The Distant Marvels

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Author :
Publisher : Europa Editions
ISBN 13 : 1609452623
Total Pages : 241 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (94 download)

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Book Synopsis The Distant Marvels by : Chantel Acevedo

Download or read book The Distant Marvels written by Chantel Acevedo and published by Europa Editions. This book was released on 2015-04-07 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The acclaimed Cuban American author of Love and Ghost Letters delivers “a wonderful story about the stories we tell each other” set in 1960s Cuba (San Francisco Chronicle). Cuba, 1963. Hurricane Flora, one of the deadliest in recorded history, is bearing down on the island. Seven women have been forcibly evacuated from their homes and herded into the former governor’s mansion. There they are watched over by another woman—Ofelia, a young soldier of Castro’s new Cuba. As the storm rages and the floodwaters rise, a cigar factory lector named Maria Sirena tells the incredible story of her childhood during Cuba’s Third War of Independence; of her father Augustin, a ferocious rebel; of her mother, Lulu, an astonishing woman who fought, loved, dreamed, and suffered as fiercely as her husband. But stories have a way of taking on a life of their own, and soon Maria will reveal more about herself than she or anyone ever expected. Chantel Acevedo’s The Distant Marvels is an epic adventure tale, a family saga, a love story, a stunning historical account of armed struggle against oppressors, and a long tender plea for forgiveness. It is, finally, a life-affirming novel about the kind of love that lasts a lifetime and the very art of storytelling itself.

The Marvels

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Author :
Publisher : Scholastic Inc.
ISBN 13 : 0545922127
Total Pages : 673 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (459 download)

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Book Synopsis The Marvels by : Brian Selznick

Download or read book The Marvels written by Brian Selznick and published by Scholastic Inc.. This book was released on 2015-09-15 with total page 673 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Don't miss Selznick's other novels in words and pictures, The Invention of Hugo Cabret and Wonderstruck, which together with The Marvels, form an extraordinary thematic trilogy! A breathtaking new voyage from Caldecott Medalist Brian Selznick.Two stand-alone stories--the first in nearly 400 pages of continuous pictures, the second in prose--create a beguiling narrative puzzle.The journey begins at sea in 1766, with a boy named Billy Marvel. After surviving a shipwreck, he finds work in a London theatre. There, his family flourishes for generations as brilliant actors until 1900, when young Leontes Marvel is banished from the stage.Nearly a century later, runaway Joseph Jervis seeks refuge with an uncle in London. Albert Nightingale's strange, beautiful house, with its mysterious portraits and ghostly presences, captivates Joseph and leads him on a search for clues about the house, his family, and the past.A gripping adventure and an intriguing invitation to decipher how the two stories connect, The Marvels is a loving tribute to the power of story from an artist at the vanguard of creative innovation.

Church of Marvels

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Author :
Publisher : HarperCollins
ISBN 13 : 0062367579
Total Pages : 223 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (623 download)

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Book Synopsis Church of Marvels by : Leslie Parry

Download or read book Church of Marvels written by Leslie Parry and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2015-05-05 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A ravishing first novel, set in vibrant, tumultuous turn-of-the-century New York City, where the lives of four outsiders become entwined, bringing irrevocable change to them all. New York, 1895. Sylvan Threadgill, a night soiler cleaning out the privies behind the tenement houses, finds an abandoned newborn baby in the muck. An orphan himself, Sylvan rescues the child, determined to find where she belongs. Odile Church and her beautiful sister, Belle, were raised amid the applause and magical pageantry of The Church of Marvels, their mother’s spectacular Coney Island sideshow. But the Church has burnt to the ground, their mother dead in its ashes. Now Belle, the family’s star, has vanished into the bowels of Manhattan, leaving Odile alone and desperate to find her. A young woman named Alphie awakens to find herself trapped across the river in Blackwell’s Lunatic Asylum—sure that her imprisonment is a ruse by her husband’s vile, overbearing mother. On the ward she meets another young woman of ethereal beauty who does not speak, a girl with an extraordinary talent that might save them both. As these strangers’ lives become increasingly connected, their stories and secrets unfold. Moving from the Coney Island seashore to the tenement-studded streets of the Lower East Side, a spectacular human circus to a brutal, terrifying asylum, Church of Marvels takes readers back to turn-of-the-century New York—a city of hardship and dreams, love and loneliness, hope and danger. In magnetic, luminous prose, Leslie Parry offers a richly atmospheric vision of the past in a narrative of astonishing beauty, full of wondrous enchantments, a marvelous debut that will leave readers breathless.

Love and Ghost Letters

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Author :
Publisher : Macmillan
ISBN 13 : 9780312340476
Total Pages : 324 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (44 download)

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Book Synopsis Love and Ghost Letters by : Chantel Acevedo

Download or read book Love and Ghost Letters written by Chantel Acevedo and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2006-09-19 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Josefina Navarro childhood was one of previledge and pampering in the pre-Castro days of Cuba. When she reached adulthood, however, she impulsively marries a poor and reckless young man who will only bring her heartache and grief. During the start of all the political troubles in Cuba, Josefina starts to get a series of letters from her father, whom she thought was dead. These "ghost letters" help her to better understand her distant father and bring some meaning to her otherwise disappointing life.

All of the Marvels

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Author :
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 0735222185
Total Pages : 385 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (352 download)

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Book Synopsis All of the Marvels by : Douglas Wolk

Download or read book All of the Marvels written by Douglas Wolk and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2023-10-03 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2022 Eisner Award for Best Comics-Related Book The first-ever full reckoning with Marvel Comics’ interconnected, half-million-page story, a revelatory guide to the “epic of epics”—and to the past sixty years of American culture—from a beloved authority on the subject who read all 27,000+ Marvel superhero comics and lived to tell the tale “Brilliant, eccentric, moving and wholly wonderful. . . . Wolk proves to be the perfect guide for this type of adventure: nimble, learned, funny and sincere. . . . All of the Marvels is magnificently marvelous. Wolk’s work will invite many more alliterative superlatives. It deserves them all.” —Junot Díaz, New York Times Book Review The superhero comic books that Marvel Comics has published since 1961 are, as Douglas Wolk notes, the longest continuous, self-contained work of fiction ever created: over half a million pages to date, and still growing. The Marvel story is a gigantic mountain smack in the middle of contemporary culture. Thousands of writers and artists have contributed to it. Everyone recognizes its protagonists: Spider-Man, the Avengers, the X-Men. Eighteen of the hundred highest-grossing movies of all time are based on parts of it. Yet not even the people telling the story have read the whole thing—nobody’s supposed to. So, of course, that’s what Wolk did: he read all 27,000+ comics that make up the Marvel Universe thus far, from Alpha Flight to Omega the Unknown. And then he made sense of it—seeing into the ever-expanding story, in its parts and as a whole, and seeing through it, as a prism through which to view the landscape of American culture. In Wolk’s hands, the mammoth Marvel narrative becomes a fun-house-mirror history of the past sixty years, from the atomic night terrors of the Cold War to the technocracy and political division of the present day—a boisterous, tragicomic, magnificently filigreed epic about power and ethics, set in a world transformed by wonders. As a work of cultural exegesis, this is sneakily significant, even a landmark; it’s also ludicrously fun. Wolk sees fascinating patterns—the rise and fall of particular cultural aspirations, and of the storytelling modes that conveyed them. He observes the Marvel story’s progressive visions and its painful stereotypes, its patches of woeful hackwork and stretches of luminous creativity, and the way it all feeds into a potent cosmology that echoes our deepest hopes and fears. This is a huge treat for Marvel fans, but it’s also a revelation for readers who don’t know Doctor Strange from Doctor Doom. Here, truly, are all of the marvels.

Wonder and the Marvellous from Homer to the Hellenistic World

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Author :
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1009007335
Total Pages : 419 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (9 download)

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Book Synopsis Wonder and the Marvellous from Homer to the Hellenistic World by : Jessica Lightfoot

Download or read book Wonder and the Marvellous from Homer to the Hellenistic World written by Jessica Lightfoot and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-09-16 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wonder and wonders constituted a central theme in ancient Greek culture. In this book, Jessica Lightfoot provides the first full-length examination of its significance from Homer to the Hellenistic period. She demonstrates that wonder was an important term of aesthetic response and occupied a central position in concepts of what philosophy and literature are and do. She also argues that it became a means of expressing the manner in which the realms of the human and the divine interrelate with one another; and that it was central to the articulation of the ways in which the relationships between self and other, near and far, and familiar and unfamiliar were conceived. The book provides a much-needed starting point for re-assessments of the impact of wonder as a literary critical and cultural concept both in antiquity and in later periods. This title is available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Muse Squad: The Cassandra Curse

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Author :
Publisher : HarperCollins
ISBN 13 : 0062947710
Total Pages : 384 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (629 download)

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Book Synopsis Muse Squad: The Cassandra Curse by : Chantel Acevedo

Download or read book Muse Squad: The Cassandra Curse written by Chantel Acevedo and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2020-07-07 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first in an action-packed debut middle grade fantasy duology about a Cuban American girl who discovers that she’s one of the nine Muses of Greek mythology. Perfect for fans of The Serpent’s Secret, the Aru Shah series, and the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series. Callie Martinez-Silva didn’t mean to turn her best friend into a pop star. But when a simple pep talk leads to miraculous results, Callie learns she’s the newest muse of epic poetry, one of the nine Muses of Greek mythology tasked with protecting humanity’s fate in secret. Whisked away to Muse Headquarters, she joins three recruits her age, who call themselves the Muse Squad. Together, the junior muses are tasked with using their magic to inspire and empower—not an easy feat when you’re eleven and still figuring out the goddess within. When their first assignment turns out to be Callie’s exceptionally nerdy classmate, Maya Rivero, the squad comes to Miami to stay with Callie and her Cuban family. There, they discover that Maya doesn’t just need inspiration, she needs saving from vicious Sirens out to unleash a curse that will corrupt her destiny. As chaos erupts, will the Muse Squad be able to master their newfound powers in time to thwart the Cassandra Curse . . . or will it undo them all?

Pitch Dark

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Author :
Publisher : New York Review of Books
ISBN 13 : 1590176146
Total Pages : 169 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (91 download)

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Book Synopsis Pitch Dark by : Renata Adler

Download or read book Pitch Dark written by Renata Adler and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2013-03-19 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A strange, thrilling novel about desperate love, paranoia, and heartbreak by one of America's most singular writers. “What’s new. What else. What next. What’s happened here.” Pitch Dark is a book about love. Kate Ennis is poised at a critical moment in an affair with a married man. The complications and contradictions pursue her from a house in rural Connecticut to a brownstone apartment in New York City, to a small island off the coast of Washington, to a pitch black night in backcountry Ireland. Composed in the style of Renata Adler’s celebrated novel Speedboat and displaying her keen journalist’s eye and mastery of language, both simple and sublime, Pitch Dark is a bold and astonishing work of art.

The Distant Land of My Father

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Author :
Publisher : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN 13 : 9780156027137
Total Pages : 404 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (271 download)

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Book Synopsis The Distant Land of My Father by : Bo Caldwell

Download or read book The Distant Land of My Father written by Bo Caldwell and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2002 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anna had a charmed childhood in 1930s Shanghai with her smuggler father. Anna and her mother fled the Japanese occupation and settled in California, but her father stayed behind. Fifteen years later, Anna is grown with a family of her own in Los Angeles when her father reappears.

Trapped Under the Sea

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Author :
Publisher : Crown
ISBN 13 : 0307886735
Total Pages : 434 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (78 download)

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Book Synopsis Trapped Under the Sea by : Neil Swidey

Download or read book Trapped Under the Sea written by Neil Swidey and published by Crown. This book was released on 2015-02-17 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The harrowing story of five men who were sent into a dark, airless, miles-long tunnel, hundreds of feet below the ocean, to do a nearly impossible job—with deadly results A quarter-century ago, Boston had the dirtiest harbor in America. The city had been dumping sewage into it for generations, coating the seafloor with a layer of “black mayonnaise.” Fisheries collapsed, wildlife fled, and locals referred to floating tampon applicators as “beach whistles.” In the 1990s, work began on a state-of-the-art treatment plant and a 10-mile-long tunnel—its endpoint stretching farther from civilization than the earth’s deepest ocean trench—to carry waste out of the harbor. With this impressive feat of engineering, Boston was poised to show the country how to rebound from environmental ruin. But when bad decisions and clashing corporations endangered the project, a team of commercial divers was sent on a perilous mission to rescue the stymied cleanup effort. Five divers went in; not all of them came out alive. Drawing on hundreds of interviews and thousands of documents collected over five years of reporting, award-winning writer Neil Swidey takes us deep into the lives of the divers, engineers, politicians, lawyers, and investigators involved in the tragedy and its aftermath, creating a taut, action-packed narrative. The climax comes just after the hard-partying DJ Gillis and his friend Billy Juse trade assignments as they head into the tunnel, sentencing one of them to death. An intimate portrait of the wreckage left in the wake of lives lost, the book—which Dennis Lehane calls "extraordinary" and compares with The Perfect Storm—is also a morality tale. What is the true cost of these large-scale construction projects, as designers and builders, emboldened by new technology and pressured to address a growing population’s rapacious needs, push the limits of the possible? This is a story about human risk—how it is calculated, discounted, and transferred—and the institutional failures that can lead to catastrophe. Suspenseful yet humane, Trapped Under the Sea reminds us that behind every bridge, tower, and tunnel—behind the infrastructure that makes modern life possible—lies unsung bravery and extraordinary sacrifice.

The Ladies of Managua

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Publisher : St. Martin's Press
ISBN 13 : 1466863005
Total Pages : 401 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (668 download)

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Book Synopsis The Ladies of Managua by : Eleni N. Gage

Download or read book The Ladies of Managua written by Eleni N. Gage and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2015-05-05 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lushly evocative of Nicaragua, its tumultuous history, and vibrant present, Eleni N. Gage's The Ladies of Managua brings you into the lives of three strong and magnetic women, as they uncover the ramifications of the choices they made in their pasts and begin to understand the ways in which love can shape their futures. When Maria Vazquez returns to Nicaragua for her beloved grandfather's funeral, she brings with her a mysterious package from her grandmother's past—and a secret of her own. And she also carries the burden of her tense relationship with her mother Ninexin, once a storied revolutionary, now a tireless government employee. Between Maria and Ninexin lies a chasm created by the death of Maria's father, who was killed during the revolution when Maria was an infant, leaving her to be raised by her grandmother Isabela as Ninexin worked to build the new Nicaragua. As Ninexin tries to reach her daughter, and Maria wrestles with her expectations for her romance with an older man, Isabela, the mourning widow, is lost in memories of attending boarding school in 1950's New Orleans, where she loved and lost almost sixty years ago. When the three women come together to bid farewell to the man who anchored their family, they are forced to confront their complicated, passionate relationships with each other and with their country—and to reveal the secrets that each of them have worked to conceal.

Land of Marvels

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Author :
Publisher : Nan A. Talese
ISBN 13 : 0385529473
Total Pages : 306 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (855 download)

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Book Synopsis Land of Marvels by : Barry Unsworth

Download or read book Land of Marvels written by Barry Unsworth and published by Nan A. Talese. This book was released on 2009-01-06 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Barry Unsworth, a writer with an “almost magical capacity for literary time travel” (New York Times Book Review) has the extraordinary ability to re-create the past and make it relevant to contemporary readers. In Land of Marvels, a thriller set in 1914, he brings to life the schemes and double-dealings of Western nations grappling for a foothold in Mesopotamia (now Iraq) in the dying days of the Ottoman Empire. Somerville, a British archaeologist, is excavating a long-buried Assyrian palace. The site lies directly in the path of a new railroad to Baghdad, and he watches nervously as the construction progresses, threatening to destroy his discovery. The expedition party includes Somerville’s beautiful, bored wife, Edith; Patricia, a smart young graduate student; and Jehar, an Arab man-of-all-duties whose subservient manner belies his intelligence and ambitions. Posing as an archaeologist, an American geologist from an oil company arrives one day and insinuates himself into the group. But he’s not the only one working undercover to stake a claim on Iraq’s rich oil fields. Historical fiction at its finest, Land of Marvels opens a window on the past and reveals its lasting impact.

The Living Infinite

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Author :
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781609454302
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (543 download)

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Book Synopsis The Living Infinite by : Chantel Acevedo

Download or read book The Living Infinite written by Chantel Acevedo and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Living Infinite is based on the true story of the Spanish princess Eulalia, an outspoken firebrand at the Bourbon court during the troubled and decadent final years of her family's reign. After her cloistered childhood at the Spanish court, her youth spent in exile, and a loveless marriage, Eulalia gladly departs Europe for the New World. In the company of Thomas Aragon, the son of her one-time wet nurse and a small-town bookseller with a thirst for adventure, she travels by ship first to a Cuba bubbling with revolutionary fervor then on to the 1893 Chicago World Fair. As far as others are concerned, she is there as an emissary of the Bourbon dynasty and a guest of the Fair. Secretly, she is in America to find a publisher for her scandalous, incendiary autobiography, a book that might well turn the old world order on its head. Acevedo's new novel is an atmospheric and gripping tale of love, adventure, power and the quest to take control of one's destiny. Bourbon Spain, Revolutionary Cuba, and fin de si cle America are vividly rendered and Eulalia's personal rebellion will resonate with many readers.

33 Revolutions

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Publisher : Europa Editions
ISBN 13 : 1609453557
Total Pages : 56 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (94 download)

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Book Synopsis 33 Revolutions by : Canek Sánchez Guevara

Download or read book 33 Revolutions written by Canek Sánchez Guevara and published by Europa Editions. This book was released on 2016-10-11 with total page 56 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A young man’s political awakening takes shape in the aftermath of Castro’s Revolution in this “prayer of a novel” by the grandson of Che Guevara (Cleaver Magazine). At the dawn of Communist Cuba, our unnamed hero, a young black Cuban man, loses his father to death and his mother to emigration. Now he spends much of his time with his Russian neighbor, discovering the pleasures of reading. The books he reads gradually open his eyes to the incongruity between party slogans and the oppressive reality that surrounds him: the office routine; the daily complaints of his colleagues; his own obsessive thoughts which circulate around his mind like a broken record. Every day he photographs the spontaneous eruptions of dissent on the streets and witnesses the sad spectacle of young people crowding onto makeshift rafts to escape the island. His frustration grows until a day when he declares his unwillingness to become an informer. And this is when his real troubles begin. “Not since Reinaldo Arenas has a Cuban literary voice arrived on American shores with such beaten madness, and sense of personal desperation.” —Cleaver Magazine

Orange World and Other Stories

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Author :
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0525656146
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (256 download)

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Book Synopsis Orange World and Other Stories by : Karen Russell

Download or read book Orange World and Other Stories written by Karen Russell and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2019-05-14 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Pulitzer Finalist and universally beloved author of the New York Times best sellers Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove, a stunning new collection of short fiction that showcases Karen Russell’s extraordinary, irresistible gifts of language and imagination. Karen Russell’s comedic genius and mesmerizing talent for creating outlandish predicaments that uncannily mirror our inner in lives is on full display in these eight exuberant, arrestingly vivid, unforgettable stories. In“Bog Girl”, a revelatory story about first love, a young man falls in love with a two thousand year old girl that he’s extracted from a mass of peat in a Northern European bog. In “The Prospectors,” two opportunistic young women fleeing the depression strike out for new territory, and find themselves fighting for their lives. In the brilliant, hilarious title story, a new mother desperate to ensure her infant’s safety strikes a diabolical deal, agreeing to breastfeed the devil in exchange for his protection. The landscape in which these stories unfold is a feral, slippery, purgatorial space, bracketed by the void—yet within it Russell captures the exquisite beauty and tenderness of ordinary life. Orange World is a miracle of storytelling from a true modern master.

A Falling Star

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Author :
Publisher : Carolina Academic Press
ISBN 13 : 9780932112958
Total Pages : 279 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (129 download)

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Book Synopsis A Falling Star by : Chantel Acevedo

Download or read book A Falling Star written by Chantel Acevedo and published by Carolina Academic Press. This book was released on 2014 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Daysy Maria del Pozo and Stella Maris Morales-Quinn both came to the United States as part of the 1980 Mariel Boatlift--Daysy settling in South Florida with her family and Stella starting a new life with her mother and step-father in Pittsburgh. Over time, they each find themselves haunted by their families' complicated and painful Cuban pasts. As Stella deals with her mother's suicide and it slowly dawns on Daysy that there are family secrets she must uncover, the reader hears the del Pozo family history, piece by piece, from Daysy's mother. Soon it becomes clear that Daysy and Stella may share more than their Cuban-American heritage.

To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

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Author :
Publisher : Little, Brown
ISBN 13 : 0316329134
Total Pages : 206 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (163 download)

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Book Synopsis To Rise Again at a Decent Hour by : Joshua Ferris

Download or read book To Rise Again at a Decent Hour written by Joshua Ferris and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2014-05-13 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, this big, brilliant, profoundly observed novel by National Book Award Finalist Joshua Ferris explores the absurdities of modern life and one man's search for meaning. Paul O'Rourke is a man made of contradictions: he loves the world, but doesn't know how to live in it. He's a Luddite addicted to his iPhone, a dentist with a nicotine habit, a rabid Red Sox fan devastated by their victories, and an atheist not quite willing to let go of God. Then someone begins to impersonate Paul online, and he watches in horror as a website, a Facebook page, and a Twitter account are created in his name. What begins as an outrageous violation of his privacy soon becomes something more soul-frightening: the possibility that the online "Paul" might be a better version of the real thing. As Paul's quest to learn why his identity has been stolen deepens, he is forced to confront his troubled past and his uncertain future in a life disturbingly split between the real and the virtual. At once laugh-out-loud funny about the absurdities of the modern world, and indelibly profound about the eternal questions of the meaning of life, love and truth, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour is a deeply moving and constantly surprising tour de force.