Download or read book Samedi the Deafness written by Jesse Ball and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2008-07-15 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One morning in the park James Sim discovers a man, crumpled on the ground, stabbed in the chest. In the man's last breath, he whispers his confession: Samedi. What follows is a spellbinding game of cat and mouse as James is abducted, brought to an asylum, and seduced by a woman in yellow. Who is lying? What is Samedi? And what will happen on the seventh day?
Download or read book The Curfew written by Jesse Ball and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-06-14 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: William and Molly lead a life of small pleasures, riddles at the kitchen table, and games of string and orange peels. All around them a city rages with war. When the uprising began, William’s wife was taken, leaving him alone with their young daughter. They keep their heads down and try to remain unnoticed as police patrol the streets, enforcing a curfew and arresting citizens. But when an old friend seeks William out, claiming to know what happened to his wife, William must risk everything. He ventures out after dark, and young Molly is left to play, reconstructing his dangerous voyage, his past, and their future. An astounding portrait of fierce love within a world of random violence, The Curfew is a mesmerizing feat of literary imagination.
Download or read book Silence Once Begun written by Jesse Ball and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2014-01-28 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the celebrated author of The Curfew (“A spare masterwork of dystopian fiction” —The New York Times Book Review), Jesse Ball’s Silence Once Begun is an astonishing novel of unjust conviction, lost love, and a journalist’s obsession. Over the course of several months, eight people vanish from their homes in the same Japanese town, a single playing card found on each door. Known as the “Narito Disappearances,” the crime has authorities baffled—until a confession appears on the police’s doorstep, signed by Oda Sotatsu, a thread salesman. Sotatsu is arrested, jailed, and interrogated—but he refuses to speak. Even as his parents, brother, and sister come to visit him, even as his execution looms, and even as a young woman named Jito Joo enters his cell, he maintains his vow of silence. Our narrator, a journalist named Jesse Ball, is grappling with mysteries of his own when he becomes fascinated by the case. Why did Sotatsu confess? Why won’t he speak? Who is Jito Joo? As Ball interviews Sotatsu’s family, friends, and jailers, he uncovers a complex story of heartbreak, deceit, honor, and chance. Wildly inventive and emotionally powerful, Silence Once Begun is a devastating portrayal of a justice system compromised, and evidence that Jesse Ball is a voraciously gifted novelist working at the height of his powers. This ebook edition includes a Reading Group Guide.
Download or read book The Way Through Doors written by Jesse Ball and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2009-02-10 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With his debut novel, Samedi the Deafness, Jesse Ball emerged as one of our most extraordinary new writers. Now, Ball returns with this haunting tale of love and storytelling, hope and identity. When Selah Morse sees a young woman get hit by a speeding taxicab, he rushes her to the hospital. The girl has lost her memory; she is delirious and has no identification, so Selah poses as her boyfriend. She is released into his care, but the doctor charges him to keep her awake, and to help her remember her past. Through the long night, he tells her stories, inventing and inventing, trying to get closer to what might be true, and hoping she will recognize herself in one of his tales. Offering up moments of pure insight and unexpected, exuberant humor, The Way Through Doors demonstrates Jesse Ball's great artistry and gift for and narrative.
Download or read book Daniel Fights a Hurricane written by Shane Jones and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2012-07-31 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ever since he was a boy, Daniel Suppleton has been deathly afraid of hurricanes, which he fears will arrive suddenly and reduce everyone he knows and loves to trembling skeletons. Retreating to live in a tipi in the woods, Daniel battles demons real and imagined. As his ex-wife, Karen, frantically searches for him, the long-awaited hurricane finally hits, and Daniel must find a way to save them both. Haunting, mesmerizing, and beautifully written, Daniel Fights a Hurricane is an affecting, original novel of love and loss, marriage and friendship, by a rising young talent.
Download or read book A Cure for Suicide written by Jesse Ball and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2016-06-14 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ***LONG-LISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD*** A man and a woman have moved into a small house in a small village. The woman is an "examiner," charged with teaching the man a series of simple functions—this is a chair, this is a fork, this is how you meet people. Still, the man is haunted by strange dreams, and when he meets a charismatic, volatile young woman named Hilda at a party, it throws everything he has learned into question. What is this village? And why is he here? A fascinating novel of love, illness, despair, and betrayal, A Cure for Suicide is the most captivating novel yet from one of our most audacious and original young writers.
Download or read book How to Set a Fire and Why written by Jesse Ball and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2016-07-05 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A teenage girl. A shattering loss. An obsession with a secret arson club. This is the story of a girl who has nothing and will burn anything. Lucia’s father is dead, her mother is in a mental hospital, and she’s living in a garage-turned-bedroom with her aunt. And now she’s been kicked out of school—again. Making her way through the world with only a book, a zippo lighter, a pocketful of stolen licorice, a biting wit, and the striking intelligence that she tries to hide, Lucia spends her days riding the bus to visit her mother and following the only rule that makes any sense to her: Don’t do things you aren’t proud of. But when she discovers that her new school has a secret Arson Club, she’s willing to do anything to be a part of it, and her life is suddenly lit up. As Lucia’s fascination with the Arson Club grows, her story becomes one of misguided friendship and, ultimately, destruction.
Download or read book Census written by Jesse Ball and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2018-03-06 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NAMED A RECOMMENDED BOOK OF 2018 BY TheNew York Times•TheChicago Reader • Nylon • The Boston Globe • TheHuffington Post • The Rumpus •The AV Club •Southern Living •The Millions • Buzzfeed • Esquire • Publishers Weekly A powerful and moving new novel from an award-winning, acclaimed author: in the wake of a devastating revelation, a father and son journey north across a tapestry of towns When a widower receives notice from a doctor that he doesn’t have long left to live, he is struck by the question of who will care for his adult son—a son whom he fiercely loves, a boy with Down syndrome. With no recourse in mind, and with a desire to see the country on one last trip, the man signs up as a census taker for a mysterious governmental bureau and leaves town with his son. Traveling into the country, through towns named only by ascending letters of the alphabet, the man and his son encounter a wide range of human experience. While some townspeople welcome them into their homes, others who bear the physical brand of past censuses on their ribs are wary of their presence. When they press toward the edges of civilization, the landscape grows wilder, and the towns grow farther apart and more blighted by industrial decay. As they approach “Z,” the man must confront a series of questions: What is the purpose of the census? Is he complicit in its mission? And just how will he learn to say good-bye to his son? Mysterious and evocative, Census is a novel about free will, grief, the power of memory, and the ferocity of parental love, from one of our most captivating young writers.
Download or read book Black Water written by Joyce Carol Oates and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1993-05-01 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Pulitzer Prize-nominated novel from the author of the New York Times bestselling novel We Were the Mulvaneys “Its power of evocation is remarkable.” —The New Yorker In the midst of a long summer on Grayling Island, Maine, twenty-six-year-old Kelly Kelleher longs for something interesting to happen to her—something that will make her finally feel some of what she imagines other people must feel when they watch the fireworks explode off the beach. So when Kelly meets The Senator at an exclusive party and he asks her to go back to a hotel room on the main island with him, she says yes. Even though the senator is old enough to be her father, even though he has perhaps been drinking too heavily to get behind the wheel, the danger of saying yes is an inevitable and even exciting part of the adventure Kelly is finally going to have. However, as The Senator’s car whips around the island’s roads and eventually crashes through a guardrail, it becomes clear to Kelly and the reader that this man embodies a wholly different and more sinister type of danger, one much larger and harder to contain than the horrible events that unfold as Kelly is left in the sinking car. Black Water is a chilling meditation on power, trust, and violation and a timeless classic from one of America’s foremost storytellers.
Download or read book The Divers Game written by Jesse Ball and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2019-09-10 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the inimitable mind of award-winning author Jesse Ball, a novel about an unsettlingly familiar society that has renounced the concept of equality—and the devastating consequences of unmitigated power The old-fashioned struggle for fairness has finally been abandoned. It was a misguided endeavor. The world is divided into two groups, pats and quads. The pats may kill the quads as they like, and do. The quads have no recourse but to continue with their lives. The Divers’ Game is a thinly veiled description of our society, an extreme case that demonstrates a truth: we must change or our world will collapse. What is the effect of constant fear on a life, or on a culture? The Divers’ Game explores the consequences of violence through two festivals, and through the dramatic and excruciating examination of a woman’s final moments. Brilliantly constructed and achingly tender, The Divers’ Game shatters the notion of common decency as the binding agent between individuals, forcing us to consider whether compassion is intrinsic to the human experience. With his signature empathy and ingenuity, Jesse Ball’s latest work solidifies his reputation as one of contemporary fiction’s most mesmerizing talents.
Download or read book Fondly written by Colin Winnette and published by . This book was released on 2013-08-06 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In two sharp, refreshingly different novellas, Colin Winette explores the tragic but persistent bloodline of a family in small-town Texas, and the surreal, various lives of two sisters, exploring what, if anything, holds us together.
Download or read book The Epiphany Machine written by David Burr Gerrard and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2017-07-18 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: *Best New Science Fiction for Summer by The Washington Post *A Most-Anticipated book of 2017 by The Millions Everyone else knows the truth about you, now you can know it, too. That’s the slogan. The product: a junky contraption that tattoos personalized revelations on its users’ forearms. It’s an old con, playing on the fear that we are obvious to everybody except ourselves. This particular ad has been circulating New York since the 1960s and it works. But, oddly enough, so might the device... A small stream of city dwellers buy into this cult of the epiphany machine, including Venter Lowood’s parents. This stigma follows them when they move upstate, where Venter can’t avoid the whispers of teachers and neighbors any more than he can ignore the machine’s accurate predictions: his mother’s abandonment and his father’s disinterest. So when Venter’s grandmother finally asks him to confront the epiphany machine and inoculate himself against his family’s mistakes, he’s only too happy to oblige. Like his parents before him, Venter is quick to fall under the spell of the device’s sweat-stained, profane, and surprisingly charming operator, Adam Lyons. But unlike them, Venter gets close enough to Adam to learn a dark secret. There’s an undeniable pattern between specific epiphanies and violent crimes. And Adam won’t jeopardize the privacy of his customers by alerting the police. It may be a hoax, but that doesn’t mean what Adam is selling isn’t also spot-on. And in this sprawling, snarling tragicomedy about accountability in contemporary America, the greater danger is that Adam Lyon’s apparatus may just be right about us all. This is "can't-miss pop culture."(Vox)
Download or read book Albion s Seed written by David Hackett Fischer and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1991-03-14 with total page 972 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This fascinating book is the first volume in a projected cultural history of the United States, from the earliest English settlements to our own time. It is a history of American folkways as they have changed through time, and it argues a thesis about the importance for the United States of having been British in its cultural origins. While most people in the United States today have no British ancestors, they have assimilated regional cultures which were created by British colonists, even while preserving ethnic identities at the same time. In this sense, nearly all Americans are "Albion's Seed," no matter what their ethnicity may be. The concluding section of this remarkable book explores the ways that regional cultures have continued to dominate national politics from 1789 to 1988, and still help to shape attitudes toward education, government, gender, and violence, on which differences between American regions are greater than between European nations.
Download or read book Random Acts of Senseless Violence written by Jack Womack and published by Grove/Atlantic, Inc.. This book was released on 2007-12-01 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year: In a dystopian future New York, a girl’s diary chronicles her life as society begins to crumble around her. Until recently, Lola Hart’s biggest problem was her annoying little sister. Now the twelve-year-old girl’s once comfortable life is slowly falling apart. Her mother is a teacher, but she’s lost her job. Her father is a writer, but no one is buying his scripts. It’s gotten so bad that they can no longer afford their Manhattan apartment or the tuition for Lola’s exclusive private school. They move to a small apartment near Harlem, and Lola enrolls in public school—but the Harts aren’t alone in their troubles. Riots, fires, TB outbreaks, roaming gangs, and civil unrest have become commonplace, threatening the very fabric of life in New York. In the pages of her diary, Lola documents her family’s attempts to adjust as the city and the country spin out of control. Jack Womack, a winner of the Philip K. Dick Award, has been compared to both William Gibson and Kurt Vonnegut for his vivid prose and unbridled imagination. In this novel, “Womack’s stark vision of the United States’s decline is an uncompromising satire that, perhaps even more than it did in the mid-1990s, forces us to confront a world instantly recognizable as our own” (Los Angeles Review of Books). “A heartrending coming-of-age story. Flecked with black humor, this is speculative fiction at its eerie best.” —Entertainment Weekly
Download or read book The Disastrous Tale of Vera Linus written by Jesse Ball and published by Nyhil. This book was released on 2006 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fiction. VERA & LINUS is a series of short sketches. The book's theme is the love between the two protagonists, Vera and Linus. They are mischief makers and tricksters of the most daring sort, and they are constantly up to no good, but the language holds them with a clear restraint, a restraint born perhaps out of the peculiar nature of their love, a love both for each other and the things of the world. Their mastery, and shifting natures allow them to compel the workaday world as they see it, but not to rule over each other, and so their game begins, as Vera struggles to outwit Linus, and Linus to outwit Vera.
Download or read book The Almost Moon written by Alice Sebold and published by . This book was released on 2014-05-21 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For years Helen Knightly has given her life to others: to her haunted mother, to her enigmatic father, to her husband and now grown children. When she finally crosses a terrible boundary, her life comes rushing in at her in a way she never could have imagined. Unfolding over the next twenty-four hours, this searing, fast-paced novel explores the complex ties between mothers and daughters, wives and lovers, the meaning of devotion, and the line between love and hate. A challenging, moving, gripping story of cumulative disappointments and low self esteem which prevent Helen from planning too far ahead or from expecting too much from the world. She's forever trapped in the muck of low expectations.
Download or read book Why I Don t Write written by Susan Minot and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2021-06-15 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A superb collection of short fiction--her first in thirty years and spanning many geographies--from the critically acclaimed author of Monkeys, Evening, and Thirty Girls. A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK. A writer dryly catalogs the myriad reasons she cannot write; an artist bicycles through a protest encampment in lower Manhattan and ruminates on an elusive lover; an old woman on her deathbed calls out for a man other than her husband; a hapless fifteen-year-old boy finds himself in sexual peril; two young people in the 1990s fall helplessly in love, then bicker just as helplessly, tortured by jealousy and mistrust. In each of these stories Minot explores the difficult geometry of human relations, the lure of love and physical desire, and the lifelong quest for meaning and connection. Her characters are all searching for truth, in feeling and in action, as societal norms are upended and justice and coherence flounder. Urgent and immediate, precisely observed, deeply felt, and gorgeously written, the stories in Why I Don't Write showcase an author at the top of her form.
