Download or read book The Ballantine Reader s Circle Reader written by and published by . This book was released on 1975 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fiction excerpts from eighteen acclaimed authors whose works appeared as Ballantine Reader's Circle titles in 1999; with a personal introduction to each author from their editor on what delights them about their authors' fiction.
Download or read book The Interpreter written by Suzanne Glass and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Interpreter is Dominique, a genius with language who, despite her professional brilliance, has not yet found her own voice. When she overhears a whispered conversation about the suppression of AIDS breakthrough, the interpreter’s mantra rings in her ears: ‘Confidentiality. Your vow is as solemn as the Hippocratic Oath. As sacred as a nun’s marriage to Jesus.’ But Dominique’s best friend Mischa is HIV positive. Drawn into a passionate love affair with Nicholas Manzini, an Italian doctor, Dominique slowly beings to discover her own voice. But her dilemma remains—and will test both her strength of character and the depth of her love for Nicholas.
Download or read book Black Glass written by Karen Joy Fowler and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2015-06-23 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An early work from PEN/Faulkner Award winner and Man Booker finalist Karen Joy Fowler, reissued and beautifully repackaged for new fans and old. First published in 1998 to high praise, and now reissued with the addition of a prefatory essay, Black Glass showcases the extraordinary talents of this prizewinning author. In fifteen gemlike tales, Fowler lets her wit and vision roam freely, turning accepted norms inside out and fairy tales upside down—pushing us to reconsider our unquestioned verities and proving once again that she is among our most subversive writers. So, then: Here is Carry Nation loose again, breaking up discos, smashing topless bars, radicalizing women as she preaches clean living to men more intent on babes and booze. And here is Mrs. Gulliver, her patience with her long-voyaging Lemuel worn thin: Money is short and the kids can’t even remember what their dad looks like. And what of Tonto, the ever-faithful companion, turning forty without so much as a birthday phone call from that masked man? It is a book full of great themes and terrific stories—but it is the way in which Fowler tells the tale, develops plot and character, plays with time, chance, and reality that makes these pieces so original.
Download or read book Southern Living written by Ad Hudler and published by Random House Digital, Inc.. This book was released on 2003 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of "Househusband" comes a funny, poignant novel about three very different women whose lives converge in the Georgia town of Selby.
Download or read book In Dark Water written by Mermer Blakeslee and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1958, in a small town in upstate New York, the Buell family is falling apart. The sudden death of David, the only son, forever changes the bonds that connect them to one another and to the world. As her mother sinks into depression, eleven-year-old Dorrie Buell, full of an unusual mix of grit and delicacy, sets out on her own. Armed with the imagined identity of a cowboy drifter, Dorrie finds kinship and refuge in the hilltop farm of the eccentric Tappen family. Yet the deep currents of Dorrie's life keep pulling her back toward her mother, toward the past that binds them, toward common ground. Luminous and alive with the secret knowledge of childhood, In Dark Water is a stunning novel of one family's trial and redemption.
Download or read book Clay s Quilt written by Silas House and published by Algonquin Books. This book was released on 2001-04-01 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On a bone-chilling New Year's Day, when all the mountain roads are slick with ice, Clay's mother, Anneth, insists on leaving her husband. She packs her things, and with three-year-old Clay in tow, they inch their way toward her hometown along the treacherous mountain roads. That journey ends in the death of Clay's mother. It's a day that comes to haunt her only son, who's left without a family and a history. This is the story of how Clay Sizemore, a coal miner in love with his town but unsure of his place within it, finds a family to call his own. And it's the story of the people who become part of the life he shapes: Aunt Easter, always filled with a sense of foreboding and bound to her faith above all; Uncle Paul, quietly producing quilt after quilt; Dreama, beautiful and flighty; Evangeline, the untameable daughter of a famous gospel singer; and Alma, the fiddler whose song wends its way into Clay's heart. Together, they all help Clay to fashion a quilt of a life from what treasured pieces are around him. Authentic and moving, Clay's Quilt is both the story of a young man's journey and of Appalachian people struggling to hold on to their heritage.
Download or read book The Mommy Club written by Sarah Bird and published by Doubleday Books. This book was released on 1991 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A young surrogate mother attempts to make an ordered world for her child as she wanders through the maze of trendy yuppiedom to the treacherous waters of her relations with her old love, Sinclair.
Download or read book The Seduction of Water written by Carol Goodman and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2003-12-30 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Iris Greenfeder, ABD (All But Dissertation), feels the “buts” are taking over her life: all but published, all but a professor, all but married. Yet the sudden impulse to write a story about her mother, Katherine Morrissey, leads to a shot at literary success. The piece recounts an eerie Irish fairy tale her mother used to tell her at bedtime—and nestled inside it is the sad story of her death. It captures the attention of her mother’s former literary agent, who is convinced that Katherine wrote one final manuscript before her strange, untimely end in a fire thirty years ago. So Iris goes back to the remote Hotel Equinox in the Catskills, the place where she grew up, to write her mother’s biography and search for the missing manuscript—and there she unravels a haunting mystery, one that holds more secrets than she ever expected. . . .
Download or read book Billie s Kiss written by Elizabeth Knox and published by Victoria University Press. This book was released on 2013-06-01 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With an Edwardian twist on The Tempest, and surprising, earthy, and magical qualities, this irresistible novel is set on the remote, divided Scottish island of Kissack and Skilling, one half of which looks historically and geographically towards Catholic Ireland, the other toward the Protestant north and Scandinavia. In the spring of 1903 a ship explodes as it docks on the island, drowning many of the passengers and crew in the icy waters of Stolnsay harbor. Young, strawberry-blonde-haired Billie Paxton is among the only survivors. Clumsy, illiterate, and suddenly alone, Billie will not say why, before the explosion, she jumped from ship to shore, and so falls under the immediate suspicion of her fellow passenger, Murdo Hesketh, and his cousin and employer, Lord Hallowhulme, who owns the island—and has controversial plans for improving the lives of its inhabitants. Gloriously inventive and vividly atmospheric, Billie’s Kiss conjures up a way of life hurtling toward a brave new world in an enchanting novel that brings together murder and eugenics, progress, prejudice, and the loss of innocence.
Download or read book Carolina Moon written by Jill McCorkle and published by Algonquin Books. This book was released on 2012-04-21 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the course of this wide-ranging, richly detailed novel, every kind of human problem finds its way to the doorstep of Quee Purdy, a tireless entrepreneur for whom love and sex are the "hot commodities" in which she deals. McCorkle's extraordinary storytelling skills allow her to juggle at least six parallel stories in a novel about playing God. And she does it divinely.
Download or read book All Is Vanity written by Christina Schwarz and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2002-10-15 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At once darkly comedic and moving, this witty exploration of female friendship, envy, and misguided ambition by the author of the number-one bestseller Drowning Ruth, deliciously satirizes the desire to shine in the world. In All is Vanity, Margaret and Letty, best friends since childhood and now living on opposite coasts, reach their mid-thirties and begin to chafe at their sense that they are not where they ought to be in life. Margaret, driven and overconfident, decides the best way to rectify this is to quit her job and whip out a literary tour de force. Frustrated almost immediately and humiliated at every turn, Margaret turns to Letty for support. But as Letty, a stay-at-home mother of four, begins to feel pressured to make a good showing in the upper-middle-class Los Angeles society into which her husband’s new job has thrust her, Margaret sees a plot unfolding that’s better than anything she could make up. Desperate to finish her book and against her better nature, she pushes Letty to take greater and greater risks, and secretly steals her friend’s stories as fast as she can live them. Hungry for the world’s regard, Margaret rashly sacrifices one of the things most precious to her, until the novel’s suspenseful conclusion shows her the terrible consequences of her betrayal. Widely celebrated for her debut novel, Drowning Ruth, Christina Schwarz once again proves herself to be a writer of remarkable depth and range. Like Drowning Ruth, All is Vanity probes into the mysteries of the human heart and uncovers the passions that drive ordinary people to break the rules in pursuit of their own desires.
Download or read book Object Lessons The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time written by Eavan Boland and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 1996-07-17 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this important prose work, one of our major poets explores, through autobiography and argument, a woman's life in Ireland together with a poet's work. Eavan Boland beautifully uncovers the powerful drama of how these lives affect one another; how the tradition of womanhood and the historic vocation of the poet act as revealing illuminations of the other.
Download or read book Remembering Blue written by Connie May Fowler and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Emotionally neglected by her mother, abandoned by her father, Mattie O’Rourke spent her childhood starved for the one thing she thought she’d never find: love. When her mother dies and, at twenty-two, she finds herself completely without ties of any kind, Mattie takes a chance at ending her loneliness and moves to a tiny coastal Florida town. At the Suwannee Swifty convenience store, a sea change envelops her. Mattie O’Rourke sees Proteus Nicholas Blue and their fate is sealed after only a few shy, stolen glances. Nick walks into Mattie’s life having fled his own. A lifelong fisherman from a remote island off the coast, Nick is haunted by the certain knowledge that the sea will be the death of him (as it has been for all the Blue men) and he has resolved to leave it behind. But as Nick and Mattie settle into an intimacy that both comforts and surprises them, Nick feels the inextricable pull of the waxing moon’s tide and the siren’s call of the dolphins that, Blue legend has it, are his brethren. And so it is that Mattie, who only months before felt that happiness would never find her, returns with Nick to the island home that nurtured him and finds herself embraced by a large and loving family and an alluring and sensual landscape. Life on Lethe is transforming for Mattie. But Nick always knew that the sea would claim him, and all of Mattie’s love cannot prevent the tragedy that is their destiny. Moving and enchanting, Remembering Blue is a lush story of love, loss, and the mythic power of the ocean, told in an elegant and passionate voice that could only come from Connie May Fowler. From the Trade Paperback edition.
Download or read book Secret Language written by Monica Wood and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2017-01-26 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: SECRET LANGUAGE by Monica Wood is a moving and compelling tale of two sisters as they reconnect, not to be missed by readers of Anne Tyler, Joanna Cannon and Sue Monk Kidd. 'Fiercely lyrical... [Wood] writes with sensitivity and intuitive insight about relationships coming apart and the walls people erect to keep others out' Publishers Weekly As children, dragged around the country by semi-famous actor parents who could barely take care of themselves, sisters Faith and Constance had to rely on one another. As adults, though, they have drifted apart: Faith has children and a grounded domestic life - but hasn't necessarily found unconditional love; whereas Constance, a flight attendant, is always searching for her true place in life. Then Isadora, the half-sister they never knew existed, makes her dramatic entrance into their lives. This crisis forces Faith and Constance into their long-forgotten childhood habits, and they begin to make their way back to one another and find a new way to be a family. What readers are saying about SECRET LANGUAGE: 'So glad I discovered Monica Wood. Her language is gorgeous, her characters compelling, and she delicately describes the pain and joy of human relationships in a way we can all identify with' 'Extremely well written and thought-provoking with outstanding character development' 'A rare and affecting book that can create such heartfelt turmoil. Highly recommend for readers who love realistic stories about family life'
Download or read book The Flamingo Rising written by Larry Baker and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: t's the 1960s in Jacksonville, Florida (where the sixties are still the fifties). Some of America's last sweet moments of innocence are unfolding out on the coastal highway at the Flamingo, the largest drive-in movie theatre in the world. Its owner, Southern patriarch Hubert Lee, possesses a fervour matching the size of the Great White Wall of the Flamingo's gigantic screen tower, where John Wayne or Audrey Hepburn or invading body-snatchers flicker nightly. Hubert's unforgiving ego meets its match in Turner West, who owns the funeral home next door and wants to build a cemetery on land staked by his gleefully stubborn neighbour. So when Hubert's teenage son Abe develops his first adolescent crush, it makes devilish sense that the object of his affections should be Grace, Turner's only daughter and the apple of his eye. At once funny and heart-breaking, THE FLAMINGO RISING is a novel full of tenderness and insight about the power of love, the need for faith and the persistence of memory.
Download or read book Your Blues Ain t Like Mine written by Bebe Moore Campbell and published by One World. This book was released on 1995-06-27 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "ABSORBING...COMPELLING...HIGHLY SATISFYING." --San Francisco Chronicle "TRULY ENGAGING...Campbell has a storyteller's ear for dialogue and the visual sense of painting a picture and a place....There's a steam that keeps the story moving as the characters, and later their children, wrestle through racial, personal and cultural crisis." --Los Angeles Times Book Review "REMARKABLE...POWERFUL." --Time "YOUR BLUES AIN'T LIKE MINE is rich, lush fiction set in rural Mississippi beginning in the mid-'50s. It is also a haunting reality flowing through Anywhere, U.S.A., in the '90s....There's love, rage and hatred, winning and losing, honor, abuse; in other words, humanity....Campbell now deserves recognition as the best of storytellers. Her writing sings." --The Indianapolis News "EXTRAORDINDARY." --The Seattle Times "A COMPELLING NARRATIVE...Campbell is a master when it comes to telling a story." --Entertainment Weekly YOUR BLUES AIN'T LIKE MINE won the NAACP Image Award for Best Literary Work of Fiction
Download or read book Lucia Lucia written by Adriana Trigiani and published by Random House. This book was released on 2003-07-08 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “This heartwarming tale is full of lessons about taking risks in life and love.”—Cosmopolitan “Funny, visual, and moving . . . A vibrant, loving, wistful portrait of a lost time and place.”—Richmond Times-Dispatch It is 1950 in glittering, vibrant New York City, and Lucia Sartori is the beautiful twenty-five-year-old daughter of a prosperous Italian grocer in Greenwich Village. The postwar boom is rife with opportunities for talented girls with ambition, and Lucia becomes an apprentice to an up-and-coming designer at chic B. Altman department store on Fifth Avenue. Engaged to her childhood sweetheart, the steadfast Dante DeMartino, Lucia is torn when she meets a handsome stranger who promises a life of uptown luxury that career girls like her only read about in the society pages. Forced to choose between duty to her family and her own dreams, Lucia finds herself in the midst of a sizzling scandal in which secrets are revealed, her beloved career is jeopardized, and the Sartoris’ honor is tested.
