Download or read book The Peripatetic Coffin written by Ethan Rutherford and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2013-05-07 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The stories in The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories, a collection from Ethan Rutherford, map the surprising ways in which the world we think we know can unexpectedly reveal its darker contours. In stories that are alternately funny, persuasive, and compelling, unforgettable characters are confronted with, and battle against, the limitations of their lives. Rutherford’s work has been selected by Alice Sebold for inclusion in the volume of The Best American Short Stories that she edited, and also published in Ploughshares, One Story, and American Short Fiction.
Download or read book Farthest South Other Stories written by Ethan Rutherford and published by Deep Vellum Publishing. This book was released on 2021-04-21 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A baby is born with gills. Foxes raise and then lose a human child. A man, in the final throes of his deathbed fever-dream, experiences a cross-Antarctic voyage. The stories in Furthest South, the second story collection from renowned writer Ethan Rutherford, find characters in the most unexpectedly menacing of circumstances, in which their sanity, happiness, and safety are put to the test. Formally ambitious, with an eye toward the strange, with a inimitable style all Rutherford's own, each story is nonetheless firmly grounded by a deep, human concern: the anxiety of family connection and humanity.
Download or read book The Almond in the Apricot written by Sara Goudarzi and published by Deep Vellum Publishing. This book was released on 2022-02-15 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Emma had the perfect trifecta: a long-term job as an engineer designing sewers; a steady relationship with her reliable boyfriend; and an adoring and creative best friend (about whom she wasn’t quite ready to admit her unrequited feelings). Then early one morning, a phone call changed her world forever. Now she’s having nightmares that threaten to disrupt the space-time continuum –– nightmares of hiding from bombs in basements, of glass shattering from nearby explosions. But these disturbing dreams, in which she inhabits the body of a young girl named Lily, seem all too real, and Emma’s waking life begins to be affected by the events that transpire in this mysterious wartime landscape. Convinced she has been given a chance to save a life, Emma tries to rescue Lily from heartache, but ultimately it is through Lily that Emma finds her way back. The Almond in the Apricot navigates connections formed across space and time and explores love, grief, and the possibility that the universe might be bigger than either Emma or Lily ever imagined.
Download or read book Uncle Janice written by Matt Burgess and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2015-11-24 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twenty-four-year-old Janice Itwaru is an “uncle”—NYPD lingo for an undercover narcotics officer—and the heroine of the most exuberantand original cop novel in years. A New York City cop who can last eighteen months in Narcotics, without getting killed or demoted first, will automatically get promoted to detective. Undercover narc Janice Itwaru is at month seventeen. Ambitious, desperate for that promotion, she hits the sidewalks of Queens in her secondhand hoochie clothes, hoping to convince potential criminals—drug dealers, addicts, dummies, whomever—to commit a felony on her behalf. And things aren’t any easier back at the narco office, where she has to keep up with the bantering lies and inventively cruel pranks of her fellow uncles while coping with the ridiculous demands of her NYPD bosses. With an ailing mother at home, her cover nearly blown, quota pressures from her superiors, and rumors circulating that Internal Affairs has her unit under surveillance, Janice is running terribly short on luck as her promotion deadline approaches. Now she has to decide which evil to confront: the absurd bureaucrats at One Police Plaza, or the violent drug dealers who may already be on to her identity. Bursting with the glorious chaos of the New York City streets, Uncle Janice is both a deeply funny portrait of how undercover cops really talk and act, and a compelling story of their crazy, dangerous, and complicated lives.
Download or read book Red Brick Black Mountain White Clay written by Christopher Benfey and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2013-02-26 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Beautiful, haunted, evocative and so open to where memory takes you. I kept thinking that this is the book that I have waited for: where objects, and poetry intertwine. Just wonderful and completely sui generis." (Edmund de Waal, author of The Hare with Amber Eyes) An unforgettable voyage across the reaches of America and the depths of memory, this generational memoir of one incredible family reveals America’s unique craft tradition. In Red Brick, Black Mountain, White Clay, renowned critic Christopher Benfey shares stories—of his mother’s upbringing in rural North Carolina among centuries-old folk potteries; of his father’s escape from Nazi Europe; of his great-aunt and -uncle Josef and Anni Albers, famed Bauhaus artists exiled at Black Mountain College—unearthing an ancestry, and an aesthetic, that is quintessentially American. With the grace of a novelist and the eye of a historian, Benfey threads these stories together into a radiant and mesmerizing harmony.
Download or read book Phase Six written by Jim Shepard and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2021 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In a tiny settlement on the west coast of Greenland, 11-year-old Aleq and his best friend, frequent trespassers at a mining site exposed to mountains of long-buried and thawing permafrost, carry what they pick up back into their village, and from there Shepard's harrowing and deeply moving story follows Aleq, one of the few survivors of the initial outbreak, through his identification and radical isolation as the likely index patient. While he shoulders both a crushing guilt for what he may have done and the hopes of a world looking for answers, we also meet two Epidemic Intelligence Service investigators dispatched from the CDC--Jeannine, an epidemiologist and daughter of Algerian immigrants, and Danice, an MD and lab wonk. As they attempt to head off the cataclysm, Jeannine--moving from the Greeland hospital overwhelmed with the first patients to a Level 4 high-security facility in the Rocky Mountains--does what she can to sustain Aleq."--Publisher's description.
Download or read book The Architecture of Happiness written by Alain De Botton and published by McClelland & Stewart. This book was released on 2010-12-03 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bestselling author Alain de Botton considers how our private homes and public edifices influence how we feel, and how we could build dwellings in which we would stand a better chance of happiness. In this witty, erudite look at how we shape, and are shaped by, our surroundings, Alain de Botton applies Stendhal’s motto that “Beauty is the promise of happiness” to the spaces we inhabit daily. Why should we pay attention to what architecture has to say to us? de Botton asks provocatively. With his trademark lucidity and humour, de Botton traces how human needs and desires have been served by styles of architecture, from stately Classical to minimalist Modern, arguing that the stylistic choices of a society can represent both its cherished ideals and the qualities it desperately lacks. On an individual level, de Botton has deep sympathy for our need to see our selves reflected in our surroundings; he demonstrates with great wisdom how buildings — just like friends — can serve as guardians of our identity. Worrying about the shape of our sofa or the colour of our walls might seem self-indulgent, but de Botton considers the hopes and fears we have for our homes at a new level of depth and insight. When shopping for furniture or remodelling the kitchen, we don’t just consider functionality but also the major questions of aesthetics and the philosophy of art: What is beauty? Can beautiful surroundings make us good? Can beauty bring happiness? The buildings we find beautiful, de Botton concludes, are those that represent our ideas of a meaningful life. The Architecture of Happiness marks a return to what Alain does best — taking on a subject whose allure is at once tantalizing and a little forbidding and offering to readers a completely beguiling and original exploration of the subject. As he did with Proust, philosophy, and travel, now he does with architecture.
Download or read book The Hotel Years written by Joseph Roth and published by Granta Books. This book was released on 2015-09-03 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The hotel that I love like a fatherland is situated in one of the great port cities of Europe, and the heavy gold Antiqua letters in which its banal name is spelled out shining across the roofs of the gently banked houses are in my eye metal flags, metal bannerets that instead of fluttering shine out their greeting. In the 1920s and 30s, Joseph Roth travelled extensively in Europe, leading a peripatetic life living in hotels and writing about the towns through which he passed. Incisive, nostalgic, curious and sharply observed - and collected together here for the first time - his pieces paint a picture of a continent racked by change yet clinging to tradition. From the 'compulsive' exercise regime of the Albanian army, the rickety industry of the new oil capital of Galicia, and 'split and scalped' houses of Tirana forced into modernity, to the individual and idiosyncratic characters that Roth encounters in his hotel stays, these tender and quietly dazzling vignettes form a series of literary postcards written from a bygone world, creeping towards world war.
Download or read book The Mathemagician and Pied Puzzler written by Elwyn R. Berlekamp and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 1999-03-08 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume comprises an imaginative collection of pieces created in tribute to Martin Gardner. Perhaps best known for writing Scientific American's "Mathematical Games" column for years, Gardner used his personal exuberance and fascination with puzzles and magic to entice a wide range of readers into a world of mathematical discovery. This tribute
Download or read book Hometown Appetites written by Kelly Alexander and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2008-09-18 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A rollicking biography of a pioneering American woman and one of our greatest culinary figures In Hometown Appetites, Kelly Alexander and Cynthia Harris come together to revive the legacy of the most important food writer you have never heard of. Clementine Paddleford was a Kansas farm girl who grew up to chronicle America's culinary habits. Her weekly readership at the New York Herald Tribune topped 12 million during the 1950s and 1960s and she earned a salary of $250,000. Yet twenty years after "America's best-known food editor" passed away, she had been forgotten--until now. Before Paddleford, newspaper food sections were dull primers on home economy. But she changed all of that, composing her own brand of sassy, unerringly authoritative prose designed to celebrate regional home cooking. This book restores Paddleford's name where it belongs: in the pantheon alongside greats like James Beard and Julia Child.
Download or read book Beethoven s Hair written by Russell Martin and published by Crown. This book was released on 2002-01-08 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The basis for the movie of the same name, an astonishing tale of one lock of hair and its amazing travels--from nineteenth-century Vienna to twenty-first-century America. When Ludwig van Beethoven lay dying in 1827, a young musician named Ferdinand Hiller came to pay his respects to the great composer, snipping a lock of Beethoven's hair as a keepsake--as was custom at the time--in the process. For a century, the lock of hair was a treasured Hiller family relic, until it somehow found its way to the town of Gilleleje, in Nazi-occupied Denmark. There, it was given to a local doctor, Kay Fremming, who was deeply involved in the effort to help save hundreds of hunted and frightened Jews. After Fremming's death, his daughter assumed ownership of the lock, and eventually consigned it for sale at Sotheby's, where two American Beethoven enthusiasts, Ira Brilliant and Che Guevara, purchased it in 1994. Subsequently, they and others instituted a series of complex forensic tests in the hope of finding the probable causes of the composer's chronically bad health, his deafness, and the final demise that Ferdinand Hiller had witnessed all those years ago. The results, revealed for the first time here, are the most compelling explanation yet offered for why one of the foremost musicians the world has ever known was forced to spend much of his life in silence. In Beethoven's Hair, Russell Martin has created a rich historical treasure hunt, a tale of false leads, amazing breakthroughs, and incredible revelations. This unique and fascinating book is a moving testament to the power of music, the lure of relics, the heroism of the Resistance movement, and the brilliance of molecular science.
Download or read book Snow Hunters written by Paul Yoon and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-08-06 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A highly anticipated debut novel from 5 Under 35 National Book Foundation honoree featuring a Korean War refugee who emigrates to Brazil to become a tailor's apprentice and confronts the wreckage of his past"--
Download or read book The Devil s Dictionary written by Ambrose Bierce and published by ReadHowYouWant.com. This book was released on 1911 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book In the Waves written by Rachel Lance and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-04-06 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of "The Most Fascinating Books WIRED Read in 2020" "One part science book, one part historical narrative, one part memoir . . . harrowing and inspiring.”—The Wall Street Journal How a determined scientist cracked the case of the first successful—and disastrous—submarine attack On the night of February 17, 1864, the tiny Confederate submarine HL Hunley made its way toward the USS Housatonic just outside Charleston harbor. Within a matter of hours, the Union ship’s stern was blown open in a spray of wood planks. The explosion sank the ship, killing many of its crew. And the submarine, the first ever to be successful in combat, disappeared without a trace. For 131 years the eight-man crew of the HL Hunley lay in their watery graves, undiscovered. When finally raised, the narrow metal vessel revealed a puzzling sight. There was no indication the blast had breached the hull, and all eight men were still seated at their stations—frozen in time after more than a century. Why did it sink? Why did the men die? Archaeologists and conservationists have been studying the boat and the remains for years, and now one woman has the answers. In the Waves is much more than just a military perspective or a technical account. It’s also the story of Rachel Lance’s single-minded obsession spanning three years, the story of the extreme highs and lows in her quest to find all the puzzle pieces of the Hunley. Balancing a gripping historical tale and original research with a personal story of professional and private obstacles, In the Waves is an enthralling look at a unique part of the Civil War and the lengths one scientist will go to uncover its secrets.
Download or read book Bloody Jack written by Louis A. Meyer and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2002 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "While disguised as a boy, Jacky Faber experiences adventure and romance on the high seas"--
Download or read book The Fortune Teller s Daughter written by Susan Wilson and published by Center Point. This book was released on 2003 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After years of moving from place to place with her fortune-teller mother, Sabine Heartwood finally has a home in Moose River Junction, a quiet New England town. But her peaceful life has suddenly turned itself upside-down. Sabine has fallen in love with Dan Smith who has returned to his hometown to deal with family affairs -- and plans to leave as soon as his business is concluded. Then Sabine’s mother appears, ready to discuss the family’s mysterious past. The last straw comes when the psychic gift Sabine has so vehemently rejected, revisits her in a vision she has about a painful family secret from which Dan is unable to free himself. Abounding in generosity and insight, The Fortune Teller’s Daughter is a powerful and moving exploration of the complexities of love.
Download or read book The Better Angels of Our Nature written by Steven Pinker and published by Penguin Books. This book was released on 2012-09-25 with total page 834 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Faced with the ceaseless stream of news about war, crime, and terrorism, one could easily think this is the most violent age ever seen. Yet as bestselling author Pinker shows in this startling and engaging new work, just the opposite is true.
