Moving from modern-day jerusalem to mccarthy-era Los Angeles to communist Prague and back again, The UnAmericans is a stunning exploration of characters shaped by the forces of history.
Last Night Vintage International
Last night is a spellbinding collection of stories about passion–by turns fiery and subdued, destructive and redemptive, alluring and devastating. A lover of poetry is asked by his wife to give up what may be his most treasured relationship. These ten powerful stories portray men and women in their most intimate moments.
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Vivid and Continuous: Essays and Exercises for Writing Fiction
While acknowledging that many fine books cover such essentials of fiction writing as point of view, and setting, characterization, McNally sets out in this new book—intended as a supplement to beginning fiction-writing classes or as the sole text for upper-level or graduate courses—to solve the tricky second-tier problems that those books cover only in footnotes.
Vivid and continuous takes its inspiration from john Gardner, whose essential truths in On Becoming a Novelist clarified McNally’s goal of communicating a “vivid and continuous dream” with his own writing. In fifteen concise, energizing chapters, he dispenses advice gained from almost thirty years of studying, writing, and teaching.
Exercises at the end of each chapter reinforce its point and serve as practical catalysts for new writings and directions. Just blunt enough to get your attention but not blunt enough to crush you, snarky but not mean, personal but not ego-ridden, challenging but not discouraging, John McNally will prompt you to think more deeply about a variety of issues that will push you toward writing more meaningful, more accomplished work.
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The Blue Notebook: A Novel
. Levine's Bingo's Run. An unforgettable, the blue notebook tells the story of Batuk, deeply affecting debut novel, a precocious fifteen-year-old girl from rural India who is sold into sexual slavery by her father.
Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays, and Other Writings
Jackson’s landscape here is most frequently domestic: dinner parties and bridge, household budgets and homeward-bound commutes, children’s games and neighborly gossip. Since her death in 1965, her place in the landscape of twentieth-century fiction has grown only more exalted. Two of jackson’s children co-edited this volume, culling through the vast archives of their mother’s papers at the Library of Congress, selecting only the very best for inclusion.
. Let me tell you brings together the deliciously eerie short stories Jackson is best known for, along with frank, inspiring lectures on writing; comic essays about her large, boisterous family; and whimsical drawings. Together they show her to be a magnificent storyteller, a sharp, sly humorist, and a powerful feminist.
Times in reading jackson’s accounts of desperate women in their thirties slowly going crazy that she seems an American Jean Rhys, other times when she rivals even Flannery O’Connor in her cool depictions of inhumanity and insidious cruelty, and still others when she matches Philip K.
In The Garden Of The North American Martyrs: Stories
Fondly yet sharply drawn, Wolff's characters stumble over each other in their baffled yet resolute search for the "right path. ".
Funeral Platter: Stories
These wildly inventive stories will appeal to readers who thirst for a unique, deeply humane voice. A young girl aspiring to be a ventriloquist using a burnt log as a dummy; Franz Kafka and Sartre cruising a seedy bar, trying to pick up chicks; a lighthearted retired couple stages and executes their own funeral; a son lovingly prepares and brings corn chowder to his parents, whom he keeps in a cage in his backyard.
From the author of buffalo Lockjaw comes a mordantly humorous collection of taut, off-the-wall, and heartbreaking short stories.
If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This: Fiction
. Brilliant, and fearlessly honest, hopeful, if i Loved You, I Would Tell You This illuminates the truths of human relationships, truths we come to recognize in these characters and in ourselves. Bonus: this edition includes an excerpt from Robin Black's Life Drawing. Look for the if i loved you, I Would Tell You This discussion guide inside.
Praise for if i loved you, i would tell you this“I want to shout about how just when you thought no one could write a story with any tinge of freshness let alone originality about childhood. An artist mourns the end of a romance while painting the portrait of a dying man. Black evokes a Sparkian blend of skepticism and grace.
Vogue.
A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam
The epic story begins with the Jews' gradual transformation of pagan idol worship in Babylon into true monotheism—a concept previously unknown in the world. Karen armstrong has a dazzling ability: she can take a long and complex subject and reduce it to the fundamentals, without oversimplifying. The sunday times London“Absorbing.
Christianity and islam both rose on the foundation of this revolutionary idea, but these religions refashioned 'the One God' to suit the social and political needs of their followers. Karen Armstrong is a genius. A. N. From classical philosophy and medieval mysticism to the Reformation, Karen Armstrong performs the near miracle of distilling the intellectual history of monotheism into one superbly readable volume, destined to take its place as a classic.
Praise for history of god“An admirable and impressive work of synthesis that will give insight and satisfaction to thousands of lay readers.
For the Relief of Unbearable Urges: Stories
. In "the tumblers, in a deft, imaginative twist, " Englander envisions a group of Polish Jews herded toward a train bound for the death camps and, turns them into acrobats tumbling out of harm's way. For the relief of unbearable urges is a work of startling authority and imagination--a book that is as wondrous and joyful as it is wrenchingly sad.
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The Association of Small Bombs: A Novel
The new yorkerfor readers of mohsin hamid, the association of small bombs is an expansive and deeply humane novel that is at once groundbreaking in its empathy, pick up their family’s television set at a repair shop with their friend Mansoor Ahmed one day in 1996, Arundhati Roy, and ambitious in scopeWhen brothers Tushar and Nakul Khurana, and Teju Cole, dazzling in its acuity, Dave Eggers, two Delhi schoolboys, disaster strikes without warning.
A bomb—one of the many “small” bombs that go off seemingly unheralded across the world—detonates in the Delhi marketplace, instantly claiming the lives of the Khurana boys, to the devastation of their parents. After a brief stint at university in america, mansoor returns to Delhi, where his life becomes entangled with the mysterious and charismatic Ayub, a fearless young activist whose own allegiances and beliefs are more malleable than Mansoor could imagine.
. I suggest you go out and buy this one. Mansoor survives, bearing the physical and psychological effects of the bomb.