Longlisted for the prestigious Booker Prize 2024, this work showcases a compelling narrative filled with rich characters and intricate themes. The story delves into the complexities of human relationships and societal challenges, offering readers a thought-provoking exploration of contemporary issues. With its engaging prose and deep emotional resonance, it promises to captivate audiences and spark meaningful discussions.
A new novel from the Booker Prize finalist Deborah Levy, the celebrated author of The Man Who Saw Everything and The Cost of Living. In Athens, a woman named Elsa glimpses her identical double. The other woman is buying two mechanical dancing horses. Elsa spends a month in pursuit of this enigmatic twin—a search that mounts to an uncanny, erotic encounter in a summer rainstorm. Deborah Levy's August Blue is a story of split selves, wayward selves, femininities, sexualities, avatars, shadows, reflections, alter egos, and the twin poles of compassion and cruelty that exist within all of us.
The debut novella from one of contemporary fiction's most exciting young voices, now in a new edition. Salem, Massachusetts, 1851: McGlue is in the hold, still too drunk to be sure of name or situation or orientation--he may have killed a man. That man may have been his best friend. Intolerable memory accompanies sobriety. A-sail on the high seas of literary tradition, Ottessa Moshfegh gives us a nasty heartless blackguard on a knife-sharp voyage through the fogs of recollection. They said I've done something wrong? . . . And they've just left me down here to starve. They'll see this inanition and be so damned they'll fall to my feet and pass up hot cross buns slathered in fresh butter and beg I forgive them. All of them . . . : the entire world one by one. Like a good priest I'll pat their heads and nod. I'll dunk my skull into a barrel of gin.
A Children’s Bible follows a group of twelve eerily mature children on a forced vacation with their families at a sprawling lakeside mansion. Contemptuous of their parents, the children decide to run away when a destructive storm descends on the summer estate, embarking on a dangerous foray into the apocalyptic chaos outside. Lydia Millet’s prophetic and heartbreaking story of generational divide offers a haunting vision of what awaits us on the far side of Revelation.
Eigenlijk zou onze hoofdpersoon gelukkig moeten zijn: ze is jong, slank, mooi, net afgestudeerd aan Columbia, heeft een eenvoudige baan bij een trendy kunstgalerij en woont in een appartement aan de Upper East Side van Manhattan dat ze - net als alles in haar leven - betaalt van een erfenis. Desondanks is er een donker, luchtledig gat in haar hart dat niet enkel te verklaren is door het verlies van haar ouders, de manier waarop haar geliefde haar behandelt of haar sadomasochistische relatie met haar beste vriendin Reva. Het is het jaar 2000 in een stad die glinstert van rijkdom en onuitputtelijke mogelijkheden. Wat zou er dan toch zo vreselijk verkeerd kunnen voelen? Mijn jaar van rust en kalmte is een krachtig antwoord op die vraag. In dit verhaal over een jaar doorgebracht onder de invloed van een waanzinnige combinatie van drugs die de hoofdpersoon zouden moeten genezen van haar vervreemding van deze wereld, toont Moshfegh de lezer hoe redelijk en zelfs noodzakelijk precies die vervreemding kan zijn. Zowel fijnzinnig als zwartgallig grappig, genadeloos en barmhartig: dit boek toont ons een jonge, veelbelovende schrijfster op de toppen van haar kunnen.
I racconti di David James Poissant parlano di relazioni. Genitori e figli, mariti e mogli, amanti o amici, i protagonisti di queste storie sono ritratti in un momento decisivo della loro vita quando, per la forza brutale dell'amore, si trovano sulla soglia di un precipizio, spinti da decisioni che loro stessi hanno preso. E sull'orlo del burrone, a ciascuno viene chiesto di fare una scelta: saltare o tornare indietro. Gli animali servono da catalizzatori, scatenano reazioni paradossali, spesso grottesche. E sono anche metafore di un territorio sospeso tra realismo e allegoria. I paesaggi sono quelli dell'America del sud, Atlanta, Florida, Tucson, ma anche Midwest e California. Non è il sogno americano ma un luogo più selvaggio e ai margini, dove fallimento e successo sono molto più vicini di quanto ci si aspetti, e il finale, lieto o triste che sia, libera sempre nuove speranze di riscatto e una profonda compassione. Come nella poesia di James L. Dickey, che dà il titolo a questa raccolta: "Sotto l'albero / cadono / sconfitti / si rialzano / si rimettono in cammino". Che poi è quello che tutti tentiamo di fare.
Mirabelle works as a shop assistant in the glove department at Niemans, LA's finest store; she also draws darkly gothic pictures at night. Adrift in the world and lonely, her situation is not improved by the fact that hardly anyone buys the kind of gloves that Niemans sell, so she spends most of her day leaning on the counter staring into empty space. There are two men in her life - Jeremy, a man who stencils amplifiers for a living, and Mr Ray Porter, an older man and millionaire who applies logic to relationships, and is serially confused and disappointed. In this exquisitely self-contained novel, Steve Martin touches on the surface horrors of LA - the false noses, lips, breasts and people - without exaggeration or explicitly playing for laughs. It's insightful, dark, funny and tender.
Thirty-five years after a trip down the Mississippi on a raft with their classmates, four women are reunited to cruise the river once again where they plan to release the ashes of a fellow rafter, Margaret "Baby" Ballou. Revered for her powerful female characters, here Lee Smith tells a brilliantly authoritative story of how college pals who grew up in an era when they were still called "girls" have negotiated life as "women." Harriet Holding is a hesitant teacher who has never married (she can't explain why, even to herself). Courtney Gray struggles to step away from her Southern Living-style life. Catherine Wilson, a sculptor, is suffocating in her happy third marriage. Anna Todd is a world-famous romance novelist escaping her own tragedies through her fiction. And finally there is Baby, the girl they come to bury-along with their memories of her rebellions and betrayals
