Someone

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Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN 13 : 1429969423
Total Pages : 242 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (299 download)

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Book Synopsis Someone by : Alice McDermott

Download or read book Someone written by Alice McDermott and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2013-09-10 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fully realized portrait of one woman's life in all its complexity, by the National Book Award–winning author An ordinary life—its sharp pains and unexpected joys, its bursts of clarity and moments of confusion—lived by an ordinary woman: this is the subject of Someone, Alice McDermott's extraordinary return, seven years after the publication of After This. Scattered recollections—of childhood, adolescence, motherhood, old age—come together in this transformative narrative, stitched into a vibrant whole by McDermott's deft, lyrical voice. Our first glimpse of Marie is as a child: a girl in glasses waiting on a Brooklyn stoop for her beloved father to come home from work. A seemingly innocuous encounter with a young woman named Pegeen sets the bittersweet tone of this remarkable novel. Pegeen describes herself as an "amadan," a fool; indeed, soon after her chat with Marie, Pegeen tumbles down her own basement stairs. The magic of McDermott's novel lies in how it reveals us all as fools for this or that, in one way or another. Marie's first heartbreak and her eventual marriage; her brother's brief stint as a Catholic priest, subsequent loss of faith, and eventual breakdown; the Second World War; her parents' deaths; the births and lives of Marie's children; the changing world of her Irish-American enclave in Brooklyn—McDermott sketches all of it with sympathy and insight. This is a novel that speaks of life as it is daily lived; a crowning achievement by one of the finest American writers at work today. A Publishers Weekly Best Fiction Book of the Year A Kirkus Reviews Best Fiction Book of 2013 A New York Times Notable Book of 2013 A Washington Post Notable Fiction Book of 2013 An NPR Best Book of 2013

The Middle Stories

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Publisher : McSweeney's
ISBN 13 : 1938073096
Total Pages : 108 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (38 download)

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Book Synopsis The Middle Stories by : Sheila Heti

Download or read book The Middle Stories written by Sheila Heti and published by McSweeney's. This book was released on 2012-04-10 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wildly acclaimed in Canada, this book marks the debut of a remarkable young writer first published by McSweeney's when she was twenty-three and living at home with her dad and brother. The Middle Stories is a strikingly original collection of stories, fables, and short brutalities that are alternately heartwarming, cruel, and hilarious. This edition, marking the 10th anniversary of The Middle Stories, will be designed in the newly iconic McSweeney's paperback style, and will be published shortly before Heti's newest novel, How Should A Person Be?, emigrates from Canada via Henry Holt & Co.

Out There

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Publisher : Random House
ISBN 13 : 0593231465
Total Pages : 257 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (932 download)

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Book Synopsis Out There by : Kate Folk

Download or read book Out There written by Kate Folk and published by Random House. This book was released on 2022-03-29 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A thrilling new voice in fiction injects the absurd into the everyday to present a startling vision of modern life, “[as] if Kafka and Camus and Bradbury were penning episodes of Black Mirror” (Chang-Rae Lee, author of My Year Abroad). “Stories so sharp and ingenious you may cut yourself on them while reading.”—Kelly Link, author of Get In Trouble With a focus on the weird and eerie forces that lurk beneath the surface of ordinary experience, Kate Folk’s debut collection is perfectly pitched to the madness of our current moment. A medical ward for a mysterious bone-melting disorder is the setting of a perilous love triangle. A curtain of void obliterates the globe at a steady pace, forcing Earth’s remaining inhabitants to decide with whom they want to spend eternity. A man fleeing personal scandal enters a codependent relationship with a house that requires a particularly demanding level of care. And in the title story, originally published in The New Yorker, a woman in San Francisco uses dating apps to find a partner despite the threat posed by “blots,” preternaturally handsome artificial men dispatched by Russian hackers to steal data. Meanwhile, in a poignant companion piece, a woman and a blot forge a genuine, albeit doomed, connection. Prescient and wildly imaginative, Out There depicts an uncanny landscape that holds a mirror to our subconscious fears and desires. Each story beats with its own fierce heart, and together they herald an exciting new arrival in the tradition of speculative literary fiction.

We're Flying

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Publisher : Other Press, LLC
ISBN 13 : 159051324X
Total Pages : 383 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (95 download)

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Book Synopsis We're Flying by : Peter Stamm

Download or read book We're Flying written by Peter Stamm and published by Other Press, LLC. This book was released on 2012-08-14 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following the publication of the widely acclaimed novel Seven Years comes a trove of stories from the Swiss master Peter Stamm. They all possess the traits that have built Stamm’s reputation: the directness of the prose, the deceptive surface simplicity of the narratives, and deep psychological insight into the existential dilemmas of contemporary life. Stamm does not waste a word, nor does he spare the reader’s feelings. These stories are a superb introduction to his work and a gift for all those who have come to regard his fiction as a precise rendering of the contemporary human psyche.

The Books of Jacob

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Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 0593087496
Total Pages : 993 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (93 download)

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Book Synopsis The Books of Jacob by : Olga Tokarczuk

Download or read book The Books of Jacob written by Olga Tokarczuk and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2022-02-01 with total page 993 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A NEW YORKER “ESSENTIAL READ” “Just as awe-inspiring as the Nobel judges claimed.” – The Washington Post “Olga Tokarczuk is one of our greatest living fiction writers. . . This could well be a decade-defining book akin to Bolaño’s 2666.” –AV Club “Sophisticated and ribald and brimming with folk wit. . . The comedy in this novel blends, as it does in life, with genuine tragedy.” –Dwight Garner, The New York Times LONGLISTED FOR THE 2022 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, TIME, THE NEW YORKER, AND NPR The Nobel Prize–winner’s richest, most sweeping and ambitious novel yet follows the comet-like rise and fall of a mysterious, messianic religious leader as he blazes his way across eighteenth-century Europe. In the mid-eighteenth century, as new ideas—and a new unrest—begin to sweep the Continent, a young Jew of mysterious origins arrives in a village in Poland. Before long, he has changed not only his name but his persona; visited by what seem to be ecstatic experiences, Jacob Frank casts a charismatic spell that attracts an increasingly fervent following. In the decade to come, Frank will traverse the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires with throngs of disciples in his thrall as he reinvents himself again and again, converts to Islam and then Catholicism, is pilloried as a heretic and revered as the Messiah, and wreaks havoc on the conventional order, Jewish and Christian alike, with scandalous rumors of his sect’s secret rituals and the spread of his increasingly iconoclastic beliefs. The story of Frank—a real historical figure around whom mystery and controversy swirl to this day—is the perfect canvas for the genius and unparalleled reach of Olga Tokarczuk. Narrated through the perspectives of his contemporaries—those who revere him, those who revile him, the friend who betrays him, the lone woman who sees him for what he is—The Books of Jacob captures a world on the cusp of precipitous change, searching for certainty and longing for transcendence. In a nod to books written in Hebrew, The Books of Jacob is paginated in reverse, beginning on p. 955 and ending on p. 1 – but read traditionally, front cover to back.

American Estrangement: Stories

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Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN 13 : 039354124X
Total Pages : 192 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (935 download)

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Book Synopsis American Estrangement: Stories by : Saïd Sayrafiezadeh

Download or read book American Estrangement: Stories written by Saïd Sayrafiezadeh and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2021-08-10 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Editors' Choice pick One of Literary Hub's Most Anticipated Books of 2021 Stories that capture our times by “a young author who has already established himself as a unique American voice” (Elle). Said Sayrafiezadeh has been hailed by Philip Gourevitch as "a masterful storyteller working from deep in the American grain." His new collection of stories—some of which have appeared in The New Yorker, the Paris Review, and the Best American Short Stories—is set in a contemporary America full of the kind of emotionally bruised characters familiar to readers of Denis Johnson and George Saunders. These are people contending with internal struggles—a son’s fractured relationship with his father, the death of a mother, the loss of a job, drug addiction—even as they are battered by larger, often invisible, economic, political, and racial forces of American society. Searing, intimate, often slyly funny, and always marked by a deep imaginative sympathy, American Estrangement is a testament to our addled times. It will cement Sayrafiezadeh’s reputation as one of the essential twenty-first-century American writers.

20 Under 40

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Publisher : Macmillan + ORM
ISBN 13 : 1429918403
Total Pages : 491 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (299 download)

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Book Synopsis 20 Under 40 by : Deborah Treisman

Download or read book 20 Under 40 written by Deborah Treisman and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2010-11-23 with total page 491 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In June 2010, the editors of The New Yorker announced to widespread media coverage their selection of "20 Under 40"—the young fiction writers who are, or will be, central to their generation. The magazine published twenty stories by this stellar group of writers over the course of the summer. They are now collected for the first time in one volume. The range of voices is extraordinary. There is the lyrical realism of Nell Freudenberger, Philipp Meyer, C. E. Morgan, and Salvatore Scibona; the satirical comedy of Joshua Ferris and Gary Shteyngart; and the genre-bending tales of Jonathan Safran Foer, Nicole Krauss, and Téa Obreht. David Bezmozgis and Dinaw Mengestu offer clear eyed portraits of immigration and identity; Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, ZZ Packer, and Wells Tower offer voice-driven, idiosyncratic narratives. Then there are the haunting sociopolitical stories of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Daniel Alarcón, and Yiyun Li, and the metaphysical fantasies of Chris Adrian, Rivka Galchen, and Karen Russell. Each of these writers reminds us why we read. And each is aiming for greatness: fighting to get and to hold our attention in a culture that is flooded with words, sounds, and pictures; fighting to surprise, to entertain, to teach, and to move not only us but generations of readers to come. A landmark collection, 20 Under 40 stands as a testament to the vitality of fiction today.

Black Box

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Publisher : Hachette UK
ISBN 13 : 1472102819
Total Pages : 44 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (721 download)

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Book Synopsis Black Box by : Jennifer Egan

Download or read book Black Box written by Jennifer Egan and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2012-09-06 with total page 44 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Close your eyes and slowly count backward from ten.' America, the near future. A young spy on a mission logs her observations. The result is an intense thriller, and a minute dissection of the experience of a woman whose beauty is also her camouflage, for whom control relies on submission: a woman whose success - whose life - depends on being seen and not seen. Originally published online via Twitter by @NYerFiction, Jennifer Egan's first new fiction since the phenomenal success of A Visit From the Goon Squad is a taut, compulsive work of unrelenting genius.

Checkout 19

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Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 0593420497
Total Pages : 289 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (934 download)

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Book Synopsis Checkout 19 by : Claire-Louise Bennett

Download or read book Checkout 19 written by Claire-Louise Bennett and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2022-03-01 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES, THE NEW YORKER, AND VOGUE “Bennett writes like no one else. She is a rare talent, and Checkout 19 is a masterful novel.” –Karl Ove Knausgaard From the author of the “dazzling. . . . and daring” Pond (O magazine), the adventures of a young woman discovering her own genius, through the people she meets–and dreams up–along the way. In a working-class town in a county west of London, a schoolgirl scribbles stories in the back pages of her exercise book, intoxicated by the first sparks of her imagination. As she grows, everything and everyone she encounters become fuel for a burning talent. The large Russian man in the ancient maroon car who careens around the grocery store where she works as a checkout clerk, and slips her a copy of Beyond Good and Evil. The growing heaps of other books in which she loses–and finds–herself. Even the derailing of a friendship, in a devastating violation. The thrill of learning to conjure characters and scenarios in her head is matched by the exhilaration of forging her own way in the world, the two kinds of ingenuity kindling to a brilliant conflagration. Exceeding the extraordinary promise of Bennett’s mold-shattering debut, Checkout 19 is a radical affirmation of the power of the imagination and the magic escape those who master it open to us all.

The Borowitz Report

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Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 1439129495
Total Pages : 116 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (391 download)

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Book Synopsis The Borowitz Report by : Andy Borowitz

Download or read book The Borowitz Report written by Andy Borowitz and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2010-05-11 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prepare to be shocked. From the man The Wall Street Journal hailed as a "Swiftean satirist" comes the most shocking book ever written! The Borowitz Report: The Big Book of Shockers, by award-winning fake journalist Andy Borowitz, contains page after page of "news stories" too hot, too controversial, too -- yes, shocking -- for the mainstream press to handle. Sample the groundbreaking reporting from the news organization whose motto is "Give us thirty minutes -- we'll waste it."

You Will Never Be Forgotten

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Publisher : Macmillan + ORM
ISBN 13 : 0374720568
Total Pages : 168 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (747 download)

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Book Synopsis You Will Never Be Forgotten by : Mary South

Download or read book You Will Never Be Forgotten written by Mary South and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2020-03-10 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this provocative, bitingly funny debut collection, people attempt to use technology to escape their uncontrollable feelings of grief or rage or despair, only to reveal their most flawed and human selves An architect draws questionable inspiration from her daughter’s birth defect. A content moderator for “the world’s biggest search engine,” who spends her days culling videos of beheadings and suicides, turns from stalking her rapist online to following him in real life. At a camp for recovering internet trolls, a sensitive misfit goes missing. A wounded mother raises the second incarnation of her child. In You Will Never Be Forgotten, Mary South explores how technology can both collapse our relationships from within and provide opportunities for genuine connection. Formally inventive, darkly absurdist, savagely critical of the increasingly fraught cultural climates we inhabit, these ten stories also find hope in fleeting interactions and moments of tenderness. They reveal our grotesque selfishness and our intense need for love and acceptance, and the psychic pain that either shuts us off or allows us to discover our deepest reaches of empathy. This incendiary debut marks the arrival of a perceptive, idiosyncratic, instantly recognizable voice in fiction—one that could only belong to Mary South.

Tenth of December

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Publisher : A&C Black
ISBN 13 : 1408837358
Total Pages : 289 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (88 download)

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Book Synopsis Tenth of December by : George Saunders

Download or read book Tenth of December written by George Saunders and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2013-01-03 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The prize-winning, New York Times bestselling short story collection from the internationally bestselling author of Lincoln in the Bardo 'The best book you'll read this year' New York Times 'Dazzlingly surreal stories about a failing America' Sunday Times WINNER OF THE 2014 FOLIO PRIZE AND SHORTLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD 2013 George Saunders's most wryly hilarious and disturbing collection yet, Tenth of December illuminates human experience and explores figures lost in a labyrinth of troubling preoccupations. A family member recollects a backyard pole dressed for all occasions; Jeff faces horrifying ultimatums and the prospect of Darkenfloxx(TM) in some unusual drug trials; and Al Roosten hides his own internal monologue behind a winning smile that he hopes will make him popular. With dark visions of the future riffing against ghosts of the past and the ever-settling present, this collection sings with astonishing charm and intensity.

My Purple Scented Novel

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Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0525564586
Total Pages : 16 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (255 download)

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Book Synopsis My Purple Scented Novel by : Ian McEwan

Download or read book My Purple Scented Novel written by Ian McEwan and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2018-06-19 with total page 16 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A jewel of a short story from the bestselling, award-winning author of Atonement—“My Purple Scented Novel” follows the perfect crime of literary betrayal, scrupulously wrought yet unscrupulously executed. Published to celebrate Ian McEwan’s 70th birthday. “You will have heard of my friend the once celebrated novelist Jocelyn Tarbet, but I suspect his memory is beginning to fade. . . . You’d never heard of me, the once obscure novelist Parker Sparrow, until my name was publicly connected with his. To a knowing few, our names remain rigidly attached, like the two ends of a seesaw. His rise coincided with, though did not cause, my decline. . . . I don’t deny there was wrongdoing. I stole a life, and I don’t intend to give it back. You may treat these few pages as a confession.”

Cat Person

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Publisher : Random House
ISBN 13 : 147356123X
Total Pages : 72 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (735 download)

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Book Synopsis Cat Person by : Kristen Roupenian

Download or read book Cat Person written by Kristen Roupenian and published by Random House. This book was released on 2018-05-03 with total page 72 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: She thought, brightly, This is the worst life decision I have ever made! And she marvelled at herself for a while, at the mystery of this person who’d just done this bizarre, inexplicable thing. Margot meets Robert. They exchange numbers. They text, flirt and eventually have sex – the type of sex you attempt to forget. How could one date go so wrong? Everything that takes place in Cat Person happens to countless people every day. But Cat Person is not an everyday story. In less than a week, Kristen Roupenian’s New Yorker debut became the most read and shared short story in their website’s history. This is the bad date that went viral. This is the conversation we’re all having. This gift edition contains photographs by celebrated photographer Elinor Carucci, who was commissioned by the New Yorker to capture the image that accompanied Kristen Roupenian’s Cat Person when it appeared in the magazine. You Know You Want This, Kristen Roupenian’s debut collection, will be published in February 2019.

Family Life: A Novel

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Author :
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN 13 : 0393242315
Total Pages : 224 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (932 download)

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Book Synopsis Family Life: A Novel by : Akhil Sharma

Download or read book Family Life: A Novel written by Akhil Sharma and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2014-04-07 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2016 International Dublin Literary Award "Gorgeously tender at its core…beautiful, heartstopping…Family Life really blazes." —Sonali Deraniyagala, New York Times Book Review Hailed as a "supreme storyteller" (Philadelphia Inquirer) for his "cunning, dismaying and beautifully conceived" fiction (New York Times), Akhil Sharma is possessed of a narrative voice "as hypnotic as those found in the pages of Dostoyevsky" (The Nation). In his highly anticipated second novel, Family Life, he delivers a story of astonishing intensity and emotional precision. We meet the Mishra family in Delhi in 1978, where eight-year-old Ajay and his older brother Birju play cricket in the streets, waiting for the day when their plane tickets will arrive and they and their mother can fly across the world and join their father in America. America to the Mishras is, indeed, everything they could have imagined and more: when automatic glass doors open before them, they feel that surely they must have been mistaken for somebody important. Pressing an elevator button and the elevator closing its doors and rising, they have a feeling of power at the fact that the elevator is obeying them. Life is extraordinary until tragedy strikes, leaving one brother severely brain-damaged and the other lost and virtually orphaned in a strange land. Ajay, the family’s younger son, prays to a God he envisions as Superman, longing to find his place amid the ruins of his family’s new life. Heart-wrenching and darkly funny, Family Life is a universal story of a boy torn between duty and his own survival.

Whereabouts

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Author :
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0593318323
Total Pages : 136 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (933 download)

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Book Synopsis Whereabouts by : Jhumpa Lahiri

Download or read book Whereabouts written by Jhumpa Lahiri and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2021-04-27 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A marvelous new novel from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Lowland and Interpreter of Maladies about a woman questioning her place in the world, wavering between stasis and movement, between the need to belong and the refusal to form lasting ties. “Another masterstroke in a career already filled with them.” —O, the Oprah Magazine Exuberance and dread, attachment and estrangement: in this novel, Jhumpa Lahiri stretches her themes to the limit. In the arc of one year, an unnamed narrator in an unnamed city, in the middle of her life’s journey, realizes that she’s lost her way. The city she calls home acts as a companion and interlocutor: traversing the streets around her house, and in parks, piazzas, museums, stores, and coffee bars, she feels less alone. We follow her to the pool she frequents, and to the train station that leads to her mother, who is mired in her own solitude after her husband’s untimely death. Among those who appear on this woman’s path are colleagues with whom she feels ill at ease, casual acquaintances, and “him,” a shadow who both consoles and unsettles her. Until one day at the sea, both overwhelmed and replenished by the sun’s vital heat, her perspective will abruptly change. This is the first novel Lahiri has written in Italian and translated into English. The reader will find the qualities that make Lahiri’s work so beloved: deep intelligence and feeling, richly textured physical and emotional landscapes, and a poetics of dislocation. But Whereabouts, brimming with the impulse to cross barriers, also signals a bold shift of style and sensibility. By grafting herself onto a new literary language, Lahiri has pushed herself to a new level of artistic achievement.

How to Behave in a Crowd

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Author :
Publisher : Crown
ISBN 13 : 0451497554
Total Pages : 338 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (514 download)

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Book Synopsis How to Behave in a Crowd by : Camille Bordas

Download or read book How to Behave in a Crowd written by Camille Bordas and published by Crown. This book was released on 2018-08-21 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A witty, heartfelt novel that brilliantly evokes the confusions of adolescence and marks the arrival of an extraordinary young talent. Isidore Mazal is eleven years old, the youngest of six siblings living in a small French town. He doesn't quite fit in. Berenice, Aurore, and Leonard are on track to have doctorates by age twenty-four. Jeremie performs with a symphony, and Simone, older than Isidore by eighteen months, expects a great career as a novelist—she's already put Isidore to work on her biography. The only time they leave their rooms is to gather on the old, stained couch and dissect prime-time television dramas in light of Aristotle's Poetics. Isidore has never skipped a grade or written a dissertation. But he notices things the others don't, and asks questions they fear to ask. So when tragedy strikes the Mazal family, Isidore is the only one to recognize how everyone is struggling with their grief, and perhaps the only one who can help them—if he doesn't run away from home first. Isidore’s unstinting empathy, combined with his simmering anger, makes for a complex character study, in which the elegiac and comedic build toward a heartbreaking conclusion. With How to Behave in a Crowd, Camille Bordas immerses readers in the interior life of a boy puzzled by adulthood and beginning to realize that the adults around him are just as lost.