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They Divided the Sky: A Novel by Christa Wolf (Literary Translation)
By Christa Wolf. 2012
First published in 1963, in East Germany, They Divided the Sky tells the story of a young couple, living in…
the new, socialist, East Germany, whose relationship is tested to the extreme not only because of the political positions they gradually develop but, very concretely, by the Berlin Wall, which went up on August 13, 1961. The story is set in 1960 and 1961, a moment of high political cold war tension between the East Bloc and the West, a time when many thousands of people were leaving the young German Democratic Republic (the GDR) every day in order to seek better lives in West Germany, or escape the political ideology of the new country that promoted the "farmer and peasant" state over a state run by intellectuals or capitalists. The construction of the Wall put an end to this hemorrhaging of human capital, but separated families, friends, and lovers, for thirty years. The conflicts of the time permeate the relations between characters in the book at every level, and strongly affect the relationships that Rita, the protagonist, has not only with colleagues at work and at the teacher's college she attends, but also with her partner Manfred (an intellectual and academic) and his family. They also lead to an accident/attempted suicide that send her to hospital in a coma, and that provide the backdrop for the flashbacks that make up the narrative. Wolf's first full-length novel, published when she was thirty-five years old, was both a great literary success and a political scandal. Accused of having a 'decadent' attitude with regard to the new socialist Germany and deliberately misrepresenting the workers who are the foundation of this new state, Wolf survived a wave of political and other attacks after its publication. She went on to create a screenplay from the novel and participate in making the film version. More importantly, she went on to become the best-known East German writer of her generation, a writer who established an international reputation and never stopped working toward improving the socialist reality of the GDR.The Fate of Bonté III (Literary Translation)
By Alain Poissant. 2015
Bonté III was five years old. A cow at that age is at her prime. Prime is an accounting term.…
A dairy farm is a business and must be managed as such. From this perspective, Bonté III’s days were numbered. Numbered is not an empty word. She had been a good representative of her breed. A cow, after all, has no need to try to be a cow. Her life is that of a cow: a predetermined cycle that is easily reflected on a balance sheet. She eats. She drinks. She ruminates. She urinates. She defecates. All this has a cost. She ovulates. She bears a calf. She gives birth. She produces milk. All this brings money. [...] Tit for tat. The only thing left to do for Bonté III was to call the butcher. The Fate of Bonté III is a story of love and loneliness with colourful characters, a reflection on life and the vital need to be useful to someone or to something.The Long Song: Shortlisted for the Booker Prize (Nhb Modern Plays Ser.)
By Andrea Levy. 2010
Now a major BBC TV drama, starring Tamara Lawrance, Lenny Henry and Hayley Atwell.A Sunday Times bestseller (2011), shortlisted for…
the Man Booker Prize, The Long Song by Andrea Levy is a hauntingly beautiful, heartbreaking and unputdownable novel of the last days of slavery in Jamaica, for those who loved Homegoing, The Underground Railroad, or the film 12 Years a Slave.'A marvel of luminous storytelling' Financial TimesYou do not know me yet. My son Thomas, who is publishing this book, tells me, it is customary at this place in a novel to give the reader a little taste of the story that is held within these pages. As your storyteller, I am to convey that this tale is set in Jamaica during the last turbulent years of slavery and the early years of freedom that followed.July is a slave girl who lives upon a sugar plantation named Amity and it is her life that is the subject of this tale. She was there when the Baptist War raged in 1831, and she was present when slavery was declared no more. My son says I must convey how the story tells also of July's mama Kitty, of the negroes that worked the plantation land, of Caroline Mortimer the white woman who owned the plantation and many more persons besides - far too many for me to list here. But what befalls them all is carefully chronicled upon these pages for you to peruse.Perhaps, my son suggests, I might write that it is a thrilling journey through that time in the company of people who lived it. All this he wishes me to pen so the reader can decide if this is a novel they might care to consider. Cha, I tell my son, what fuss-fuss. Come, let them just read it for themselves.Small Pleasures: Longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction
By Clare Chambers. 2020
LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2021'A WORD-OF-MOUTH HIT' Evening Standard 'A very fine book... It's witty and sharp…
and reads like something by Barbara Pym or Anita Brookner, without ever feeling like a pastiche'David Nicholls'Perfect'India Knight 'Beautiful' Jessie Burton'Wonderful'Richard Osman 'Miraculous'Tracy Chevalier 'A wonderful novel. I loved it'Nina Stibbe 'Effortless to read, but every sentence lingers in the mind' Lissa Evans 'This is one of the most beautiful books I have ever read. I honestly don't want you to be without it'Lucy Mangan'Gorgeous... If you're looking for something escapist and bittersweet, I could not recommend more' Pandora Sykes'Remarkable... Small Pleasures is no small pleasure'The Times'An irresistible novel - wry, perceptive and quietly devastating'Mail on Sunday'Chambers' eye for undemonstrative details achieves a Larkin-esque lucidity' Guardian'An almost flawlessly written tale of genuine, grown-up romantic anguish' The Sunday Times 1957, the suburbs of South East London. Jean Swinney is a journalist on a local paper, trapped in a life of duty and disappointment from which there is no likelihood of escape. When a young woman, Gretchen Tilbury, contacts the paper to claim that her daughter is the result of a virgin birth, it is down to Jean to discover whether she is a miracle or a fraud. As the investigation turns her quiet life inside out, Jean is suddenly given an unexpected chance at friendship, love and - possibly - happiness. But there will, inevitably, be a price to pay.Book of the Year for: The Times, Daily Telegraph, Evening Standard, Daily Express, Metro, Spectator, Red Magazine and Good HousekeepingWhen I sing, mountains dance: a novel
By Irene Solà. 2022
A spellbinding Catalan novel that places one family's tragedies against the uncontainable life force of the land itself. Near a…
village high in the Pyrenees, Domènec wanders across a ridge, fancying himself more a poet than a farmer, to "reel off his verses over on this side of the mountain." He gathers black chanterelles and attends to a troubled cow. And then storm clouds swell, full of electrifying power. Reckless, gleeful, they release their bolts of lightning, one of which strikes Domènec. He dies. The ghosts of seventeenth-century witches gather around him, taking up the chanterelles he'd harvested before going on their merry ways. So begins this novel that is as much about the mountains and the mushrooms as it is about the human dramas that unfold in their midst. UnratedKnucklehead
By Adam Smyer. 2014
Knucklehead is the only title shortlisted for the 2018 Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence!"By setting his novel in…
the '90s, Smyer, who lives in Oakland, has crafted some brutal deja vu. As [protagonist] Marcus reflects on Rodney King, the Million Man March and the Oklahoma City bombing, we think of Freddie Gray, Black Lives Matter and school shootings that have become a way of life. And when Marcus laments San Francisco's dwindling black population, here we are more than 20 years on, and it's only gotten worse. We should all be furious."--San Francisco Chronicle"Here is a list of things you'll need to read this book: ample space for stretching out the side stitches you'll get from laughter; half a box of tissues for the most gripping and harrowing dramas at the heart of the novel; a fresh stress ball for the tense situations the protagonist finds himself in (both of his own doing and not); and just a bit of that space in your heart to see people, in all their complexity, trying to do their best."--Pittsburgh Post-Gazette"This book is bold in how it treats the reader as an insider to the reality of American blackness. It can be, in turns, lyrically poignant, cynical, hilarious, and infuriating."--Foreword Reviews, Starred Review"In this comic debut novel, lawyer Marcus Hayes careens through the racially divisive 1990s while trying to manage his compulsive anger, chaotic love life, and economic misfortunes...Smyer gives Marcus a sardonic and hilarious voice reminiscent of a Paul Beatty protagonist and endows him with a troubled psychology that plumbs the nuances of black male identity."--Kirkus Reviews"Marcus is an intelligent, acerbic, and often hilarious narrator, bringing a fresh, biting perspective to the social and racial tensions of the time that, as debut novelist Smyer makes clear, are not particularly different from today."--Library Journal"While loss and loneliness are at its core, Knucklehead is a mordantly funny book."--San Francisco Chronicle"While not strictly a crime novel, Smyer's debut Knucklehead does contain a whole lot of guns, violence, and rage, as well as plenty of love and sadness. A black lawyer in the late 80s through the mid-90s deals with micro and macro aggressions from a society determined to treat him as a criminal. Also, there are cats. Lots of cats."--Literary Hub"While the provocative subject material will take readers to a sometimes-uncomfortable place, this brilliant debut is also deeply, darkly funny...This is one of those books that simply has to be discussed, as it managed to tackle difficult topics with unexpected humor and pathos. While Marcus is a troubled character, his journey and the choices he makes will provide rich meat for discussion about race in America and how justifiable anger can turn toxic."--IndiePicks Magazine"[A] masterpiece...In this, his debut narrative, Smyer dramatically encapsulates the ancestral trauma, the collective guilt and suffering of tens of millions of people. Indeed he has scored big. Real big...A must buy."--Kaitur News (Guyana)"Smyer's debut explores themes of the self in chaos; the prose is clean as bone and the anger is focused and piercing."--Michigan Quarterly ReviewIn Knucklehead we meet Marcus Hayes, a black law student who struggles, sometimes unsuccessfully, with the impulse to confront everyday bad behavior with swift and antisocial action. The cause of this impulse is unknown to him.When Marcus unexpectedly becomes involved with the brilliant and kind Amalia Stewart, her love and acceptance pacify his demons. But when his demons return, he is no longer inclined to contain them.Accidental happiness: a novel
By Jean Reynolds Page. 2005
South Carolina. Since her husband Ben unexpectedly died three months ago, thirty-three-year-old Gina Melrose has been living aboard their sailboat.…
When Reese, Ben's ex-wife, and her seven-year-old daughter Angel, who might be Ben's child, arrive on the boat, Gina confronts the possibility that Ben betrayed her. Strong language. 2005The magnificent Ambersons
By Booth Tarkington. 2001
George Amberson Minafer is the pampered but pitiful scion of a dynasty spanning three generations. When industrialization transforms his small…
midwestern town, George finds his family's fortune threatened not only by a new breed of entrepreneur, but by his relatives' arrogance and greed. Pulitzer Prize. 1918L'aventure: récit d'un éditeur
By Jacques Fortin. 2000
"Des commencements avec son complice privilégié, Gilbert La Rocque, jusqu'à la grande aventure internationale des dictionnaires Visuel, du Multidictionnaire et…
du multimédia, en passant par les grandes réussites éditoriales qu'ont été Le Matou d'Yves Beauchemin, les mémoires de René Lévesque, celles de Lise Payette ou Les Filles de Caleb d'Arlette Cousture, c'est tout un panorama de l'aventure éditoriale du Québec qui nous est tracé. Historique, cela va de soi, cette fresque n'en constitue pas moins une profonde réflexion sur l'ensemble de l'industrie culturelle québécoise. Jacques Fortin y prend des positions qui ne plairont pas à tous et son évaluation de l'actuelle situation du livre au Québec saura déranger et forcer à la réflexion. Bref, voici l'histoire d'un homme qui se souvient, et qui n'en pense pas moins à l'avenir." -- 4e de couvThe story of a goat
By N. Kalyan Raman, Perumāḷmurukan̲. 2019
One evening, a giant gives an old man a runt of a goat kid to raise. The goat is soon…
named Poonachi. She observes the world around her, finds joys, even as she is wary of dangers. Translated from the original 2016 Tamil edition. Some violence and some explicit descriptions of sex. 2018People Collide: A Novel
By Isle McElroy. 2023
From the acclaimed author of The Atmospherians—“a Fight Club for the Millennial Generation” (Mat Johnson)—a gender-bending, body-switching novel that explores…
marriage, identity, and sex, and raises profound questions about the nature of true partnership.When Eli leaves the cramped Bulgarian apartment he shares with Elizabeth, his more organized and successful wife, he discovers that he now inhabits her body. Not only have he and his wife traded bodies but Elizabeth, living as Eli, has disappeared without a trace. What follows is Eli’s search across Europe to America for his missing wife—and a roving, no-holds-barred exploration of gender and embodied experience. As Eli comes closer to finding Elizabeth—while learning to exist in her body—he begins to wonder what effect this metamorphosis will have on their relationship and how long he can maintain the illusion of living as someone he isn’t. Will their new marriage wither completely in each other's bodies? Or is this transformation the very thing Eli and Elizabeth need for their marriage to thrive? A rich, rewarding exploration of ambition and sacrifice, desire and loss, People Collide is a portrait of shared lives that shines a refreshing light on everything we thought we knew about love, sexuality, and the truth of who we are.This Child's Gonna Live (Contemporary Classics by Women)
By Thulani Davis, Sarah E. Wright. 1969
"Sarah Wright's triumph in this novel is a celebration of life over death. It is, in every respect, an impressive…
achievement."--The New York Times, 1969"Often compared to the work of Zora Neale Hurston, the novel was unusual in its exploration of the black experience from a woman's perspective, anticipating fiction by writers like Toni Morrison and Alice Walker."--The New York Times, 2009Sarah Wright's searing yet lyrical story of a Southern black woman's life during the Depression--a period seldom accounted for in African-American literature-- is as compelling as her protagonist's insistence that "this child's gonna live." In this lost literary masterpiece by a seminal figure in the Black Arts movement, a husband and wife struggle amidst the poverty of Maryland's Eastern Shore during the 1930s. "Saturated in harsh beauty," declares Tillie Olsen, "this book has been and still is for me one of the most important and indispensable books published in my lifetime."Sarah E. Wright, novelist and poet, was a former vice president of the Harlem Writers Guild and coauthor of Give Me a Child. She died at age 80 in New York City.Like Son: A Novel
By Felicia Luna Lemus. 2007
Set amidst the outsider worlds of present-day downtown New York, 1990s Los Angeles, and 1940s Mexico City, Like Son is…
the not-so-simple story of a love-blindness shared between a father and a son. Born a bouncing baby girl named Francisca Cruz, Frank Cruz is now a post-punk thirty-year-old who has inherited his dead father's wanderlust, unrequited love, and hyperbolic tendencies. Felicia Luna Lemus is the author of the novel Trace Elements of Random Tea Parties (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), and her writing has appeared in various magazines and anthologies, including A Fictional History of the United States with Huge Chunks Missing (Akashic Books). She currently teaches writing at The New School and lives in the East Village of Manhattan.Fast Eddie, King of the Bees
By Robert Arellano. 2001
An abandoned child hustles on the streets of a dystopic, near-future Boston in the aftermath of the Great Devaluation--squatters have…
turned the tunnel system into an underground hive known as Dig City. In an elaborate search for his unknown parents, Eddie narrates through several levels of deception: street performer, pickpocket, adoptee, casino employee, and finally commander of the subterranean revolution. Fast Eddie is a convoluted Oedipal adventure blending low-brow scenarios with high-art diction, reminiscent of Robert Coover, John Hawkes, and Edmund White.Cuban-American author Robert Arellano instructs fiction workshops at Brown University. He spends his breaks playing guitar for indie rock outfit Palace Brothers. Arellano's interactive novel, Sunshine '69, was published by SonicNet in 1996. He lives in Providence, Rhode Island.Blood and Guts in High School: A Novel
By Kathy Acker. 1978
“Kathy Acker’s writing is virtuoso, maddening, crazy, so sexy, so painful, and beaten out of a wild heart that nothing…
can tame. Acker is a landmark writer.” —Jeanette Winterson, New York Times–bestselling authorA masterpiece of surrealist fiction, steeped in controversy upon its first publication in 1984, Blood and Guts in High School is the book that established Kathy Acker as the preeminent voice of post-punk feminism. With 2017 marking the 70th anniversary of her birth, as well as the 10th year since her death this transgressive work of philosophical, political, and sexual insight—with a new introduction by Chris Kraus—continues to become more relevant than ever before.In the Mexican city of Merida, ten-year-old Janey lives with Johnny—her “boyfriend, brother, sister, money, amusement, and father” —until he leaves her for another woman. Bereft, Janey travels to New York City, plunging into an underworld of gangs and prostitution. After escaping imprisonment, she flees to Tangiers where she meets Jean Genet, and they begin a torrid affair that will lead Janey to her demise. Fantastical, sensual, and fearlessly radical, this hallucinatory collage is both a comic and tragic portrait of erotic awakening.“The girl in this story had more agency and voice than any girl I’d ever read or would read in my entire life.” —Lydia Yuknavitch, national bestselling author of Thrust“No writer I know is more audacious than Kathy Acker, whose anarchic wit drives a thoroughgoing attack on conventions and complacencies of all sorts. Not unlike Gertrude Stein in her day, Acker gives us a different way to look at the uses to which language is put.” —Lynne Tillman, author of Men and ApparitionsA collection of three novels from the experimental feminist writer: “Literal Madness is Acker at her most powerful, disturbing, and…
provocative.” —Catherine Texier, author of VictorineKathy Goes to Haiti, the first of three novels in Literal Madness, “speaks to us out of a delightful mock-naivete that reminds one at times of the Dick and Jane readers rewritten as manuals for politics and sex . . . At once hilarious and terrifying, [it] has all the logic of a Caribbean tour and a nightmare combined” (Los Angeles Times).My Death My Life by Pier Paolo Pasolini—wherein, among other things, the late Italian filmmaker solves his own murder, with the help of, among others, Romeo, Juliet, and the Bronté sisters—is a “scathing commentary on false values in art” (The Hartford Courant).In the haunting Florida, Acker achieves “a nearly telegraphic reduction of the Bogart-Bacall movie Key Largo to fatalistic, tough-guy essentials” (Booklist).“There’s a haunting method to Acker’s ‘madness’: a rough, raw, erudite wail against the postmodern loss of meaning and emotion.” —Kirkus ReviewsThe swank hotel: A Novel
By Lucy Corin. 2021
Em's days pass drifting back and forth between her respectably cute starter house and her dreary office. Then something unthinkable,…
something impossible, happens and she begins to see how madness permeates everything around her while the mundane spaces she inhabits are transformed into shimmering sites of the uncanny. Adult. Descriptions of sex. Strong languageWhereabouts: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries Ser.)
By Jhumpa Lahiri. 2021
A marvelous new novel from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Lowland and Interpreter of Maladies--her first in nearly a…
decade. Exuberance and dread, attachment and estrangement: in this novel, Jhumpa Lahiri stretches her themes to the limit. The woman at the centre wavers between stasis and movement, between the need to belong and the refusal to form lasting ties. The city she calls home, an engaging backdrop to her days, acts as a confidant: the sidewalks around her house, parks, bridges, piazzas, streets, stores, coffee bars. We follow her to the pool she frequents and to the train station that sometimes leads her to her mother, mired in a desperate solitude after her father's untimely death. In addition to colleagues at work, where she never quite feels at ease, she has girl friends, guy friends, and "him," a shadow who both consoles and unsettles her. But in the arc of a year, as one season gives way to the next, transformation awaits. One day at the sea, both overwhelmed and replenished by the sun's vital heat, her perspective will change. This is Jhumpa Lahiri's first novel written in Italian. It brims with the impulse to cross barriers. By grafting herself onto a new literary language, Lahiri has pushed herself to a new level of artistic achievement. A New York Times Best SellerEl interior
By Martín Caparrós. 1999
El Interior logra describir con más eficacia que cualquier imagen un país deshecho y, al mismo tiempo, siempre por hacer.…
El Interior es la aventura de recorrer y descubrir buena parte de la Argentina. Los espacios más maravillosos, los personajes más diversos, los esfuerzos por hacer un país que se deshace, los rasgos de cada lugar, sus diferencias, sus comidas y bebidas y canciones, sus historias de crímenes y corruptelas, sus santitos y santitas y demonios,el vacío que amenaza en todas partes: un país que todavía no termina de construirse y que, tan a menudo, se asoma al precipicio. En sus páginas, poemas y reflexiones, análisis y datos, diálogos y situaciones, paisajes y personajes se combinan para armar el gran rompecabezas. Su forma, donde se encuentran tantos recursos de la mejor literatura, ha sido retomada por los mejores cronistas de la lengua. Críticas:«El interior es una road movie en forma de libro que puede ser leída como la "gran novela argentina". Esa que se espera y nunca llega».Jorge Fernández Díaz, La Nación «Martín Caparrós quiso meter un país entero -la Argentina, nada menos- en una sola obra, y esos esfuerzos no toleran términos medios: un país solo cabe en un aforismo o en un tocho de setecientas páginas y letra chata. La opción fue la segunda, y el resultado, excepcional».Nadal Suau, El Cultural«Un mapa de tribulación social, un espacio que, a pesar de la alborotada época de información en que vivimos, permanecía oculto, desconocido, y que Caparrós ha decidido conocer confrontándolo con ojos, oídos y la terquedad de entender lo incomprensible».Francisco Solano, BabeliaLast Flag Flying: A Novel
By Darryl Ponicsán. 2017
Now a major movie starring Steve Carell, Bryan Cranston, and Laurence Fishburne, directed by Richard Linklater!Darryl Ponicsan's debut novel The…
Last Detail was named one of the best of the year and widely acclaimed, catapulting him to fame when it was first published. The story of two career sailors assigned to escort a young seaman from Norfolk to the naval prison in Portsmouth, New Hampshire—and of the mayhem that ensues—was made into an award-winning movie starring Jack Nicholson. Last Flag Flying, set thirty-four years after the events of The Last Detail, brings together the same beloved characters—Billy Bad-Ass Buddusky, Mule Mulhall, and Meadows—to reprise the same journey but under very different circumstances. Now middle-aged, Meadows seeks out his former captors in their civilian lives to help him bury his son, a Marine killed in Iraq, in Arlington National Cemetery. When he learns that the authorities have told him a lie about the circumstances of his son's death, he decides, with the help of the two others, to transport him home to Portsmouth. And so begins the journey, centered around a solemn mission but, as in the first book, a protest against injustice and celebration of life too, at once irreverent, funny, profane, and deeply moving.Last Flag Flying is now a major movie from Amazon Studios, directed by Richard Linklater and starring Bryan Cranston, Steve Carell, and Laurence Fishburne.