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Title search results
Showing 1 - 20 of 48 items
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General fiction, War storiesWar
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In No Space for Further Burials Feryal Ali Gauhar has crafted a novel of unrelenting truth held in transcendent… prose and an exquisite grace There is no easy redemption here but there is light and more light -Chris Abani author of GraceLand and Song for Night In writing through the eyes of an American captive in Afghanistan Feryal Ali Gauhar has fashioned a fascinating two-way mirror in which we see the author creating an Other confronting Otherness As in Richard Powers hostage novel Ploughing in the Dark the mask of character reveals as much as it conceals -Stewart O Nan author of Songs for the Missing An unbearably beautiful book one you will not soon forget What Gauhar shows us is that in a war there are only those who die and those who survive and sometimes even those lines get blurred And that s what keeps you hungrily turning the pages -Radhika Jha author of SmellSet in Afghanistan in late 2002 No Space for Further Burials is a chilling indictment of the madness of war and our collective complicity in the perpetuation of violence The novel s narrator a US Army medical technician in Afghanistan helping to liberate the country from the Taliban has been captured by rebels and thrown into an asylum The other inmates are a besieged gathering of society s forgotten and unwanted refugees and derelicts disabled and different resilient and maddened struggling to survive the lunacy raging outside the asylum compound The novel becomes a powerful evocation of the country s desolate history of plunder and war waged by insiders and outsiders all fueled by ideology desperation and greed This astonishingly powerful story unfolds the tragedy of Afghanistan as told by the captive narrator in hauntingly beautiful prose While the characters try to cope with their individual destinies the terrible madness of war is counterpointed with the poignancy of their lives and the narrator s own peculiar predicament-the victor now a victim his ambivalence a metaphor for everything Afghanistan symbolizes Feryal Ali Gauhar studied political economy at McGill University in Montreal and has worked as a filmmaker and broadcaster in Europe and the United States She has been imprisoned by two military regimes in Pakistan for her pro-democracy activism In 1999 she was appointed Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations Population Fund She lives in Lahore Pakistan with fourteen cats three dogs a turtle and four donkeys
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General fictionFine arts biography, Journals and memoirs, Psychology
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A graphic memoir about the treatment of mental illness treating mental illness as a commodity and the often… unavoidable choice between sanity and happiness In her early twenties in New York City diagnosed with bipolar disorder Rachel Lindsay takes a job in advertising in order to secure healthcare coverage for her treatment But work takes a strange turn when she is promoted onto the Pfizer account and suddenly finds herself on the other side of the curtain developing ads for an antidepressant drug She is the audience of the work she s been pouring over and it highlights just how unhappy and trapped she feels stuck in an endless cycle of treatment insurance and medication Overwhelmed by the stress of her professional life and the self-scrutiny it inspires she begins to destabilize and while in the midst of a crushing job search her mania takes hold Her altered mindset yields a simple solution to quit her job and pursue life as an artist an identity she had abandoned in exchange for medical treatment When her parents intervene she finds herself hospitalized against her will and stripped of the control she felt she had finally reclaimed Over the course of her two weeks in the ward she struggles in the midst of doctors nurses patients and endless rules to find a path out of the hospital and this cycle of treatment One where she can live the life she wants finding freedom and autonomy without sacrificing her dreams in order to stay well
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General fictionHistory, Politics and government, Psychology
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Saer is one of the best writers of today in any language --Ricardo Piglia What Saer presents marvelously is… the experience of reality and the characters attempts to write their own narratives within its excess --BookforumIn modern-day Paris Pich n Garay receives a computer disk containing a manuscript--which might be fictional or could be a memoir--by Doctor Real a nineteenth-century physician tasked with leading a group of five mental patients on a trip to a recently constructed asylum Their trip which ends in disaster and fire is a brilliant tragicomedy thanks to the various insanities of the patients among whom is a delusional man who greatly over-estimates his own importance and a nymphomaniac nun who tricks everyone--even the other patients--into sleeping with her Fascinating as a faux historical novel and written in Saer s typically gorgeous Proustian style The Clouds can be read as a metaphor for exile--a huge theme for Saer and a lot of Argentine writers--as well as an examination of madness Juan Jos Saer was the leading Argentinian writer of the post-Borges generation The author of numerous novels and short-story collections including Scars and La Grande Saer was awarded Spain s prestigious Nadal Prize in 1987 for The Event Five of his novels are available from Open Letter Books Hilary Vaughn Dobel has an MFA in poetry and translation from Columbia University She is the author of two manuscripts and in addition to Saer she has translated work by Carlos Pintado
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General fiction, Mysteries and crime stories, Police procedural fictionWar
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Baghdad Central is a noir debut novel set in Baghdad in September 2003 The US occupation of Iraq is… a swamp of incompetence and self-delusion The CPA has disbanded the Iraqi army and police as a consequence of its paranoid policy of de-Ba athification of Iraqi society Tales of hubris and reality-denial abound culminating in Washington hailing the mess a glorious mission accomplished Inspector Muhsin al-Khafaji is a mid-level Iraqi cop who deserted his post back in April Khafaji has lived long enough in pre- and post-Saddam Iraq to know that clinging on to anything but poetry and his daughter Mrouj is asking for trouble Nabbed by the Americans and imprisoned in Abu Ghraib Khafaji is offered one way out-work for the CPA to rebuild the Iraqi Police Services But it s only after United States forces take Mrouj that he figures out a way to make his collaboration palatable and even rewarding Soon he is investigating the disappearance of young women translators working for the US Army The bloody trail leads Khafaji through battles bars and brothels then finally back to the Green Zone where it all began This is a first novel by Elliott Colla an American writer totally immersed in Middle Eastern affairs He is a professor of Arabic literature at Georgetown University and a well-known translator from the Arabic of local fiction and poetry He lives between Washington DC and the Middle East
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General fiction, War storiesWar
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This volume combines three of Richard Rohmer s best-selling novels in one book Ultimatum Exxoneration … and Periscope Red are all fast-paced incisive novels in which Rohmer makes fiction read like fact They are chilling visions of a world of military conflict legal and political entanglements and Canada s role in domestic and international spheres The issues inside are just as important to Canada today as they were when the books were written In all of these works Rohmer demonstrates his insider s knowledge of the energy industry and the military and his master storyteller s ability to bring it alive
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General fictionPsychology
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Sturla Jón Jónsson is invited to represent Iceland at a poetry festival in Lithuania, which is the beginning of his… troubles. While at the conference, his overcoat is stolen, his article about how stupid literary festivals are causes a huge controversy, and he's accused of plagiarism. And that doesn't even include his encounters with the bizarre festival attendees.
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Family stories, General fictionPsychology
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In this five-book compilation by the author of the Baby-Sitters Club, a group of teenage friends struggles with friendships, family,… and romanceDawn and Sunny aren't speaking. Maggie's eating disorder has become extreme and Amalia is making it her mission to help. Ducky's parents have left him alone--again--and this time he could really use their advice.A spin-off of the bestselling Baby-Sitters Club, the California Diaries are first-person accounts of five teenagers dealing with the ups and downs of growing up. Diary Two contains the second journal of each of the main characters, books six through ten in the series.This ebook features an illustrated personal history of Ann M. Martin, including rare images from the author's collection.
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Family stories, General fiction, Suspense and thrillersPsychology
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'First published in France in 1973, this unbearably sad novel from Swiss author Chessex, the first non-French writer to win… the Prix Goncourt, charts a man's slow but steady path toward tragedy.Chessex perfectly captures the juxtaposition of the profound and the banal in a surreal scene where a mortuary representative hawks different models of urns to hold cremated remains. Jean's burden of guilt only grows heavier with time, and the denouement will strike many as pathetically inevitable.' Publishers WeeklyA haunting work, reminiscent of Albert Camus, that portrays with exquisite psychological detail the emotional crisis in the life of Jean Calmet, a young Swiss schoolteacher. As we watch the father's cremation in the opening chapter, we sense that, even though his father's body has been reduced to ashes, his spirit survives to haunt Jean. His father's prodigious vitality and virility had crushed his family and ruined his son's childhood. Even after his father's death, Jean cannot be free. The parental ogre's actions continue to suck Jean into a vortex of despair.Jacques Chessex, a giant of Swiss literature, won the Grand Prix de la langue française and was awarded the Grand Prix Jean Giono for his entire work. Bitter Lemon Press published his novels The Vampire of Ropraz and A Jew Must Die to high acclaim. He died in 2009 at age seventy-five.
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General fiction, Suspense and thrillers, Short storiesPsychology
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The characters in these nine short stories abandon families, plot assassinations, nurse vendettas, tease, taunt, and terrorize. They retaliate for… bad marriages, dream of weddings, and wait decades for lovers. How far will we go to escape to a better dream? What consequences must we face for hope and fantasy? Robin McLean's stories are strange, often disturbing and funny, and as full of foolishness and ugliness as they are of the wisdom and beauty all around us.Robin McLean holds an MFA from UMass Amherst. She teaches at Clark University and lives in Bristol, New Hampshire, and Sunderland, Massachusetts.
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General fiction, Historical fictionWar
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In 1706, war still rages in Europe, and the tobacco planters of the Virginia colony's tidewater struggle against shrinking markets… and pirates lurking off the coast. But American seafarers have found a new source of wealth: the Indian Ocean and ships carrying fabulous treasure to the great Mogul of India. Faced with ruin, former pirate Thomas Marlowe is determined to find a way to the riches of the East. Carrying his crop of tobacco in his privateer, Elizabeth Galley, he secretly plans to continue on to the Indian Ocean to hunt the Mogul's ships. But Marlowe does not know that he is sailing into a triangle of hatred and vengeance -- a rendezvous with two bitter enemies from his past. Ultimately, none will emerge unscathed from the blood and thunder, the treachery and danger, of sailing the Pirate Round.
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General fictionWar
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The moving story of two brothers who fought in the First World War through the real letters, complete with hand-drawn… cartoons, they sent to their sisters. Like so many families across the world, the Semple family were split apart by the First World War. While William and Robert were fighting the Germans in France, their younger sisters, Mabel and Jelly (Eileen), had to carry on with school back in England. To keep in touch, they wrote letters. The sisters treasured these letters, which gave snapshots of their brothers' lives as soldiers. Many of the letters included cartoon illustrations to amuse the sisters. The book presents these letters with their illustrations. After each letter the author has written a short commentary, drawing out the facts about the war that can be taken from it. Altogether the book is a powerful and moving record of one family's experience of the First World War.
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General fictionWar
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When, at the height of the First World War, many Allied governments introduced conscription, there were thousands of individuals who,… for personal or religious reasons, refused to fight. After tough questioning, some were exempted but the majority were forced into the army anyways. Those who 'refused to do their duty' were threatened with death sentences or harsh prison terms; many died from ill treatment. Conchies collects many of the moving true stories of these brave individuals.
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General fiction, Short storiesPhilosophy, Psychology
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Glass Grapes and Other Stories is the first full-length collection of short stories by distinguished poet and fiction writer Martha… Ronk. Ronk's work has garnered critical accolades and numerous awards, including, most recently, a 2005 PEN USA Award in poetry, a 2007 NEA Fellowship, and a 2007 National Poetry Series Award. Glass Grapes is a collection of short, experimental stories, usually dominated by an object imbued with fetishistic qualities by an obsessive, self-involved narrator. The language of these stories is repetitive, provocative, imagistic, occasionally comic, and unnerving. Ronk's fiction moves with the same grace, beauty, and attention to language as her most accomplished poetry.
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General fictionMedicine, Psychology
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Foreign correspondent James Ryan was there whenever the world changed: in the Middle East, in the Balkans, in the former… Soviet bloc. But now he can't remember these events; he can't recall anything long-term, except the summer of his fifteenth year following his mother's death. It was the summer his father told him to call him Kurt. The summer the mysterious and enchanting Vera burst into their lonely, quiet lives. The summer his own world opened, then irrevocably changed.James, at fifty-two, suffers from a severe case of early onset Alzheimer's. The novel unravels James's predicament through the clear glimpses he retains of that long ago summer, and through the desperate attempts of his wife and his nurse to bring him back to the present, if only for stolen moments. Each has her motives: his wife trying not to lose the man with whom she shared so much - wars, death, love, loss of a child, history. And his nurse, the half sister he never knew he had, needing James's adolescent memory to understand the biological father and mother she never met. Told from the perspective of a man betrayed by his own mind, Shadow Man is a novel of identity and suspense that travels across continents and deep into the pasts that make us each who we are. It explores the power of memory to heal and to mask, and of the limits of unconditional love. Set in Philly and the eastern shore of yesteryear, in the Middle East, and throughout Eastern Europe, Fleishman's trademark descriptive but spare lyricism shines. Shadow Man is a touching and haunting novel perhaps most similar to The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, though it is a work of fiction. From the Trade Paperback edition.
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Romantic suspense, General fictionPsychology
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Martine Desjardins delivers to readers of Maleficium the unexpurgated revelations of Vicar Jerome Savoie, a heretic priest in nineteenth century… Montreal. Braving threats from the Catholic Church, Savoie dares to violate the sanctity of the confessional in this confession-within-a-confession, in which seven penitents, each afflicted with a debilitating malady or struck with a crippling deformity, relates his encounter with an enigmatic young woman whose lips bear a striking scar.As these men penetrate deep into the exotic Orient, each falls victim to his own secret vice. One treks through Ethiopia in search of wingless locusts. Another hunts for fly-whisks among the clove plantations of Zanzibar. Yet others bargain for saffron in a Srinagar bazaar, search for the rarest frankincense, and pursue the coveted hawksbill turtle in the Sea of Oman. Two more seek the formula for sabon Nablus in Palestine or haggle over Persian carpets in the royal gardens of Shiraz. The men's individual forms of punishment, revealed through the agency of the young woman, are wrought upon their bodies.Baroque in its complexity, Kafka-like in its inexorable mechanics, Maleficium by turns astonishes, amuses, and beguiles. Then author Martine Desjardins's Vicar Savoie-as in any confession worth its communion wafer-saves the best (or worst) for last.Maleficium won the Prix Jacques Brossard and was a finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award (French Fiction), the Prix des libraires du Québec, the Prix des cinq continents de la Francophonie, and the Prix France-Québec.
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Family stories, General fictionEuropean history, Psychology
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The Brother is a spaghetti western told in poetic prose, simultaneously paying tribute to both Clint Eastwood and Alessandro Baricco.… It opens with a mysterious stranger arriving in a small town controlled by a group of men-men who recently cheated the stranger's supposed sister out of her inheritance. Following his arrival, fortunes change dramatically, enraging this group of powerful men.
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General fiction, War storiesWar
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A novel of the black markets of the South Vietnamese city of Da Nang during the Vietnam War, based on… the author's experiences as a self-described South Korean mercenary on the side of the South Vietnamese, this is a Vietnam War novel like no other, truly one that sees the war from all sides. Scenes of battle are breathtakingly well told. The plot is thick with intrigue and complex subplots. But ultimately The Shadow of Arms is a novel of the human condition rather than of the exploits and losses of one side or the other in war. From the Trade Paperback edition.
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Family stories, General fictionPsychology
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Called "remarkable" (The Wall Street Journal) and "an ambitious, colossal debut novel" (Publishers Weekly), Helen DeWitt's The Last Samurai is… back in print at last Helen DeWitt's 2000 debut, The Last Samurai, was "destined to become a cult classic" (Miramax). The enterprising publisher sold the rights in twenty countries, so "Why not just, 'destined to become a classic?'" (Garth Risk Hallberg) And why must cultists tell the uninitiated it has nothing to do with Tom Cruise? Sibylla, an American-at-Oxford turned loose on London, finds herself trapped as a single mother after a misguided one-night stand. High-minded principles of child-rearing work disastrously well. J. S. Mill (taught Greek at three) and Yo Yo Ma (Bach at two) claimed the methods would work with any child; when these succeed with the boy Ludo, he causes havoc at school and is home again in a month. (Is he a prodigy, a genius? Readers looking over Ludo's shoulder find themselves easily reading Greek and more.) Lacking male role models for a fatherless boy, Sibylla turns to endless replays of Kurosawa's masterpiece Seven Samurai. But Ludo is obsessed with the one thing he wants and doesn't know: his father's name. At eleven, inspired by his own take on the classic film, he sets out on a secret quest for the father he never knew. He'll be punched, sliced, and threatened with retribution. He may not live to see twelve. Or he may find a real samurai and save a mother who thinks boredom a fate worse than death.
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Historical fiction, General fictionPregnancy and childbirth
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A former superstar of Andy Warhol s Factory offers an intimate tale of sex drugs art and… motherhood based on video recordings The Baby is not your average parenthood novel Viva a k a Viva Superstar--actor writer painter denizen of Andy Warhol s world-famous Factory and early pioneer in video arts--weaves a tale of childbirth and motherhood with often-shocking candor exploring a new mother s mixed emotions and her internal and external conflicts Based on filmed records created by Viva s husband Michael Auder of their daughter s difficult birth and early development and interspersed with stills from their life Viva s addictive video novel tells the story of a fictional couple Augustine and Frederick Marat whose unorthodox parenting takes them from New York to Paris to Casablanca to California In her own unique style Viva explores breast-feeding and breast pumps infidelity and incest while offering startlingly intimate details of a family s singular lifestyle An unabashedly autobiographical literary invention alternately outrageous and honest revelatory and touching The Baby is truly one of a kind
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General fictionWar
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Ernest Hemingway witnessed many of the seminal conflicts of the twentieth century--from his post as a Red Cross ambulance driver… during World War I to his nearly twenty-five years as a war correspondent for The Toronto Star--and he recorded them with matchless power. This landmark volume brings together Hemingway's most important and timeless writings about the nature of human combat. Passages from his beloved World War I novel, A Farewell to Arms, and For Whom the Bell Tolls, about the Spanish Civil War, offer an unparalleled portrayal of the physical and psychological impact of war and its aftermath. Selections from Across the River and into the Trees vividly evoke an emotionally scarred career soldier in the twilight of life as he reflects on the nature of war. Classic short stories, such as "In Another Country" and "The Butterfly and the Tank," stand alongside excerpts from Hemingway's first book of short stories, In Our Time, and his only full-length play, The Fifth Column. With captivating selections from Hemingway's journalism--from his coverage of the Greco-Turkish War of 1919-22 to a legendary early interview with Mussolini to his jolting eyewitness account of the Allied invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944--Hemingway on War collects the author's most penetrating chronicles of perseverance and defeat, courage and fear, and love and loss in the midst of modern warfare.