Bad Dreams and Other Stories

Bad Dreams and Other Stories PDF Author: Tessa Hadley
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062476688
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Winner of the Edge Hill Short Story Prize A New York Times Notable Book of the Year An NPR Best Book of the Year The award-winning author of The Past once again "crystallizes the atmosphere of ordinary life in prose somehow miraculous and natural" (Washington Post), in a collection of stories that elevate the mundane into the exceptional. The author of six critically acclaimed novels, Tessa Hadley has proven herself to be the champion of revealing the hidden depths in the deceptively simple. In these short stories it’s the ordinary things that turn out to be most extraordinary: the history of a length of fabric or a forgotten jacket. Two sisters quarrel over an inheritance and a new baby; a child awake in the night explores the familiar rooms of her home, made strange by the darkness; a housekeeper caring for a helpless old man uncovers secrets from his past. The first steps into a turning point and a new life are made so easily and carelessly: each of these stories illuminate crucial moments of transition, often imperceptible to the protagonists. A girl accepts a lift in a car with some older boys; a young woman reads the diaries she discovers while housesitting. Small acts have large consequences, some that can reverberate across decades; private fantasies can affect other people, for better and worse. The real things that happen to people, the accidents that befall them, are every bit as mysterious as their longings and their dreams. Bad Dreams and Other Stories demonstrates yet again that Tessa Hadley "puts on paper a consciousness so visceral, so fully realized, it heightens and expands your own. She is a true master" (Lily King, author of Euphoria).

Bad Dreams and Other Stories

Bad Dreams and Other Stories PDF Author: Tessa Hadley
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062476688
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Get Book

Book Description
Winner of the Edge Hill Short Story Prize A New York Times Notable Book of the Year An NPR Best Book of the Year The award-winning author of The Past once again "crystallizes the atmosphere of ordinary life in prose somehow miraculous and natural" (Washington Post), in a collection of stories that elevate the mundane into the exceptional. The author of six critically acclaimed novels, Tessa Hadley has proven herself to be the champion of revealing the hidden depths in the deceptively simple. In these short stories it’s the ordinary things that turn out to be most extraordinary: the history of a length of fabric or a forgotten jacket. Two sisters quarrel over an inheritance and a new baby; a child awake in the night explores the familiar rooms of her home, made strange by the darkness; a housekeeper caring for a helpless old man uncovers secrets from his past. The first steps into a turning point and a new life are made so easily and carelessly: each of these stories illuminate crucial moments of transition, often imperceptible to the protagonists. A girl accepts a lift in a car with some older boys; a young woman reads the diaries she discovers while housesitting. Small acts have large consequences, some that can reverberate across decades; private fantasies can affect other people, for better and worse. The real things that happen to people, the accidents that befall them, are every bit as mysterious as their longings and their dreams. Bad Dreams and Other Stories demonstrates yet again that Tessa Hadley "puts on paper a consciousness so visceral, so fully realized, it heightens and expands your own. She is a true master" (Lily King, author of Euphoria).

After the Funeral and Other Stories

After the Funeral and Other Stories PDF Author: Tessa Hadley
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0593469844
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
A masterful collection of stories that plumb the depths of everyday life to reveal the shifting tides and hidden undercurrents of ordinary relationships—"a revelation for aficionados of the form, as vibrant and knowing as the best of Hadley's celebrated career." —Washington Post “Hadley is pure magic and After the Funeral is a triumph.”—Lily King, New York Times best-selling author of Writers & Lovers and Euphoria “Hadley brings her eloquent prose and her psychological acuity to the relationships—between siblings, friends, lovers, parents, and children—that shape us and change us, that call into question our view of ourselves and our place in the world.” —The New Yorker In each of these twelve stories, small events have huge consequences. Heloise’s father died in a car crash when she was a little girl; at a dinner party in her forties, she meets someone connected to that long-ago tragedy. Two estranged sisters cross paths at a posh hotel and pretend not to recognize each other. Janie’s bohemian mother plans to marry a man close to Janie’s own age—everything changes when an accident interrupts the wedding party. A daughter caring for her elderly mother during the pandemic becomes obsessed with the woman next door; in the wake of his best friend’s death, a man must reassess his affair with the friend’s wife. Cecilia, a teenager, wakes one morning in Florence on vacation with her parents and sees them for the first time through disenchanted eyes. As psychologically astute as they are emotionally rich, these stories illuminate the enduring conflicts between responsibility and freedom, power and desire, convention and subversion, reality and dreams. A vital addition to Tessa Hadley’s celebrated body of work, After the Funeral and Other Stories showcases what Colm Tóibín describes as "Tessa Hadley's extraordinary skill at making both surface life and deep interiors come fully alive."

Confessions of a Funeral Director

Confessions of a Funeral Director PDF Author: Caleb Wilde
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062465260
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 164

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Book Description
The blogger behind Confessions of a Funeral Director—what Time magazine called a "must read"—reflects on mortality and the powerful lessons death holds for every one of us in this compassionate and thoughtful spiritual memoir that combines the humor and insight of Smoke Gets in Your Eyes with the poignancy and brevity of When Breath Becomes Air. We are a people who deeply fear death. While humans are biologically wired to evade death for as long as possible, we have become too adept at hiding from it, vilifying it, and—when it can be avoided no longer—letting the professionals take over. Sixth-generation funeral director Caleb Wilde understands this reticence and fear. He had planned to get as far away from the family business as possible. He wanted to make a difference in the world, and how could he do that if all the people he worked with were . . . dead? Slowly, he discovered that caring for the deceased and their loved ones was making a difference—in other people’s lives to be sure, but it also seemed to be saving his own. A spirituality of death began to emerge as he observed: The family who lovingly dressed their deceased father for his burial The act of embalming a little girl that offered a gift back to her grieving family The nursing home that honored a woman’s life by standing in procession as her body was taken away The funeral that united a conflicted community Through stories like these, told with equal parts humor and poignancy, Wilde offers an intimate look into the business and a new perspective on living and dying

Married Love

Married Love PDF Author: Tessa Hadley
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062135651
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 161

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Book Description
“Filled with exquisitely calibrated gradations and expressions of class, conducted with symphonic intensity and complexity. . . . Extraordinarily well-made.” —New York Times Book Review Married Love is a masterful collection of short fiction from one of today’s most accomplished storytellers. These tales showcase the qualities for which Tessa Hadley has long been praised: her humor, warmth, and psychological acuity; her powerful, precise, and emotionally dense prose; her unflinching examinations of family relationships. Here are stories that range widely across generations and classes, exploring the private and public lives of unforgettable characters: a young girl who haunts the edges of her parents’ party; a wife released by the sudden death of her film-director husband; an eighteen-year-old who insists on marrying her music professor, only to find herself shut out from his secrets. Hadley evokes worlds that expand in the imagination far beyond the pages, capturing domestic dramas, generational sagas, wrenching love affairs and epiphanies, and distilling them to remarkable effect. “Hadley parses the meaning of love in all its paradoxical, panoramic glory.” —Booklist “These stories are gemlike and unforgettable.” —Kate Tuttle, Boston Globe “One of the most interesting writers around.” —Philip Womack, The Spectator “Only Alice Munro and Colm Tóibin . . . are so adept at portraying whole lives in a few thousand words. . . . Hadley joins their company as one of the most clear-sighted chroniclers of contemporary emotional journeys.” —Edmund Gordon, The Guardian “There is a grand sweep and an emotional charge that brings to mind DH Lawrence.” —Elena Seymenliyska, Daily Telegraph (London)) “An exceptional storyteller.” —Library Journal “Shrewd, insightful, unpredictable.” —Kirkus Reviews

Instructions for a Funeral

Instructions for a Funeral PDF Author: David Means
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 0571330975
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
After winning international acclaim with his first novel, the Man Booker-nominated Hystopia, David Means returns to the form that made his name in Instructions for a Funeral, a collection of fourteen masterful stories that run the gamut from the playful to the personal. 'The Terminal Artist,' originally published in Vice, skirts reportage in grappling with the revelation that the death of a hospitalized loved one was in fact a murder; 'The Tree Line, Kansas, 1934,' from the New Yorker, is a wry anatomy of the moments before an FBI raid goes spectacularly wrong; while 'The Chair,' from The Paris Review, gives us a clear-eyed look at fatherhood, with all its paradoxes, recriminations, and rewards gloriously intact. Means's work has earned him comparisons to Flannery O'Connor, Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, Denis Johnson, Poe, Chekhov, and Carver - but his place in the American literary landscape is fully and originally his own.

Late in the Day

Late in the Day PDF Author: Tessa Hadley
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062476718
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
“With each new book by Tessa Hadley, I grow more convinced that she’s one of the greatest stylists alive.”—Ron Charles, Washington Post New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice |A Parnassus First Editions Club Pick | Powell’s Indispensable Book Club Pick | A Washington Post Notable Book | A Slate Best Book of the Year | A Boston Globe Best Book of the Year | A Bookpage Best Book of the Year The lives of two close-knit couples are irrevocably changed by an untimely death in the latest from Tessa Hadley, the acclaimed novelist and short story master who “recruits admirers with each book” (Hilary Mantel). Alexandr and Christine and Zachary and Lydia have been friends since they first met in their twenties. Thirty years later, Alex and Christine are spending a leisurely summer’s evening at home when they receive a call from a distraught Lydia: she is at the hospital. Zach is dead. In the wake of this profound loss, the three friends find themselves unmoored; all agree that Zach, with his generous, grounded spirit, was the irreplaceable one they couldn’t afford to lose. Inconsolable, Lydia moves in with Alex and Christine. But instead of loss bringing them closer, the three of them find over the following months that it warps their relationships, as old entanglements and grievances rise from the past, and love and sorrow give way to anger and bitterness. Late in the Day explores the complex webs at the center of our most intimate relationships, to expose how, beneath the seemingly dependable arrangements we make for our lives, lie infinite alternate configurations. Ingeniously moving between past and present and through the intricacies of her characters’ thoughts and interactions, Tessa Hadley once again “crystallizes the atmosphere of ordinary life in prose somehow miraculous and natural” (Washington Post).

Accidents in the Home

Accidents in the Home PDF Author: Tessa Hadley
Publisher: Henry Holt and Company
ISBN: 1466829583
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
A powerful literary debut chronicling a year in the life of one thoroughly modern family Clare Verey, a twenty-nine-year-old mother of three, bakes her own bread and grinds her own spices. She has a comfortable home in the suburbs and a devoted husband. Why is it, then, that when her best friend's lover appears in her life he has the power to invert her world? Why is the desire for more never satisfied? So begins Accidents in the Home, a novel that exposes the emotional underbelly of a modern-day family. Clare's narrative is deftly intertwined with the stories of her extended family: her mother, Marian, the clever daughter of a Dostoevsky scholar whose husband leaves her for a beautiful young art student; Clare's half brother, Toby, a dreamy boy who prefers to view life through the lens of a camera; her troubled younger half sister, Tamsin, who develops an apparatus of taboos and rituals to restore order to her chaotic past. In the world Tessa Hadley has created, family is no longer a steady foundation but a complex web of marriages, divorces, half siblings, and stepchildren that expands with every new connection and betrayal. Accidents in the Home offers a startling, intimate portrait of family life in our time.

The Houseguest: And Other Stories

The Houseguest: And Other Stories PDF Author: Amparo Dávila
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 0811228223
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 131

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Book Description
The first collection in English of an endlessly surprising, master storyteller Like those of Kafka, Poe, Leonora Carrington, or Shirley Jackson, Amparo Dávila’s stories are terrifying, mesmerizing, and expertly crafted—you’ll finish each one gasping for air. With acute psychological insight, Dávila follows her characters to the limits of desire, paranoia, insomnia, and fear. She is a writer obsessed with obsession, who makes nightmares come to life through the everyday: loneliness sinks in easily like a razor-sharp knife, some sort of evil lurks in every shadow, delusion takes the form of strange and very real creatures. After reading The Houseguest—Dávila’s debut collection in English—you’ll wonder how this secret was kept for so long.

Virgin and Other Stories

Virgin and Other Stories PDF Author: April Ayers Lawson
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0865478708
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
A confident and mesmerizing fiction debut, from the winner of the Plimpton Prize Set in the South, at the crossroads of a world that is both secular and devoutly Christian, April Ayers Lawson's stories evoke the inner lives of young women and men navigating sexual, emotional, and spiritual awakenings. In "The Negative Effects of Homeschooling," Conner, sixteen, accompanies his grieving mother to the funeral of her best friend, Charlene, a woman who was once a man. In "The Way You Must Play Always," Gretchen, who looks young even for thirteen, heads into her weekly piano lesson in nervous anticipation of her next illicit meeting with her teacher's brother, Wesley. Thin and sickly, wasting from a brain tumor, Wesley spends his days watching pornography and smoking pot, and yet Gretchen can only interpret his advances as the first budding of love. And in the title story, Jake grapples with the growing chasm between him and his wife, Sheila, who was still a virgin when they wed. At a cocktail party thrown by a wealthy donor to his hospital, he ponders the intertwining imperatives of marriage--sex and love, violation and trust, spirituality and desire--even as he finds himself succumbing to the temptations of his host. Self-assured and sensual, Virgin and Other Stories is the first work of a young writer of unusual mastery.

Hugh Hefner's First Funeral and Other True Tales of Love and Death in Chicago

Hugh Hefner's First Funeral and Other True Tales of Love and Death in Chicago PDF Author: Pat Colander
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780996608114
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
Pat Colander was a writer for The Reader and The Chicago Tribune in the 1970s and 1980s, and covered some of the most offbeat stories during that time. Seven of those tales of love and death in Chicago are featured in this incredible book.Featuring a beautiful cover photograph from Barry Butler and memorable illustrations from artist Dave Mosele, Hugh Hefner's First Funeral and other True Tales of Love and Death in Chicago is a gritty trip into Chicago's past. Before the last page is devoured, the reader will track the Tylenol killer(s), get inside the mind of a tortured artist, meet the woman behind the women at Playboy Magazine, follow along with a shocking murder trial, spend time with a legendary Chicago attorney, and tour the old Cook County morgue.Hugh Hefner's First Funeral and other True Tales of Love and Death in Chicago is shocking, gruesome, and gritty, and will remain in your heart and mind long after you finish reading the final page.