Elsey Come Home

Elsey Come Home PDF Author: Susan Conley
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0525520996
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
The highly acclaimed author of Landslide delivers “[an] intricate, delicate-as-rice-paper novel" (O, The Oprah Magazine) about an ex-pat in China who embarks on a journey that takes her into the darkest corners of addiction, marriage, and motherhood. When Elsey's husband, Lukas, hands her a brochure for a weeklong mountain retreat, she knows he is really giving her an ultimatum: Go, or we’re done. Once a successful painter, Elsey set down roots in China after falling in love with Lukas. Now, with two young daughters and unable to find a balance between her identities as artist, mother, and wife, Elsey fills her days worrying, drinking, and descending into boredom and unhappiness. So she agrees to go. There, she meets a group of men and women who will forever alter the way she understands herself and her marriage. Written in a voice at once wry, sensual, blunt, and hypnotic, Elsey Come Home is a modern odyssey and a quietly dynamic portrait of contemporary womanhood.

Elsey Come Home

Elsey Come Home PDF Author: Susan Conley
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0525520996
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Get Book Here

Book Description
The highly acclaimed author of Landslide delivers “[an] intricate, delicate-as-rice-paper novel" (O, The Oprah Magazine) about an ex-pat in China who embarks on a journey that takes her into the darkest corners of addiction, marriage, and motherhood. When Elsey's husband, Lukas, hands her a brochure for a weeklong mountain retreat, she knows he is really giving her an ultimatum: Go, or we’re done. Once a successful painter, Elsey set down roots in China after falling in love with Lukas. Now, with two young daughters and unable to find a balance between her identities as artist, mother, and wife, Elsey fills her days worrying, drinking, and descending into boredom and unhappiness. So she agrees to go. There, she meets a group of men and women who will forever alter the way she understands herself and her marriage. Written in a voice at once wry, sensual, blunt, and hypnotic, Elsey Come Home is a modern odyssey and a quietly dynamic portrait of contemporary womanhood.

Landslide

Landslide PDF Author: Susan C. Conley
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 1984898000
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
This beautiful portrait of a family in a fishing village in Maine is "a fresh look at marriage, motherhood, and the wondrous inner lives of teenagers. A truly beautiful and unforgettable love story of a family on the brink” (Lily King, author of Writers & Lovers). A must-read from the critically acclaimed author of Elsey Comes Home. “I loved Landslide. You are right there with them in a fishing village in Maine, feeling the wind, the sea, the danger. Smart, honest, and funny, this is a story you won't forget.” —Judy Blume, best-selling author of In the Unlikely Event After a fishing accident leaves her husband hospitalized across the border in Canada, Jill is left to look after her teenage boys—"the wolves"—alone. Nothing comes easy in their remote corner of Maine: money is tight; her son Sam is getting into more trouble by the day; her eldest, Charlie, is preoccupied with a new girlfriend; and Jill begins to suspect her marriage isn't as stable as she once believed. As one disaster gives way to the next, she begins to think that it's not enough to be a caring wife and mother anymore—not enough to show up when needed, to nudge her boys in the right direction, to believe everything will be okay. But how to protect this life she loves, this household, this family? With remarkable poise and startling beauty, Landslide ushers us into a modern household where, for a family at odds, Instagram posts, sex-positivity talks, and old fishing tales mingle to become a kind of love language. It is a beautiful portrait of a family, as compelling as it is moving, and raises the question of how to remain devoted when the eye of the storm closes in.

Paris Was the Place

Paris Was the Place PDF Author: Susan Conley
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307739872
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
When Willie Pears arrives in Paris, she’s looking for adventure and to reconnect with her brother, Luke. Even so, when she takes a job teaching at a center for immigrant girls who are all hoping for French asylum, she does not expect to feel so connected to the ups and downs of their lives—or to find romance with their attractive and committed lawyer, Macon. But as Willie learns the girls’ histories, the lines between teaching and mothering quickly begin to blur, leading her to make a risky move that will threaten to upend the life and relationships she’s found.

The Foremost Good Fortune

The Foremost Good Fortune PDF Author: Susan Conley
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307739864
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
When Susan Conley, her husband, and their two young sons leave their house in Maine for a two-year stint in a high-rise apartment in Beijing, they are prepared to weather the inevitable onslaught of culture shock. But the challenges of living and mothering in an utterly foreign country become even more complicated when Susan learns she has cancer. After undergoing treatment in Boston, she returns to Beijing, again as a foreigner—but this time, it’s her own body in which she feels like a stranger. Set against the eternally fascinating backdrop of modern China and full of insight into the trickiest questions of motherhood, this poignant memoir is a celebration of family and a candid exploration of mortality and belonging.

An Unplanned Life

An Unplanned Life PDF Author: George M. Elsey
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
ISBN: 0826264883
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
An Unplanned Life is the scintillating memoir of George Elsey, a small-town kid from western Pennsylvania who, at age twenty-four, was assigned to Franklin Roosevelt's top-secret intelligence and communications center in the White House. As an officer in the U.S. Naval Reserve, Elsey helped brief the president and his senior associates on war events. He and his map room colleagues acted as the secretariat for Roosevelt's cabled exchanges with Winston Churchill, Joseph Stalin, and Chiang Kai-shek; filed records of "summit conferences"; and stored in safes plans for future operations. He also traveled with the president in order to code and decode the classified messages that flowed between the presidential train or ship and the White House. Elsey's duties continued with Harry Truman's succession to the presidency. He decoded the famous message from Secretary of War Henry Stimson reporting the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and carried it to President Truman. In 1947, he shed his Naval Reserve uniform and joined the White House's civilian staff as assistant to the special counsel to the president. In 1949, he became administrative assistant to the president, and, in 1952, he became a member of the Mutual Security Agency staff. During those years, he grew very close to Harry Truman, and thus, a major portion of An Unplanned Life relates to his experiences then. In the first postwar winter, Elsey was frequently the only staff member who accompanied President Truman on the USS Williamsburg. In September 1946, Elsey submitted a report to Truman on U.S.-Soviet relations, which came to be well known as the "Clifford-Elsey Report." Providing Truman with notes for some two hundred of his "back-of-the-train" informal talks, Elsey played a part in the best remembered feature of the "Whistle-Stop Campaign" that resulted in "the political upset of the century." In addition to his years at the White House, Elsey also touches on his post-White House years-his time in private industry, his months with Clark Clifford when Clifford was trying unsuccessfully to extricate America from Vietnam, and his long association with the American Red Cross. An Unplanned Life is a fascinating look at the life of an extraordinary individual who played an important and unprecedented part in two different presidents' decisions and affected the course of our nation. Anyone with an interest in history will find this memoir fascinating and invaluable.

Stop Here, This is the Place

Stop Here, This is the Place PDF Author: Susan Conley
Publisher: Down East Books
ISBN: 160893621X
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 113

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Book Description
Winky Lewis and Susan Conley, a photographer and a writer in Portland, tried an experiment. At the start of every week for a year, Winky sent Susan a photograph: of their children, of the street where they live as neighbors, and of other green places in Maine. By the end of that week Susan sent a tiny story back that talked to the photograph. Stop Here, This Is The Place tells the story of a year in which children's arms and legs get longer, and traces of babyhood fade--a year that feels interminable to a ten-year-old looking forward and fleeting to that ten-year-old’s mother, who can always stop here, go back and remember. This delightfully evocative gift book is a reminder to stop and enjoy the precious time we have with our kids while we have them. Through Susan's recollections of moments from her childhood and the ongoing lives of her children, we’re reminded of our own childhoods, and of the necessity to stop and pay attention, to hold on.

Citizens and Sportsmen

Citizens and Sportsmen PDF Author: Brenda Elsey
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292726309
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
Fútbol, or soccer as it is called in the United States, is the most popular sport in the world. Millions of people schedule their lives and build identities around it. The World Cup tournament, played every four years, draws an audience of more than a billion people and provides a global platform for displays of athletic prowess, nationalist rhetoric, and commercial advertising. Fútbol is ubiquitous in Latin America, yet few academic histories of the sport exist, and even fewer focus on its relevance to politics in the region. To fill that gap, this book uses amateur fútbol clubs in Chile to understand the history of civic associations, popular culture, and politics. In Citizens and Sportsmen, Brenda Elsey argues that fútbol clubs integrated working-class men into urban politics, connected them to parties, and served as venues of political critique. In this way, they contributed to the democratization of the public sphere. Elsey shows how club members debated ideas about class, ethnic, and gender identities, and also how their belief in the uniquely democratic nature of Chile energized state institutions even as it led members to criticize those very institutions. Furthermore, she reveals how fútbol clubs created rituals, narratives, and symbols that legitimated workers' claims to political subjectivity. Her case study demonstrates that the relationship between formal and informal politics is essential to fostering civic engagement and supporting democratic practices.

The Astral

The Astral PDF Author: Kate Christensen
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0385530927
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
From the PEN/Faulkner Award–winning author of The Great Man, a scintillating novel of love, loss, and literary rivalry set in rapidly changing Brooklyn. The Astral is a huge rose-colored old pile of an apart­ment building in the gentrifying neighborhood of Greenpoint, Brooklyn. For decades it was the happy home (or so he thought) of the poet Harry Quirk and his wife, Luz, a nurse, and of their two children: Karina, now a fer­vent freegan, and Hector, now in the clutches of a cultish Christian community. But Luz has found (and destroyed) some poems of Harry’s that ignite her long-simmering sus­picions of infidelity, and he’s been summarily kicked out. He now has to reckon with the consequence of his literary, marital, financial, and parental failures (and perhaps oth­ers) and find his way forward—and back into Luz’s good graces. Harry Quirk is, in short, a loser, living small and low in the water. But touched by Kate Christensen’s novelistic grace and acute perception, his floundering attempts to reach higher ground and forge a new life for himself become funny, bittersweet, and terrifically moving. She knows what secrets lurk in the hearts of men—and she turns them into literary art of the highest order. BONUS: This edition includes an excerpt from Kate Christensen's Blue Plate Special.

Stop That Girl

Stop That Girl PDF Author: Elizabeth McKenzie
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0307431843
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
From the start of Elizabeth McKenzie’s beguiling fiction debut, we are drawn into the offbeat worldview of sharp-eyed, intrepid Ann Ransom. Stop That Girl chronicles Ann’s colorful coming-of-age travails, from her childhood in a disjointed family through her tender adolescence and beyond. Along the way, she discovers the absurdities that lurk around every corner of a young woman’s life, by way of oafish neighbors, overzealous boyfriends, prurient vegetable salesmen, sour landlords, and an iconoclast grandmother, known even to her family as Dr. Frost. Keenly funny and highly original, Stop That Girl is a brilliant examination of the exigencies of love and the fragile fabric of family, and heralds the emergence of a remarkable new voice in fiction.

The Politics of Space and Place

The Politics of Space and Place PDF Author: Bob Brecher
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443845086
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
What might an analysis of politics which focuses on the operation of power through space and place, and on the spatial structuring of inequality, tell us about the world we make for ourselves and others? From the national border to the wire fence; from the privatisation of land to the exclusion and expulsion of persecuted peoples; questions of space and place, of who can be where and what they can do there, are at the very heart of the most important political debates of our time. Bringing together an interdisciplinary collection of authors deploying diverse perspectives and methodological approaches, this book responds to the pressing demand to reflect on and engage with some of the key questions raised by a political analysis of space and place. Its chapters chart the ways in which inequality and exclusion are played out in spatial terms, exploring the operations of power and resistance at the micro-level of the individual home and small community, analysing modes of securitisation and fortification utilised in the interests of wealth and power, and documenting the ways in which space and place are being transformed by changing socio-economic and cultural demands. As well as analysing the ways in which forms of exclusion and persecution are manifest spatially, the chapters in this book also attend to the forms of resistance and contestation which emerge in response to them. Resistance is found in the persistence of those who build and rebuild their homes and communities in a world which seems bent on their exclusion. At the same time life on the peripheries can give rise to new conceptions of citizenship and public space as well as to new political demands which seek to (re)claim space and contest the dominant order. Bringing together scholars working in fields as diverse as political science, geography, international studies, cultural anthropology, architecture, political philosophy and the visual arts, this book offers readers access to a range of contemporary case studies and theoretical perspectives. Relevant, timely and thoroughly accessible, this text offers an integrated approach to what can be a dauntingly diverse area of study and will be of interest not only to those working in fields such as architecture, political theory and geography but also to non-specialists and students.