The Shaman of Turtle Valley

The Shaman of Turtle Valley PDF Author: Clifford Garstang
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781732895669
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 396

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Book Description
Fiction. The author of the award-winning What the Zhang Boys Know ("...utterly beautiful and unforgettable"--Kevin Wilson) now gives us a heart-rending first novel about love, displacement, and the powerful ghosts that haunt so many families. The Alexanders have farmed the land in Turtle Valley for generations, and their family and its history is tied to this mountainous region of Virginia in ways few others can claim. When Gulf War veteran Aiken Alexander brings home a young and pregnant South Korean bride, he hopes at long last to claim his own place in that complicated history--coming out from behind the shadow of his tragically killed older brother and taking up a new place in his father's affections. However, things do not go according to plan. His wife, Soon-hee, can't--or won't--adjust to life in America. When Soon-hee disappears with their son, Aiken's life and dreams truly fall apart--he loses his job, is compelled to return to the family home, and falls prey to all his worst impulses. It is at this low point that Aiken's story becomes interwoven with a dubious Alexander family history, one that pitted brother against brother and now cousin against cousin, in a perfect storm of violence and dysfunction. Drawing on Korean beliefs in spirits and shamanism, how Aiken solves these problems--both corporeal and spiritual--is at the center of this dynamic and beautifully written debut novel.

The Shaman of Turtle Valley

The Shaman of Turtle Valley PDF Author: Clifford Garstang
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781732895669
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 396

Get Book Here

Book Description
Fiction. The author of the award-winning What the Zhang Boys Know ("...utterly beautiful and unforgettable"--Kevin Wilson) now gives us a heart-rending first novel about love, displacement, and the powerful ghosts that haunt so many families. The Alexanders have farmed the land in Turtle Valley for generations, and their family and its history is tied to this mountainous region of Virginia in ways few others can claim. When Gulf War veteran Aiken Alexander brings home a young and pregnant South Korean bride, he hopes at long last to claim his own place in that complicated history--coming out from behind the shadow of his tragically killed older brother and taking up a new place in his father's affections. However, things do not go according to plan. His wife, Soon-hee, can't--or won't--adjust to life in America. When Soon-hee disappears with their son, Aiken's life and dreams truly fall apart--he loses his job, is compelled to return to the family home, and falls prey to all his worst impulses. It is at this low point that Aiken's story becomes interwoven with a dubious Alexander family history, one that pitted brother against brother and now cousin against cousin, in a perfect storm of violence and dysfunction. Drawing on Korean beliefs in spirits and shamanism, how Aiken solves these problems--both corporeal and spiritual--is at the center of this dynamic and beautifully written debut novel.

Snow Hunters

Snow Hunters PDF Author: Paul Yoon
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1476714819
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
"A highly anticipated debut novel from 5 Under 35 National Book Foundation honoree featuring a Korean War refugee who emigrates to Brazil to become a tailor's apprentice and confronts the wreckage of his past"--

If I Had Two Wings: Stories

If I Had Two Wings: Stories PDF Author: Randall Kenan
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 1324005475
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 145

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Book Description
Finalist for 2020 National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction Longlisted for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction Finalist for the 2021 Aspen Words Literary Prize Mingling the earthy with the otherworldly, these ten stories chronicle ineffable events in ordinary lives. In Kenan’s fictional territory of Tims Creek, North Carolina, an old man rages in his nursing home, a parson beats up an adulterer, a rich man is haunted by a hog, and an elderly woman turns unwitting miracle worker. A retired plumber travels to Manhattan, where Billy Idol sweeps him into his entourage. An architect who lost his famous lover to AIDS reconnects with a high-school fling. Howard Hughes seeks out the woman who once cooked him butter beans. Shot through with humor and seasoned by inventiveness and maturity, Kenan riffs on appetites of all kinds, on the eerie persistence of history, and on unstoppable lovers and unexpected salvations. If I Had Two Wings is a rich chorus of voices and visions, dreams and prophecies, marked by physicality and spirit. Kenan’s prose is nothing short of wondrous.

Algorithms

Algorithms PDF Author: Sid Balman
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1684632099
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 158

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Book Description
This final novel in the acclaimed Seventh Flag Trilogy thrusts readers thirty years into the future—a dystopic reality of regional fiefdoms, marauding scavengers, and the quest for ultimate power: the Algorithms of everything, which have been secretly pilfered from an undersea Internet cable, stored on hard drives, and implanted in the last surviving blue whale. Ademar Zarkan—the iconic and unlikely heroine of the American West, now a seventy-year-old woman—leads the Free People of West Texas in an alliance with Native Americans and the indigenous people of northern Mexico to retrieve the hard drives and to rescue her clairvoyant granddaughter from the radicalized Sisterhood and its merciless leader, Mother. But they aren’t the only ones in pursuit of the Algorithms. Haunting and prophetic, Algorithms is a story of violent extremism, resilience, family, and, above all, the interconnectedness of humankind and the natural world.

Bird Medicine

Bird Medicine PDF Author: Evan T. Pritchard
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 159143825X
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
Explores the living spiritual tradition surrounding birds in Native American culture • Pairs scholarly research with more than 200 firsthand accounts of bird signs from traditional Native Americans and their descendants • Examines the legends, wisdom, and powers of the birds known as the gatekeepers of the four directions—Eagle, Hawk, Crow, and Owl • Provides many examples of bird sign interpretations and human-bird communication that can be applied in your own encounters with birds Birds are our strongest allies in the natural world. Revered in Native American spirituality and shamanic traditions around the world, birds are known as teachers, guardians, role models, counselors, healers, clowns, peacemakers, and meteorologists. They carry messages and warnings from loved ones and the spirit world, report deaths and injuries, and channel divine intelligence to answer our questions. Some of their “signs” are so subtle that one could discount them as subjective, but others are dramatic enough to strain even a skeptic’s definition of coincidence. Pairing scholarly research with more than 200 firsthand accounts of bird encounters from traditional Native Americans and their descendants, Evan Pritchard explores the living spiritual tradition surrounding birds in Native American culture. He examines in depth the birds known as the gatekeepers of the four directions--Eagle in the North, Hawk in the East, Crow in the South, and Owl in the West--including their roles in legends and the use of their feathers in shamanic rituals. He reveals how the eagle can be a direct messenger of the Creator, why crows gather in “Crow Councils,” and how shamans have the ability to travel inside of birds, even after death. Expanding his study to the wisdom and gifts of birds beyond the four gatekeepers, such as hummingbirds, seagulls, and the mythical thunderbird, he provides numerous examples of everyday bird sign interpretations that can be applied in your own encounters with birds as well as ways we can help protect birds and encourage them to communicate with us.

What the Zhang Boys Know

What the Zhang Boys Know PDF Author: Clifford Garstang
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781935708612
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
"What the Zhang Boys Know has a dozen chapters, each one a vivid short story in itself. Garstang makes the whole greater than the sum of its parts. The lives of the inhabitants of a condominium in Washington, D.C.'s Chinatown are told separately and as part of a web of entanglements. The entrances and exits are handled with the deftness of a French comedy, but the empathy of the author brings all the characters achingly alive. What the Zhang Boys Know is a wonderful and haunting book." - John Casey, author of Compass Rose and Spartina, winner of the National Book Award

Murmuration

Murmuration PDF Author: Sid Balman
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1684630924
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
Charlie Christmas, Ademar Zarkan, and Prometheus Stone are the best of America—united by war, scarred by displacement, and resolute in the face of the troubles that rip the nation apart over three decades. Christmas, a Somali translator with a split personality, and Zarkan, a Muslim sharpshooter who defies gender and religious constraints to graduate from West Point, are first brought together by Stone, a lapsed Jew and an Army captain, amidst war and famine in East Africa. Their ensuing journey—which takes them from the mean streets of Mogadishu to the high desert of West Texas, from the barren plains of Indian country to the rolling hills of Minnesota—is at turns tragic and uplifting. Charlie’s son, Amir, is the bookmark in their lives, and the struggle to raise him amid the predators of white supremacy and violent radicalism is their life’s work. With the help of Buck, the bomb-sniffing dog with a nose for danger, they prevail over Somali militias, pirates, white supremacists, and ISIS terrorists in a splintering world that has turned on itself like a serpent in the singularly obscene act of devouring its own tail. A sweeping novel that digs deep into the backstories of some of the beloved West Texas characters from Seventh Flag, Balman’s award-winning debut novel, Murmuration is a mesmerizing story of what it means to be American in the twenty-first century.

Valley of the Turtle Shirt Men

Valley of the Turtle Shirt Men PDF Author: Jack Lindquist
Publisher: FriesenPress
ISBN: 1039152724
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 367

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Book Description
Former Texas Ranger Jesse Rivers is on his way to California to seek his fortune in the burgeoning gold rush when a chance meeting with siblings Betsy and Shea O’Brian puts him on course to find a completely different kind of treasure—a fabled hoard of Spanish gold said to be lost in a place called the Valley of the Turtle Shirt Men. Although Jesse is skeptical of the gold’s existence, he agrees to the mission, if only to protect his naïve new friends, who are clearly in way over their heads. Having to cross into hostile Indian territory to reach the valley—and with a gang of outlaws waiting to ambush them if by some slim chance they manage to return home-- the quest will call upon every skill that Jesse gained as a Ranger and as an adopted captive raised by the Comanche. Even so, the price of the treasure may be nothing less than their lives.

The House on Fripp Island

The House on Fripp Island PDF Author: Rebecca Kauffman
Publisher: Ecco
ISBN: 035804152X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 341

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Book Description
A taut, page-turning novel of secrets and strife. When two families--one rich, one not--vacation together off the coast of South Carolina, little do they know that someone won't be returning home. Fripp Island, South Carolina is the perfect destination for the wealthy Daly family: Lisa, Scott, and their two girls. For Lisa's childhood friend, Poppy Ford, the resort island is a world away from the one she and Lisa grew up in--and when Lisa invites Poppy's family to join them, how can a working-class woman turn down an all-expenses paid vacation for her husband and children? But everyone brings secrets to the island, distorting what should be a convivial, relaxing summer on the beach. Lisa sees danger everywhere--the local handyman can't be allowed near the children, and Lisa suspects Scott is fixated on something, or someone, else. Poppy watches over her husband John and his routines with a sharp eye. It's a summer of change for all of the children: Ryan Ford who prepares for college in the fall, Rae Daly who seethes on the brink of adulthood, and the two youngest, Kimmy Daly and Alex Ford, who are exposed to new ideas and different ways of life as they forge a friendship of their own. Those who return from this vacation will spend the rest of their lives trying to process what they witnessed, the tipping points, moments of violence and tenderness, and the memory of whom they left behind.

Lake Life

Lake Life PDF Author: David James Poissant
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
ISBN: 1476729999
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
From the award-winning author of the acclaimed story collection The Heaven of Animals, called “a wise debut…beautiful [stories] with a rogue touch” (The New York Times Book Review), comes a sweeping, domestic novel about a family that reunites at their North Carolina lake house for one last vacation before the home is sold—and the long-buried secrets that are finally revealed. The Starling family is scattered across the country. Parents Richard and Lisa live in Ithaca, New York, and work at Cornell University. Their son Michael, a salesperson, lives in Dallas with his elementary school teacher wife, Diane. Michael’s brother, Thad, an aspiring poet, makes his home in New York City with his famous painter boyfriend, Jake. For years they’ve traveled to North Carolina to share a summer vacation at the family lake house. That tradition is coming to an end, as Richard and Lisa have decided to sell the treasured summer home and retire to Florida. Before they do, the family will spend one last weekend at the lake. But what should to be a joyous farewell takes a nightmarish turn when the family witnesses a tragedy that triggers a series of dramatic revelations among the Starlings—alcoholism, infidelity, pregnancy, and a secret the parents have kept from their sons for over thirty years. As the weekend unfolds, relationships fray, bonds are tested, and the Starlings are forced to reckon with who they are and what they want from this life. Set in today’s America, Lake Life is a beautifully rendered, emotionally compelling novel in the tradition of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, and Ann Patchett’s Commonwealth.