Serious Men: A Novel

Serious Men: A Novel PDF Author: Manu Joseph
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 039333953X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
A poignant, bitingly funny Indian satire and love story set in a scientific institute and in Mumbai’s humid tenements. Ayyan Mani will not be constrained by Indian traditions. Despite working at the Institute of Theory and Research in Mumbai as the lowly personal assistant to a brilliant but insufferable astronomer, he dreams of more for himself and his family. Ever wily and ambitious, Ayyan weaves two plots: the first to cheer up his weary, soap-opera-addicted wife by creating outrageous fictions around their ten-year-old son; the other to sabotage the married director by using his boss’s seeming romance with the institute’s first female—and very attractive—researcher. Meanwhile, as the institute’s Brahmins wage a vicious war over theories about alien life, Ayyan sees his deceptions intertwining and setting in motion a series of extraordinary events he cannot stop. Unfailingly funny and irreverent, Serious Men is at once a hilarious portrayal of runaway egos and ambitions and a moving portrait of love and its strange workings. One of 2010’s “First Novels to Savor.” —Sunday Telegraph

Serious Men: A Novel

Serious Men: A Novel PDF Author: Manu Joseph
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 039333953X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Get Book Here

Book Description
A poignant, bitingly funny Indian satire and love story set in a scientific institute and in Mumbai’s humid tenements. Ayyan Mani will not be constrained by Indian traditions. Despite working at the Institute of Theory and Research in Mumbai as the lowly personal assistant to a brilliant but insufferable astronomer, he dreams of more for himself and his family. Ever wily and ambitious, Ayyan weaves two plots: the first to cheer up his weary, soap-opera-addicted wife by creating outrageous fictions around their ten-year-old son; the other to sabotage the married director by using his boss’s seeming romance with the institute’s first female—and very attractive—researcher. Meanwhile, as the institute’s Brahmins wage a vicious war over theories about alien life, Ayyan sees his deceptions intertwining and setting in motion a series of extraordinary events he cannot stop. Unfailingly funny and irreverent, Serious Men is at once a hilarious portrayal of runaway egos and ambitions and a moving portrait of love and its strange workings. One of 2010’s “First Novels to Savor.” —Sunday Telegraph

The Illicit Happiness of Other People: A Novel

The Illicit Happiness of Other People: A Novel PDF Author: Manu Joseph
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393344657
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 351

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Book Description
A quirky and darkly comic take on domestic life in southern India. The PEN Open Book Award called Manu Joseph "that rare bird who can wildly entertain his readers as forcefully as he moves them." In The Illicit Happiness of Other People, Joseph brilliantly brings his talents to the story of an Indian Christian family living far afield in south India. It has been three years since seventeen-year-old Unni Chacko mysteriously fell from a balcony to his death. His family—journalist father Ousep, who smokes two cigarettes at once “because three is too much”; mother Mariamma, who fantasizes gleefully about murdering her husband; and twelve-year-old love-struck brother Thoma with zero self-esteem, have coped by not coping. When the post office delivers a comic drawn by Unni that had been lost in the mail, Ousep, shocked out of his stupor, ventures on a quest to understand his son and rewrite his family’s story. Combining family drama with philosophy, social satire with satisfying storytelling, The Illicit Happiness of Other People reminds us that the greatest mystery of all—the one most worth our time and energy—is understanding the people we love.

The Serious Goose

The Serious Goose PDF Author: Jimmy Kimmel
Publisher: Random House Books for Young Readers
ISBN: 0525707751
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 41

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Book Description
Meet a very Serious Goose in late-night host Jimmy Kimmel's first fun and funny picture book! There is nothing silly about this goose. You CANNOT make her laugh, so DON'T EVEN TRY! Written, illustrated, and lettered by Jimmy Kimmel, this picture book challenges young readers to bring the silly out of a very Serious Goose. Inspired by Jimmy's nickname for his kids, The Serious Goose reminds us to be silly in a serious way. Put your little comedians in front of a mylar mirror and challenge them to make this no-nonsense goose smile. This delightful read-aloud is guaranteed to create gaggles of giggles time and time again! Kimmel’s proceeds from sales of THE SERIOUS GOOSE will be donated to Children’s Hospital Los Angeles (CHLA) and children’s hospitals around the country.

Serious Girls

Serious Girls PDF Author: Maxine Swann
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780312288020
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
When her grandmother insists Maya be sent away to boarding school, the 16-year-old feels as if her life has turned a new page. She and a new friend soon test the precarious line between an emerging sense of self and its total disintegration in the very different relationships from which they eventually escape.

Miss Laila, Armed and Dangerous

Miss Laila, Armed and Dangerous PDF Author: Manu Joseph
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 9352770455
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
A building collapses in Mumbai. In the debris is a man who is mumbling something in delirium. It appears that he is passing on the real-time movements of a young Muslim couple. Elsewhere, a young intelligence agent is assigned to shadow two terror suspects, one of whom is a teenager and the sweetheart of her street, Laila.Taking up a slice of recent history, the novel glares at the entire system - not just politicians, the bureaucracy, the police and lackeys, but also the good folks. Pervasive in its satire, wicked in its humour and broad-based in its canvas, Miss Laila, Armed and Dangerous is one of the most stylish and honest works of fiction about India ever written.

A Better Man

A Better Man PDF Author: Michael Ian Black
Publisher: Algonquin Books
ISBN: 1643752049
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
"Raw, intimate, and true . . . A Better Man cracked me wide open, and it's a template for the conversation we need to be having with our boys." --Peggy Orenstein, bestselling author of Boys & Sex A poignant look at boyhood, in the form of a heartfelt letter from comedian Michael Ian Black to his teenage son before he leaves for college, and a radical plea for rethinking masculinity and teaching young men to give and receive love. In a world in which the word masculinity now often goes hand in hand with toxic, comedian, actor, and father Michael Ian Black offers up a way forward for boys, men, and anyone who loves them. Part memoir, part advice book, and written as a heartfelt letter to his college-bound son, A Better Man reveals Black's own complicated relationship with his father, explores the damage and rising violence caused by the expectations placed on boys to "man up," and searches for the best way to help young men be part of the solution, not the problem. "If we cannot allow ourselves vulnerability," he writes, "how are we supposed to experience wonder, fear, tenderness?" Honest, funny, and hopeful, Black skillfully navigates the complex gender issues of our time and delivers a poignant answer to an urgent question: How can we be, and raise, better men?

Why I Read

Why I Read PDF Author: Wendy Lesser
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 0374709815
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
"Wendy Lesser's extraordinary alertness, intelligence, and curiosity have made her one of America's most significant cultural critics," writes Stephen Greenblatt. In Why I Read, Lesser draws on a lifetime of pleasure reading and decades of editing one of the most distinguished literary magazines in the country, The Threepenny Review, to describe her love of literature. As Lesser writes in her prologue, "Reading can result in boredom or transcendence, rage or enthusiasm, depression or hilarity, empathy or contempt, depending on who you are and what the book is and how your life is shaping up at the moment you encounter it." Here the reader will discover a definition of literature that is as broad as it is broad-minded. In addition to novels and stories, Lesser explores plays, poems, and essays along with mysteries, science fiction, and memoirs. As she examines these works from such perspectives as "Character and Plot," "Novelty," "Grandeur and Intimacy," and "Authority," Why I Read sparks an overwhelming desire to put aside quotidian tasks in favor of reading. Lesser's passion for this pursuit resonates on every page, whether she is discussing the book as a physical object or a particular work's influence. "Reading literature is a way of reaching back to something bigger and older and different," she writes. "It can give you the feeling that you belong to the past as well as the present, and it can help you realize that your present will someday be someone else's past. This may be disheartening, but it can also be strangely consoling at times." A book in the spirit of E. M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel and Elizabeth Hardwick's A View of My Own, Why I Read is iconoclastic, conversational, and full of insight. It will delight those who are already avid readers as well as neophytes in search of sheer literary fun.

A Serious Man

A Serious Man PDF Author: Ethan Coen
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0571255329
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 139

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Book Description
Script for the motion picture, A serious man.

The Man in the High Castle

The Man in the High Castle PDF Author: Philip K. Dick
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0547572484
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
Slavery is back. America, 1962. Having lost a war, America finds itself under Nazi Germany and Japan occupation. A few Jews still live under assumed names. The 'I Ching' is prevalent in San Francisco. Science fiction meets serious ideas in this take on a possible alternate history.

A Lecture to Young Men on Chastity; Intended Also for the Serious Consideration of Parents and Guardians

A Lecture to Young Men on Chastity; Intended Also for the Serious Consideration of Parents and Guardians PDF Author: Sylvester Graham
Publisher: Theclassics.Us
ISBN: 9781230365343
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 42

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Book Description
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1838 edition. Excerpt: ... lent and hazardous to life. And where it is promiscuous, the genital organs are almost continually stimulated by the mind. Every female that is a little more comely, or a little more meretricious than others, in her appearance, becomes an object of desire; the contemplation of her charms, and all her movements, increase the lust, and thus the genital organs are kept under an habitual excitement, which is reflected or diffused over the whole nervous system; and disturbs, and disorders all the functions of the body, and impairs all the tissues, and leads to that frequency of commerce which produces the most ruinous consequences. But, between the husband and wife, where there is a proper degree of chastity, all these causes either entirely lose, or are exceedingly diminished in their effect. They become accustomed to each other's body, and their parts no longer excite an impure imagination, and their sexual intercourse is the result of the more natural and instinctive excitements of the organs themselves;--and when the dietetic and other habits are such as they should be, this intercourse is very seldom. Moreover, a promiscuous commerce between the sexes would be terribly pernicious to the female and to the offspring, as well as to the male. Debility, abortion, barrenness, and painful diseases of various forms, would be the inevitable result in the female; and that peculiarly loathsome, virulent and ruinous disease which is generated and perpetuated by such commerce, and which has already been so dreadful a scourge to millions of the human family, would prevail on every hand, and become a common calamity of society. With equal certainty, the offspring would be very generally feeble, puny, and extremely predisposed to disease. A large...