Lucretia and the Kroons (Novella)

Lucretia and the Kroons (Novella) PDF Author: Victor LaValle
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0812984374
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 104

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Book Description
From one of the most acclaimed young writers of fiction in America today comes a fast-paced and fantastical novella about a young girl’s journey into a dark netherworld to find her missing best friend. This eBook edition contains an exclusive excerpt from Victor LaValle’s new novel The Devil in Silver, about which Gary Shteyngart raves, “Literary horror just found a new master.” Lucretia’s best friend and upstairs neighbor Sunny—a sweet pitbull of a kid, even as she struggles with a mysterious illness—has gone missing. The only way to get her back is for Lucretia to climb the rickety fire escape of their Queens tenement and crawl through the window of apartment 6D, portal to a vast shadowland of missing kids ruled by a nightmarish family of mutants whose designs on the children are unknown. Her search for Sunny takes Lucretia through a dark fantasyland where she finds lush forests growing from concrete, pigeon-winged rodents, and haunted playgrounds. Her quest ultimately forces her to confront the most frightening specter of all: losing, forever, the thing you love the most. Lucretia and the Kroons is a dazzlingly imaginative adventure story and a moving exploration of the power of friendship and the terror of loss. This all-new novella serves as the perfect companion piece to The Devil in Silver, a thrillingly suspenseful work of literary horror that continues the story of Lucretia. Advance praise for The Devil in Silver “The Devil in Silver is the rare work that takes seemingly disparate parts and brings them together seamlessly into something entirely original. There is madness here, and it is infused with brilliance, and the result is a story that is as illuminating as it is entertaining.”—Mat Johnson, author of Pym

Lucretia and the Kroons (Novella)

Lucretia and the Kroons (Novella) PDF Author: Victor LaValle
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0812984374
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 104

Get Book Here

Book Description
From one of the most acclaimed young writers of fiction in America today comes a fast-paced and fantastical novella about a young girl’s journey into a dark netherworld to find her missing best friend. This eBook edition contains an exclusive excerpt from Victor LaValle’s new novel The Devil in Silver, about which Gary Shteyngart raves, “Literary horror just found a new master.” Lucretia’s best friend and upstairs neighbor Sunny—a sweet pitbull of a kid, even as she struggles with a mysterious illness—has gone missing. The only way to get her back is for Lucretia to climb the rickety fire escape of their Queens tenement and crawl through the window of apartment 6D, portal to a vast shadowland of missing kids ruled by a nightmarish family of mutants whose designs on the children are unknown. Her search for Sunny takes Lucretia through a dark fantasyland where she finds lush forests growing from concrete, pigeon-winged rodents, and haunted playgrounds. Her quest ultimately forces her to confront the most frightening specter of all: losing, forever, the thing you love the most. Lucretia and the Kroons is a dazzlingly imaginative adventure story and a moving exploration of the power of friendship and the terror of loss. This all-new novella serves as the perfect companion piece to The Devil in Silver, a thrillingly suspenseful work of literary horror that continues the story of Lucretia. Advance praise for The Devil in Silver “The Devil in Silver is the rare work that takes seemingly disparate parts and brings them together seamlessly into something entirely original. There is madness here, and it is infused with brilliance, and the result is a story that is as illuminating as it is entertaining.”—Mat Johnson, author of Pym

The Devil in Silver

The Devil in Silver PDF Author: Victor LaValle
Publisher: One World
ISBN: 0812982258
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 434

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Book Description
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • The Washington Post • Publishers Weekly New Hyde Hospital’s psychiatric ward has a new resident. It also has a very, very old one. Pepper is a rambunctious big man, minor-league troublemaker, working-class hero (in his own mind), and, suddenly, the surprised inmate of a budget-strapped mental institution in Queens, New York. He’s not mentally ill, but that doesn’t seem to matter. He is accused of a crime he can’t quite square with his memory. In the darkness of his room on his first night, he’s visited by a terrifying creature with the body of an old man and the head of a bison who nearly kills him before being hustled away by the hospital staff. It’s no delusion: The other patients confirm that a hungry devil roams the hallways when the sun goes down. Pepper rallies three other inmates in a plot to fight back: Dorry, an octogenarian schizophrenic who’s been on the ward for decades and knows all its secrets; Coffee, an African immigrant with severe OCD, who tries desperately to send alarms to the outside world; and Loochie, a bipolar teenage girl who acts as the group’s enforcer. Battling the pill-pushing staff, one another, and their own minds, they try to kill the monster that’s stalking them. But can the Devil die? The Devil in Silver brilliantly brings together the compelling themes that spark all of Victor LaValle’s radiant fiction: faith, race, class, madness, and our relationship with the unseen and the uncanny. More than that, it’s a thrillingly suspenseful work of literary horror about friendship, love, and the courage to slay our own demons. Praise for The Devil in Silver “A fearless exploration of America’s heart of darkness . . . a dizzying high-wire act.”—The Washington Post “LaValle never writes the same book and his recent is a stunner. . . . Fantastical, hellish and hilarious.”—Los Angeles Times “It’s simply too bighearted, too gentle, too kind, too culturally observant and too idiosyncratic to squash into the small cupboard of any one genre, or even two.”—The New York Times Book Review “Embeds a sophisticated critique of contemporary America’s inhumane treatment of madness in a fast-paced story that is by turns horrifying, suspenseful, and comic.”—The Boston Globe “LaValle uses the thrills of horror to draw attention to timely matters. And he does so without sucking the joy out of the genre. . . . A striking and original American novelist.”—The New Republic

Big Machine

Big Machine PDF Author: Victor LaValle
Publisher: One World
ISBN: 0385530412
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description
Ricky Rice is a middling hustler with a lingering junk habit, a bum knee, and a haunted mind. A survivor of a suicide cult, he scrapes by as a porter at a bus depot in Utica, New York, until one day a mysterious letter arrives, summoning him to enlist in a band of paranormal investigators comprised of former addicts and petty criminals, all of whom had at some point in their wasted lives heard what may have been the voice of God. Infused with the wonder of a disquieting dream and laced with Victor LaValle’s fiendish comic sensibility, Big Machine is a mind-rattling mystery about doubt, faith, and the monsters we carry within us.

Ancient History

Ancient History PDF Author: Victor LaValle
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 1101974184
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 22

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Book Description
A Vintage Shorts “Short Story Month” Selection Horse and Ahab share the kind of contempt and love for one another that only true friends can. Months after graduating high school, Horse is getting married to his longtime girlfriend, Melissa, and moving into her apartment in Manhattan, and Ahab has enlisted in the Marines. They’ve found ways to escape the neighborhood, just not together. From the extraordinary fiction debut, Slapboxing with Jesus, that launched Victor LaValle to literary stardom—a raw, gritty, and unremittingly truthful look into the lives of two friends who go to say goodbye to each other and their neighborhood on the shores of Rockaway Beach. An ebook short.

No Humans Involved

No Humans Involved PDF Author: Kelley Armstrong
Publisher: Bantam
ISBN: 0553588370
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 546

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Book Description
Readers around the world have fallen for Kelley Armstrong’s intoxicating, sensual and wicked tales of the paranormal, in which demons and witches, werewolves and vampires collide – often hilariously, sometimes violently – with everyday life. In Armstrong’s first six novels, Elena, Paige and Eve have had their way with us. Now get ready for Jaime Vegas, the luscious, lovelorn and haunted necromancer. . . Jaime, who knows a thing or two about showbiz, is on a television shoot in Los Angeles when weird things start to happen. As a woman whose special talent is raising the dead, her threshold for weirdness is pretty high: she’s used to not only seeing dead people but hearing them speak to her in very emphatic terms. But for the first time in her life – as invisible hands brush her skin, unintelligible fragments of words are whispered into her ears, and beings move just at the corner of her eye–she knows what humans mean when they talk about being haunted. She is determined to get to the bottom of these manifestations, but as she sets out to solve the mystery she has no idea how scary her investigation will get, or to what depths ordinary humans will sink in their attempts to gain supernatural powers. As she digs into the dark underside of Los Angeles, she’ll need as much Otherworld help as she can get in order to survive, calling on her personal angel, Eve, and Hope, the well-meaning chaos demon. Jeremy, the alpha werewolf, is also by her side offering protection. And, Jaime hopes, maybe a little more than that. “As I knelt on the cobblestones to begin the ritual, I opened not some ancient leather pouch, but a Gucci make-up bag. . . . I know little about the geography and theology of the afterlife, but I do know that the worst spirits are kept secured, and my risk of “accidentally” tapping into a hell dimension is next to nil. Even if I do bring back some depraved killer’s spirit, what can it do to me? When you deprive someone of the ability to act in the living world, he’s pretty darned helpless. In death, even the worst killer plummets from lethal to merely annoying. Yet whatever had been trying to contact me apparently could cross that barrier, could act in the living world. . .at least on me. I added an extra helping of vervain to the censer.” —from No Humans Involved

The Ecstatic, Or, Homunculus

The Ecstatic, Or, Homunculus PDF Author: Victor D. LaValle
Publisher: Crown
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
Something is wrong with Anthony, and it's getting worse. Schizophrenia runs in his family's blood, picking off an uncle here, a mother there, and has now found a home in Anthony's mind. The women in his life -- his mother, sister, and grandmother -- bring him home to Queens and try to fix him, but his presence slowly turns their home into a semi-suburban asylum.Anthony narrates the skewed story of his family's surreal adventures in an exploitative world, from black-market employers and neighborhood loansharks to bogus beauty pageants and bootleg medical clinics. In the tradition of misfit picaresques from The World According to Garp to Confederacy of Dunces, this is the story of a family trying to save themselves from the ravenous world and their own unraveling minds.

Slapboxing with Jesus

Slapboxing with Jesus PDF Author: Victor LaValle
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307803384
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
Twelve original and interconnected stories in the traditions of Junot Díaz and Sherman Alexie. Victor D. LaValle's astonishing, violent, and funny debut offers harrowing glimpses at the vulnerable lives of young people who struggle not only to come of age, but to survive the city streets. In "ancient history," two best friends graduating from high school fight to be the one to leave first for a better world; each one wants to be the fortunate son. In "pops," an African-American boy meets his father, a white cop from Connecticut, and tries not to care. And in "kids on colden street," a boy is momentarily uplifted by the arrival of a younger sister only to discover that brutality leads only to brutality in the natural order of things. Written with raw candor, grit, and a cautious heart, slapboxing with jesus introduces an exciting and bold new craftsman of contemporary fiction. LaValle's voices echo long after their stories are told.

Who Fears Death

Who Fears Death PDF Author: Nnedi Okorafor
Publisher: HarperCollins UK
ISBN: 0008288720
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 394

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Book Description
An award-winning literary author enters the world of magical realism with her World Fantasy Award-winning novel of a remarkable woman in post-apocalyptic Africa. Now optioned as a TV series for HBO, with executive producer George R.R. Martin!

The Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction, 2 Volumes

The Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction, 2 Volumes PDF Author: Patrick O'Donnell
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1119431719
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 1607

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Book Description
Fresh perspectives and eye-opening discussions of contemporary American fiction In The Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction: 1980-2020, a team of distinguished scholars delivers a focused and in-depth collection of essays on some of the most significant and influential authors and literary subjects of the last four decades. Cutting-edge entries from established and new voices discuss subjects as varied as multiculturalism, contemporary regionalisms, realism after poststructuralism, indigenous narratives, globalism, and big data in the context of American fiction from the last 40 years. The Encyclopedia provides an overview of American fiction at the turn of the millennium as well as a vision of what may come. It perfectly balances analysis, summary, and critique for an illuminating treatment of the subject matter. This collection also includes: An exciting mix of established and emerging contributors from around the world discussing central and cutting-edge topics in American fiction studies Focused, critical explorations of authors and subjects of critical importance to American fiction Topics that reflect the energies and tendencies of contemporary American fiction from the forty years between 1980 and 2020 The Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction: 1980-2020 is a must-have resource for undergraduate and graduate students of American literature, English, creative writing, and fiction studies. It will also earn a place in the libraries of scholars seeking an authoritative array of contributions on both established and newer authors of contemporary fiction.

The Sundial

The Sundial PDF Author: Shirley Jackson
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0698148207
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
Before there was Hill House, there was the Halloran mansion of Jackson’s stunningly creepy fourth novel, The Sundial When the Halloran clan gathers at the family home for a funeral, no one is surprised when the somewhat peculiar Aunt Fanny wanders off into the secret garden. But then she returns to report an astonishing vision of an apocalypse from which only the Hallorans and their hangers-on will be spared, and the family finds itself engulfed in growing madness, fear, and violence as they prepare for a terrible new world. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.