From the bestselling author of We the Animals, Blackouts mines lost histories - personal and collective.Out in the desert in a place called the Palace, a young man tends to a dying soul, someone he once knew briefly, but who has haunted the edges of his life. Juan Gay - playful raconteur, child lost and found and lost, guardian of the institutionalized - has a project to pass along to this new narrator. It is inspired by a true artifact of a book, Sex Variants: A Study in Homosexual Patterns, which contains stories collected in the early twentieth century from queer subjects by a queer researcher, Jan Gay, whose groundbreaking work was then co-opted by a committee, her name buried. As Juan waits for his end, he and the narrator trade stories - moments of joy and oblivion - and resurrect lost loves, lives, mothers, fathers, minor heroes.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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9780374293574
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Hardcover
The Rabbit Hutch
By Gunty, Tess
A stunning debut novel about the quest for transcendence and the desire for love set in a crumbling apartment building in the post-industrial MidwestOnce a bustling industrial center, Vacca Vale, Indiana is now no more than another notch in the Rust Belt, and its inhabitants are no exception. In a run-down apartment building on the edge of town, commonly known as the Rabbit Hutch, a number of these people, those left behind, now reside quietly out-of-place. Apartment C2 is lonely and detached. C6 is aging and stuck. C8 harbors an extraordinary fear. But C4 is of particular interest. Here live four teenagers who have recently aged out of the state foster care system: three teenage boys and one girl, Blandine. Hauntingly beautiful and unnervingly bright, Blandine is plagued by her past and by the structures, people, and places that not only failed her, but actively harmed her.
Knopf
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9780593534663
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Hardcover
Hell of a Book
By Mott, Jason
Publisher: n/a
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9780593330968
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Hardcover
Interior Chinatown
By Yu, Charles
A deeply personal novel about race, pop culture, and escaping the roles we are forced to play - by the author of the infinitely inventive How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe. Willis Wu doesn't perceive himself as a protagonist even in his own life: He's merely Generic Asian man. Sometimes he gets to be Background Oriental Making a Weird Face or even Disgraced Son, but he is always relegated to a prop. Yet every day he leaves his tiny room in a Chinatown SRO and enters the Golden Palace restaurant, where Black and White, a procedural cop show, is in perpetual production. He's a bit player here, too, but he dreams of being Kung Fu Guy - the most respected role that anyone who looks like him can attain. At least that's what he has been told, time and time again. Except by one person, his mother. Who says to him: Be more. Playful but heartfelt, a send-up of Hollywood tropes and Asian stereotypes, Interior Chinatown is Charles Yu's most moving, daring, and masterly novel yet.
Pantheon
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9780307907196
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Hardcover
Trust Exercise
By Choi, Susan
"Brilliant and challenging . . . An uncanny evocation of the not-so-distant past." -- Tom Perrotta, New York Times bestselling author of Mrs. FletcherPulitzer finalist Susan Choi's multipart, narrative-upending novel in which what happens in high school does not stay in high school but reverberates through lives -- and across generationsIn an American suburb in the early 1980s, students at a highly competitive performing arts high school struggle and thrive in a rarified bubble, ambitiously pursuing music, movement, Shakespeare, and, particularly, their acting classes. When within this striving "Brotherhood of the Arts," two freshmen, David and Sarah, fall headlong into love, their passion does not go unnoticed -- or untoyed with -- by anyone, especially not by their charismatic acting teacher, Mr. Kingsley. The outside world of family life and economic status, of academic pressure and of their future adult lives, fails to penetrate this school's walls -- until it does, in a shocking spiral of events that catapults the action forward in time and flips the premise upside-down. What the reader believes to have happened to David and Sarah and their friends is not entirely true -- though it's not false, either. It takes until the book's stunning coda for the final piece of the puzzle to fall into place -- revealing truths that will resonate long after the final sentence. As captivating and tender as it is surprising, Trust Exercise will incite heated conversations about fiction and truth, and about friendships and loyalties, and will leave readers with wiser understandings of the true capacities of adolescents and of the powers and responsibilities of adults.
Henry Holt and Co.
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9781250309884
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Hardcover
The Friend
By Nunez, Sigrid
FINALIST FOR THE 2018 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD "Nunez's prose itself comforts us. Her confident and direct style uplifts - the music in her sentences, her deep and varied intelligence." -The New York Times Book Review"A penetrating, moving meditation on loss, comfort, memory...Nunez has a wry, withering wit." - NPR"[A] sneaky gut punch of a novel...a consummate example of the human-animal tale." - Harper's MagazineA moving story of love, friendship, grief, healing, and the magical bond between a woman and her dog.When a woman unexpectedly loses her lifelong best friend and mentor, she finds herself burdened with the unwanted dog he has left behind. Her own battle against grief is intensified by the mute suffering of the dog, a huge Great Dane traumatized by the inexplicable disappearance of its master, and by the threat of eviction: dogs are prohibited in her apartment building.While others worry that grief has made her a victim of magical thinking, the woman refuses to be separated from the dog except for brief periods of time. Isolated from the rest of the world, increasingly obsessed with the dog's care, determined to read its mind and fathom its heart, she comes dangerously close to unraveling. But while troubles abound, rich and surprising rewards lie in store for both of them.Elegiac and searching, The Friend is both a meditation on loss and a celebration of human-canine devotion.
Riverhead Books
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9780735219441
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Hardcover
Sing, Unburied, Sing
By Ward, Jesmyn
WINNER of the NATIONAL BOOK AWARD and A NEW YORK TIMES TOP 10 BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR A finalist for the Kirkus Prize, Andrew Carnegie Medal, Aspen Words Literary Prize, and a New York Times bestseller, this majestic, stirring, and widely praised novel from two-time National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward, the story of a family on a journey through rural Mississippi, is a "tour de force" (O, The Oprah Magazine) and a timeless work of fiction that is destined to become a classic.Jesmyn Wards historic second National Book Award-winner is "perfectly poised for the moment" (The New York Times) , an intimate portrait of three generations of a family and an epic tale of hope and struggle. "Wards writing throbs with life, grief, and love ... this book is the kind that makes you ache to return to it" (Buzzfeed) . Jojo is thirteen years old and trying to understand what it means to be a man. He doesnt lack in fathers to study, chief among them his Black grandfather, Pop. But there are other men who complicate his understanding: his absent White father, Michael, who is being released from prison; his absent White grandfather, Big Joseph, who wont acknowledge his existence; and the memories of his dead uncle, Given, who died as a teenager. His mother, Leonie, is an inconsistent presence in his and his toddler sisters lives. She is an imperfect mother in constant conflict with herself and those around her. She is Black and her childrens father is White. She wants to be a better mother but cant put her children above her own needs, especially her drug use. Simultaneously tormented and comforted by visions of her dead brother, which only come to her when shes high, Leonie is embattled in ways that reflect the brutal reality of her circumstances. When the childrens father is released from prison, Leonie packs her kids and a friend into her car and drives north to the heart of Mississippi and Parchman Farm, the State Penitentiary. At Parchman, there is another thirteen-year-old boy, the ghost of a dead inmate who carries all of the ugly history of the South with him in his wandering. He too has something to teach Jojo about fathers and sons, about legacies, about violence, about love. Rich with Wards distinctive, lyrical language, Sing, Unburied, Sing is a majestic and unforgettable family story and "an odyssey through rural Mississippis past and present" (The Philadelphia Inquirer) .
SCRIBNER
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9781501126062
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Hardcover
The Underground Railroad
By Whitehead, Colson
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, the #1 New York Times bestseller from Colson Whitehead, a magnificent tour de force chronicling a young slave's adventures as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hell for all the slaves, but especially bad for Cora; an outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is coming into womanhood - where even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Matters do not go as planned - Cora kills a young white boy who tries to capture her. Though they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted. In Whitehead's ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor - engineers and conductors operate a secret network of tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Cora and Caesar's first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially seems like a haven. But the city's placid surface masks an insidious scheme designed for its black denizens. And even worse: Ridgeway, the relentless slave catcher, is close on their heels. Forced to flee again, Cora embarks on a harrowing flight, state by state, seeking true freedom. Like the protagonist of Gulliver's Travels, Cora encounters different worlds at each stage of her journey - hers is an odyssey through time as well as space. As Whitehead brilliantly re-creates the unique terrors for black people in the pre-Civil War era, his narrative seamlessly weaves the saga of America from the brutal importation of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. The Underground Railroad is at once a kinetic adventure tale of one woman's ferocious will to escape the horrors of bondage and a shattering, powerful meditation on the history we all share.
Doubleday
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9780385542364
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Paperback
Fortune Smiles
By Johnson, Adam
The National Book Award-winning story collection from the author of The Orphan Masters Son offers something rare in fiction: a new way of looking at the world.. "MASTERFUL." - The Washington Post "ENTRANCING." - O: The Oprah Magazine "PERCEPTIVE AND BRAVE." - The New York Times. Throughout these six stories, Pulitzer Prize winner Adam Johnson delves deep into love and loss, natural disasters, the influence of technology, and how the political shapes the personal, giving voice to the perspectives we dont often hear.. In "Nirvana," a programmer whose wife has a rare disease finds solace in a digital simulacrum of the president of the United States. In "Hurricanes Anonymous," a young man searches for the mother of his son in a Louisiana devastated by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. "George Orwell Was a Friend of Mine" follows a former warden of a Stasi prison in East Germany who vehemently denies his past, even as pieces of it are delivered in packages to his door. And in the unforgettable title story, Johnson returns to his signature subject, North Korea, depicting two defectors from Pyongyang who are trying to adapt to their new lives in Seoul, while one cannot forget the woman he left behind.. WINNER OF THE STORY PRIZE * A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK . NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Miami Herald * San Francisco Chronicle * USA Today . AND ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Washington Post * NPR * Marie Claire * St. Louis Post-Dispatch * BuzzFeed * The Daily Beast * Los Angeles Magazine * The Independent * BookPage * Kirkus Reviews. "Remarkable . . . Adam Johnson is one of Americas greatest living writers." - The Huffington Post. "Haunting, harrowing . . . Johnsons writing is as rich in compassion as it is in invention, and that rare combination makes Fortune Smiles worth treasuring." - USA Today. "Fortune Smiles [blends] exotic scenarios, morally compromised characters, high-wire action, rigorously limber prose, dense thickets of emotion, and, most critically, our current techno-moment." - The Boston Globe "Johnsons boundary-pushing stories make for exhilarating reading." - San Francisco Chronicle
Random House
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9780812997477
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Hardcover
Redeployment
By Klay, Phil
Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction"Redeployment is hilarious, biting, whipsawing and sad. Its the best thing written so far on what the war did to peoples souls." - Dexter Filkins, The New York Times Book ReviewSelected as one of the best books of the year by The New York Times Book Review, Time, Newsweek, The Washington Post Book World, Amazon, and more Phil Klays Redeployment takes readers to the frontlines of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, asking us to understand what happened there, and what happened to the soldiers who returned. Interwoven with themes of brutality and faith, guilt and fear, helplessness and survival, the characters in these stories struggle to make meaning out of chaos. In "Redeployment", a soldier who has had to shoot dogs because they were eating human corpses must learn what it is like to return to domestic life in suburbia, surrounded by people "who have no idea where Fallujah is, where three members of your platoon died." In "After Action Report", a Lance Corporal seeks expiation for a killing he didnt commit, in order that his best friend will be unburdened. A Morturary Affairs Marine tells about his experiences collecting remains - of U.S. and Iraqi soldiers both. A chaplain sees his understanding of Christianity, and his ability to provide solace through religion, tested by the actions of a ferocious Colonel. And in the darkly comic "Money as a Weapons System", a young Foreign Service Officer is given the absurd task of helping Iraqis improve their lives by teaching them to play baseball. These stories reveal the intricate combination of monotony, bureaucracy, comradeship and violence that make up a soldiers daily life at war, and the isolation, remorse, and despair that can accompany a soldiers homecoming. Redeployment has become a classic in the tradition of war writing. Across nations and continents, Klay sets in devastating relief the two worlds a soldier inhabits: one of extremes and one of loss. Written with a hard-eyed realism and stunning emotional depth, this work marks Phil Klay as one of the most talented new voices of his generation.
The Penguin Press, 2014.
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9781594204999
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Paperback
The Good Lord Bird
By Mcbride, James
Winner of the 2013 National Book Award for FictionSoon to be a major motion picture starring Liev Schreiber and Jaden SmithA Washington Post, Publishers Weekly, Oprah Magazine Top 10 Book of the YearWinner of the Morning News Tournament of Champions"A magnificent new novel by the best-selling author James McBride." -cover review of The New York Times Book Review"Outrageously entertaining." -USA Today"James McBride delivers another tour de force" -Essence"So imaginative, you'll race to the finish." -NPR.org"Wildly entertaining." - 4-star People lead review"A boisterous, highly entertaining, altogether original novel." - Washington Post From the bestselling author of The Color of Water and Song Yet Sung comes the story of a young boy born a slave who joins John Brown's antislavery crusade - and who must pass as a girl to survive.
Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated
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9781594486340
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Hardcover
The Round House
By Erdrich, Louise
The Round House won the National Book Award for fiction.One of the most revered novelists of our time - a brilliant chronicler of Native-American life - Louise Erdrich returns to the territory of her bestselling, Pulitzer Prize finalist The Plague of Doves with The Round House, transporting readers to the Ojibwe reservation in North Dakota. It is an exquisitely told story of a boy on the cusp of manhood who seeks justice and understanding in the wake of a terrible crime that upends and forever transforms his family.Riveting and suspenseful, arguably the most accessible novel to date from the creator of Love Medicine, The Beet Queen, and The Bingo Palace, Erdrichs The Round House is a page-turning masterpiece of literary fiction - at once a powerful coming-of-age story, a mystery, and a tender, moving novel of family, history, and culture.
Harper; First Edition edition
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9780062065247
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Hardcover
Salvage the Bones
By Ward, Jesmyn
Winner of the National Book AwardJesmyn Ward, two-time National Book Award winner and author of Sing, Unburied, Sing, delivers a gritty but tender novel about family and poverty in the days leading up to Hurricane Katrina.. A hurricane is building over the Gulf of Mexico, threatening the coastal town of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, and Eschs father is growing concerned. A hard drinker, largely absent, he doesnt show concern for much else. Esch and her three brothers are stocking food, but there isnt much to save. Lately, Esch cant keep down what food she gets; shes fourteen and pregnant. Her brother Skeetah is sneaking scraps for his prized pitbulls new litter, dying one by one in the dirt. Meanwhile, brothers Randall and Junior try to stake their claim in a family long on childs play and short on parenting.. As the twelve days that make up the novels framework yield to their dramatic conclusion, this unforgettable family--motherless children sacrificing for one another as they can, protecting and nurturing where love is scarce--pulls itself up to face another day. A big-hearted novel about familial love and community against all odds, and a wrenching look at the lonesome, brutal, and restrictive realities of rural poverty, Salvage the Bones is muscled with poetry, revelatory, and real.
Bloomsbury USA; Reprint edition
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9781608196265
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Hardcover
Lord of Misrule
By Gordon, Jaimy
WON 2010 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTIONAt the rock-bottom end of the sport of kings sits the ruthless and often violent world of cheap horse racing, where trainers and jockeys, grooms and hotwalkers, loan sharks and touts all struggle to take an edge, or prove their luck, or just survive. Equal parts Nathanael West, Damon Runyon and Eudora Welty, Lord of Misrule follows five characters -- scarred and lonely dreamers in the American grain -- through a year and four races at Indian Mound Downs, downriver from Wheeling, West Virginia. Horseman Tommy Hansel has a scheme to rescue his failing stable: Hell ship four unknown but ready horses to Indian Mound Downs, run them in cheap claiming races at long odds, and then get out fast before anyone notices. The problem is, at this rundown riverfront half-mile racetrack in the Northern Panhandle, everyone notices--veteran groom Medicine Ed, Kidstuff the blacksmith, old lady "gyp" Deucey Gifford, stall superintendent Suitcase Smithers, eventually even the rulled-off "racetrack financier" Two-Twi and the ominous leading trainer, Joe Dale Bigg. But no one bothers to factor in Tommy Hansels go-fer girlfriend, Maggie Koderer. Like the beautiful, used-up, tragic horses she comes to love, Maggie has just enough heart to wire everyones flagging hopes back to the source of all luck.
Vintage Contemporaries
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9780307946737
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Hardcover
Let the Great World Spin
By Mccann, Colum
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER * Colum McCanns beloved novel inspired by Philippe Petits daring high-wire stunt, which is also depicted in the film The Walk starring Joseph Gordon-LevittIn the dawning light of a late-summer morning, the people of lower Manhattan stand hushed, staring up in disbelief at the Twin Towers. It is August 1974, and a mysterious tightrope walker is running, dancing, leaping between the towers, suspended a quarter mile above the ground. In the streets below, a slew of ordinary lives become extraordinary in bestselling novelist Colum McCanns stunningly intricate portrait of a city and its people. Let the Great World Spin is the critically acclaimed authors most ambitious novel yet: a dazzlingly rich vision of the pain, loveliness, mystery, and promise of New York City in the 1970s. Corrigan, a radical young Irish monk, struggles with his own demons as he lives among the prostitutes in the middle of the burning Bronx. A group of mothers gather in a Park Avenue apartment to mourn their sons who died in Vietnam, only to discover just how much divides them even in grief. A young artist finds herself at the scene of a hit-and-run that sends her own life careening sideways. Tillie, a thirty-eight-year-old grandmother, turns tricks alongside her teenage daughter, determined not only to take care of her family but to prove her own worth. Elegantly weaving together these and other seemingly disparate lives, McCanns powerful allegory comes alive in the unforgettable voices of the citys people, unexpectedly drawn together by hope, beauty, and the "artistic crime of the century."A sweeping and radical social novel, Let the Great World Spincaptures the spirit of America in a time of transition, extraordinary promise, and, in hindsight, heartbreaking innocence. Hailed as a "fiercely original talent" (San Francisco Chronicle) , award-winning novelist McCann has delivered a triumphantly American masterpiece that awakens in us a sense of what the novel can achieve, confront, and even heal.Praise for Let the Great World Spin"This is a gorgeous book, multilayered and deeply felt, and its a damned lot of fun to read, too. Leave it to an Irishman to write one of the greatest-ever novels about New York. Theres so much passion and humor and pure lifeforce on every page of Let the Great World Spin that youll find yourself giddy, dizzy, overwhelmed." - Dave Eggers"Stunning . . . [an] elegiac glimpse of hope . . . Its a novel rooted firmly in time and place. It vividly captures New York at its worst and best. But it transcends all that. In the end, its a novel about families - the ones were born into and the ones we make for ourselves." - USA Today "The first great 9/11 novel . . . We are all dancing on the wire of history, and even on solid ground we breathe the thinnest of air." - Esquire "Mesmerizing . . . a Joycean look at the lives of New Yorkers changed by a single act on a single day . . . Colum McCanns marvelously rich novel . . . weaves a portrait of a city and a moment, dizzyingly satisfying to read and difficult to put down." - The Seattle Times "Vibrantly whole . . . With a series of spare, gorgeously wrought vignettes, Colum McCann brings 1970s New York to life. . . . And as always, McCanns heart-stoppingly simple descriptions wow." - Entertainment Weekly "An act of pure bravado, dizzying proof that to keep your balance you need to know how to fall." - O: The Oprah Magazine
Random House
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9781400063734
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Paperback
Shadow Country
By Matthiessen, Peter
2008 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNERPeter Matthiessen's great American epic-Killing Mister Watson, Lost Man's River, and Bone by Bone-was conceived as one vast mysterious novel, but because of its length it was originally broken up into three books. In this bold new rendering, Matthiessen has cut nearly a third of the overall text and collapsed the time frame while deepening the insights and motivations of his characters with brilliant rewriting throughout. In Shadow Country, he has marvelously distilled a monumental work, realizing his original vision. Inspired by a near-mythic event of the wild Florida frontier at the turn of the twentieth century, Shadow Country reimagines the legend of the inspired Everglades sugar planter and notorious outlaw E. J. Watson, who drives himself relentlessly toward his own violent end at the hands of neighbors who mostly admired him, in a killing that obsessed his favorite son.
Modern Library
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9780679640196
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Print book
Tree of Smoke
By Johnson, Denis
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNEROne of the New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year"The God I want to believe in has a voice and a sense of humor like Denis Johnsons." -- Jonathan Franzen Named A Best Book of the Year by Time, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, Salon, Slate, The National Book Critics Circle, The Christian Science Monitor. . .Tree of Smoke is the story of William "Skip" Sands, CIA--engaged in Psychological Operations against the Vietcong--and the disasters that befall him. It is also the story of the Houston brothers, Bill and James, young men who drift out of the Arizona desert and into a war where the line between disinformation and delusion has blurred away. In the words of Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times, Tree of Smoke is "bound to become one of the classic works of literature produced by that tragic and uncannily familiar war."
Farrar, Straus and Giroux; First Edition edition
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9780374279127
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Paperback
The Echo Maker
By Powers, Richard
Winner of the National Book Award From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Overstory and the Oprahs Book Club selection Bewilderment comes Richard Powerss The Echo Maker, a powerful novel about family and loss. "Wise and elegant . . . The mysteries unfold so organically and stealthily that you are unaware of his machinations until they come to stunning fruition . . . Powers accomplishes something magnificent." - Colson Whitehead, The New York Times Book Review On a winter night on a remote Nebraska road, twenty-seven-year-old Mark Schluter has a near-fatal car accident. His older sister, Karin, returns reluctantly to their hometown to nurse Mark back from a traumatic head injury. But when Mark emerges from a coma, he believes that this woman - who looks, acts, and sounds just like his sister - is really an imposter. When Karin contacts the famous cognitive neurologist Gerald Weber for help, he diagnoses Mark as having Capgras syndrome. The mysterious nature of the disease, combined with the strange circumstances surrounding Marks accident, threatens to change all of their lives beyond recognition. In The Echo Maker, Richard Powers proves himself to be one of our boldest and most entertaining novelists.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux; First Edition edition
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9780374146351
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Hardcover
Europe Central
By Vollmann, William T.
Audacious. Wildly ambitious. Prolific. All describe William T. Vollmann, author of the seven- volume nonfiction work Rising Up and Rising Down and the Seven Dreams sequence of novels, which the Chicago Tribune hailed as likely to become one of the masterpieces of the century. In Europe Central, Vollmann presents a mesmerizing series of intertwined paired stories that compare and contrast the moral decisions made by various figuressome famous, some infamous, some unknownassociated with the warring authoritarian cultures of Germany and the USSR in the twentieth century. He conjures up two generals, one Russian and one German, who collaborate with the enemy for different reasons and with different results. Another pairing tells of two heroesa female Russian partisan martyred at the beginning of World War II and a young German man who joins the SS in order to reveal its secrets and halt its crimes.
Viking Adult; First Edition edition
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9780670033928
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Hardcover
The News from Paraguay
By Tuck, Lily
For him it began with a bright blue parrot feather that fell from Ella Lynch's hat when she was horseback riding in the Bois de Boulogne. The year was 1854, and Francisco Solano Lopez -- "Franco," the future dictator of Paraguay -- began his courtship of the young, beautiful Irishwoman with a poncho, a Paraguayan band, and a horse named Mathilde. From Paris, Ella Lynch follows Franco to Asuncin, where she reigns as his mistress. Isolated and estranged in this new world, she embraces her lover's ill-fated dream -- one fueled by outsize imperial ambition and heedless arrogance, and with devastating consequences for Paraguay and all its inhabitants. A historical epic that tells an unusual love story, The News from Paraguay offers a kaleidoscopic portrait of nineteenth-century Paraguay, a largely untouched wilderness where Europeans and North Americans intermingle with both the old Spanish aristocracy and native Guaran Indians.
HarperCollins
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9780066209449
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Paperback
The Great Fire
By Hazzard, Shirley
A great writer's sweeping story of men and women struggling to reclaim their lives in the aftermath of world conflict
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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9780374166441
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Print book
Three Junes
By Glass, Julia
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER * NATIONAL BESTSELLER * An astonishing novel that traces the lives of a Scottish family over a decade as they confront the joys and longings, fulfillments and betrayals of love in all its guises. In June of 1989 Paul McLeod, a newspaper publisher and recent widower, travels to Greece, where he falls for a young American artist and reflects on the complicated truth about his marriage.... Six years later, again in June, Pauls death draws his three grown sons and their families back to their ancestral home. Fenno, the eldest, a wry, introspective gay man, narrates the events of this unforeseen reunion. Far from his straitlaced expatriate life as a bookseller in Greenwich Village, Fenno is stunned by a series of revelations that threaten his carefully crafted defenses.... Four years farther on, in yet another June, a chance meeting on the Long Island shore brings Fenno together with Fern Olitsky, the artist who once captivated his father. Now pregnant, Fern must weigh her guilt about the past against her wishes for the future and decide what family means to her. In prose rich with compassion and wit, Three Junes paints a haunting portrait of loves redemptive powers.
Pantheon Books
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9780375422416
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Hardcover
The Corrections
By Franzen, Jonathan
Jonathan Franzens third novel, The Corrections, is a great work of art and a grandly entertaining overture to our new century: a bold, comic, tragic, deeply moving family drama that stretches from the Midwest at mid-century to Wall Street and Eastern Europe in the age of greed and globalism. Franzen brings an old-time America of freight trains and civic duty, of Cub Scouts and Christmas cookies and sexual inhibitions, into brilliant collision with the modern absurdities of brain science, home surveillance, hands-off parenting, do-it-yourself mental healthcare, and the anti-gravity New Economy. With The Corrections, Franzen emerges as one of our premier interpreters of American society and the American soul.Enid Lambert is terribly, terribly anxious. Although she would never admit it to her neighbors or her three grown children, her husband, Alfred, is losing his grip on reality. Maybe its the medication that Alfred takes for his Parkinsons disease, or maybe its his negative attitude, but he spends his days brooding in the basement and committing shadowy, unspeakable acts. More and more often, he doesnt seem to understand a word Enid says.Trouble is also brewing in the lives of Enids children. Her older son, Gary, a banker in Philadelphia, has turned cruel and materialistic and is trying to force his parents out of their old house and into a tiny apartment. The middle child, Chip, has suddenly and for no good reason quit his exciting job as a professor at D------ College and moved to New York City, where he seems to be pursuing a "transgressive" lifestyle and writing some sort of screenplay. Meanwhile the baby of the family, Denise, has escaped her disastrous marriage only to pour her youth and beauty down the drain of an affair with a married man--or so Gary hints.Enid, who loves to have fun, can still look forward to a final family Christmas and to the ten-day Nordic Pleasurelines Luxury Fall Color Cruise that she and Alfred are about to embark on. But even these few remaining joys are threatened by her husbands growing confusion and unsteadiness. As Alfred enters his final decline, the Lamberts must face the failures, secrets, and long-buried hurts that haunt them as a family if they are to make the corrections that each desperately needs.
Alexandria Library
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9780374129989
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Hardcover
In America
By Sontag, Susan
In America is a kaleidoscopic portrait of America on the cusp of modernity. As she did in her enormously popular novel The Volcano Lover, Susan Sontag casts a story located in the past in a fresh, provocative light to create a fictional world full of contemporary resonance. In a group of Poles led by Maryna Zalezowska, Polands greatest actress, emigrate to the United States and travel to California to found a utopian commune. When the commune fails, Maryna stays, learns English, andas Marina Zalenskaforges a new, even more triumphant career on the American stage, becoming a diva on par with Sara Bernhardt. In America is about many things a womans search for self-transformation the fate of idealism a life in the theater the many varieties of love and, not least of all, stories and storytelling itself.
Blackouts
By Torres, Justin
From the bestselling author of We the Animals, Blackouts mines lost histories - personal and collective.Out in the desert in a place called the Palace, a young man tends to a dying soul, someone he once knew briefly, but who has haunted the edges of his life. Juan Gay - playful raconteur, child lost and found and lost, guardian of the institutionalized - has a project to pass along to this new narrator. It is inspired by a true artifact of a book, Sex Variants: A Study in Homosexual Patterns, which contains stories collected in the early twentieth century from queer subjects by a queer researcher, Jan Gay, whose groundbreaking work was then co-opted by a committee, her name buried. As Juan waits for his end, he and the narrator trade stories - moments of joy and oblivion - and resurrect lost loves, lives, mothers, fathers, minor heroes.
The Rabbit Hutch
By Gunty, Tess
A stunning debut novel about the quest for transcendence and the desire for love set in a crumbling apartment building in the post-industrial MidwestOnce a bustling industrial center, Vacca Vale, Indiana is now no more than another notch in the Rust Belt, and its inhabitants are no exception. In a run-down apartment building on the edge of town, commonly known as the Rabbit Hutch, a number of these people, those left behind, now reside quietly out-of-place. Apartment C2 is lonely and detached. C6 is aging and stuck. C8 harbors an extraordinary fear. But C4 is of particular interest. Here live four teenagers who have recently aged out of the state foster care system: three teenage boys and one girl, Blandine. Hauntingly beautiful and unnervingly bright, Blandine is plagued by her past and by the structures, people, and places that not only failed her, but actively harmed her.
Hell of a Book
By Mott, Jason
Interior Chinatown
By Yu, Charles
A deeply personal novel about race, pop culture, and escaping the roles we are forced to play - by the author of the infinitely inventive How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe. Willis Wu doesn't perceive himself as a protagonist even in his own life: He's merely Generic Asian man. Sometimes he gets to be Background Oriental Making a Weird Face or even Disgraced Son, but he is always relegated to a prop. Yet every day he leaves his tiny room in a Chinatown SRO and enters the Golden Palace restaurant, where Black and White, a procedural cop show, is in perpetual production. He's a bit player here, too, but he dreams of being Kung Fu Guy - the most respected role that anyone who looks like him can attain. At least that's what he has been told, time and time again. Except by one person, his mother. Who says to him: Be more. Playful but heartfelt, a send-up of Hollywood tropes and Asian stereotypes, Interior Chinatown is Charles Yu's most moving, daring, and masterly novel yet.
Trust Exercise
By Choi, Susan
"Brilliant and challenging . . . An uncanny evocation of the not-so-distant past." -- Tom Perrotta, New York Times bestselling author of Mrs. FletcherPulitzer finalist Susan Choi's multipart, narrative-upending novel in which what happens in high school does not stay in high school but reverberates through lives -- and across generationsIn an American suburb in the early 1980s, students at a highly competitive performing arts high school struggle and thrive in a rarified bubble, ambitiously pursuing music, movement, Shakespeare, and, particularly, their acting classes. When within this striving "Brotherhood of the Arts," two freshmen, David and Sarah, fall headlong into love, their passion does not go unnoticed -- or untoyed with -- by anyone, especially not by their charismatic acting teacher, Mr. Kingsley. The outside world of family life and economic status, of academic pressure and of their future adult lives, fails to penetrate this school's walls -- until it does, in a shocking spiral of events that catapults the action forward in time and flips the premise upside-down. What the reader believes to have happened to David and Sarah and their friends is not entirely true -- though it's not false, either. It takes until the book's stunning coda for the final piece of the puzzle to fall into place -- revealing truths that will resonate long after the final sentence. As captivating and tender as it is surprising, Trust Exercise will incite heated conversations about fiction and truth, and about friendships and loyalties, and will leave readers with wiser understandings of the true capacities of adolescents and of the powers and responsibilities of adults.
The Friend
By Nunez, Sigrid
FINALIST FOR THE 2018 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD "Nunez's prose itself comforts us. Her confident and direct style uplifts - the music in her sentences, her deep and varied intelligence." -The New York Times Book Review"A penetrating, moving meditation on loss, comfort, memory...Nunez has a wry, withering wit." - NPR"[A] sneaky gut punch of a novel...a consummate example of the human-animal tale." - Harper's MagazineA moving story of love, friendship, grief, healing, and the magical bond between a woman and her dog.When a woman unexpectedly loses her lifelong best friend and mentor, she finds herself burdened with the unwanted dog he has left behind. Her own battle against grief is intensified by the mute suffering of the dog, a huge Great Dane traumatized by the inexplicable disappearance of its master, and by the threat of eviction: dogs are prohibited in her apartment building.While others worry that grief has made her a victim of magical thinking, the woman refuses to be separated from the dog except for brief periods of time. Isolated from the rest of the world, increasingly obsessed with the dog's care, determined to read its mind and fathom its heart, she comes dangerously close to unraveling. But while troubles abound, rich and surprising rewards lie in store for both of them.Elegiac and searching, The Friend is both a meditation on loss and a celebration of human-canine devotion.
Sing, Unburied, Sing
By Ward, Jesmyn
WINNER of the NATIONAL BOOK AWARD and A NEW YORK TIMES TOP 10 BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR A finalist for the Kirkus Prize, Andrew Carnegie Medal, Aspen Words Literary Prize, and a New York Times bestseller, this majestic, stirring, and widely praised novel from two-time National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward, the story of a family on a journey through rural Mississippi, is a "tour de force" (O, The Oprah Magazine) and a timeless work of fiction that is destined to become a classic.Jesmyn Wards historic second National Book Award-winner is "perfectly poised for the moment" (The New York Times) , an intimate portrait of three generations of a family and an epic tale of hope and struggle. "Wards writing throbs with life, grief, and love ... this book is the kind that makes you ache to return to it" (Buzzfeed) . Jojo is thirteen years old and trying to understand what it means to be a man. He doesnt lack in fathers to study, chief among them his Black grandfather, Pop. But there are other men who complicate his understanding: his absent White father, Michael, who is being released from prison; his absent White grandfather, Big Joseph, who wont acknowledge his existence; and the memories of his dead uncle, Given, who died as a teenager. His mother, Leonie, is an inconsistent presence in his and his toddler sisters lives. She is an imperfect mother in constant conflict with herself and those around her. She is Black and her childrens father is White. She wants to be a better mother but cant put her children above her own needs, especially her drug use. Simultaneously tormented and comforted by visions of her dead brother, which only come to her when shes high, Leonie is embattled in ways that reflect the brutal reality of her circumstances. When the childrens father is released from prison, Leonie packs her kids and a friend into her car and drives north to the heart of Mississippi and Parchman Farm, the State Penitentiary. At Parchman, there is another thirteen-year-old boy, the ghost of a dead inmate who carries all of the ugly history of the South with him in his wandering. He too has something to teach Jojo about fathers and sons, about legacies, about violence, about love. Rich with Wards distinctive, lyrical language, Sing, Unburied, Sing is a majestic and unforgettable family story and "an odyssey through rural Mississippis past and present" (The Philadelphia Inquirer) .
The Underground Railroad
By Whitehead, Colson
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, the #1 New York Times bestseller from Colson Whitehead, a magnificent tour de force chronicling a young slave's adventures as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hell for all the slaves, but especially bad for Cora; an outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is coming into womanhood - where even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Matters do not go as planned - Cora kills a young white boy who tries to capture her. Though they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted. In Whitehead's ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor - engineers and conductors operate a secret network of tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Cora and Caesar's first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially seems like a haven. But the city's placid surface masks an insidious scheme designed for its black denizens. And even worse: Ridgeway, the relentless slave catcher, is close on their heels. Forced to flee again, Cora embarks on a harrowing flight, state by state, seeking true freedom. Like the protagonist of Gulliver's Travels, Cora encounters different worlds at each stage of her journey - hers is an odyssey through time as well as space. As Whitehead brilliantly re-creates the unique terrors for black people in the pre-Civil War era, his narrative seamlessly weaves the saga of America from the brutal importation of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. The Underground Railroad is at once a kinetic adventure tale of one woman's ferocious will to escape the horrors of bondage and a shattering, powerful meditation on the history we all share.
Fortune Smiles
By Johnson, Adam
The National Book Award-winning story collection from the author of The Orphan Masters Son offers something rare in fiction: a new way of looking at the world.. "MASTERFUL." - The Washington Post "ENTRANCING." - O: The Oprah Magazine "PERCEPTIVE AND BRAVE." - The New York Times. Throughout these six stories, Pulitzer Prize winner Adam Johnson delves deep into love and loss, natural disasters, the influence of technology, and how the political shapes the personal, giving voice to the perspectives we dont often hear.. In "Nirvana," a programmer whose wife has a rare disease finds solace in a digital simulacrum of the president of the United States. In "Hurricanes Anonymous," a young man searches for the mother of his son in a Louisiana devastated by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. "George Orwell Was a Friend of Mine" follows a former warden of a Stasi prison in East Germany who vehemently denies his past, even as pieces of it are delivered in packages to his door. And in the unforgettable title story, Johnson returns to his signature subject, North Korea, depicting two defectors from Pyongyang who are trying to adapt to their new lives in Seoul, while one cannot forget the woman he left behind.. WINNER OF THE STORY PRIZE * A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK . NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Miami Herald * San Francisco Chronicle * USA Today . AND ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Washington Post * NPR * Marie Claire * St. Louis Post-Dispatch * BuzzFeed * The Daily Beast * Los Angeles Magazine * The Independent * BookPage * Kirkus Reviews. "Remarkable . . . Adam Johnson is one of Americas greatest living writers." - The Huffington Post. "Haunting, harrowing . . . Johnsons writing is as rich in compassion as it is in invention, and that rare combination makes Fortune Smiles worth treasuring." - USA Today. "Fortune Smiles [blends] exotic scenarios, morally compromised characters, high-wire action, rigorously limber prose, dense thickets of emotion, and, most critically, our current techno-moment." - The Boston Globe "Johnsons boundary-pushing stories make for exhilarating reading." - San Francisco Chronicle
Redeployment
By Klay, Phil
Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction"Redeployment is hilarious, biting, whipsawing and sad. Its the best thing written so far on what the war did to peoples souls." - Dexter Filkins, The New York Times Book ReviewSelected as one of the best books of the year by The New York Times Book Review, Time, Newsweek, The Washington Post Book World, Amazon, and more Phil Klays Redeployment takes readers to the frontlines of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, asking us to understand what happened there, and what happened to the soldiers who returned. Interwoven with themes of brutality and faith, guilt and fear, helplessness and survival, the characters in these stories struggle to make meaning out of chaos. In "Redeployment", a soldier who has had to shoot dogs because they were eating human corpses must learn what it is like to return to domestic life in suburbia, surrounded by people "who have no idea where Fallujah is, where three members of your platoon died." In "After Action Report", a Lance Corporal seeks expiation for a killing he didnt commit, in order that his best friend will be unburdened. A Morturary Affairs Marine tells about his experiences collecting remains - of U.S. and Iraqi soldiers both. A chaplain sees his understanding of Christianity, and his ability to provide solace through religion, tested by the actions of a ferocious Colonel. And in the darkly comic "Money as a Weapons System", a young Foreign Service Officer is given the absurd task of helping Iraqis improve their lives by teaching them to play baseball. These stories reveal the intricate combination of monotony, bureaucracy, comradeship and violence that make up a soldiers daily life at war, and the isolation, remorse, and despair that can accompany a soldiers homecoming. Redeployment has become a classic in the tradition of war writing. Across nations and continents, Klay sets in devastating relief the two worlds a soldier inhabits: one of extremes and one of loss. Written with a hard-eyed realism and stunning emotional depth, this work marks Phil Klay as one of the most talented new voices of his generation.
The Good Lord Bird
By Mcbride, James
Winner of the 2013 National Book Award for FictionSoon to be a major motion picture starring Liev Schreiber and Jaden SmithA Washington Post, Publishers Weekly, Oprah Magazine Top 10 Book of the YearWinner of the Morning News Tournament of Champions"A magnificent new novel by the best-selling author James McBride." -cover review of The New York Times Book Review"Outrageously entertaining." -USA Today"James McBride delivers another tour de force" -Essence"So imaginative, you'll race to the finish." -NPR.org"Wildly entertaining." - 4-star People lead review"A boisterous, highly entertaining, altogether original novel." - Washington Post From the bestselling author of The Color of Water and Song Yet Sung comes the story of a young boy born a slave who joins John Brown's antislavery crusade - and who must pass as a girl to survive.
The Round House
By Erdrich, Louise
The Round House won the National Book Award for fiction.One of the most revered novelists of our time - a brilliant chronicler of Native-American life - Louise Erdrich returns to the territory of her bestselling, Pulitzer Prize finalist The Plague of Doves with The Round House, transporting readers to the Ojibwe reservation in North Dakota. It is an exquisitely told story of a boy on the cusp of manhood who seeks justice and understanding in the wake of a terrible crime that upends and forever transforms his family.Riveting and suspenseful, arguably the most accessible novel to date from the creator of Love Medicine, The Beet Queen, and The Bingo Palace, Erdrichs The Round House is a page-turning masterpiece of literary fiction - at once a powerful coming-of-age story, a mystery, and a tender, moving novel of family, history, and culture.
Salvage the Bones
By Ward, Jesmyn
Winner of the National Book AwardJesmyn Ward, two-time National Book Award winner and author of Sing, Unburied, Sing, delivers a gritty but tender novel about family and poverty in the days leading up to Hurricane Katrina.. A hurricane is building over the Gulf of Mexico, threatening the coastal town of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, and Eschs father is growing concerned. A hard drinker, largely absent, he doesnt show concern for much else. Esch and her three brothers are stocking food, but there isnt much to save. Lately, Esch cant keep down what food she gets; shes fourteen and pregnant. Her brother Skeetah is sneaking scraps for his prized pitbulls new litter, dying one by one in the dirt. Meanwhile, brothers Randall and Junior try to stake their claim in a family long on childs play and short on parenting.. As the twelve days that make up the novels framework yield to their dramatic conclusion, this unforgettable family--motherless children sacrificing for one another as they can, protecting and nurturing where love is scarce--pulls itself up to face another day. A big-hearted novel about familial love and community against all odds, and a wrenching look at the lonesome, brutal, and restrictive realities of rural poverty, Salvage the Bones is muscled with poetry, revelatory, and real.
Lord of Misrule
By Gordon, Jaimy
WON 2010 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTIONAt the rock-bottom end of the sport of kings sits the ruthless and often violent world of cheap horse racing, where trainers and jockeys, grooms and hotwalkers, loan sharks and touts all struggle to take an edge, or prove their luck, or just survive. Equal parts Nathanael West, Damon Runyon and Eudora Welty, Lord of Misrule follows five characters -- scarred and lonely dreamers in the American grain -- through a year and four races at Indian Mound Downs, downriver from Wheeling, West Virginia. Horseman Tommy Hansel has a scheme to rescue his failing stable: Hell ship four unknown but ready horses to Indian Mound Downs, run them in cheap claiming races at long odds, and then get out fast before anyone notices. The problem is, at this rundown riverfront half-mile racetrack in the Northern Panhandle, everyone notices--veteran groom Medicine Ed, Kidstuff the blacksmith, old lady "gyp" Deucey Gifford, stall superintendent Suitcase Smithers, eventually even the rulled-off "racetrack financier" Two-Twi and the ominous leading trainer, Joe Dale Bigg. But no one bothers to factor in Tommy Hansels go-fer girlfriend, Maggie Koderer. Like the beautiful, used-up, tragic horses she comes to love, Maggie has just enough heart to wire everyones flagging hopes back to the source of all luck.
Let the Great World Spin
By Mccann, Colum
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER * Colum McCanns beloved novel inspired by Philippe Petits daring high-wire stunt, which is also depicted in the film The Walk starring Joseph Gordon-LevittIn the dawning light of a late-summer morning, the people of lower Manhattan stand hushed, staring up in disbelief at the Twin Towers. It is August 1974, and a mysterious tightrope walker is running, dancing, leaping between the towers, suspended a quarter mile above the ground. In the streets below, a slew of ordinary lives become extraordinary in bestselling novelist Colum McCanns stunningly intricate portrait of a city and its people. Let the Great World Spin is the critically acclaimed authors most ambitious novel yet: a dazzlingly rich vision of the pain, loveliness, mystery, and promise of New York City in the 1970s. Corrigan, a radical young Irish monk, struggles with his own demons as he lives among the prostitutes in the middle of the burning Bronx. A group of mothers gather in a Park Avenue apartment to mourn their sons who died in Vietnam, only to discover just how much divides them even in grief. A young artist finds herself at the scene of a hit-and-run that sends her own life careening sideways. Tillie, a thirty-eight-year-old grandmother, turns tricks alongside her teenage daughter, determined not only to take care of her family but to prove her own worth. Elegantly weaving together these and other seemingly disparate lives, McCanns powerful allegory comes alive in the unforgettable voices of the citys people, unexpectedly drawn together by hope, beauty, and the "artistic crime of the century."A sweeping and radical social novel, Let the Great World Spincaptures the spirit of America in a time of transition, extraordinary promise, and, in hindsight, heartbreaking innocence. Hailed as a "fiercely original talent" (San Francisco Chronicle) , award-winning novelist McCann has delivered a triumphantly American masterpiece that awakens in us a sense of what the novel can achieve, confront, and even heal.Praise for Let the Great World Spin"This is a gorgeous book, multilayered and deeply felt, and its a damned lot of fun to read, too. Leave it to an Irishman to write one of the greatest-ever novels about New York. Theres so much passion and humor and pure lifeforce on every page of Let the Great World Spin that youll find yourself giddy, dizzy, overwhelmed." - Dave Eggers"Stunning . . . [an] elegiac glimpse of hope . . . Its a novel rooted firmly in time and place. It vividly captures New York at its worst and best. But it transcends all that. In the end, its a novel about families - the ones were born into and the ones we make for ourselves." - USA Today "The first great 9/11 novel . . . We are all dancing on the wire of history, and even on solid ground we breathe the thinnest of air." - Esquire "Mesmerizing . . . a Joycean look at the lives of New Yorkers changed by a single act on a single day . . . Colum McCanns marvelously rich novel . . . weaves a portrait of a city and a moment, dizzyingly satisfying to read and difficult to put down." - The Seattle Times "Vibrantly whole . . . With a series of spare, gorgeously wrought vignettes, Colum McCann brings 1970s New York to life. . . . And as always, McCanns heart-stoppingly simple descriptions wow." - Entertainment Weekly "An act of pure bravado, dizzying proof that to keep your balance you need to know how to fall." - O: The Oprah Magazine
Shadow Country
By Matthiessen, Peter
2008 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNERPeter Matthiessen's great American epic-Killing Mister Watson, Lost Man's River, and Bone by Bone-was conceived as one vast mysterious novel, but because of its length it was originally broken up into three books. In this bold new rendering, Matthiessen has cut nearly a third of the overall text and collapsed the time frame while deepening the insights and motivations of his characters with brilliant rewriting throughout. In Shadow Country, he has marvelously distilled a monumental work, realizing his original vision. Inspired by a near-mythic event of the wild Florida frontier at the turn of the twentieth century, Shadow Country reimagines the legend of the inspired Everglades sugar planter and notorious outlaw E. J. Watson, who drives himself relentlessly toward his own violent end at the hands of neighbors who mostly admired him, in a killing that obsessed his favorite son.
Tree of Smoke
By Johnson, Denis
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNEROne of the New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year"The God I want to believe in has a voice and a sense of humor like Denis Johnsons." -- Jonathan Franzen Named A Best Book of the Year by Time, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, Salon, Slate, The National Book Critics Circle, The Christian Science Monitor. . .Tree of Smoke is the story of William "Skip" Sands, CIA--engaged in Psychological Operations against the Vietcong--and the disasters that befall him. It is also the story of the Houston brothers, Bill and James, young men who drift out of the Arizona desert and into a war where the line between disinformation and delusion has blurred away. In the words of Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times, Tree of Smoke is "bound to become one of the classic works of literature produced by that tragic and uncannily familiar war."
The Echo Maker
By Powers, Richard
Winner of the National Book Award From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Overstory and the Oprahs Book Club selection Bewilderment comes Richard Powerss The Echo Maker, a powerful novel about family and loss. "Wise and elegant . . . The mysteries unfold so organically and stealthily that you are unaware of his machinations until they come to stunning fruition . . . Powers accomplishes something magnificent." - Colson Whitehead, The New York Times Book Review On a winter night on a remote Nebraska road, twenty-seven-year-old Mark Schluter has a near-fatal car accident. His older sister, Karin, returns reluctantly to their hometown to nurse Mark back from a traumatic head injury. But when Mark emerges from a coma, he believes that this woman - who looks, acts, and sounds just like his sister - is really an imposter. When Karin contacts the famous cognitive neurologist Gerald Weber for help, he diagnoses Mark as having Capgras syndrome. The mysterious nature of the disease, combined with the strange circumstances surrounding Marks accident, threatens to change all of their lives beyond recognition. In The Echo Maker, Richard Powers proves himself to be one of our boldest and most entertaining novelists.
Europe Central
By Vollmann, William T.
Audacious. Wildly ambitious. Prolific. All describe William T. Vollmann, author of the seven- volume nonfiction work Rising Up and Rising Down and the Seven Dreams sequence of novels, which the Chicago Tribune hailed as likely to become one of the masterpieces of the century. In Europe Central, Vollmann presents a mesmerizing series of intertwined paired stories that compare and contrast the moral decisions made by various figuressome famous, some infamous, some unknownassociated with the warring authoritarian cultures of Germany and the USSR in the twentieth century. He conjures up two generals, one Russian and one German, who collaborate with the enemy for different reasons and with different results. Another pairing tells of two heroesa female Russian partisan martyred at the beginning of World War II and a young German man who joins the SS in order to reveal its secrets and halt its crimes.
The News from Paraguay
By Tuck, Lily
For him it began with a bright blue parrot feather that fell from Ella Lynch's hat when she was horseback riding in the Bois de Boulogne. The year was 1854, and Francisco Solano Lopez -- "Franco," the future dictator of Paraguay -- began his courtship of the young, beautiful Irishwoman with a poncho, a Paraguayan band, and a horse named Mathilde. From Paris, Ella Lynch follows Franco to Asuncin, where she reigns as his mistress. Isolated and estranged in this new world, she embraces her lover's ill-fated dream -- one fueled by outsize imperial ambition and heedless arrogance, and with devastating consequences for Paraguay and all its inhabitants. A historical epic that tells an unusual love story, The News from Paraguay offers a kaleidoscopic portrait of nineteenth-century Paraguay, a largely untouched wilderness where Europeans and North Americans intermingle with both the old Spanish aristocracy and native Guaran Indians.
The Great Fire
By Hazzard, Shirley
A great writer's sweeping story of men and women struggling to reclaim their lives in the aftermath of world conflict
Three Junes
By Glass, Julia
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER * NATIONAL BESTSELLER * An astonishing novel that traces the lives of a Scottish family over a decade as they confront the joys and longings, fulfillments and betrayals of love in all its guises. In June of 1989 Paul McLeod, a newspaper publisher and recent widower, travels to Greece, where he falls for a young American artist and reflects on the complicated truth about his marriage.... Six years later, again in June, Pauls death draws his three grown sons and their families back to their ancestral home. Fenno, the eldest, a wry, introspective gay man, narrates the events of this unforeseen reunion. Far from his straitlaced expatriate life as a bookseller in Greenwich Village, Fenno is stunned by a series of revelations that threaten his carefully crafted defenses.... Four years farther on, in yet another June, a chance meeting on the Long Island shore brings Fenno together with Fern Olitsky, the artist who once captivated his father. Now pregnant, Fern must weigh her guilt about the past against her wishes for the future and decide what family means to her. In prose rich with compassion and wit, Three Junes paints a haunting portrait of loves redemptive powers.
The Corrections
By Franzen, Jonathan
Jonathan Franzens third novel, The Corrections, is a great work of art and a grandly entertaining overture to our new century: a bold, comic, tragic, deeply moving family drama that stretches from the Midwest at mid-century to Wall Street and Eastern Europe in the age of greed and globalism. Franzen brings an old-time America of freight trains and civic duty, of Cub Scouts and Christmas cookies and sexual inhibitions, into brilliant collision with the modern absurdities of brain science, home surveillance, hands-off parenting, do-it-yourself mental healthcare, and the anti-gravity New Economy. With The Corrections, Franzen emerges as one of our premier interpreters of American society and the American soul.Enid Lambert is terribly, terribly anxious. Although she would never admit it to her neighbors or her three grown children, her husband, Alfred, is losing his grip on reality. Maybe its the medication that Alfred takes for his Parkinsons disease, or maybe its his negative attitude, but he spends his days brooding in the basement and committing shadowy, unspeakable acts. More and more often, he doesnt seem to understand a word Enid says.Trouble is also brewing in the lives of Enids children. Her older son, Gary, a banker in Philadelphia, has turned cruel and materialistic and is trying to force his parents out of their old house and into a tiny apartment. The middle child, Chip, has suddenly and for no good reason quit his exciting job as a professor at D------ College and moved to New York City, where he seems to be pursuing a "transgressive" lifestyle and writing some sort of screenplay. Meanwhile the baby of the family, Denise, has escaped her disastrous marriage only to pour her youth and beauty down the drain of an affair with a married man--or so Gary hints.Enid, who loves to have fun, can still look forward to a final family Christmas and to the ten-day Nordic Pleasurelines Luxury Fall Color Cruise that she and Alfred are about to embark on. But even these few remaining joys are threatened by her husbands growing confusion and unsteadiness. As Alfred enters his final decline, the Lamberts must face the failures, secrets, and long-buried hurts that haunt them as a family if they are to make the corrections that each desperately needs.
In America
By Sontag, Susan
In America is a kaleidoscopic portrait of America on the cusp of modernity. As she did in her enormously popular novel The Volcano Lover, Susan Sontag casts a story located in the past in a fresh, provocative light to create a fictional world full of contemporary resonance. In a group of Poles led by Maryna Zalezowska, Polands greatest actress, emigrate to the United States and travel to California to found a utopian commune. When the commune fails, Maryna stays, learns English, andas Marina Zalenskaforges a new, even more triumphant career on the American stage, becoming a diva on par with Sara Bernhardt. In America is about many things a womans search for self-transformation the fate of idealism a life in the theater the many varieties of love and, not least of all, stories and storytelling itself.