Strangers at the Feast

Strangers at the Feast PDF Author: Jennifer Vanderbes
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439166986
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
A riveting second novel that unfolds over the course of Thanksgiving Day as two families are connected by a horrific crime.

Strangers at the Feast

Strangers at the Feast PDF Author: Jennifer Vanderbes
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439166986
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
A riveting second novel that unfolds over the course of Thanksgiving Day as two families are connected by a horrific crime.

The Stranger at the Feast

The Stranger at the Feast PDF Author: Tom Boylston
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520968972
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
At publication date, a free ebook version of this title will be available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. The Stranger at the Feast is a pathbreaking ethnographic study of one of the world’s oldest and least-understood religious traditions. Based on long-term ethnographic research on the Zege peninsula in northern Ethiopia, the author tells the story of how people have understood large-scale religious change by following local transformations in hospitality, ritual prohibition, and feeding practices. Ethiopia has undergone radical upheaval in the transition from the imperial era of Haile Selassie to the modern secular state, but the secularization of the state has been met with the widespread revival of popular religious practice. For Orthodox Christians in Zege, everything that matters about religion comes back to how one eats and fasts with others. Boylston shows how practices of feeding and avoidance have remained central even as their meaning and purpose has dramatically changed: from a means of marking class distinctions within Orthodox society, to a marker of the difference between Orthodox Christians and other religions within the contemporary Ethiopian state.

The Peacock Feast

The Peacock Feast PDF Author: Lisa Gornick
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 0374718490
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Book Description
From “one of the most perceptive, compassionate writers of fiction in America...immensely talented and brave” (Michael Schaub, NPR), a historical saga about love, class, and the past we never escape. The Peacock Feast opens on a June day in 1916 when Louis C. Tiffany, the eccentric glass genius, dynamites the breakwater at Laurelton Hall—his fantastical Oyster Bay mansion, with columns capped by brilliant ceramic blossoms and a smokestack hidden in a blue-banded minaret—so as to foil the town from reclaiming the beach for public use. The explosion shakes both the apple crate where Prudence, the daughter of Tiffany’s prized gardener, is sleeping and the rocks where Randall, her seven-year-old brother, is playing. Nearly a century later, Prudence receives an unexpected visit at her New York apartment from Grace, a hospice nurse and the granddaughter of Randall, who Prudence never saw again after he left at age fourteen for California. The mementos Grace carries from her grandfather’s house stir Prudence’s long-repressed memories and bring her to a new understanding of the choices she made in work and love, and what she faces now in her final days. Spanning the twentieth century and three continents, The Peacock Feast ricochets from Manhattan to San Francisco, from the decadent mansions of the Tiffany family to the death row of a Texas prison, and from the London consultation room of Anna Freud to a Mendocino commune. With psychological acuity and aching eloquence, Lisa Gornick has written a sweeping family drama, an exploration of the meaning of art and the art of dying, and an illuminating portrait of how our decisions reverberate across time and space.

The Traveling Feast

The Traveling Feast PDF Author: Rick Bass
Publisher: Little, Brown
ISBN: 0316381195
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Acclaimed author Rick Bass decided to thank all of his writing heroes in person, one meal at a time, in this "rich smorgasbord of a memoir . . . a soul-nourishing, road-burning act of tribute" (New York Times Book Review). "Exuberant . . . A classic . . . This is a rich bounty of a book." --Publishers Weekly (starred review) "A master."--Boston Globe "One of the very best writers we have."--San Francisco Chronicle "Both mythic and intimate . . . A virtuoso."--O: The Oprah Magazine "The beauty of his sentences recalls the stylistic finesse of Cormac McCarthy and Willa Cather."--Chicago Tribune From his bid to become Eudora Welty's lawn boy to the time George Plimpton offered to punch him in the nose, lineage has always been important to Rick Bass. Now at a turning point--in his midfifties, with his long marriage dissolved and his grown daughters out of the house--Bass strikes out on a journey of thanksgiving. His aim: to make a memorable meal for each of his mentors, to express his gratitude for the way they have shaped not only his writing but his life. The result, an odyssey to some of America's most iconic writers, is also a record of self-transformation as Bass seeks to recapture the fire that drove him as a young man. Along the way we join in escapades involving smuggled contraband, an exploding grill, a trail of blood through Heathrow airport, an episode of dog-watching with Amy Hempel in Central Park, and a near run-in with plague-ridden prairie dogs on the way to see Lorrie Moore, as well as heartwarming and bittersweet final meals with the late Peter Matthiessen, John Berger, and Denis Johnson. Poignant, funny, and wistful, The Traveling Feast is a guide to living well and an unforgettable adventure that nourishes and renews the spirit.

Feast Days

Feast Days PDF Author: Ian MacKenzie
Publisher: Little, Brown
ISBN: 0316440140
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
Intelligent and deeply felt, Feast Days follows a young wife who relocates with her financier husband to São Paulo -- a South American megacity that impresses and unsettles, conceals and erupts. Here in her new home, she reckons with the twenty-first century as she encounters crime, protests, refugees gentrification, and the collision of art and commerce, while confronting the crisis slowly building inside her own marriage. In stylish prose and with piercing wit, Ian MacKenzie tells the story of Emma, a young woman who has moved from New York to Brazil just as massive demonstrations against the government are breaking out across the country amid growing economic inequality. Emma has come to Brazil for her husband's career, with no job prospects of her own, a weak grasp of the language, and a deep ambivalence about having a child. Her early days in Sao Paulo are listless but privileged; she dines at high-end restaurants, tutors wealthy Brazilians in English, and observes the city she now calls home. But when Emma volunteers at a local church to assist refugees and grows more deeply connected to the people she meets in the course of her days, she finds herself unable to resist the tug of Sao Paulo's political and social unrest. As the country moves seemingly closer to a breaking point, so does Emma's marriage, as she and her husband can no longer ignore the silent, tectonic shifts beneath the surface of their relationship. Feast Days is a sharply observed story of expatriate life, as well as a meditation on the hidden costs of modern living and how easily our belief systems can collapse around us. "Devastating, funny and wise, it's among the best novels I know about the fate of American innocence abroad."-Garth Greenwell

Feast

Feast PDF Author: Merrie Destefano
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062092294
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
“Merrie Destefano storms the world of urban fantasy…breathing new life into the vast genre of the undead.” —Tosca Lee, author of Havah and Demon: A Memoir “Merrie Destefano has made a fine start on a promising career.” —James Gunn, science fiction Grand Master With her brilliant debut novel, Afterlife, author Merrie Destefano earned herself a place of honor at the banquet table alongside today’s top authors of sf and urban fantasy. With Feast, she serves up another heaping helping of thrills, shivers, wonder, and glorious invention while spicing up the recipe with dark romance in the bestselling vein of C.L Wilson, Marjorie M. Liu, and other paranormal superstars. A spellbinding fantasy of supernatural intrigue and forbidden love, Feast blends vampire and fairy lore, with the resulting dish offering a sumptuous new take on both, as a troubled storyteller returns home to the mysterious autumn woods just prior to Halloween, to find her life and her soul captivated by a cursed immortal, the Lord of the Hunt.

The Feast

The Feast PDF Author: Margaret Kennedy
Publisher: New York : Rinehart
ISBN:
Category : Deadly sins
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
A story that would gather the Sins all under the roof of a Cornish seaside hotel managed by the unhappy wife of Sloth ... Among The Feast's entertaining cast of characters are a clergyman, a gaggle of adolescents and children, a quarter of lovers, and a clutch of frustrated husbands and wives - all serving Kennedy's dark and witty moral fable, which bears out the Biblical adage that many are called but only a very few chosen.

Easter Island

Easter Island PDF Author: Jennifer Vanderbes
Publisher: Dial Press Trade Paperback
ISBN: 0385336748
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
In this extraordinary fiction debut—rich with love and betrayal, history and intellectual passion—two remarkable narratives converge on Easter Island, one of the most remote places in the world. It is 1913. Elsa Pendleton travels from England to Easter Island with her husband, an anthropologist sent by the Royal Geographical Society to study the colossal moai statues, and her younger sister. What begins as familial duty for Elsa becomes a grand adventure; on Easter Island she discovers her true calling. But, out of contact with the outside world, she is unaware that World War I has been declared and that a German naval squadron, fleeing the British across the South Pacific, is heading toward the island she now considers home. Sixty years later, Dr. Greer Farraday, an American botanist, travels to Easter Island to research the island’s ancient pollen, but more important, to put back the pieces of her life after the death of her husband. A series of brilliant revelations brings to life the parallel quests of these two intrepid young women as they delve into the centuries-old mysteries of Easter Island. Slowly unearthing the island’s haunting past, they are forced to confront turbulent discoveries about themselves and the people they love, changing their lives forever. Easter Island is a tour de force of storytelling that will establish Jennifer Vanderbes as one of the most gifted writers of her generation.

The Secret of Raven Point

The Secret of Raven Point PDF Author: Jennifer Vanderbes
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439167052
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
From the award-winning author of Easter Island comes a powerful, “unputdownable” (Vogue.com) novel of love, loss, and redemption amid the ruins of war-torn Italy. 1943: When seventeen-year-old Juliet Dufresne receives a cryptic letter from her enlisted brother and then discovers that he’s been reported missing in action, she lies about her age and travels to the front lines as an army nurse, determined to find him. Shy and awkward, Juliet is thrust into the bloody chaos of a field hospital, a sprawling encampment north of Rome where she forges new friendships and is increasingly consumed by the plight of her patients. One in particular, Christopher Barnaby, a deserter awaiting court martial, may hold the answer to her brother’s whereabouts—but the trauma of war has left him catatonic. Racing against the clock, Juliet works with an enigmatic young psychiatrist, Dr. Henry Willard, to break Barnaby’s silence before the authorities take him away. Plunged into the horrifying depths of one man’s memories of combat, Juliet and Willard together plumb the moral nuances of a so-called “just war” and face the dangers of their own deepening emotional connection. In vibrant, arresting prose, Vanderbes tells the story of one girl’s fierce determination to find her brother as she comes of age in a time of unrelenting violence. An unforgettable war saga that captures the experiences of soldiers long after the battles have ended, The Secret of Raven Point is heartbreaking, and ultimately uplifting: “The only disappointing thing about this book is that it has to end” (Library Journal, starred review).

City of Strangers

City of Strangers PDF Author: Ian MacKenzie
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101061308
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Faith, family, and the weight of history intersect in this remarkable debut from a rising literary talent A cold, gray Sunday dawns on New York City to find Paul Metzger trudging through the winter streets to visit his past. He goes first to see his estranged, decades-older half-brother; then his dying father, whose notorious early life still haunts his children; and finally the ex-wife he cannot help but continue to love. But a fourth encounter-violent, unexpected-sets in motion a chain of events that will forever change Paul's life, as well as the family he's struggled so long to understand. Ian MacKenzie's stirring and lyrical debut is a story of a family inalterably fractured by its past, of a man who refuses to believe that what is done cannot be undone, and of a world that insists-catastrophically, in the end-otherwise.