Download or read book Sun and Strands written by Rabia Gale and published by Rabia Gale. This book was released on 2020-04-11 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Out of work and trapped in a dead-end coastal town. This is not what Amber had in mind when she left her island home to explore a continent drenched in magic and once inhabited by dragons. She’s this close to working at Stunning Spells, a magical sweatshop that churns out generic spells. But then a group of the strongest mages she’s ever seen comes to town. Accidentally caught up in their mission, Amber’s given the chance of a lifetime—and a place at Heartwood Academy, a school for gifted mages. Does she have what it takes to make a home for herself at Heartwood? This anime-inspired YA fantasy is an ongoing web serial. Sun and Strands is a collection of the first three completed arcs and a short story introducing Heartwood’s Librarian.

Download or read book The Sun in Your Eyes written by Deborah Shapiro and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2016-06-28 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice The Wall Street Journal calls The Sun in Your Eyes one of "the season's most exciting fiction reads." One of Vulture's "7 Books You Need to Read This July" Harper's Bazaar picked it as one of "Spring's Hottest Breakout Novels." Ann Hood says it's "the perfect summer book." A witty and winning new voice comes alive in this infectious road trip adventure with a rock-and-roll twist. Shapiro’s debut blends the emotional nuance of Elena Ferrante with the potent nostalgia of High Fidelity, in a story of two women—one rich and alluring, the other just another planet in her dazzling orbit—and their fervid and troubled friendship. From the distance of a few yards, there might be nothing distinctive about Lee Parrish, nothing you could put your finger on, and yet, if she were to walk into a room, you would notice her. And if you were with her, I’d always thought, you could walk into any room. For quiet, cautious and restless college freshman Vivian Feld real life begins the day she moves in with the enigmatic Lee Parrish—daughter of died-too-young troubadour Jesse Parrish and model-turned-fashion designer Linda West—and her audiophile roommate Andy Elliott. When a one-night stand fractures Lee and Andy’s intimate rapport, Lee turns to Viv, inviting her into her glamorous fly-by-night world: an intoxicating mix of Hollywood directors, ambitious artists, and first-class everything. It is the beginning of a friendship that will inexorably shape both women as they embark on the rocky road to adulthood. More than a decade later, Viv is married to Andy and hasn’t heard from Lee in three years. Suddenly, Lee reappears, begging for a favor: she wants Viv to help her find the lost album Jesse was recording before his death. Holding on to a life-altering secret and ambivalent about her path, Viv allows herself to be pulled into Lee’s world once again. But the chance to rekindle the magic and mystery of their youth might come with a painful lesson: While the sun dazzles us with its warmth and brilliance, it may also blind us from seeing what we really need. What begins as a familiar story of two girls falling under each other’s spell evolves into an evocative, and at times irrepressibly funny, study of female friendship in all its glorious intensity and heartbreaking complexity.

Download or read book Something New Under the Sun written by Alexandra Kleeman and published by Hogarth. This book was released on 2021-08-03 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE • A novelist discovers the dark side of Hollywood and reckons with ambition, corruption, and environmental collapse in “a darkly satirical reflection of ecological reality” (Time) LONGLISTED FOR THE JOYCE CAROL OATES PRIZE • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, Time, Los Angeles Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Vulture, Thrillist, Literary Hub “An urgent novel about our very near future, and a deeply addictive pleasure.”—Katie Kitamura, author of Intimacies Novelist Patrick Hamlin has come to Los Angeles to oversee the film adaptation of one of his books and try to impress his wife and daughter back home with this last-ditch attempt at professional success. But California is not as he imagined. Drought, wildfire, and corporate corruption are everywhere, and the company behind a mysterious new brand of synthetic water seems to be at the root of it all. Patrick finds an unlikely partner in Cassidy Carter—the cynical starlet of his film—and the two investigate the sun-scorched city, where they discover the darker side of all that glitters in Hollywood. Something New Under the Sun is an unmissable novel for our present moment—a bold exploration of environmental catastrophe in the age of alternative facts, and “a ghost story not of the past but of the near future” (The New York Times).

Download or read book The Sun Collective written by Charles Baxter and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2021-10-05 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR • A timely and unsettling novel about the people drawn to—and unmoored by—a local activist group more dangerous than it appears. From the winner of the PEN/Malamud Award and “one of our most gifted writers” (Chicago Tribune). Once a promising actor, Tim Brettigan has gone missing. His father thinks he may have seen him among some homeless people. And though she knows he left on purpose, his mother has been searching for him all over their home city of Minneapolis. She checks the usual places— churches, storefronts, benches—and stumbles upon a local community group with lofty goals and an enigmatic leader. Christina, a young woman rapidly becoming addicted to a boutique drug that gives her a feeling of blessedness, is inexplicably drawn to the same collective by a man who’s convinced he may start a revolution. A vision of modern American society and the specters of the consumerism, fanaticism, and fear that haunt it, The Sun Collective captures both the mystery and the violence that punctuate our daily lives.

Download or read book Lost in the Sun written by Lisa Graff and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2016-04-26 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of A Tangle of Knots and Absolutely Almost, a touching story about a boy who won't let one tragic accident define him. Everyone says that middle school is awful, but Trent knows nothing could be worse than the year he had in fifth grade, when a freak accident on Cedar Lake left one kid dead, and Trent with a brain full of terrible thoughts he can't get rid of. Trent’s pretty positive the entire disaster was his fault, so for him middle school feels like a fresh start, a chance to prove to everyone that he's not the horrible screw-up they seem to think he is. If only Trent could make that fresh start happen. It isn’t until Trent gets caught up in the whirlwind that is Fallon Little—the girl with the mysterious scar across her face—that things begin to change. Because fresh starts aren’t always easy. Even in baseball, when a fly ball gets lost in the sun, you have to remember to shift your position to find it. Praise for Lost in the Sun: A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year! * "Graff writes with stunning insight [and] consistently demonstrates why character-driven novels can live from generation to generation."--Kirkus Reviews *STARRED* * "Graff creates layered, vulnerable characters that are worth getting to know."--Booklist *STARRED* * "[A]n ambitious and gracefully executed story."--Publishers Weekly *STARRED* * "Weighty matters deftly handled with humor and grace will give this book wide appeal."--School Library Journal *STARRED* * "Characterization is thoughtful."--BCCB *STARRED* “In Lost in the Sun, Trent decides that he will speak the truth: that pain and anger and loss are not the final words, that goodness can find us after all—even when we hide from it. This is a novel that speaks powerfully, honestly, almost shockingly about our human pain and our human redemption. This book will change you.”—Gary Schmidt, two-time Newbery Honor-winning author of The Wednesday Wars and Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy “Lisa Graff crafts a compelling story about a boy touched with tragedy and the world of people he cares about. And like all the best stories, it ends at a new beginning.”—Richard Peck, Newbery Award-winning author of A Year Down Yonder and A Long Way From Chicago Lisa Graff's Awards and Reviews: Lisa Graff's books have been named to 30 state award lists, and A Tangle of Knots was long-listed for the National Book Award.

Download or read book A Moment in the Sun written by John Sayles and published by McSweeney's. This book was released on 2011-10-18 with total page 1293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It’s 1897. Gold has been discovered in the Yukon. New York is under the sway of Hearst and Pulitzer. And in a few months, an American battleship will explode in a Cuban harbor, plunging the U.S. into war. Spanning five years and half a dozen countries, this is the unforgettable story of that extraordinary moment: the turn of the twentieth century, as seen by one of the greatest storytellers of our time. Shot through with a lyrical intensity and stunning detail that recall Doctorow and Deadwood both, A Moment in the Sun takes the whole era in its sights—from the white-racist coup in Wilmington, North Carolina to the bloody dawn of U.S. interventionism in the Philippines. Beginning with Hod Brackenridge searching for his fortune in the North, and hurtling forward on the voices of a breathtaking range of men and women—Royal Scott, an African American infantryman whose life outside the military has been destroyed; Diosdado Concepcíon, a Filipino insurgent fighting against his country’s new colonizers; and more than a dozen others, Mark Twain and President McKinley’s assassin among them—this is a story as big as its subject: history rediscovered through the lives of the people who made it happen.

Download or read book The Sun and Her Stars written by Donna Rifkind and published by Other Press, LLC. This book was released on 2020-01-28 with total page 561 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: National Jewish Book Award Finalist The little-known story of screenwriter Salka Viertel, whose salons in 1930s and 40s Hollywood created a refuge for a multitude of famous figures who had escaped the horrors of World War ll. Hollywood was created by its “others”; that is, by women, Jews, and immigrants. Salka Viertel was all three and so much more. She was the screenwriter for five of Greta Garbo's movies and also her most intimate friend. At one point during the Irving Thalberg years, Viertel was the highest-paid writer on the MGM lot. Meanwhile, at her house in Santa Monica she opened her door on Sunday afternoons to scores of European émigrés who had fled from Hitler—such as Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, and Arnold Schoenberg—along with every kind of Hollywood star, from Charlie Chaplin to Shelley Winters. In Viertel's living room (the only one in town with comfortable armchairs, said one Hollywood insider), countless cinematic, theatrical, and musical partnerships were born. Viertel combined a modern-before-her-time sensibility with the Old-World advantages of a classical European education and fluency in eight languages. She combined great worldliness with great warmth. She was a true bohemian with a complicated erotic life, and at the same time a universal mother figure. A vital presence in the golden age of Hollywood, Salka Viertel is long overdue for her own moment in the spotlight.

Download or read book Klara and the Sun written by Kazuo Ishiguro and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2021-03-02 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Once in a great while, a book comes along that changes our view of the world. This magnificent novel from the Nobel laureate and author of Never Let Me Go is “an intriguing take on how artificial intelligence might play a role in our futures ... a poignant meditation on love and loneliness” (The Associated Press). • A GOOD MORNING AMERICA Book Club Pick! Here is the story of Klara, an Artificial Friend with outstanding observational qualities, who, from her place in the store, watches carefully the behavior of those who come in to browse, and of those who pass on the street outside. She remains hopeful that a customer will soon choose her. Klara and the Sun is a thrilling book that offers a look at our changing world through the eyes of an unforgettable narrator, and one that explores the fundamental question: what does it mean to love?

Download or read book Same Sun Here written by Neela Vaswani and published by Candlewick Press. This book was released on 2012-02-14 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this extraordinary novel in letters, an Indian immigrant girl in New York City and a Kentucky coal miner's son find strength and perspective by sharing their true selves across the miles. Meena and River have a lot in common: fathers forced to work away from home to make ends meet, grandmothers who mean the world to them, and faithful dogs. But Meena is an Indian immigrant girl living in New York City’s Chinatown, while River is a Kentucky coal miner’s son. As Meena’s family studies for citizenship exams and River’s town faces devastating mountaintop removal, this unlikely pair become pen pals, sharing thoughts and, as their camaraderie deepens, discovering common ground in their disparate experiences. With honesty and humor, Meena and River bridge the miles between them, creating a friendship that inspires bravery and defeats cultural misconceptions. Narrated in two voices, each voice distinctly articulated by a separate gifted author, this chronicle of two lives powerfully conveys the great value of being and having a friend and the joys of opening our lives to others who live beneath the same sun.

Download or read book A Raisin in the Sun written by Lorraine Hansberry and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-11-02 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Never before, in the entire history of the American theater, has so much of the truth of Black people's lives been seen on the stage," observed James Baldwin shortly before A Raisin in the Sun opened on Broadway in 1959. This edition presents the fully restored, uncut version of Hansberry's landmark work with an introduction by Robert Nemiroff. Lorraine Hansberry's award-winning drama about the hopes and aspirations of a struggling, working-class family living on the South Side of Chicago connected profoundly with the psyche of Black America—and changed American theater forever. The play's title comes from a line in Langston Hughes's poem "Harlem," which warns that a dream deferred might "dry up/like a raisin in the sun." "The events of every passing year add resonance to A Raisin in the Sun," said The New York Times. "It is as if history is conspiring to make the play a classic."

Download or read book Out of the Sun written by Esi Edugyan and published by House of Anansi. This book was released on 2021-09-28 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An insightful exploration and moving meditation on identity, art, and belonging from one of the most celebrated writers of the last decade. What happens when we begin to consider stories at the margins, when we grant them centrality? How does that complicate our certainties about who we are, as individuals, as nations, as human beings? Through the lens of visual art, literature, film, and the author’s lived experience, Out of the Sun examines Black histories in art, offering new perspectives to challenge us. In this groundbreaking, reflective, and erudite book, two-time Scotiabank Giller Prize winner and internationally bestselling author Esi Edugyan illuminates myriad varieties of Black experience in global culture and history. Edugyan combines storytelling with analyses of contemporary events and her own personal story in this dazzling first major work of non-fiction.

Download or read book A Bittersweet Season written by Jane Gross and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2011-04-26 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Just a few of the vitally important lessons in caring for your aging parent—and yourself—from Jane Gross in A Bittersweet Season As painful as the role reversal between parent and child may be for you, assume it is worse for your mother or father, so take care not to demean or humiliate them. Avoid hospitals and emergency rooms, as well as multiple relocations from home to assisted living facility to nursing home, since all can cause dramatic declines in physical and cognitive well-being among the aged. Do not accept the canard that no decent child sends a parent to a nursing home. Good nursing home care, which supports the entire family, can be vastly superior to the pretty trappings but thin staffing of assisted living or the solitude of being at home, even with round-the-clock help. Important Facts Every state has its own laws, eligibility standards, and licensing requirements for financial, legal, residential, and other matters that affect the elderly, including qualification for Medicare. Assume anything you understand in the state where your parents once lived no longer applies if they move. Many doctors will not accept new Medicare patients, nor are they legally required to do so, especially significant if a parent is moving a long distance to be near family in old age. An adult child with power of attorney can use a parent’s money for legitimate expenses and thus hasten the spend-down to Medicaid eligibility. In other words, you are doing your parent no favor—assuming he or she is likely to exhaust personal financial resources—by paying rent, stocking the refrigerator, buying clothes, or taking him or her to the hairdresser or barber.

Download or read book After the Sun written by Jonas Eika and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2022-08-23 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Relentlessly thrilling . . . an orgy of the unpredictable.” —New York Times Book Review “Like Thomas Pynchon taking on late capitalism. . . . surrealistic, granular in its details, and concerned with social entropy and desperate attempts at communion.” —Wall Street Journal From a major new international voice, mesmerizing, inventive fiction that probes the tender places where human longings push through the cracks of a breaking world. Under Cancún’s hard blue sky, a beach boy provides a canvas for tourists’ desires, seeing deep into the world’s underbelly. An enigmatic encounter in Copenhagen takes an IT consultant down a rabbit hole of speculation that proves more seductive than sex. The collapse of a love triangle in London leads to a dangerous, hypnotic addiction. In the Nevada desert, a grieving man tries to merge with an unearthly machine. After the Sun opens portals to our newest realities, haunting the margins of a globalized world that’s both saturated with yearning and brutally transactional. Infused with an irrepressible urgency, Eika’s fiction seems to have conjured these far-flung characters and their encounters in a single breath. Juxtaposing startling beauty with grotesquery, balancing the hyperrealistic with the fantastical—“as though the worlds he describes are being viewed through an ultraviolet filter,” in one Danish reviewer's words—he has invented new modes of storytelling for an era when the old ones no longer suffice.

Download or read book Sunshine State written by Sarah Gerard and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2017-04-11 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Longlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay • Finalist for the Southern Book Prize A New York Times Critics’ Best Books of the Year • An NPR Best Book of the Year • A NYLON Best Nonfiction Book of the Year • A Buzzfeed Best Nonfiction Book of the Year • An Entrophy Magazine Best Non-Fiction Book of the Year • A Brooklyn Rail Best Non-Fiction Book of the Year • A Baltimore Beat Best Book of the Year A Paris Review Staff Pick • A Chicago Tribune Exciting Book for 2017 • A Rolling Stone Culture Index Reccomendation • A Buzzfeed Most Exciting Book for 2017 • A The Millions Great 2017 Book Preview Pick • A Huffington Post 2017 Preview Pick • A NYLON Best 10 Books of the Month • A Lit Hub 15 Books to Read This Month A Poets & Writers New and Noteworth Selection • A PW Top 10 Spring Pick in Essays & Literary Criticism • An Emma Straub Reccomendation on PBS “One of the themes of ‘Sunshine State,’ Sarah Gerard’s striking book of essays, is how Florida can unmoor you and make you reach for shoddy, off-the-shelf solutions to your psychic unease…. The first essay is a knockout, a lurid red heart wrapped in barbed wire.... This essay draws blood.” — Dwight Garner, New York Times "Unflinchingly candid memoir bolstered by thoughtfully researched history…. A nuanced and subtly intimate mosaic… her writing, lucid yet atmospheric, takes on a timeless ebb and flow.” — Jason Heller, NPR.org "Stunning." — Rolling Stone “These large-hearted, meticulous essays offer an uncanny x-ray of our national psyche... showing us both the grand beauty of our American dreams and the heartbreaking devastation they wreak.” — Garth Greenwell, author of What Belongs to You Sarah Gerard follows her breakout novel, Binary Star, with the dynamic essay collection Sunshine State, which explores Florida as a microcosm of the most pressing economic and environmental perils haunting our society. In the collection’s title essay, Gerard volunteers at the Suncoast Seabird Sanctuary, a world renowned bird refuge. There she meets its founder, who once modeled with a pelican on his arm for a Dewar’s Scotch campaign but has since declined into a pit of fraud and madness. He becomes our embezzling protagonist whose tales about the birds he “rescues” never quite add up. Gerard’s personal stories are no less eerie or poignant: An essay that begins as a look at Gerard’s first relationship becomes a heart-wrenching exploration of acquaintance rape and consent. An account of intimate female friendship pivots midway through, morphing into a meditation on jealousy and class. With the personal insight of The Empathy Exams, the societal exposal of Nickel and Dimed, and the stylistic innovation and intensity of her own break-out debut novel Binary Star, Sarah Gerard’s Sunshine State uses the intimately personal to unearth the deep reservoirs of humanity buried in the corners of our world often hardest to face.

Download or read book This Is 18 written by Jessica Bennett and published by Abrams. This book was released on 2019-11-12 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A stunning celebration of girlhood around the world, from the New York Times Featuring and photographed by young women, This Is 18 is an immersive look at what it means to be on the cusp of adulthood around the world and across cultures. Twenty-two empowering and uniquely personal profiles, expanded from the New York Times interactive feature and curated by Gender Editor Jessica Bennett, with Sandra Stevenson, Anya Strzemien, and Sharon Attia, give teen readers a rare glimpse at the realities and interests of their contemporaries. With stunning photography and a gifty design, This Is 18 is a perfect tribute to girlhood for readers of all ages.

Download or read book Strands of Sunlight written by Gael Baudino and published by Open Road Media Sci-Fi & Fantasy. This book was released on 2013-12-10 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the conclusion of the Strand Novels, Natil, now living in modern Denver, must guide a small group of humans with elven blood toward their true destiny The powers of the Elves have lain dormant for half a millennium, but the immortal bloodlines are very much alive. In present-day Denver, sixteen people have felt their elven heritage stirring, their abilities as healers and seers manifesting and blossoming, and Natil, through unimaginable favor and grace brought forward in time, is there to shepherd them through their transformation. Told through interweaving narratives, Strands of Sunlight is the story of the reborn Elves, as well as that of TK, a troubled Vietnam veteran embroiled in a conflict with local drug dealers; Sandy Joy, a college student caught in the manipulative wiles of a fraudulent instructor; and Natil herself, struggling to bring about the final awakening of the elven blood. Strands of Sunlight is the final book of the Strand Novels. More about the Elves can be found in the story collection Spires of Spirit.

Download or read book Sun Storm written by Asa Larsson and published by Delacorte Press. This book was released on 2006-04-25 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER OF SWEDEN’S BEST FIRST CRIME NOVEL AWARD • In the land of silence and snow, the killing has begun . . . Rebecka Martinsson is heading home to Kiruna, the town she’d left in disgrace years before. A Stockholm attorney, Rebecka has a good reason to return: her friend Sanna, whose brother has been horrifically murdered in the revivalist church his charisma helped create. Beautiful and fragile, Sanna needs someone like Rebecka to remove the shadow of guilt that is engulfing her, to forestall an ambitious prosecutor and a dogged policewoman. But to help her friend, and to find the real killer of a man she once adored and is now not sure she ever knew, Rebecka must relive the darkness she left behind in Kiruna, delve into a sordid conspiracy of deceit, and confront a killer whose motives are dark, wrenching, and impossible to guess. . . . Praise for Sun Storm “Richly atmospheric.”—Kirkus Reviews “Larsson builds suspense gradually but inexorably, and she is equally good at creating mood. . . .This impressive debut heralds another striking voice from Scandinavia.”—Booklist “For those who eschew exotic travel in favor of the familiar hammock, there’s nothing better than a well-written and well-translated story from some place you’ll probably never visit. is that story and more!”—Rocky Mountain News