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Book Crooked Letter  Crooked Letter

Download or read book Crooked Letter Crooked Letter written by Tom Franklin and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2010-10-05 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The classic trifecta of talent, heart, and a bone-deep sense of storytelling….A masterful performance, deftly rendered and deeply satisfying. For days on end, I woke with this story on my mind.” —David Wroblewski A powerful and resonant novel from the critically acclaimed author of Smonk and Hell at the Breech, Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter tells the riveting story of two boyhood friends, torn apart by circumstance, who are brought together again by a terrible crime in a small Mississippi town. An extraordinary novel that seamlessly blends elements of crime and Southern literary fiction, Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter is a must for readers of Larry Brown, Pete Dexter, Ron Rash, and Dennis Lehane. In the late 1970s, Larry Ott and Silas "32" Jones were boyhood pals. Their worlds were as different as night and day: Larry, the child of lower-middle-class white parents, and Silas, the son of a poor, single black mother. Yet for a few months the boys stepped outside of their circumstances and shared a special bond. But then tragedy struck: Larry took a girl on a date to a drive-in movie, and she was never heard from again. She was never found and Larry never confessed, but all eyes rested on him as the culprit. The incident shook the county—and perhaps Silas most of all. His friendship with Larry was broken, and then Silas left town. More than twenty years have passed. Larry, a mechanic, lives a solitary existence, never able to rise above the whispers of suspicion. Silas has returned as a constable. He and Larry have no reason to cross paths until another girl disappears and Larry is blamed again. And now the two men who once called each other friend are forced to confront the past they've buried and ignored for decades.

Book Easy Beauty

Download or read book Easy Beauty written by Chloé Cooper Jones and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2023-04-04 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Memoir or Autobiography A New York Times Notable Book of 2022 * Vulture’s #1 Memoir of 2022 * A Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, USA TODAY, Time, BuzzFeed, Publishers Weekly, Booklist, and New York Public Library Best Book of the Year From Chloé Cooper Jones—Pulitzer Prize finalist, philosophy professor, Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant recipient—an “exquisite” (Oprah Daily) and groundbreaking memoir about disability, motherhood, and the search for a new way of seeing and being seen. “I am in a bar in Brooklyn, listening to two men, my friends, discuss whether my life is worth living.” So begins Chloé Cooper Jones’s bold, revealing account of moving through the world in a body that looks different than most. Jones learned early on to factor “pain calculations” into every plan, every situation. Born with a rare congenital condition called sacral agenesis which affects both her stature and gait, her pain is physical. But there is also the pain of being judged and pitied for her appearance, of being dismissed as “less than.” The way she has been seen—or not seen—has informed her lens on the world her entire life. She resisted this reality by excelling academically and retreating to “the neutral room in her mind” until it passed. But after unexpectedly becoming a mother (in violation of unspoken social taboos about the disabled body), something in her shifts, and Jones sets off on a journey across the globe, reclaiming the spaces she’d been denied, and denied herself. From the bars and domestic spaces of her life in Brooklyn to sculpture gardens in Rome; from film festivals in Utah to a Beyoncé concert in Milan; from a tennis tournament in California to the Killing Fields of Phnom Penh, Jones weaves memory, observation, experience, and aesthetic philosophy to probe the myths underlying our standards of beauty and desirability and interrogates her own complicity in upholding those myths. “Bold, honest, and superbly well-written” (Andre Aciman, author of Call Me By Your Name) Easy Beauty is the rare memoir that has the power to make you see the world, and your place in it, with new eyes.

Book Crooked Hallelujah

    Book Details:
  • Author : Kelli Jo Ford
  • Publisher : Grove Press
  • Release : 2020-07-14
  • ISBN : 0802149146
  • Pages : 247 pages

Download or read book Crooked Hallelujah written by Kelli Jo Ford and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 2020-07-14 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A masterful debut” that follows four generations of Cherokee women across four decades—from the Plimpton Prize–winning author (Sarah Jessica Parker). It’s 1974 in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and fifteen-year-old Justine grows up in a family of tough, complicated, and loyal women, presided over by her mother, Lula, and Granny. After Justine’s father abandoned the family, Lula became a devout member of the Holiness Church—a community that Justine at times finds stifling and terrifying. But Justine does her best as a devoted daughter, until an act of violence sends her on a different path forever. Crooked Hallelujah tells the stories of Justine—a mixed-blood Cherokee woman—and her daughter, Reney, as they move from Eastern Oklahoma’s Indian Country in the hopes of starting a new, more stable life in Texas amid the oil bust of the 1980s. However, life in Texas isn’t easy, and Reney feels unmoored from her family in Indian Country. Against the vivid backdrop of the Red River, we see their struggle to survive in a world—of unreliable men and near-Biblical natural forces, like wildfires and tornados—intent on stripping away their connections to one another and their very ideas of home. In lush and empathic prose, Kelli Jo Ford depicts what this family of proud, stubborn, Cherokee women sacrifices for those they love, amid larger forces of history, religion, class, and culture. This is a big-hearted and ambitious novel of the powerful bonds between mothers and daughters by an exquisite and rare new talent. “A compelling journey through the evolving terrain of multiple generations of women.” —The Washington Post

Book Smonk

    Book Details:
  • Author : Tom Franklin
  • Publisher : Harper Collins
  • Release : 2009-10-13
  • ISBN : 0061842621
  • Pages : 274 pages

Download or read book Smonk written by Tom Franklin and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Fast-paced and unrelentingly violent . . . readers looking for a strange and savage tale can’t go wrong” with this western from an Edgar Award–winning author (Publishers Weekly). From the New York Times–bestselling author of Hell at the Breech and Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter, a historical thriller in turns hilarious, bawdy and terrifying. It’s 1911 and the townsfolk of Old Texas, Alabama, have had enough. Every Saturday night for a year, E. O. Smonk has been destroying property, killing livestock, seducing women, cheating and beating men, all from behind the twin barrels of his Winchester 45-70 caliber over-and-under rifle. Syphilitic, consumptive, gouty, and goitered—an expert with explosives and knives—Smonk hates horses, goats, and the Irish, and it’s high time he was stopped. But capturing old Smonk won’t be easy—and putting him on trial could have shocking and disastrous consequences, considering the terrible secret the citizens of Old Texas are hiding. Praise for Tom Franklin: “I’m reminded, by the evocative strength of the prose and the relentlessness of the imagination, of William Faulkner.” —Philip Roth “It’s as if the author kidnapped Raymond Carver’s characters and set them loose in the Deep South.” —The New York Times Book Review

Book The Chain Letter

Download or read book The Chain Letter written by Julie Schumacher and published by Yearling. This book was released on 2009-04-23 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Livvie isn’t superstitious like her best friend, Joyce, who thinks everything is bad luck. So Livvie isn’t worried about tearing up the chain letter and throwing it away–until she’s humiliated in gym class, falls down her back stairs, and gets invited to Thanksgiving dinner at Peter Finch’s house. Peter’s dad has crooked teeth, a plastic wonderland in his front yard, and some kind of secret up in his study. There is no way Livvie wants Phil Finch to date her mom. But it’s hard work keeping their families apart–especially when Livvie is assigned to work on the sixth-grade snow maze project with Peter. Clearly, Joyce was right: breaking the chain was a huge mistake. And the only way to set things straight is to find out who sent the letter in the first place. . . . Rich in humor and suspense, Julie Schumacher’s absorbing novel is about friendship, choices, and the kind of luck that really matters.

Book A Death at Crooked Creek

Download or read book A Death at Crooked Creek written by Marianne Wesson and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2013-05-24 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This is an extraordinary and ground-breaking book, a wonderfully creative mix of fact and theory, imagination and drama…The startling origin of the complex 'intention exception' to the hearsay evidence rule becomes canvas on which a grand and marvelously detailed tale is told. This is modern narrative at its best: a marriage of spectacular writing and hard, documented truth presented by a brilliant author who doubles as a gifted and fastidious legal scholar and historian." —Andrew Popper, American University One winter night in 1879, at a lonely Kansas campsite near Crooked Creek, a man was shot to death. The dead man’s traveling companion identified him as John Hillmon, a cowboy from Lawrence who had been attempting to carve out a life on the blustery prairie. The case might have been soon forgotten and the apparent widow, Sallie Hillmon, left to mourn—except for the $25,000 life insurance policies Hillmon had taken out shortly before his departure. The insurance companies refused to pay on the policies, claiming that the dead man was not John Hillmon, and Sallie was forced to take them to court in a case that would reach the Supreme Court twice. The companies’ case rested on a crucial piece of evidence: a faded love letter written by a disappeared cigarmaker, declaring his intent to travel westward with a “man named Hillmon.” In A Death at Crooked Creek, Marianne Wesson re-examines the long-neglected evidence in the case of the Kansas cowboy and his wife, recreating the court scenes that led to a significant Supreme Court ruling on the admissibility of hearsay evidence. Wesson employs modern forensic methods to examine the body of the dead man, attempting to determine his true identity and finally put this fascinating mystery to rest. This engaging and vividly imagined work combines the drama, intrigue, and emotion of excellent storytelling with cutting-edge forensic investigation techniques and legal theory. Wesson’s superbly imagined A Death at Crooked Creek will have general readers, history buffs, and legal scholars alike wondering whether history, and the Justices, may have misunderstood altogether the events at that bleak winter campsite. Marianne Wesson is Professor of Law and President’s Teaching Scholar, University of Colorado Law School. She is the author of best-selling and prize-winning legal novels including Render up the Body, A Suggestion of Death, and Chilling Effect. She lives in a Colorado mountain valley with her husband, llamas, dogs, and visiting wildlife.

Book Poachers

    Book Details:
  • Author : Tom Franklin
  • Publisher : Harper Collins
  • Release : 2009-10-13
  • ISBN : 0061856843
  • Pages : 212 pages

Download or read book Poachers written by Tom Franklin and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An Edgar Award winner, Tom Franklin’s Poachers collects ten stunning, bleak tales set in the woodlands, swamps and chemical plants along the Alabama River. Staking his claim as a fresh, original Southern voice, Tom Frankin’s lyric, deceptively simple prose conjures a world where the default setting is violence, a world of hunting and fishing, gambling and losing, drinking and poaching—a world most of us have never seen. In the chilling title novella, three wild boys confront a mythic game warden as mysterious and deadly as the river they haunt. And, as a weathered, hand-painted sign reads: “Jesus is not coming.” This terrain isn’t pretty, isn’t for the weak of heart, but in these deperate, lost people, Franklin somehow finds the moments of grace that make them what they so abundantly are: human. “While he may occasionally wax sentimental about life in the impoverished South, Franklin’s style is often as laconic and simply spoken as his characters’ dialogue, sometimes close to Hemingway, but more often akin to Denis Johnson or Raymond Carver in its resonant ordinariness.” —Publishers Weekly

Book The Savage Kind

    Book Details:
  • Author : John Copenhaver
  • Publisher : Simon and Schuster
  • Release : 2021-10-05
  • ISBN : 1643138103
  • Pages : 388 pages

Download or read book The Savage Kind written by John Copenhaver and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-10-05 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two lonely teenage girls in 1940s Washington, DC, discover they have a penchant for solving crimes—and an even greater desire to commit them—in the new mystery novel by Macavity Award-winning novelist John Copenhaver. Philippa Watson, a good-natured yet troubled seventeen-year-old, has just moved to Washington, DC. She’s lonely until she meets Judy Peabody, a brilliant and tempestuous classmate. The girls become unlikely friends and fashion themselves as intellectuals, drawing the notice of Christine Martins, their dazzling English teacher, who enthralls them with her passion for literature and her love of noirish detective fiction. When Philippa returns a novel Miss Martins has lent her, she interrupts a man grappling with her in the shadows. Frightened, Philippa flees, unsure who the man is or what she’s seen. Days later, her teacher returns to school altered: a dark shell of herself. On the heels of her teacher’s transformation, a classmate is found dead in the Anacostia River—murdered—the body stripped and defiled with a mysterious inscription. As the girls follow the clues and wrestle with newfound feelings toward each other, they suspect that the killer is closer to their circle than they imagined—and that the greatest threat they face may not be lurking in the halls at school, or in the city streets, but creeping out from a murderous impulse of their own.

Book The Letter Writer

    Book Details:
  • Author : Dan Fesperman
  • Publisher : Vintage Crime/Black Lizard
  • Release : 2017-03-21
  • ISBN : 110187399X
  • Pages : 386 pages

Download or read book The Letter Writer written by Dan Fesperman and published by Vintage Crime/Black Lizard. This book was released on 2017-03-21 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES 10 BEST CRIME NOVELS OF THE YEAR February 9, 1942. Disgraced Southern cop Woodrow Cain arrives in New York City for a new position with the NYPD and is greeted with smoke billowing out from the SS Normandie, engulfed in flames on the Hudson. On Cain’s first day on the job, a body turns up in the same river. Unfamiliar with the milieu of mob bosses and crooked officials in the big city, Cain’s investigation stalls, until a strange man who calls himself Danziger enters his life. Danziger looks like a miscreant, but speaks five languages, has the manners of a gentleman, and is the one person who can help Cain identify the body. A letter writer for illiterate European immigrants, Danzinger has a seemingly boundless knowledge of the city’s denizens and networks—and possesses information that extends beyond the reach of his clients, hinting at an unfathomable past. As the body count grows, Cain and Danziger inch closer toward an underground web of possibly traitorous corruption . . . but in these murky depths, not even Danzinger can know what kind of danger will await them.

Book Beautiful Crooked Letter I

    Book Details:
  • Author : Shae Smith
  • Publisher :
  • Release : 2018-05-23
  • ISBN : 9781718955417
  • Pages : 30 pages

Download or read book Beautiful Crooked Letter I written by Shae Smith and published by . This book was released on 2018-05-23 with total page 30 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A charming story about how our differences make us beautiful! A Beautiful Crooked Letter I aims to raise awareness of Scoliosis and the emotional struggle of the condition through the story of Izzy, a young girl who is diagnosed during a school screening. Share in Izzy's journey as she realizes she is bent, but she is not broken!

Book Crooked

    Book Details:
  • Author : Laura McNeal
  • Publisher : Ember
  • Release : 2007-05-08
  • ISBN : 0375841911
  • Pages : 354 pages

Download or read book Crooked written by Laura McNeal and published by Ember. This book was released on 2007-05-08 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Public Library Book for the Teen Age A California Book Award Winner for Juvenile Literature An ALA-YALSA Top Ten Best Book for Young Adults A Booklist Top Ten Youth Romance Clara Wilson and Amos MacKenzie are finding their lives turned upside down: by each other, by fickle friendships, by failing families, and by the two meanest brothers in town. As the pressures of high school and home life collide, Clara and Amos struggle to maintain their identities amid the chaos. Honesty may be the answer...but it can be awfully hard to find.

Book Crooked

    Book Details:
  • Author : Cathryn Jakobson Ramin
  • Publisher : HarperCollins
  • Release : 2017-05-09
  • ISBN : 0062641808
  • Pages : 412 pages

Download or read book Crooked written by Cathryn Jakobson Ramin and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2017-05-09 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The acclaimed author of Carved in Sand—a veteran investigative journalist who endured persistent back pain for decades—delivers the definitive book on the subject: an essential examination of all facets of the back pain industry, exploring what works, what doesn't, what may cause harm, and how to get on the road to recovery. In her effort to manage her chronic back pain, investigative reporter Cathryn Jakobson Ramin spent years and a small fortune on a panoply of treatments. But her discomfort only intensified, leaving her feeling frustrated and perplexed. As she searched for better solutions, she exposed a much bigger problem. Costing roughly $100 billion a year, spine medicine—often ineffective and sometimes harmful —exemplified the worst aspects of the U.S. health care system. The result of six years of intensive investigation, Crooked offers a startling look at the poorly identified risks of spine medicine, and provides practical advice and solutions. Ramin interviewed scores of spine surgeons, pain management doctors, physical medicine and rehabilitation physicians, exercise physiologists, physical therapists, chiropractors, specialized bodywork practitioners. She met with many patients whose pain and desperation led them to make life-altering decisions, and with others who triumphed over their limitations. The result is a brilliant and comprehensive book that is not only important but essential to millions of back pain sufferers, and all types of health care professionals. Ramin shatters assumptions about surgery, chiropractic methods, physical therapy, spinal injections and painkillers, and addresses evidence-based rehabilitation options—showing, in detail, how to avoid therapeutic dead ends, while saving money, time, and considerable anguish. With Crooked, she reveals what it takes to outwit the back pain industry and get on the road to recovery.

Book The Book of Mirrors

    Book Details:
  • Author : E. O. Chirovici
  • Publisher : Simon and Schuster
  • Release : 2017-02-21
  • ISBN : 1501141546
  • Pages : 288 pages

Download or read book The Book of Mirrors written by E. O. Chirovici and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-02-21 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Famous professor Joseph Wieder was brutally murdered, and the crime was never solved. Years later when literary agent Peter Katz receives an incomplete memoir written by a student of the murdered professor, he becomes obsessed with solving the crime.

Book Crooked Letter i

Download or read book Crooked Letter i written by Connie Griffin and published by NewSouth Books. This book was released on 2016-03-01 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Crooked Letter i offers a collection of first-person nonfiction narratives that reflect the distinct 'coming out' experiences of a complex cross-section of gay, lesbian, and transgendered Southerners from all walks of life and at different stages in their lives. There is the Appalachian widower who, following the death of his wife, decides it's time to tell his church community. There is the young man who left his hometown as a girl, returning hesitant but hopeful for his grandmother's love. There is the adolescent girl who refuses to surrender her soul to Jesus because she is not yet certain of her own beliefs. There is the well-mannered Southern gentleman who hopes his blueberries and biscuits will help ease the awkwardness of coming out to his elderly neighbor. There are the ones who survived the frequent bar raids, arrests, and beatings. But, there is also the first kiss, and the first love. The experiences represented here pivot around a central theme -- finally finding language to understand one's identity, and then discovering we were never the only ones. Revealing a vibrant cross-section of Southerners, the writers of these narratives have in common the experience of being Southern and different, but determined against all odds.

Book The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat  And Other Clinical Tales

Download or read book The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat And Other Clinical Tales written by Oliver Sacks and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 1998 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores neurological disorders and their effects upon the minds and lives of those affected with an entertaining voice.

Book A Crooked Kind of Perfect

Download or read book A Crooked Kind of Perfect written by Linda Urban and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2009-04-06 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ten-year-old Zoe Elias has perfect piano dreams. She can practically feel the keys under her flying fingers; she can hear the audience's applause. All she needs is a baby grand so she can start her lessons, and then she'll be well on her way to Carnegie Hall. But when Dad ventures to the music store and ends up with a wheezy organ instead of a piano, Zoe's dreams hit a sour note. Learning the organ versions of old TV theme songs just isn't the same as mastering Beethoven on the piano. And the organ isn't the only part of Zoe's life in Michigan that's off-kilter, what with Mom constantly at work, Dad afraid to leave the house, and that odd boy, Wheeler Diggs, following her home from school every day. Yet when Zoe enters the annual Perform-O-Rama organ competition, she finds that life is full of surprises—and that perfection may be even better when it's just a little off center. This ebook includes a sample chapter of Hound Dog True.

Book Liberalism s Crooked Circle

Download or read book Liberalism s Crooked Circle written by Ira Katznelson and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-08-10 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a profoundly moving and analytically incisive attempt to shift the terms of discussion in American politics. It speaks to the intellectual and political weaknesses within the liberal tradition that have put the United States at the mercy of libertarian, authoritarian populist, nakedly racist, and traditionalist elitist versions of the right-wing; and it seeks to identify resources that can move the left away from the stunned intellectual incoherence with which it has met the death of Bolshevism. In Ira Katznelson's view, Americans are squandering a tremendous ethical and political opportunity to redefine and reorient the liberal tradition. In an opening essay and two remarkable letters addressed to Adam Michnik, who is arguably East Europe's emblematic democratic intellectual, Katznelson seeks to recover this possibility. By examining issues that once occupied Michnik's fellow dissidents in the Warsaw group known as the Crooked Circle, Katznelson brings a fresh realism to old ideals and posits a liberalism that "stares hard" at cruelty, suffering, coercion, and tyrannical abuses of state power. Like the members of Michnik's club, he recognizes that the circumference of liberalism's circle never runs smooth and that tolerance requires extremely difficult judgments. Katznelson's first letter explores how the virtues of socialism, including its moral stand on social justice, can be related to liberalism while overcoming debilitating aspects of the socialist inheritance. The second asks whether liberalism can recognize, appreciate, and manage human difference. Situated in the lineage of efforts by Richard Hofstadter, C. Wright Mills, and Lionel Trilling to "thicken" liberalism, these letters also draw on personal experience in the radical politics of the 1960s and in the dissident culture of East and Central Europe in the years immediately preceding communism's demise. Liberalism's Crooked Circle could help foster a substantive debate in the American elections of 1996 and determine the contents of that desperately needed discussion.