Download or read book The Index of Self Destructive Acts written by Christopher Beha and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the day Sam Waxworth arrives in New York to write for the Interviewer, a street-corner preacher declares that the world is coming to an end. A data journalist and recent media celebrity—he correctly forecast every outcome of the 2008 election—Sam knows a few things about predicting the future. But when projection meets reality, life gets complicated. His first assignment for the Interviewer is a profile of disgraced political columnist Frank Doyle, known to Sam for the sentimental works of baseball lore that first sparked his love of the game. When Sam meets Frank at Citi Field for the Mets’ home opener, he finds himself unexpectedly ushered into Doyle’s crumbling family empire. Kit, the matriarch, lost her investment bank to the financial crisis; Eddie, their son, hasn’t been the same since his second combat tour in Iraq; Eddie’s best friend from childhood, the fantastically successful hedge funder Justin Price, is starting to see cracks in his spotless public image. And then there’s Frank’s daughter, Margo, with whom Sam becomes involved—just as his wife, Lucy, arrives from Wisconsin. While their lives seem inextricable, none of them know how close they are to losing everything, including each other. Sweeping in scope yet meticulous in its construction, The Index of Self-Destructive Acts is a remarkable family portrait and a masterful evocation of New York City and its institutions. Over the course of a single baseball season, Christopher Beha traces the passing of the torch from the old establishment to the new meritocracy, exploring how each generation’s failure helped land us where we are today. Whether or not the world is ending, Beha’s characters are all headed to apocalypses of their own making.

Download or read book A Race Around the World written by Caroline Starr Rose and published by Albert Whitman & Company. This book was released on 2019-10-01 with total page 40 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Best Picture Books of 2019, The Christian Science Monitor A Mighty Girl's 2019 Books of the Year Kirkus Reviews' Best Indie Picture Books of 2020 The true story of two women who raced against time—and each other! In 1889, New York reporter Nellie Bly—inspired by Jules Verne's Around the World in 80 Days—began a circumnavigation she hoped to complete in less time. Her trip was sponsored by her employer, The World. Just hours after her ship set out across the Atlantic, another New York publication put writer Elizabeth Bisland on a westbound train. Bisland was headed around the world in the opposite direction, thinking she could beat Bly's time. Only one woman could win the race, but both completed their journeys in record time.

Download or read book The Book of V written by Anna Solomon and published by Henry Holt and Company. This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A GOOD MORNING AMERICA BOOK CLUB PICK A BELLETRIST BOOK CLUB PICK For fans of The Hours and Fates and Furies, a bold, kaleidoscopic novel intertwining the lives of three women across three centuries as their stories of sex, power, and desire finally converge in the present day. Lily is a mother and a daughter. And a second wife. And a writer, maybe? Or she was going to be, before she had children. Now, in her rented Brooklyn apartment she’s grappling with her sexual and intellectual desires, while also trying to manage her roles as a mother and a wife in 2016. Vivian Barr seems to be the perfect political wife, dedicated to helping her charismatic and ambitious husband find success in Watergate-era Washington D.C. But one night he demands a humiliating favor, and her refusal to obey changes the course of her life—along with the lives of others. Esther is a fiercely independent young woman in ancient Persia, where she and her uncle’s tribe live a tenuous existence outside the palace walls. When an innocent mistake results in devastating consequences for her people, she is offered up as a sacrifice to please the King, in the hopes that she will save them all. In Anna Solomon's The Book of V., these three characters' riveting stories overlap and ultimately collide, illuminating how women’s lives have and have not changed over thousands of years.

Download or read book Old Lovegood Girls written by Gail Godwin and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "As always, wry, beadyeyed, acute." -Margaret Atwood, via Twitter From the bestselling, award-winning author of Flora and Evensong comes the story of two remarkable women and the complex friendship between them that spans decades. When the dean of Lovegood Junior College for Girls decides to pair Feron Hood with Merry Jellicoe as roommates in 1958, she has no way of knowing the far-reaching consequences of the match. Feron, who has narrowly escaped from a dark past, instantly takes to Merry and her composed personality. Surrounded by the traditions and four-story Doric columns of Lovegood, the girls--and their friendship--begin to thrive. But underneath their fierce friendship is a stronger, stranger bond, one comprised of secrets, rivalry, and influence--with neither of them able to predict that Merry is about to lose everything she grew up taking for granted, and that their time together will be cut short. Ten years later, Feron and Merry haven't spoken since college. Life has led them into vastly different worlds. But, as Feron says, once someone is inside your “reference aura,” she stays there forever. And when each woman finds herself in need of the other's essence, that spark--that remarkable affinity, unbroken by time--between them is reignited, and their lives begin to shift as a result. Luminous and masterfully crafted, Old Lovegood Girls is the story of a powerful friendship between talented writers, two college friends who have formed a bond that takes them through decades of a fast-changing world, finding and losing and finding again the one friendship that defines them.

Download or read book Book of the Little Axe written by Lauren Francis-Sharma and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 2020-05-12 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This “masterful epic” spans decades and oceans from Trinidad to the American frontier during the tumultuous days of westward expansion (Publishers Weekly). Trinidad, 1796. Young Rosa Rendón quietly rebels against the life others expect her to lead. Bright, competitive, and opinionated, she does not intend to cook and keep house, for it is obvious her talents lie in running the farm she views as her birthright. But when her homeland changes from Spanish to British rule, the fate of free black property owners—Rosa’s family among them—is suddenly jeopardized. By 1830, Rosa is living among the Crow Nation in Bighorn, Montana, with her children and her husband, Edward Rose, a Crow chief. Her son Victor is of the age where he must seek his vision and become a man. But his path forward is blocked by secrets Rosa has kept from him. So Rosa must take him to where his story began and, in turn, retrace her own roots. Along the way, she must acknowledge the painful events that forced her from the middle of an ocean to the rugged terrain of a far-away land. A Booklist Editor’s Choice Book of the Year

Download or read book Private Means written by Cree LeFavour and published by Atlantic Monthly Press. This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “This feels like an Ian McEwan novel. Served on a bed of Cheever. I can’t offer higher praise than that. But written by a woman. Which is even better.”— Elizabeth Gilbert Spanning the course of a single summer, Private Means is acclaimed memoirist Cree LeFavour’s sumptuous fiction debut—a sharply observed comedy of manners and a moving meditation on marriage, money, and loss. A deliciously compulsive first novel from New York Times Editor’s Choice author of Lights On, Rats Out, Cree LeFavour’s Private Means captures the very essence of summer in a sharply observed, moving meditation on marriage, money, and loss. It's Memorial Day weekend and Alice’s beloved dog Maebelle has been lost. Alice stays in New York, desperate to find her dog, while her husband Peter drives north to stay with friends in the Berkshires. Relieved to be alone, Alice isn&apost sure if she should remain married to Peter but she’s built a life with him. For his part, Peter is pleased to have time alone—he’s tired of the lost dog drama, of Alice’s coolness, of New York. A psychiatrist, he ponders his patients and one, particularly attractive, woman in particular. As the summer unfolds, tensions rise as Alice and Peter struggle with infidelity, loneliness, and loss. Escaping the heat of New York City to visit wealthy friends in the Hamptons, on Cape Cod, and in the Berkshires, each continues to play his or her part in the life they’ve chosen together. By the time Labor Day rolls around, a summer that began with isolation has transformed into something else entirely. Matching keen observations on human behavior with wry prose, Private Means, with its sexy, page-turning plot, will draw fans of Nora Ephron and Meg Wolitzer. At once dark, funny, sad, and suspenseful, LeFavour’s debut is a rare find: a tart literary indulgence with depth and intelligence.

Download or read book Antkind written by Charlie Kaufman and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2021-07-06 with total page 721 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The bold and boundlessly original debut novel from the Oscar®-winning screenwriter of Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Synecdoche, New York. LONGLISTED FOR THE CENTER FOR FICTION FIRST NOVEL PRIZE • “A dyspeptic satire that owes much to Kurt Vonnegut and Thomas Pynchon . . . propelled by Kaufman’s deep imagination, considerable writing ability and bull’s-eye wit."—The Washington Post “An astonishing creation . . . riotously funny . . . an exceptionally good [book].”—The New York Times Book Review • “Kaufman is a master of language . . . a sight to behold.”—NPR NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR AND MEN’S HEALTH B. Rosenberger Rosenberg, neurotic and underappreciated film critic (failed academic, filmmaker, paramour, shoe salesman who sleeps in a sock drawer), stumbles upon a hitherto unseen film made by an enigmatic outsider—a film he’s convinced will change his career trajectory and rock the world of cinema to its core. His hands on what is possibly the greatest movie ever made—a three-month-long stop-motion masterpiece that took its reclusive auteur ninety years to complete—B. knows that it is his mission to show it to the rest of humanity. The only problem: The film is destroyed, leaving him the sole witness to its inadvertently ephemeral genius. All that’s left of this work of art is a single frame from which B. must somehow attempt to recall the film that just might be the last great hope of civilization. Thus begins a mind-boggling journey through the hilarious nightmarescape of a psyche as lushly Kafkaesque as it is atrophied by the relentless spew of Twitter. Desperate to impose order on an increasingly nonsensical existence, trapped in a self-imposed prison of aspirational victimhood and degeneratively inclusive language, B. scrambles to re-create the lost masterwork while attempting to keep pace with an ever-fracturing culture of “likes” and arbitrary denunciations that are simultaneously his bête noire and his raison d’être. A searing indictment of the modern world, Antkind is a richly layered meditation on art, time, memory, identity, comedy, and the very nature of existence itself—the grain of truth at the heart of every joke.

Download or read book Last Impressions written by Joseph Kertes and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2020-03-03 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shortlisted for the 2021 Leacock Medal for Humour Longlisted for the 2020 Toronto Book Awards How can you say goodbye forever when you've left an important secret unspoken? "I'll tell you what I'm going to do," Zoltan said. "When I die, I'll leave my luck to you." Zoltan Beck is dying. His devoted but long-suffering sons, Ben and Frank, are trying to prepare themselves and their families for Zoltan's eventual departure...but they can't quite bring themselves to believe that the end is really at hand, and neither can Zoltan himself. The head of a family marked by war and tragedy for decades, he "can't stand to be in a room with a miserable person" and has done his best to keep the pain of his refugee past from his beloved children. But as he faces the end of his life, he discovers a heartbreaking secret from the War that will ultimately bring the family together--or irrevocably disrupt it. Set in both mid-20th century Hungary and contemporary Toronto, this is a deeply moving novel that revels in the energy of its extraordinary characters. It is the story of lost love and newfound connections, of a father and his sons desperately reaching out to bridge an ever-widening gap...even as their time together ebbs away.

Download or read book Little Family written by Ishmael Beah and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2020-04-28 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the #1 New York Times–bestselling author of A Long Way Gone. A powerful novel about young people living at the margins of society, struggling to replace the homes they have lost with the one they have created together. Hidden away from a harsh outside world, five young people have improvised a home in an abandoned airplane, a relic of their country’s tumultuous past. Elimane, the bookworm, is as street-smart as he is wise. Clever Khoudiemata maneuvers to keep the younger kids—athletic, pragmatic Ndevui, thoughtful Kpindi, and especially their newest member, Namsa—safe and fed. When Elimane makes himself of service to the shadowy William Handkerchief, it seems as if the little family may be able to keep the world at bay and their household intact. But when Khoudi comes under the spell of the “beautiful people”—the fortunate sons and daughters of the elite—the desire to resume an interrupted coming of age and follow her own destiny proves impossible to resist. A profound and tender portrayal of the connections we forge to survive the fate we’re dealt, Little Family marks the further blossoming of a unique global voice.

Download or read book The Living Days written by Ananda Devi and published by Feminist Press at CUNY. This book was released on 2019-11-05 with total page 111 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER OF THE NEUSTADT PRIZE This novel of post-9/11 London is a masterful dissection of racism, aging, and the perturbing nature of desire. Ananda Devi's "fluid, poetic language memorably conjures a union of two outcasts" (The New Yorker). A chance encounter on Portobello Road incites an unsettling, magnetic attraction between Mary, a seventy-five-year-old white British spinster, and Cub, a thirteen-year-old Jamaican boy from Brixton. Mary increasingly clings to phantoms as dementia overtakes her reality, latching on to Cub and channeling all of her remaining energy into their relationship. But their macabre romance comes to a horrific climax, as white supremacy, poverty, and class conflict explode on the streets of London. Through exquisite juxtaposition, Devi uses lush prose to confront the tensions of an increasingly nationalistic metropolis, and the queasy nature of desire muddled with power. “A gorgeously written, profoundly upsetting fairy tale of race, class, power, and desire.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review "Brutal and entirely believable, a gorgeous and haunting depiction of London and the real lives and memories of those unseen within it." —Publishers Weekly

Download or read book Robert B Parker s Grudge Match written by Mike Lupica and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robert B. Parker's beloved PI Sunny Randall returns on a case that blurs the line between friend and foe...and if Sunny can't tell the difference, the consequences may be deadly. When Sunny's long-time gangster associate Tony Marcus comes to her for help, Sunny is surprised--after all, she double crossed him on a recent deal, and their relationship is on shakier ground than ever. But the way Tony figures it, Sunny owes him, and Sunny's willing to consider his case if it will clear the slate. Tony's trusted girlfriend and business partner has vanished, appears to have left in a hurry, and he has no idea why. He just wants to talk to her, he says, but first he needs Sunny to track her down. While Sunny isn't willing to trust his good intentions, the missing woman intrigues her--against all odds, she's risen to a position of power in Tony's criminal enterprise. Sunny can't help but admire her, and if this woman's in a jam, Sunny would like to help. But when a witness is murdered hours after speaking to Sunny, it's clear there's more at stake than just Tony's love life. Someone--maybe even Tony himself--doesn't want this woman on the loose...and will go to any lengths to make sure she stays silent.

Download or read book Glorious Boy written by Aimee Liu and published by Red Hen Press. This book was released on 2020-05-12 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “An absolutely gorgeous historical novel . . . set against the backdrop of a tribe in the Andamans struggling with British rule . . . Just magnificent.” —Caroline Leavitt, New York Times bestselling author of Pictures of You One of Booklist’s Top Ten Historical Fiction Books of 2020 Glorious Boy is a tale of war and devotion, longing and loss, and the power of love to prevail. Set in India’s remote Andaman Islands before and during WWII, the story revolves around a mysteriously mute four-year-old who vanishes on the eve of the Japanese occupation. Little Ty’s parents, Shep and Claire, will go to any lengths to rescue him, but neither is prepared for the brutal and soul-changing odyssey that awaits them. “A riveting amalgam of history, family epic, anticolonial/antiwar treatise, cultural crossroads, and more . . . a fascinating, irresistible marvel.” —Library Journal (starred review) “The most memorable and original novel I’ve read in ages . . . evokes every side in a multi-cultural conversation with sympathy and rare understanding.” —Pico Iyer, author of Autumn Light Shortlisted for the Staunch Book Prize New York Post’s Best Books of the Week Good Housekeeping’s 20 Best Books of 2020 Parade’s 30 Best Beach Reads of 2020

Download or read book A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth written by Daniel Mason and published by Pan Macmillan. This book was released on 2020-05-14 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: *Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2021** From Daniel Mason, the bestselling, award-winning author of The Winter Soldier and The Piano Tuner comes a collection of interlacing tales of men and women as they face the mysteries and magic of the world. On a fated flight, a balloonist makes a discovery that changes her life forever. A telegraph operator finds an unexpected companion in the middle of the Amazon. A doctor is beset by seizures, in which he is possessed by a second, perhaps better, version of himself. And in Regency London, a bare-knuckle fighter prepares to face his most fearsome opponent, while a young mother seeks a miraculous cure for her ailing son. At times funny and irreverent, always moving, these stories cap a fifteen-year project that has won both a National Magazine Award and Pushcart Prize. From the Nile’s depths to the highest reaches of the atmosphere, from volcano-wracked islands to an asylum on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, these are lives of ecstasy and epiphany.

Download or read book The Resolutions written by Brady Hammes and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2021-05-11 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Three accomplished, globe trotting siblings in crisis take refuge in the last place they would ever expect—back home in Chicago, with one another—in this razor-sharp debut for readers of The Nest, Commonwealth, and Imagine Me Gone “A vivid literary thrill ride . . . Take the journey. The pages will fly by.”—Matthew Quick, New York Times bestselling author of The Silver Linings Playbook The three Brennan siblings are well on their way in the world. Samantha, the youngest, is a ballerina who recently joined the ranks of a Russian dance company; her brother Jonah is a grad student studying elephants in the rainforest of Gabon; and the eldest, Gavin, has stayed closer to home, living in Los Angeles and acting in a television series. But as the holidays draw near, all three find themselves in profoundly troubling, though distinctly different, predicaments. Samantha is losing the battle to keep her drug addiction from ruining her career; Jonah, in his attempts to protect his elephants, gets in way too deep with a gang of ivory poachers; and Gavin’s TV show is canceled the same day his girlfriend moves out. With their lives run aground, they reunite in their parents’ home for the holidays, where they discover that the bonds between siblings are unshakable. But with their personal problems threatening to derail their nascent careers and possibly their very survival, the three embark on a trip to West Africa in a perilous attempt to right their crooked paths. The Resolutions is a contemporary look at three young people in the defining moments of their lives, by a talented author just getting started on a promising literary career.

Download or read book Telephone written by Percival Everett and published by Picador. This book was released on 2024-03-26 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction Zach Wells is a perpetually dissatisfied geologist-slash-paleobiologist. Expert in a very narrow area – the geological history of a cave forty-four metres above the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon – he is a laconic man who plays chess with his daughter, trades puns with his wife while she does yoga, and dodges committee work at the college where he teaches. After a field trip to the desert yields nothing more than a colleague with a tenure problem and a student with an unwelcome crush on him, Wells returns home to find his world crumbling. His daughter has lost her edge at chess, she has developed mysterious eye problems, and her memory has lost its grasp. Powerless in the face of his daughter’s slow deterioration, he finds a mysterious note asking for help tucked into the pocket of a jacket he’s ordered off eBay. Desperate for someone to save, he sets off to New Mexico in secret on a quixotic rescue mission. A deeply affecting story about the lengths to which loss and grief will drive us, Telephone is a Percival Everett novel we should have seen coming all along, one that will shake you to the core as it asks questions about the power of narrative to save.

Download or read book I d Give Anything written by Marisa de los Santos and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2020-05-12 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the New York Times bestselling author of Love Walked In and Belong to Me comes a profound and heart-rending story about a horrific tragedy that marks one woman and her hometown and about the explosive secrets that come to light twenty years later. Ginny Beale is eighteen, irreverent, funny, and brave, with a brother she adores and a circle of friends for whom she would do anything. Because of one terrible night, she loses them all—and her adventurous spirit—seemingly forever. While the town cheers on the high school football team, someone sets a fire in the school’s auditorium. Ginny’s best friend Gray Marsden’s father, a fire fighter, dies in the blaze. While many in the town believe a notoriously troubled local teen set the fire, Ginny makes a shattering discovery that casts blame on the person she trusts most in the world. Ginny tells no one, but the secret isolates her, looming between her and her friends and ruining their friendship. Over the next two decades, Ginny puts aside her wanderlust and her dreams. She marries a quiet man after college, and they move back to her hometown, where she raises their daughter, Avery, and cares for her tyrannical, ailing mother, Adela. She distances herself from the past and from nearly everyone she knew. But when Ginny’s husband, Harris, becomes embroiled in a scandal, her carefully controlled life crumbles, and, just when Ginny believes she is regaining her bearings, the secret she’s kept for twenty years emerges and threatens to destroy her hopes for the future. With the help of fifteen-year-old Avery and of friends both old and new, Ginny must summon the courage to confront old lies and hard truths and to free herself and the people she loves from the mistakes and regrets that have burdened them for so long.

Download or read book No Going Back written by Sheena Kamal and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2020-04-14 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A People Magazine Best New Book Pick Named a Most Anticipated Book of the Year by CrimeReads, LitHub, and Book Riot! “If you’re looking for a dark, moody, complex thriller with a complex woman protagonist this is your series. I love love love these books."--Roxane Gay, New York Times bestselling author of Hunger From Strand Critics Award winner Sheena Kamal, comes the third novel featuring the brilliant, fearless, deeply flawed Nora Watts whose vendetta against a triad enforcer escalates when he places a target on her daughter's back. Find your enemy. Before he finds you. Nora Watts has a talent for seeing what lies beneath strangers’ surfaces, and for knowing what they’re working hard to keep hidden. Somehow, it’s the people closest to her she has trouble truly connecting with. In the case of Bonnie, the teenage daughter Nora gave up for adoption, she has to keep trying. For Bonnie has a target on her back—and it’s all because of Nora. Two years ago, Bonnie was kidnapped by the wealthy Zhang family. Though Nora rescued her, she made a powerful enemy in Dao, a mysterious triad enforcer and former head of the Zhangs’ private security. Now Dao is out for revenge, and she needs to track him down in order to keep herself—and Bonnie—safe. On Dao’s trail, Nora forms an unlikely partnership with Bernard Lam, an eccentric playboy billionaire with his own mysterious grudge to bear, and reunites with Jon Brazuca, ex-cop turned private investigator and Nora’s occasional ally. From Canada to southeast Asia they pursue Dao, uncovering a shadowy criminal cabal. But soon, the trail will lead full circle to Vancouver, the only home Nora’s ever known, and right to the heart of her brutal past.