Download or read book Pacazo written by Roy Kesey and published by Random House. This book was released on 2012-02-02 with total page 532 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Segovia is many things - American, corpulent, shambolic, and obsessed with the history of South America. This history is what drew him to the city of Piura in the coastal desert of Peru, where every grain of sand teems with stories of Incas and conquistadors. Here, where past and present intermesh, he thought he'd finally found a life for himself. He met Pilar and he married her; they had a baby girl. But John is now a widower - and a killer remains at large. A foreigner in a riotous, mythic city, John must somehow learn to be a father to his infant daughter, to cope with the visceral trauma of loss, and to suppress a voracious desire for impossible revenge. His story features an extraordinary cast of characters (a one-eyed nanny, a collective of monk-like vigilantes, the conquistadors themselves); it travels centuries within sentences, encompasses slapstick and heartbreak, and takes John from bordellos to bat-infested cinemas and ancient burial grounds in his attempts to 'beat back death'. Alive with risk and innovation, Pacazo is a novel which maximises the freedom of fiction. It gives living form to anger and fear and desire, to courage and kindness, strength and love, and tells a story as richly entertaining as it is moving.
Download or read book Pacazo Roy Kesey written by Roy Kesey and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2013-02-01 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Segovia is many things u American, corpulent, shambolic, and obsessed with the history of South America. This is what drew him to the city of Piura in the coastal desert of Peru, where every grain of sand teems with stories of Incas and Conquistadors. Here, where past and present intermesh, he thought he'd finally found a life for himself. He met Pilar and he married her; they had a baby girl. But John is now a widower, and a killer u a taxi driver u remains at large. In a riotous, decrepit city, where natural disasters make regular visits, John must somehow learn to be a father to his infant daughter, to cope with the visceral trauma of loss, and suppress a voracious desire for impossible revenge. This undertaking will not be a conventional one: it will feature an extraordinary cast of characters (a one-eyed nanny, a collective of monk-like vigilantes, the conquistadors themselves), travel centuries within a sentence, and take John from bordellos to bat-infested cinemas and ancient burial grounds in his attempts to 'beat back death'. Alive with risk and innovation, Pacazo is a novel which maximises the freedom of fiction. It gives living form to anger and fear and desire, to courage and kindness, strength and love, and tells a story as richly entertaining as it is moving.
Download or read book Any Deadly Thing written by Roy Kesey and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Short story collection from BASS author, Roy Kesey. With incredible language and plots, Kesey leaves his readers wanting more stories.
Download or read book The Wolf Gift written by Anne Rice and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2012-02-14 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • “Vintage Anne Rice—a lushly written, gothic … metaphysical tale. This time, with werewolves.” —The Wall Street Journal When Reuben Golding, a young reporter on assignment, arrives at a secluded mansion on a bluff high above the Pacific, it’s at the behest of the home’s enigmatic female owner. She quickly seduces him, but their idyllic night is shattered by violence when the man is inexplicably attacked—bitten—by a beast he cannot see in the rural darkness. It will set in motion a terrifying yet seductive transformation that will propel Reuben into a mysterious new world and raise profound questions. Why has he been given the wolf gift? What is its true nature—good or evil? And are there others out there like him?
Download or read book From Melancholia to Prozac written by Clark Lawlor and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2012-02-23 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Depression is an experience known to millions. But arguments rage on aspects of its definition and its impact on societies present and past: do drugs work, or are they merely placebos? Is the depression we have today merely a construct of the pharmaceutical industry? Is depression under- or over-diagnosed? Should we be paying for expensive 'talking cure' treatments like psychoanalysis or Cognitive Behavioural Therapy? Here, Clark Lawlor argues that understanding the history of depression is important to understanding its present conflicted status and definition. While it is true that our modern understanding of the word 'depression' was formed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the condition was originally known as melancholia, and characterised by core symptoms of chronic causeless sadness and fear. Beginning in the Classical period, and moving on to the present, Lawlor shows both continuities and discontinuities in the understanding of what we now call depression, and in the way it has been represented in literature and art. Different cultures defined and constructed melancholy and depression in ways sometimes so different as to be almost unrecognisable. Even the present is still a dynamic history, in the sense that the 'new' form of depression, defined in the 1980s and treated by drugs like Prozac, is under attack by many theories that reject the biomedical model and demand a more humanistic idea of depression - one that perhaps returns us to a form of melancholy.
Download or read book Cooked Up written by and published by New Internationalist. This book was released on 2015-03-16 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Food can bring together families, communities, and cultures. It is the essence of life and yet our relationships with one another can be most fraught at the dinner table. This perpetually fascinating subject has inspired a unique collection of fiction—including flash fiction, essay, short stories, and even a "stoku" (amalgam of short story and haiku)—from a wonderfully diverse and international group of authors. The authors in the anthology include Elaine Chiew, Chitra Banarjee Divakaruni, Rachel J. Fenton, Diana Ferraro, Vanessa Gebbie, Pippa Goldschmidt, Sue Guiney, Patrick J. Holland, Roy Kesey, Charles Lambert, Krys Lee, Stefani Nellen, Mukoma Wa Ngugi, Ben Okri, Angie Pelekidis, Susannah Rickards, and Nikesh Shukla. Elaine Chiew is a London-based writer who has won several prizes for her short stories and flash fiction. She was included in One World: A Global Anthology of Short Stories. Many of her stories revolve around food. Chitra Banarjee Divakaruni is an award-winning author, poet, activist, and teacher of writing. She has been published in many magazines and her writing has been included in over fifty anthologies. Ben Okri has published eight novels, including The Famished Road and Starbook, as well as collections of poetry, short stories, and essays. He has won numerous international prizes. Pippa Goldschmidt writes long and short fiction, poetry and nonfiction. Her PhD in astronomy inspired her first novel The Falling Sky, about a female astronomer who discovers the Universe and loses her mind.
Download or read book My Mother was an Upright Piano written by Tania Hershman and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: My Mother Was an Upright Piano builds on the strengths of Tania Hershman's first collection of short stories The White Road which was commended by the judges of the 2009 Orange Award for New Writers. Hershman's fiction is inspiring, thought-provoking and witty. Her economy with words cloaks her subtlety and power, and she is able to create characters with distinct voices and explore deep and sometimes disturbing relationships is just a few paragraphs of prose. Her writing style has a lyrical quality and often the meter of her work brings added resonance to her themes.
Download or read book Middle Age written by David Bainbridge and published by Granta Publications. This book was released on 2012-03-01 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “There's lots of good news for the middle aged…A very jolly book with clear scientific explanations.”—The Telegraph David Bainbridge is a vet with a particular interest in evolutionary zoology—and he has just turned forty. As well as the usual concerns about greying hair, failing eyesight, and goldfish levels of forgetfulness, he finds himself pondering some bigger questions: have I come to the end of my productive life as a human being? And what I am now for? By looking afresh at the latest research from the fields of anthropology, neuroscience, psychology, and reproductive biology, it seems that the answers are surprisingly, reassuringly encouraging. In clear, engaging and amiable prose, Bainbridge explains the science behind the physical, mental and emotional changes men and women experience between the ages of 40 and 60, and reveals the evolutionary—and personal—benefits of middle age, which is unique to human beings and helps to explain the extraordinary success of our species. Middle Age will change the way you think about midlife, and help turn the crisis into a cause for celebration. “Bainbridge's zoological examination of the human animal results in a study that is full of surprises...Heartening.”—Sunday Times “Thought-provoking. [It] should certainly shed some new light on one's own potbellied or menopausal mid-life crisis...Fascinating.”—Evening Standard
Download or read book How to Mars written by David Ebenbach and published by . This book was released on 2021-05-28 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What happens when your dream mission to Mars is a reality TV nightmare? "Ebenbach is more at home in the minefield of ambiguity than most of us are in our houses." ―Roy Kesey, author of Any Deadly Thing For the six lucky scientists selected by the Destination Mars! corporation, a one-way ticket to Mars--in exchange for a lifetime of research--was an absolute no-brainer. The incredible opportunity was clearly worth even the most absurdly tedious screening process. Perhaps worth following the odd protocols in a nonsensical handbook written by an eccentric billionaire. Possibly even worth the constant surveillance, which is carefully edited into a TV ratings bonanza on Earth. But it turns out that after a while even scientists can get bored of science. Tempers begin to fray; unsanctioned affairs blossom. When perfectly good equipment begins to fail, the Marsonauts are faced with a possibility that technology simply cannot explain. Irreverent, poignant, and perfectly weird, David Ebenbach's debut science-fiction outing, like a mission to Mars, is an incredible outing you will never forget.
Download or read book Coulrophobia Fata Morgana written by Jacob M. Appel and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his ninth book and fifth collection of stories, Jacob M. Appel introduces readers to a diplomat's wife who attempts to seduce her chimney sweep through Norwegian lessons, a minister whose dead wife is romantically involved with Greta Garbo, and a landlord menaced by a rent-delinquent mime.
Download or read book Comedy and Error written by Simon Day and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2011-06-23 with total page 405 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Best known as one of the stars of the Fast Show(where he played characters such as Dave Angel -- Eco-Warrior, Tommy Cockles and Competitive Dad) and Bellamy's Peopleco-starring Paul Whitehouse, Simon Day tells the shocking, sometimes sad and hilariously funny story of his life so far. Simon Day's memoir is a story of unlikely successes and secret lives. In the early 1980s he was a petty thief living rough in South East London and stealing whatever he could to fund an addiction to fruit machines. He was arrested and sentenced to borstal. Simon's memoir tells the story of how this nice, middle-class boy from the suburbs -- a self-confessed 'crap criminal' -- served time with the professionals and hard-cases in a jail fiercely divided along racial lines during the height of the 1981 riots. It moves on to the lucky breaks, the talent getting recognised, the 'redemption' of his years as a celebrity . . . with the parallel story of his addiction which -- with money and success -- became fuelled by drugs. Dark and dramatic, Simon Day's memoir is a laugh-out-loud-funny story of drugs, crime and comedy.
Download or read book Running Through Beijing written by Xu Zechen and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chinese literature published in the United States has tended to focus on politics -- think the Cultural Revolution and dissidents -- but there's a whole other world of writing out there. It's punk, dealing with the harsh realities lived by the millions of city-dwellers struggling to get by in the grey economy. Dunhuahg, recently out of prison for selling fake IDs, has just enough money for a couple of meals. He also has no place to stay and no prospects for earning more yuan. When he happens to meet a pretty woman selling pirated DVDs, he falls into both an unexpected romance and a new business venture. But when her on-and-off boyfriend steps back into the picture, Dunhuahg is forced to make some tough decisions. Running Through Beijing explores an underworld of constant thievery, hardcore porn, cops (both real and impostors), prison bribery, rampant drinking, and the smothering, bone-dry dust storms that blanket one of the world's largest cities. Like a literary Run Lola Run, it follows a hustling hero rushing at breakneck speed to stay just one step ahead. Full of well-drawn, authentic characters, Running Through Beijing is a masterful performance from a fresh Chinese voice.
Download or read book What Happened Here written by Bonnie ZoBell and published by . This book was released on 2014-05-03 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Bonnie ZoBell's linked novella and story collection, What Happened Here, made me feel as if I'd lived all my life in San Diego's North Park, whose inhabitants live and work in the long shadow of the 1978 airline crash that decimated the neighborhood. What is most extraordinary is the ease with which ZoBell at once accumulates the layers of a novelistic narrative and offers us beautifully written, compact stories with lives of their own. Like Krzysztof Kie lowski's Red or Haruki Murakami's After the Quake, ZoBell allows us a complete picture only through a nimble narrative triangulation between the many characters and stories. The hard-fought and bounded truth we see here is, I think, the truest kind of truth." -Jerry Gabriel, author of Drowned Boy, winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction"
Download or read book Light Lifting written by Alexander MacLeod and published by Random House. This book was released on 2012-02-02 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Light Lifting is a suite of darkly urban, unflinching elegies. The seven stories each encompass a keenly observed, immersive world, rooted firmly in the real life of work and family. They are elemental stories of work and its bonds, of tragedy and tragedy barely averted, but also of beauty and love and moments of pure transcendence.
Download or read book The Little Shadows written by Marina Endicott and published by Random House. This book was released on 2012-02-02 with total page 546 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: MARINA ENDICOTT PRESENTS THE THREE GRACEFUL AVERY GIRLS THE SISTER ACT TO TAKE VAUDEVILLE BY STORM STARRING: AURORA, CLOVER and BELLA As they set off on the road to fame and fortune, the Avery sisters join a cast of extraordinary and unforgettable characters – charming charlatans, unpredictable eccentrics, and some who seem ordinary but have magical gifts. Taking us behind the curtain and into their lives, THE LITTLE SHADOWS reveals how the art of vaudeville – in all its variety, madness, melodrama, hilarity and sorrow – echoes the art of life itself.
Download or read book Await Your Reply written by Dan Chaon and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2009-08-25 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: BONUS: This edition contains an Await Your Reply discussion guide. The lives of three strangers interconnect in unforeseen ways–and with unexpected consequences–in acclaimed author Dan Chaon’s gripping, brilliantly written new novel. Longing to get on with his life, Miles Cheshire nevertheless can’t stop searching for his troubled twin brother, Hayden, who has been missing for ten years. Hayden has covered his tracks skillfully, moving stealthily from place to place, managing along the way to hold down various jobs and seem, to the people he meets, entirely normal. But some version of the truth is always concealed. A few days after graduating from high school, Lucy Lattimore sneaks away from the small town of Pompey, Ohio, with her charismatic former history teacher. They arrive in Nebraska, in the middle of nowhere, at a long-deserted motel next to a dried-up reservoir, to figure out the next move on their path to a new life. But soon Lucy begins to feel quietly uneasy. My whole life is a lie, thinks Ryan Schuyler, who has recently learned some shocking news. In response, he walks off the Northwestern University campus, hops on a bus, and breaks loose from his existence, which suddenly seems abstract and tenuous. Presumed dead, Ryan decides to remake himself–through unconventional and precarious means. Await Your Reply is a literary masterwork with the momentum of a thriller, an unforgettable novel in which pasts are invented and reinvented and the future is both seductively uncharted and perilously unmoored.
Download or read book Various Pets Alive and Dead written by Marina Lewycka and published by Fig Tree. This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marcus and Doro were part of a commune from the late 1960s until the early 1990s: lentils, free love, spliffs, radical politics, cheesecloth blouses, sex, housework and cooking rotas, crochet, allotments. Their children have grown up differently from them: primary school teacher Clara craves order and clean bathrooms ; son Serge is pretending he is still doing a doctorate at Cambridge ; while third child Oolie Anna, who has Downs Syndrome, is desperate to escape home and live on her own. Once the truth starts breaking through, who knows what further secrets will be revealed about any of them? Risible tale of modern values, featuring hamsters, cockroaches, poodles, a chicken and multiplying rabbits.
