Download or read book The Spinster Diaries written by Gina Fattore and published by Prospect Park Books. This book was released on 2020-04-21 with total page 115 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Our heroine, a moderately successful TV writer in L.A., wants her life to be as sunny and perfect as a Hollywood rom-com: a cool job, a wacky best friend, and lots of age-appropriate hot guys just dying to date her. Instead, she’s a self-described spinster who is swimming in anxiety and just might have a tiny little brain tumor. So she turns to an unlikely source for inspiration: the eighteenth-century novelist and diarist Frances Burney, who pretty much invented the chick-lit novel. A semi-autobiographical unromantic comedy, The Spinster Diaries is a laugh-out-loud satire of both the TV business and the well-worn conventions of chick lit—as well as the true tale of the forgotten writer who inspired Jane Austen to greatness. It's an endearing and refreshingly honest testament to how one person’s life can reach out across the centuries to touch another’s.
Download or read book The Spinster s Guide to Scandalous Behavior written by Jennifer McQuiston and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2015-11-24 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In New York Times bestselling author Jennifer McQuiston's enticing new Seduction Diaries entry, a mysterious journal may provide a potential spinster with instruction—or lead her to her heart's desire Free-spirited Lucy Westmore isn't yet a spinster, although she fully intends to be. Fortunately, an eccentric aunt has left her both a diary detailing the secrets to spinsterhood and a cottage in Cornwall. Unfortunately, an insufferable marquess is angling for her prize! Turning Lord Thomas Branston down flat should be easy. So why does this man who won't take no for an answer make Lucy's body and soul sigh yes? Thomas knows the real value of Heathmore Cottage, and he has no intention of letting some silly Society miss get her hands on it. He'll simply have to charm Lucy into selling. But the clever young woman he encounters, first in London, then en route to Cornwall, stands stubbornly on her own two (quite lovely) feet. And now, Thomas can think only of sweeping her off them.
Download or read book Spinster written by Kate Bolick and published by Crown. This book was released on 2015-04-21 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Book Review Notable Book “Whom to marry, and when will it happen—these two questions define every woman’s existence.” So begins Spinster, a revelatory and slyly erudite look at the pleasures and possibilities of remaining single. Using her own experiences as a starting point, journalist and cultural critic Kate Bolick invites us into her carefully considered, passionately lived life, weaving together the past and present to examine why she—along with over 100 million American women, whose ranks keep growing—remains unmarried. This unprecedented demographic shift, Bolick explains, is the logical outcome of hundreds of years of change that has neither been fully understood, nor appreciated. Spinster introduces a cast of pioneering women from the last century whose genius, tenacity, and flair for drama have emboldened Bolick to fashion her life on her own terms: columnist Neith Boyce, essayist Maeve Brennan, social visionary Charlotte Perkins Gilman, poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, and novelist Edith Wharton. By animating their unconventional ideas and choices, Bolick shows us that contemporary debates about settling down, and having it all, are timeless—the crucible upon which all thoughtful women have tried for centuries to forge a good life. Intellectually substantial and deeply personal, Spinster is both an unreservedly inquisitive memoir and a broader cultural exploration that asks us to acknowledge the opportunities within ourselves to live authentically. Bolick offers us a way back into our own lives—a chance to see those splendid years when we were young and unencumbered, or middle-aged and finally left to our own devices, for what they really are: unbounded and our own to savor.
Download or read book Saint Everywhere written by Mary Lea Carroll and published by Prospect Park Books. This book was released on 2019-05-02 with total page 101 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traveling with—and learning from—the women saints While visiting Siena, Italy, Mary Lea Carroll grew fascinated with the remarkable story of St. Catherine of Siena and made a resolution: Whenever she was lucky enough to travel, if a shrine dedicated to a female saint was nearby, she'd visit it and learn about her. What started as a hobby grew into a journey she never expected, one rich with challenges and cappuccinos, doubts and inspiration, glasses of wine with strangers and moments of transcendence. Over eight quests, Carroll takes readers along with her as she seeks to learn something from a few great women of history, while looking for ways to be a better citizen of the world.
Download or read book Alas Poor Lady written by Rachel Ferguson and published by . This book was released on 1937 with total page 463 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Excellent Women written by Barbara Pym and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2006-12-26 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Excellent Women is probably the most famous of Barbara Pym's novels. The acclaim a few years ago for this early comic novel, which was hailed by Lord David Cecil as one of 'the finest examples of high comedy to have appeared in England during the past seventy-five years,' helped launch the rediscovery of the author's entire work. Mildred Lathbury is a clergyman's daughter and a spinster in the England of the 1950s, one of those 'excellent women' who tend to get involved in other people's lives - such as those of her new neighbor, Rockingham, and the vicar next door. This is Barbara Pym's world at its funniest.
Download or read book Am I Normal Yet written by Holly Bourne and published by Usborne Publishing Ltd. This book was released on 2015-08-01 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The groundbreaking and bestselling first Spinster Club novel from YA star Holly Bourne - "A brutal and brilliant takedown of how we talk about mental illness, feminism, and friendship." The Guardian All Evie wants is to be normal. And now that she's almost off her meds and at a new college where no one knows her as the-girl-who-went-nuts, there's only one thing left to tick off her list... But relationships can mess with anyone's head - something Evie's new friends Amber and Lottie know only too well. The trouble is, if Evie won't tell them her secrets, how can they stop her making a huge mistake?
Download or read book The Paying Guests written by Sarah Waters and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2014-09-16 with total page 478 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New York Times bestselling novel that has been called “a tour de force” (Wall Street Journal), “unputdownable” (The Washington Post), “a delicious hothouse of a novel” (USA Today), “effortless” (The Economist), “seductive” (Vanity Fair) and “pitch perfect” (Salon) “Superb, bewitching…Forget about Fifty Shades of Grey; this novel is one of the most sensual you will ever read, and all without sacrificing either good taste or a "G" rating” – NPR “One of the year’s most engrossing and suspenseful novels…a love affair, a shocking murder, and a flawless ending … Will keep you sleepless for three nights straight and leave you grasping for another book that can sustain that high.” — Entertainment Weekly (A rating) “Volcanically sexy, sizzingly smart, plenty bloody and just plain irresistible." —USA Today (4 stars) It is 1922, and London is tense. Ex-servicemen are disillusioned; the out-of-work and the hungry are demanding change. And in South London, in a genteel Camberwell villa—a large, silent house now bereft of brothers, husband, and even servants—life is about to be transformed as impoverished widow Mrs. Wray and her spinster daughter, Frances, are obliged to take in lodgers. With the arrival of Lilian and Leonard Barber, a modern young couple of the “clerk class,” the routines of the house will be shaken up in unexpected ways. Little do the Wrays know just how profoundly their new tenants will alter the course of Frances’s life—or, as passions mount and frustration gathers, how far-reaching, and how devastating, the disturbances will be. Short-listed for the Man Booker Prize three times, Sarah Waters has earned a reputation as one of our greatest writers of historical fiction, and here she has delivered again. A love story, a tension-filled crime story, and a beautifully atmospheric portrait of a fascinating time and place, The Paying Guests is Sarah Waters’s finest achievement yet.
Download or read book Miss MacIntosh My Darling written by Marguerite Young and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This novel is one of the most ambitious and remarkable literary achievements of our time. It is a picaresque, psychological novel--a novel of the road, a journey or voyage of the human spirit in its search for reality in a world of illusion and nightmare. It is an epic of what might be called the Arabian Nights of American life. Marguerite Young's method is poetic, imagistic, incantatory; in prose of extraordinary richness she tests the nature of her characters--and the nature of reality. Miss MacIntosh, My Darling is written with oceanic music moving at many levels of consciousness and perception; but the toughly fibred realistic fabric is always there, in the happenings of the narrative, the humor, the precise details, the definitions of the characters. Miss MacIntosh herself, who hails from What Cheer, Iowa, and seems downright and normal, with an incorruptible sense of humor and the desire to put an end to phantoms; Catherine Cartwheel, the opium lady, a recluse who is shut away in a great New England seaside house and entertains imaginary guests; Mr. Spitzer, the lawyer, musical composer and mystical space traveler, a gentle man, wholly unsure of himself and of reality; his twin brother Peron, the gay and raffish gambler and virtuoso in the world of sports; Cousin Hannah, the horsewoman, balloonist, mountain-climber and militant Boston feminist, known as Al Hamad through all the seraglios of the East; Titus Bonebreaker of Chicago, wild man of God dreaming of a heavenly crown; the very efficient Christian hangman, Mr. Weed of the Wabash River Valley; a featherweight champion who meets his equal in a graveyard--these are a few who live with phantasmagorical vividness in the pages of Miss MacIntosh, My Darling. The novel touches on many aspects of life--drug addiction, woman's suffrage, murder, suicide, pregnancy both real and imaginary, schizophrenia, many strange loves, the psychology of gambling, perfectionism; but the profusion of this huge book serves always to intensify the force of the central question: "What shall we do when, fleeing from illusion, we are confronted by illusion?" What is real, what is dream? Is the calendar of the human heart the same as that kept by the earth? Is it possible that one may live a secondary life of which one does not know? In every aspect, Miss MacIntosh, My Darling stands by itself--in the lyric beauty of its prose, its imaginative vitality and cumulative emotional power. It is the work of a writer of genius.
Download or read book Turtle Diary written by Russell Hoban and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2013-06-11 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two lonely Londoners bond over a plan to free the sea turtles at the city zoo in this touching novel from a cult-favorite author who has drawn comparisons to J.D. Salinger and Kurt Vonnegut. A wise and touching classic that “crackles with witty detail, mordant intelligence and self-deprecating irony,” from the author of Riddley Walker (Time) Life in a city can be atomizing, isolating. And it certainly is for William G. and Neaera H., the strangers at the center of Russell Hoban’s surprisingly heartwarming novel Turtle Diary. William, a clerk at a used bookstore, lives in a rooming house after a divorce that has left him without home or family. Neaera is a successful writer of children’s books, who, in her own estimation, “looks like the sort of spinster who doesn’t keep cats and is not a vegetarian. Looks…like a man’s woman who hasn’t got a man.” Entirely unknown to each other, they are both drawn to the turtle tank at the London Zoo with “minds full of turtle thoughts,” wondering how the turtles might be freed. And then comes the day when Neaera walks into William’s bookstore, and together they form an unlikely partnership to make what seemed a crazy dream become a reality.
Download or read book Grange House written by Sarah Blake and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2001-06-01 with total page 459 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of the New York Times bestselling novels THE POSTMISTRESS and THE GUEST BOOK comes Sarah Blake's GRANGE HOUSE. "Pleasing, intricate...[a] delightful book" —New York Times Book Review Maisie Thomas spends every summer at Grange House, a hotel on the coast of Maine ruled by the elegant Miss Grange. In 1896, when Maisie turns 17, her visit marks a turning point. On the morning after her arrival, local fishermen make a gruesome discovery: drowned lovers, found clasped in each other's arms. It's only the first in a series of events that casts a shadow over Maisie's summer. As she considers the attentions of two very different young men, Maisie also falls under the gaze of Miss Grange, who begins to tell her disturbing stories of her past. Rich with the details, customs, and language of the era, Sarah Blake's Grange House is a wonderfully atmospheric, page-turning novel of literary suspense and romance.
Download or read book Nothing to Do But Stay written by Carrie Young and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This daughter's loving tribute to her pioneer mother tells of a real heroine who traveled by herself to North Dakota in 1904, to stake a lonely claim and start a farm on 160 empty acres before she married and began her family. Photos.
Download or read book The Boy Book written by E. Lockhart and published by Delacorte Press. This book was released on 2008-04-22 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From E. Lockhart, author of the highly acclaimed, New York Times bestseller We Were Liars, which John Green called "utterly unforgettable," comes The Boy Book, the second book in the uproarious and heartwarming Ruby Oliver novels. Here is how things stand at the beginning of newly-licensed driver Ruby Oliver's junior year at Tate Prep: • Kim: Not speaking. But far away in Tokyo. • Cricket: Not speaking. • Nora: Speaking--sort of. Chatted a couple times this summer when they bumped into each other outside of school--once shopping in the U District, and once in the Elliot Bay Bookstore. But she hadn't called Ruby, or anything. • Noel: Didn't care what anyone thinks. • Meghan: Didn't have any other friends. • Dr. Z: Speaking. • And Jackson. The big one. Not speaking. But, by Winter Break, a new job, an unlikely but satisfying friend combo, additional entries to The Boy Book and many difficult decisions help Ruby to see that there is, indeed, life outside the Tate Universe.
Download or read book The Duke Undone written by Joanna Lowell and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-04-06 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An artist stumbles upon a naked duke and an unlikely love story begins in this captivating Victorian historical romance. When Royal Academy painting student Lucy Coover trips over a naked man passed out in an East End alley, she does the decent thing. She covers him up and fetches help. Trouble is, she can't banish his muscular form from her dreams as easily. Compelled to capture every detail, she creates a stunning portrait but is forced to sell it when the rent comes due. What could be worse than surrendering the very picture of your desire? Meeting the man himself. Anthony Philby, Duke of Weston, is nobody's muse. Upon discovering the scandalous likeness, he springs into action. His infamous family has been torn apart by shame and secrets, and he can't afford more gossip. Even a whisper may jeopardize his inheritance and his chance at independence. His plan is simple: burn the painting, confront the artist. Or rather, it's simple until he meets Lucy and decides to offer the bewitching young artist a devil's bargain. He'll help save her foreclosed home, if she'll help repair his family’s brutal legacy. An irresistible passion ignites between them, but when danger strikes, Lucy and Anthony must risk everything... for a love that might destroy them both.
Download or read book The Neurotic Parent s Guide to College Admissions written by J.D. Rothman and published by Prospect Park Books. This book was released on 2012-04-01 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Admissions rates of 6 percent? Kids applying to thirty-two colleges? Sixteen-year-olds with more impressive resumes than Fortune 500 CEOs? Has the nation lost its mind? Why yes, it has! J.D. Rothman, the Neurotic Parent of blog fame, takes readers on a hilarious satiric journey through today’s insane college admissions process. The vividly illustrated book takes you from the Itsy-Bitsy Fiske Guide and Junior Kumon Tips for Preschoolers through Rejection Letters from the Heart and Bed Bath & Bye-Bye.
Download or read book B Side Books written by John Plotz and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2021-06-01 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There are the acknowledged classics of world literature: the canonical works assigned in schools, topping every must-read list . . . and then there are the B-Sides. These are the books that slipped through the cracks, went unread, missed their rightful appointment with posterity. They were ahead of their times or behind their times or on a whole different schedule than the rest of the universe. What do you do when a book that you love has been neglected or dismissed by everyone else? In B-Side Books, leading writers, critics, and scholars show why their favorite forgotten books deserve a new audience. From dusty westerns and far-out science fiction to obscure Czech novelists and romance-novel precursors, the contributors advocate for the unsung virtues of overlooked books. They write about unheralded novels, poetry collections, memoirs, and more with understanding, respect, passion, and love. In these thoughtful, often personal essays, contributors—including Stephanie Burt, Caleb Crain, Merve Emre, Ursula K. Le Guin, Carlo Rotella, and Namwali Serpell—read books by writers such as Helen DeWitt, Shirley Jackson, Stanislaw Lem, Dambudzo Marechera, Paule Marshall, and Charles Portis.
Download or read book Diary of an Accidental Wallflower written by Jennifer McQuiston and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2015-02-24 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times bestselling author “explores class, friendship and family ties in this refreshing romance” between a doctor and a debutante (Kirkus Reviews). Pretty and popular, Miss Clare Westmore knows exactly what (or rather, who) she wants: the next Duke of Harrington. But when she twists her ankle on the eve of the Season’s most touted event, Clare is left standing in the wallflower line watching her best friend dance away with her duke. Dr. Daniel Merial is tempted to deliver more than a diagnosis to London’s most unlikely wallflower, but he doesn’t have time for distractions, even one so delectable. Besides, she’s clearly got her sights on more promising prey. So why can’t he stop thinking about her? All Clare wants to do is return to the dance floor. But as her former friends try to knock her permanently out of place, she realizes with horror she is falling for her doctor instead of her duke. When her ankle finally heals and she faces her old life again, will she throw herself back into the game? Or will her time in the wallflower line have given her a glimpse of who she was really meant to be?
