Download or read book The Cider House Rules written by John Irving and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2012-07-31 with total page 521 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An American classic first published in 1985 by William Morrow and adapted into an Academy Award-winning film, The Cider House Rules is among John Irving's most beloved novels. Set in rural Maine in the first half of the twentieth century, it tells the story of Dr. Wilbur Larch—saint and obstetrician, founder and director of the orphanage in the town of St. Cloud's, ether addict and abortionist. It is also the story of Dr. Larch's favorite orphan, Homer Wells, who is never adopted. “A novel as good as one could hope to find from any author, anywhere, anytime. Engrossing, moving, thoroughly satisfying.” —Joseph Heller, author of Catch-22

Download or read book The Cider House Rules written by John Irving and published by Random House. This book was released on 2012-05-10 with total page 706 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'The reason Homer Wells kept his name was that he came back to St Cloud's so many times, after so many failed foster homes, that the orphanage was forced to acknowledge Homer's intention to make St Cloud's his home.' Homer Wells' odyssey begins among the apple orchards of rural Maine. As the oldest unadopted child at St Cloud's orphanage, he strikes up a profound and unusual friendship with Wilbur Larch, the orphanage's founder - a man of rare compassion and an addiction to ether. What he learns from Wilbur takes him from his early apprenticeship in the orphanage surgery, to an adult life running a cider-making factory and a strange relationship with the wife of his closest friend...

Download or read book Here in St Cloud s written by Peter Parnell and published by Dramatists Play Service Inc. This book was released on 2001 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cider House Rules is a two-part stage adaptation of the John Irving novel. Spanning eight decades of American life, it tells the story of Dr. Wilbur Larch, founder of the St. Cloud's, Maine orphanage and hospital, and of the complex father-son relationship he develops with the young orphan Homer Wells. Homer's growth into adulthood begins first at St. Cloud's, and then out in the wide world, where he learns about life and love and must ultimately decide whether to return to St. Cloud's and fulfill the destiny his "father" has always believed in for him.

Download or read book Trying to Save Piggy Sneed written by John Irving and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-11-05 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Trying to Save Piggy Sneed contains a dozen short works by John Irving, beginning with three memoirs, including an account of Mr. Irving’s dinner with President Ronald Reagan at the White House. The longest of the memoirs, “The Imaginary Girlfriend,” is the core of this collection. The middle section of the book is fiction. Since the publication of his first novel, Setting Free the Bears, in 1968, John Irving has written twelve more novels but only half a dozen stories that he considers “finished”: they are all published here, including “Interiors,” which won the O. Henry Award. In the third and final section are three essays of appreciation: one on Günter Grass, two on Charles Dickens. To each of the twelve pieces, Mr. Irving has contributed his Author’s Notes. These notes provide some perspective on the circumstances surrounding the writing of each piece—for example, an election-year diary of the Bush-Clinton campaigns accompanies Mr. Irving’s memoir of his dinner with President Reagan; and the notes to one of his short stories explain that the story was presented and sold to Playboy as the work of a woman. Trying to Save Piggy Sneed is both as moving and as mischievous as readers would expect from the author of The World According to Garp, The Cider House Rules, A Prayer of Owen Meany, A Widow for One Year, and In One Person. And Mr. Irving’s concise autobiography, “The Imaginary Girlfriend,” is both a work of the utmost literary accomplishment and a paradigm for living. Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade, Yucca, and Good Books imprints, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in fiction—novels, novellas, political and medical thrillers, comedy, satire, historical fiction, romance, erotic and love stories, mystery, classic literature, folklore and mythology, literary classics including Shakespeare, Dumas, Wilde, Cather, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

Download or read book In One Person written by John Irving and published by Knopf Canada. This book was released on 2012-05-08 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “My dear boy, please don’t put a label on me – don’t make me a category before you get to know me!” John Irving’s new novel is a glorious ode to sexual difference, a poignant story of a life that no reader will be able to forget, a book that no one else could have written. Told with the panache and assurance of a master storyteller, In One Person takes the reader along a dizzying path: from a private school in Vermont in the 1950s to the gay bars of Madrid’s Chueca district, from the Vienna State Opera to the wrestling mat at the New York Athletic Club. It takes in the ways that cross-dressing passes from one generation to the next in a family, the trouble with amateur performances of Ibsen, and what happens if you fall in love at first sight while reading Madame Bovary on a troop transport ship, in the middle of an Atlantic storm. For the sheer pleasure of the tale, there is no writer alive as entertaining and enthralling as John Irving at his best. But this is also a heartfelt, intimate book about one person, a novelist named William Francis Dean. By his side as he tells his own story, we follow Billy on a fifty-year journey toward himself, meeting some uniquely unconventional characters along the way. For all his long and short relationships with both men and women, Billy remains somehow alone, never quite able to fit into society’s neat categories. And as Billy searches for the truth about himself, In One Person grows into an unforgettable call for compassion in a world marked by failures of love and failures of understanding. Utterly contemporary and topical in its themes, In One Person is one of John Irving’s most political novels. It is a book that grapples with the mysteries of identity and the multiple tragedies of the AIDS epidemic, a book about everything that has changed in our sexual life over the last fifty years and everything that still needs to. It’s also one of Irving’s most sincere and human novels, a book imbued on every page with a spirit of openness that expands and challenges the reader’s world. A brand new story in a grand old tradition, In One Person stands out as one of John Irving’s finest works – and as such, one of the best and most important American books of the last four decades.

Download or read book The Hotel New Hampshire written by John Irving and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2019-03-26 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The first of my father’s illusions was that bears could survive the life lived by human beings, and the second was that human beings could survive a life led in hotels.” So says John Berry, son of a hapless dreamer, brother to a cadre of eccentric siblings, and chronicler of the lives lived, the loves experienced, the deaths met, and the myriad strange and wonderful times encountered by the family Berry. Hoteliers, pet-bear owners, friends of Freud (the animal trainer and vaudevillian, that is), and playthings of mad fate, they “dream on” in a funny, sad, outrageous, and moving novel by the remarkable author of A Son of the Circus and A Prayer for Owen Meany.

Download or read book The Cider Shop Rules written by Julie Anne Lindsey and published by Kensington Cozies. This book was released on 2021-07-27 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Autumn in Blossom Valley means pumpkin patches are ripe and Winona Mae Montgomery and her Granny Smythe’s cider shop is flourishing. But with this season comes . . . A FATAL HARVEST The Fall Festival is in full swing. Civil War reenactors from three counties are partaking in Blossom Valley’s tribute to John Brown. Blue Ridge Mountain foliage is in full bloom. And best of all is Jacob Potter’s pumpkin farm where his hay rides, piglet races, pumpkin picking and corn maze are time-honored draws for locals and tourists alike. That’s why it’s such a shock when Mr. Potter is found dead, hidden under a tarp in the back of Winnie’s pickup truck. This certainly betrays Potter’s reputation as one of the town’s most popular citizens. Fortunately, when it comes to solving a murder, no one has a patch on Winnie. Now, all eyes are on her to do it. Unfortunately, that includes those of the killer who’ll do anything to keep an orchard full of secrets buried.

Download or read book Last Night in Twisted River written by John Irving and published by Random House. This book was released on 2009-10-27 with total page 577 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1954, in the cookhouse of a logging and sawmill settlement in northern New Hampshire, an anxious twelve-year-old boy mistakes the local constable’s girlfriend for a bear. Both the twelve-year-old and his father become fugitives, forced to run from Coos County—to Boston, to southern Vermont, to Toronto—pursued by the implacable constable. Their lone protector is a fiercely libertarian logger, once a river driver, who befriends them. In a story spanning five decades, Last Night in Twisted River depicts the recent half-century in the United States as “a living replica of Coos County, where lethal hatreds were generally permitted to run their course.” What further distinguishes Last Night in Twisted River is the author’s unmistakable voice—the inimitable voice of an accomplished storyteller.

Download or read book My Movie Business written by John Irving and published by Random House. This book was released on 1999-12-20 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Irving's memoir begins with his account of the distinguished career and medical writings of the novelist's grandfather Dr. Frederick C. Irving, a renowned obstetrician and gynecologist, and includes Mr. Irving's incisive history of abortion politics in the United States. But My Movie Business focuses primarily on the thirteen years John Irving spent adapting his novel The Cider House Rules for the screen--for four different directors. Mr. Irving also writes about the failed effort to make his first novel, Setting Free the Bears, into a movie; about two of the films that were made from his novels (but not from his screenplays), The World According to Garp and The Hotel New Hampshire; about his slow progress at shepherding his screenplay of A Son of the Circus into production. Not least, and in addition to its qualities as a memoir--anecdotal, comic, affectionate, and candid--My Movie Business is an insightful essay on the essential differences between writing a novel and writing a screenplay. The photographs in My Movie Business were taken by Stephen Vaughan, the still photographer on the set of The Cider House Rules--a Miramax production directed by Lasse Hallström, with Michael Caine in the role of Dr. Larch. Concurrently with the November 1999 release of the film, Talk Miramax Books will publish John Irving's screenplay.

Download or read book A Widow for One Year written by John Irving and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2012-05-08 with total page 635 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “One night when she was four and sleeping in the bottom bunk of her bunk bed, Ruth Cole woke to the sound of lovemaking—it was coming from her parents’ bedroom.” This sentence opens John Irving’s ninth novel, A Widow for One Year, a story of a family marked by tragedy. Ruth Cole is a complex, often self-contradictory character—a “difficult” woman. By no means is she conventionally “nice,” but she will never be forgotten. Ruth’s story is told in three parts, each focusing on a critical time in her life. When we first meet her—on Long Island, in the summer of 1958—Ruth is only four. The second window into Ruth’s life opens on the fall of 1990, when she is an unmarried woman whose personal life is not nearly as successful as her literary career. She distrusts her judgment in men, for good reason. A Widow for One Year closes in the autumn of 1995, when Ruth Cole is a forty-one-year-old widow and mother. She’s about to fall in love for the first time. Richly comic, as well as deeply disturbing, A Widow for One Year is a multilayered love story of astonishing emotional force. Both ribald and erotic, it is also a brilliant novel about the passage of time and the relentlessness of grief.

Download or read book Until I Find You written by John Irving and published by Random House. This book was released on 2005-07-12 with total page 848 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Until I Find You is the story of the actor Jack Burns – his life, loves, celebrity and astonishing search for the truth about his parents. When he is four years old, Jack travels with his mother Alice, a tattoo artist, to several North Sea ports in search of his father, William Burns. From Copenhagen to Amsterdam, William, a brilliant church organist and profligate womanizer, is always a step ahead – has always just departed in a wave of scandal, with a new tattoo somewhere on his body from a local master or “scratcher.” Alice and Jack abandon their quest, and Jack is educated at schools in Canada and New England – including, tellingly, a girls’ school in Toronto. His real education consists of his relationships with older women – from Emma Oastler, who initiates him into erotic life, to the girls of St. Hilda’s, with whom he first appears on stage, to the abusive Mrs. Machado, whom he first meets when sent to learn wrestling at a local gym. Too much happens in this expansive, eventful novel to possibly summarize it all. Emma and Jack move to Los Angeles, where Emma becomes a successful novelist and Jack a promising actor. A host of eccentric minor characters memorably come and go, including Jack’s hilariously confused teacher the Wurtz; Michelle Maher, the girlfriend he will never forget; and a precocious child Jack finds in the back of an Audi in a restaurant parking lot. We learn about tattoo addiction and movie cross-dressing, “sleeping in the needles” and the cure for cauliflower ears. And John Irving renders his protagonist’s unusual rise through Hollywood with the same vivid detail and range of emotions he gives to the organ music Jack hears as a child in European churches. This is an absorbing and moving book about obsession and loss, truth and storytelling, the signs we carry on us and inside us, the traces we can’t get rid of. Jack has always lived in the shadow of his absent father. But as he grows older – and when his mother dies – he starts to doubt the portrait of his father’s character she painted for him when he was a child. This is the cue for a second journey around Europe in search of his father, from Edinburgh to Switzerland, towards a conclusion of great emotional force. A melancholy tale of deception, Until I Find You is also a swaggering comic novel, a giant tapestry of life’s hopes. It is a masterpiece to compare with John Irving’s great novels, and restates the author’ s claim to be considered the most glorious, comic, moving novelist at work today.

Download or read book The World According to Garp written by John Irving and published by Random House Digital, Inc.. This book was released on 1978 with total page 530 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: T.S. Garp, a man with high ambitions for an artistic career and with obsessive devotion to his wife and children, and Jenny Fields, his famous feminist mother, find their lives surrounded by an assortment of people including teachers, whores, and radicals

Download or read book Adrenaline Junkies and Template Zombies written by Tom DeMarco and published by Addison-Wesley. This book was released on 2013-07-15 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the digital version of the printed book (Copyright © 2008). Adrenaline junkies, dead fish, project sluts, true believers, Lewis and Clark, template zombies . . . Most developers, testers, and managers on IT projects are pretty good at recognizing patterns of behavior and gut-level hunches, as in, “I sense that this project is headed for disaster.” But it has always been more difficult to transform these patterns and hunches into a usable form, something a team can debate, refine, and use. Until now. In Adrenaline Junkies and Template Zombies, the six principal consultants of The Atlantic Systems Guild present the patterns of behavior they most often observe at the dozens of IT firms they transform each year, around the world. The result is a quick-read guide to identifying nearly ninety typical scenarios, drawing on a combined one-hundred-and-fifty years of project management experience. Project by project, you’ll improve the accuracy of your hunches and your ability to act on them. The patterns are presented in an easy-reference format, with names designed to ease communication with your teammates. In just a few words, you can describe what’s happening on your project. Citing the patterns of behavior can help you quickly move those above and below you to the next step on your project. You’ll find classic patterns such as these: News Improvement Management by Mood Ring Piling On Rattle Yer Dags Natural Authority Food++ Fridge Door and more than eighty more! Not every pattern will be evident in your organization, and not every pattern is necessarily good or bad. However, you’ll find many patterns that will apply to your current and future assignments, even in the most ambiguous circumstances. When you assess your situation and follow your next hunch, you'll have the collective wisdom of six world-class consultants at your side.

Download or read book The Last Chairlift written by John Irving and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2022-10-18 with total page 1096 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Irving’s fifteenth novel is “powerfully cinematic” (The Washington Post) and “eminently readable” (The Boston Globe). The Last Chairlift is part ghost story, part love story, spanning eight decades of sexual politics. In Aspen, Colorado, in 1941, Rachel Brewster is a slalom skier at the National Downhill and Slalom Championships. Little Ray, as she is called, finishes nowhere near the podium, but she manages to get pregnant. Back home, in New England, Little Ray becomes a ski instructor. Her son, Adam, grows up in a family that defies conventions and evades questions concerning the eventful past. Years later, looking for answers, he will go to Aspen. In the Hotel Jerome, where he was conceived, Adam will meet some ghosts; in The Last Chairlift, they aren’t the first or last ghosts he sees. John Irving has written some of the most acclaimed books of our time—among them, The World According to Garp and The Cider House Rules. A visionary voice on the subject of sexual tolerance, Irving is a bard of alternative families. In the “generously intertextual” (The New York Times) The Last Chairlift, readers will once more be in his thrall.

Download or read book A Son of the Circus written by John Irving and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2012-05-08 with total page 758 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Hindi film star and an American missionary are twins separated at birth; a dwarf — a former circus clown — mistakes the missionary for the movie star. And stalking one of them is a serial killer...

Download or read book Rules of the House written by Mac Barnett and published by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers. This book was released on 2018-03-04 with total page 50 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ian always follows the rules. His sister, Jenny, breaks them all the time -- especially "Don't pinch." So Ian is thrilled when the house where his family is vacationing posts a tidy list of rules. But when Jenny breaks them all, the house itself decides it's time for payback. The rug, the stove, and the bathtub are hungry for rulebreaker soup, and they've found the perfect ingredient: Jenny! Now Ian is faced with a thorny question: What if saving your sister means breaking the rules? From the New York Times best-selling team of Mac Barnett and Matthew Myers comes a hilarious tale of sibling rivalry, moral complexity, and disgruntled monsters, perfect for sharing with your own favorite rulebreakers. Praise for Count the Monkeys "This spot-on spoof of counting books is the perfect reward for anyone who's put in a hard day's work with numbers, big or small." -- Publishers Weekly, starred review Praise for Oh No! Not Again! "Wonderfully ridiculous in premise and execution and abounding in creative touches, this will surely spark student spinoffs." -- Kirkus Reviews, starred review Praise for Chloe and the Lion "[R]at-a-tat dialogue and fresh visuals should keep it at the top of the bedtime pile." -- Publishers Weekly Praise for Mustache "Youngsters will get a kick out of this kingly comedy?." -- Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books Praise for Oh No! * "A must-have." -- Kirkus Reviews, starred review Praise for Billy Twitters and His Blue Whale Problem "Definitely funny and slyly subversive." -Kirkus Reviews, starred review

Download or read book Every Light in the House Burnin written by Andrea Levy and published by Tinder Press. This book was released on 2010-06-24 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The remarkable, emotional debut novel, both funny and moving, which was longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction, from the critically aclaimed Andrea Levy, author of the Orange Prize winning SMALL ISLAND and the Man Booker shortlisted THE LONG SONG. 'Better opportunity' - that's why Angela's dad sailed to England from America in 1948 on the Empire Windrush. Six months later her mum joined him in his one room in Earl's Court... ...Twenty years and four children later, Mr Jacob has become seriously ill and starts to move unsteadily through the care of the National Health Service. As Angela, his youngest, tries to help her mother through this ordeal, she finds herself reliving her childhood years, spent on a council estate in Highbury.