Download or read book I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl written by Kelle Groom and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-04-03 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A memoir of addiction and grief, forgiveness, and survival from a poet who recovers from alcoholism only after she sees her child die of leukemia.

Download or read book Happy Baby written by Stephen Elliott and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2005 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Happy Baby is the story of Theo, once an orphan in the Chicago foster care system and now a grown man living in California. Theo, saturated with memories of abuse and heartache, and filled with the simple wish to understand more about himself, returns to Chicago to reconnect with an old girlfriend from his troubled youth. Told in reverse order, this edgy and powerful novel slowly and subtly turns mysterious, as we attempt to recognize the root of Theo's plight and the source for his quietly wavering humanity.

Download or read book Signposts in a Strange Land written by Walker Percy and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2000-04 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At his death in 1990, Walker Percy left a considerable legacy of uncollected nonfiction. Assembled in Signposts in a Strange Land, these essays on language, literature, philosophy, religion, psychiatry, morality, and life and letters in the South display the imaginative versatility of an author considered by many to be one the greatest modern American writers.

Download or read book Head in Flames written by Lance Olsen and published by . This book was released on 2017-04-08 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Head in Flames is an astonishing collage novel composed of chips of sensation, observation, memory, and quotation shaped into a series of narraticules told by three alternating voices, each inhabiting a different font and aesthetic / political / existential space. The first belongs to Vincent van Gogh on the day he shot himself in Auverssur-Oise in July 1890. The second to Theo van Gogh (Vincent's brother's great grandson) on the day he was assassinated in Amsterdam in November 2004. The third to Mohammed Bouyeri, Theo's murderer, outraged by the filmmaker's collaboration with controversial politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali on a 10-minute experimental short critiquing Muslim subjugation and abuse of women. The aggregate: a restless, haunting exploration of art's purpose, religion's increasingly dominant role as engine of politics and passion, the complexities of foreignness and assimilation, and the limits of tolerance.

Download or read book A Life Without Consequences written by Stephen Elliott and published by MacAdam/Cage Publishing. This book was released on 2002-07 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Life Without Consequences is a semi-biographical novel from emerging author Steve Elliott. His novel traces the fate of Paul, a boy whose mother has died and who runs away from a violent father. The book follows Paul from living on the streets of Chicago to passing through juvinile institutions and a state system that is primarily programmed for failure. There, he meets Tanya and they fall in love but they are young and are separated after a failed attempt to escape the institution. Paul battles through the violent system all the while battling his own rapidly budding adolescence. But as he turns sixteen he starts to come to terms with his own path, not as an adult, but as a scared child. Paul's emotions that we think of as anger are actually the determination to take control of his future. As he starts to overcome the system that has housed him, we see him developing a voice and a future of his own, but one day Tanya reappears in his life and the real decisions have to be made. While the characters are fictional, the do not have to be they are representative of many and we realize the fragility of childhood and the burden on the children who have nowhere else to go.

Download or read book How to Be Safe A Novel written by Tom McAllister and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2018-04-03 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Washington Post Notable Book of the Year A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year “Explosive” –Entertainment Weekly “Scalding” –The New Yorker “One of the most highly acclaimed novels of the year thus far.” –Bustle FORMER TEACHER HAD MOTIVE. Recently suspended for a so-called outburst, high school English teacher Anna Crawford is stewing over the injustice at home when she is shocked to see herself named on television as a suspect in a shooting at the school where she works. Though she is quickly exonerated, and the actual teenage murderer identified, her life is nevertheless held up for relentless scrutiny and judgment as this quiet town descends into media mania. Gun sales skyrocket, victims are transformed into martyrs, and the rules of public mourning are ruthlessly enforced. Anna decides to wholeheartedly reject the culpability she’s somehow been assigned, and the rampant sexism that comes with it, both in person and online. A piercing feminist howl written in trenchant prose, How to Be Safe is a compulsively readable, darkly funny exposé of the hypocrisy that ensues when illusions of peace are shattered.

Download or read book Buffalo Lockjaw written by Greg Ames and published by Hachette Books. This book was released on 2009-04-01 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: James Fitzroy isn't doing so well. Though his old friends in Buffalo believe his life in New York City is a success, in fact he writes ridiculous taglines for a greeting card company. Now he's coming home on Thanksgiving to visit his aging father and dying mother, and unlike other holidays, he's not sure how this one is going to end. Buffalo Lockjaw introduces a fresh new voice in American fiction.

Download or read book Hole in the Middle written by Kendra Fortmeyer and published by Soho Press. This book was released on 2018-09-04 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For every reader who grew up loving R.J. Palacio’s Wonder comes a hilarious, heartbreaking, and magical YA debut about what it means to accept the body you’re given. What if the empty space was what made you whole? Morgan Stone was born with a hole in her middle: a perfectly smooth, sealed, fist-sized chunk of nothing near her belly button. After seventeen years of hiding behind lumpy sweaters and a smart mouth, she decides to bare all. At first she feels liberated . . . until a few online photos snowball into a media frenzy. Now Morgan is desperate to return to her own strange version of normal—when only her doctors, her divorced parents, and her best friend, Caro, knew the truth. Then a new doctor appears with a boy who may be both Morgan’s cure and her destiny. But what happens when you meet the person who is—literally—your perfect match? Is being whole really all it’s cracked up to be?

Download or read book The Convalescent written by Jessica Anthony and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2010-07-13 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “One of the most amusing and poignant anti-heroes since Gunter Grass’s The Tin Drum” lives up to his misfit heritage in this ribald debut (Spike Magazine). Ask Rovar Ákos Pfliegman about himself and he’ll say: “I have no life. I have no known relatives, no known friends. I’m barely human. I’m a hairy little Hungarian pulp. I am a sorry gathering of organs. That is all.” But there is more to Rovar than meets the eye. He has a pet beetle named Mrs. Kipner, he is a butcher plagued by rare ailments, he sells meat out of a broken-down bus next to a river in suburban Virginia, and he is the last of the Pfliegman line, a not-too-bright pagan clan that reaches back to pre-medieval Hungary. He also believes he’ll fulfill the ignoble destiny of inbred self-destruction that has wiped out all Pfliegmans before him. But against all odds, and the cruel laws of nature, this unlikely loner, seller of fresh mutton at unbeatable prices, unloved lover, and historian of the unimportant is still capable of being reborn in the most extraordinary way. “Innocent and wise, grave and hilarious, bleak and hopeful, fast-paced and meditative, heartbreaking and heart healthy, evanescent and concrete” (Heidi Julavits), The Convalescent “nods to all sorts of greats—Kafka, Rushdie, Darwin and Grass, to name a few. But Anthony’s style—funny, immediate and unapologetically cerebral—carves out a space all its own” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).

Download or read book A Peculiar Feeling of Restlessness written by Amy L. Clark and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The four chapbooks collected in A Peculiar Feeling of Restlessness, three of them finalists and one of them the winner of the Rose Metal Press first annual short short chapbook contest, all revel in the succinctness of their form, the underlying tension anchored beneath each story of 1,000 words or less. These stories are peculiar; they resonate with restlessness. They are deft, they are gritty, and they are lyrical."--BOOK JACKET.

Download or read book The Almost Archer Sisters written by Lisa Gabriele and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2008-10-07 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Georgia "Peachy" Archer always thought she was happy with her choices in life: quitting college, marrying young, raising two boys in the same small town where she grew up. But just as Peachy's life is beginning to settle into a careful routine, her sister's life begins to dangerously unravel. Beth Archer chose a different life: fancy apartment in Manhattan, fancy friends, making lots of money. She's been on her own since she was a teenager, and she's still on her own, outgrowing dress styles and boyfriends faster than Peachy can inherit them. But on a visit home one weekend, Beth upends everything Peachy thought she knew about being happy. In the tradition of Jennifer Weiner and Melissa Bank, The Almost Archer Sisters is a refreshingly honest portrait of sisterhood, motherhood, and female mayhem in its many states of grievance, grace, and forgiveness.

Download or read book The Submission written by Amy Waldman and published by Random House. This book was released on 2011-08-18 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A jury gathers in Manhattan to select a memorial for the victims of a devastating terrorist attack. Their fraught deliberations complete, the jurors open the envelope containing the anonymous winner's name – and discover he is an American Muslim. Instantly they are cast into roiling debate about the claims of grief, the ambiguities of art, and the meaning of Islam. The memorial's designer is Mohammad Khan, an enigmatic, ambitious architect. His fiercest defender on the jury is its sole widow, the mediagenic Claire Burwell. But when the news of his selection leaks to the press, Claire finds herself under pressure from outraged family members and in collision with hungry journalists, wary activists, opportunistic politicians, fellow jurors, and Khan himself. All will bring the emotional weight of their own histories to bear on the urgent question of how to remember, and understand, a national tragedy.

Download or read book Best New American Voices 2010 written by John Kulka and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2009 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bestselling novelist and memoirist Dani Shapiro brings her expertise to this year's volume of great fiction being produced in the top writers' workships.

Download or read book The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2011 written by Guillermo del Toro and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2011 with total page 531 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eggers has hand-picked a selection of the best writing--including fiction, nonfiction, poetry, comics, and blogs--published during 2010.

Download or read book The Best American Travel Writing 2013 written by Jason Wilson and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2013-10-08 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Number-one New York Times best-selling author of Eat, Pray, Love and Committed: A Love Story, Elizabeth Gilbert transports readers to far-flung locales with this collection of the year’s lushest and most inspiring travel writing.

Download or read book East Fifth Bliss written by Douglas Light and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There are seven defining moments in a person's life. For Morris Bliss, the difficulty is in knowing which moments are defining. Morris Bliss, at thirty-five, is clamped in the jaws of New York City inertia - he wants to travel but has no money; he needs a job but has no prospects; he still shares a walk-up apartment with his father. Enter Stefani, an 18 year-old in a Catholic school uniform, and Morris's once static life quickly unravels when Stefani's father, unwittingly calls on Morris to work for him. Life becomes further entangled when his best friend is recruited by a cartel that local sex markets, and begs for Morris to save his bacon. Most importantly, Morris's father, a taciturn widower, finally reveals the truth surrounding the strange death of Morris's mother. A body at rest will remain at rest. Unless acted upon. With the agony of his inertia finally broken, Morris Bliss fights to keep his life from careening out of control. He must learn to adapt if he is to survive.

Download or read book Where Night Stops written by Douglas Light and published by Vireo Book, A. This book was released on 2018-02 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We're born with a finite number of opportunities. Attrition, bad choices, misspent goodwill, and fucked-up luck. The opportunities dwindle through a process called living. Our portfolio of prospects turns into a tattered novel of outcomes. I am twenty-two. Orphaned by a brutal car crash, a young man lives with no plans for the future. Leaving his small town of Windstop, Iowa, he finds his way to Seattle, where he ends up broke and sleeping in a homeless shelter. There he meets Ray-Ray, an Iranian with a shadowy past, who inducts him into a criminal underworld. When Ray-Ray disappears, the young man is left to fend for himself through carrying out clandestine drops for cash from an anonymous source. At first, it's perfect: living without the responsibilities of a real job or a proper home. But then the scope of his travels widens to Europe, Brazil, and China, leading him deep into a conflict of international proportion. Soon, he finds himself targeted for death, but from whom or for what reason, he's not sure. The only thing that he's sure of is that if he wants to survive, he needs a plan--now. Because at noon, they're coming to kill him.