Download or read book My Ideal Bookshelf written by Thessaly La Force and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2012-11-13 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The books that we choose to keep -- let alone read -- can say a lot about who we are and how we see ourselves. In My Ideal Bookshelf, dozens of leading cultural figures share the books that matter to them most; books that define their dreams and ambitions and in many cases helped them find their way in the world. Contributors include Malcolm Gladwell, Thomas Keller, Michael Chabon, Alice Waters, James Patterson, Maira Kalman, Judd Apatow, Chuck Klosterman, Miranda July, Alex Ross, Nancy Pearl, David Chang, Patti Smith, Jennifer Egan, and Dave Eggers, among many others. With colorful and endearingly hand-rendered images of book spines by Jane Mount, and first-person commentary from all the contributors, this is a perfect gift for avid readers, writers, and all who have known the influence of a great book.

Download or read book The World According to Garp written by John Irving and published by Random House Digital, Inc.. This book was released on 1978 with total page 530 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: T.S. Garp, a man with high ambitions for an artistic career and with obsessive devotion to his wife and children, and Jenny Fields, his famous feminist mother, find their lives surrounded by an assortment of people including teachers, whores, and radicals

Download or read book In One Person written by John Irving and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Billy, a solitary bisexual man, is dedicated to making himself worthwhile.

Download or read book A Son of the Circus written by John Irving and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2012-05-08 with total page 758 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Hindi film star and an American missionary are twins separated at birth; a dwarf — a former circus clown — mistakes the missionary for the movie star. And stalking one of them is a serial killer...

Download or read book Until I Find You written by John Irving and published by Random House. This book was released on 2005-07-12 with total page 848 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Until I Find You is the story of the actor Jack Burns – his life, loves, celebrity and astonishing search for the truth about his parents. When he is four years old, Jack travels with his mother Alice, a tattoo artist, to several North Sea ports in search of his father, William Burns. From Copenhagen to Amsterdam, William, a brilliant church organist and profligate womanizer, is always a step ahead – has always just departed in a wave of scandal, with a new tattoo somewhere on his body from a local master or “scratcher.” Alice and Jack abandon their quest, and Jack is educated at schools in Canada and New England – including, tellingly, a girls’ school in Toronto. His real education consists of his relationships with older women – from Emma Oastler, who initiates him into erotic life, to the girls of St. Hilda’s, with whom he first appears on stage, to the abusive Mrs. Machado, whom he first meets when sent to learn wrestling at a local gym. Too much happens in this expansive, eventful novel to possibly summarize it all. Emma and Jack move to Los Angeles, where Emma becomes a successful novelist and Jack a promising actor. A host of eccentric minor characters memorably come and go, including Jack’s hilariously confused teacher the Wurtz; Michelle Maher, the girlfriend he will never forget; and a precocious child Jack finds in the back of an Audi in a restaurant parking lot. We learn about tattoo addiction and movie cross-dressing, “sleeping in the needles” and the cure for cauliflower ears. And John Irving renders his protagonist’s unusual rise through Hollywood with the same vivid detail and range of emotions he gives to the organ music Jack hears as a child in European churches. This is an absorbing and moving book about obsession and loss, truth and storytelling, the signs we carry on us and inside us, the traces we can’t get rid of. Jack has always lived in the shadow of his absent father. But as he grows older – and when his mother dies – he starts to doubt the portrait of his father’s character she painted for him when he was a child. This is the cue for a second journey around Europe in search of his father, from Edinburgh to Switzerland, towards a conclusion of great emotional force. A melancholy tale of deception, Until I Find You is also a swaggering comic novel, a giant tapestry of life’s hopes. It is a masterpiece to compare with John Irving’s great novels, and restates the author’ s claim to be considered the most glorious, comic, moving novelist at work today.

Download or read book The Toymaker written by Liam Pieper and published by Penguin Group Australia. This book was released on 2016-06-27 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ‘Hugely memorable, The Toymaker is an unflinching examination of the dark instinct for survival that lies in all of us.’ Hannah Kent, author of Burial Rites A person is defined by the secrets they keep . . . Adam Kulakov likes his life. He's on the right side of middle age; the toy company he owns brightens the lives of children around the world; and he has more money than he can ever spend, a wife and child he adores, and as many mistresses as he can reasonably hide from them. And he is not the only one with secrets. In 1944, Adam's grandfather, Arkady, was imprisoned in Auschwitz and given an impossible choice. Now, as he's coming to the end of his life, he has to keep the truth from his family, and hold back the crushing memories of his time with one of history's greatest monsters. As a mistake threatens to bring Adam's world tumbling down around him, the past reaches for Arkady. Everything he's spent a lifetime building will be threatened, as will everything Adam and his family think they know of the world. Bold, dark and compelling, The Toymaker is a novel about privilege, fear and the great harm we can do when we are afraid of losing what we hold dear. ‘Pieper writes superbly. The Toymaker gives immediate and absorbing pleasure, and has similarities to J M Coetzee’s Disgrace in terms of the main character’s wretched search for redemption, both for himself and for humanity.’ Books+Publishing

Download or read book The Mysteries of Pittsburgh written by Michael Chabon and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2011-12-20 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Pulitzer Prize–winning author’s “astonishing” debut novel, about a son’s struggle to find his own identity and integrity (The New York Times). Michael Chabon, author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Moonglow, and The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, is one of the most acclaimed talents in contemporary fiction. The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, published when Chabon was just twenty-five, is the beautifully crafted debut that propelled him into the literary stratosphere. Art Bechstein may be too young to know what he wants to do with his life, but he knows what he doesn’t want: the life of his father, a man who laundered money for the mob. He spends the summer after graduation finding his own way, experimenting with a group of brilliant and seductive new friends: erudite Arthur Lecomte, who opens up new horizons for Art; mercurial Phlox, who confounds him at every turn; and Cleveland, a poetry-reciting biker who pulls him inevitably back into his father’s mobbed-up world. A New York Times bestseller, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh was called “astonishing” by Alice McDermott, and heralded the arrival of one of our era’s great voices. This ebook features a biography of the author.

Download or read book Avenue of Mysteries written by John Irving and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2015-11-03 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "As we grow older--most of all, in what we remember and what we dream--we live in the past. Sometimes, we live more vividly in the past than in the present. As an older man, Juan Diego will take a trip to the Philippines, but what travels with him are his dreams and memories; he is most alive in his childhood and early adolescence in Mexico. "An aura of fate had marked him," John Irving writes, of Juan Diego. "The chain of events, the links in our lives--what leads us where we're going, the courses we follow to our ends, what we don't see coming, and what we do--all this can be mysterious, or simply unseen, or even obvious." Avenue of Mysteries is the story of what happens to Juan Diego in the Philippines, where what happened to him in the past--in Mexico--collides with his future"--

Download or read book A Widow for One Year written by John Irving and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2012-05-08 with total page 635 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “One night when she was four and sleeping in the bottom bunk of her bunk bed, Ruth Cole woke to the sound of lovemaking—it was coming from her parents’ bedroom.” This sentence opens John Irving’s ninth novel, A Widow for One Year, a story of a family marked by tragedy. Ruth Cole is a complex, often self-contradictory character—a “difficult” woman. By no means is she conventionally “nice,” but she will never be forgotten. Ruth’s story is told in three parts, each focusing on a critical time in her life. When we first meet her—on Long Island, in the summer of 1958—Ruth is only four. The second window into Ruth’s life opens on the fall of 1990, when she is an unmarried woman whose personal life is not nearly as successful as her literary career. She distrusts her judgment in men, for good reason. A Widow for One Year closes in the autumn of 1995, when Ruth Cole is a forty-one-year-old widow and mother. She’s about to fall in love for the first time. Richly comic, as well as deeply disturbing, A Widow for One Year is a multilayered love story of astonishing emotional force. Both ribald and erotic, it is also a brilliant novel about the passage of time and the relentlessness of grief.

Download or read book A Prayer for the Dying written by Stewart O'Nan and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2013-10-08 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A deadly epidemic threatens the lives and sanity of a Civil War veteran and his family in this “new masterpiece of American literature” (Dennis Lehane). Set in Friendship, Wisconsin, just after the Civil War, A Prayer for the Dying tells of a horrible epidemic that is suddenly and gruesomely killing the town’s residents and setting off a terrifying paranoia. Jacob Hansen, Friendship’s sheriff, undertaker, and pastor, is soon overwhelmed by the fear and anguish around him, and his sanity begins to fray. Dark, poetic, and chilling, Stewart O’Nan’s A Prayer for the Dying examines the effect of madness and violence on the morality of a once-decent man. Praise for A Prayer for the Dying New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year “A Prayer for the Dying reads like the amazing, unrelenting love child of Shirley Jackson and Cormac McCarthy. It’s twisted proof that God will do worse to test a faithful man than the devil would ever do to punish a sinner.”―Chuck Palahniuk “O’Nan again proves himself a writer of dazzling virtuosity and imagination. . . . A mesmerizing story and a brilliant tour de force.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Download or read book The Last Chairlift written by John Irving and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2022-10-18 with total page 1096 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Irving’s fifteenth novel is “powerfully cinematic” (The Washington Post) and “eminently readable” (The Boston Globe). The Last Chairlift is part ghost story, part love story, spanning eight decades of sexual politics. In Aspen, Colorado, in 1941, Rachel Brewster is a slalom skier at the National Downhill and Slalom Championships. Little Ray, as she is called, finishes nowhere near the podium, but she manages to get pregnant. Back home, in New England, Little Ray becomes a ski instructor. Her son, Adam, grows up in a family that defies conventions and evades questions concerning the eventful past. Years later, looking for answers, he will go to Aspen. In the Hotel Jerome, where he was conceived, Adam will meet some ghosts; in The Last Chairlift, they aren’t the first or last ghosts he sees. John Irving has written some of the most acclaimed books of our time—among them, The World According to Garp and The Cider House Rules. A visionary voice on the subject of sexual tolerance, Irving is a bard of alternative families. In the “generously intertextual” (The New York Times) The Last Chairlift, readers will once more be in his thrall.

Download or read book Last Night in Twisted River written by John Irving and published by Random House. This book was released on 2009-10-27 with total page 577 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1954, in the cookhouse of a logging and sawmill settlement in northern New Hampshire, an anxious twelve-year-old boy mistakes the local constable’s girlfriend for a bear. Both the twelve-year-old and his father become fugitives, forced to run from Coos County—to Boston, to southern Vermont, to Toronto—pursued by the implacable constable. Their lone protector is a fiercely libertarian logger, once a river driver, who befriends them. In a story spanning five decades, Last Night in Twisted River depicts the recent half-century in the United States as “a living replica of Coos County, where lethal hatreds were generally permitted to run their course.” What further distinguishes Last Night in Twisted River is the author’s unmistakable voice—the inimitable voice of an accomplished storyteller.

Download or read book The Iguana Tree written by Michel Stone and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set amid the perils of illegal border crossings, The Iguana Tree is the suspenseful saga of Lilia and Hector, who separately make their way from Mexico into the United States, seeking work in the Carolinas and a home for their infant daughter. Michel Stone s harrowing novel meticulously examines the obstacles each faces in pursuing a new life: manipulation, rape, and murder in the perilous commerce of border crossings; betrayal by family and friends; exploitation by corrupt officials and rapacious landowners on the U.S. side; and, finally, the inexorable workings of the U.S. justice system. Hector and Lilia meet Americans willing to help them with legal assistance and offers of responsible employment, but their illegal entry seems certain to prove their undoing. The consequences of their decisions are devastating. In the end, The Iguana Tree is a universal story of loss, grief, and human dignity.

Download or read book The Fourth Hand written by John Irving and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2010-07-16 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Imagine a young man on his way to a less-than-thirty second event — the loss of his left hand, long before he reached middle age.” The Fourth Hand asks an interesting question: “How can anyone identify a dream of the future?” The answer: “Destiny is not imaginable, except in dreams or to those in love.” While reporting a story from India, a New York television journalist has his left hand eaten by a lion; millions of TV viewers witness the accident. In Boston, a renowned hand surgeon awaits the opportunity to perform the nation’s first hand transplant; meanwhile, in the distracting aftermath of an acrimonious divorce, the surgeon is seduced by his housekeeper. A married woman in Wisconsin wants to give the one-handed reporter her husband’s left hand—that is, after her husband dies. But the husband is alive, relatively young, and healthy. This is how John Irving’s tenth novel begins; it seems, at first, to be a comedy, perhaps a satire, almost certainly a sexual farce. Yet, in the end, The Fourth Hand is as realistic and emotionally moving as any of Mr. Irving’s previous novels—including The World According to Garp, A Prayer for Owen Meany, and A Widow for One Year—or his Oscar-winning screenplay of The Cider House Rules. The Fourth Hand is characteristic of John Irving’s seamless storytelling and further explores some of the author’s recurring themes—loss, grief, love as redemption. But this novel also breaks new ground; it offers a penetrating look at the power of second chances and the will to change.

Download or read book The Imaginary Girlfriend written by John Irving and published by Skyhorse. This book was released on 2013-12-10 with total page 131 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The nearest thing to an autobiography Irving has written . . . worth saving and savoring."—Seattle Times Dedicated to the memory of two wrestling coaches and two writer friends, The Imaginary Girlfriend is John Irving's candid memoir of his twin careers in writing and wrestling. The award-winning author of best-selling novels from The World According to Garp to In One Person, Irving began writing when he was fourteen, the same age at which he began to wrestle at Exeter. He competed as a wrestler for twenty years, was certified as a referee at twenty-four, and coached the sport until he was forty-seven. Irving coached his sons Colin and Brendan to New England championship titles, a championship that he himself was denied. In an autobiography filled with the humor and compassion one finds in his fiction, Irving explores the interrelationship between the two disciplines of writing and wrestling, from the days when he was a beginner at both until his fourth wresting related surgery at the age of fifty-three. Writing as a father and mentor, he offers a lucid portrait of those—writers and wrestlers from Kurt Vonnegut to Ted Seabrooke—who played a mentor role in his development as a novelist, wrestler, and wrestling coach. He reveals lessons he learned about the pursuit for which he is best known, writing. “And,” as the Denver Post observed, in filling “his narrative with anecdotes that are every bit as hilarious as the antics in his novels, Irving combines the lessons of both obsessions (wrestling and writing) . . . into a somber reflection on the importance of living well.”

Download or read book The Hotel New Hampshire written by John Irving and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2018-04-10 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New York Times bestselling saga of a most unusual family from the award-winning author of The World According to Garp. “The first of my father’s illusions was that bears could survive the life lived by human beings, and the second was that human beings could survive a life led in hotels.” So says John Berry, son of a hapless dreamer, brother to a cadre of eccentric siblings, and chronicler of the lives lived, the loves experienced, the deaths met, and the myriad strange and wonderful times encountered by the family Berry. Hoteliers, pet-bear owners, friends of Freud (the animal trainer and vaudevillian, that is), and playthings of mad fate, they “dream on” in a funny, sad, outrageous, and moving novel by the remarkable author of A Prayer for Owen Meany and Last Night in Twisted River.

Download or read book A Prayer for Owen Meany written by John Irving and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2012-05-08 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice—not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother’s death, but because he was the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.” In the summer of 1953, two eleven-year-old boys—best friends—are playing in a Little League baseball game in Gravesend, New Hampshire. One of the boys hits a foul ball that kills the other boy’s mother. The boy who hits the ball doesn’t believe in accidents; Owen Meany believes he is God’s instrument. What happens to Owen, after that 1953 foul ball, is extraordinary and terrifying.