Download or read book The Swank Hotel written by Lucy Corin and published by Graywolf Press. This book was released on 2021-10-05 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A stunningly ambitious, prescient novel about madness, generational trauma, and cultural breakdown At the outset of the 2008 financial crisis, Em has a dependable, dull marketing job generating reports of vague utility while she anxiously waits to hear news of her sister, Ad, who has gone missing—again. Em’s days pass drifting back and forth between her respectably cute starter house (bought with a “responsible, salary-backed, fixed-rate mortgage”) and her dreary office. Then something unthinkable, something impossible, happens and she begins to see how madness permeates everything around her while the mundane spaces she inhabits are transformed, through Lucy Corin’s idiosyncratic magic, into shimmering sites of the uncanny. The story that swirls around Em moves through several perspectives and voices. There is Frank, the tart-tongued, failing manager at her office; Jack, the man with whom Frank has had a love affair for decades; Em and Ad’s eccentric parents, who live in a house that is perpetually being built; and Tasio, the young man from Chiapas who works for them and falls in love with Ad. Through them Corin portrays porousness and breakdown in individuals and families, in economies and political systems, in architecture, technology, and even in language itself. The Swank Hotel is an acrobatic, unforgettable, surreal, and unexpectedly comic novel that interrogates the illusory dream of stability that pervaded early twenty-first-century America.
Download or read book The Swank Hotel written by Lucy Corin and published by Graywolf Press. This book was released on 2021-10-05 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A stunningly ambitious, prescient novel about madness, generational trauma, and cultural breakdown At the outset of the 2008 financial crisis, Em has a dependable, dull marketing job generating reports of vague utility while she anxiously waits to hear news of her sister, Ad, who has gone missing—again. Em’s days pass drifting back and forth between her respectably cute starter house (bought with a “responsible, salary-backed, fixed-rate mortgage”) and her dreary office. Then something unthinkable, something impossible, happens and she begins to see how madness permeates everything around her while the mundane spaces she inhabits are transformed, through Lucy Corin’s idiosyncratic magic, into shimmering sites of the uncanny. The story that swirls around Em moves through several perspectives and voices. There is Frank, the tart-tongued, failing manager at her office; Jack, the man with whom Frank has had a love affair for decades; Em and Ad’s eccentric parents, who live in a house that is perpetually being built; and Tasio, the young man from Chiapas who works for them and falls in love with Ad. Through them Corin portrays porousness and breakdown in individuals and families, in economies and political systems, in architecture, technology, and even in language itself. The Swank Hotel is an acrobatic, unforgettable, surreal, and unexpectedly comic novel that interrogates the illusory dream of stability that pervaded early twenty-first-century America.
Download or read book One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses written by Lucy Corin and published by McSweeney's. This book was released on 2016-08-09 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lucy Corin's "eye popping, enlightening read" (Publishers Weekly), now in paperback. At the heart of Lucy Corin’s dazzling collection are one hundred apocalypses: visions of loss and destruction, vexation and crisis, revelation and revolution, sometimes only a few lines long. In these haunting and wickedly funny stories, an apocalypse might come in the form of the end of a relationship or the end of the world, but they all expose the tricky landscape of our longing for a clean slate. In three longer stories, contemporary American life is playfully, if disturbingly, distorted: the rite of passage for adolescent girls involves choosing the madman who will accompany them into adulthood; California burns to the ground while, on the east coast, life carries on; and a soldier returns home broke from war to encounter a witch who extends a dangerous offer. At once mournful and explosively energetic, One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses is "deeply rooted in the politics and upheaval of our times" (Lambda Literary).
Download or read book Hotel Splendid written by Marie Redonnet and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 1994-09 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The woman who owns the once proud Hotel Splendid is burdened with the care of her sickly and selfish sisters, and is forced to battle the elements as her now-decaying hotel is about to be swallowed up by an encroaching swamp
Download or read book My Omaha Obsession written by Miss Cassette and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2020-11 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: My Omaha Obsession takes the reader on an idiosyncratic tour through some of Omaha’s neighborhoods, buildings, architecture, and people, celebrating the city’s unusual history. Rather than covering the city’s best-known sites, Miss Cassette is irresistibly drawn to strange little buildings and glorious large homes that don’t exist anymore as well as to stories of Harkert’s Holsum Hamburgers and the Twenties Club. Piecing together the records of buildings and homes and everything interesting that came after, Miss Cassette shares her observations of the property and its significance to Omaha. She scrutinizes land deeds, insurance maps, tax records, and old newspaper articles to uncover a property’s singular story. Through conversations with fellow detectives and history enthusiasts, she guides readers along her path of hunches, personal interests, mishaps, and more. As a longtime resident of Omaha, Miss Cassette is informed by memories of her youth combined with an enduring curiosity about the city’s offbeat relics and remains. Part memoir and part research guide with a healthy dose of colorful wandering, My Omaha Obsession celebrates the historic built environment and searches for the people who shaped early Omaha.
Download or read book Everyday Psychokillers written by Lucy Corin and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: InEveryday Psychokillersspectacular violence is the idiom of everyday life, a lurid extravaganza in which all those around the narrator seem vicarious participants. And at its center are the interchangeable young girls, thrilling to know themselves the object of so much desire and terror. The narrative interweaves history, myth, rumor, and news with the experiences of a young girl living in the flatness of South Florida. Like Grace Paley's narrators, she is pensive and eager, hungry for experience but restrained. Into the sphere of her regard come a Ted Bundy reject, the God Osiris, a Caribbean slave turned pirate, a circus performer living in a box, broken horses, a Seminole chief in a swamp, and a murderous babysitter. What these preposterously commonplace figures all know is that murder is identity: "Of course what matters really is the psychokiller, what he's done, what he threatens to do. Of course to be the lucky one you have to be abducted in the first place. Without him, you wouldn't exist." Everyday Psychokillersreaches to the edge of the psychoanalytical and jolts the reader back to daily life. The reader becomes the killer, the watcher, the person on the verge, hiding behind an everyday face.
Download or read book Last Call at the Hotel Imperial written by Deborah Cohen and published by Random House. This book was released on 2022-03-15 with total page 609 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER OF THE MARK LYNTON HISTORY PRIZE • A prize-winning historian’s “effervescent” (The New Yorker) account of a close-knit band of wildly famous American reporters who, in the run-up to World War II, took on dictators and rewrote the rules of modern journalism “High-speed, four-lane storytelling . . . Cohen’s all-action narrative bursts with colour and incident.”—Financial Times NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE • WINNER OF THE GOLDSMITH BOOK PRIZE • FINALIST FOR THE PROSE AWARD ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, NPR, BookPage, Booklist They were an astonishing group: glamorous, gutsy, and irreverent to the bone. As cub reporters in the 1920s, they roamed across a war-ravaged world, sometimes perched atop mules on wooden saddles, sometimes gliding through countries in the splendor of a first-class sleeper car. While empires collapsed and fledgling democracies faltered, they chased deposed empresses, international financiers, and Balkan gun-runners, and then knocked back doubles late into the night. Last Call at the Hotel Imperial is the extraordinary story of John Gunther, H. R. Knickerbocker, Vincent Sheean, and Dorothy Thompson. In those tumultuous years, they landed exclusive interviews with Hitler and Mussolini, Nehru and Gandhi, and helped shape what Americans knew about the world. Alongside these backstage glimpses into the halls of power, they left another equally incredible set of records. Living in the heady afterglow of Freud, they subjected themselves to frank, critical scrutiny and argued about love, war, sex, death, and everything in between. Plunged into successive global crises, Gunther, Knickerbocker, Sheean, and Thompson could no longer separate themselves from the turmoil that surrounded them. To tell that story, they broke long-standing taboos. From their circle came not just the first modern account of illness in Gunther’s Death Be Not Proud—a memoir about his son’s death from cancer—but the first no-holds-barred chronicle of a marriage: Sheean’s Dorothy and Red, about Thompson’s fractious relationship with Sinclair Lewis. Told with the immediacy of a conversation overheard, this revelatory book captures how the global upheavals of the twentieth century felt up close.
Download or read book Look at Us written by T. L. Toma and published by Bellevue Literary Press. This book was released on 2021-10-12 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A marriage is transformed by a new arrival “Look at Us is a scrupulous dissection of a contemporary marriage in mortal peril. It’s also a wild ride of a novel, gorgeously written, by turns comic, lyrical, elegiac, disturbing, and profound. I couldn’t put it down until the startling conclusion.” —Valerie Martin, author of Property and I Give It to You Martin, a market analyst, and Lily, a corporate attorney, have a life that many would envy—they share an expensive New York apartment with their twin toddlers, sample the delicacies of Manhattan’s finest restaurants, and take Caribbean vacations. But when the couple’s nanny announces her imminent departure, they panic: how will they ever find a replacement capable of managing their spirited boys? Enter Maeve, a young Irish émigré. Neither of them imagines how indispensable she will become, either to the household or to their marriage. As the family’s domestic bliss takes an unexpected turn, a different type of intimacy evolves, leading to an explosive finale. A captivating, trenchant portrait of class and sexual dynamics, Look at Us reveals just how fragile our social arrangements really are. T. L. Toma lives with his wife in Portland, Texas.
Download or read book Imperial Palace written by Arnold Bennett and published by Good Press. This book was released on 2021-08-31 with total page 746 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Imperial Palace " by Arnold Bennett is a quintessential exploration of class dynamics, the intricacies of work, and the fragility of human nature. Set in the Imperial Palace hotel, the novel delves into the life of Evelyn Orcham, the manager, and his two love affairs, offering a behind-the-scenes look at the running of a luxury hotel with meticulous detail. Bennett's sharp insights into human flaws and the beauty found in the mundane make for an uncomfortable yet thought-provoking read.
Download or read book Up in the Old Hotel written by Joseph Mitchell and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2015-07-15 with total page 736 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Saloon-keepers and street preachers, gypsies and steel-walking Mohawks, a bearded lady and a 93-year-old “seafoodetarian” who believes his specialized diet will keep him alive for another two decades. These are among the people that Joseph Mitchell immortalized in his reportage for The New Yorker and in four books—McSorley's Wonderful Saloon, Old Mr. Flood, The Bottom of the Harbor, and Joe Gould's Secret—that are still renowned for their precise, respectful observation, their graveyard humor, and their offhand perfection of style. These masterpieces (along with several previously uncollected stories) are available in one volume, which presents an indelible collective portrait of an unsuspected New York and its odder citizens—as depicted by one of the great writers of this or any other time.
Download or read book The Entire Predicament written by Lucy Corin and published by Tin House Books. This book was released on 2007-09-28 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this refreshing, funny, and startling collection of stories, Lucy Corin veers far from the path of staid contemporary fiction. She masterfully weaves traditional and experimental topics and techniques, creating a fictional world where people behave normally in the most extreme situations, and in bizarrely with almost no provocation at all. But thanks to her vivid, sharp prose and insightful first-person voices, even the oddest behavior is utterly believable. Unpredictable and playful, these stories transcend their apocalyptic feel to offer a vision that is clear, humane, and completely engaging.The Entire Predicamentsecures Corin’s reputation as an original, stylistically courageous voice in contemporary avant-garde fiction.
Download or read book First Avenue written by Lowen Clausen and published by Berkley. This book was released on 2000 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Seattle cop is shaken by finding an dead baby.
Download or read book The Promise of Elsewhere written by Brad Leithauser and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2020-02-25 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comic novel about a Midwestern professor who tries to prop up his failing prospects for happiness by setting out on the Journey of a Lifetime. Louie Hake is forty-three and teaches architectural history at a third-rate college in Michigan. His second marriage is collapsing, and he's facing a potentially disastrous medical diagnosis. In an attempt to fend off what has become a soul-crushing existential crisis, he decides to treat himself to a tour of the world's most breathtaking architectural sites. Perhaps not surprisingly, Louie gets waylaid on his very first stop in Rome--ludicrously, spectacularly so--and fails to reach most of his other destinations. He embarks on a doomed romance with a jilted bride celebrating her ruined marriage plans alone in London. And in the Arctic he finds that turf houses and aluminum sheds don't amount to much of an architectural tradition. But it turns out that there's another sort of architecture there: icebergs the size of cathedrals, bobbing beside a strange and wondrous landscape. It soon becomes clear that Louie's grand journey is less about where his wanderings have taken him and more about where his past encounters with romance have not. Whether pursuing his first wife, or his estranged current wife, or the older woman he kissed just once a quarter-century ago, Louie reveals himself to be endearing, deeply touching, wonderfully ridiculous . . . and destined to find love in all the wrong places.
Download or read book The Woman Who Lost Her Soul written by Bob Shacochis and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2013-09-03 with total page 773 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pulitzer Prize finalist: “A soaring literary epic about the forces that have driven us to the 9/11 age . . . relentlessly captivating” (Ron Charles, The Washington Post). When humanitarian lawyer Tom Harrington travels to Haiti to investigate the murder of a beautiful photojournalist, he is confronted with a dangerous landscape riddled with poverty, corruption, and voodoo. It’s the late 1990s, a time of brutal guerrilla warfare and civilian kidnappings. The journalist, whom he knew years before as Jackie Scott, had a bigger investment in Haiti than it seemed. To make sense of her death, Tom must plunge back into his complicated ties to Jackie—and her mysterious past. Shacochis traces Jackie’s shadowy family history from the outlaw terrain of World War II Dubrovnik to 1980s Istanbul. Caught between her first love and her domineering father—an elite Cold War spy pressuring her to follow in his footsteps—seventeen-year-old Jackie hatches a desperate escape plan. But getting out also puts her on the path that turns her into the soulless woman Tom fears as much as desires. Set over fifty years and in four war-torn countries, The Woman Who Lost Her Soul is National Book Award winner Bob Shacochis’s masterpiece and a magnum opus. It brings to life an intricate portrait of catastrophic events that led up to the war on terror and the America we are today.
Download or read book Design for Living written by Margot Peters and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the much-admired biographer of Charlotte Brontë, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, and the Barrymores (“Margot Peters is surely now . . . our foremost historian of stage make-believe”—Leon Edel), a new biography of the most famous English-speaking acting team of the twentieth century. Individually, they were recognized as extraordinary actors, each one a star celebrated, imitated, sought after. Together, they were legend. The Lunts. A name to conjure with. Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne worked together so imaginatively, so seamlessly onstage that they seemed to fuse into one person. Offstage, they brawled so famously and raucously over every detail of every performance that they inspired the musical Kiss Me, Kate. At home on Broadway, in London’s West End, touring the United States and Great Britain, and even playing “the foxhole circuit” of World War II, the Lunts stunned, moved, and mystified audiences for more than four decades. They were considered to be a rarefied taste, but when they toured Texas in the 1930s, the audience threw cowboy hats onto the stage. Their private life was equally fascinating, as unusual as the one they led in public. Friends like the critic Alexander Woollcott (whom Edna Ferber once described as “the little New Jersey Nero who thinks his pinafore is a toga”), Noël Coward, Laurette Taylor, and Sidney Greenstreet received lifelong loyalty and hospitality. Ten Chimneys, their country home in Genesee Depot, Wisconsin, “is to performers what the Vatican is to Catholics,” Carol Channing once said. “The Lunts are where we all spring from.” In this new biography, Margot Peters catches the magic of Lunt and Fontanne—their period, their work, their intimacy and its contradictions—with candor, delicacy, intelligence, and wit. She writes about their personal and creative choices as deftly as she captures their world, from their meeting (backstage, naturally)—when Fontanne was a young actress in the first flush of stardom and Lunt a lanky midwesterner who came in the stage door, bowed to her elaborately, lost his balance, and fell down the stairs—and the early days when an unknown and very hungry Noël Coward lived in a swank hotel in a room the size of a closet and cadged meals at their table to the telegram the famous couple once sent to a movie mogul, turning down a studio contract worth a fortune (“We can be bought, my dear Mr. Laemmle, but we can’t be bored”). We follow the Lunts through triumphs in plays such as The Guardsman, The Taming of the Shrew, and Design for Living; through friendships and feuds; through the intricate way they worked with such playwrights and directors as S. N. Behrman, Robert Sherwood, Giraudoux, Dürrenmatt, Peter Brook, and with each other. Margot Peters captures the gallantry of two remarkably gifted people who lived for their art and for each other. Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne were once described as an “amazing duet of intelligence and gaiety.” Margot Peters re-creates the fun and the fireworks.
Download or read book The Cocaine Chronicles written by Gary Phillips and published by No Exit Press. This book was released on 2015-03-22 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This ambitious anthology of jaw-grinding criminal behaviour is masterfully curated by acclaimed authors Phillips and Tervalon. Cocaine, that most troubling and fascinating of substances is the subject, the subtext, the whys and whereofs in Cocaine Chronicles, a collection of original short stories that are funny and harrowing, sad and scary, but at all times riveting. Cocaine Chronicles contains tough tales by a cross-section of today's most thought-provoking writers including Susan Straight, Lee Child, Jerry Stahl, Ken Bruen, Laura Lippman, Billy Moody and more.
Download or read book Falling In written by Lydia Michaels and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2014-10-07 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The beginning of the emotionally charged and highly erotic contemporary romance Surrender trilogy, in which love and trust are the most dangerous games of all… With a dark past that would have shattered most people, Evelyn “Scout” Keats is doing what no one in her bleak world thinks possible—getting off the streets and leaving her impoverished life behind. She’s a new maid at the luxurious Patras Hotel and aims to keep her job no matter what. But that doesn’t mean she’s going to sacrifice her dignity, or let anyone into her heart. The risk of losing either is just too great. When hotel tycoon Lucian Patras discovers Evelyn in a compromising position, he uses everything at his disposal to seduce her—a proposition that both surprises and frightens her. Ignorant to her true circumstances, Lucian relentlessly pursues Scout as a prize to be won. But he is soon given an unforgettable lesson in love and sacrifice when he learns how far Scout has gone to gain her independence and discovers that there are some things money can never buy.
