Download or read book The Secret Society of Demolition Writers written by Aimee Bender and published by Random House. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What would you write if no one knew who you were? In the spirit of the demolition derby, where drivers take heedless risks with reckless abandon, welcome to the first convocation of the Secret Society of Demolition Writers. Here is a one-of-a-kind collection by famous authors writing anonymously–and dangerously. With the usual concerns about reputations and renown cast aside, these twelve daredevils have each contributed an extreme, no-holds-barred unsigned story, each shining as brightly and urgently as hazard lights. Unconventional and unapologetic, this publishing equivalent of a whodunit features an eclectic group of fictional characters, including a delusional schizophrenic narrator, an egg donor with second thoughts about her decision, a pharmacist who forms a weird crush on a woman who beat both of her parents to death, and a little girl who understands that an old safe is the threshold to another, ghostly, world. Equally diverse and surprising are the authors themselves: Aimee Bender, Benjamin Cheever, Michael Connelly, Sebastian Junger, Elizabeth McCracken, Rosie O’Donnell, Chris Offutt, Anna Quindlen, John Burnham Schwartz, Alice Sebold, Lauren Slater, and Marc Parent, the editor of the collection. Never before has such a wide-ranging and talented group of authors been assembled to such explosive and entertaining effect. The Secret Society of Demolition Writers is an intriguing puzzle in itself, but it’s also an important addition to the careers of some of our finest storytellers–even if we never really know who wrote what. Its boundary-smashing fiction offers exhilarating proof that for an artist, withholding your identity can mean gaining your freedom.
Download or read book The Safe Man written by Michael Connelly and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2012-10-23 with total page 86 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Read the riveting detective story that inspired the Audible dramatization featuring Jack Quaid and Titus Welliver. Like his father before him, Brian Holloway is a safe man. That is, his specialty is opening safes. Every job is a little mystery, and he has yet to encounter a lock he can't break or a box he can't crack. But the day Holloway gets called in to open a rare, antique safe in a famous author's library, his skills open a door that should have remained closed. In this haunting and singular story, previously published anonymously, Michael Connelly proves once again that he is "superb at building suspense.... the reader can never be sure what sudden turns the plot may take" (Wall Street Journal). [Word count: 11,662]
Download or read book The Crime World of Michael Connelly written by David Geherin and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2022-10-27 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since his first novel in 1992, Michael Connelly has become one of America's most popular and critically acclaimed crime writers. He is best known as the author of a long-running series featuring LAPD homicide detective Harry Bosch, a compelling figure in contemporary crime fiction. He also created several additional series featuring a criminal defense attorney (Mickey Haller, known as the Lincoln Lawyer), an FBI profiler (Terry McCaleb), a newspaper reporter (Jack McEvoy), and an LAPD policewoman (Renee Ballard) who works the night shift. When he began incorporating all his characters into the Bosch megaseries, he expanded the notion of what a crime series can accomplish.This work takes an in-depth look at all of Connelly's work, including the 34 novels that comprise the Bosch megaseries, the film adaptations of his books, the popular "Bosch" TV series, and his standalone novels, short stories and podcasts. It includes chapters on his novelistic artistry and his portraits of Los Angeles and its police department.
Download or read book Turning Stones written by Marc Parent and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 1998-01-27 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “An absorbing piece of narrative nonfiction . . . A rare glimpse of what it is like to man these front lines of the war on child abuse—and what it does to a person’s soul. . . . Devastating [and] mesmerizing.”—The Los Angeles Times Featuring a new Afterword by the author Why does an infant die of malnutrition? Why does an eight-year-old hold a knife to his brother’s throat? Or a mother push her cherished daughter twenty-three floors to her death? Marc Parent, a city caseworker, searched the streets—and his heart—for the answers, and shares them in this powerful, vivid, beautifully written book.
Download or read book A Study Guide for Aimee Bender s The Rememberer written by Gale, Cengage Learning and published by Gale, Cengage Learning . This book was released on with total page 21 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Study Guide for Aimee Bender's "The Rememberer," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.
Download or read book The Lovely Bones written by Alice Sebold and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-09-25 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Susie Salmon is just like any other young American girl. She wants to be beautiful, adores her charm bracelet and has a crush on a boy from school. There's one big difference though – Susie is dead. Add: Now she can only observe while her family manage their grief in their different ways. Susie is desperate to help them and there might be a way of reaching them... Alice Sebold's novel The Lovely Bones is a unique coming-of-age tale that captured the hearts of readers throughout the world. Award-winning playwright Bryony Lavery has adapted it for this unforgettable play about life after loss.
Download or read book Willful Creatures written by Aimee Bender and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2009-08-26 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Contemporary fairy tales, cushioned by goofy humor and a deep tenderness for her characters, that aren't always as dark or as sinister as they initially appear." --The New York Times Book Review Aimee Bender’s Willful Creatures conjures a fantastical world in which authentic love blooms. This is a place where a boy with keys for fingers is a hero, a woman’s children are potatoes, and a little boy with an iron for a head is born to a family of pumpkin heads. With her singular mix of surrealism, musical prose, and keenly felt emotion, Bender once again proves herself to be a masterful chronicler of the human condition.
Download or read book The Color Master written by Aimee Bender and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2013-08-13 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The bestselling author of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake returns with a wondrous collection of dreamy, strange, and magical stories. Truly beloved by readers and critics alike, Aimee Bender has become known as something of an enchantress whose lush prose is “moving, fanciful, and gorgeously strange” (People), “richly imagined and bittersweet” (Vanity Fair), and “full of provocative ideas” (The Boston Globe). In her deft hands, “relationships and mundane activities take on mythic qualities” (The Wall Street Journal). In this collection, Bender’s unique talents sparkle brilliantly in stories about people searching for connection through love, sex, and family—while navigating the often painful realities of their lives. A traumatic event unfolds when a girl with flowing hair of golden wheat appears in an apple orchard, where a group of people await her. A woman plays out a prostitution fantasy with her husband and finds she cannot go back to her old sex life. An ugly woman marries an ogre and struggles to decide if she should stay with him after he mistakenly eats their children. Two sisters travel deep into Malaysia, where one learns the art of mending tigers who have been ripped to shreds. In these deeply resonant stories—evocative, funny, beautiful, and sad—we see ourselves reflected as if in a funhouse mirror. Aimee Bender has once again proven herself to be among the most imaginative, exciting, and intelligent writers of our time.
Download or read book The Letter Killers Club written by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2011-12-06 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Letter Killers Club is a secret society of self-described “conceivers” who, to preserve the purity of their conceptions, will commit nothing to paper. (What, after all, is your run-of-the-mill scribbler of stories if not an accomplished corruptor of conceptions?) The logic of the club is strict and uncompromising. Every Saturday, members meet in a firelit room filled with empty black bookshelves where they strive to top one another by developing ever unlikelier, ever more perfect conceptions: a rehearsal of Hamlet hijacked by an actor who vanishes with the role; the double life of a merry medieval cleric derailed by a costume change; a machine-run world that imprisons men’s minds while conscripting their bodies; a dead Roman scribe stranded this side of the River Acheron. But in this book set in an ominous Soviet Moscow of the 1920s, the members of the club are strangely mistrustful of one another, while all are under the spell of its despotic President, and there is no telling, in the end, just how lethal the purely conceptual—or, for that matter, letters—may be.
Download or read book The Secret Scripture written by Sebastian Barry and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2008-06-12 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now a major motion picture starring Rooney Mara An epic story of family, love, and unavoidable tragedy from the two-time Booker Prize finalist and author of Old God's Time Sebastian Barry's novels have been hugely admired by readers and critics, and in 2005 his novel A Long Long Way was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. In The Secret Scripture, Barry revisits County Sligo, Ireland, the setting for his previous three books, to tell the unforgettable story of Roseanne McNulty. Once one of the most beguiling women in Sligo, she is now a resident of Roscommon Regional Mental Hospital and nearing her hundredth year. Set against an Ireland besieged by conflict, The Secret Scripture is an engrossing tale of one woman's life, and a poignant story of the cruelties of civil war and corrupted power. The Secret Scripture is now a film starring Rooney Mara, Eric Bana, and Vanessa Redgrave.
Download or read book On the Bright Side written by Hendrik Groen and published by Grand Central Publishing. This book was released on 2019-03-19 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "THE MALE ELENA FERRANTE" -- New York Post In the acclaimed follow-up to the #1 international bestseller The Secret Diary of Hendrik Groen, everyone's favorite curmudgeon is back and as funny and charming as ever with the newest adventures of the Old-But-Not-Dead Club -- for fans of Frederik Backman and Graeme Simsion. Everyone's favorite octogenarian is back and, together with his pals in the Old-But-Not-Dead Club, he is more determined than ever to wreak havoc and turn a twinkly eye on the brighter side of life. After a year spent mourning the death of his beloved friend Eefje, Hendrik may be older and a little more wobbly, but his youthful appetite for mischief hasn't diminished. When fears arise that the home is set for demolition, it's up to Hendrik and the Old-But-Not-Dead Club to intervene.
Download or read book Fire written by Sebastian Junger and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2001-10-17 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Forest fires, terrorism, war: explorations of danger by the author of The Perfect Storm. In Fire, Sebastian Junger brings to bear the same meticulous prose that made A Perfect Storm a modern classic onto the inner workings of a terrifying elemental force—an out-of-control inferno burning in the steep canyons of Idaho—and the cast of characters risking everything to bring that force under control. Few writers have been to so many desperate corners of the globe as has Sebastian Junger; fewer still have provided such starkly memorable evocations of characters and events. From the murderous mechanics of the diamond trade in Sierra Leone to the logic of guerrilla warfare in Afghanistan and the forensics of genocide in Kosovo, this collection of Junger's nonfiction will take you places you wouldn't dream of going to on your own.
Download or read book The Butterfly Lampshade written by Aimee Bender and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2020-07-28 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first novel in ten years from the author of the beloved New York Times bestseller The Particular Sadness Of Lemon Cake, a luminous, poignant tale of a mother, a daughter, mental illness, and the fluctuating barrier between the mind and the world On the night her single mother is taken to a mental hospital after a psychotic episode, eight year-old Francie is staying with her babysitter, waiting to take the train to Los Angeles to go live with her aunt and uncle. There is a lovely lamp next to the couch on which she's sleeping, the shade adorned with butterflies. When she wakes, Francie spies a dead butterfly, exactly matching the ones on the lamp, floating in a glass of water. She drinks it before the babysitter can see. Twenty years later, Francie is compelled to make sense of that moment, and two other incidents -- her discovery of a desiccated beetle from a school paper, and a bouquet of dried roses from some curtains. Her recall is exact -- she is sure these things happened. But despite her certainty, she wrestles with the hold these memories maintain over her, and what they say about her own place in the world. As Francie conjures her past and reduces her engagement with the world to a bare minimum, she begins to question her relationship to reality. The scenes set in Francie's past glow with the intensity of childhood perception, how physical objects can take on an otherworldly power. The question for Francie is, What do these events signify? And does this power survive childhood? Told in the lush, lilting prose that led the San Francisco Chronicle to say Aimee Bender is "a writer who makes you grateful for the very existence of language," The Butterfly Lampshade is a heartfelt and heartbreaking examination of the sometimes overwhelming power of the material world, and a broken love between mother and child.
Download or read book An Invisible Sign of My Own written by Aimee Bender and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2011-08-17 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aimee Bender’s stunning debut collection, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, proved her to be one of the freshest voices in American fiction. Now, in her first novel, she builds on that early promise. Mona Gray was ten when her father contracted a mysterious illness and she became a quitter, abandoning each of her talents just as pleasure became intense. The only thing she can’t stop doing is math: She knocks on wood, adds her steps, and multiplies people in the park against one another. When Mona begins teaching math to second-graders, she finds a ready audience. But the difficult and wonderful facts of life keep intruding. She finds herself drawn to the new science teacher, who has an unnerving way of seeing through her intricately built façade. Bender brilliantly directs her characters, giving them unexpected emotional depth and setting them in a calamitous world, both fancifully surreal and startlingly familiar. BONUS MATERIAL: This edition includes an excerpt from Aimee Bender's The Color Master.
Download or read book The Plagiarist written by Benjamin Cheever and published by Scribner. This book was released on 1994 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arthur Prentice, the son of an aging, alcoholic, much-celebrated American author, embarks on a career with a prestigious magazine and finds himself undertaking an emotional journey that transforms every facet of his life. "An ingenious first novel".--Newsweek.
Download or read book Minesweeper Special Forces Book 2 written by Chris Lynch and published by Scholastic Inc.. This book was released on 2019-12-03 with total page 133 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "All the sizzle, chaos, noise and scariness of war is clay in the hands of ace storyteller Lynch." -- Kirkus Reviews for the World War II series Discover the secret missions behind America's greatest conflicts.Fergus Frew thought he knew what to expect when he signed up with the Navy's demolitions team. But as the Korean War rages on, Fergus and his fellow divers -- AKA "frogmen" -- are tasked with more than just scouting mudflats. Soon they're planting mines. And sabotaging tunnels, bridges... and even fishing nets. Strangest of all, it falls to Fergus to transport a spy into the country -- and that means traveling far from Navy-controlled waters.But frogmen are amphibious. And Fergus may not realize it, but he's in a position to change the way the whole world thinks about combat.National Book Award finalist Chris Lynch continues his explosive fiction series based on the real-life, top-secret history of US black ops and today's heroic Navy SEALs.
