Download or read book A Fan s Notes written by Frederick Exley and published by Vintage. This book was released on 1988-08-12 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This fictional memoir, the first of an autobiographical trilogy, traces a self professed failure's nightmarish decent into the underside of American life and his resurrection to the wisdom that emerges from despair.
Download or read book Vintage Contemporaries written by Dan Kois and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2023-01-17 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Vintage Contemporaries is about being young and becoming less young, exploring friendship (sometimes magical, sometimes messy), parenthood (ditto), and how to reconcile youthful ambition and ideals with real life. It’s a warm and big-hearted coming of age story that made me wistful for my own twenties, set in a vividly rendered and long-vanished New York City.”—Rumaan Alam, New York Times bestselling author of Leave the World Behind Slate editor Dan Kois makes his fiction debut with this stunning coming-of-age novel set in New York City, about the joys of unexpected life-altering friendships, the power of finding ourselves in the moment, and the importance of forgiving ourselves when we inevitably mess everything up. It’s 1991. Em moved to New York City for excitement and possibility, but the big city isn’t quite what she thought it would be. Working as a literary agent’s assistant, she’s down to her last nineteen dollars but has made two close friends: Emily, a firebrand theater director living in a Lower East Side squat, and Lucy, a middle-aged novelist and single mom. Em’s life revolves around these two wildly different women and their vividly disparate yet equally assured views of art and the world. But who is Em, and what does she want to become? It's 2004. Em is now Emily, a successful book editor, happily married and barely coping with the challenges of a new baby. And suddenly Lucy and Emily return to her life: Her old friend Lucy's posthumous book needs a publisher, and her ex-friend Emily wants to rekindle their relationship. As they did once before, these two women—one dead, one very alive—force Emily to reckon with her decisions, her failures, and what kind of creative life she wants to lead. A sharp, reflective, and funny story of a young woman coming into herself and struggling to find her place, Vintage Contemporaries is a novel about art, parenthood, loyalty, and fighting for a cause—the times we do the right thing, and the times we fail—set in New York City on both sides of the millennium.
Download or read book Undiscovered Gyrl written by Allison Burnett and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2009-08-11 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beautiful, wild, funny, and lost, Katie Kampenfelt is taking a year off before college to find her passion. Ambitious in her own way, Katie intends to do more than just smoke weed with her boyfriend, Rory, and work at the bookstore. She plans to seduce Dan, a thirty-two-year-old film professor. Katie chronicles her adventures in an anonymous blog, telling strangers her innermost desires, shames, and thrills. But when Dan stops taking her calls, when her alcoholic father suffers a terrible fall, and when she finds herself drawn into a dangerous new relationship, Katie's fearless narrative begins to crack, and dark pieces of her past emerge. Sexually frank, often heartbreaking, and bursting with devilish humor, Undiscovered Gyrl is an extraordinarily accomplished novel of identity, voyeurism, and deceit. "Imagine an 18-year-old Lolita, updated for the 21st century, blogging her own provocative adventures. By turns charming and crude, disturbingly reckless and achingly tender, Undiscovered Gyrl seduces you into her downy arms, locks her long legs around your waist, and doesn't let go." — Rachel Resnick, author of Love Junkie
Download or read book The Resisters written by Gish Jen and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2020 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Resisters is palpably loving, smart, funny, and desperately unsettling. The novel should be required reading for the country both as a cautionary tale and because it is a stone-cold masterpiece. This is Gish Jen's moment. She has pitched a perfect game." --Ann Patchett The time: not so long from now. The place: AutoAmerica. The land: half under water. The Internet: one part artificial intelligence, one part surveillance technology, and oddly human--even funny. The people: Divided. The angel-fair "Netted" have jobs, and literally occupy the high ground. The "Surplus" live on swampland if they're lucky, on water if they're not. The story: To a Surplus couple--he once a professor, she still a lawyer--is born a Blasian girl with a golden arm. At two, Gwen is hurling her stuffed animals from the crib; by ten, she can hit whatever target she likes. Her teens find her happily playing in an underground baseball league. When AutoAmerica rejoins the Olympics, though--with a special eye on beating ChinRussia--Gwen attracts interest. Soon she finds herself playing ball with the Netted even as her mother challenges the very foundations of this divided society. A moving and important story of an America that seems ever more possible, The Resisters is also the story of one family struggling to maintain its humanity and normalcy in circumstances that threaten their every value--as well as their very existence. Extraordinary and ordinary, charming and electrifying, this is Gish Jen at her most irresistible.
Download or read book The Debut written by Anita Brookner and published by Vintage. This book was released on 1990 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since childhood Ruth Weiss has been escaping from life into books, and from the hothouse attentions of her tyrannical and eccentric parents into the gentler warmth of lovers and friends. Now Dr. Weiss, at forty, a quiet scholar devoted to the study of Balzac, is convinced that her life has been ruined by literature, and that once again she must make a new start in life.
Download or read book Trauma written by Patrick McGrath and published by Anchor Canada. This book was released on 2010-10-29 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hailed by the San Francisco Chronicle as "an uncommon storyteller [with a] trademark ability to probe the layers of the human psyche," Patrick McGrath has written his most addictive and enthralling novel yet. Charlie Weir's family is comprehensively dysfunctional — abandoned by his father, his mother ravaged by that betrayal, and his brother, Walt, a successful artist, less Charlie's ally than his rival. So it's hardly surprising that he should find a vocation in psychiatry in New York City, counseling traumatized war veterans returning home from Vietnam. Agnes Magill, the sister of one damaged soldier, soon becomes Charlie's wife. But the suicide of her brother, Danny, ends the marriage, leaving Charlie to endure a corrosive loneliness even as Manhattan grows steadily more dirty and dangerous around him. Then, in the haunting aftermath of Charlie's mother's death, Agnes returns to offer him the solace that he has never been able to provide for her. Almost simultaneously, he is presented with a quite different anodyne — a volatile woman whose irresistible beauty, tinged though it is with an air of grievous suffering, jeopardizes everything he has hoped might restore his dwindling faith in his calling, his future and himself. As Charlie's hold on sanity weakens, and events conspire to send him reeling headlong toward the abyss, the themes of family, passion and madness - by now synonymous with Patrick McGrath's writing — rightly assume "the inevitability of myth," as Tobias Wolff has written of his work, in "fiction of a depth and power we hardly hope to encounter anymore." A genuine psychological thriller, Trauma is an experience at once unnerving, unsettling and utterly riveting.
Download or read book Brother I m Dying written by Edwidge Danticat and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2007 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a personal memoir, the author describes her relationships with the two men closest to her--her father and his brother, Joseph, a charismatic pastor with whom she lived after her parents emigrated from Haiti to the United States.
Download or read book Interior Chinatown written by Charles Yu and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2020-11-17 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • From the infinitely inventive author of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe comes "one of the funniest books of the year.... A delicious, ambitious Hollywood satire" (The Washington Post). A deeply personal novel about race, pop culture, immigration, assimilation, and escaping the roles we are forced to play. Willis Wu doesn’t perceive himself as the protagonist in his own life: he’s merely Generic Asian Man. Sometimes he gets to be Background Oriental Making a Weird Face or even Disgraced Son, but always he is relegated to a prop. Yet every day, he leaves his tiny room in a Chinatown SRO and enters the Golden Palace restaurant, where Black and White, a procedural cop show, is in perpetual production. He’s a bit player here, too, but he dreams of being Kung Fu Guy—the most respected role that anyone who looks like him can attain. Or is it? After stumbling into the spotlight, Willis finds himself launched into a wider world than he’s ever known, discovering not only the secret history of Chinatown, but the buried legacy of his own family. Infinitely inventive and deeply personal, exploring the themes of pop culture, assimilation, and immigration—Interior Chinatown is Charles Yu’s most moving, daring, and masterful novel yet.
Download or read book Scent of Darkness written by Margot Berwin and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2013-11-05 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Deep in the bayous of Louisiana exists a world of fortune-tellers, soothsayers, and makers of potent elixirs. Among them is Evangeline’s grandmother, Louise, a master of scent-making and perfume. And when Eva is eighteen, Louise leaves her the ultimate gift—a scent created just for her. However, the bottle comes with a warning: do not remove the crystal stopper unless you want everything in your life to change. From the moment she places a drop on her neck, Eva is the object of intense desire to everyone around her. Strangers follow her down the street, a young boy appears at her door asking for a favor, and two men—one kind and good, the other dark and exciting—fall madly in love with her. As her greatest gift becomes an unbearable curse, Eva will be forced to wonder if it is possible to truly love someone evil and to question the true nature of her grandmother’s legacy.
Download or read book Heartburn written by Nora Ephron and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-08-17 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A 40th anniversary reissue of the national bestselling author's hilarious first novel that memorably mixed food, heartbreak, and revenge into a comic masterpiece—now with a new foreword by Stanley Tucci. • "Touching and funny.... Proof that writing well is the best revenge." —Chicago Tribune Is it possible to write a sidesplitting novel about the breakup of the perfect marriage? If the writer is Nora Ephron, the answer is a resounding yes. In this inspired confection of adultery, revenge, group therapy, and pot roast, the creator of Sleepless in Seattle and When Harry Met Sally... reminds us that comedy depends on anguish as surely as a proper gravy depends on flour and butter. Seven months into her pregnancy, Rachel Samstat discovers that her husband, Mark, is in love with another woman. The fact that the other woman has "a neck as long as an arm and a nose as long as a thumb and you should see her legs" is no consolation. Food sometimes is, though, since Rachel writes cookbooks for a living. And in between trying to win Mark back and loudly wishing him dead, Ephron's irrepressible heroine offers some of her favorite recipes. Heartburn is a sinfully delicious novel, as soul-satisfying as mashed potatoes and as airy as a perfect soufflé.
Download or read book One Day written by David Nicholls and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2010-06-15 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NOW A NETFLIX SERIES • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • TWO PEOPLE. ONE DAY. TWENTY YEARS. • What starts as a fleeting connection between two strangers soon becomes a deep bond that spans decades. • "[An] instant classic. . . . One of the most ...emotionally riveting love stories you’ll ever encounter." —People It’s 1988 and Dexter Mayhew and Emma Morley have only just met. But after only one day together, they cannot stop thinking about one another. Over twenty years, snapshots of that relationship are revealed on the same day—July 15th—of each year. They face squabbles and fights, hopes and missed opportunities, laughter and tears. Dex and Em must come to grips with the nature of love and life itself. As the years go by, the true meaning of this one crucial day is revealed. "[A] surprisingly deep romance...so thoroughly satisfying." —Entertainment Weekly
Download or read book Company written by Max Barry and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2007-03-13 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stephen Jones is a shiny new hire at Zephyr Holdings. From the outside, Zephyr is just another bland corporate monolith, but behind its glass doors business is far from usual: the beautiful receptionist is paid twice as much as anybody else to do nothing, the sales reps use self help books as manuals, no one has seen the CEO, no one knows exactly what they are selling, and missing donuts are the cause of office intrigue. While Jones originally wanted to climb the corporate ladder, he now finds himself descending deeper into the irrational rationality of company policy. What he finds is hilarious, shocking, and utterly telling.
Download or read book Mr Peanut written by Adam Ross and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2010-06-22 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Noteable Book Mesmerizing, exhilarating, and profoundly moving, Mr. Peanut is a police procedural of the soul, a poignant investigation of the relentlessly mysterious human heart. David Pepin has been in love with his wife, Alice, since the moment they met in a university seminar on Alfred Hitchcock. After thirteen years of marriage, he still can’t imagine a remotely happy life without her—yet he obsessively contemplates her demise. Soon she is dead, and David is both deeply distraught and the prime suspect. The detectives investigating Alice’s suspicious death have plenty of personal experience with conjugal enigmas: Ward Hastroll is happily married until his wife inexplicably becomes voluntarily and militantly bedridden; and Sam Sheppard is especially sensitive to the intricacies of marital guilt and innocence, having decades before been convicted and then exonerated of the brutal murder of his wife. Like the Escher drawings that inspire the computer games David designs for a living, these complex, interlocking dramas are structurally and emotionally intense, subtle, and intriguing; they brilliantly explore the warring impulses of affection and hatred, and pose a host of arresting questions. Is it possible to know anyone fully, completely? Are murder and marriage two sides of the same coin, each endlessly recycling into the other? And what, in the end, is the truth about love?
Download or read book The Late summer Passion of a Woman of Mind written by Rebecca Goldstein and published by Vintage. This book was released on 1990 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The liberation of Eva Mueller, a middle-aged German-American professor of philosophy, does not come easy. Having lived in the self-protected world of the intellect all her life, she must first submerge herself in the unhappy reality of her past--recalling that her father, a German musicologist, was a Nazi accomplice. Eva's acceptance of her past and of the validity of her emotions is sparked by her unlikely relationship with Michael, an enthusiastic if callow young student.
Download or read book Gallatin Canyon written by Thomas McGuane and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the acclaimed author of Ninety-two in the Shade and Cloudbursts—the stories of Gallatin Canyon are rich in the wit, compassion, and matchless language for which Thomas McGuane is celebrated. Set mostly in famed Big Sky Country, McGuane brings us an "astonishing" (The New York Times Book Review) collection in which place exerts the power of destiny. A boy makes a surprising discovery skating at night on Lake Michigan; an Irish clan in Massachusetts gather around their dying matriarch; a battered survivor of the glory days of Key West washes up on other shores. Several of the stories unfold in Big Sky country: a father tries to buy his adult son’s way out of virginity; a convict turns cowhand on a ranch; a couple makes a fateful drive through a perilous gorge. McGuane's people are seekers, beguiled by the land's beauty and myth, compelled by the fantasy of what a locale can offer, forced to reconcile dream and truth.
Download or read book Property written by Valerie Martin and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER OF THE ORANGE PRIZE • Set in 1828 on a Louisiana sugar plantation, this novel from the bestselling author of Mary Reilly presents a “fresh, unsentimental look at what slave-owning does to (and for) one's interior life.... The writing—so prised and clean limbed—is a marvel" (Toni Morrison, Nobel Prize-winning author of Beloved). Manon Gaudet, pretty, bitterly intelligent, and monstrously self-absorbed, seethes under the dominion of her boorish husband. In particular his relationship with her slave Sarah, who is both his victim and his mistress. Exploring the permutations of Manon’s own obsession with Sarah against the backdrop of an impending slave rebellion, Property unfolds with the speed and menace of heat lightning, casting a startling light from the past upon the assumptions we still make about the powerful and powerful.
Download or read book American Psycho written by Bret Easton Ellis and published by Pan Macmillan. This book was released on 2014-12-15 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A cult classic, adapted into a film starring Christian Bale. Is evil something you are? Or is it something you do? Patrick Bateman has it all: good looks, youth, charm, a job on Wall Street, reservations at every new restaurant in town and a line of girls around the block. He is also a psychopath. A man addicted to his superficial, perfect life, he pulls us into a dark underworld where the American Dream becomes a nightmare . . . With an introduction by Irvine Welsh, Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho is one of the most controversial and talked-about novels of all time. A multi-million-copy bestseller hailed as a modern classic, it is a violent black comedy about the darkest side of human nature.
