Author: Meng Jin
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0063160730
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 193
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Book Description
“A knockout short story collection...Each one of these 10 dizzyingly immersive stories offers up a heady and visceral portrait of what ails us, from isolation and self-doubt, to unrequited love and regret over what might have been, to what it means to be (and to be considered) an American." -- San Francisco Chronicle Meng Jin’s critically acclaimed debut novel, Little Gods, was praised as “spectacular and emotionally polyphonic (Omar El-Akkad, BookPage), “powerful” (Washington Post), and “meticulously observed, daringly imagined” (Claire Messud). Now Jin turns her considerable talents to short fiction, in ten thematically linked stories. Written during the turbulent years of the Trump administration and the first year of the pandemic, these stories explore intimacy and isolation, coming-of-age and coming to terms with the repercussions of past mistakes, fraying relationships and surprising moments of connection. Moving between San Francisco and China, and from unsparing realism to genre-bending delight, Self-Portrait with Ghost considers what it means to live in an age of heightened self-consciousness, seemingly endless access to knowledge, and little actual power. Page-turning, thought-provoking, and wholly unique, Self-Portrait with Ghost further establishes Meng Jin as a writer who “reminds us that possible explanations in our universe are as varied as the beings who populate it” (Paris Review).
Author: Kelly Dwyer
Publisher: Berkley
ISBN: 9780425176962
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 276
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Book Description
A family in California is brought together by death. For years sculptor Kate Flannigan refused to speak to her sister, Colleen, because she stole her husband, nor would she allow her ex-husband to visit their daughter. All that ends when Kate's brother, Luke, commits suicide.
Author: Meng Jin
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062935976
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 307
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Book Description
LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/OPEN BOOK AWARD “Compellingly complex…Expands the future of the immigrant novel even as it holds us in uneasy thrall to the past.” – Gish Jen, New York Times Book Review Combining the emotional resonance of Home Fire with the ambition and innovation of Asymmetry, a lyrical and thought-provoking debut novel that explores the complex web of grief, memory, time, physics, history, and selfhood in the immigrant experience, and the complicated bond between daughters and mothers. On the night of June Fourth, a woman gives birth in a Beijing hospital alone. Thus begins the unraveling of Su Lan, a brilliant physicist who until this moment has successfully erased her past, fighting what she calls the mind’s arrow of time. When Su Lan dies unexpectedly seventeen years later, it is her daughter Liya who inherits the silences and contradictions of her life. Liya, who grew up in America, takes her mother’s ashes to China—to her, an unknown country. In a territory inhabited by the ghosts of the living and the dead, Liya’s memories are joined by those of two others: Zhu Wen, the woman last to know Su Lan before she left China, and Yongzong, the father Liya has never known. In this way a portrait of Su Lan emerges: an ambitious scientist, an ambivalent mother, and a woman whose relationship to her own past shapes and ultimately unmakes Liya’s own sense of displacement. A story of migrations literal and emotional, spanning time, space and class, Little Gods is a sharp yet expansive exploration of the aftermath of unfulfilled dreams, an immigrant story in negative that grapples with our tenuous connections to memory, history, and self.
Author: Rachel Lyon
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 139853336X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 396
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Book Description
Rachel Lyon's first novel – soon to be made into a major motion picture starring Zoë Kravitz and Thomasin McKenzie Lu Rile is a relentlessly focused young photographer struggling to make ends meet. Working three jobs, and worrying that the crumbling warehouse she lives in is being sold to developers, she is at a point of desperation. Until, by pure chance, Lu discovers she’s captured a tragedy in the background of a self portrait; a boy falling to his death. The photograph turns out to be the best work of art she’s ever made. It’s an image that could change her life – if she lets it. Set in early 90s Brooklyn on the brink of gentrification, Self-Portrait with Boy is a provocative commentary about the emotional dues that must be paid on the road to success. ‘Beautifully imagined and flawlessly executed’ Joyce Carol Oates ‘A sparkling debut’ New York Times Book Review
Author: Cleo Coyle
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0698188632
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 336
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Book Description
Bookshop owner Penelope Thornton-McClure and her gumshoe ghost team up to solve the stunning mystery at the heart of a madwoman’s self-portrait in this all new installment from New York Times bestselling author Cleo Coyle. While gathering a collection of vintage book cover paintings for a special event in her quaint Rhode Island bookshop, Penelope discovers a spooky portrait of a beautiful woman, one who supposedly went mad, according to town gossip. Seymour, the local mailman, falls in love with the haunting image and buys the picture, refusing to part with it, even as fatal accidents befall those around it. Is the canvas cursed? Or is something more sinister at work? For answers, Pen turns to an otherworldly source: Jack Shepard, PI. Back in the 1940s, Jack cracked a case of a killer cover artist, and (to Pen’s relief) his spirit is willing to help her solve this mystery, even if he and his license did expire decades ago.
Author:
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 40
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Book Description
A well-known illustrator of children's books discusses her life and art.
Author: Frederic Tuten
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393079058
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 249
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Book Description
Inspired by the stories the author read to his possibly illiterate Sicilian grandmother as a child, these nested narratives are told by couples traveling through hallucinatory, romantic landscapes. As the traveler in "Self Portrait with Sicily" rides a train through the Bronx, boundaries between worlds, geography, and generations blur, transporting him through Sicily and the rural landscape of his Nonna. On a honeymoon in Spain, the narrator of "Self Portrait with Bullfight" decides that "forbearance" is the key to a lasting marriage and proceeds to try the patience of his new bride with a long-winded tale of the "frisson of rivalry" between two youths vying for the attentions of a Gypsy woman. In "Self Portrait with Cheese," an allegory about a family of bears that flees the circus only to languish, bored, in their freedom, offers a convoluted fable about the needs of artists. Tuten's (The Green Hour) polished stories of beauty, longing, and loss are relatable, yet strange enough that they constantly pique--Publisher's Weekly.
Author: Sarah Kennedy
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781911261100
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 332
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Book Description
The small Virginia town of Chadwick seems peaceful, but deep divisions and hatreds surface when Chloe Anderson suddenly gains nation-wide attention after showing a series of images featuring young artist Zadie Williams' dead mother, Leslie Williams. Worse for Zadie, Chloe has stolen the title from a series of paintings that Zadie herself hoped would launch her young career. Zadie, still consumed with grief by the recent loss of her mother and her father's quick remarriage, overhears a story that Chloe is haunted by the ghost of Leslie. Encouraged by her friend Michelle and her boyfriend Tom, Zadie enters a virtual competition with Chloe, in a mutual, growing obsession with social media. As Chloe sickens, with the same illness that killed Leslie, Zadie enters a world in which truth is indiscernible from fiction, where the human and the paranormal intersect, and where hatred, jealousy, and love become the same emotion.
Author: Marie NDiaye
Publisher: Influx Press
ISBN: 1910312908
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 81
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Book Description
'NDiaye is a hypnotic storyteller with an unflinching understanding of the rock-bottom reality of most people's life.' New York Times ' One of France's most exciting prose stylists.' The Guardian. Obsessed by her encounters with the mysterious green women, and haunted by the Garonne River, a nameless narrator seeks them out in La Roele, Paris, Marseille, and Ouagadougou. Each encounter reveals different aspects of the women; real or imagined, dead or alive, seductive or suicidal, driving the narrator deeper into her obsession, in this unsettling exploration of identity, memory and paranoia. Self Portrait in Green is the multi-prize winning, Marie NDiaye's brilliant subversion of the memoir. Written in diary entries, with lyrical prose and dreamlike imagery, we start with and return to the river, which mirrors the narrative by posing more questions than it answers.
Author: Aimee Pokwatka
Publisher: Tordotcom
ISBN: 1250820847
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
"Aimee Pokwatka's novel Self-Portrait with Nothing is "fraught and deeply moving...the work of a genuinely exciting new talent." (Booker Prize winner, George Saunders). If a picture paints a thousand worlds... Abandoned as an infant on the local veterinarian's front porch, Pepper Rafferty was raised by two loving mothers, and now at thirty-six is married to the stable, supportive Ike. She's never told anyone that at fifteen she discovered the identity of her biological mother. That's because her birth mother is Ula Frost, a reclusive painter famous for the outrageous claims that her portraits summon their subjects' doppelgangers from parallel universes. Researching the rumors, Pepper couldn't help but wonder: Was there a parallel universe in which she was more confident, more accomplished, better able to accept love? A universe in which Ula decided she was worth keeping? A universe in which Ula's rejection didn't still hurt too much to share? Sometimes living our best life means embracing the imperfect one we already have..."--
