Download or read book The Epicure s Lament written by Kate Christensen and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2009-07-29 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hugo Whittier–failed poet and former kept man–is a wily misanthrope with a taste for whiskey, women, and his own cooking. Afflicted with a rare disease that will be fatal unless he quits smoking, Hugo retreats to his once aristocratic family’s dilapidated mansion, determined to smoke himself to death without forfeiting any of his pleasures. To his chagrin, the world that he has forsaken is not quite finished with him. First, his sanctimonious older brother moves in, closely followed by his estranged wife, their alleged daughter, and his gay uncle. Infuriated at the violation of his sanctum, Hugo devises hilariously perverse ploys to send the intruders packing. Yet the unexpected consequences of his schemes keep forcing him to reconsider, however fleetingly, the more wholesome ingredients of love, and life itself. BONUS: This edition includes an excerpt from Kate Christensen's Blue Plate Special.

Download or read book The Great Man written by Kate Christensen and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2008-05-13 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: National Bestseller and Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction Oscar Feldman, the renowned figurative painter, has passed away. As his obituary notes, Oscar is survived by his wife, Abigail, their son, Ethan, and his sister, the well-known abstract painter Maxine Feldman. What the obituary does not note, however, is that Oscar is also survived by his longtime mistress, Teddy St. Cloud, and their daughters. As two biographers interview the women in an attempt to set the record straight, the open secret of his affair reaches a boiling point and a devastating skeleton threatens to come to light. From the acclaimed author of The Epicure's Lament, a scintillating novel of secrets, love, and legacy in the New York art world. "Mischievous...funny, astute...As unexpectedly generous as it is entertaining.... Christensen is a witty observer of the art universe." —The New York Times

Download or read book Trouble written by Kate Christensen and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2010-06-01 with total page 8 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Josie is a Manhattan psychotherapist living a comfortable life with her husband and daughter. Raquel is a Los Angeles rock star with a platinum album and the attendant money and fame. When Josie realizes her marriage is over, and Raquel finds herself at the center of a scandal, these old friends take off for Mexico City where sweltering heat, new acquaintances, and tequila-fueled nights rapidly spiral out of control. In this vibrant novel, award-winning author Kate Christensen has crafted a bewitching tale of lust, loyalty, and the limits of friendship.

Download or read book In the Drink written by Kate Christensen and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2011-09-28 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Combining sly humor with an urban edge, Kate Christensen's In the Drink tells the story of a resolutely clear-eyed young woman who makes a complete mess of her life, and lives to tell the tale. The novel's heroine is the smart, pretty, underemployed, and single Claudia Steiner, personal secretary to Genevieve del Castellano, a terrifying, glamorous semi-lunatic who has it in for her for reasons she can't even begin to fathom. William, her best friend, considers Claudia his pal, his confidante, his sidekick in matters amatory, which would be fine if she weren't desperately in love with him herself. Further complicating matters is Claudia's old lover John Threadgill, an unpublished epic poet whose marriage to a Romanian stripper named Rima hasn't kept him from trying to seduce Claudia at every opportunity. Claudia came to New York City fresh out of college, buoyed along by her dream of becoming a journalist. But her starry-eyed notion of Claudia Steiner, Reporter on the Beat, quickly vanished into the ozone when she couldn't muster the requisite hard-bitten, white-hot urgency, the chain-smoking, the yelling, and the cutthroat story-mongering. Now, at the age of twenty-nine, she finds herself adrift in the city, careening dangerously from catastrophe to catastrophe. Desperately trying to keep her head above water, Claudia has little to rely on but a wry sense of humor, a keen appreciation of the medicinal properties of whiskey, and something more subtle--a persistent little flame of belief in herself, which makes a happy ending seem possible even in this most unforgiving of cities. Hilarious, compassionate, and keenly observed, In the Drink is the enormously entertaining debut of a startlingly talented young writer. BONUS: This edition includes an excerpt from Kate Christensen's Blue Plate Special.

Download or read book Blue Plate Special written by Kate Christensen and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2014-05-06 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A delectable memoir about the transformative power of food, Blue Plate Special is a deeply personal narrative in which food becomes the vehicle for exploring a life. Here, novelist Kate Christensen tells her own story, from her unorthodox childhood in 1960s Berkeley as the daughter of a legal activist who ruled the house with his fists to her extraordinary success as a PEN/Faulkner Award-winning author. Hungry not just for food, but for love and a sense of belonging, Christensen writes honestly about her struggle to find the contentment she has always yearned for. A beautifully written account of a knockabout life, full of sorrows, pleasures—and, of course, food—Blue Plate Special is a delicious reading experience.

Download or read book The Astral written by Kate Christensen and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2012-06-12 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the gentrifying neighborhood of Greenpoint, Brooklyn, rests a huge rose-colored apartment building called The Astral. For decades it was the happy home of the poet Harry Quirk, his wife, Luz, and their two children: Karina, now a fervent freegan, and Hector, now in the clutches of a cultish Christian community. But when Luz finds poems that ignite her long-simmering suspicions of infidelity, Harry is summarily kicked out, leaving him to reckon with the consequence of his literary, marital, and parental failures. With tremendous grace and acute perception, Kate Christensen details Harry’s floundering attempts to find his way back into Luz’s arms—and back to his better self—in a novel that is funny, bittersweet, and terrifically moving.

Download or read book The Last Cruise written by Kate Christensen and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2019-06-04 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 1950s ocean liner Queen Isabella is making her final voyage—a retro cruise from Long Beach to Hawaii and back—before heading to the scrapyard. For the guests on board, it’s a chance to experience a bygone era of decadent luxury, complete with fine dining, classic highballs, string quartets, and sophisticated jazz. Smoking is allowed but not cell phones—or children, for that matter. But this is the second decade of an uncertain new millennium, not the sunny, heedless mid-twentieth century, and certain disquieting signs of strife and malfunction above and below deck intrude on the festivities, throwing a trio of strangers together in an unexpected and startling test of character.

Download or read book Jeremy Thrane written by Kate Christensen and published by Broadway. This book was released on 2001 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of the highly acclaimed In the Drink, a smart and sexy exploration of New York and its customs through the eyes of a disillusioned, yet secretly hopeful, gay man. Jeremy Thrane is a thirty-five-year-old writer in love with a married man. For years, Jeremy has posed as "archivist" to Ted Masterson, a Hollywood action star. Jeremy maintains Ted's New York brownstone and guards the secret that could destroy his career. But when Ted and his movie-star wife, Giselle, adopt a child and become America's most-photographed family, Jeremy finds himself without a job and, more importantly, bereft of the love of his life. With the same wit and authenticity that have made her a critical and popular favorite, Kate Christensen chronicles Jeremy's search for a new start as he ventures to every corner of the New York landscape, from watering holes where gossip columnists await an "item" to dives where waiters and busboys are eager to please patrons-especially after their shifts are over. In his spare time, he struggles to finish a novel based on his father's peripatetic life as a fanatical Marxist and turns out sizzling pornography for a one-man enterprise run by an old high school acquaintance. His sister, an up-and-coming rock musician, and his thrice-married, former flower-child mother, who found her true calling as a poet late in life, provide the mixture of criticism and compassion Jeremy has known all his life and now, for the most unexpected reasons, finally learns to appreciate. A fast-paced and funny social satire, Jeremy Thrane deftly captures the slippery chameleon quality of American identity, the power of youth and beauty, and the complexity of love.

Download or read book This Beautiful Life written by Helen Schulman and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2011-08-02 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "ThisBeautiful Life is a gripping, potent and blisteringly well-written story offamily, dilemma, and consequence. . . . I read this book with white-knuckledurgency, and I finished it in tears. Helen Schulman is an absolutely brilliantnovelist." —Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love Theevents of a single night shatter one family’s sense of security and identity inthis provocative and deeply affecting domestic drama from Helen Schulman, theacclaimed author of A Day at the Beach and Out of Time. In thetradition of Lionel Shriver, Sue Miller, and Laura Moriarty, Schulman crafts abrilliantly observed portrait of parenting and modern life, cunningly exploringour most deeply-held convictions and revealing the enduring strengths thatemerge in the face of crisis.

Download or read book Call of the Mild written by Lily Raff McCaulou and published by Grand Central Publishing. This book was released on 2012-06-12 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From an outsider perspective learning about a sometimes misunderstood cultural pastime, a beautifully written and contrarian narrative about what it means to hunt in America today. When Lily Raff McCaulou traded in an indie film production career in New York for a reporting job in central Oregon, she never imagined that she'd find herself picking up a gun and learning to hunt. She'd been raised as a gun-fearing environmentalist and an animal lover, and though a meat-eater, she'd always abided by the principle that harming animals is wrong. But Raff McCaulou's perspective shifted when she began spending weekends fly-fishing and weekdays interviewing hunters for her articles, realizing that many of them were more thoughtful about animals and the environment than she was. So she embarked upon the project of learning to hunt from square one. From attending a Hunter Safety course designed for children to field dressing an elk and serving it for dinner, she explores the sport of hunting and all it entails, and tackles the big questions surrounding one of the most misunderstood American practices and pastimes. Not just a personal memoir, this book also explores the role of the hunter in the twenty-first century, the tension (at times artificial) between hunters and environmentalists, and new models of sustainable and ethical food procurement.

Download or read book Leonard and Hungry Paul written by Ronan Hession and published by Melville House. This book was released on 2021-05-11 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A disarming novel that asks a simple question: Can gentle people change the world? In this charming and truly unique debut, popular Irish musician Ronan Hession tells the story of two single, thirty-something men who still live with their parents and who are . . . nice. They take care of their parents and play board games together. They like to read. They take satisfaction from their work. They are resolutely kind. And they realize that none of this is considered . . . normal. Leonard and Hungry Paul is the story of two friends struggling to protect their understanding of what’s meaningful in life. It is about the uncelebrated people of this world — the gentle, the meek, the humble. And as they struggle to persevere, the book asks a surprisingly enthralling question: Is it really them against the world, or are they on to something?

Download or read book Poser written by Claire Dederer and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2012-01-05 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Witty and heartfelt, clear-sighted and irreverent, Poser is the book that sane, sensible and intelligent mothers around the world have been waiting for

Download or read book Consider the Oyster written by M. F. K. Fisher and published by Pickle Partners Publishing. This book was released on 2016-10-21 with total page 74 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: M. F. K. Fisher, whom John Updike has called our “poet of the appetites,” here pays tribute to that most enigmatic of ocean creatures, the oyster. As she tells of oysters found in stews, in soups, roasted, baked, fried, prepared à la Rockefeller or au naturel—and of the pearls sometimes found therein—Fisher describes her mother’s joy at encountering oyster loaf in a girls’ dorm in the 1890s, recalls her own initiation into the “strange cold succulence” of raw oysters as a young woman in Marseille and Dijon, and explores both the bivalve’s famed aphrodisiac properties and its equally notorious gut-wrenching powers. Plumbing the “dreadful but exciting” life of the oyster, Fisher invites readers to share in the comforts and delights that this delicate edible evokes, and enchants us along the way with her characteristically wise and witty prose. “Consider the Oyster marks M. F. K. Fisher’s emergence as a storyteller so confident that she can maneuver a reader through a narrative in which recipes enhance instead of interrupt the reader’s attention to the tales. She approaches a recipe as a published dream or wish, and the stories she tells here...are also stories of the pleasures and disillusionments of dreams fulfilled.”—PATRICIA STORACE, The New York Review of Books “Since Lewis Carroll no one had written charmingly about that indecisively sexed bivalve until Mrs. Fisher came along with her Consider the Oyster. Surely this will stand for some time as the most judicious treatment in English.”—CLIFFTON FADIMAN

Download or read book How to Cook a Moose written by Kate Christensen and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following on the heels of her critically acclaimed 2012 memoir, Blue Plate Special, author Kate Christensen continues her exploration into autobiography and food in this important new culinary memoir about cooking at the end of the world, both geographically and metaphorically.

Download or read book The Forgiven written by Lawrence Osborne and published by Hogarth. This book was released on 2012-09-25 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE STARRING JESSICA CHASTAIN AND RALPH FIENNES • A haunting novel exploring the reverberations of a random accident on the lives of Moroccan Muslims and Western visitors who converge on a luxurious desert villa for a decadent weekend-long party. “Surprising and dark and excellent . . . a sinister and streamlined entertainment.”—The New York Times NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Economist • The Guardian • Library Journal David and Jo Henniger, a doctor and a children's book author, in search of an escape from their less than happy lives in London, accept an invitation to attend a bacchanal at their old friends' home, deep in the Moroccan desert. But as a groggy David navigates the dark desert roads, two young men spring from the roadside, the car swerves . . . and one boy is left dead. When David and Jo arrive at the party, the Moroccan staff, already disgusted by the rich, hedonistic foreigners in their midst, soon learn of David's unforgivable act. Then the boy's irate Berber father appears, and events begin to spin beyond anyone's control. With spare, evocative prose, searing sensuality, and a gift for the unexpected, Lawrence Osborne memorably portrays the privileged guests wrestling with their secrets amid the remoteness and beauty of the desert landscape. He gradually reveals the jolting backstory of the young man who was killed and leaves David’s fate in the balance as the novel builds to a shattering conclusion.

Download or read book You Can t Get There from Here written by Gayle Forman and published by Rodale. This book was released on 2005-04-02 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When a journalist sets out on a round-the-globe adventure, she hopes to meet those that live outside mainstream society, only to find that even on the fringes, the unstoppable forces of globalization encroach on daily life. 30,000 first printing.

Download or read book Flashman in the Great Game written by George MacDonald Fraser and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2013-04-23 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Hilariously funny.”—The New York Times Book Review One of literature's most delightful rakes is back in another tale of rollicking adventure and tantalizing seduction. The plucky Flashman's latest escapades are sure to entertain devotees as well as attract new aficionados.