Download or read book An Arsonist s Guide to Writers Homes in New England written by Brock Clarke and published by Algonquin Books. This book was released on 2008-09-02 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A lot of remarkable things have happened in the life of Sam Pulsifer, the hapless hero of this incendiary novel, beginning with the ten years he spent in prison for accidentally burning down Emily Dickinson's house and unwittingly killing two people. Emerging at age twenty-eight, he creates a new life and identity as a husband and father. But when the homes of other famous New England writers suddenly go up in smoke, he must prove his innocence by uncovering the identity of this literary-minded arsonist. In the league of such contemporary classics as A Confederacy of Dunces and The World According to Garp, An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England is an utterly original story about truth and honesty, life and the imagination.
Download or read book An Arsonist s Guide to Writers Homes in New England written by Brock Clarke and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sam Pulsifer has come to the end of a very long and unusual journey. The truth is, a lot of remarkable things have happened in Sam's life. He spent ten years in prison for accidentally burning down poet Emily Dickinson's house and unwittingly killing two people in the process.
Download or read book Insight Guides New England Travel Guide eBook written by Insight Guides and published by Apa Publications (UK) Limited. This book was released on 2022-10-01 with total page 818 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Insight Guide to New England is a pictorial travel guide in a magazine style providing answers to the key questions before or during your trip: deciding when to go to New England, choosing what to see, from exploring Boston to discovering Acadia National Park, Maine or creating a travel plan to cover key places like White Mountains, Cape Cod. This is an ideal travel guide for travellers seeking inspiration, in-depth cultural and historical information about New England as well as a great selection of places to see during your trip. The Insight Guide NEW ENGLAND covers: Boston, Cape Cod and the islands, central Massachusetts, the Pioneer Valley, the Berkshires, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine. In this travel guide you will find: IN-DEPTH CULTURAL AND HISTORICAL FEATURES Created to explore the culture and the history of New England to get a greater understanding of its modern-day life, people and politics. BEST OF The top attractions and Editor's Choice highlighting the most special places to visit around New England. CURATED PLACES, HIGH-QUALITY MAPS Geographically organised text cross-referenced against full-colour, high-quality travel maps for quick orientation in Cambridge, Springfield and many more locations in New England. COLOUR-CODED CHAPTERS Every part of New England, from Boston to Maine has its own colour assigned for easy navigation. TIPS AND FACTS Up-to-date historical timeline and in-depth cultural background to the Berkshires as well as an introduction to Cape Cod's food and drink and fun destination-specific features. PRACTICAL TRAVEL INFORMATION A-Z of useful advice on everything from when to go to New England, how to get there and how to get around, as well as New England's climate, advice on tipping, etiquette and more. STRIKING PICTURES Features inspirational colour photography, including the stunning Walden Pond and the spectacular Quabbin Reservoir.
Download or read book Insight Guides New England written by Insight Guides and published by Apa Publications (UK) Limited. This book was released on 2015-06-01 with total page 945 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Insight Guides: Inspiring your next adventure Insight Guide New England will give you the best advice and inspiration for planning your perfect getaway. Plan the perfect trip with Insight Guides' unique combination of inspiring photos, absorbing narrative and detailed maps. Lively features on New England's history and culture provide an in-depth introduction to what makes the region unique, while stunning photography captures its people, landscape, flora and fauna. This guide will leave you breathless as you explore the mountains of Vermont, the shores of Maine, and the islands of Massachusetts. Our detailed maps are cross-referenced to the text, so you'll always know what to look for, whether it's the best spot to catch the colourful fall foliage or where to find the best microbreweries and seafood restaurants. The travel tips section is packed with useful information on transport, climate, festivals and outdoor activities, and provides answers to such questions as when to go and what to budget for your trip. Planning to spend a few days or more in Boston? Why not buy our City Guide Boston, the perfect companion to Insight Guide New England. About Insight Guides: Insight Guides has over 40 years' experience of publishing high-quality, visual travel guides. We produce around 400 full-color print guide books and maps as well as picture-packed eBooks to meet different travelers' needs. Insight Guides' unique combination of beautiful travel photography and focus on history and culture together create a unique visual reference and planning tool to inspire your next adventure. 'Insight Guides has spawned many imitators but is still the best of its type.' - Wanderlust Magazine
Download or read book Homes and Haunts written by Alison Booth and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-09-08 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first full-length study of literary tourism in North America as well as Britain, and a unique exploration of popular response to writers, literary house museums, and the landscapes or "countries " associated with their lives and works. An interdisciplinary study ranging from 1820-1940, Homes and Haunts: Touring Writers' Shrines and Countries unites museum and tourism studies, book history, narrative theory, theories of gender, space, and things, and other approaches to depict and interpret the haunting experiences of exhibited houses and the curious history of topo-biographical writing about famous authors. In illustrated chapters that blend Victorian and recent first-person encounters that range from literary shrines and plaques to guidebooks, memoirs, portraits, and monuments, Alison Booth discusses pilgrims such as William and Mary Howitt, Anna Maria and Samuel Hall, and Elbert Hubbard, and magnetic hosts and guests as Washington Irving, Wordsworth, Martineau, Longfellow, Hawthorne, James, and Dickens. Virginia Woolf's feminist response to homes and haunts shapes a chapter on Mary Russell Mitford, Gaskell, and the Brontës, and another on the Carlyles' house and Monk's House. Booth rediscovers collections of personalities, haunted shrines, and imaginative re-enactments that have been submerged by a century of academic literary criticism.
Download or read book A Fan s Notes written by Frederick Exley and published by Vintage. This book was released on 1988-08-12 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This fictional memoir, the first of an autobiographical trilogy, traces a self professed failure's nightmarish decent into the underside of American life and his resurrection to the wisdom that emerges from despair.
Download or read book Material Cultures in Canada written by Thomas Allen and published by Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press. This book was released on 2015-06-08 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Material Cultures in Canada presents the vibrant and diverse field of material culture studies in Canadian literary, artistic, and political contexts today. The first of its kind, this collection features sixteen essays by leading scholars in Canada, each of whom examines a different object of study, including the beaver, geraniums, comics, water, a musical playlist, and the human body. The book’s three sections focus, in turn, on objects that are persistently material, on things whose materiality blends into the immaterial, and on the materials of spaces. Contributors highlight some of the most exciting new developments in the field, such as the emergence of “new materialism,” affect theory, globalization studies, and environmental criticism. Although the book has a Canadian centre, the majority of its contributors consider objects that cross borders or otherwise resist national affiliation. This collection will be valuable to readers within and outside of Canada who are interested in material culture studies and, in addition, will appeal to anyone interested in the central debates taking place in Canadian political and cultural life today, such as climate change, citizenship, shifts in urban and small-town life, and the persistence of imperialism.
Download or read book Cincinnati Magazine written by and published by . This book was released on 2007-11 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cincinnati Magazine taps into the DNA of the city, exploring shopping, dining, living, and culture and giving readers a ringside seat on the issues shaping the region.
Download or read book Breakfast with Buddha written by Roland Merullo and published by Algonquin Books. This book was released on 2008-08-26 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When his sister tricks him into taking her guru on a trip to their childhood home, Otto Ringling, a confirmed skeptic, is not amused. Six days on the road with an enigmatic holy man who answers every question with a riddle is not what he'd planned. But in an effort to westernize his passenger—and amuse himself—he decides to show the monk some "American fun" along the way. From a chocolate factory in Hershey to a bowling alley in South Bend, from a Cubs game at Wrigley field to his family farm near Bismarck, Otto is given the remarkable opportunity to see his world—and more important, his life—through someone else's eyes. Gradually, skepticism yields to amazement as he realizes that his companion might just be the real thing. In Roland Merullo's masterful hands, Otto tells his story with all the wonder, bemusement, and wry humor of a man who unwittingly finds what he's missing in the most unexpected place.
Download or read book The Big Steal written by Emyl Jenkins and published by Algonquin Books. This book was released on 2009-07-14 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hired to assess the value of broken and missing antiques following a suspicious burglary at a Virginia manor house, intrepid appraiser and amateur sleuth Sterling Glass finds that her job is more complicated than she’d anticipated. The antiques, she realizes, are not always what they seem: some are worth tens of thousands, others are well-done replicas. Whether the well-traveled and well-heeled couple who once owned Wynderly could have been trafficking in fakes is what Sterling must unravel from the secret rooms, hidden treasures, uncovered diaries, and convoluted trail of paperwork and provenance. As our sharp-witted heroine sifts through details doled out by the museum's curators, board members, and the town's local residents, she discovers that objects, unlike people, do not lie. The Big Steal is a delightful mystery that enhances readers' antiques acumen and provides an easy guide to identifying the most popular styles and periods in an illustrated appendix.
Download or read book Mudbound written by Hillary Jordan and published by Algonquin Books. This book was released on 2008-03-04 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The International Bestseller Now a major motion picture from Netflix, directed by Dee Rees, nominated in four categories for the Academy Awards. In Jordan's prize-winning debut, prejudice takes many forms, both subtle and brutal. It is 1946, and city-bred Laura McAllan is trying to raise her children on her husband's Mississippi Delta farm—a place she finds foreign and frightening. In the midst of the family's struggles, two young men return from the war to work the land. Jamie McAllan, Laura's brother-in-law, is everything her husband is not—charming, handsome, and haunted by his memories of combat. Ronsel Jackson, eldest son of the black sharecroppers who live on the McAllan farm, has come home with the shine of a war hero. But no matter his bravery in defense of his country, he is still considered less than a man in the Jim Crow South. It is the unlikely friendship of these brothers-in-arms that drives this powerful novel to its inexorable conclusion. The men and women of each family relate their versions of events and we are drawn into their lives as they become players in a tragedy on the grandest scale. As Barbara Kingsolver says of Hillary Jordan, "Her characters walked straight out of 1940s Mississippi and into the part of my brain where sympathy and anger and love reside, leaving my heart racing. They are with me still."
Download or read book The Possessed written by Elif Batuman and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2010-02-16 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of The Economist's 2011 Books of the Year THE TRUE BUT UNLIKELY STORIES OF LIVES DEVOTED—ABSURDLY! MELANCHOLICALLY! BEAUTIFULLY!—TO THE RUSSIAN CLASSICS No one who read Elif Batuman's first article (in the journal n+1) will ever forget it. "Babel in California" told the true story of various human destinies intersecting at Stanford University during a conference about the enigmatic writer Isaac Babel. Over the course of several pages, Batuman managed to misplace Babel's last living relatives at the San Francisco airport, uncover Babel's secret influence on the making of King Kong, and introduce her readers to a new voice that was unpredictable, comic, humane, ironic, charming, poignant, and completely, unpretentiously full of love for literature. Batuman's subsequent pieces—for The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, and the London Review of Books— have made her one of the most sought-after and admired writers of her generation, and its best traveling companion. In The Possessed we watch her investigate a possible murder at Tolstoy's ancestral estate. We go with her to Stanford, Switzerland, and St. Petersburg; retrace Pushkin's wanderings in the Caucasus; learn why Old Uzbek has one hundred different words for crying; and see an eighteenth-century ice palace reconstructed on the Neva. Love and the novel, the individual in history, the existential plight of the graduate student: all find their place in The Possessed. Literally and metaphorically following the footsteps of her favorite authors, Batuman searches for the answers to the big questions in the details of lived experience, combining fresh readings of the great Russians, from Pushkin to Platonov, with the sad and funny stories of the lives they continue to influence—including her own.
Download or read book The Happiest People in the World written by Brock Clarke and published by Algonquin Books. This book was released on 2015-06-30 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “[A] dark and funny satire . . . Infidelities, secret identities and double-crosses . . . Reflects the absurdity of any country obsessed with spying on its own people.” —The Wall Street Journal Take the format of a spy thriller, shape it around real-life incidents involving international terrorism, leaven it with dark, dry humor, toss in a love rectangle, give everybody a gun, and let everything play out in the outer reaches of upstate New York--there you have an idea of Brock Clarke’s new novel. Filled with wonder and anger in almost equal parts,The Happiest People in the World is a ripped-from-the-headlines tale of paranoia and the all-American obsession with security and the conspiracies that threaten it. “A literary first: a book that feels like the love child of Saul Bellow and Hogan’s Heroes, full of authorial cartwheels of comedy and profundity.” —GQ “The Happiest People in the World begins with a raucous bar scene featuring party streamers, smoke, prone bodies, spilled fluids and a stuffed moose with a surveillance camera in its left eye . . . [Clarke has] success in dreaming up oddball originals that have instant appeal.” —Janet Maslin, The New York Times “[Clarke] creates books that taste like delicious cuts of absurdity marbled with erudition.” —The Washington Post “A whiz-bang spy satire bundled in an edgy tale of redemption . . . His comedy of errors is impossible to put down.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review “A darkly hilarious novel . . . The writing is clever, the dialogue snappy and understated, and the effect is as pleasantly unsettling as anything Kurt Vonnegut Jr. ever wrote.” —The Portland Sun “A zany and fast-paced book that explores the myriad ways people of all nations make themselves and others unhappy.” —Chicago Tribune, Printer’s Row “Ranks among the funniest and most relevant social satires I’ve read . . . It might just make you the happiest reader in the world.” —The Dallas Morning News
Download or read book The Resurrectionist written by Jack O'Connell and published by Algonquin Books. This book was released on 2009-09-22 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Resurrectionist is a wild ride into a territory where nothing is as it appears. Part classic noir thriller, part fabulist fable, it is the story of Sweeney and his comatose son, Danny. Hoping for a miracle, Sweeney has brought Danny to the fortresslike Peck Clinic, whose doctors claim to have "resurrected" patients who were similarly lost in the void. but the real cure for his son's condition may lie in Limbo, a comic book world beloved by Danny before he slipped into a coma. O'Connell has crafted a spellbinding novel about stories and what they can do for and to those who create them and those who consume them. About the nature of consciousness and the power of the unknown. And, ultimately, about forgiveness and the depth of our need to extend it and receive it.
Download or read book A Friend of the Family written by Lauren Grodstein and published by Algonquin Books. This book was released on 2010-11-09 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pete Dizinoff, a skilled and successful New Jersey internist, has a loving and devoted wife, a network of close friends, an impressive house, and, most of all, a son, Alec, now nineteen, on whom he has pinned all his hopes. But Pete hadn’t expected his best friend’s troubled daughter to set her sights on his boy. When Alec falls under her spell, Pete sets out to derail the romance, never foreseeing the devastating consequences. In a riveting story of suburban tragedy, Lauren Grodstein charts a father’s fall from grace as he struggles to save his family, his reputation, and himself.
Download or read book Who Are You Calvin Bledsoe written by Brock Clarke and published by Algonquin Books. This book was released on 2020-07-14 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A story in which anything and everything can happen, and mostly does. This is a book of many trips—across oceans, back to the past, and, most profoundly, into the infinite deep space of the human heart. Brock Clarke has given us a wonderful novel that bursts with all the meaty stuff of real life.” —Ben Fountain, author of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk Calvin Bledsoe’s journey begins with the death of his mother. An internationally known theologian and an expert on all things John Calvin, she had been the dominant force in her son’s existence, so much so that he never left home—even when he married—and, as a result, never grew up. At his mother’s funeral, Calvin is introduced to his aunt Beatrice, a woman he had not even known existed. Beatrice immediately makes it clear to Calvin that she is now in charge of his life, and the first thing she is going to do is whisk him off to Europe with her for a grand adventure. As Calvin and his aunt traverse the continent, it becomes apparent that her clandestine behavior is leading him into danger. Facing a menagerie of antiquities thieves, secret agents, religious fanatics, and an ex-wife who is stalking him, Calvin begins to suspect there might be some meaning behind the madness. Maybe he’s not the person he thought he was? Perhaps no one is ever who they appear to be? But there’s little time for soul-searching, as Calvin first has to figure out why he has been kidnapped, why his aunt has disappeared, and who the hell burned down his house in Maine. Powered by pitch-perfect dialogue, lovable characters, and surprising optimism, Who Are You, Calvin Bledsoe? is a modern-day take on Graham Greene’s classic Travels with My Aunt, a novel about grabbing life, and holding on—wherever it may take you.
Download or read book The Happiest People in the World written by Brock Clarke and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2014-11-04 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “[A] dark and funny satire . . . Infidelities, secret identities and double-crosses . . . Reflects the absurdity of any country obsessed with spying on its own people.” —The Wall Street Journal Take the format of a spy thriller, shape it around real-life incidents involving international terrorism, leaven it with dark, dry humor, toss in a love rectangle, give everybody a gun, and let everything play out in the outer reaches of upstate New York--there you have an idea of Brock Clarke’s new novel. Filled with wonder and anger in almost equal parts,The Happiest People in the World is a ripped-from-the-headlines tale of paranoia and the all-American obsession with security and the conspiracies that threaten it. “A literary first: a book that feels like the love child of Saul Bellow and Hogan’s Heroes, full of authorial cartwheels of comedy and profundity.” —GQ “The Happiest People in the World begins with a raucous bar scene featuring party streamers, smoke, prone bodies, spilled fluids and a stuffed moose with a surveillance camera in its left eye . . . [Clarke has] success in dreaming up oddball originals that have instant appeal.” —Janet Maslin, The New York Times “[Clarke] creates books that taste like delicious cuts of absurdity marbled with erudition.” —The Washington Post “A whiz-bang spy satire bundled in an edgy tale of redemption . . . His comedy of errors is impossible to put down.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review “A darkly hilarious novel . . . The writing is clever, the dialogue snappy and understated, and the effect is as pleasantly unsettling as anything Kurt Vonnegut Jr. ever wrote.” —The Portland Sun “A zany and fast-paced book that explores the myriad ways people of all nations make themselves and others unhappy.” —Chicago Tribune, Printer’s Row “Ranks among the funniest and most relevant social satires I’ve read . . . It might just make you the happiest reader in the world.” —The Dallas Morning News
