Download or read book Two Step Devil written by Jamie Quatro and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 2024-09-10 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Jamie Quatro is a writer of sinuous, muscular power and grace. Two-Step Devil is a starkly gorgeous story of God and loss and art and love, and her best book yet.” —Lauren Groff From a New York Times Notable “writer of great originality” comes a bold new novel about love, faith and two societal outsiders whose lives converge in the contemporary American South The “fearless” (New Yorker) author of I Want to Show You More and Fire Sermon—whose recently published stories in The New Yorker and The Paris Review have brought her new attention—is known for her sharp, seductive prose and masterful exploration of the divine and the carnal in daily life. In Two-Step Devil, Quatro delivers a striking and formally inventive story of the unlikely relationship between two strangers on the margins of society and the shadowy forces that threaten their futures. In 2014, in Lookout Mountain, Alabama, the Prophet—a seventy-year-old man who paints his visions—lives off the grid in a cabin near the Georgia border. While scrounging for materials at the local scrapyard, the Prophet sees a car pull up to an abandoned gas station. In the back seat is a teenage girl with zip ties on her wrists, a girl he realizes he must rescue from her current life. Her name is Michael, and the Prophet feels certain that she is a messenger sent by God to take his end-time warnings to the White House. Michael finds herself in the Prophet’s remote, art-filled cabin, and as their uncertain dynamic evolves into tender friendship, she is offered a surprising opportunity to escape her past—and perhaps change her future. Moving through the worlds of the Prophet, the girl, and a beguiling devil figure who dances in the corner of their lives, Two-Step Devil is a propulsive, philosophical examination of fate and faith that dares to ask what salvation, if any, can be found in our modern world.
Download or read book I Want To Show You More written by Jamie Quatro and published by Picador. This book was released on 2019-02-26 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sharp-edged and fearless, mixing white-hot yearning with daring humour, Jamie Quatro’s debut short-story collection is a stunning and subversive portrait of modern infidelity, faith, and family. Set around Lookout Mountain on the border of Georgia and Tennessee, Quatro’s hypnotically revealing stories range from the traditional to the fabulist as they expose lives torn between spirituality and sexuality in the New American South. These fifteen linked tales confront readers with dark theological complexities, fractured marriages, and mercurial temptations. Throughout the collection, a mother in her late thirties relates the various stages of her affair while other characters lay bare their own notions of God, illicit sex, raising children, and running: a wife comes home with her husband to find her lover’s corpse in their bed; marathon runners on a Civil War battlefield must carry phallic statues and are punished if they choose to unload their burdens; a girl’s embarrassment over attending a pool party with her quadriplegic mother turns to fierce devotion under the pitying gaze of other guests; and a husband asks his wife to show him how she would make love to another man. Sultry, acute, startlingly intimate, and enticingly cool, I Want To Show You More is the thrilling debut of an exhilarating new voice in American fiction.
Download or read book Fire Sermon written by Jamie Quatro and published by House of Anansi. This book was released on 2018-01-16 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the critically acclaimed author of I Want to Show You More comes an unflinching and profound portrait of Maggie and Thomas, and their disintegrating marriage. Married twenty years to Thomas and living in Nashville with their two children, Maggie is drawn ineluctably into a passionate affair while still fiercely committed to her husband and family. What begins as a platonic intellectual and spiritual exchange between writer Maggie and poet James gradually transforms into an emotional and erotically-charged bond that challenges Maggie’s sense of loyalty and morality, drawing her deeper into the darkness of desire. Using an array of narrative techniques and written in spare, elegant prose, Jamie Quatro gives us a compelling account of one woman’s emotional, psychological, physical, and spiritual yearnings — unveiling the impulses and contradictions that reside in us all. Fire Sermon is an unflinchingly honest and formally daring debut novel from a writer of enormous talent.
Download or read book Second Place written by Rachel Cusk and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2021-05-04 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A haunting fable of art, family, and fate from the author of the Outline trilogy. A woman invites a famous artist to use her guesthouse in the remote coastal landscape where she lives with her family. Powerfully drawn to his paintings, she believes his vision might penetrate the mystery at the center of her life. But as a long, dry summer sets in, his provocative presence itself becomes an enigma—and disrupts the calm of her secluded household. Second Place, Rachel Cusk’s electrifying new novel, is a study of female fate and male privilege, the geometries of human relationships, and the moral questions that animate our lives. It reminds us of art’s capacity to uplift—and to destroy.
Download or read book Outwitting the Devil written by Napoleon Hill and published by Sharon Lechter. This book was released on 2011 with total page 30 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally written in 1938 but never published due to its controversial nature, an insightful guide reveals the seven principles of good that will allow anyone to triumph over the obstacles that must be faced in reaching personal goals.
Download or read book The Devil Went Down to Austin written by Rick Riordan and published by Bantam. This book was released on 2002-06-25 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series Rick Riordan, triple-crown winner of the Edgar, Anthony, and Shamus Awards, brings his fast-talking, hard-living, Texas-hip P.I. Tres Navarre to the heart of the Lone Star State—Austin—to unravel a case so dark, twisted, and deadly, it can only involve family.... Tres Navarre, the P.I. with a Ph.D. in literature, heads to Austin for a laid-back summer teaching gig. But he’s in store for a whole lot more. His big brother Garrett--computer whiz, Jimmy Buffett fanatic, and all-around eccentric—is hoping to retire a multimillionaire by the fall. He’s bet his career and the Navarre family ranch to do it. Then Garrett’s oldest friend and business partner is murdered—and Garrett is the only suspect. As Tres delves into Garrett’s bizarre world to find the truth behind the murder, he comes face to face with the damaged relationships, violent lives, and billion-dollar schemes of a high-tech world gone haywire. Connecting them all is beautiful Lake Travis and the shocking secret that lies within its depths. Now, as Tres struggles with his own troubled family past and to clear his brother’ s name, he finds himself stalked by a cold-blooded killer—one who could spell the death of both Navarres. Don’t miss any of these hotter-than-Texas-chili Tres Navarre novels: BIG RED TEQUILA • THE WIDOWER’S TWO-STEP • THE LAST KING OF TEXAS • THE DEVIL WENT DOWN TO AUSTIN • SOUTHTOWN • MISSION ROAD • REBEL ISLAND
Download or read book Hot Stew written by Fiona Mozley and published by Algonquin Books. This book was released on 2022-04-12 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A contemporary story of class, gender, and property ownership--told through the interconnected lives of the residents of one London building and the real estate heiress who wants to tear it down"--
Download or read book Kill Switch written by Penelope Douglas and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2024-03-12 with total page 641 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One woman’s worst fears come to life in the third novel of the Devil’s Night dark romance series by New York Times bestseller Penelope Douglas, now with bonus material. Sending Damon to prison was the worst thing Winter could’ve done. It didn’t matter that he did the crime or that she wished he was dead. Winter thought he’d cool off in jail and be anything but the horror he was, or that at the very least she’d have time to disappear before he got out. But she was wrong. Three years came and went too fast, and prison only gave him time to plan. And while Winter anticipated his vengeance, she didn’t expect this. He doesn’t want to make her hurt. He wants to make everything hurt. Damon knows he needs to get rid of Winter’s father, giving her, her sister, and her mother nowhere to run. The Ashby women are desperate for a knight in shining armor. But that’s not what’s coming. It's time Damon took control of his future. It’s time he showed them all that he will never stop being the nightmare they think he is. Damon won’t have to break into her home to do it. As the new man of the house, he has all the keys.
Download or read book Aphasia written by Mauro Javier Cárdenas and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2020-11-03 with total page 147 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mauro Javier Cárdenas, the critically-acclaimed author of The Revolutionaries Try Again—“an original, insubordinate novel” (New York Times)—pens a profound story of literature about a man coming to terms with his dysfunctional Colombian family, as well as his own behavior, as an immigrant in America. Antonio wants to avoid thinking about his sister—even though he knows he won’t be able to avoid thinking about his sister—because his sister is on the run after allegedly threatening to shoot her neighbors, and has been claiming that Antonio, Obama, the Pentagon, and their mother are all conspiring against her. Nevertheless, Antonio is going to try his best to be as avoidant as possible, because he worries that what’s been happening to his sister might somehow infect his relatively contented, ordered American life, and destabilize the precarious arrangement with his ex-wife that’s allowed him to stay close to his two daughters. In fact, he’s busy doing everything except facing his problems head-on: transcribing recordings of his mother speaking about their troubled life in Colombia, transcribing recordings of his ex-wife speaking about her idyllic life in the Czech Republic; writing about former girlfriends whose words and deeds still recur in his mind; rereading stories by American writers that allow him to skirt the subject of his sister’s state of mind without completely destroying his own. Written in long, unravelling sentences that accommodate all the detritus of thought—scenes real and imagined, headphones and heartache, Toblerones and Thomas Bernhard—Aphasia captures the immensity of the present moment as well as the pain of the past. It cements Mauro Javier Cárdenas’s place as one of the most innovative and extraordinary novelists working today.
Download or read book The Devil Himself written by Eric Dezenhall and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2011-07-19 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "I'll talk to anybody, a priest, a bank manager, a gangster, the devil himself, if I can get the information I need. This is a war." -- Lt. Commander Charles Radcliffe Haffenden, Naval Intelligence Unit, B-3 In late 1982, a spike in terrorism has the Reagan Administration considering covert action to neutralize the menace before it reaches the United States. There are big risks to waging a secret war against America's enemies---but there is one little-known precedent. Forty years earlier, German U-boats had been prowling the Atlantic, sinking hundreds of U.S. ships along the east coast, including the largest cruise ship in the world, Normandie, destroyed at a Manhattan pier after Pearl Harbor. Nazi agents even landed on Long Island with explosives and maps of railways, bridges, and defense plants. Desperate to secure the coast, the Navy turned to Meyer Lansky, the Jewish Mob boss. A newly naturalized American whose fellow Eastern European Jews were being annihilated by Hitler, Lansky headed an unlikely fellowship of mobsters Lucky Luciano, Bugsy Siegel, Frank Costello, and naval intelligence officers. Young Reagan White House aide Jonah Eastman, grandson of Atlantic City gangster Mickey Price, is approached by the president's top advisor with an assignment: Discreetly interview his grandfather's old friend Lansky about his wartime activities. There just might be something to learn from that secret operation. The notoriously tight-lipped gangster, dying of cancer, is finally ready to talk. Jonah gets a riveting---and darkly comic---history lesson. The Mob caught Nazi agents, planted propaganda with the help of columnist Walter Winchell, and found Mafia spies to plot the invasion of Sicily, where General Patton was poised to strike at the soft underbelly of the Axis. Lansky's men stopped at nothing to sabotage Hitler's push toward American shores. Based on real events, The Devil Himself is a high-energy novel of military espionage and Mafia justice.
Download or read book The Devil Wins written by Dallas G. Denery II and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2016-09-13 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A bold retelling of the history of lying in medieval and early modern Europe Is it ever acceptable to lie? This question plays a surprisingly important role in the story of Europe's transition from medieval to modern society. According to many historians, Europe became modern when Europeans began to lie—that is, when they began to argue that it is sometimes acceptable to lie. This popular account offers a clear trajectory of historical progression from a medieval world of faith, in which every lie is sinful, to a more worldly early modern society in which lying becomes a permissible strategy for self-defense and self-advancement. Unfortunately, this story is wrong. For medieval and early modern Christians, the problem of the lie was the problem of human existence itself. To ask "Is it ever acceptable to lie?" was to ask how we, as sinners, should live in a fallen world. As it turns out, the answer to that question depended on who did the asking. The Devil Wins uncovers the complicated history of lying from the early days of the Catholic Church to the Enlightenment, revealing the diversity of attitudes about lying by considering the question from the perspectives of five representative voices—the Devil, God, theologians, courtiers, and women. Examining works by Augustine, Bonaventure, Martin Luther, Madeleine de Scudéry, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and a host of others, Dallas G. Denery II shows how the lie, long thought to be the source of worldly corruption, eventually became the very basis of social cohesion and peace.
Download or read book Kiss of the She Devil written by M. William Phelps and published by Pinnacle Books . This book was released on 2012-03-01 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The true-crime story of a cheating husband, the other woman, and her plot to kill the wife, by the bestselling author of Murder, New England. When librarian Martha Gail Fulton was gunned down in a Michigan parking lot on a quiet evening, there were two obvious suspects—Gail's husband George, a former military officer . . . and George's mistress, the flashy businesswoman Donna Kay Trapani. Police were baffled to find that both had ironclad alibis. Yet evidence showed the shooter, a male, had an accomplice—a mystery woman. Now, M. William Phelps recounts the compelling real-life drama of a twisted love triangle that ended in bloody murder, and the riveting investigation that brought to light a master manipulator's trail of deadly deceit. Praise for New York Times bestselling author M. William Phelps “One of our most engaging crime journalists.” —Katherine Ramsland, New York Times – bestselling author of Confession of a Serial Killer: The Untold Story of Dennis Rader, the BTK Killer “Phelps creates a vivid portrait.” —Publishers Weekly “One of America's finest true-crime writers.” —Vincent Bugliosi, New York Times bestselling author of Helter Skelter Includes sixteen pages of dramatic photos
Download or read book Waltzing a Two Step written by Dan Juday and published by Calling Card Books. This book was released on 2021-09-15 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Waltzing a Two-Step is the first-person account of a boy born into the rural Midwest in the middle of the 20th Century. A bright, timid boy, he is enthralled with the grandeur of his local library and his Catholic church. One of five children in an upwardly mobile family, he struggles with being gay. Contemplating the paradoxes that life presents him, he looks for his proper place in an enticing but unwelcoming world, a search that takes him overseas-chasing lost happiness, and struggling to fit in. His search ultimately reveals that he has been looking for himself all along. It is a cautionary tale told late in life out of the comfort and regret that come with memory, and with the bittersweetness of time and opportunity gone by without addressing things that should have been said earlier. The story has many parallels to the world in the 21st Century and is for anyone searching for life's answers.
Download or read book The Art of Revision written by Peter Ho Davies and published by Graywolf Press. This book was released on 2021-11-02 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fifteenth volume in the Art of series takes an expansive view of revision—on the page and in life In The Art of Revision: The Last Word, Peter Ho Davies takes up an often discussed yet frequently misunderstood subject. He begins by addressing the invisibility of revision—even though it’s an essential part of the writing process, readers typically only see a final draft, leaving the practice shrouded in mystery. To combat this, Davies pulls examples from his novels The Welsh Girl and The Fortunes, as well as from the work of other writers, including Flannery O’Connor, Carmen Machado, and Raymond Carver, shedding light on this slippery subject. Davies also looks beyond literature to work that has been adapted or rewritten, such as books made into films, stories rewritten by another author, and the practice of retconning in comics and film. In an affecting frame story, Davies recounts the story of a violent encounter in his youth, which he then retells over the years, culminating in a final telling at the funeral of his father. In this way, the book arrives at an exhilarating mode of thinking about revision—that it is the writer who must change, as well as the writing. The result is a book that is as useful as it is moving, one that asks writers to reflect upon themselves and their writing.
Download or read book The Devil s Backbone written by Kim Wozencraft and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2007-10-02 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though they are sisters, Kit and Jenny could not be more different. Jenny is the dutiful daughter, following in her father's footsteps to become a Texas cop. A detective in the Austin Police Department, she is surprised when she sees a crime report with her sister's name on it. Rebellious Kit is always trying to escape the fallout of her mother's death and the gravitational pull of her father's expectations. Working as a stripper, she is living in a nighttime world of pseudonyms and lies. And she's begun to notice some new characters hanging around the club. Suddenly, one sister's murder leads to the other's investigation of it, and brings her into a world more deadly than she can imagine. As the truth unfolds, one sister begins to question everything--even her own sanity--and the role she might have played in this lethal dance.
Download or read book The Devil s Backbone written by Bill Wittliff and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2014-10-01 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The last the boy Papa saw of his Momma, she was galloping away on her horse Precious in the saddle her father took from a dead Mexican officer after the Battle of San Jacinto, fleeing from his Daddy, Old Karl, a vicious, tight-fisted horse trader. Momma’s flight sets Papa on a relentless quest to find her that thrusts him and his scrappy little dog Fritz into adventures all across the wild and woolly Hill Country of Central Texas, down to Mexico, and even into the realm of the ghostly “Shimmery People.” In The Devil’s Backbone, master storyteller Bill Wittliff takes readers on an exciting journey through a rough 1880s frontier as full of colorful characters and unexpected turns of events as the great American quest novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Wittliff grew up listening to stories and memories like these in his own family, and in this imaginative novel, they come to vivid life, creating an engrossing story of a Texas Huck Finn that brims with folk wisdom and sly humor. A rogue’s gallery of characters thwart and aid Papa’s path—Old Karl, hell-bent on bringing the boy back to servitude on his farm, and Herman, Papa’s brother who’s got Old Karl’s horse-trading instincts and greed; Calley Pearsall, an enigmatic cowboy with “other Fish to Fry” who might be an outlaw or a trustworthy “o’Amigo”; o’Jeffey, a black seer who talks to the spirits but won’t tell Papa what she has divined about his Momma; Mister Pegleg, a three-legged coyote with whom Papa forms a poignant, nearly tragic friendship; the “Mexkins” Pepe and Peto and their father Old Crecencio, whose longing for his lost family is as strong as Papa’s; and blind Bird, a magical “blue baby” who can’t see with his eyes but who helps other people see what they hold in their hearts. Papa’s adventures draw him ever nearer to a mysterious cave that haunts his dreams—an actual cave that he discovers at last in the canyons of the Devil’s Backbone—but will he find Momma before Old Karl finds him?
Download or read book One Step Forward Two Steps Back written by D.F. Block and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2011-11-12 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It had been a long day; the phone hadn't stopped ringing since it was turned on at Ten 'o clock this morning, it was now just after eleven at night and I was tired. As I pulled into the large empty car park on this cold wet night there in the far corner sat a metallic blue XR3i. The headlights flashed once and I cruised over to where it was parked, Dave sat on the rear parcel shelf staring vacantly out of the window. I drew up alongside the car and its driver's window went down automatically, I dropped my window slightly."Yer gonna have to get in the motor, I aint passing fuck all through the window!" I wound my window back up and waited. There were a few stragglers waiting so time was of the essence. The passenger door of my car opened slowly and then shut quietly, a young girl sat on the passenger seat wearing a blue pair of pyjamas and a green towelling dressing gown.
