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Author: Joan Merriam Publisher: Joan Merriam ISBN: 173656322X Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 180
Book Description
Staring down into the yawning grave, investigative journalist Tess Alexander inhaled the dirty gray fog, then gave a long sigh that briefly briefly parted the mist in front of her before closing in again. It made no sense: Rennie Matlock was finally getting her life together, finally shaking off the horrors of her earlier years and moving into a hopeful future where the past no longer chained and haunted her. The young woman’s sudden and violent suicide gnawed at a corner of Tess’s mind like a vile worm, leaving an inky trail of doubt behind. A decade before, media pundits and mental health experts alike had somberly, head-shakingly declared that Rennie’s act of plunging a letter-opener into her mother’s neck was unfathomable and without motive. Here was a lovely, seemingly well-adjusted teenage girl from a prominent and wealthy San Francisco family, suddenly gone completely mad. But Tess knew the dark truth that helped explain the inexplicable, and understood the roots of terror and hopelessness that had driven Rennie's fury. She knew too that the long and spinning years between then and now had brought the young woman a small measure of redemption, and that she was opening the door to a new life that perhaps even included extending herself a fragment of mercy, if not forgiveness. Baffled by the abruptness of Rennie's anguished descent into an inescapable abyss of despair, Tess vowed to uncover the impetus behind her suicidal act. She had no idea how potentially lethal that effort would be.
Author: Joan Merriam Publisher: Joan Merriam ISBN: 173656322X Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 180
Book Description
Staring down into the yawning grave, investigative journalist Tess Alexander inhaled the dirty gray fog, then gave a long sigh that briefly briefly parted the mist in front of her before closing in again. It made no sense: Rennie Matlock was finally getting her life together, finally shaking off the horrors of her earlier years and moving into a hopeful future where the past no longer chained and haunted her. The young woman’s sudden and violent suicide gnawed at a corner of Tess’s mind like a vile worm, leaving an inky trail of doubt behind. A decade before, media pundits and mental health experts alike had somberly, head-shakingly declared that Rennie’s act of plunging a letter-opener into her mother’s neck was unfathomable and without motive. Here was a lovely, seemingly well-adjusted teenage girl from a prominent and wealthy San Francisco family, suddenly gone completely mad. But Tess knew the dark truth that helped explain the inexplicable, and understood the roots of terror and hopelessness that had driven Rennie's fury. She knew too that the long and spinning years between then and now had brought the young woman a small measure of redemption, and that she was opening the door to a new life that perhaps even included extending herself a fragment of mercy, if not forgiveness. Baffled by the abruptness of Rennie's anguished descent into an inescapable abyss of despair, Tess vowed to uncover the impetus behind her suicidal act. She had no idea how potentially lethal that effort would be.
Author: Maja Haderlap Publisher: Archipelago ISBN: 0914671472 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 308
Book Description
Haderlap is an accomplished poet, and that lyricism leaves clear traces on this ravishing debut, which won the prestigious Bachmann Prize in 2011. The descriptions are sensual, and the unusual similes and metaphors occasionally change perspective unexpectedly. Angel of Oblivion deals with harrowing subjects - murder, torture, persecution and discrimination of an ethnic minority - in intricate and lyrical prose. The novel tells the story of a family from the Slovenian minority in Austria. The first-person narrator starts off with her childhood memories of rural life, in a community anchored in the past. Yet behind this rural idyll, an unresolved conflict is smouldering. At first, the child wonders about the border to Yugoslavia, which runs not far away from her home. Then gradually the stories that the adults tell at every opportunity start to make sense. All the locals are scarred by the war. Her grandfather, we find out, was a partisan fighting the Nazis from forest hideouts. Her grandmother was arrested and survived Ravensbrück. As the narrator grows older, she finds out more. Through conversations at family gatherings and long nights talking to her grandmother, she learns that her father was arrested by the Austrian police and tortured - at the age of ten - to extract information on the whereabouts of his father. Her grandmother lost her foster-daughter and many friends and relatives in Ravensbrück and only escaped the gas chamber by hiding inside the camp itself. The narrator begins to notice the frequent suicides and violent deaths in her home region, and she develops an eye for how the Slovenians are treated by the majority of German-speaking Austrians. As an adult, the narrator becomes politicised and openly criticises the way in which Austria deals with the war and its own Nazi past. In the closing section, she visits Ravensbrück and finds it strangely lifeless - realising that her personal memories of her grandmother are stronger. Illuminating an almost forgotten chapter of European history and the European present, the book deals with family dynamics scarred by war and torture - a dominant grandmother, a long-suffering mother, a violent father who loves his children but is impossible to live with. And interwoven with this is compelling reflection on storytelling: the narrator hoping to rid herself of the emotional burden of her past and to tell stories on behalf of those who cannot.
Author: Sergei Lebedev Publisher: New Vessel Press ISBN: 1939931290 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 300
Book Description
This acclaimed twenty-first–century Russian novel is “a Dantean descent” into the abandoned Soviet gulags, written “with a clear poetic sensibility” (The Wall Street Journal). In Sergei Lebedev’s debut novel, an unnamed young man travels to the vast wastelands of the Far North to uncover the truth about a mysterious neighbor who once saved his life, and whom he knows only as Grandfather II. What he finds among the forgotten mines and decrepit barracks of former gulags is a world relegated to oblivion, where it is easier to ignore both the victims and the executioners than to come to terms with a terrible past. This disturbing tale evokes the great and ruined beauty of a land where man and machine work in tandem with nature to destroy millions of lives during the Soviet century. Emerging from today’s Russia, where the ills of the past are being forcefully erased from public memory, this masterful novel is an epic literary act of bearing witness, attempting to rescue history from the brink of oblivion. A Wall Street Journal Top 10 Novel of the Year “Not since Alexander Solzhenitsyn has Russia had a writer as obsessed as Sergei Lebedev with that country’s history or the traces it has left on the collective consciousness . . . The best of Russia’s younger generation of writers.” ―The New York Review of Books
Author: Joan Merriam Publisher: Pinnacle Books ISBN: 9780786004874 Category : At-risk youth Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
Shedding painful light on a brutal crime, the author explores the neglectful and abusive circumstances that brought young Shirley Katherine Wolf and Cindy Lee Collier to the edge and resulted in their stabbing murder of eighty-five-year-old Anna Brackett. Reissue.
Author: Thomas Frank Publisher: Metropolitan Books ISBN: 1250293669 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 240
Book Description
Tack and Richardson show you how to start with a batch of plain cupcakes, and turn them into fun creations such as robots, farm- or zoo-animals, and even a cookie village! --Adapted from back cover.
Author: Julie Eshbaugh Publisher: HarperCollins ISBN: 0062399330 Category : Young Adult Fiction Languages : en Pages : 384
Book Description
In this mesmerizing YA fantasy mash-up of The Road meets The Amazing Race, one girl chooses to risk her life in a cutthroat competition in order to win her freedom. In Lanoria, Outsiders, who don’t have magic, are inferior to Enchanteds, who do. That’s just a fact for Astrid, an Outsider who is indentured to pay off her family’s debts. She serves as the surrogate for the princess—if Renya steps out of line, Astrid is the one who bears the punishment for it. But there is a way out: the life-or-death Race of Oblivion. First, racers are dosed with the drug Oblivion, which wipes their memories. Then, when they awake in the middle of nowhere, only cryptic clues—and a sheer will to live—will lead them through treacherous terrain full of opponents who wouldn’t think twice about killing each other to get ahead. But what throws Astrid the most is what she never expected to encounter in this race. A familiar face she can’t place. Secret powers she shouldn’t have. And a confusing memory of the past that, if real, could mean the undoing of the entire social structure that has kept her a slave her entire life. Competing could mean death…but it could also mean freedom.
Author: Bailey Ardisone Publisher: Bailey Ardisone ISBN: 1301155217 Category : Languages : en Pages : 245
Book Description
Free! ~ Nariella has a hard life. Hated and beaten by her foster father, she finds solace in the one person who has always been there for her--Rydan, her overprotective best friend. His sheltering only gets worse once Nari collides--literally--with Mycah. A boy being chased by two kinds of evil; a boy who Nari is convinced is either the devil or an angel. But she was wrong. He's something completely different. Then there's Naminé. A servant who lives in fear for her family, for herself, and for the dying kingdom she lives in. But there is hope, and she's the only one who can bring that hope home to save them all. Naminé will risk everything to make that happen, even if it means betraying her king. People always want the truth until they have it. To be let in on secrets until they get burned by them. Nari is no different. But once she's kidnapped, tortured, and ultimately becomes intertwined in a secret world she never could've imagined existed, she knows there's no going back to blissful ignorance. And maybe she doesn't want to. If darkness is the absence of light, what results from the absence of truth? Nothing but Oblivion. This is book one in a series- Sweet Oblivion (Sweet Series #1) - FREEBIE Sweet Escape (Sweet Series #2) Sweet Requiem (Sweet Series #3) Sweet Redemption (Sweet Series #4 - Finale)
Author: James Meek Publisher: Canongate Books ISBN: 1847673759 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 417
Book Description
1919, Siberia . . . Deep in the unforgiving landscape a town lies under military rule, awaiting the remorseless assault of Bolsheviks along the Trans-Siberian railway. One night a stranger, Samarin, appears from the woods with a tale of escape from an Arctic prison, insisting a cannibal is on his trail. Only Anna, a beautiful young widow, trusts his story. When a local shaman is found dead suspicion and terror engulf the isolated community, which harbours a secret of its own . . .
Author: David Foster Wallace Publisher: Little, Brown ISBN: 075951156X Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 336
Book Description
In the stories that make up Oblivion, David Foster Wallace joins the rawest, most naked humanity with the infinite involutions of self-consciousness -- a combination that is dazzlingly, uniquely his. These are worlds undreamt of by any other mind. Only David Foster Wallace could convey a father's desperate loneliness by way of his son's daydreaming through a teacher's homicidal breakdown (The Soul Is Not a Smithy). Or could explore the deepest and most hilarious aspects of creativity by delineating the office politics surrounding a magazine profile of an artist who produces miniature sculptures in an anatomically inconceivable way (The Suffering Channel). Or capture the ache of love's breakdown in the painfully polite apologies of a man who believes his wife is hallucinating the sound of his snoring (Oblivion). Each of these stories is a complete world, as fully imagined as most entire novels, at once preposterously surreal and painfully immediate.
Author: Joan Merriam
Author: Joan Merriam
Author: Maja Haderlap
Author: Sergei Lebedev
Author: Joan Merriam
Author: Thomas Frank
Author: Julie Eshbaugh
Author: Bailey Ardisone
Author: James Meek
Author: David Mack
Author: David Foster Wallace