Download or read book Lulu in Marrakech written by Diane Johnson and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2008 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Attempting to rekindle a romance with a worldly Englishman as part of a cover-up for her assignment with the CIA, Lulu Sawyer finds the delicate balance between her public and covert worlds disintegrating when she attempts to aid two Middle Eastern women. By the author of Le Divorce. 75,000 first printing.
Download or read book Lulu in Marrakech written by Diane Johnson and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2008-10-07 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Timely and provocatively incorrect."—Oprah.com (Mysteries Every Thinking Woman Should Read) The two-time Pulitzer Prize and three-time National Book Award-nominated author of Le Divorce returns with a mesmerizing novel of double standards and double agents Now, Diane Johnson brilliantly exposes the manners and morals of the cultural collision between Islam and the West. Lulu Sawyer arrives in Marrakech, Morocco, hoping to rekindle her romance with a worldly Englishman, Ian Drumm. It's the perfect cover for her assignment for the CIA: tracing the flow of money from well-heeled donors to radical Islamic groups. While spending her days poolside among Europeans in villas staffed by maids in abayas, and her nights at lively dinner parties, Lulu observes the fragile and tense coexistence of two cultures. But beneath the surface of this polite expatriate community lies a sinister world laced not only with double standards, but double agents. Johnson weaves a dazzling tale in the great tradition of works about naïve Americans abroad, with a fascinating new assortment of characters as well as witty and timely observations on the political and sexual complexities between Islamic and Western culture.
Download or read book Tazmamart written by Aziz BineBine and published by Haus Publishing. This book was released on 2022-01-05 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A memoir from a political prisoner in Morocco's notorious Tazmamart prison. On July 10, 1971, during birthday celebrations for King Hassan II of Morocco, attendant officers and cadets opened fire on visiting dignitaries. A young officer, Aziz BineBine, arrived late and witnessed the ensuing massacre without firing a single shot, yet he would spend the next two decades in a political prison hidden in the Atlas Mountains—Tazmamart. Conditions in this now-infamous prison were nightmarish. The dark, underground cells, too small for standing up in, exposed prisoners to extreme weather, overflowing sewage, and disease-ridden rats. Forgetting life outside his cell—his past, his family, his friends—and clinging to God, BineBine resolved to survive. Tazmamart: 18 Years in Morocco’s Secret Prison is a memorial to BineBine and his fellow inmates’ sacrifice. This searing tale of endurance offers an unfiltered depiction of the agonizing life of a political prisoner.
Download or read book Persian Nights written by Diane Johnson and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1998-02-01 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Funny, incisive, frightening and eminently skillful."—New York Times The year is 1978, the tumultuous period leading up to the Iranian Revolution. While visiting Iran with her husband, Chloe Fowler is left to travel alone after he is summoned home. Much to her surprise, she finds herself drawn to the country, intoxicated by each unfamiliar sight that reminds her how far from home she really is, both comforted and unsettled by the group of foreign and Iranian physicians and their wives who take her in. However, her exhilaration crashes when odd, often frightening events begin to occur, exposing the darker side of this "colonial life." Chloe is about to be liberated from everything she has ever known—in a place where her ordinary notions of reason and reality will run headlong into a wall of intrigue, and where every idea she has about herself will be put to the test. Persian Nights follows Chloe on a voyage through the seductively inexplicable, and has all the qualities one expects from the gifted author of Le Divorce—the quirky, vivid atmosphere; the intelligent, humane voice; the compelling narrative. Once again, Diane Johnson delivers an entertaining novel of an appealing woman caught up in a mysterious world of change and intrigue.
Download or read book Lorna Mott Comes Home written by Diane Johnson and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2021-06-29 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of the best-selling Le Divorce and Le Mariage, a comedy of contemporary manners, morals, (ex)marriages, and motherhood (past, present, and future)--about an American woman leaving her 20-year marriage to her French second husband, returning to her native San Francisco and to the entwining lives of her children and grandchildren. “Delightful”--Claire Messud (Harper’s Magazine); “Razor-sharp prose and astute observations … a treat”--Publishers Weekly (starred review). Lorna Mott Dumas, small, pretty, high-strung, the epitome of a successful woman--lovely offspring, grandchildren, health, a French husband, a delightful house and an independent career as an admired art lecturer involving travel and public appearances, expensive clothes. She's a woman with an uncomplicated, sociable nature and an intellectual life. But in an impulsive and planned decision, Lorna has decided to leave her husband, a notorious tombeur (seducer), and his small ancestral village in France, and return to America, much more suited to her temperament than the rectitude of formal starchy France. For Lorna, a beautiful idyll is over, finished, done . . . In Lorna Mott Comes Home, Diane Johnson brings us into the dreamy, anxiety-filled American world of Lorna Mott Dumas, where much has changed and where she struggles to create a new life to support herself. Into the mix--her ex-husband, and the father of her three grown children (all supportive), and grandchildren with their own troubles (money, divorce, real estate, living on the fringe; a thriving software enterprise; a missing child in the far east; grandchildren--new hostages to fortune; and, one, 15 years old, a golden girl yet always different, diagnosed at a young age with diabetes, and now pregnant and determined to have the child) . . . In the midst of a large cast, the precarious balance of comedy and tragedy, happiness and anxiety, contentment and striving, generosity and greed, love and sex, Diane Johnson, our Edith Wharton of expat life, comes home to America to deftly, irresistibly portray, with the lightest of touch, the way we live now.
Download or read book Flyover Lives written by Diane Johnson and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2014-01-16 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “[A] vivid . . . quest for roots. . . . Splendid.” —The New York Times Book Review Growing up in the small river town of Moline, Illinois, Diane Johnson always dreamed of venturing off to see the world—and did. Now having traveled widely and lived part-time in Paris for many years, she is stung when a French friend teases her about Americans’ indifference to history. Could it be true? The j’accuse haunts Diane and inspires her to dig into her family’s past, working back from the Friday night football of her youth to the adventures illuminated in the letters and memoirs of her stalwart pioneer ancestors—beginning with a lonely young soldier who came to America from France in 1711. As enchanting as her bestselling novels, Flyover Lives is a moving examination of identity and the “wispy but material” family ghosts who shape us. As Johnson pays tribute to her deep Midwestern roots, she captures the perpetual tug-of-war between the magnetic pull of home and our lust for escape and self-invention.
Download or read book Le Divorce written by Diane Johnson and published by Random House. This book was released on 2012-01-31 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set in Paris, LE DIVORCE is an alluring and elegant comedy of love and divorce French-style. Isabel Walker, a young, not-so-innocent, American abroad, arrives in Paris to find that her sister's French husband ('the frog prince') has just walked out. While Isabel embarks on her own sentimental education - seduced by gourmet food, antiques, existentialism and an older man - her sister's marriage disintergrates into bitter Franco-American wrangles over money, titles and a mysterious painting. With a sharp tongue and an ironic eye for the foibles of the Parisian bourgeoisie, the French art world and American ex-patriots, Isabel is a collector of experience, even those she can't control. Comedy veers suddenly close to tragedy as passionate jealousy, self-interest and artistic intrigue interweave.
Download or read book Welcome to Paradise written by Mahi Binebine and published by Tin House Books. This book was released on 2012-03-27 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mahi Binebine's courageous novel delves into a world that most readers know only from stories on the nightly news, delivering a compassionate glimpse into the difficulties facing asylum seekers and a striking portrait of human desperation. Mahi Binebine’s courageous novel takes place in Morocco, where seven would-be immigrants gather one night near the Strait of Gibraltar to wait for a signal from a trafficker that it is time to cross. While they wait, their stories unfold: Kacem Judi is an escapee from the civil war in Algeria; Nuara, with her newborn child, hopes to find her husband, who hasn’t been in touch for months since moving to France; and Aziz, the young narrator, and his cousin Reda are severed, in different ways, from their families in southern Morocco. They all share a longing to escape and a readiness to risk everything. Welcome to Paradise delves into a world that most readers know only from stories on the nightly news, delivering a compassionate and striking portrait of human desperation.
Download or read book Understanding Diane Johnson written by Carolyn A. Durham and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2012-08-27 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Understanding Diane Johnson is a biographical and critical study of a quintessential American novelist who has devoted forty-five years to writing about French and American culture. Johnson, who was nominated for the National Book Award three times and the Pulitzer Prize twice, has been a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books since the 1970s and is the author of more than a dozen fiction and nonfiction volumes. Johnson is well known as a comic novelist who addresses serious social problems. Durham outlines Johnson's continued exploration of women's lives and her experimentation with varied forms of narrative technique and genre parody in the detective novels The Shadow Knows and Lying Low, both award-winning novels. Durham examines Johnson's reinvention of the international novel of manners—inherited from Henry James and Edith Wharton—in her best-selling Franco-American trilogy: Le Divorce, Le Mariage, and L'Affaire. As the first book-length study of this distinguished American writer, Understanding Diane Johnson surveys an extensive body of work and draws critical attention to a well-published, widely read author who was the winner of the California Book Awards Gold Medal for Fiction in 1997.
Download or read book The Players and the Game written by Julian Symons and published by . This book was released on 1972-01-01 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Horses of God written by Mahi Binebine and published by Granta Books. This book was released on 2013-04-04 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the outskirts of Casablanca, next to the dump, is the shantytown of Sidi Moumen, where Yachine and his ten brothers grew up in the aimless chaos of drugs, violence, unemployment, and despair. The barefoot boys started their own football team - the Stars of Sidi Moumen. They played amongst the rocks, detritus, and buried skeletons of the dump but they dreamed of becoming the best football players of all time. Then their dreams changed. Yachine's older brother Hamid started growing a beard and attending religious meetings with Sheikh Abou Zoubeir. Week after week, the sheikh beguiled the Stars of Sidi Moumen into believing that there was a better world in the afterlife, where their faith in Allah would be rewarded. They needed only to choose between dying gloriously and together, or living disgracefully and alone. For Yachine and his brother, the choice was clear.
Download or read book The Talented Miss Highsmith written by Joan Schenkar and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2010-01-18 with total page 733 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Patricia Highsmith's The Price of Salt is now a major motion picture (Carol) starring Cate Blanchett and Mia Wasikowska, directed by Todd Hayes A 2010 New York Times Notable Book A 2010 Lambda Literary Award Winner A 2009 Edgar Award Nominee A 2009 Agatha Award Nominee A Publishers Weekly Pick of the Week Patricia Highsmith, one of the great writers of twentieth-century American fiction, had a life as darkly compelling as that of her favorite "hero-criminal," the talented Tom Ripley. Joan Schenkar maps out this richly bizarre life from her birth in Texas to Hitchcock's filming of her first novel, Strangers on a Train, to her long, strange self-exile in Europe. We see her as a secret writer for the comics, a brilliant creator of disturbing fictions, and an erotic predator with dozens of women (and a few good men) on her love list. The Talented Miss Highsmith is the first literary biography with access to Highsmith's whole story: her closest friends, her oeuvre, her archives. It's a compulsive page-turner unlike any other, a book worthy of Highsmith herself.
Download or read book Lying Low written by Diane Johnson and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 1998-04-01 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST “A nearly flawless performance—a beautifully constructed, elegantly written book, delicate in its perceptions, powerful in its impact.”—New York Times The riveting story of four crucial days in the lives of four people sharing a rambling Victorian house, "lying low" and harboring secrets not meant to be shared Theo Wait, a middle-aged former ballet dancer, and her brother, Anton, have taken in two boarders: beautiful Lynn, who never receives mail or visitors; and energetic and effusive Ouida, a Brazilian student and illegal alien who won't let complicated bureaucratic wrangles and constant fear of deportation taint her vision of America as the land of opportunity. A faked identity, a search for one of the FBI's most wanted escaped prison convicts, and a Brazilian feast that spins out of control kick the plot into high gear. While each of these characters has been plagued by a sense of impending disaster, the terrible thing they've all been fearing comes from an entirely unexpected direction, shattering all of their lives.
Download or read book Crepuscule written by Roman Payne and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2004-10-31 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Crepuscule is a poetic panorama of life among the Parisians and the expatriates in the French capital. An intense drama flowing with passion, Crepuscule is the epic story of romance, love, freedom, and survival where the reader is taken on an expedition to the heights of hope and the depths of despair." - - From publisher's website.
Download or read book American Writers in Europe written by F. Asya and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-10-03 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These essays explore the impartial critical outlook American writers acquired through their experiences in Europe since 1850. Collectively, contributors reveal how the American writer's intuitive sense of freedom, coupled with their feeling of liberation from European influences, led to intellectual independence in the literary works they produced.
Download or read book Manservant and Maidservant written by Ivy Compton-Burnett and published by . This book was released on 1969 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Le Mariage written by Diane Johnson and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2001-04-01 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Like Jane Austen, Johnson delights in the worldly rituals surrounding courtship and marriage... she is a philosopher as much as a novelist."—The New Yorker From the author of the acclaimed bestseller and National Book Award finalist Le Divorce, a sparkling comedy of manners once again set in the world of Americans in Paris Anne-Sophie is a young Frenchwoman engaged to Tim Nolinger, an American journalist hot on the trail of a breaking story: The theft of a valuable illuminated manuscript from a private collection in New York, which may now be in the possession of a reclusive film director living on the outskirts of Paris. As Tim, Anne-Sophie, a pair of American antique dealers, and one amorous member of the local gentry converge on the director's chateau, the director's wife—a former actress—is accused of desecrating a national monument. Add to that a disappearing American; a hunting contretemps; a wrongful arrest; and murder, and you have this sexy, stylish, delight of a novel that celebrates the paradoxes of marriage and morality as they are perceived on both sides of the Atlantic. Filled with the author's pithy insights and hilarious asides, Le Mariage is Diane Johnson at her very best.
