Download or read book Booth written by Karen Joy Fowler and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2023-02-07 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Best Book of the Year Real Simple • AARP • USA Today • NPR • Virginia Living Longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize From the Man Booker finalist and bestselling author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves comes an epic and intimate novel about the family behind one of the most infamous figures in American history: John Wilkes Booth. In 1822, a secret family moves into a secret cabin some thirty miles northeast of Baltimore, to farm, to hide, and to bear ten children over the course of the next sixteen years. Junius Booth—breadwinner, celebrated Shakespearean actor, and master of the house in more ways than one—is at once a mesmerizing talent and a man of terrifying instability. One by one the children arrive, as year by year, the country draws frighteningly closer to the boiling point of secession and civil war. As the tenor of the world shifts, the Booths emerge from their hidden lives to cement their place as one of the country’s leading theatrical families. But behind the curtains of the many stages they have graced, multiple scandals, family triumphs, and criminal disasters begin to take their toll, and the solemn siblings of John Wilkes Booth are left to reckon with the truth behind the destructively specious promise of an early prophecy. Booth is a startling portrait of a country in the throes of change and a vivid exploration of the ties that make, and break, a family.

Download or read book A Confederacy of Dunces written by John Kennedy Toole and published by Grove/Atlantic, Inc.. This book was released on 2007-12-01 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Pulitzer Prize “A masterwork . . . the novel astonishes with its inventiveness . . . it is nothing less than a grand comic fugue.”—The New York Times Book Review A Confederacy of Dunces is an American comic masterpiece. John Kennedy Toole's hero, one Ignatius J. Reilly, is "huge, obese, fractious, fastidious, a latter-day Gargantua, a Don Quixote of the French Quarter. His story bursts with wholly original characters, denizens of New Orleans' lower depths, incredibly true-to-life dialogue, and the zaniest series of high and low comic adventures" (Henry Kisor, Chicago Sun-Times).

Download or read book The Shipping News written by Annie Proulx and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2008-01-01 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News is a vigorous, darkly comic, and at times magical portrait of the contemporary North American family. Quoyle, a third-rate newspaper hack, with a “head shaped like a crenshaw, no neck, reddish hair...features as bunched as kissed fingertips,” is wrenched violently out of his workaday life when his two-timing wife meets her just desserts. An aunt convinces Quoyle and his two emotionally disturbed daughters to return with her to the starkly beautiful coastal landscape of their ancestral home in Newfoundland. Here, on desolate Quoyle’s Point, in a house empty except for a few mementos of the family’s unsavory past, the battered members of three generations try to cobble up new lives. Newfoundland is a country of coast and cove where the mercury rarely rises above seventy degrees, the local culinary delicacy is cod cheeks, and it’s easier to travel by boat and snowmobile than on anything with wheels. In this harsh place of cruel storms, a collapsing fishery, and chronic unemployment, the aunt sets up as a yacht upholsterer in nearby Killick-Claw, and Quoyle finds a job reporting the shipping news for the local weekly, the Gammy Bird (a paper that specializes in sexual-abuse stories and grisly photos of car accidents). As the long winter closes its jaws of ice, each of the Quoyles confronts private demons, reels from catastrophe to minor triumph—in the company of the obsequious Mavis Bangs; Diddy Shovel the strongman; drowned Herald Prowse; cane-twirling Beety; Nutbeem, who steals foreign news from the radio; a demented cousin the aunt refuses to recognize; the much-zippered Alvin Yark; silent Wavey; and old Billy Pretty, with his bag of secrets. By the time of the spring storms Quoyle has learned how to gut cod, to escape from a pickle jar, and to tie a true lover’s knot.

Download or read book Subject Guide to Books in Print written by and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 1146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Stoner written by John Williams and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2015 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Born the child of a poor farmer in Missouri, William Stoner is urged by his parents to study new agriculture techniques at the state university. Digging instead into the texts of Milton and Shakespeare, Stoner falls under the spell of the unexpected pleasures of English literature, and decides to make it his life. Stoner is the story of that life"--

Download or read book An Imaginary Life written by David Malouf and published by Random House. This book was released on 2012-11-30 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the first century AD, Publius Ovidius Naso, the most urbane and irreverant poet of imperial Rome, was banished to a remote village on the edge of the Black Sea. From these sparse facts, one of our most distinguished novelists has fashioned an audacious and supremely moving work of fiction. Marooned on the edge of the known world, exiled from his native tongue, Ovid depends on the kindness of barbarians who impate their dead and converse with the spirit world. But then he becomes the guardian of a still more savage creature, a feral child who has grown up among deer. What ensues is a luminous encounter between civilization and nature, as enacted by a poet who once catalogued the treacheries of love and a boy who slowly learns how to give it.

Download or read book Forthcoming Books written by Rose Arny and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 1756 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book American Fiction 1774 1850 written by Lyle Henry Wright and published by . This book was released on 1939 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book When We Were Animals written by Joshua Gaylord and published by Hachette+ORM. This book was released on 2015-04-07 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this chilling Shirley Jackson Award-nominated novel, a small, quiet Midwestern town is unremarkable save for one fact: when the teenagers reach a certain age, they run wild. When Lumen Fowler looks back on her childhood, she wouldn't have guessed she would become a kind suburban wife, a devoted mother. In fact, she never thought she would escape her small and peculiar hometown. When We Were Animals is Lumen's confessional: as a well-behaved and over-achieving teenager, she fell beneath the sway of her community's darkest, strangest secret. For one year, beginning at puberty, every resident "breaches" during the full moon. On these nights, adolescents run wild, destroying everything in their path. Lumen resists. Promising her father she will never breach, she investigates the mystery of her community's traditions and the stories erased from the town record. But the more we learn about the town's past, the more we realize that Lumen's memories are harboring secrets of their own. A gothic coming-of-age tale for modern times, When We Were Animals is a dark, provocative journey into the American heartland. Nominated for the 2015 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel

Download or read book Versailles written by Kathryn Davis and published by Graywolf Press. This book was released on 2024-11-12 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marie Antoinette “tells her own story” in this “sage, mercurial, and ravishing” novel (The New Yorker) Versailles tells the story of an expansive spirit locked in a pretty body and an impossible moment in history. As the novel begins, fourteen-year-old Marie Antoinette is traveling from Austria to France to meet her fiancé. He will become the sixteenth Louis to rule France, and Antoinette will be his queen—though neither shows a strong inclination toward power, politics, or the roles they have been summoned to play. Antoinette finds herself hemmed in by towering hairdos, the xenophobic suspicion of her subjects, the misogyny of her detractors, and the labyrinthine twists and turns of the palace she calls home. At once witty, entertaining, and astonishingly wise, this widely acclaimed novel is an enchanting meditation on girlhood, womanhood, architecture, and—above all—time and the soul’s true journey within it. Shaken free of the dust of history and calcified myth, Antoinette is “very much alive here, and she’s magnificent” (Stacey D’Erasmo, The New York Times Book Review).

Download or read book The Presidents of American Fiction written by Michael J. Blouin and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2022-11-03 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Presidents of American Fiction brings together American literature, history, and political science to explore the most influential fictionalized accounts of the presidency from the early 19th century to the time of Trump. Of late, popular understandings of the presidency are being radically re-written-consider, for example, the distinctive myths that accompanied the ascent of the Obama and Trump administrations-and many readers of all stripes are radically reimagining the office and its holder. Placing these changes within a broader cultural context, Michael J. Blouin investigates narratives involving fictional presidents, from the supposedly factual to the outright fantastical, within their distinct literary and historical moments. The author considers representative texts including works penned by James Fenimore Cooper from the Jacksonian moment, Gore Vidal in the age of Nixon and Vietnam, and Philip Roth in the neoliberal period. Through detailed readings that question how American presidents function as characters within the popular imagination, this book examines the presidency as a complex, ever-evolving trope, and in so doing enhances our appreciation of American literature's inextricable link with American politics.

Download or read book The Infernal World of Branwell Bront written by Daphne Du Maurier and published by . This book was released on 1960 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pursued by the twin demons of drink and madness, Branwell Bronte created a private world that was indeed infernal. As a bold and gifted child, his promise seemed boundless to the three adoring sisters over whom his rule was complete. But as an adult, the precocious flame of genius distorted and burned low. With neither the strength nor the resources to counter rejection, unable to sell his paintings or publish his books, Branwell became a spectre in the Bronte story, in pathetic contrast with the astonishing achievements of Charlotte, Emily and Anne. This is the biography of the shadowy figure of the "unknown" Bronte.

Download or read book The Satirical Element in the American Novel written by Ernest Jackson Hall and published by . This book was released on 1922 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Autofictional written by Alexandra Effe and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-01-03 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This open access book offers innovative and wide-ranging responses to the continuously flourishing literary phenomenon of autofiction. The book shows the insights that are gained in the shift from the genre descriptor to the adjective, and from a broad application of “the autofictional” as a theoretical lens and aesthetic strategy. In three sections on “Approaches,” “Affordances,” and “Forms,” the volume proposes new theoretical approaches for the study of autofiction and the autofictional, offers fresh perspectives on many of the prominent authors in the discussion, draws them into a dialogue with autofictional practice from across the globe, and brings into view texts, forms, and media that have not traditionally been considered for their autofictional dimensions. The book, in sum, expands the parameters of research on autofiction to date to allow new voices and viewpoints to emerge.

Download or read book Sibling Romance in American Fiction 1835 1900 written by E. VanDette and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-02-06 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study posits that the narrative of sibling love as a culturally significant tradition in nineteenth-century American fiction. Ultimately, Emily E. VanDette suggests that these novels contribute to historical conversations about affiliation in such tumultuous contexts as sectional divisions, slavery debates, the Civil War, and Reconstruction.

Download or read book The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn written by Mark Twain and published by Ernst Klett Sprachen. This book was released on 1996 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Empty Revelations written by Peter Wallace Alward and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2012 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A rich and engaging investigation into the nature of literary fiction.