Download or read book A Curable Romantic written by Joseph Skibell and published by Hachette+ORM. This book was released on 2011-11-07 with total page 778 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I fell in love with Emma Eckstein the moment I saw her from the fourth gallery of the Carl Theater, and this was also the night I met Sigmund Freud.” So goes the life, times, and loves of Dr. Jakob Sammelsohn, a fairly incurable romantic venturing optimistically through modern history. In this inventive and satiric tour de force, Joseph Skibell, award-winning author of A Blessing on the Moon, presents a picaresque novel of exile that could spring only from the imagination of a virtuoso.
Download or read book A Blessing on the Moon written by Joseph Skibell and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2010-09-07 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Joseph Skibell’s magical tale about the Holocaust—a fable inspired by fact—received unanimous nationwide acclaim when first published in 1997. At the center of A Blessing on the Moon is Chaim Skibelski. Death is merely the beginning of Chaim’s troubles. In the opening pages, he is shot along with the other Jews of his small Polish village. But instead of resting peacefully in the World to Come, Chaim, for reasons unclear to him, is left to wander the earth, accompanied by his rabbi, who has taken the form of a talking crow. Chaim’s afterlife journey is filled with extraordinary encounters whose consequences are far greater than he realizes. Not since art Spiegelman’s Maus has a work so powerfully evoked one of the darkest moments of the twentieth century with such daring originality.
Download or read book Sand in My Eyes written by Christine Lemmon and published by Emerald Book (Distributor). This book was released on 2010-07-01 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sand in My Eyes is the story of Anna Hott, who is so overwhelmed by life that hardly is she seeing the beauty around her.
Download or read book Brooklyn Love written by Yael Levy and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-09-17 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For any young woman, it can be hard to follow the rules . . . especially when you’re falling in love. But for Rachel, Hindy, and Leah, it’s especially hard. Because as Orthodox Jews, they live by a whole different set of rules. No touching a guy - any guy! - before marriage. No dating - unless they are considering marriage - and then, only marrying a man who rates high on their parents’ checklists. All Rachel’s mother wants for her daughter is to see that her daughter marries well. Naturally, this is where the rich, Columbia U educated lawyer comes in. The problem is, Rachel’s already found a guy who makes her heart race. A Rabbi. But how could a struggling Rabbi possibly give Rachel the security her mother demands? Hindy is very pious and only wants to marry a Talmud scholar. The problem is, she’s in love with an Orthodox Jewish guy she works with. How long can she keep saying no when her heart says yes? And will she be able to stick to her values amidst temptation? Leah wants to be a doctor, but her mother insists she study computers even though she hates computers. Her mom, a struggling immigrant, has fixed ideas about the course to success and marriage - which doesn’t include any of Leah’s wishes. What will it take for Leah to break out of her mom’s - and community’s - expectations and follow her dreams? In Brooklyn Love, three Orthodox Jewish women who are caught between crushing guilt of defying their mothers and their desire to be ''normal'' are there for each other as they try to figure out who they really are . . . and what they really want. Sensuality Level: Behind Closed Doors
Download or read book Love Bomb written by Lisa Zeidner and published by Sarah Crichton Books. This book was released on 2012-09-04 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An inventive, mordantly funny novel about love, marriage, stalkers, and the indignities of parenthood In quaint Haddonfield, New Jersey, Tess is about to marry Gabe in her childhood home. Her mother, Helen, is in a panic about the guests, who include warring exes, crying babies, jealous girlfriends, and too many psychiatrists. But the most difficult guest was never on the list at all: a woman in a wedding dress and a gas mask, armed with a rifle, a bomb trigger strapped to her arm. Lisa Zeidner's audacious novel Love Bomb begins as a hostage drama and blossoms into a far-reaching tale about the infinite varieties of passion and heartbreak. Who has offended this nutcase, and how? Does she seek revenge against the twice-divorced philanderer? Or is her agenda political—against the army general? Or the polygamous Muslim from Mali? While the warm, wise Helen attempts to bond with the masked woman and control the hysteria, the hostages begin to untangle what connects them to one another, and to their captor. But not until the SWAT team arrives does "the terrorist of love" unveil her real motives . . . Critics have praised Lisa Zeidner's prose for its "unforced edginess and power"; her fiction "shines with humor, wisdom, and poignancy." In her most masterful novel yet, Zeidner gives us a tough yet tender social comedy, a romance with guts, a serious frolic written out of deep affection for all that it skewers.
Download or read book The Incurable Romantic written by Frank Tallis and published by Abacus. This book was released on 2019-02-07 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Frank Tallis brings a lifetime's clinical experience and wise reflection to a condition that, by its own strange routes, leads us into the very heart of love itself. This is a brilliant, compelling book' Ian McEwan Love is a great leveller. Everyone wants love, everyone falls in love, everyone loses love, and everyone knows something of love's madness. But the experience of obsessive love is no trivial matter. In the course of his career psychologist Dr Frank Tallis has treated many unusual patients, whose stories have lessons for all of us. A barristers' clerk becomes convinced that her dentist has fallen in love with her and they are destined to be together for eternity; a widow is visited by the ghost of her dead husband; an academic is besotted with his own reflection; a beautiful woman searches jealously for a rival who isn't there; and a night porter is possessed by a lascivious demon. These are just some of the people whom we meet in an extraordinary and original book that explores the conditions of longing and desire - true accounts of psychotherapy that take the reader on a journey through the darker realms of the amorous mind. Drawing on the latest scientific research into the biological and psychological mechanisms underlying romance and emotional attachment, The Incurable Romantic demonstrates that ultimately love dissolves the divide between what we judge to be normal and abnormal.
Download or read book My Father s Guitar and Other Imaginary Things written by Joseph Skibell and published by Algonquin Books. This book was released on 2015-10-27 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Often comic, sometimes tender, profoundly truthful, the pleasure in these nonfiction pieces by award-winning novelist Joseph Skibell is discovering along with the author that catastrophes, fantasies, and delusions are what give sweetness and shape to our lives. “As a writer,” Skibell has said, “I feel about life the way the people of the Plains felt about the buffalo: I want to use every part of it.” In My Father’s Guitar and Other Imaginary Things, his first nonfiction work, he mines the events of his own life to create a captivating collection of personal essays, a suite of intimate stories that blurs the line between funny and poignant, and between the imaginary and the real. Often improbable, these stories are 100 percent true. Skibell misremembers the guitar his father promised him; together, he and a telemarketer dream of a better world; a major work of Holocaust art turns out to have been painted by his cousin. Woven together, the stories paint a complex portrait of a man and his family: a businessman father and an artistic son and the difficult love between them; complicated uncles, cousins, and sisters; a haunted house; and—of course—an imaginary guitar. Skibell’s novels have been praised as “startlingly original” (the Washington Post), “magical” (the New Yorker), and the work of “a gifted, committed imagination” (the New York Times). With his distinctive style, he has been referred to as “the bastard love child of Mark Twain, I. B. Singer, and Wes Anderson, left on a doorstep in Lubbock, Texas.”
Download or read book Transgression written by James W. Nichol and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-09-10 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A tale of love and war, Transgression by James W. Nichol is part romance, part mystery, and part riveting historical novel set during World War Two in Europe and in North America in the years directly following the terrible conflict. Nichol—winner of the Arthur Ellis Award and shortlisted for the UK’s Gold Dagger Award for his debut novel Midnight Cab—tells the haunting story of a young French woman undone by love during the Nazi occupation of her country and branded a “horizontal collaborator” after its liberation. Beautifully written and unforgettable, Transgression is a novel about secrets and survival and the high price that must be paid for passion.
Download or read book Sonora written by Hannah Lillith Assadi and published by Soho Press. This book was released on 2017-03-28 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2018 NATIONAL BOOK FOUNDATION'S 5 UNDER 35 HONOREE A fevered, lyrical debut about two young women drawn into an ever-intensifying friendship set against the stark, haunted landscape of the Sonoran desert and the ecstatic frenzy of New York City. Ahlam, the daughter of a Palestinian refugee and his Israeli wife, grows up in the arid lands of desert suburbia outside of Phoenix. In a stark landscape where coyotes prowl and mysterious lights occasionally pass through the nighttime sky, Ahlam’s imagination reigns. She battles chronic fever dreams and isolation. When she meets her tempestuous counterpart Laura, the two fall into infatuated partnership, experimenting with drugs and sex and boys, and watching helplessly as a series of mysterious deaths claim high school classmates. The girls flee their pasts for New York City, but as their emotional bond heightens, the intensity of their lives becomes unbearable. In search of love, ecstasy, oblivion, and belonging, Ahlam and Laura’s drive to outrun the ghosts of home threatens to undo them altogether.
Download or read book Diary of a Curable Romantic written by Junius A. Davis and published by Xlibris Corporation. This book was released on 2007-12-06 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is an account of the first 82 years in the life of Junius A. Davis. who entered this world starry eyed and believing in the inherent beauty of all things, and his continuing discovery that his romantic view of the world and his part in it was essentially and fatally flawed..
Download or read book Stealing Cherries written by Marina Rubin and published by Manic D Press. This book was released on 2013-10-21 with total page 90 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In Stealing Cherries, Marina Rubin offers us a collection of precisely chiseled blocks of soulful, funny, heart-rending fiction."—Ted Jonathan, author of Bones & Jokes "Part old-fashioned gal who begs airport security to allow through her dearly departed grandmother's eyebrow tweezers and part Sex in the City sophisticate who leaves another luxurious but disappointing dinner date dreaming of her cold chicken in the fridge, you will surprisingly find yourself somewhere in her stories. Rubin will take you on a gritty but glamorous tour through New Delhi, Italy, Wall Street, the French Riviera, Grand Canyon, and Brooklyn. . . . And still, you will be the one who's running to catch up with her wit, wisdom, and wondrously poetic narratives."—Michael Montlack, author of Cool Limbo Whether she's writing an engaging account of childhood memories from the Ukraine ("Otlichnitsa"), her family's quixotic immigration experiences ("Welcome to America"), or current romantic misadventures ("Curious Things at the W Hotel"), with a unique voice and sharp eye for detail, award-winning author Marina Rubin reveals the triumphant absurdities of contemporary times. Her stories and characters are all too human, too familiar, too flawed, and just glamorous enough to be endearing and unforgettable in these poetic, bite-sized short stories. Marina Rubin's writing has appeared in more than seventy literary journals and magazines. Her family emigrated from the former Soviet Union seeking political asylum in 1989. She is an associate editor of Tribeca's literary and art magazine, Mudfish and a 2013 recipient of COJECO's prestigious Blueprint Fellowship. She resides in Brooklyn, New York.
Download or read book Winnie and Wolf written by A. N. Wilson and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2009-10-27 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winnie and Wolf is the story of the extraordinary friendship between Winifred Wagner and Adolf Hitler in the Years between the First and Second World Wars. The girl who would become Winifred Wagner was raised in an orphanage and married, at the age of eighteen, to the gay son of composer Richard Wagner. As heiress to the country's most august cultural legacy, she grows up in the Wagner family compound, surrounded by the philosophers and composers who would define western European culture in the mid-twentieth century. In 1923, the Wagners met the man who would be their hero and hope for the future: a wild-eyed Viennese opera fanatic named Adolf Hitler. Almost immediately Winnie and Wolf struck up an intimate friendship. In A. N. Wilson's most bold and ambitious novel yet, the world of the Weimar Republic comes to vivid life as the backdrop to this strange and powerful kinship.
Download or read book The Book of Summer written by Michelle Gable and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2017-05-09 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Michelle Gable has moved in on [Elin] Hilderbrand’s home turf with a humorous and smartly written story of two generations of love and vacations.” —Wall Street Journal From New York Times bestselling author of A Paris Apartment comes a novel about summer in Nantucket and a guestbook that reveals family secrets. The ocean, the wild roses on the dunes and the stunning Cliff House, perched atop a bluff in Sconset, Nantucket. Inside the faded pages of the Cliff House guest book live the spellbinding stories of its female inhabitants: from Ruby, a bright-eyed newlywed on the eve of World War II to her granddaughter Bess, who returns to the beautiful summer estate. For the first time in four years, physician Bess Codman visits the compound her great-grandparents built almost a century before, but due to erosion, the once-grand home will soon fall into the sea. Bess must now put aside her complicated memories in order to pack up the house and deal with her mother, a notorious town rabble-rouser, who refuses to leave. It’s not just memories of her family home Bess must face though, but also an old love that might hold new possibilities. In the midst of packing Bess rediscovers the forgotten family guest book. Bess’s grandmother and primary keeper of the book, Ruby, always said Cliff House was a house of women, and by the very last day of the very last summer at Cliff House, Bess will understand the truth of her grandmother’s words in ways she never imagined.
Download or read book A Town of Empty Rooms written by Karen E. Bender and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2014-07-15 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Karen E. Bender burst on to the literary scene a decade ago with her luminous first novel, Like Normal People, which garnered remarkable acclaim. A Town of Empty Rooms presents the story of Serena and Dan Shine, estranged from one another as they separately grieve over the recent loss of Serena's father and Dan's older brother. Serena's actions cause the couple and their two small children to be banished from New York City, and they settle in the only town that will offer Dan employment: Waring, North Carolina. There, in the Bible belt of America, Serena becomes enmeshed with the small Jewish congregation in town led by an esoteric rabbi, whose increasingly erratic behavior threatens the future of his flock. Dan and their young son are drawn into the Boy Scouts by their mysterious and vigilant neighbor, who may not have their best intentions at heart. Tensions accrue when matters of faith, identity, community, and family all fall into the crosshairs of contemporary, small–town America. A Town of Empty Rooms presents a fascinating insight into the lengths we will go to discover just where we belong.
Download or read book The Cure for Grief written by Nellie Hermann and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2008-08-05 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Deeply bonded to her three older brothers and in awe of her father's experiences as a Holocaust survivor, young Ruby is shocked when her eldest brother is abruptly taken away to a hospital, where he changes into a person she barely recognizes. 35,000 first printing.
Download or read book The Little Clan written by Iris Martin Cohen and published by Harlequin. This book was released on 2018-04-17 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A brilliant newcomer ... Cohen is not only a talented writer; she is an artist.”—Andre Aciman, New York Times-bestselling author of Call Me by Your Name, the novel that inspired the Academy Award-winning film A love letter to classic literature and an illuminating look at newfound adulthood Ava Gallanter is the librarian in residence at the Lazarus Club, an ancient, dwindling Manhattan arts club full of eccentric geriatric residents stuck in a long-gone era. Twenty-five-year-old Ava, however, feels right at home. She leads a quiet life, surrounded by her beloved books and sequestered away from her peers. When Ava’s enigmatic friend Stephanie returns after an unplanned year abroad, the intoxicating opportunist vows to rescue Ava from a life of obscurity. Stephanie, on the hunt for fame and fortune, promises to make Ava’s dream of becoming a writer come true, and together they start a Victorian-inspired literary salon at the Lazarus Club. However, Ava’s romanticized idea of the salon quickly erodes as Stephanie’s ambitions take the women in an unexpected—and precarious—direction. In this humorous yet keenly observant coming-of-age story, Cohen brings us into a boisterous literary world bathed in hubris and ambition. With eloquent prose and affecting storytelling, The Little Clan is both a wickedly fun yet sharply insightful look at friendship, feminism and finding yourself in your twenties.
Download or read book Six Memos from the Last Millennium written by Joseph Skibell and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2016-04-19 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A storyteller’s take on the Talmud and the timeless wisdom contained within its tales provides “a fresh look at an ancient source” (Kirkus Reviews). A thief-turned-saint, killed by an insult. A rabbi burning down his world in order to save it. A man who lost his sanity while trying to fathom the origin of the universe. A beautiful woman battling her brother’s and her husband’s egos to preserve their family. Stories such as these enliven the pages of the Talmud, the great repository of ancient wisdom that is one of the sacred texts of the Jewish people. Comprised of the Mishnah, the oral law of the Torah, and the Gemara, a multigenerational metacommentary on the Mishnah dating from between 3950 and 4235 (190 and 475 CE), the Talmud presents a formidable challenge to understand without scholarly training and study. But what if one approaches it as a collection of tales with surprising relevance for contemporary readers? In Six Memos from the Last Millennium, Joseph Skibell, critically acclaimed author of A Blessing on the Moon and other novels, reads some of the Talmud’s tales with a storyteller’s insight, concentrating on the lives of the legendary rabbis depicted in its pages to uncover the wisdom they can still impart to our modern age. He unifies strands of stories that are scattered throughout the Talmud into coherent narratives or “memos,” which he then analyzes and interprets from his perspective as a novelist. In Skibell’s imaginative and personal readings, this sacred literature frequently defies our conventional notions of piety. Sometimes wild, rude, and even bawdy, these memos from the last millennium pursue a livable transcendence, a way of fusing the mundane hours of earthly life with a cosmic sense of holiness and wonder.
