Lights Out in the Reptile House

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Author :
Publisher : Open Road Media
ISBN 13 : 1504026691
Total Pages : 198 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (4 download)

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Book Synopsis Lights Out in the Reptile House by : Jim Shepard

Download or read book Lights Out in the Reptile House written by Jim Shepard and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2015-12-22 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A shy and apolitical herpetologist-in-training finds the weight of history bearing down on him as the effects of repression ramp up in his country In an unspecified country that combines elements of Chile under its military regime, South Africa under apartheid, and Italy under fascism, fifteen-year-old Karel Roeder asks only to be left alone to learn from Albert, his mentor at the zoo’s reptile house, and to devote himself to his girlfriend, Leda. But both Leda and Albert lead him into increasingly proscribed areas of thought and speech, and thus into conflict with a newly ascendant party that intends to prosecute a border war against an officially despised ethnic group and criminalize dissent. Citizens have been disappearing and surveillance in the name of safety has become all-pervasive. When Kehr, a special assistant of the civil guard, billets himself at Karel’s house for unknown reasons, Karel finds his already tenuous hold on his own innocence crushed as Kehr—tribune, inquisitor, and metaphysician of terror—instructs his unwilling protégé in those moments when history is let off the leash. Lights Out in the Reptile House is at once a dystopian political parable, a meditation on totalitarianism, and a moving coming-of-age story, as its protagonist struggles to understand his own values and meaning even in the most extreme of crucibles.

Amelia Island’s Velvet Undertow

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Author :
Publisher : AuthorHouse
ISBN 13 : 1449029205
Total Pages : 268 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (49 download)

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Book Synopsis Amelia Island’s Velvet Undertow by : Jane Marie Malcolm

Download or read book Amelia Island’s Velvet Undertow written by Jane Marie Malcolm and published by AuthorHouse. This book was released on 2009-11-17 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Amelia Island's VELVET UNDERTOW,The Goodbye Lie Series - Carolena Dunnigan witnesses the unthinkable and her safe, secure life on Amelia Island, Florida turns to ashes. Vowing to save her siblings, she seeks work and is lured to Charleston, South Carolina. Lust, love, and decades of lies do fierce battle, driving her into Pennsylvania's deadly Johnstown Flood of 1889. It scours away secrets of the past, but will anyone survive the churning undertow of it all? "Engaging historical romance Known to her admirers as GRACIOUS JANE MARIE [of GraciousJaneMarie.com], the author has written a delightful story with THE GOODBYE LIE. Set in the late 1800's , the story takes off to far away shores-and far away desires, lies, and deceit. I look forward to the next [novel in the series], VELVET UNDERTOW." - Jennifer Wardrip for RomanceJunkies.com

Getting to Happy

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Author :
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 0451233344
Total Pages : 449 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (512 download)

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Book Synopsis Getting to Happy by : Terry McMillan

Download or read book Getting to Happy written by Terry McMillan and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2011-06-07 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #1 New York Times bestselling author Terry McMillan's exuberant return to the four unforgettable heroines of Waiting to Exhale. Waiting to Exhale was more than just a bestselling novel—its publication was a watershed moment in literary history. McMillan's sassy and vibrant story about four black women struggling to find love and their place in the world touched a cultural nerve, inspired a blockbuster film, and generated a devoted audience. Now, McMillan revisits Savannah, Gloria, Bernadine, and Robin fifteen years later. Each is at her own midlife crossroads: Savannah has awakened to the fact that she's made too many concessions in her marriage, and decides to face life single again—at fifty-one. Bernadine has watched her megadivorce settlement dwindle, been swindled by her husband number two, and conned herself into thinking that a few pills will help distract her from her pain. Robin has an all-American case of shopaholism, while the big dream of her life—to wear a wedding dress—has gone unrealized. And for years, Gloria has taken happiness and security for granted. But being at the wrong place at the wrong time can change everything. All four are learning to heal past hurts and to reclaim their joy and their dreams; but they return to us full of spirit, sass, and faith in one another. They've exhaled: now they are learning to breathe.

Bottom of the Ninth

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Publisher : SIU Press
ISBN 13 : 9780809325047
Total Pages : 268 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (25 download)

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Book Synopsis Bottom of the Ninth by : John McNally

Download or read book Bottom of the Ninth written by John McNally and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Skillfully edited by John McNally, Bottom of the Ninth: Great Contemporary Baseball Short Stories collects nineteen contemporary baseball short stories from a successful mix of well-established writers, lesser-knowns, and a few up-and-comers. These stories are characterized by the same dramatic elements that draw people to the sport itself--the mythologizing of players, the obsessions and romance of the game, the bonds between players and fans, parents and children. From a key play, a missed catch, a chance lost, these are tales of characters facing high stakes and calls to action, metaphorically and literally, in the bottom of the ninth.

Reptile House

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Publisher : BOA Editions, Ltd.
ISBN 13 : 1938160665
Total Pages : 226 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (381 download)

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Book Synopsis Reptile House by : Robin McLean

Download or read book Reptile House written by Robin McLean and published by BOA Editions, Ltd.. This book was released on 2015-05-18 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The characters in these nine short stories abandon families, plot assassinations, nurse vendettas, tease, taunt, and terrorize. They retaliate for bad marriages, dream of weddings, and wait decades for lovers. How far will we go to escape to a better dream? What consequences must we face for hope and fantasy? Robin McLean's stories are strange, often disturbing and funny, and as full of foolishness and ugliness as they are of the wisdom and beauty all around us. Robin McLean holds an MFA from UMass Amherst. She teaches at Clark University and lives in Bristol, New Hampshire, and Sunderland, Massachusetts.

Cuba in Mind

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Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 1400076137
Total Pages : 334 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 ( download)

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Book Synopsis Cuba in Mind by : Maria Finn Dominguez

Download or read book Cuba in Mind written by Maria Finn Dominguez and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2004-06-08 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since Columbus arrived in 1492 and called Cuba “the most beautiful country that human eyes have ever seen,” few places on earth have evoked such passion. The thirty-one writers in Cuba in Mind offer ample proof of the fascinations that have lured generations of travelers. In this richly varied anthology of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, we hear from such famous visitors as Anthony Trollope, Langston Hughes, Ernest Hemingway, and Graham Greene. Poets and journalists offer their responses, from Allen Ginsberg and Jayne Cortez to Alma Guillermoprieto and Robert Stone; and novelists weigh in with such fictional portrayals as Elmore Leonard’s Cuba Libre and Pico Iyer’s Cuba and the Night. Cuban exiles, immigrants, and their offspring provide their unique perspective, from Cristina García’s essay “Simple Life” to excerpts from Oscar Hijuelos’s novel The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love and from Carlos Eire’s memoir Waiting for Snow in Havana. Embracing salsa and santeria, politics and baseball, the island’s sparkling beaches and the teeming Havana streets, Cuba in Mind captures the vibrancy, the contradictions, the heat and the humor of Cuba as shown by some of the best writers in the English language. Contributors: Thomas Barbour • José Barreiro • Ruth Behar • William Cullen Bryant • Jayne Cortez • Stephen Crane • Andrei Codrescu • Eleanor Early • Carlos Eire • Kimi Eisele • Cristina García • Allen Ginsberg • Graham Greene • Alma Guillermoprieto • Elizabeth Hanly • Ernest Hemingway • Consuelo Hermer • Oscar Hijuelos • Langston Hughes • Pico Iyer • Elmore Leonard • Rosa Lowinger • Marjorie May • Tom Miller • Holly Morris • Ricardo Pau-Llosa • Robert Stone • Jim Shepard • Isadora Tattlin • Anthony Trollope • Walter D. Wilcox

Phase Six

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Publisher : Knopf
ISBN 13 : 052565545X
Total Pages : 257 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (256 download)

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Book Synopsis Phase Six by : Jim Shepard

Download or read book Phase Six written by Jim Shepard and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2021 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In a tiny settlement on the west coast of Greenland, 11-year-old Aleq and his best friend, frequent trespassers at a mining site exposed to mountains of long-buried and thawing permafrost, carry what they pick up back into their village, and from there Shepard's harrowing and deeply moving story follows Aleq, one of the few survivors of the initial outbreak, through his identification and radical isolation as the likely index patient. While he shoulders both a crushing guilt for what he may have done and the hopes of a world looking for answers, we also meet two Epidemic Intelligence Service investigators dispatched from the CDC--Jeannine, an epidemiologist and daughter of Algerian immigrants, and Danice, an MD and lab wonk. As they attempt to head off the cataclysm, Jeannine--moving from the Greeland hospital overwhelmed with the first patients to a Level 4 high-security facility in the Rocky Mountains--does what she can to sustain Aleq."--Publisher's description.

The World to Come

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Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 1524731811
Total Pages : 273 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (247 download)

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Book Synopsis The World to Come by : Jim Shepard

Download or read book The World to Come written by Jim Shepard and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2017-02-21 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bursting with wicked humor and driven by an incomparable understanding of what it means to be human, The World to Come is the inimitable work of “the most ambitious story writer in America” (The Daily Beast). Now a major motion picture Shepard traverses both borders and centuries, seamlessly inhabiting a multitude of disparate men and women, and giving voice to visionaries, pioneers, and secret misfits—from nineteenth-century explorers departing on one of the Arctic’s most nightmarish expeditions to twentieth-century American military wives maintaining hope at home. Shepard’s characters confront everything from the emotional pitfalls of everyday life to colossal catastrophes, battling natural forces, the hazards of new technology, and their own implacable shortcomings. "[Shepard] has a knack for compressing a novel’s worth of life into 30 or 40 pages.” —The Boston Globe

Like You'd Understand, Anyway

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Author :
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0307277607
Total Pages : 226 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (72 download)

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Book Synopsis Like You'd Understand, Anyway by : Jim Shepard

Download or read book Like You'd Understand, Anyway written by Jim Shepard and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2008-08-12 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following his widely acclaimed Project X and Love and Hydrogen—“Here is the effect of these two books,” wrote the Chicago Tribune: “A reader finishes them buzzing with awe”—Jim Shepard now gives us his first entirely new collection in more than a decade. Like You’d Understand, Anyway reaches from Chernobyl to Bridgeport, with a host of narrators only Shepard could bring to pitch-perfect life. Among them: a middle-aged Aeschylus taking his place at Marathon, still vying for parental approval. A maddeningly indefatigable Victorian explorer hauling his expedition, whaleboat and all, through the Great Australian Desert in midsummer. The first woman in space and her cosmonaut lover, caught in the star-crossed orbits of their joint mission. Two Texas high school football players at the top of their food chain, soliciting their fathers’ attention by leveling everything before them on the field. And the rational and compassionate chief executioner of Paris, whose occupation, during the height of the Terror, eats away at all he holds dear. Brimming with irony, compassion, and withering humor, these eleven stories are at once eerily pertinent and dazzlingly exotic, and they showcase the work of a protean, prodigiously gifted writer at the height of his form. Reading Jim Shepard, according to Michael Chabon, “is like encountering our national literature in microcosm.”

The Book of Aron

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Author :
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 1101874325
Total Pages : 172 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (18 download)

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Book Synopsis The Book of Aron by : Jim Shepard

Download or read book The Book of Aron written by Jim Shepard and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2015-05-12 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The acclaimed National Book Award finalist—“one of the United States’ finest writers,” according to Joshua Ferris, “full of wit, humanity, and fearless curiosity”—now gives us a novel that will join the short list of classics about children caught up in the Holocaust. Aron, the narrator, is an engaging if peculiar and unhappy young boy whose family is driven by the German onslaught from the Polish countryside into Warsaw and slowly battered by deprivation, disease, and persecution. He and a handful of boys and girls risk their lives by scuttling around the ghetto to smuggle and trade contraband through the quarantine walls in hopes of keeping their fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters alive, hunted all the while by blackmailers and by Jewish, Polish, and German police, not to mention the Gestapo. When his family is finally stripped away from him, Aron is rescued by Janusz Korczak, a doctor renowned throughout prewar Europe as an advocate of children’s rights who, once the Nazis swept in, was put in charge of the Warsaw orphanage. Treblinka awaits them all, but does Aron manage to escape—as his mentor suspected he could—to spread word about the atrocities? Jim Shepard has masterfully made this child’s-eye view of the darkest history mesmerizing, sometimes comic despite all odds, truly heartbreaking, and even inspiring. Anyone who hears Aron’s voice will remember it forever.

You Think That's Bad

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Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0307595560
Total Pages : 241 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (75 download)

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Book Synopsis You Think That's Bad by : Jim Shepard

Download or read book You Think That's Bad written by Jim Shepard and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-03-22 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following Like You’d Understand, Anyway—awarded the Story Prize and a finalist for the National Book Award—Jim Shepard returns with an even more wildly diverse collection of astonishingly observant stories. Like an expert curator, he populates the vastness of human experience—from its bizarre fringes and lonely, breathtaking pinnacles to the hopelessly mediocre and desperately below average—with brilliant scientists, reluctant soldiers, workaholic artists, female explorers, depraved murderers, and deluded losers, all wholly convincing and utterly fascinating. A “black world” operative at Los Alamos isn’t allowed to tell his wife anything about his daily activities, but he can’t resist sharing her intimate confidences with his work buddy. A young Alpine researcher falls in love with the girlfriend of his brother, who was killed in an avalanche he believes he caused. An unlucky farm boy becomes the manservant of a French nobleman who’s as proud of his military service with Joan of Arc as he’s aroused by the slaughter of children. A free-spirited autodidact, grieving her lost sister, traces the ancient steps of a ruthless Middle Eastern sect and becomes the first Western woman to travel the Arabian deserts. From the inventor of the Godzilla epics to a miserable G.I. in New Guinea, each comes to realize that knowing better is never enough. Enthralling and unfailingly compassionate, You Think That’s Bad traverses centuries, continents, and social strata, but the joy and struggle that Shepard depicts with such devastating sensitivity—all the heartbreak, alienation, intimacy, and accomplishment—has a universal resonance.

Ajax Is All About Attack

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Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 1101912391
Total Pages : 30 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (19 download)

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Book Synopsis Ajax Is All About Attack by : Jim Shepard

Download or read book Ajax Is All About Attack written by Jim Shepard and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2015-05-04 with total page 30 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Vintage Shorts “Short Story Month” Selection Velibor Vasovic is not political. He is a soccer player; has played for Partizan Belgrade and his national team. Scored Partizan’s only goal against Real Madrid in the European Cup. He is the rock supporting any defense. But in 1966, he starts playing for Ajax Amsterdam, firmly in the West. And politics catches up to him. Jim Shepard is the wildly inventive guru of the historical fiction short story; a finalist for the National Book Award, and “one of the United States’ finest writers” (Joshua Ferris). “Ajax Is All About Attack” is classic Shepard, from the collection Love and Hydrogen. An eBook short.

Kiss of the Wolf

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Author :
Publisher : Open Road Media
ISBN 13 : 1504026675
Total Pages : 167 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (4 download)

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Book Synopsis Kiss of the Wolf by : Jim Shepard

Download or read book Kiss of the Wolf written by Jim Shepard and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2015-12-22 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Notable Book:A lethal accident turns life into a waking nightmare for a mother and her son in this gripping novel of secrecy and dread Abandoned by her husband, Joanie Mucherino and her eleven-year-old son, Todd, struggle to cope while dealing with their comically tactless and intrusive Italian family. Further complicating things, Joanie now seems available to Bruno Minea, an old family friend whose two-decade passion for her has been unwavering and faintly frightening. When Joanie and Todd kill an acquaintance in a hit-and-run accident, they soon discover—to their horror—that they’re keeping it a secret. But as the weight of their lies becomes more than they can can bear, their crime connects them to something even more sinister, as the victim had powerful, dangerous friends who will go to great lengths to avenge his death. Part family drama, part thriller, Kiss of the Wolf exemplifies the talents of National Book Award finalist Jim Shepard, author of 2015 favorite The Book of Aron, who crafts hilarious, spot-on dialogue with the same mastery he lends to the ingenious, page-turning plot, in which a loving mother is forced to confront her role as the architect of her son’s anguished guilt.

Love and Hydrogen

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Author :
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0307426718
Total Pages : 297 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (74 download)

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Book Synopsis Love and Hydrogen by : Jim Shepard

Download or read book Love and Hydrogen written by Jim Shepard and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I’ve been a problem baby, a lousy son, a distant brother, an off-putting neighbor, a piss-poor student, a worrisome seatmate, an unreliable employee, a bewildering lover, a frustrating confidante and a crappy husband. Among the things I do pretty well at this point I’d have to list darts, re-closing Stay-Fresh boxes, and staying out of the way. This is the self-eulogy offered early on by the unwilling hero of the opening story in this collection, a dazzling array of work in short fiction from a master of the form. The stories in Love and Hydrogen—familiar to readers from publications ranging from McSweeney’s to The New Yorker to Harper’s to Tin House—encompass in theme and compassion what an ordinary writer would seem to need several lifetimes to imagine. A frustrated wife makes use of an enterprising illegal-gun salesman to hold her husband hostage; two hapless adult-education students botch their attempts at rudimentary piano but succeed in a halting, awkward romance; a fascinated and murderous Creature welcomes the first human visitors to his Black Lagoon; and in the title story, the stupefyingly huge airship Hindenburg flies to its doom, representing in 1937 mankind's greatest yearning as well as its titanic failure. Generous in scope and astonishing in ambition, Shepard’s voice never falters; the virtuosity of Love and Hydrogen cements his reputation as, in the words of Rick Bass, “a passionate writer with a razor-sharp wit and an elephantine heart”—in short, one of the most powerful talents at work today.

Project X

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Author :
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 1400033489
Total Pages : 178 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 ( download)

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Book Synopsis Project X by : Jim Shepard

Download or read book Project X written by Jim Shepard and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2005-04-12 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the wilderness of junior high, Edwin Hanratty is at the bottom of the food chain. His teachers find him a nuisance. His fellow students consider him prey. And although his parents are not oblivious to his troubles, they can't quite bring themselves to fathom the ruthless forces that demoralize him daily. Sharing in these schoolyard indignities is his only friend, Flake. Branded together as misfits, their fury simmers quietly in the hallways, classrooms, and at home, until an unthinkable idea offers them a spectacular and terrifying release. From Jim Shepard, one of the most enduring and influential novelists writing today, comes an unflinching look into the heart and soul of adolescence. Tender and horrifying, prescient and moving, Project X will not easily be forgotten.

Robert Altman

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Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0307273350
Total Pages : 578 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (72 download)

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Book Synopsis Robert Altman by : Mitchell Zuckoff

Download or read book Robert Altman written by Mitchell Zuckoff and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2009-10-20 with total page 578 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robert Altman—visionary director, hard-partying hedonist, eccentric family man, Hollywood legend—comes roaring to life in this rollicking oral biography. After an all-American boyhood in Kansas City, a stint flying bombers in World War II, and jobs ranging from dog tattoo entrepreneur to television director, Robert Altman burst onto the scene in 1970 with M*A*S*H. He reinvented American filmmaking, and went on to produce such masterpieces as McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Nashville, The Player, Short Cuts, and Gosford Park. In Robert Altman, Mitchell Zuckoff has woven together Altman’s final interviews; an incredible cast of voices including Meryl Streep, Warren Beatty, Paul Newman, among scores of others; and contemporary reviews and news accounts into a riveting tale of an extraordinary life.

Bringing the Devil to His Knees

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Author :
Publisher : University of Michigan Press
ISBN 13 : 9780472067749
Total Pages : 276 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (677 download)

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Book Synopsis Bringing the Devil to His Knees by : Charles Baxter

Download or read book Bringing the Devil to His Knees written by Charles Baxter and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fiction writers share the secrets of their craft in essays geared for the serious writer