Download or read book The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore written by Benjamin Hale and published by Hachette+ORM. This book was released on 2010-11-01 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bruno Littlemore is quite unlike any chimpanzee in the world. Precocious, self-conscious and preternaturally gifted, young Bruno, born and raised in a habitat at the local zoo, falls under the care of a university primatologist named Lydia Littlemore. Learning of Bruno's ability to speak, Lydia takes Bruno into her home to oversee his education and nurture his passion for painting. But for all of his gifts, the chimpanzee has a rough time caging his more primal urges. His untimely outbursts ultimately cost Lydia her job, and send the unlikely pair on the road in what proves to be one of the most unforgettable journeys -- and most affecting love stories -- in recent literature. Like its protagonist, this novel is big, loud, abrasive, witty, perverse, earnest and amazingly accomplished. The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore goes beyond satire by showing us not what it means, but what it feels like be human -- to love and lose, learn, aspire, grasp, and, in the end, to fail.
Download or read book The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore written by Benjamin Hale and published by Atlantic Books Ltd. This book was released on 2011-04-01 with total page 593 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: SHORTLISTED FOR THE DYLAN THOMAS PRIZE 2011 Bruno Littlemore; linguist, artist, philosopher. A life defined by a soaring mind, yet bound by a restrictive body. Born in down-town Chicago, Bruno's precocity pulls him from an unremarkable childhood, and under the tuition of Lydia, his intellect dazzles a watching world. But when falls in love with his mentor, the world turns on them with outrage: Bruno is striving to be something he is not, and denying everything that he is. For despite his all too human complexities, dreams and frailties, Bruno's hairy body, flattened nose and jutting brow are, undeniably, the features of a chimpanzee. Like its protagonist, this novel is big, abrasive, witty, perverse, earnest and accomplished. The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore goes beyond satire by showing us not what it means, but what it feels like be human - to love and lose, learn, aspire, grasp, and, in the end, to fail.
Download or read book The Fat Artist and Other Stories written by Benjamin Hale and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2016-05-17 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Oddly beautiful and impossible to look away from” (Los Angeles Times), the stories in The Fat Artist are suffused with fear and desire, introducing us to a company of indelible characters reeling with love, jealousy, megalomania, and despair. In prose alternately stark, lush and hallucinatory, occasionally nightmarish and often absurd, the voices in Benjamin Hale’s The Fat Artist and Other Stories speak from the margins: a dominatrix whose longtime client, a US congressman, drops dead during a tryst in a hotel room; an addict in precarious recovery who lands a job driving a truck full of live squid; a heartbroken performance artist who attempts to eat himself to death as a work of art. From underground radicals hiding in Morocco to an aging hippy in Colorado in the summer before 9/11 to a young drag queen in New York at the cusp of the AIDS crisis, these stories rove freely across time and place, carried by haunting, peculiar narratives that form the vast tapestry of American life. “A steadily growing…talent” (Kirkus Reviews), Hale’s prize-winning fiction abounds with a love of language and a wild joy for storytelling, earning accolades from writers such as novelist Jonathan Ames, who compared discovering his work to watching Mickey Mantle play ball for the first time; Washington Post critic Ron Charles, who declared him “fully evolved as a writer,” and bestselling author Jodi Picoult, who simply called him “brilliant.” Pairing absurdity with philosophical musings on the unnerving intersections between life and death, art and ridicule, consumption and creation, “the audacious imagination evident in Hale’s acclaimed debut, The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore, shines again in this…provocative collection that takes a unique view of the human condition” (Booklist).
Download or read book We are All Completely Beside Ourselves written by Karen Joy Fowler and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2013 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the "New York Times"-bestselling author of "The Jane Austen Book Club," the story of an American family, ordinary in every way but one--their close family relative was a chimpanzee.
Download or read book The Wild and the Wicked written by Benjamin Hale and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2016-12-10 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A brief foray into a moral thicket, exploring why we should protect nature despite tsunamis, malaria, bird flu, cancer, killer asteroids, and tofu. Most of us think that in order to be environmentalists, we have to love nature. Essentially, we should be tree huggers—embracing majestic redwoods, mighty oaks, graceful birches, etc. We ought to eat granola, drive hybrids, cook tofu, and write our appointments in Sierra Club calendars. Nature's splendor, in other words, justifies our protection of it. But, asks Benjamin Hale in this provocative book, what about tsunamis, earthquakes, cancer, bird flu, killer asteroids? They are nature, too. For years, environmentalists have insisted that nature is fundamentally good. In The Wild and the Wicked, Benjamin Hale adopts the opposite position—that much of the time nature can be bad—in order to show that even if nature is cruel, we still need to be environmentally conscientious. Hale argues that environmentalists needn't feel compelled to defend the value of nature, or even to adopt the attitudes of tree-hugging nature lovers. We can acknowledge nature's indifference and periodic hostility. Deftly weaving anecdote and philosophy, he shows that we don't need to love nature to be green. What really ought to be driving our environmentalism is our humanity, not nature's value. Hale argues that our unique burden as human beings is that we can act for reasons, good or bad. He claims that we should be environmentalists because environmentalism is right, because we humans have the capacity to be better than nature. As humans, we fail to live up to our moral potential if we act as brutally as nature. Hale argues that despite nature's indifference to the plight of humanity, humanity cannot be indifferent to the plight of nature.
Download or read book You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine written by Alexandra Kleeman and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2015-08-25 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A powerful allegory of our civilization’s many maladies, artfully and elegantly articulated, by one of the young wise women of our generation.” —New York Times Book Review An intelligent and madly entertaining debut novel reminiscent of The Crying of Lot 49, White Noise, and City of Glass that is at once a missing-person mystery, an exorcism of modern culture, and a wholly singular vision of contemporary womanhood from a terrifying and often funny voice of a new generation. A woman known only by the letter A lives in an unnamed American city with her roommate, B, and boyfriend, C, who wants her to join him on a reality show called That’s My Partner! A eats (or doesn’t) the right things, watches endless amounts of television, often just for the commercials—particularly the recurring cartoon escapades of Kandy Kat, the mascot for an entirely chemical dessert—and models herself on a standard of beauty that only exists in such advertising. She fixates on the fifteen minutes of fame a news-celebrity named Michael has earned after buying up his local Wally Supermarket’s entire, and increasingly ample, supply of veal. Meanwhile B is attempting to make herself a twin of A, who hungers for something to give meaning to her life, something aside from C’s pornography addiction, and becomes indoctrinated by a new religion spread throughout a web of corporate franchises, which moves her closer to the decoys that populate her television world, but no closer to her true nature.
Download or read book Ride Around Shining written by Chris Leslie-Hynan and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2014-08-05 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction A provocative debut novel about a young white chauffeur and his wealthy black employer, an NBA player—a twenty-first century inversion of what we’ve come to expect stories of race and class to look like, and a discomfiting portrait of envy and obsession. Ride Around Shining concerns the idle preoccupations, and later machinations, of a transplanted Portlander named Jess—a nobody from nowhere with a Master’s degree and a gig delivering takeout. He parlays the latter, along with a few lies, into a job as a chauffeur for an up-and-coming Trail Blazer named Calyph West and his young wife, Antonia. Calyph is black and Antonia is white and Jess becomes fascinated, innocuously at first, by all they are that he is not. In striving to make himself indispensable to them, he causes Calyph to have a season-ending knee injury, then brings about the couple’s estrangement, before positioning himself at last as their perverse savior. In the tradition of The Talented Mr. Ripley, The Great Gatsby, and Harold Pinter’s The Servant—not to mention a certain Shakespeare play about a creepy white dude obsessed with a black dude—Ride Around Shining tries to say the unsayable about white fixation on black culture, particularly black athletic culture, something so common in everyday life it has gone all but unaddressed.
Download or read book Slake s Limbo written by Felice Holman and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 1986-05-31 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Artemis Slake, at the age of thirteen, took his fear and misfortune and hid them underground. The thing is, he had to go with them".
Download or read book The Templars Last Secret written by Martin Walker and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2017-06-13 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bruno, the beloved chief of police in the idyllic French town of St. Denis, is back! This time a mysterious death brings ancient secrets to light, and it's up to our hero--and favorite gourmand--to connect the tangled threads of past and present When a woman's body is found at the foot of a cliff near St. Denis, Bruno suspects a connection to the great ruin that stands on the cliff above: the Château de Commarque, a long-ago Knights Templar stronghold which, along with the labyrinth of prehistoric caves beneath it, continues to draw the interest of scholars. With the help of Amélie, a young newcomer to the Dordogne, Bruno learns that the dead woman was an archaeologist searching for a religious artifact of incredible importance, the discovery of which could have dramatic repercussions throughout the Middle East--not to mention in St. Denis. And the woman's ties to Islamic terrorists can only heighten the pressure on Bruno to unravel the centuries-old mystery. Meanwhile, an old flame of Bruno's is assigned to work with him on the case, and the two find time, naturellement, to enjoy the supreme pleasures of the wine, food, and beauty of the Dordogne.
Download or read book The Zero and the One written by Ryan Ruby and published by Twelve. This book was released on 2017-03-07 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A gothic twist on the classic tale of innocents abroad, The Zero and the One is a meditation on the seductions of friendship and the power of dangerous ideas that registers the dark, psychological suspense of Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley and the intellectual and philosophical intrigue of John Banville's The Book of Evidence. A shy, bookish scholarship student from a working-class family, Owen Whiting has high hopes of what awaits him at Oxford, only to find himself adrift and out of place among the university's dim aristocrats and posh radicals. But his life takes a dramatic turn when he is assigned to the same philosophy tutorial as Zachary Foedern, a visiting student from New York City. Rich, brilliant, and charismatic, Zach takes Owen under his wing, introducing him to a world of experiences Owen has only ever read about. From the quadrangles of Oxford to the seedy underbelly of Berlin, they practice what Zach preaches, daring each other to transgress the boundaries of convention and morality, until Zach proposes the greatest transgression of all: a suicide pact. But when Zach's plans go horribly awry, Owen is left to pick up the pieces in the sleek lofts and dingy dives of lower Manhattan. Now he must navigate the treacherous boundary between illusion and reality if he wants to understand his friend and preserve a hold on his once bright future.
Download or read book Cartwheel written by Jennifer duBois and published by Scribe Publications. This book was released on 2013-10-28 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An American foreign-exchange student arrested for murder. A desperate father determined to win her freedom. The brilliant lawyer tasked with her prosecution. And the sphinx-like young man who happens to be her only alibi. When Lily Hayes arrives in Buenos Aires for her semester abroad, she is enchanted by everything she encounters: the colourful buildings, the street food, the elusive guy next door. Her studious roommate, Katy, is a bit of a bore, but Lily hasn’t come to Argentina to hang out with other Americans. Five weeks later, Katy is found brutally murdered in their shared home, and Lily is the prime suspect. But who is Lily Hayes? It depends on who’s asking. As the case takes shape — revealing deceptions, secrets, and suspicious DNA — Lily appears alternately sinister and guileless through the eyes of those around her. With mordant wit and keen emotional insight, Jennifer duBois delivers a novel of propulsive psychological suspense and rare moral nuance. Cartwheel will keep you guessing until the final page, and its questions about how well we really know one another — and ourselves — will linger well beyond.
Download or read book Babayaga written by Toby Barlow and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2013-08-06 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By the author of Sharp Teeth, a novel of love, spies, and witches in 1950s Paris—and a cop turned into a flea Will is a young American ad executive in Paris. Except his agency is a front for the CIA. It's 1959 and the cold war is going strong. But Will doesn't think he's a warrior—he's just a good-hearted Detroit ad guy who can't seem to figure out Parisian girls. Zoya is a beautiful young woman wandering les boulevards, sad-eyed, coming off a bad breakup. In fact, she impaled her ex on a spike. Zoya, it turns out, has been a beautiful young woman for hundreds of years; she and her far more traditionally witchy-looking companion, Elga, have been thriving unnoticed in the bloody froth of Europe's wars. Inspector Vidot is a hardworking Paris police detective who cherishes quiet nights at home. But when he follows a lead from a grisly murder to the abode of an ugly old woman, he finds himself turned into a flea. Oliver is a patrician, fun-loving American who has come to France to start a literary journal with the help of friends in D.C. who ask a few favors in return. He's in well over his head, but it's nothing that a cocktail can't fix. Right? Add a few chance encounters, a chorus of some more angry witches, a strung-out jazzman or two, a weaponized LSD program, and a cache of rifles buried in the Bois de Bologne—and that's a novel! But while Toby Barlow's Babayaga may start as just a joyful romp though the City of Light, it quickly grows into a daring, moving exploration of love, mortality, and responsibility.
Download or read book Magnificence A Novel written by Lydia Millet and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2013 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This novel introduces Susan Lindley, a woman adrift after her husband's death. Suddenly gifted her great uncle's Pasadena mansion, Susan decides to restore his extensive collection of preserved animals, tending to the fur and feathers, the beaks, the bones and shimmering tails. Meanwhile, a menagerie of uniquely damaged humans - including a cheating husband and a chorus of eccentric elderly women - joins her in residence.
Download or read book Rachel in Love written by Pat Murphy and published by Untreed Reads. This book was released on 2013-01-09 with total page 22 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 1987 Nebula Award! Rachel has the mind of a teenage girl, but the body and the innocent heart of a young chimp. Sometimes when she looks at her gnarled brown fingers, they seem alien, wrong, out of place. She remembers having small, pale, delicate hands with painted fingernails. Memories lie upon memories, layers upon layers, like the sedimentary rocks of the desert buttes. Aaron Jacobs, the man Rachel calls father, was a neurologist who discovered how to capture the electrical pattern of a living brain's thoughts and memories. When his daughter died unexpectedly, the grieving father imposed the electrical pattern of the girl's brain on a young chimp, creating Rachel, a chimp he recognizes as his daughter. Rachel knows that she is a real girl - but when Aaron Jacobs dies, she must make her way in a world that treats her as nothing but an animal.
Download or read book The Book of Life written by Stuart Nadler and published by Hachette+ORM. This book was released on 2011-09-01 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Forced together on a trip from Manhattan to Rhode Island, a father and son attempt to renew their bond over lobster, cigarettes, and a buried secret. A pure-hearted artist finds his devotion cruelly tested, while his true love tries to repent for the biggest mistake of her life. Unwittingly thrust into an open marriage, a man struggles to reconnect with his newly devout son. And in the book's daring first story, an arrogant businessman begins a forbidden affair during the High Holidays. Written in clear, crystalline prose, The Book of Life comprises seven stunning tales about faith, family, grief, love, temptation, and redemption that signal the arrival of a bold and exciting new writer.
Download or read book The History of Love A Novel written by Nicole Krauss and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2006-05-17 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ONE OF THE MOST LOVED NOVELS OF THE DECADE. A long-lost book reappears, mysteriously connecting an old man searching for his son and a girl seeking a cure for her widowed mother's loneliness. Leo Gursky taps his radiator each evening to let his upstairs neighbor know he’s still alive. But it wasn’t always like this: in the Polish village of his youth, he fell in love and wrote a book…Sixty years later and half a world away, fourteen-year-old Alma, who was named after a character in that book, undertakes an adventure to find her namesake and save her family. With virtuosic skill and soaring imaginative power, Nicole Krauss gradually draws these stories together toward a climax of "extraordinary depth and beauty" (Newsday).
Download or read book History Has Begun written by Bruno Maçães and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Popular consensus says that the US rose over two centuries to Cold War victory and world domination, and is now in slow decline. But is this right? History's great civilizations have always lasted much longer, and for all its colossal power, American culture was overshadowed by Europe until recently. What if this isn't the end? In History Has Begun, Bruno Maçães offers a compelling vision of America's future, both fascinating and unnerving. From the early American Republic, he takes us to the turbulent present, when, he argues, America is finally forging its own path. We can see the birth pangs of this new civilization in today's debates on guns, religion, foreign policy and the significance of Trump. Should the coronavirus pandemic be regarded as an opportunity to build a new kind of society? What will its values be, and what will this new America look like? Maçães traces the long arc of US history to argue that in contrast to those who see the US on the cusp of decline, it may well be simply shifting to a new model, one equally powerful but no longer liberal. Consequently, it is no longer enough to analyze America's current trajectory through the simple prism of decline vs. progress, which assumes a static model-America as liberal leviathan. Rather, Maçães argues that America may be casting off the liberalism that has defined the country since its founding for a new model, one more appropriate to succeeding in a transformed world.
