Godforsaken Idaho

Godforsaken Idaho PDF Author: Shawn Vestal
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0544027760
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 227

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Book Description
Nine stories illuminate what it means to be Mormon and how faith serves to humanize, in a work that includes a seriocomic portrait of a young Joseph Smith.

Godforsaken Idaho

Godforsaken Idaho PDF Author: Shawn Vestal
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0544027760
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 227

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Book Description
Nine stories illuminate what it means to be Mormon and how faith serves to humanize, in a work that includes a seriocomic portrait of a young Joseph Smith.

When the Moon Turns to Blood

When the Moon Turns to Blood PDF Author: Leah Sottile
Publisher: Twelve
ISBN: 9781538721339
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"WHEN THE MOON TURNS TO BLOOD is a harrowing and fascinating tale of apocalyptic obsession and murder. Leah Sottile leads us down every head-shaking twist and turn of the case, an expert guide to the dark tributaries of religious extremism that run closer to the American mainstream than we'd ever like to believe."―Jess Walter, American author of Ruby Ridge On the heels of the sensational murder trial and shocking verdict, WHEN THE MOON TURNS TO BLOOD examines the culture of end times paranoia and a trail of mysterious deaths surrounding former beauty queen Lori Vallow and her husband, grave digger turned doomsday novelist, Chad Daybell. When police in Rexburg, Idaho perform a wellness check on seven J.J. Vallow and his sister, sixteen-year-old Tylee Ryan, both children are nowhere to be found. Their mother, Lori Vallow, gives a phony explanation, and when officers return the following day with a search warrant, she, too, is gone. As the police begin to close in, a larger web of mystery, murder, fanaticism and deceit begins to unravel. Vallow's case is sinuously complex. As investigators prod further, they find the accused Black Widow has an unusual number of bodies piling up around her. WHEN THE MOON TURNS TO BLOOD tells a gripping story of extreme beliefs, snake oil prophets, and explores the question: if it feels like the world is ending, how are people supposed to act?

Daredevils

Daredevils PDF Author: Shawn Vestal
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101979909
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
From the winner of 2014’s PEN Robert W. Bingham Prize, an unforgettable debut novel about Loretta, a teenager married off as a “sister wife,” who makes a break for freedom At the heart of this exciting debut novel, set in Arizona and Idaho in the mid-1970s, is fifteen-year-old Loretta, who slips out of her bedroom every evening to meet her so-called gentile boyfriend. Her strict Mormon parents catch her returning one night, and promptly marry her off to Dean Harder, a devout yet materialistic fundamentalist who already has a wife and a brood of kids. The Harders relocate to his native Idaho, where Dean’s teenage nephew Jason falls hard for Loretta. A Zeppelin and Tolkien fan, Jason worships Evel Knievel and longs to leave his close-minded community. He and Loretta make a break for it. They drive all night, stay in hotels, and relish their dizzying burst of teenage freedom as they seek to recover Dean’s cache of “Mormon gold.” But someone Loretta left behind is on their trail... A riveting story of desire and escape, Daredevils boasts memorable set pieces and a rich cast of secondary characters. There’s Dean’s other wife, Ruth, who as a child in the 1950s was separated from her parents during the notorious Short Creek raid, when federal agents descended on a Mormon fundamentalist community. There’s Jason’s best friend, Boyd, part Native American and caught up in the activist spirit of the time, who comes along for the ride, with disastrous results. And Vestal’s ultimate creation is a superbly sleazy chatterbox—a man who might or might not be Evel Knievel himself—who works his charms on Loretta at a casino in Elko, Nevada. A lifelong journalist whose Spokesman column is a fixture in Spokane, WA, Shawn has honed his fiction over many years, publishing in journals like McSweeney's and Tin House. His stunning first collection, Godforsaken Idaho, burrowed into history as it engaged with masculinity and crime, faith and apostasy, and the West that he knows so well. Daredevils shows what he can do on a broader canvas--a fascinating, wide-angle portrait of a time and place that's both a classic coming of age tale and a plunge into the myths of America, sacred and profane.

I'm Fine, But You Appear to Be Sinking

I'm Fine, But You Appear to Be Sinking PDF Author: Leyna Krow
Publisher: featherproof books
ISBN: 1943888124
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 197

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Book Description
In I’m Fine, But You Appear to Be Sinking the strange and the mundane collide. These are stories of strange experiences set in familiar places, and of familiar experiences set in strange places. Many of the pieces in I’m Fine take place close to home, in suburban neighborhoods, or rural communities. The settings are conventional, yet something unexpected, or even magical, is occurring. In one piece, a couple speculates about random objects that appear without reason in their backyard. In another, neighbors try to figure out if a local meth dealer is keeping a live tiger captive on his property. In other pieces, it’s the setting that’s fantastical, but the characters’ reactions that remain ordinary, like in the titular story where a journalist lost at sea and hunted by a mythical ocean creature admits to struggling with loneliness and isolation in much the same way he does even when he’s safe at home. Although they are not directly linked by any specific character, the pieces in this collection are bound through reoccurring imagery and a shared theme of protagonists in emotional peril. There are unexpected appearances and disappearances, movement of inanimate objects, the search for something lost, the finding of something unusual. There are prophesies, dreams, unidentifiable creatures, and environmental catastrophes on a scale both large and small. There are action figures and octopuses, sullen teenagers and missing cats. At their core, these stories are imbued with mystery, oddity, humor, and empathy. They each stand on their own, but mean considerably more when read together.

The Grand Promise

The Grand Promise PDF Author: Rebekah Anderson
Publisher: Empty Bowl
ISBN: 1737040859
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 307

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Book Description
2023 PNWA Nancy Pearl Book Award Finalist "A thoughtful look at desperation brought about by early-20th-century American enterprise." -- Kirkus Reviews "Enthralling...the storytelling has grit under its fingernails"--Publishers Weekly, BookLife Review "Readers will be swept up"--Seattle Book Review Published on the 80th anniversary of the Grand Coulee Dam, The Grand Promise is a work of literary fiction about the real communities that were impacted by the dam's construction on the Columbia River in the 1930's during Franklin D. Roosevelt's presidency. Called "a gripping debut" by best-selling author Jonathan Evison and "an ambitious saga" by Washington State Book Award winner Peter Mountford, The Grand Promise was the #1 fiction bestseller at Small Press Distribution in its release month.

Quinn

Quinn PDF Author: Sally Mandel
Publisher: Diversion Publishing Corp.
ISBN: 1626811253
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 341

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Book Description
A novel of an unlikely college romance and the choices we face on the cusp of independence, by a New York Times–bestselling author. Headstrong and beautiful Quinn Mallory meets Will Ingraham at college in the 1960s. Their personalities couldn’t be more different, but a true love blossoms between them that, they believe, will last forever. But eventually, Quinn’s dreams of a career in the big city will collide with Will’s longing for a quiet life together in his Idaho home—leaving Quinn to choose between the life she wants and the man she loves, in this moving, poignant novel by an author who “has a gift for true and incisive dialogue” (Publishers Weekly). “A novel full of fresh characters in a timeless setting . . . . A delightful book to read and reread.” —The Pittsburgh Press “Her novels will inspire you with love, laughter and courage.” —Luanne Rice, author of The Secret Language of Sisters

Latter-day Screens

Latter-day Screens PDF Author: Brenda R. Weber
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478005297
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
From Sister Wives and Big Love to The Book of Mormon on Broadway, Mormons and Mormonism are pervasive throughout American popular media. In Latter-day Screens, Brenda R. Weber argues that mediated Mormonism contests and reconfigures collective notions of gender, sexuality, race, spirituality, capitalism, justice, and individualism. Focusing on Mormonism as both a meme and an analytic, Weber analyzes a wide range of contemporary media produced by those within and those outside of the mainstream and fundamentalist Mormon churches, from reality television to feature films, from blogs to YouTube videos, and from novels to memoirs by people who struggle to find agency and personhood in the shadow of the church's teachings. The broad archive of mediated Mormonism contains socially conservative values, often expressed through neoliberal strategies tied to egalitarianism, meritocracy, and self-actualization, but it also offers a passionate voice of contrast on behalf of plurality and inclusion. In this, mediated Mormonism and the conversations on social justice that it fosters create the pathway toward an inclusive, feminist-friendly, and queer-positive future for a broader culture that uses Mormonism as a gauge to calibrate its own values.

Daredevils

Daredevils PDF Author: Shawn Vestal
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101979917
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
From the winner of 2014’s PEN Robert W. Bingham Prize, an unforgettable debut novel about Loretta, a teenager married off as a “sister wife,” who makes a break for freedom At the heart of this exciting debut novel, set in Arizona and Idaho in the mid-1970s, is fifteen-year-old Loretta, who slips out of her bedroom every evening to meet her so-called gentile boyfriend. Her strict Mormon parents catch her returning one night, and promptly marry her off to Dean Harder, a devout yet materialistic fundamentalist who already has a wife and a brood of kids. The Harders relocate to his native Idaho, where Dean’s teenage nephew Jason falls hard for Loretta. A Zeppelin and Tolkien fan, Jason worships Evel Knievel and longs to leave his close-minded community. He and Loretta make a break for it. They drive all night, stay in hotels, and relish their dizzying burst of teenage freedom as they seek to recover Dean’s cache of “Mormon gold.” But someone Loretta left behind is on their trail... A riveting story of desire and escape, Daredevils boasts memorable set pieces and a rich cast of secondary characters. There’s Dean’s other wife, Ruth, who as a child in the 1950s was separated from her parents during the notorious Short Creek raid, when federal agents descended on a Mormon fundamentalist community. There’s Jason’s best friend, Boyd, part Native American and caught up in the activist spirit of the time, who comes along for the ride, with disastrous results. And Vestal’s ultimate creation is a superbly sleazy chatterbox—a man who might or might not be Evel Knievel himself—who works his charms on Loretta at a casino in Elko, Nevada. A lifelong journalist whose Spokesman column is a fixture in Spokane, WA, Shawn has honed his fiction over many years, publishing in journals like McSweeney's and Tin House. His stunning first collection, Godforsaken Idaho, burrowed into history as it engaged with masculinity and crime, faith and apostasy, and the West that he knows so well. Daredevils shows what he can do on a broader canvas--a fascinating, wide-angle portrait of a time and place that's both a classic coming of age tale and a plunge into the myths of America, sacred and profane.

Pie & Whiskey

Pie & Whiskey PDF Author: Kate Lebo
Publisher: Sasquatch Books
ISBN: 1632171139
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
"an anthology that’s ... eclectic, drunk and delicious." —The New York Times If you love pie, whiskey, and good writing, this collection of funny and heartbreaking stories, poems, and recipes serves up a plethora of pleasure. What happens when good writing is inspired by and served with a slice of pie and a shot of whiskey? Pie & Whiskey is a literary event series started in Spokane, Washington, where the idea was to serve good pie, good whiskey, and good writers reading prose or poetry about pie and whiskey. This collection features the best original work from the series by writers such as Anthony Doerr, Elissa Washuta, Kim Barnes, and more. Proving that good writing is best served with a slice of pie and a shot of whiskey, a smattering of pie recipes and whiskey-centric cocktails are included alongside dozens of surprising, funny, heartbreaking, fantastically written stories and poems by Jess Walter, J Robert Lennon, Kim Barnes, and ML Smoker and more. Full contributor list: Kim Addonizio • Steve Almond • Kim Barnes • Devin Becker • Judy Blunt • Anthony Doerr • Thom Caraway • Elizabeth J. Colen • Debra Magpie Earling • Christopher Howell • Sherrie Flick • Jacob H. Fries • Nina Mukerjee Furstenau • Margot Kahn • Meissa Kwasny • Kate Lebo • J. Robert Lennon • Samuel Ligon • Gary Copeland Lilley • Robert Lopez • Tod Marshall • Virginia Reeves • Laura Read • Paisley Rekdal • Nicole Sheets • M. L. Smoker • Alexandra Teague • Rachel Toor • Robert Wrigley • Ed Skoog • Jess Walter • Shawn Vestal • Elissa Washuta • Joe Wilkins • Nance Van Winckel • Kristen Millares Young • Maya Jewell Zeller

The Cassandra

The Cassandra PDF Author: Sharma Shields
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1250197449
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
The Cassandra follows a woman who goes to work in a top secret research facility during WWII, only to be tormented by visions of what the mission will mean for humankind. Mildred Groves is an unusual young woman. Gifted and cursed with the ability to see the future, Mildred runs away from home to take a secretary position at the Hanford Research Center in the early 1940s. Hanford, a massive construction camp on the banks of the Columbia River in remote South Central Washington, exists to test and manufacture a mysterious product that will aid the war effort. Only the top generals and scientists know that this product is processed plutonium, for use in the first atomic bombs. Mildred is delighted, at first, to be part of something larger than herself after a lifetime spent as an outsider. But her new life takes a dark turn when she starts to have prophetic dreams about what will become of humankind if the project is successful. As the men she works for come closer to achieving their goals, her visions intensify to a nightmarish pitch, and she eventually risks everything to question those in power, putting her own physical and mental health in jeopardy. Inspired by the classic Greek myth, this 20th century reimagining of Cassandra's story is based on a real WWII compound that the author researched meticulously. A timely novel about patriarchy and militancy, The Cassandra uses both legend and history to look deep into man's capacity for destruction, and the resolve and compassion it takes to challenge the powerful.