Author: Stephanie Danler
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1398527793
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 212
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Book Description
From the author of the international bestseller Sweetbitter, a memoir of survival, starting over, and love in all its complicated guises. Even after achieving her dream of selling her debut novel, Stephanie Danler feels adrift in New York. Struggling in the throes of a doomed relationship and haunted by her tumultuous childhood, something nameless compels her to return home to Southern California. In a cottage in Laurel Canyon, as a new life begins to shape itself, she finally succumbs to memories of the past that have proved impossible to escape. A father who swung in and out of her life erratically, charming and mercurial and prone to addiction. A mother now disabled by years of alcoholism and an aneurysm, who cannot remember the abuse she inflicted. The looming, desolate mountains of Colorado, and a teenage freedom that nearly killed her. And above all, the painful love and forgiveness for those who failed her over and over again. ‘It's such a thrill to watch a writer open up her greediest thoughts, to slice open little pockets of her skin and root around underneath her flesh.’ New York Times Book Review ‘A compulsive, neck-breaking masterpiece.’ Lisa Taddeo ‘This is a story of triumph: the triumph of grit, talent, grace, and beauty over the dark pull of inner demons.’ Dani Shapiro
Author: Rosaria Champagne Butterfield
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781884527821
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 191
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Book Description
"Rosaria, by the standards of many, was living a very good life. She had a tenured position at a large university in a field for which she cared deeply. She owned two homes with her partner, in which they provided hospitality to students and activists that were looking to make a difference in the world. In the community, Rosaria was involved in volunteer work. At the university, she was a respected advisor of students and her department's curriculum. And then, in her late 30s, Rosaria encountered something that turned her world upside down -- the idea that Christianity, a religion that she had regarded as problematic and sometimes downright damaging, might be right about who God was. That idea seemed to fly in the face of the people and causes that she most loved. What follows is a story of what she describes as a train wreck at the hand of the supernatural. These are her secret thoughts about those events, written as only a reflective English professor could."--Back cover.
Author: Zakiah Sayeed
Publisher: Createspace Indie Pub Platform
ISBN: 9781468090109
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 190
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Book Description
For author Zakiah Sayeed, baring her soul to the world, releasing these intensely personal thoughts and feelings, is a freeing experience. Within these pages is solace and inspiration, happiness and sorrow, and a warm feeling of connection and shared understanding. Free verse poetry and flash fiction, it relies on stream of consciousness and ethereal connection cascading into awareness rather than preconceived rhythm and rhyme, her words true to the cadences of being, each a pulse—a reflection—that when viewed in their whole portrays a stunning breadth of emotion with resonance and beauty. Combined with prose and artfully crafted letters that provide insight into her life, her children, and her grandchildren, her fearless honesty displays for all to see the truth of her being.
Author: Luke Yates
Publisher: Independently Published
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 66
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Book Description
Thoughts Of A Stray Mind is a rare window into the mind of a teenager trying to find their way in the world. This is a must-read for teens who will relate to the author's insightful depictions of both everyday challenges and extraordinary, but often shared, events. This book speaks to teens. It brings meaning to all kinds of experiences. Luke Yates writes candidly, through poetry, about feelings so often diminished by adults and buried deep by high school peers.
Author: Chelsey Johnson
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062666703
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 420
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Book Description
“A thoughtful and joyous literary experience that celebrates its characters and liberally rewards its readers.”—New York Times Book Review, Editors' Choice "I tore through this novel like an orphaned reader seeking a home in its ragtag yet shimmering world." — Carrie Brownstein “Our ’90s nostalgia is hella high these days, and this tender, funny story made our aging hipster hearts sing.”— Marie Claire A warm, funny, and whip-smart debut novel about rebellious youth, inconceivable motherhood, and the complications of belonging—to a city, a culture, and a family—when none of them can quite contain who you really are. All of us were refugees of the nuclear family. . . Twenty-three-year-old artist Andrea Morales escaped her Midwestern Catholic childhood—and the closet—to create a home and life for herself within the thriving but insular lesbian underground of Portland, Oregon. But one drunken night, reeling from a bad breakup and a friend’s betrayal, she recklessly crosses enemy lines and hooks up with a man. To her utter shock, Andrea soon discovers she’s pregnant—and despite the concerns of her astonished circle of gay friends, she decides to have the baby. A decade later, when her precocious daughter Lucia starts asking questions about the father she’s never known, Andrea is forced to reconcile the past she hoped to leave behind with the life she’s worked so hard to build. A thoroughly modern and original anti-romantic comedy, Stray City is an unabashedly entertaining literary debut about the families we’re born into and the families we choose, about finding yourself by breaking the rules, and making bad decisions for all the right reasons.
Author: Rebecca Watson
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0385545770
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 217
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Book Description
"Extraordinary"--THE NEW YORKER In the formally innovative tradition of Grief Is the Thing with Feathers and Ducks, Newburyport comes a dazzlingly original, shot-in-the-arm of a debut that reveals a young woman's every thought over the course of one deceptively ordinary day. She wakes up, goes to work. Watches the clock and checks her phone. But underneath this monotony there's something else going on: something under her skin. Relayed in interweaving columns that chart the feedback loop of memory, the senses, and modern distractions with wit and precision, our narrator becomes increasingly anxious as the day moves on: Is she overusing the heart emoji? Isn't drinking eight glasses of water a day supposed to fix everything? Why is the etiquette of the women's bathroom so fraught? How does she define rape? And why can't she stop scratching? Fiercely moving and slyly profound, little scratch is a defiantly playful look at how our minds function in--and survive--the darkest moments.
Author: Rachel Vincent
Publisher: Harlequin
ISBN: 0369747224
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 428
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Book Description
From New York Times bestselling author Rachel Vincent comes the first book in her The Shifters series, set in a world where the line between man and beast is blurred and the only constant is attraction. I look like an all-American grad student. But I am a werecat, a shape-shifter, and I live in two worlds. Despite reservations from my family and my Pride, I escaped the pressure to continue my species and carved out a normal life for myself. Until the night a Stray attacked. I'd been warned about Strays—werecats without a Pride—constantly on the lookout for someone like me: attractive, female and fertile. I fought him off, but then learned two of my fellow tabbies had disappeared. This brush with danger was all my Pride needed to summon me back…for my own protection. Yeah, right. But I'm no meek kitty. I'll take on whatever—and whoever—I have to in order to find my friends. Watch out, Strays—'cause I got claws, and I'm not afraid to use them…. Previously published.
Author: Wislawa Szymborska
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0544618858
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 255
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Book Description
"Unquestionably one of the great living European poets. She's accessible and deeply human and a joy--though it is a dark kind of joy--to read. . . . She is a poet to live with." —Robert Hass, The Washington Post Book World Wislawa Szymborska's poems are admired around the world, and her unsparing vision, tireless wit, and deep sense of humanity are cherished by countless readers. Unknown to most of them, however, Szymborska, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, also worked for several decades as a columnist, reviewing a wide variety of books under the unassuming title "Nonrequired Reading." As readers of her poems would expect, the short prose pieces collected here are anything but ordinary. Reflecting the author's own eclectic tastes and interests, the pretexts for these ruminations range from books on wallpapering, cooking, gardening, and yoga, to more lofty volumes on opera and world literature. Unpretentious yet incisive, these charming pieces are on a par with Szymborska's finest lyrics, tackling the same large and small questions with a wonderful curiosity.
Author: Peter Orner
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 1936787253
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 337
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Book Description
This National Book Critics Circle Award is “an entrancing attempt to catch what falls between: the irreducibly personal, messy, even embarrassing ways reading and living bleed into each other, which neither literary criticism nor autobiography ever quite acknowledges" (The New York Times). “Stories, both my own and those I’ve taken to heart, make up whoever it is that I’ve become,” Peter Orner writes in this collection of essays about reading, writing, and living. Orner reads and writes everywhere he finds himself: a hospital cafeteria, a coffee shop in Albania, or a crowded bus in Haiti. The result is a book of unlearned meditations that stumbles into memoir. Among the many writers Orner addresses are Isaac Babel and Zora Neale Hurston, both of whom told their truths and were silenced; Franz Kafka, who professed loneliness but craved connection; Robert Walser, who spent the last twenty-three years of his life in a Swiss insane asylum, working at being crazy; and Juan Rulfo, who practiced the difficult art of silence. Virginia Woolf, Eudora Welty, Yasunari Kawabata, Saul Bellow, Mavis Gallant, John Edgar Wideman, William Trevor, and Václav Havel make appearances, as well as the poet Herbert Morris--about whom almost nothing is known. An elegy for an eccentric late father, and the end of a marriage, Am I Alone Here? is also a celebration of the possibility of renewal. At once personal and panoramic, this book will inspire readers to return to the essential stories of their own lives.
Author: Elissa Sussman
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062274589
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 215
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Book Description
Princess Aislynn has long dreamed about attending her Introduction Ball, about dancing with the handsome suitors her adviser has chosen for her, about meeting her true love and starting her happily ever after. When the night of the ball finally arrives and Nerine Academy is awash with roses and royalty, Aislynn wants nothing more than to dance the night away, dutifully following the Path that has been laid out for her. She does not intend to stray. But try as she might, Aislynn has never quite managed to control the magic that burns within her—magic brought on by wicked, terrible desires that threaten the Path she has vowed to take. After all, it is wrong to want what you do not need. Isn't it?
