Terrible, unspeakable things happened to Sethe at Sweet Home, the farm where she lived as a slave for many years until she escaped to Ohio. Her new life is full of hope but eighteen years later she is still not free. Sethe's new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved.
Awe and exhiliration--along with heartbreak and mordant wit--abound in Lolita , Nabokov's most famous and controversial novel, which tells the story of the aging Humbert Humbert's obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze. Lolita is also the story of a hypercivilized European colliding with the cheerful barbarism of postwar America. Most of all, it is a meditation on love--love as outrage and hallucination, madness and transformation.
From the revered, Oscar-winning, stunningly original screenwriter comes a potently surreal, wide-ranging, and hysterical debut novel about the finding and losing and making of a masterpiece. This is a novel that could only be written by Charlie Kaufman, legendary screenwriter of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Being John Malkovich . When B., a self-important, pretentious, washed-up film critic, rents an apartment in St. Augustine, Florida to research his essay that nobody will read on a long-forgotten film that nobody saw, he's got no idea there's a genuine, undiscovered masterpiece living next door. His neighbor, Ingo, a Bible-quoting, foul-mouthed, form-shifting 116-year-old, has been working on the movie for ninety-eight years. The movie is three months long, beginning as a silent film from the early 20th century, and includes scheduled breaks for bathroom, eating, and sleeping, during which it infects your dream state. When Ingo dies midway through the viewing, B. is certain that Ingo's legacy will make his as well, and rushes back home to New York to claim this monumental discovery for the world. But when the canisters of film catch fire on the way, destroying the film and putting B. into a three-month coma from which he suffers critical memory loss, all that's left is a single frame. B. makes it his life's mission to remember the movie, but where does his memory end and his quickly unraveling life begin? As the lines of reality, memory, and dream blur, what ensues is an absurdly wide-ranging adventure through hypnotic memory recovery, film history, puppetry, vaudevillian comedy, biblical references, metacritiques, goo-like lobster creatures called globsters, an alternative history of the lunar space landing, a giant with leading man good looks found living in a cave, and multiple characters using different forms of time travel simultaneously. It contains just about every idea you could think of, and yet the more you ruminate on it, the bigger and richer it becomes. It's filled with knotty concepts, but it's a fluid, profoundly sad, devastatingly funny, and, ultimately, deeply human read.
Orphaned at an early age, Jane Eyre, leads a lonely life until she finds a position as a governess at Thornfield Hall. There she meets the mysterious Mr. Rochester and sees a ghostly woman who roams the halls at night. What is the sinister secret that threatens Jane and her new found happiness? Step into Classics(TM) adaptations feature easy-to-read texts, big type, and short chapters that are ideal for reluctant readers and kids not yet ready to tackle original classics.
Spectacular.--NPR Uproariously funny.-- The Boston Globe An artistic triumph.-- San Francisco Chronicle A novel in which comedy and pathos are exquisitely balanced.-- The Washington Post Shteyngarts best book.-- The Seattle Times The bestselling author of Super Sad True Love Story returns with a biting, brilliant, emotionally resonant novel very much of our times. NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE AND MAUREEN CORRIGAN, NPRS FRESH AIR AND NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review NPR The Washington Post O: The Oprah Magazine Mother Jones Glamour Library Journal Kirkus Reviews Newsday Pamela Paul, KQED Financial Times The Globe and Mail Narcissistic, hilariously self-deluded, and divorced from the real world as most of us know it, hedge-fund manager Barry Cohen oversees $2.4 billion in assets. Deeply stressed by an SEC investigation and by his three-year-old sons diagnosis of autism, he flees New York on a Greyhound bus in search of a simpler, more romantic life with his old college sweetheart. Meanwhile, his super-smart wife, Seema--a driven first-generation American who craved the picture-perfect life that comes with wealth--has her own demons to face. How these two flawed characters navigate the Shteyngartian chaos of their own making is at the heart of this piercing exploration of the 0.1 Percent, a poignant tale of familial longing and an unsentimental ode to what really makes America great. LONGLISTED FOR THE CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE IN FICTION The fuel and oxygen of immigrant literature--movement, exile, nostalgia, cultural disorientation--are what fire the pistons of this trenchant and panoramic novel. . . . [It is] a novel so pungent, so frisky and so intent on probing the dissonances and delusions--both individual and collective--that grip this strange land getting stranger. -- The New York Times Book Review Shteyngart, perhaps more than any American writer of his generation, is a natural. He is light, stinging, insolent and melancholy. . . . The wit and the immigrants sense of heartbreak--he was born in Russia--just seem to pour from him. The idea of riding along behind Shteyngart as he glides across America in the early age of Trump is a propitious one. He doesnt disappoint. -- The New York Times
The questions, discussion topics, and reading list that follow are designed to enhance your group's reading of Peter Mayle's delightful books about life in Provence, where he and his wife bought a two-hundred-year-old stone farmhouse nestled in the foothills of the Lubéron Mountains.
The New York Times bestselling author of The Tigers Wife returns with a bracingly epic and imaginatively mythic journey across the American West in 1893, in which the lives of a former outlaw and a frontierswoman collide and intertwine ( Entertainment Weekly ) In the lawless, drought-ridden lands of the Arizona Territory in 1893, two extraordinary lives collide. Nora is an unflinching frontierswoman awaiting the return of the men in her life--her husband, who has gone in search of water for the parched household, and her elder sons, who have vanished after an explosive argument. Nora is biding her time with her youngest son, who is convinced that a mysterious beast is stalking the land around their home. Lurie is a former outlaw and a man haunted by ghosts. He sees lost souls who want something from him, and he finds reprieve from their longing in an unexpected relationship that inspires a momentous expedition across the West. The way in which Noras and Luries stories intertwine is the surprise and suspense of this brilliant novel. Mythical, lyrical, and sweeping in scope, Inland is grounded in true but little-known history. It showcases all of Téa Obrehts talents as a writer, as she subverts and reimagines the myths of the American West, making them entirely--and unforgettably--her own. Advance praise for Inland A frontier tale [that] dazzles with camels and wolves and two characters who never quite meet . . . [Obreht] returns with a novel saturated in enough realism and magic to make the ghost of Gabriel García Márquez grin. . . . Will take your breath away. -- Kirkus Reviews (starred review) This is no boilerplate Louis LAmour yarn--there are ghosts, camels and other fantastical elements. -- Newsday (Best Summer Books 2019) The long-anticipated second novel from Téa Obreht transports readers to the Wild West through the juxtaposed stories of a frontierswoman whose husband and sons have gone missing, and of an outlaw on the run. -- Bustle
Remarkable stories of men, women, and families living on the edge--the eagerly anticipated first collection from the New York Times bestselling author of The Girls . A young woman trying to make it in L.A. takes a risk that forces her to confront the dangerous game she is playing. A father tries to medicate and control his fear and anger at his son's lifestyle and behavior. An aspiring actress feels herself turning hard and toward an ambition marked by a glittering coldness. In nine stunning stories, Emma Cline explores the menace and the shocking costs of the choices people make, the complicated interactions between men and women and within families, and the violence lurking at the edge of ordinary people's lives.
B>b>A beautiful, arresting story about race and the relationships that shape us through life by the legendary Toni Morrison, in a stand-alone Knopf hardcover for the first time./b>/b>br>br>In this 1983 short story--the only short story Morrison ever wrote--we meet Twyla and Roberta, who have known each other since they were eight years old and spent four months together as roommates in St. Bonaventure shelter. Inseparable then, they lose touch as they grow older, only later to find each other again at a diner, a grocery store, and again at a protest. Seemingly at opposite ends of every problem, and at each other''s throats each time they meet, the two women still cannot deny the deep bond their shared experience has forged between them.br>;br>Another work of genius by this masterful writer, Recitatif keeps Twyla''s and Roberta''s races ambiguous throughout the story. Morrison herself described Recitatif, a story which will keep readers thinking and discussing for years to come, as "an experiment in the removal of all racial codes from a narrative about two characters of different races for whom racial identity is crucial." We know that one is white and one is Black, but which is which? And who is right about the race of the woman the girls tormented at the orphanage?br>;br>A remarkable look into what keeps us together and what keeps us apart, and how perceptions are made tangible by reality, Recitatif is a gift to readers in these changing times.
Abraham Lincoln, as well as an unforgettable cast of supporting characters, living and dead, historical and invented Named One of the Ten Best Books of the Year by The Washington Post, USA Today, and Maureen Corrigan, NPR - One of Time's Ten Best Novels of the Year - A New York Times Notable Book February 1862. The Civil War is less than one year old. The fighting has begun in earnest, and the nation has begun to realize it is in for a long, bloody struggle. Meanwhile, President Lincoln's beloved eleven-year-old son, Willie, lies upstairs in the White House, gravely ill. In a matter of days, despite predictions of a recovery, Willie dies and is laid to rest in a Georgetown cemetery. «My poor boy, he was too good for this earth,» the president says at the time. «God has called him home.» Newspapers report that a grief-stricken Lincoln returns, alone, to the crypt several times to hold his boy's body. From that seed of historical truth, George Saunders spins an unforgettable story of familial love and loss that breaks free of its realistic, historical framework into a supernatural realm both hilarious and terrifying. Willie Lincoln finds himself in a strange purgatory where ghosts mingle, gripe, commiserate, quarrel, and enact bizarre acts of penance. Within this transitional state-called, in the Tibetan tradition, the bardo-a monumental struggle erupts over young Willie's soul. Lincoln in the Bardo is an astonishing feat of imagination and a bold step forward from one of the most important and influential writers of his generation. Formally daring, generous in spirit, deeply concerned with matters of the heart, it is a testament to fiction's ability to speak honestly and powerfully to the things that really matter to us. Saunders has invented a thrilling new form that deploys a kaleidoscopic, theatrical panorama of voices to ask a timeless, profound question: How do we live and love when we know that everything we love must end?
In this bravura follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize, and National Book Award-winning #1 New York Times bestseller The Underground Railroad , Colson Whitehead brilliantly dramatizes another strand of American history through the story of two boys sentenced to a hellish reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida. As the Civil Rights movement begins to reach the black enclave of Frenchtown in segregated Tallahassee, Elwood Curtis takes the words of Dr. Martin Luther King to heart: He is "as good as anyone." Abandoned by his parents, but kept on the straight and narrow by his grandmother, Elwood is about to enroll in the local black college. But for a black boy in the Jim Crow South of the early 1960s, one innocent mistake is enough to destroy the future. Elwood is sentenced to a juvenile reformatory called the Nickel Academy, whose mission statement says it provides "physical, intellectual and moral training" so the delinquent boys in their charge can become "honorable and honest men." In reality, the Nickel Academy is a grotesque chamber of horrors where the sadistic staff beats and sexually abuses the students, corrupt officials and locals steal food and supplies, and any boy who resists is likely to disappear "out back." Stunned to find himself in such a vicious environment, Elwood tries to hold onto Dr. King's ringing assertion "Throw us in jail and we will still love you." His friend Turner thinks Elwood is worse than naive, that the world is crooked, and that the only way to survive is to scheme and avoid trouble. The tension between Elwood's ideals and Turner's skepticism leads to a decision whose repercussions will echo down the decades. Formed in the crucible of the evils Jim Crow wrought, the boys' fates will be determined by what they endured at the Nickel Academy. Based on the real story of a reform school in Florida that operated for one hundred and eleven years and warped the lives of thousands of children, The Nickel Boys is a devastating, driven narrative that showcases a great American novelist writing at the height of his powers.
In an unnamed Third World country, in the not-so-distant future, three dumpsite boys make a living picking through the mountains of garbage on the outskirts of a large city. br>br>One unlucky-lucky day, Raphael finds something very special and very mysterious. So mysterious that he decides to keep it, even when the city police offer a handsome reward for its return. That decision brings with it terrifying consequences, and soon the dumpsite boys must use all of their cunning and courage to stay ahead of their pursuers. Its up to Raphael, Gardo, and Rat--boys who have no education, no parents, no homes, and no money--to solve the mystery and right a terrible wrong.br>br>Andy Mulligan has written a powerful story about unthinkable poverty--and the kind of hope and determination that can transcend it. With twists and turns, unrelenting action, and deep, raw emotion, Trash is a heart-pounding, breath-holding novel.
First published in 1844, Alexandre Dumas's swashbuckling epic chronicles the adventures of D'Artagnan, a gallant young nobleman who journeys to Paris in 1625 hoping to join the ranks of musketeers guarding Louis XIII. He soon finds himself fighting alongside three heroic comrades--Athos, Porthos, and Aramis--who seek to uphold the honor of the king by foiling the wicked plots of Cardinal Richelieu and the beautiful spy "Milady." As Clifton Fadiman reflected, "We read The Three Musketeers to experience a sense of romance and for the sheer excitement of the story. In these violent pages all is action, intrigue, suspense, surprise--an almost endless chain of duels, murders, love affairs, unmaskings, ambushes, hairbreadth escapes, wild rides. It is all impossible and it is all magnificent."
Les Saisons de la Vie : A travers ces trente-huit nouvelles, Nadine Gordimer explore près de soixante ans de l'histoire sud-africaine. D'un regard acéré, attentive aux moindres détails, elle procède par touches et dévoile la complexe hiérarchie sociale et raciale de l'apartheid, ses conséquences sur l'Afrique du Sud d'aujourd'hui, les dérives de la mondialisation. Qu'il soit explicite ou à fleur de texte, son engagement politique est toujours présent, et bien que chaque nouvelle soit ancrée dans un contexte historique, elles ont conservé toute leur puissance.
Ce roman, parmi les plus élaborés et les plus poétiques de Nadine Gordimer, a obtenu le Booker Prize en 1974. On y retrouve l'un de ses thèmes favoris : la bonne conscience, les mensonges qui aident certains à vivre et qui forcent d'autres à mourir. Le début du "Conservateur" (le cadavre d'un Noir trouvé dans la propriété agricole d'un industriel blanc nommé Mehring) ressemble à un fait divers, mais c'est encore l'occasion pour Nadine Gordimer, prix nobel de littérature en 1991, de développer une analyse spectrale de l'histoire et des mentalités de son pays.
