Author: Marie Mutsuki Mockett
Publisher: Graywolf Press
ISBN: 1644451166
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 445
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Book Description
An epic story of the American wheat harvest, the politics of food, and the culture of the Great Plains For over one hundred years, the Mockett family has owned a seven-thousand-acre wheat farm in the panhandle of Nebraska, where Marie Mutsuki Mockett’s father was raised. Mockett, who grew up in bohemian Carmel, California, with her father and her Japanese mother, knew little about farming when she inherited this land. Her father had all but forsworn it. In American Harvest, Mockett accompanies a group of evangelical Christian wheat harvesters through the heartland at the invitation of Eric Wolgemuth, the conservative farmer who has cut her family’s fields for decades. As Mockett follows Wolgemuth’s crew on the trail of ripening wheat from Texas to Idaho, they contemplate what Wolgemuth refers to as “the divide,” inadvertently peeling back layers of the American story to expose its contradictions and unhealed wounds. She joins the crew in the fields, attends church, and struggles to adapt to the rhythms of rural life, all the while continually reminded of her own status as a person who signals “not white,” but who people she encounters can’t quite categorize. American Harvest is an extraordinary evocation of the land and a thoughtful exploration of ingrained beliefs, from evangelical skepticism of evolution to cosmopolitan assumptions about food production and farming. With exquisite lyricism and humanity, this astonishing book attempts to reconcile competing versions of our national story.
Author: Mauro Javier Cárdenas
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 0374719098
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 147
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Book Description
Mauro Javier Cárdenas, the critically-acclaimed author of The Revolutionaries Try Again—“an original, insubordinate novel” (New York Times)—pens a profound story of literature about a man coming to terms with his dysfunctional Colombian family, as well as his own behavior, as an immigrant in America. Antonio wants to avoid thinking about his sister—even though he knows he won’t be able to avoid thinking about his sister—because his sister is on the run after allegedly threatening to shoot her neighbors, and has been claiming that Antonio, Obama, the Pentagon, and their mother are all conspiring against her. Nevertheless, Antonio is going to try his best to be as avoidant as possible, because he worries that what’s been happening to his sister might somehow infect his relatively contented, ordered American life, and destabilize the precarious arrangement with his ex-wife that’s allowed him to stay close to his two daughters. In fact, he’s busy doing everything except facing his problems head-on: transcribing recordings of his mother speaking about their troubled life in Colombia, transcribing recordings of his ex-wife speaking about her idyllic life in the Czech Republic; writing about former girlfriends whose words and deeds still recur in his mind; rereading stories by American writers that allow him to skirt the subject of his sister’s state of mind without completely destroying his own. Written in long, unravelling sentences that accommodate all the detritus of thought—scenes real and imagined, headphones and heartache, Toblerones and Thomas Bernhard—Aphasia captures the immensity of the present moment as well as the pain of the past. It cements Mauro Javier Cárdenas’s place as one of the most innovative and extraordinary novelists working today.
Author: Anstey Harris
Publisher: Gallery Books
ISBN: 1982126892
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 336
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Book Description
“Moving.” —Booklist (starred review) At Hatters Museum of the Wide Wide World, where the animals never age but time takes its toll, one woman must find the courage to overcome the greatest loss of her life. Four years after her husband Richard’s death, Cate Morris is let go from her teaching job and unable to pay rent on the London flat she shares with her son, Leo. With nowhere else to turn, they pack up and venture to Richard’s ancestral Victorian museum in the small town of Crouch-on-Sea. Despite growing pains and a grouchy caretaker, Cate begins to fall in love with the quirky taxidermy exhibits and sprawling grounds, and she makes it her mission to revive them. But threats from both inside and outside the museum derail her plans and send her spiraling into self-doubt. As Cate becomes more invested in Hatters, she must finally confront the reality of Richard’s death—and the role she played in it—in order to reimagine her future. Perfect for fans of Katherine Center and Evvie Drake Starts Over.
Author: Daniel Polansky
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1250767571
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 108
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Book Description
Hugo Award finalist Daniel Polansky crafts an innovative, mind-bending fantasy mystery in The Seventh Perfection When a woman with perfect memory sets out to solve a riddle, the threads she tugs on could bring a whole city crashing down. The God-King who made her is at risk, and his other servants will do anything to stop her. To become the God-King's Amanuensis, Manet had to master all seven perfections, developing her body and mind to the peak of human performance. She remembers everything that has happened to her, in absolute clarity, a gift that will surely drive her mad. But before she goes, Manet must unravel a secret which threatens not only the carefully prepared myths of the God-King's ascent, but her own identity and the nature of truth itself. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Author: Simon Han
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0593086066
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 273
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Book Description
Named a Best Book of the Year by Time, The Washington Post, and Harper's Bazaar “A tender, spiky family saga about love in all its mysterious incarnations.” —Lorrie Moore, author of A Gate at the Stairs and Birds of America “Absolutely luminous . . . Weaves the transience of suburbia between the highs and lows of a family saga . . . Shocks, awes, and delights.” —Bryan Washington, author of Memorial From the outside, the Chengs seem like so-called model immigrants. Once Patty landed a tech job near Dallas, she and Liang grew secure enough to have a second child, and to send for their first from his grandparents back in China. Isn’t this what they sacrificed so much for? But then little Annabel begins to sleepwalk at night, putting into motion a string of misunderstandings that not only threaten to set their community against them but force to the surface the secrets that have made them fear one another. How can a man make peace with the terrors of his past? How can a child regain trust in unconditional love? How can a family stop burying its history and forge a way through it, to a more honest intimacy? Nights When Nothing Happened is gripping storytelling immersed in the crosscurrents that have reshaped the American landscape, from a prodigious new literary talent.
Author: Nikolai Gogol
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231549067
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 418
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Book Description
Nikolai Gogol’s novel Dead Souls and play The Government Inspector revolutionized Russian literature and continue to entertain generations of readers around the world. Yet Gogol’s peculiar genius comes through most powerfully in his short stories. By turns—or at once—funny, terrifying, and profound, the tales collected in The Nose and Other Stories are among the greatest achievements of world literature. These stories showcase Gogol’s vivid, haunting imagination: an encounter with evil in a darkened church, a downtrodden clerk who dreams only of a new overcoat, a nose that falls off a face and reappears around town on its own, outranking its former owner. Written between 1831 and 1842, they span the colorful setting of rural Ukraine to the unforgiving urban landscape of St. Petersburg to the ancient labyrinth of Rome. Yet they share Gogol’s characteristic obsessions—city crowds, bureaucratic hierarchy and irrationality, the devil in disguise—and a constant undercurrent of the absurd. Susanne Fusso’s translations pay careful attention to the strangeness and wonder of Gogol's style, preserving the inimitable humor and oddity of his language. The Nose and Other Stories reveals why Russian writers from Dostoevsky to Nabokov have returned to Gogol as the cornerstone of their unparalleled literary tradition.
Author: Alecia McKenzie
Publisher: Akashic Books
ISBN: 1617758957
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 109
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Book Description
American-born artist Chris is forced to reconsider his conception of family during a visit to his mother’s Caribbean homeland. “Thoroughly satisfying . . . This bighearted narrative of love, loss, and family is handled with grace and beauty.” —Publishers Weekly, Starred Review “Alecia McKenzie’s tender new novel [is] an emotionally resonant ode to adopted families and community resilience.” —New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice After a personal tragedy upends his world, American-born artist Chris travels to his mother’s homeland in the Caribbean hoping to find some peace and tranquility. He plans to spend his time painting in solitude and coming to terms with his recent loss and his fractured relationship with his father. Instead, he discovers a new extended and complicated “family.” The people he meets help him to heal, even as he supports them in unexpected ways. Told from different points of view, this is a compelling novel about unlikely love, friendship, and community, with surprises along the way.
Author: Edward Schwarzschild
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438480938
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 238
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Book Description
Gary Waldman is a grief-stricken former tennis coach slowly reentering the world after the death of his wife. As he struggles to remain a good father to his six-year-old son, Waldman finds unexpected comfort and stability in the rule-bound confines of the TSA, working as a Transportation Security Officer in upstate New York. But his life is turned upside down again after he uses CPR to bring a passenger back from the dead. Part airport thriller, part family drama, part love story, In Security explores how those who strive to protect us are often unable to protect themselves. Can someone who does security work ever feel truly safe? As the novel races toward its conclusion, Waldman discovers the limits of what he can control, both at the checkpoint and under his own roof.
Author: Megan Hunter
Publisher: Grove Press
ISBN: 0802148174
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 166
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Book Description
Part revenge tale, part fairy tale—an electrifying story of marriage, infidelity and power by the author of the #1 Indie Next Pick, The End We Start From. A MILLIONS Most Anticipated Book of the Month A Best Book of Fall for ESQUIRE A VOGUE Novel Editors Recommend for Fall A LITERARY HUB 20 books that are laced with sinister magic Lucy and Jake live in a house by a field where the sun burns like a ball of fire. Lucy has set her career aside in order to devote her life to the children, to their finely tuned routine, and to the house itself, which comforts her like an old, sly friend. But then a man calls one afternoon with a shattering message: his wife has been having an affair with Lucy’s husband, Jake. The revelation marks a turning point: Lucy and Jake decide to stay together, but make a special arrangement designed to even the score and save their marriage—she will hurt him three times. As the couple submit to a delicate game of crime and punishment, Lucy herself begins to change, surrendering to a transformation of both mind and body from which there is no return. Told in dazzling, musical prose, The Harpy is a dark, staggering fairy tale, at once mythical and otherworldly and fiercely contemporary. It is a novel of love, marriage and its failures, of power, control and revenge, of metamorphosis and renewal. “A beautiful, poetic account of [a] marriage, and also an insightful character study . . . And when it borders on a dark fairy tale, The Harpy soars.” —NPR
Author: Roni Horn
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 069120814X
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 256
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Book Description
"Roni Horn (b. 1955) is a prominent contemporary artist known for her sculptures, photography, and installations inspired by landscape and the natural world, and especially the isolated landscapes of Iceland, where she has travelled and lived for substantial periods of time since the early 1970s. Horn's work explores geology and climate; the interplay of nature, art, and place; and the relationships between words, appearance, androgyny, and the self. Horn is author of more than twenty books and artist's books, and is herself the subject of more than thirty books and exhibition catalogs, including a survey published by Phaidon and many by Steidl. Examples of her work include You Are the Weather (1994-96), a series of photographs of a young woman bathing in Icelandic hot springs; Pair Objects (1988), identical metal sculptures placed in two different locations; and the installation Library of Water (2007) in Iceland, with columns that enclose water from melting glaciers. Horn is arguably the most important visual chronicler of the landscape of Iceland. Upon graduating from her MFA program at Yale, she traveled to Iceland, journeying across its interior on a motorcycle. Over thirty years, she has continually returned to Iceland to explore and record the astonishing beauty of its geology, climate, and culture. This book will contain a range of texts, from evocative vignettes to illustrated essays written for Iceland's most widely-read newspaper. A combination of artists' writings and travelogue, the texts reveal Iceland as one of Horne's most important influences and inspirations, and record a unique and beautiful environment undergoing climate change"--
