Download or read book Sunstroke and Other Stories written by Tessa Hadley and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2007-07-24 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Picador Paperback Original Tessa Hadley's stories trace the currents of desire, desperation, and mischief that that lie hidden inside domestic relationships. A mother hears her son's confession that he's cheating on his girlfriend; a student falls in love with a professor and initiates an affair with a man who looks just like him. A boy on a seaside vacation realizes that a grown-up woman is pressing dangerously close. In Tessa Hadley's Sunstroke and Other Stories, everyone conspires to hold the loving and stable surface of family life together, as old secrets and new appetites threaten to blow it apart.
Download or read book Sunstroke And Other Stories written by Ian Watson and published by Gateway. This book was released on 2011-09-29 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This second collection of Watson's short stories further demonstrates his seemingly inexhaustible imagination. In 'The Thousand Cuts' the entire human race finds its consciousness blanked out for varying periods, but life seems somehow to have gone on in the missing days, and indeed, previously intractable problems have moved towards a solution. In 'Sunstroke' a doctor blinded accidentally during the voyage to a seemingly benign new world becomes gradually aware of disturbing changes afflicting her sighted companions. These stories, and many others, confirm Watson's place in the forefront of contemporary SF writers.
Download or read book Sunstroke written by Ivan Alekseevich Bunin and published by Ivan R. Dee Publisher. This book was released on 2002 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Graham Hettlinger has selected 25 of Ivan Bunin's stories and translated them afresh--several for the first time in English.
Download or read book Bad Dreams and Other Stories written by Tessa Hadley and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2017-05-16 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Edge Hill Short Story Prize A New York Times Notable Book of the Year An NPR Best Book of the Year The award-winning author of The Past once again "crystallizes the atmosphere of ordinary life in prose somehow miraculous and natural" (Washington Post), in a collection of stories that elevate the mundane into the exceptional. The author of six critically acclaimed novels, Tessa Hadley has proven herself to be the champion of revealing the hidden depths in the deceptively simple. In these short stories it’s the ordinary things that turn out to be most extraordinary: the history of a length of fabric or a forgotten jacket. Two sisters quarrel over an inheritance and a new baby; a child awake in the night explores the familiar rooms of her home, made strange by the darkness; a housekeeper caring for a helpless old man uncovers secrets from his past. The first steps into a turning point and a new life are made so easily and carelessly: each of these stories illuminate crucial moments of transition, often imperceptible to the protagonists. A girl accepts a lift in a car with some older boys; a young woman reads the diaries she discovers while housesitting. Small acts have large consequences, some that can reverberate across decades; private fantasies can affect other people, for better and worse. The real things that happen to people, the accidents that befall them, are every bit as mysterious as their longings and their dreams. Bad Dreams and Other Stories demonstrates yet again that Tessa Hadley "puts on paper a consciousness so visceral, so fully realized, it heightens and expands your own. She is a true master" (Lily King, author of Euphoria).
Download or read book The Decapitated Chicken and Other Stories written by Horacio Quiroga and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2013-05-15 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tales of horror, madness, and death, tales of fantasy and morality: these are the works of South American master storyteller Horacio Quiroga. Author of some 200 pieces of fiction that have been compared to the works of Poe, Kipling, and Jack London, Quiroga experienced a life that surpassed in morbidity and horror many of the inventions of his fevered mind. As a young man, he suffered his father's accidental death and the suicide of his beloved stepfather. As a teenager, he shot and accidentally killed one of his closest friends. Seemingly cursed in love, he lost his first wife to suicide by poison. In the end, Quiroga himself downed cyanide to end his own life when he learned he was suffering from an incurable cancer. In life Quiroga was obsessed with death, a legacy of the violence he had experienced. His stories are infused with death, too, but they span a wide range of short fiction genres: jungle tale, Gothic horror story, morality tale, psychological study. Many of his stories are set in the steaming jungle of the Misiones district of northern Argentina, where he spent much of his life, but his tales possess a universality that elevates them far above the work of a regional writer. The first representative collection of his work in English, The Decapitated Chicken and Other Stories provides a valuable overview of the scope of Quiroga's fiction and the versatility and skill that have made him a classic Latin American writer.
Download or read book Married Love written by Tessa Hadley and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2012-11-20 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Filled with exquisitely calibrated gradations and expressions of class, conducted with symphonic intensity and complexity. . . . Extraordinarily well-made.” —New York Times Book Review Married Love is a masterful collection of short fiction from one of today’s most accomplished storytellers. These tales showcase the qualities for which Tessa Hadley has long been praised: her humor, warmth, and psychological acuity; her powerful, precise, and emotionally dense prose; her unflinching examinations of family relationships. Here are stories that range widely across generations and classes, exploring the private and public lives of unforgettable characters: a young girl who haunts the edges of her parents’ party; a wife released by the sudden death of her film-director husband; an eighteen-year-old who insists on marrying her music professor, only to find herself shut out from his secrets. Hadley evokes worlds that expand in the imagination far beyond the pages, capturing domestic dramas, generational sagas, wrenching love affairs and epiphanies, and distilling them to remarkable effect. “Hadley parses the meaning of love in all its paradoxical, panoramic glory.” —Booklist “These stories are gemlike and unforgettable.” —Kate Tuttle, Boston Globe “One of the most interesting writers around.” —Philip Womack, The Spectator “Only Alice Munro and Colm Tóibin . . . are so adept at portraying whole lives in a few thousand words. . . . Hadley joins their company as one of the most clear-sighted chroniclers of contemporary emotional journeys.” —Edmund Gordon, The Guardian “There is a grand sweep and an emotional charge that brings to mind DH Lawrence.” —Elena Seymenliyska, Daily Telegraph (London)) “An exceptional storyteller.” —Library Journal “Shrewd, insightful, unpredictable.” —Kirkus Reviews
Download or read book Clever Girl written by Tessa Hadley and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2014-03-04 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Clever Girl is an indelible story of one woman’s life, unfolded in a series of beautifully sculpted episodes that illuminate an era, moving from the 1960s to today, from one of Britain’s leading literary lights—Tessa Hadley—the author of the New York Times Notable Books Married Love and The London Train. Like Alice Munro and Colm Tóibin, Tessa Hadley brilliantly captures the beauty, innocence, and irony of ordinary lives—an ability to transform the mundane into the sublime that elevates domestic fiction to literary art. Written with the celebrated precision, intensity, and complexity that have marked her previous works, Clever Girl is a powerful exploration of family relationships and class in modern life, witnessed through the experiences of an English woman named Stella. Unfolding in a series of snapshots, Tessa Hadley’s moving novel follows Stella from the shallows of childhood, growing up with a single mother in a Bristol bedsit in the 1960s, into the murky waters of middle age. Clever Girl is a story vivid in its immediacy and rich in drama—violent deaths, failed affairs, broken dreams, missed chances. Yet it is Hadley’s observations of everyday life, her keen skill at capturing the ways men and women think and feel and relate to one another, that dazzles.
Download or read book Late in the Day written by Tessa Hadley and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2019-01-15 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “With each new book by Tessa Hadley, I grow more convinced that she’s one of the greatest stylists alive.”—Ron Charles, Washington Post New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice |A Parnassus First Editions Club Pick | Powell’s Indispensable Book Club Pick | A Washington Post Notable Book | A Slate Best Book of the Year | A Boston Globe Best Book of the Year | A Bookpage Best Book of the Year The lives of two close-knit couples are irrevocably changed by an untimely death in the latest from Tessa Hadley, the acclaimed novelist and short story master who “recruits admirers with each book” (Hilary Mantel). Alexandr and Christine and Zachary and Lydia have been friends since they first met in their twenties. Thirty years later, Alex and Christine are spending a leisurely summer’s evening at home when they receive a call from a distraught Lydia: she is at the hospital. Zach is dead. In the wake of this profound loss, the three friends find themselves unmoored; all agree that Zach, with his generous, grounded spirit, was the irreplaceable one they couldn’t afford to lose. Inconsolable, Lydia moves in with Alex and Christine. But instead of loss bringing them closer, the three of them find over the following months that it warps their relationships, as old entanglements and grievances rise from the past, and love and sorrow give way to anger and bitterness. Late in the Day explores the complex webs at the center of our most intimate relationships, to expose how, beneath the seemingly dependable arrangements we make for our lives, lie infinite alternate configurations. Ingeniously moving between past and present and through the intricacies of her characters’ thoughts and interactions, Tessa Hadley once again “crystallizes the atmosphere of ordinary life in prose somehow miraculous and natural” (Washington Post).
Download or read book The London Train written by Tessa Hadley and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2011-05-24 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this New York Times Notable Book from one of today’s most acclaimed writers, two lives stretched between two cities converge in a chance meeting that will irrevocably change their lives. “Hadley is a supremely perceptive writer of formidable skill and intelligence, someone who goes well beyond surfaces.”—New York Times Book Review Unsettled by the recent death of his mother, Paul sets out in search of Pia, his daughter from his first marriage, who has disappeared into the labyrinth of London. Discovering her pregnant and living illegally in a run-down council flat with a pair of Polish siblings, Paul is entranced by Pia’s excitement at living on the edge. Abandoning his second wife and their children in Wales, he joins her to begin a new life in the heart of London. Cora, meanwhile, is running in the opposite direction, back to Cardiff, to the house she has inherited from her parents. She is escaping her marriage, and the constrictions and disappointments of her life in London. But there is a deeper reason why she cannot stay with her decent Civil Service husband; the aftershocks of which she hasn’t fully come to terms with herself. Connecting both stories is the London train, and a chance meeting that will have immediate and far-reaching consequences for both Paul and Cora.
Download or read book Selected Stories written by Alice Munro and published by Random House. This book was released on 2010 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Short Stories. This first-ever selection of Alice Munro's stories sums up her genius. Her territory is the secrets that cackle beneath the facade of everyday lives, the pain and promises, loves and fears of apparently ordinary men and women whom she renders extraordinary and unforgettable.
Download or read book The Master Bedroom written by Tessa Hadley and published by Henry Holt and Company. This book was released on 2007-07-24 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A single woman at loose ends becomes the object of two men's affections—a father and his teenage son—in this sly, richly drawn novel, The Master Bedroom After more than twenty years in London, Kate Flynn has returned to her family home in Wales to care for her aging mother. Having cast off her academic career, she is unmoored, and when she runs into a childhood friend, David Roberts, at a concert, she finds herself falling for him, although she knows she's grasping at anything to fill the sudden emptiness of her life. For his part, David's marriage isn't as solid as it looks—his wife, Suzie, has begun acting strangely, moving out of their bedroom, neglecting their children, and disappearing for days at a time—and he begins to seek refuge with Kate from the newfound chaos of his life. David's seventeen-year-old son, Jamie, is also drawn to Kate's eccentricity and her strange, glamorous old house full of books and music and history. As both father and son set about their parallel courtships, Tessa Hadley's intricate, graceful novel explores the tangled web of connections between parents and children, revealing how each generation replays the stories of the one that came before, in new and sometimes startling patterns.
Download or read book Free Love written by Tessa Hadley and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2022-02-01 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Tessa Hadley recruits admirers with each book. She writes with authority, and with delicacy: she explores nuance, but speaks plainly; she is one of those writers a reader trusts.”—Hilary Mantel From the bestselling author of Late in the Day and The Past comes a compulsive new novel about one woman’s sexual and intellectual awakening in 1960s London. 1967. While London comes alive with the new youth revolution, the suburban Fischer family seems to belong to an older world of conventional stability: pretty, dutiful homemaker Phyllis is married to Roger, a devoted father with a career in the Foreign Office. Their children are Colette, a bookish teenager, and Hugh, the golden boy. But when the twenty-something son of an old friend pays the Fischers a visit one hot summer evening, and kisses Phyllis in the dark garden after dinner, something in her catches fire. Newly awake to the world, Phyllis makes a choice that defies all expectations of her as a wife and a mother. Nothing in these ordinary lives is so ordinary after all, it turns out, as the family’s upheaval mirrors the dramatic transformation of the society around them. With scalpel-sharp insight, Tessa Hadley explores her characters’ inner worlds, laying bare their fears and longings. Daring and sensual, Free Love is an irresistible exploration of romantic love, sexual freedom and living out the truest and most meaningful version of our selves – a novel that showcases Hadley’s unrivaled ability to “put on paper a consciousness so visceral, so fully realized, it heightens and expands your own” (Lily King, author of Euphoria).
Download or read book The Gentleman from San Francisco and Other Stories written by Ivan Alekseyevich Bunin and published by Library of Alexandria. This book was released on 2020-09-28 with total page 77 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Fallen Moon written by Ian Watson and published by Gateway. This book was released on 2011-09-29 with total page 502 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The second and concluding volume of Ian Watson's extraordinary epic, The Book of Mana. Kaleva is Earth's first and only interstellar colony, discovered by Lucky Sariola who was transported there by an Ukko, a mysterious asteriod-like entity that responds to stories told to it - in Lucky's case, those of her Finnish grandmother. Now Queen Lucky, half-mad and newly widowed, is obsessed by relocating that Ukko - but this is potentially disastrous, as the snakelike alien Isi are also on its trail as part of their design to enslave humans. Understanding this, one of Lucky's daughters (with obsessions of her own) crowns herself rival queen. A summer turns into unseasonable winter and elysian peace turns to bitter civil war and Ukko, once more, has a role to play in the history of Kaleva.
Download or read book God s World written by Ian Watson and published by Gateway. This book was released on 2011-09-29 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The sudden appearance of angelic beings bearing a mystical space drive and a summons to ''God's World'' launches an international crew of scientists on a voyage to the far limits of space. There they become embroiled in an alien war that will decide the fate of all creation . . .
Download or read book The Collected Stories of Arthur C Clarke written by Arthur C. Clarke and published by Rosetta Books. This book was released on 2016-07-12 with total page 1575 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Six decades of fascinating stories from the legendary “colossus of science fiction” and creator of 2001: A Space Odyssey gathered in one compendium (The New Yorker). Arthur C. Clarke, along with H. G. Wells, Isaac Asimov, and Robert A. Heinlein, was a definitive voice in twentieth century science fiction. A prophetic thinker, undersea explorer, and “one of the true geniuses of our time,” Clarke not only won the highest science fiction honors, the Nebula and Hugo Awards, but also received nominations for an Academy Award and the Nobel Peace Prize, and was knighted for his services to literature (Ray Bradbury). Now, more than one hundred works of the sci-fi master’s short fiction are available in the “single-author collection of the decade” (Booklist, starred review). This definitive edition includes early work such as “Rescue Party” and “The Lion of Comarre,” classics like “The Nine Billion Names of God” and “The Sentinel” (which was the kernel of the later novel and movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey), and later works including “A Meeting with Medusa” and “The Hammer of God.” Encapsulating one of the great science fiction careers of all time, this immense volume “displays the author’s fertile imagination and irrepressible enthusiasm for both good storytelling and impeccable science” (Library Journal). “One of the most astounding imaginations ever encountered in print.” —The New York Times “As his Collected Stories helps to demonstrate, there has been no popular writer since the days of C S Lewis and Charles Williams whose disposition is more nakedly apocalyptic, who takes greater pleasure in cradling eternity in the palm of his hand.” —The Guardian
Download or read book The Sun s Heartbeat written by Bob Berman and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2011-07-13 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The beating heart of the sun is the very pulse of life on earth. And from the ancients who plotted its path at Stonehenge to the modern scientists who unraveled the nuclear fusion reaction that turns mass into energy, humankind has sought to solve its mysteries. In this lively biography of the sun, Bob Berman ranges from its stellar birth to its spectacular future death with a focus on the wondrous and enthralling, and on the heartbreaking sacrifice, laughable errors, egotistical battles, and brilliant inspirations of the people who have tried to understand its power. What, exactly, are the ghostly streaks of light astronauts see-but can't photograph-when they're in space? And why is it impossible for two people to see the exact same rainbow? Why are scientists beginning to think that the sun is safer than sunscreen? And how does the fluctuation of sunspots-and its heartbeat-affect everything from satellite communications to wheat production across the globe? Peppered with mind-blowing facts and memorable anecdotes about spectral curiosities-the recently-discovered "second sun" that lurks beneath the solar surface, the eerie majesty of a total solar eclipse-The Sun's Heartbeat offers a robust and entertaining narrative of how the Sun has shaped humanity and our understanding of the universe around us.
