Author:
Publisher: Guido Natale
ISBN:
Category : Antiques & Collectibles
Languages : en
Pages : 48

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Book Description
This book you are thinking of buying is explosive. Not because it will activate a strange mechanism that will blow everything out of the air; it is pure napalm. It permeates your memory and after you have identified with each of the situations and characters it slowly but systematically corrodes your conception of reality. Martín Segovia bursts into literature with a book of short stories in a transversal way; against trends and fashions, in the dark room of those who are not afraid to tell the truth. Faithful to a literary tradition that is much named but infrequent in writing (Bukowski, Celine, Sábato), Natale's literature has a trait of moral incorrectness; his stories always narrate the fall of our convictions through small epiphanies. If the fallen angels are beings who recover the earthly dirt, the characters change the focus of their fall; it is an inverse fall, from below to above; because they know that above, in their desperate search for communication, for love, for meaning, there is only an instant of flotation where suddenly, in the comedy of nothingness itself, everything comes crashing down again. Fernando Krapp, periodista página/12.

Author: Bill Buford
Publisher: Granta: The Magazine of New Writing
ISBN: 9780140068696
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The issue of Granta that defined a new school of American writers: Richard Ford, Jayne Anne Phillips, Raymond Carver, Elizabeth Tallent, Tobias Wolff, Bobbie Ann Mason, Frederic Barthelme, Carolyn Forché and others.

Author: Jayne Anne Phillips
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 030780884X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
Called “an enduring literary achievement . . . astonishing” by The New York Times, this highly acclaimed debut novel from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Night Watch introduces the Hampsons, an ordinary, small-town American family profoundly affected by the extraordinary events of history—from the Depression to the Vietnam War. One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years Here is a stunning chronicle that is revealed in the thoughts, dreams, and memories of each member of the Hampson family. Mitch struggles to earn a living as Jeans becomes the main breadwinner, working to complete college and raise the family. While the couple fight to keep their marriage intact, their daughter Danner and son Billy forge a sibling bond of uncommon strength. When Billy goes off to Vietnam, Danner becomes the sole bond linking her family, whose dissolution mirrors the fractured state of America in the 1960s. Deeply felt and vividly imagined, this lyrical novel is "among the wisest of a generation to grapple with a war that maimed us all" (The Village Voice), by a master of contemporary fiction.

Author: Frederick Barthelme
Publisher: Little, Brown
ISBN: 031623138X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
A fiftyish graphic designer forced into retirement discovers, via a parade of unlikely events, that it may still be a lovely day in the neighborhood, by "the master of the low-key epiphany." (The New Yorker). Wallace Webster lives alone in Kemah, Texas at Forgetful Bay, a condo development where residents are passing away at an alarming rate. As he monitors events in the neighborhood, Wallace keeps in touch with his ex-wife, his grown daughter, a former coworker for whom he has much averted eyes, and a somewhat exotic resident with whom he commences an off-beat affair. He sifts through the curious accidents that plague his neighbors, all the while reflecting on his past and shortening future. Required to reflect upon his own mortality, he wonders if "settling for" something less than he aspired to is a kind of cowardice, or just good sense. Beneath the arresting repartee and the ever-present and often satisfying banality of our modern lives -- from Google searches to real life mysteries on TV -- lies Frederick Barthelme's affection for and curiosity about our human condition. There Must be Some Mistake is warm and wry, beautifully written, and completely irresistible.

Author: Brenda Peynado
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0525507272
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
An NPR Best Book of 2021 NYPL 10 Best Books for Adults, 2021 A story collection, in the vein of Carmen Maria Machado, Kelly Link, and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, spanning worlds and dimensions, using strange and speculative elements to tackle issues ranging from class differences to immigration to first-generation experiences to xenophobia What does it mean to be other? What does it mean to love in a world determined to keep us apart? These questions murmur in the heart of each of Brenda Peynado’s strange and singular stories. Threaded with magic, transcending time and place, these stories explore what it means to cross borders and break down walls, personally and politically. In one story, suburban families perform oblations to cattlelike angels who live on their roofs, believing that their “thoughts and prayers” will protect them from the world’s violence. In another, inhabitants of an unnamed dictatorship slowly lose their own agency as pieces of their bodies go missing and, with them, the essential rights that those appendages serve. “The Great Escape” tells of an old woman who hides away in her apartment, reliving the past among beautiful objects she’s hoarded, refusing all visitors, until she disappears completely. In the title story, children begin to levitate, flying away from their parents and their home country, leading them to eat rocks in order to stay grounded. With elements of science fiction and fantasy, fabulism and magical realism, Brenda Peynado uses her stories to reflect our flawed world, and the incredible, terrifying, and marvelous nature of humanity.

Author: Anna Larner
Publisher: Bold Strokes Books
ISBN: 9781635558920
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
When city girl about town Roxanne Barns reluctantly accepts a holiday invite to her best friend Eve's birthday party in the Scottish Highlands, the last thing she expects is to fall for the very person she's been dreading seeing again-the feisty Highlander, Alice Campbell. The moment Alice learns that Roxanne is visiting her home hamlet of Newland, she couldn't be more suspicious or defensive. A warm welcome is certainly not the plan, let alone falling in love. Despite Eve's warnings that Roxanne is not relationship material, Alice can't ignore her growing attraction. She absolutely trusts Eve's judgment, but taking her advice just might break Alice's heart. Highland Whirl reunites readers with the characters and landscape of Highland Fling in an emotionally enthralling story of trust, friendship, family, and love.

Author: Joel Lane
Publisher: Influx Press
ISBN: 1910312193
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
'Joel Lane's imagination is bleak. But it is also the imagination of a poet.' – M John Harrison, author of The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY CONRAD WILLIAMS Set in a post-industrial landscape of the present, the near future, and the imagined, Joel Lane's seminal collection The Lost District explores human encounters with the unknown: sexual discovery, drug-inspired visions, the lonely paths of madness, and the shadow realms on the other side of death. A neighbourhood fades into corrupt echoes of itself; a porn actor's scars reveal the forces controlling his life; a musician is haunted by the madness of a deceased singer; and a man literally follows his ex-lover to the end of the world. Ranging from grim urban horror to strange erotic fantasies to bitter allegories of loss and exploitation, the stories in The Lost District link the hidden places in the urban and small-town landscapes to the secret spaces inside all of us. First published in the USA in 2006, and long out-of-print, The Lost District has never been published in the UK until now, further enforcing Joel Lane's reputation as one of the most significant and distinctive British writers of the weird.

Author: Raymond Carver
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 1101970537
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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Book Description
A rich collection of poems from not only “one of the great short story writers of our time” (The Philadelphia Inquirer), but one of America’s most large-hearted and affecting poets. Like Raymond Carver’s stories, the more than 300 poems in All of Us are marked by a keen attention to the physical world; an uncanny ability to compress vast feeling into discreet moments; a voice of conversational intimacy, and an unstinting sympathy. This complete edition brings together all the poems of Carver’s five previous books, from Fires to the posthumously published No Heroics, Please. It also contains bibliographical and textual notes on individual poems; a chronology of Carver’s life and work; and a moving introduction by Carver’s widow, the poet Tess Gallagher.

Author: Joy Williams
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 030776382X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • From one of our most heralded writers comes the “poetic, disturbing, yet very funny” (The Washington Post Book World) life-and-death adventures of three misfit teenagers in the American desert. Alice, Corvus, and Annabel, each a motherless child, are an unlikely circle of friends. One filled with convictions, another with loss, the third with a worldly pragmatism, they traverse an air-conditioned landscape eccentric with signs and portents—from the preservation of the living dead in a nursing home to the presentation of the dead as living in a wildlife museum—accompanied by restless, confounded adults. A father lusts after his handsome gardener even as he's haunted (literally) by his dead wife; a heartbroken dog runs afoul of an angry neighbor; a young stroke victim drifts westward, his luck running from worse to awful; a sickly musician for whom Alice develops an attraction is drawn instead toward darker imaginings and solutions; and an aging big-game hunter finds spiritual renewal through his infatuation with an eight-year-old—the formidable Emily Bliss Pickless. With nature thoroughly routed and the ambiguities of existence on full display, life and death continue in directions both invisible and apparent. Gloriously funny and wonderfully serious, The Quick and the Dead limns the vagaries of love, the thirst for meaning, and the peculiar paths by which all creatures are led to their destiny. A panorama of contemporary life and an endlessly surprising tour de force: penetrating and magical, ominous and comic, this is the most astonishing book yet in Joy Williams's illustrious career. Joy Williams belongs, James Salter has written, "in the company of Céline, Flannery O'Connor, and Margaret Atwood."

Author: Amy Hempel
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1451604009
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 170

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Book Description
Amy Hempel's compassion, intensity, and illuminating observations have made her one of the most distinctive and admired modern writers. In three stunning books of stories, she has established a voice as unique and recognizable as the photographs of Cindy Sherman or the brushstrokes of Robert Motherwell. The Dog of the Marriage, Hempel's fourth collection, is about sexual obsession, relationships gone awry, and the unsatisfied longings of everyday life. In "Offertory," a modern-day Scheherazade entertains and manipulates her lover with stories of her sexual encounters with a married couple as a very young woman. In "Reference # 388475848-5," a letter contesting a parking ticket becomes a beautiful and unnerving statement of faith. In "Jesus Is Waiting," a woman driving to New York sends a series of cryptically honest postcards to an old lover. And the title story is a heartbreaking tale about the objects and animals and unmired desires that are left behind after death or divorce. These nine stories teem with wisdom, emotion, and surprising wit. Hempel explores the intricate psychology of people falling in and out of love, trying to locate something or someone elusive or lost. Her sentences are as lean, original, and startling as any in contemporary fiction.