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Popa Singer (CARAF Books)
By René Depestre. 2016
The latest novel by one of Haiti&’s most brilliant writers The most recent book by the renowned Haitian novelist, essayist,…
and poet René Depestre, Popa Singer is a semiautobiographical chronicle of Haiti in the late 1950s, the very moment when the country first came under decades of despotic rule. To celebrate her son&’s return home after years of exile, Dianira Fontoriol (aka &“Popa Singer&”)—an indomitable mother armed only with her sewing machine and her personal convictions—determines to resist in her own way the infamous Ubu King of the Tropics: François &“Papa Doc&” Duvalier. Depestre&’s novel tells the story of this at once intimate and epic struggle. Combining colorful fantasy and biting social satire, it is a deeply personal and singularly artistic take on an infamous chapter in Haitian history.The Players: A sweeping epic of friendship where all the world's a stage
By Deborah Pike. 1938
One hot summer, a group of university students gathers in an orchard to rehearse a play. Veronika is born for…
a life on the stage while Felix seizes his last chance for creative freedom. Sebastian woos Veronika, and Cassie longs for Sebastian. Josh and Gloria each carry a secret they are unable to share. Passion, rivalry and enduring connections will bind the Players across years and continents, long after the final curtain falls and they leave university behind. From Perth to Paris, Cambridge, London, Berlin and Dili the friends search for meaning in their careers and friendship, discover love and endure heartbreak.Carry Me Like Water: A Novel
By Benjamin Alire Sáenz. 1995
"Sentimental and ferocious, upsetting and tender, firmly magic-realist yet utterly modern. . . Sáenz is a writer with greatness in him." —San…
Diego Union TribuneWith Carry Me Like Water, Benjamin Alire Sáenz unfolds a beautiful story about hope and forgiveness, unexpected reunions, an expanded definition of family, and, ultimately, what happens when the disparate worlds of pain and privilege collide.Diego, a deaf-mute, is barely surviving on the border in El Paso, Texas. Diego's sister, Helen, who lives with her husband in the posh suburbs of San Francisco, long ago abandoned both her brother and her El Paso roots. Helen's best friend, Lizzie, a nurse in an AIDS ward, begins to uncover her own buried past after a mystical encounter with a patient.This immensely moving novel confronts divisions of race, gender, and class, fusing together the stories of people who come to recognize one another from former lives they didn't know existed— or that they tried to forget.A Dream of Wolves: A Novel
By Michael C. White. 2000
From the author of the critically acclaimed novels A Brother's Blood and The Blind Side of the Heart comes a…
brilliant tale of a decent man's struggle to choose between his past and his future, between the woman he once loved and the woman he now loves.Essential Poems (To Fall in Love With)
By Daisy Goodwin. 2003
Forget chocolate, exotic lingerie, or marriage counselors -- the only props you'll ever need, whether you are in love or…
out of it, are the poems in this book. There are verses here to console you when the phone doesn't ring or the divorce papers have been signed, and poems that celebrate the joy of being in love, from the first kiss to walking down the aisle (for the second time). These essential poems, which include never-before-anthologized works, will tell you the truth about love.Nobody, Somebody, Anybody: A Novel
By Kelly McClorey. 2021
“It's My Year of Rest and Relaxation, but with fewer pills and more boats.” —Entertainment WeeklyA moving and darkly comic debut…
novel about an anxious young woman who administers a self-made “placebo” treatment in a last-ditch attempt to rebuild her lifeAmy Hanley has a job as a maid for the summer, but on August 25, she will take the exam to become an EMT (third time’s the charm!) and finally move on with her life. In the meantime, she doesn’t mind scrubbing toilets immaculately clean or tucking the sheet corners just so. In fact, she tells herself that her work is a noble act of service to the rich guests at the yacht club.Amy’s profound isolation colors everything: her job, her aspirations, even her interactions with the woman at the deli counter. And as the date for the EMT exam comes closer, Amy’s anxiety ratchets up in a way that is both familiar and troubling. In desperation, she concocts a “placebo” program—a self-prescribed regimen for her confidence, devised to trick herself into succeeding.When her landlord, Gary, starts to invite her over for dinner—to practice his cooking skills as he awaits approval of his Ukrainian fiancé’s visa—Amy makes her first friend since her mother’s passing. Alongside this unexpected connection comes a surge of hopeful obsession that Amy knows she must reckon with before the summer’s end.Tender and laugh-out-loud funny, Nobody, Somebody, Anybody explores the shadowy corners of a young woman’s inner world of grief, delusion, and self-loathing, revealing the creeping loneliness of modern life and our endless search for connection. Kelly McClorey captures the hilarity and heartbreak of American ambition.The Three Button Trick and Other Stories
By Nicola Barker. 2018
Nicola Barker weaves humor and tragedy through this fresh and original collection, as her characters struggle to find love, independence,…
and fulfillment in this new addition to the Ecco Art of the Story seriesNicola Barker's collection of her nineteen most brilliant stories exemplifies her ability to create daring, witty, and dynamic characters, all their idiosyncracies intact. Barker's stories often use wordplay and humor to stretch the boundaries of metaphor and reality as the outrageously original plots unfold. Through her confident and clever style, these short stories sling Barker to the forefront of fiction writing, as she is reminiscent of Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, and Margaret Atwood.The collection begins with a smart tale of a teenage girl whose obsession with the size of her nose dangerously compromises her relationships with her friends and her family. "Inside Information" is a pun of a title, describing how the protagonist's unborn fetus is the only one able to reform his mother's compulsive shoplifting by pulling the ultimate prank. "G-String" and "Symbiosis: Class Cestoda" detail women who gain self-esteem, albeit through quirky methods, despite the cowardly men who try to suppress them. The title story, "Three Button Trick," is about a man who deliberately buttons his duffel coat incorrectly to attract sympathetic females. Carrie falls for this trick, and it takes twenty-one years, a curious friend, and an eighty-three-year-old widower for her to realize her mistake. Wesley is the protagonist of a three-part collection, "Blisters," "Braces," and "Mr. Lippy" who, traumatized by two unfortunate incidents as a young boy, is an eccentric obsessed with freedom and the sea.Barker skillfully intertwines humor with despair to stimulate any reader's interest; she taps into the psyches of her characters to create an authentic, original, and highly enjoyable read. The Three Button Trick and Other Stories is a resonant, audacious volume from a writer of immense talent and originality.Jane Austen: Blood Persuasion
By Janet Mullany. 2011
It is 1810, and the Damned are out of favor—banished from polite society. Jane Austen’s old undead friends have become…
new neighbors, raising hell in her tranquil village just in time to interrupt Jane’s work on what will be her masterpiece. Suddenly Jane’s niece is flirting dangerously with vampires, and a formerly respectable spinster friend has discovered the forbidden joys of intimate congress with the Damned (and is borrowing Jane’s precious silk stockings for her assignations). Writing is simply impossible now, with murderous creatures prowling the village’s once-peaceful lanes. And with the return of her vampire characteristics, a civil war looming between factions of the Damned, and a former lover who intends to spend eternity blaming her for his broken heart, Jane is facing a very busy year indeed.Gravity Is the Thing: A Novel
By Jaclyn Moriarty. 2019
One of Real Simple’s Best Books of the Year“I loved this book. . . . Funny, heartbreaking and clever with a mystery…
at its heart.” —Jojo Moyes“With an eye as keen for human idiosyncrasies as Miranda July’s, and a sense of humor as bright and surprising as Maria Semple’s, this is a novel of pure velocity.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)Twenty years ago, Abigail Sorenson’s brother Robert went missing one day before her sixteenth birthday, never to be seen again. That same year, she began receiving scattered chapters in the mail of a self-help manual, the Guidebook, whose anonymous author promised to make her life soar to heights beyond her wildest dreams.The Guidebook’s missives have remained a constant in Abi’s life—a befuddling yet oddly comforting voice through her family’s grief over her brother’s disappearance, a move across continents, the devastating dissolution of her marriage, and the new beginning as a single mother and café owner in Sydney.Now, two decades after receiving those first pages, Abi is invited to an all-expenses paid weekend retreat to learn “the truth” about the Guidebook. It’s an opportunity too intriguing to refuse. If Everything is Connected, then surely the twin mysteries of the Guidebook and a missing brother must be linked?What follows is completely the opposite of what Abi expected––but it will lead her on a journey of discovery that will change her life––and enchant readers. Gravity Is the Thing is a smart, unusual, wickedly funny novel about the search for happiness that will break your heart into a million pieces and put it back together, bigger and better than before.Green Girl: A Novel
By Kate Zambreno. 2014
With the fierce emotional and intellectual power of such classics as Jean Rhys's Good Morning, Midnight, Sylvia Plath's The Bell…
Jar, and Clarice Lispector's The Hour of the Star, Kate Zambreno's novel Green Girl is a provocative, sharply etched portrait of a young woman navigating the spectrum between anomie and epiphany.First published in 2011 in a small press edition, Green Girl was named one of the best books of the year by critics including Dennis Cooper and Roxane Gay. In Bookforum, James Greer called it "ambitious in a way few works of fiction are." This summer it is being republished in an all-new Harper Perennial trade paperback, significantly revised by the author, and including an extensive P.S. section including never before published outtakes, an interview with the author, and a new essay by Zambreno.Zambreno's heroine, Ruth, is a young American in London, kin to Jean Seberg gamines and contemporary celebutantes, by day spritzing perfume at the department store she calls Horrids, by night trying desperately to navigate a world colored by the unwanted gaze of others and the uncertainty of her own self-regard. Ruth, the green girl, joins the canon of young people existing in that important, frightening, and exhilarating period of drift and anxiety between youth and adulthood, and her story is told through the eyes of one of the most surprising and unforgettable narrators in recent fiction—a voice at once distanced and maternal, indulgent yet blackly funny. And the result is a piercing yet humane meditation on alienation, consumerism, the city, self-awareness, and desire, by a novelist who has been compared with Jean Rhys, Virginia Woolf, and Elfriede Jelinek.Suicide's Girlfriend: A Novella and Short Stories
By Elizabeth Evans. 2002
Elizabeth Evans traces the complex and often painful threads of human relationships in Suicide's Girlfriend, her most inspired work to…
date. In these richly textured stories, you'll meet:Oyekan, a confused young Nigerian student who wrestles with feelings his U.S. friends cannot understand.Marie, an adolescent who makes a carefully philosophized, end-of-the-rope stab at salvation for herself and her seven abused siblings.Jenny and Heather, two girls whose friendship has suffered from the distractions of adolescence and the cruelty of one moving on while the other must sit idly by and watch.A group of college boys, whose discovery of a dead body on the side of the road leaves one of them changed in ways he never thought possible.Elegant, acute, and engaging, Suicide's Girlfriend will introduce you to these characters and more, their stories, and an incredible new voice in fiction.Maggie-Now: A Novel
By Betty Smith. 1966
Betty Smith, the beloved author of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, weaves a riveting modern myth out of the experiences of…
her own life in this rediscovered classic.In Brooklyn's unforgiving urban jungle, Maggie Moore is torn between answering her own needs and catering to the desirous men who dominate her life. Confronted by her quarrelsome Irish immigrant father, the feckless lover who may become her husband, and others, Maggie must learn to navigate a cycle of loss, separation, and hope as she forges her own path toward happiness.With characteristic warmth, compelling insight, and easy, conversational prose, Maggie-Now poignantly illuminates one woman's struggles and successes as she grapples with timeless questions of desire, duty, self-sacrifice, and the quest for fulfillment. Maggie-Now is an unforgettable masterpiece from one of the twentieth century's greatest talents.Fauna
By Alissa York. 2010
Scotiabank Giller Prize-nominated author Alissa York creates a contemporary human fable that taps into the great tenderness and drama at…
the heart of the animal world.The wide ravine that bisects the city is home to countless species of urban wildlife, including human waifs and strays. When Edal Jones can't cope with the casual cruelty she encounters in her job as a federal wildlife officer, she finds herself drawn to a beacon of solace nestled in the valley under the unlikely banner of an auto-wrecker's yard. Guy Howell, the handsome proprietor, offers sanctuary to animals and people alike: a half-starved hawk and a brood of orphaned raccoon kits, a young soldier whose spirit failed him during his first tour of duty, a teenage runaway and her massive black dog. Guy is well versed in the delicate workings of damaged beings, and he might just stand a chance at mending Edal's heart.But before love can bloom, the little community must come to terms with a different breed of lost soul—a young man whose brutal backwoods childhood is catching up with him, causing him to persecute the creatures that call the valley home.A Discovery Of Strangers
By Rudy Wiebe. 1994
A Discovery of Strangers is a story--based on true events--of love and innocence, murder, greed and passion set within the…
terrifying, fragile Arctic landscape. In 1820, John Franklin's small group of British officers and Canadian voyageurs, on their first expedition to search for a route through the incomprehensible North, encounter the Yellowknife Indians -- and Greenstockings, fifteen-year-old daughter of Keskarrah, elder of the Yellowknife, meets young Robert Hood, son of a Lancashire clergyman. Wordless, they devise a language of their own as their two worlds clash.The Island Walkers: A Novel
By John Bemrose. 2003
John Bemrose’s highly acclaimed national bestseller tells the story of a family who slips from fortune’s favour in a southwestern…
Ontario mill town during the mid-1960s. Like his father before him, Alf Walker is a fixer in the local textile mill. When a labour dispute forces him to choose between loyalty to his friends and his own advancement, Alf’s actions inadvertently set in motion a series of events that will reverberate far into the future. Meanwhile, Alf’s wife, Margaret, must reconcile her middle-class upbringing with her blue-collar reality, as her marriage is undermined by forces she cannot name. And after their eldest son, Joe, falls headlong for a girl he first glimpses on a bridge, the boy finds his world overturned by the passion and uncertainty of young love. At once intimate and epic in scope, The Island Walkers follows the Walker family to the very bottom of their night, only to confirm, in the end, life’s regenerative power.Hello, Sunshine: A Novel
By Laura Dave. 2017
FROM THE AUTHOR OF THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER THE LAST THING HE TOLD ME Best Books of Summer Selection…
by People, Elle, Redbook, Domino Magazine, Us Weekly, PopSugar, PureWow, InStyle, W Magazine, Harpers Bazaar, Southern Living, Arizona Republic, and Tallahassee Democrat Epicurious Best Foodie Reads Selection Library Reads Pick &“A clever beach bag must-have&” (People) from Laura Dave—the author of the &“addictive&” (Us Weekly) and critically acclaimed bestseller Eight Hundred Grapes—&“a smart, fun read about trying to live an authentic life in the age of social media overload&” (PopSugar).Sunshine Mackenzie has it all…until her secrets come to light. Sunshine is living the dream—she&’s a culinary star with millions of fans, a line of #1 bestselling cookbooks, and a devoted husband happy to support her every endeavor. Sunshine Mackenzie has it all…until she gets hacked. When Sunshine&’s secrets are revealed, her fall from grace is catastrophic. She loses her husband, her show, the fans, and her apartment. She&’s forced to return to the childhood home—and the estranged sister—she&’s tried hard to forget. But what Sunshine does amid the ashes of her own destruction may well save her life. &“A delightfully addictive page-turner&” (WMagazine.com) that takes place in a world where celebrity is a careful construct, Hello, Sunshine is &“wickedly funny and gorgeously entertaining…there is no chance you won&’t consume this golden summer read in one sitting&” (Redbook.com).Writing from Ukraine: Fiction, Poetry and Essays since 1965
By Mark Andryczyk. 2017
A selection of fifteen of Ukraine's most important, dynamic and entertaining contemporary writersUnder USSR rule, the subject matter and style…
of literary expression in Ukraine was strictly controlled and censored. But once Ukraine gained independence in 1991 its literary scene flourished, as the moving and delightful poems, essays and extracts collected here show. There are fifteen authors included in this book, both established and emerging, and in this anthology we see them grappling with history and the future, with big questions and small moments. From essays about Chernobyl to poetry about Robbie Williams, from fiction discussing Jimmy Hendrix live in Lviv to underground Ukrainian poetry of the Soviet era, WRITING FROM UKRAINE offers a unique window into a rich culture, a chance to experience a particularly Ukrainian sensibility and to celebrate Ukraine's nationhood, as told by its writers.Wounds (The London Trilogy #1)
By Maureen Duffy. 2013
Wounds begins with two lovers in bed. Their lovemaking throughout the book forms a recurring lietmotif, a counterpoint to the…
examination of the spiritual death of the characters.In a South London environment of pub and fairground, home and work, the wounds of 20th century experience are evoked in prose which is both lyrical and precise. Kingy in her garden, ‘loved by the most handsome women in the world’; Maura the barmaid: ‘I prefer the little, thin men'; Glisten the Mayor: ‘It’ll be take-over time and too late’ — these and the many other characters illustrate the basic theme of the novel.Who Among Us? (Penguin Modern Classics)
By Mario Benedetti. 2019
'This novel is a jewel ... one of those books that enters the soul, which it is impossible not to…
be conquered by. It is a masterpiece like few others' Huffington PostMiguel and Alicia fall quietly in love as teenagers, walking back from school together. When Lucas - enigmatic, charismatic - arrives, everything changes, and Miguel is certain he has lost Alicia. Yet, against the odds, she marries him. Now, eleven years later, their marriage has begun to fray, and Alicia sets out to see Lucas again. As each member of this strange love triangle tells their side of what happened, an unforgettable story of desire, deception and tragic misunderstanding unfolds.White Nights (Penguin Little Black Classics)
By Fyodor Dostoyevsky. 2010
'My God! A whole minute of bliss! Is that really so little for the whole of a man's life?'A poignant…
tale of love and loneliness from Russia's foremost writer.One of 46 new books in the bestselling Little Black Classics series, to celebrate the first ever Penguin Classic in 1946. Each book gives readers a taste of the Classics' huge range and diversity, with works from around the world and across the centuries - including fables, decadence, heartbreak, tall tales, satire, ghosts, battles and elephants.