Download or read book Leda and the Swan written by Anna Caritj and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2022-05-03 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Affecting narrative about consent, power and loneliness.”—Time “Intoxicatingly ominous.”—Kirkus Reviews In a hothouse of collegiate sex and ambition, one young woman mysteriously disappears after a wild campus party, and another becomes obsessed with finding her. It’s Halloween night on a pastoral East Coast college campus. Scantily costumed students ride the fine line between adolescence and adulthood as they prepare for a night of drinking and debauchery. Expectations are high as Leda flirts with her thrilling new crush, Ian, and he flirts back. But by the end of the night, things will have taken a turn. A mysterious young woman in a swan costume speaks with Leda outside a party—and then vanishes. When Leda later wakes up in Ian’s room the next morning, she is unsure exactly what happened between them. Meanwhile, as the campus rouses itself to respond to the young woman’s disappearance, rumors swirl, suspicious facts pile up, and Leda’s obsession with her missing classmate grows. Is it just a coincidence that Ian used to date Charlotte, the missing woman? Is Leda herself in danger? As Leda becomes more and more dangerously consumed with the mystery of Charlotte and questions about Ian, her motivations begin to blur. Is Leda looking for Charlotte, or trying to find herself? In Leda and the Swan, Anna Caritj’s riveting storytelling brings together a suspenseful plot; an intimate, confessional voice; and invaluable insights into sex, power, and contemporary culture.

Download or read book The Prodigal Daughter written by Mette Ivie Harrison and published by Soho Press. This book was released on 2021-05-25 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the wake of the #MeToo movement, has it become easier to speak out about sexual assault in religious communities? Linda Wallheim, increasingly disillusioned with her Mormon religion, has begun marriage counseling with her husband, Kurt, a bishop in the Latter-Day Saints Church. On other days, Linda occupies herself with happier things, like visiting her five grown sons and their families. When Linda’s eldest son, Joseph, tells her his infant daughter’s babysitter, a local teenager named Sabrina Jensen, has vanished, Linda can’t help but ask questions. Her casual inquiries form the portrait of a girl under extreme pressure from her parents to be the perfect Mormon daughter, and it eventually emerges that Sabrina is the victim of a terrible crime at the hands of her own classmates—including the high school’s golden boys and future church leaders. Linda’s search for Sabrina will lead her to the darker streets of Utah and cause her to question whether the Mormon community’s most privileged and powerful will be called to task for past sins.

Download or read book Folklorn written by Angela Mi Young Hur and published by Erewhon. This book was released on 2021-04-27 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Best Sci-Fi and Fantasy Novel of 2021 An NPR Best Book of 2021 A genre-defying, continents-spanning saga of Korean myth, scientific discovery, and the abiding love that binds even the most broken of families. Elsa Park is a particle physicist at the top of her game, stationed at a neutrino observatory in the Antarctic, confident she's put enough distance between her ambitions and the family ghosts she's run from all her life. But it isn't long before her childhood imaginary friend—an achingly familiar, spectral woman in the snow—comes to claim her at last. Years ago, Elsa's now-catatonic mother had warned her that the women of their line were doomed to repeat the narrative lives of their ancestors from Korean myth and legend. But beyond these ghosts, Elsa also faces a more earthly fate: the mental illness and generational trauma that run in her immigrant family, a sickness no less ravenous than the ancestral curse hunting her. When her mother breaks her decade-long silence and tragedy strikes, Elsa must return to her childhood home in California. There, among family wrestling with their own demons, she unravels the secrets hidden in the handwritten pages of her mother’s dark stories: of women’s desire and fury; of magic suppressed, stolen, or punished; of the hunger for vengeance. From Sparks Fellow, Tin House alumna, and Harvard graduate Angela Mi Young Hur, Folklorn is a wondrous and necessary exploration of the myths we inherit and those we fashion for ourselves.

Download or read book Paradise Nevada written by Dario Diofebi and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2021-04-06 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Diofebi is an irreverent and audacious new voice.”- Susan Choi, National Book Award-Winning author of TRUST EXERCISE "Vegas has been right there forever, waiting for a great novelist, and Dario Diofebi has come dealing nothing but aces."--Darin Strauss, NBCC Award-Winning author of HALF A LIFE From an exhilarating new literary voice--the story of four transplants braving the explosive political tensions behind the deceptive, spectacular, endlessly self-reinventing city of Las Vegas. On Friday, May 1st, 2015 a bomb detonates in the infamous Positano Luxury Resort and Casino, a mammoth hotel (and exact replica of the Amalfi coast) on the Las Vegas Strip. Six months prior, a crop of strivers converge on the desert city, attempting to make a home amidst the dizzying lights: Ray, a mathematically-minded high stakes professional poker player; Mary Ann, a clinically depressed cocktail waitress; Tom, a tourist from the working class suburbs of Rome, Italy; and Lindsay, a Mormon journalist for the Las Vegas Sun who dreams of a literary career. By chance and by design, they find themselves caught up in backroom schemes for personal and political power, and are thrown into the deep end of an even bigger fight for the soul of the paradoxical town. A furiously rowdy and ricocheting saga about poker, happiness, class, and selflessness, Paradise, Nevada is a panoramic tour of America in miniature, a vertiginously beautiful systems novel where the bloody battles of neo-liberalism, immigration, labor, and family rage underneath Las Vegas' beguiling and strangely benevolent light. This exuberant debut marks the beginning of a significant career.

Download or read book In the Company of Killers written by Bryan Christy and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2021-04-13 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Immensely talented… Christy’s muscular, vivid writing and John le Carré-esque talent for thrusting us deep into unfamiliar territory ensure that what could lapse into cliché instead sounds fresh and exciting… Klay is a great, flawed hero, in the vein of the classic hard-drinking, hard-living, hard-loving loner.”--New York Times Book Review In this intricate and propulsive thriller--from National Geographic's founder of Special Investigations--Tom Klay an investigative reporter leading a double life as a CIA spy, discovers that he has been weaponized in a global game of espionage pitting him against one of the world's most ruthless men. Tom Klay is a celebrated investigative wildlife reporter for the esteemed magazine The Sovereign. But Klay is not just a journalist. His reporting is cover for an even more dangerous job: CIA agent. Klay's press credentials make him a perfect spy--able to travel the globe, engage both politicians and warlords, and openly record what he sees. When he needs help, the Agency provides it to him, and asks little in return. But while on assignment in Kenya, Klay is attacked and his closest friend is murdered. Soon Klay's carefully constructed double life unravels as his ambition turns to revenge. The CIA has an answer. Klay is offered a devil's bargain to capture the man who killed his friend by infiltrating the offices of the woman he once loved, South Africa's special prosecutor, Hungry Khoza. But Klay soon discovers that he and Hungry are part of a larger, more lethal game--one that involves a ruthless mercenary and a global superpower. The deeper he digs, the more Klay realizes that everything he thought he knew about his work may have been a lie, and his sworn enemy may be his only ally. In this riveting, timely thriller, the lines between good and evil blur, and absolutely nothing is as it seems.

Download or read book Eat the Mouth That Feeds You written by Carribean Fragoza and published by City Lights Books. This book was released on 2021-03-30 with total page 92 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER OF THE WHITING AWARD PEN AMERICA LITERARY FINALIST Recommended by Héctor Tobar as an essential Los Angeles book in the New York Times. Carribean Fragoza's debut collection of stories reside in the domestic surreal, featuring an unusual gathering of Latinx and Chicanx voices from both sides of the U.S./Mexico border, and universes beyond. "Eat the Mouth That Feeds You is an accomplished debut with language that has the potential to affect the reader on a visceral level, a rare and significant achievement from a forceful new voice in American literature."—Kali Fajardo-Anstine, New York Times Book Review, and author of Sabrina and Corina Carribean Fragoza's imperfect characters are drawn with a sympathetic tenderness as they struggle against circumstances and conditions designed to defeat them. A young woman returns home from college, only to pick up exactly where she left off: a smart girl in a rundown town with no future. A mother reflects on the pain and pleasures of being inexorably consumed by her small daughter, whose penchant for ingesting grandma's letters has extended to taking bites of her actual flesh. A brother and sister watch anxiously as their distraught mother takes an ax to their old furniture, and then to the backyard fence, until finally she attacks the family’s beloved lime tree. Victories are excavated from the rubble of personal hardship, and women's wisdom is brutally forged from the violence of history that continues to unfold on both sides of the US-Mexico border. "Eat the Mouth that Feeds You renders the feminine grotesque at its finest."—Myriam Gurba, author of Mean "Eat the Mouth that Feeds You will establish Fragoza as an essential and important new voice in American fiction."—Héctor Tobar, author of The Barbarian Nurseries "Fierce and feminist, Eat the Mouth That Feeds You is a soul-quaking literary force."—Dontaná McPherson-Joseph, The Foreword, *Starred Review ". . . a work of power and a darkly brilliant talisman that enlarges in necessary ways the feminist, Latinx, and Chicanx canons."—Wendy Ortiz, Alta Magazine "Fragoza's surreal and gothic stories, focused on Latinx, Chicanx, and immigrant women's voices, are sure to surprise and move readers."—Zoe Ruiz, The Millions "This collection of visceral, often bone-chilling stories centers the liminal world of Latinos in Southern California while fraying reality at its edges. Full of horror and wonder."—Kirkus Reviews, *Starred Review "Fragoza's debut collection delivers expertly crafted tales of Latinx people trying to make sense of violent, dark realities. Magical realism and gothic horror make for effective stylistic entryways, as Fragoza seamlessly blurs the lines between the corporeal and the abstract."—Publishers Weekly "The magic realism of Eat the Mouth that Feeds You is thoroughly worked into the fabric of the stories themselves . . . a wonderful debut."—Brian Evenson, author of Song for the Unraveling of the World

Download or read book Echo Tree written by Henry Dumas and published by Coffee House Press. This book was released on 2021-05-21 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: African futurism, gothic romance, ghost story, parable, psychological thriller, inner-space fiction—Dumas’s stories form a vivid, expansive portrait of Black life in America. Henry Dumas’s fabulist fiction is a masterful synthesis of myth and religion, culture and nature, mask and identity, the present and the ancestral. From the Deep South to the simmering streets of Harlem, his characters embark on real, magical, and mythic quests. Humming with life, Dumas’s stories create a collage of mid-twentieth-century Black experiences, interweaving religious metaphor, African cosmologies, diasporic folklore, and America’s history of slavery and systemic racism.

Download or read book Fate written by Jorge Consiglio and published by Charco Press. This book was released on 2020-03-05 with total page 83 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This novel focuses on a group of characters who are all in different ways endeavouring to take control of their fate. Their desire to lead a genuine existence forces them to confront difficult decisions, and to break out of comfortable routines.Karl and Marina have been together for ten years and have a young son, Simón. Karl is a German-born oboist at Argentina’s national orchestra, and Marina is a meteorologist. On a field trip, she meets fellow researcher Zárate, and what might have been just a fling starts to erode the foundations of her marriage. Then there is Amer, a dynamic and successful taxidermist. At a group therapy session for smokers, Amer falls for the younger Clara. While the relationship between Karl and Marina disintegrates, the love story between Amer and Clara is just beginning – or is it already at an end? One of Argentina’s leading contemporary writers, Jorge Consiglio portrays the inner worlds of these characters through the minute details of their everyday lives, laying bare their strivings and their frustrations with a wry gaze, and seeking in this close-up texture a deeper truth.

Download or read book House Standoff written by Mike Lawson and published by Grove Atlantic. This book was released on 2021-04-06 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A D.C. fixer heads to Wyoming on a personal mission in the new novel from the Edgar Award–finalist and “reliably excellent writer” (Seattle Times). When someone close to him is shot dead in a roadside motel in a small Wyoming town, Joe DeMarco shirks his responsibilities as the Speaker of the House’s fixer to make sure the authorities are doing everything they can to catch the killer. He soon realizes that the rural area is dominated by Hiram Bunt, a wealthy rancher with an obstructionist streak who’s willing to take on the federal government at gunpoint and seems to have a number of politicians under his thumb. But Bunt isn’t the only one in the way. DeMarco also learns that his friend―a woman he was once in love with―had unearthed explosive secrets during her time in the backwoods, and that the deputy in charge of the investigation may be ignoring leads to preserve a secret of his own. Surrounded by people willing to kill to maintain the status quo, DeMarco launches his own investigation into a growing list of intertwining suspects. And being DeMarco, he concludes that breaking the law to uncover the truth is the best way to ensure that justice is done . . . “[A] consistently entertaining, well-crafted series.” —Booklist “A charmingly likable character.” —Tess Gerritsen, New York Times bestselling author of the Rizzoli & Isles novels “A writer who gets everything right.” —The Plain Dealer

Download or read book Big Bad written by Whitney Collins and published by Sarabande Books. This book was released on 2021-03-16 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Within the thirteen stories of Whitney Collins’s Big Bad dwells a hunger that’s dark, deep, and hilarious. Part domestic horror, part flyover gothic, Big Bad serves up real-world predicaments in unremarkable places (motels, dormitories, tiki bars), all with Collins’s heart-wrenching flavor of magical realism. A young woman must give birth to future iterations of herself; a widower kills a horse en route to his grandson’s circumcision; a conflicted summer camper is haunted by a glass eye and motorcycle crash. Collins’s cast of characters must repeatedly choose to fight or flee the “big bad” that dwells within us all. Winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, and boasting a 2020 Pushcart-winning story, Big Bad simultaneously entertains and disconcerts.

Download or read book Chola Salvation written by Estella Gonzalez and published by Arte Publico Press. This book was released on 2021-04-30 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the title story of this collection, Isabela is minding her family’s restaurant, drinking her dad’s beer, when Frida Kahlo and the Virgen de Guadalupe walk in. Even though they’re dressed like cholas, the girl immediately recognizes Frida’s uni-brow and La Virgen’s crown. They want to give her advice about the quinceanera her parents are forcing on her. In fact, their lecture (don’t get pregnant, go to school, be proud of your indigenous roots) helps Isabela to escape her parents’ physical and sexual abuse. But can she really run away from the self-hatred they’ve created? These inter-related stories, mostly set in East Los Angeles, uncover the lives of a conflicted Mexican-American community. In “Sabado Gigante,” Bernardo drinks himself into a stupor every Saturday night. “Aqui no es mi tierra,” he cries, as he tries to ease the sorrow of a life lived far from home. Meanwhile, his son Gustavo struggles with his emerging gay identity and Maritza, the oldest daughter, is expected to cook and clean for her brother, even though they live in East LA, not Guadalajara or Chihuahua. In “Powder Puff,” Mireya spends hours every day applying her make-up, making sure to rub the foundation all the way down her neck so it looks like her natural color. But no matter how much she rubs and rubs, her skin is no lighter. Estella Gonzalez vividly captures her native East LA in these affecting stories about a marginalized people dealing with racism, machismo and poverty. In painful and sometimes humorous scenes, young people try to escape the traditional expectations of their family. Other characters struggle with anger and resentment, often finding innovative ways to exact revenge for slights both real and imagined. Throughout, music—traditional and contemporary—accompanies them in the search for love and acceptance.

Download or read book Love Like Water Love Like Fire written by Mikhail Iossel and published by Bellevue Literary Press. This book was released on 2021-05-04 with total page 163 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Comedy and tragedy collide in stories of family life in Soviet Russia and the complexities of the immigrant experience “We can’t stop turning the pages of this book.” —Ilya Kaminsky, New York Times Book Review From the moment of its founding, the USSR was reviled and admired, demonized and idealized. Many Jews saw the new society ushered in by the Russian Revolution as their salvation from shtetl life with its deprivations and deadly pogroms. But Soviet Russia was rife with antisemitism, and a Jewish boy growing up in Leningrad learned early, harsh, and enduring lessons. Unsparing and poignant, Mikhail Iossel’s twenty stories of Soviet childhood and adulthood, dissidence and subsequent immigration, are filled with wit and humor even as they describe the daily absurdities of a fickle and often perilous reality.

Download or read book The Vanishing Point written by Elizabeth Brundage and published by Back Bay Books. This book was released on 2022-10-25 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At Rye Adler's funeral, they didn't bury his body - or the rivalry of his closest enemy. A gripping literary thriller by the author of the "wrenching and exhilarating" All Things Cease to Appear (Wall Street Journal). Julian Ladd and Rye Adler cross paths as photography students in the exclusive Brodsky Workshop. When Rye needs a roommate, Julian moves in, and a quiet, compulsive envy takes root, assuring, at least in his own mind, that he will never achieve Rye's certain success. Both men are fascinated with their beautiful and talented classmate, Magda, whose captivating images of her Polish neighborhood set her apart, and each will come to know her intimately - a woman neither can possess and only one can love. Twenty years later, long after their paths diverge, Rye is at the top of his field, famous for his photographs of celebrities and far removed from the downtrodden and disenfranchised subjects who'd secured his reputation as the eye of his generation. When Magda reenters his life, asking for help only he can give, Rye finds himself in a broken landscape of street people and addicts, forcing him to reckon with the artist he once was, until his search for a missing boy becomes his own desperate fight to survive. Months later, when Julian discovers Rye's obituary, the paper makes it sound like a suicide. Despite himself, Julian attends the funeral, where there is no casket and no body. This sudden reentry into a world he thought he left behind forces Julian to question not only Rye's death, but the very foundations of his life. In this eerie and evocative novel, Elizabeth Brundage establishes herself as one of the premiere authors of literary fiction at work today.

Download or read book The Captive written by Fiona King Foster and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2021-01-12 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A rural noir about a woman on a pulse-pounding expedition to deliver a fugitive—and forced to confront her own past on the journey In a secessionist rural state that has cut itself off completely from urban centers, where living is hardscrabble and poor but “free,” Brooke Holland runs a farm with her husband, Milo, and two daughters. Their life at the fringes of modern society is tenuous—they make barely enough from each harvest to keep going—yet Brooke cherishes the loving, peaceful life they have carved out for themselves. She has even begun to believe she is free from the violent history she has kept a secret from her family. When escaped criminal Stephen Cawley attacks at the farm, Brooke’s buried talents surface, and she manages to quickly and harshly subdue him. She is convinced that he has come in retribution for the blood feud she thought she escaped years ago. Brooke sets out to bring Cawley to justice, planning to use the bounty on his head to hide her family far from danger. Fearing that other members of Cawley’s infamous family will soon descend, Brooke insists Milo and the girls flee with her, travelling miles on foot across an unforgiving landscape to reach the nearest marshal. Their journey, started at the onset of winter with little preparation, brings already strained family dynamics to the breaking point. As Brooke’s ghosts—both real and imagined—close in, the ruthlessness that let her survive her past may become the biggest threat to her hopes for a different future. What follows is a harrowing exploration of family loyalty, trauma, and resilience. As haunting and propulsive as it is powerfully written, The Captive is a thrilling debut novel about the impossible choices we make to survive and protect the ones we love.

Download or read book Above the Rain written by Víctor del Árbol and published by Other Press, LLC. This book was released on 2021-05-25 with total page 609 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the latest novel from a master of European crime fiction, past, present, and future collide on a breathtaking journey from 1950s Morocco to modern-day Spain and Sweden. Miguel and Helena meet at a nursing home in Tarifa, at an age when they believe they have lived it all already. Distanced from their children, they feel they are no longer needed. The sudden suicide of one of the other residents opens their eyes. They don’t want to spend their last days longing for supposedly better times, so together they decide to undertake the journey of their lives and confront the darkness in their pasts. Meanwhile, in the distant Swedish city of Malmö, the young Yasmina, a child of Moroccan immigrants who dreams of being a singer, lives trapped between her authoritarian grandfather and her contemptuous mother, who is ashamed of Yasmina because she works for a Swede with a murky reputation. And she’s having a secret affair with the Deputy Commissioner of the Swedish police, an older, influential man. As Yasmina is drawn deeper into Malmö’s criminal underworld and Miguel and Helena approach the end of their feverish road trip, Víctor del Árbol masterfully reconstructs the history of violence that links their seemingly disparate lives.

Download or read book Burn It All Down written by Nicolas DiDomizio and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2021-05-25 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Take the ride of a lifetime with this mother/son buddy comedy James Patterson praises as “audacious, addictive, highly entertaining.” ​ Eighteen-year-old aspiring comic Joey Rossi just found out his boyfriend has been cheating on him for the past ten months. But what did he expect? Joey was born with an addiction to toxic jerks—something he inherited from his lovably messy, wisecracking, Italian-American spitfire of a mom (and best friend): 34-year-old Gia Rossi. When Gia’s latest non-relationship goes up in flames only a day later, the pair’s Bayonne, New Jersey apartment can barely contain their rage. In a misguided attempt at revenge, Joey and Gia inadvertently commit a series of crimes and flee the state, running to the only good man either of them has ever known—Gia’s ex, Marco. As they hide out from the law at Marco’s secluded lake house, Joey and Gia must confront all the bad habits and mistakes they’ve made that have led them to this moment—and find a way to take responsibility for what they’ve done.

Download or read book Maxwell s Demon written by Steven Hall and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2021-02-09 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This autumn, life is catching up with Thomas Quinn. Five years ago, his sometime friend Andrew Black wrote a mystery novel that sold a million copies and then disappeared. Now could it be that Quinn is being stalked by the hero of Black’s book? His wife, Imogen, usually has the answers, but she’s working on the other side of the world and talking to her on webcam just isn’t the same. Quinn finds himself in a world that might well be coming apart at the seams. If he can find Black, he might start finding answers. Maxwell’s Demon forges an entirely new blend of mystery—somewhere between detective fiction, ghost story and philosophical quest. Providing the same white-knuckle thrills as Hall’s first novel, The Raw Shark Texts, this new book is also a freewheeling investigation into the magic power locked inside the alphabet, love through the looking glass, the bond between parents and children and, at its heart, the quest for meaning in a world that, with each passing season, seems to become more chaotic and untidy.