most important moments, however brief or passing.The House with the Stained-Glass Window (MacLehose Press Editions #7)
By Zanna Sloniowska, Antonia Lloyd Jones. 2015
"The House with the Stained-Glass Window is remarkable, a gripping, Lvivian evocation of a city and a family across a…
long and painful century, at once personal and political, a novel of life and survival across the ages" PHILIPPE SANDS, author of East West StreetIn 1989, Marianna, the beautiful star soprano at the Lviv opera, is shot dead in the street as she leads the Ukrainian citizens in their protest against Soviet power. Only eleven years old at the time, her daughter tells the story of their family before and after that critical moment - including, ten years later, her own passionate affair with an older, married man. Just like their home city of Lviv, which stands at the crossroads of nations and cultures, the women in this family have had turbulent lives, scarred by war and political turmoil, but also by their own inability to show each other their feelings. Lyrically told, this is the story of a young girl's emotional, sexual, artistic and political awakening as she matures under the influence of her relatives, her mother's former lover, her city and its fortunes.Translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-JonesThe Vampire of Ropraz
By Jacques Chessex, Donald Wilson. 1973
"Silky prose in this harrowing account of crime and punishment."--Kirkus Reviews "Using spare, effective prose, Chessex brilliantly renders both the…
inhospitable winter landscape of the mountains and the harshness of a society that makes monsters of its victims.'--London Review of Books"A superb novel, hard as a winter in these landscapes of dark forests, where an atmosphere of prejudice and violence envelops the reader."--L'Express"It's beautiful; it's pure, like a blue sky over a black forest. Giono without garlic and olives."--Le Point"Far from just telling us a simple story Chessex has had the intelligence to integrate a dose of poetry, of the aesthetics of sin, and of the metaphysics of the monster."--LireJacques Chessex, winner of the prestigious Goncourt prize, takes a true story and weaves it into a lyrical tale of fear and cruelty.1903, Ropraz, a small village near the Jura Mountains of Switzerland. On a howling December day, a lone walker discovers a recently opened tomb, the body of a young woman violated, her left hand cut off, genitals mutilated, and heart carved out. There is horror in the nearby villages: the return of atavistic superstitions and mutual suspicions. Then two more bodies are violated. A suspect must be found. Favez, a stableboy with bloodshot eyes, is arrested and placed in psychiatric care. He escapes, enlists in the Foreign Legion as the First World War begins, and is sent into battle in the trenches of the Somme.Jacques Chessex, born in 1934, won the Prix Goncourt, France's most prestigious literary prize for his novel A Father's Love. He is considered one of Switzerland's greatest living authors. He lives in Ropraz.Marta Oulie
By Sigrid Undset, Tiina Nunnally. 2014
"I have been unfaithful to my husband." Marta Oulie's opening line scandalized Norwegian readers in 1907. And yet, Sigrid Undset…
had a gift for depicting modern women "sympathetically but with merciless truthfulness," as the Swedish Academy noted in awarding her the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1928. At the time she was one of the youngest recipients and only the third woman so honored. It was Undset's honest story of a young woman's love life--"the immoral kind," as she herself bluntly put it--that made her first novel an instant sensation in Norway.Marta Oulie, written in the form of a diary, intimately documents the inner life of a young woman disappointed and constrained by the conventions of marriage as she longs for an all-consuming passion. Set in Kristiania (now Oslo) at the beginning of the twentieth century, Undset's book is an incomparable psychological portrait of a woman whose destiny is defined by the changing mores of her day--as she descends, inevitably, into an ever-darker reckoning. Remarkably, though Undset's other works have attracted generations of readers, Marta Oulie has never before appeared in English translation. Tiina Nunnally, whose award-winning translation of Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter captured the author's beautifully clear style, conveys the voice of Marta Oulie with all the stark poignancy of the original Norwegian.The Safe House: A Novel
By Laura Marris, Christophe Boltanski. 2017
In Paris’s exclusive Saint-Germain neighborhood is a mansion. In that mansion lives a family. Deep in that mansion. The Bolts…
are that family, and they have secrets. The Safe House tells their story. When the Nazis came, Étienne Boltanski divorced his wife and walked out the front door, never to be seen again during the war. So far as the outside world knew, the Jewish doctor had fled. The truth was that he had sneaked back to hide in a secret crawl space at the heart of the house. There he lived for the duration of the war. With the Liberation, Étienne finally emerged, but he and his family were changed forever—anxious, reclusive, yet proudly eccentric. Their lives were spent, amid Bohemian disarray and lingering wartime fears, in the mansion’s recesses or packed comically into the protective cocoon of a Fiat. That house (and its vehicular appendage) are at the heart of Christophe Boltanski’s ingeniously structured, lightly fictionalized account of his grandparents and their extended family. The novel unfolds room by room—each chapter opening with a floorplan— introducing us to the characters who occupy each room, including the narrator’s grandmother--a woman of “savage appetites”--and his uncle Christian, whose haunted artworks would one day make him famous. “The house was a palace,” Boltanski writes, “and they lived like hobos.” Rejecting convention as they’d rejected the outside world, the family never celebrated birthdays, or even marked the passage of time, living instead in permanent stasis, ever more closely bonded to the house itself. The Safe House was a literary sensation when published in France in 2015 and won the Prix de Prix, France’s most prestigious book prize. With hints of Oulipian playfulness and an atmosphere of dark humor, The Safe House is an unforgettable portrait of a self-imprisoned family.Vernon Subutex Two: Roman
By Frank Wynne, Virginie Despentes. 2018
Rock star Alexandre Bleach might be dead, but he has a secret. It's a secret that concerns several people, but…
the only person who can unlock it is Vernon Subutex, former record shop proprietor turned homeless messiah and guru, last seen hallucinating and feverish on a bench in the parc des Buttes Chaumont. Acha wants to know the truth behind the death of her mother, Vodka Satana. And if she finds the bastards responsible, she wants to make them pay, whatever Celeste thinks of her plan.C?leste wants Acha to get a grip and stop hanging around with Subutex's gang of disciples. The Hyena wants to find the Bleach tapes. She wants to untangle her complicated feelings about Ana?s, her boss' assistant. And speaking of her boss, she does not want Laurent Dopalet to discover how badly she has double-crossed him.Laurent Dopalet wants the Hyena to find and destroy the Bleach tapes. He wants to forget he ever knew Vodka Satana. He wants people to stop graffitiing his apartment with ludicrous allegations. Above all, he wants people to understand: NONE OF THIS IS HIS FAULT.THE SEQUEL TO VERNON SUBUTEX 1, SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE 2018.Translated from the French by Frank Wynne