Primære faneblade

  • Alison Lurie: Nowhere City : A Novel
    Af Alison Lurie (2012)
    Summary: In this “excellent” novel of “rare understanding” from a Pulitzer Prize–winning author, culture shock consumes a young Harvard couple in Los Angeles ( The New York Times ).   When his mentor at Harvard University suddenly leaves for Washington, Paul Cattleman finds himself adrift in the wilds of academia. After losing his fellowship, he is out of work and one thesis short of a PhD. Rather than doom his career by taking what he considers to be an unsuitable job, he finds a temporary position at the Nutting Research and Development Corporation in Los Angeles, a city whose superficial charms signal an adventure. He is ready to make the best of his year out west among the beatniks and Hollywood hippies. The only thing holding him back is his wife.   Katherine is a New Englander through and through, and as soon as she steps into the LA smog, she knows this transition will be a struggle. What Paul sees as fun, she considers vulgar. Bogged down by her allergies and crumbling marriage, she seeks out a shrink, who surprises and transforms her. While Los Angeles may be a cultural wasteland, this East Coast girl will find that West Coast pleasures can be quite a lot of fun.   The National Book Award–shortlisted author of Foreign Affairs “ writes coolly and wickedly” of freedom and self-discovery in this witty novel ( The New Yorker ).   This ebook features an illustrated biography of Alison Lurie including rare images from the author’s collection.  

  • Joe Trivigno: Finding Bob
    Af Joe Trivigno (2014)
    Summary: Finding Bob is based on one boy’s journey to find the man behind the legendary lyrics. Having left behind a life of slavery in Africa, Mogli’s adventure leads him to the land of lions, pushing the limits of his personal strength and testing the power of the human race.   The story opens with imagery of raw Africa—a young boy’s living nightmare of a war-torn country where genocide, rape, and murder are commonplace. As a witness to the tragedy that took his family from this earth and his life, the young boy is taken captive and forced into performing the unthinkable duties of the murderers. He complies, but counter to the anger and fear building inside his little body, the boy musters the strength to escape the cult’s wrath.   After days without sleep, due to the haunting scenes relived in his memory, the boy remains a mere shell. He finds some items left behind— the more fortuitous of the lot being a set of keys marked with an address and a Walkman cassette player. The music player baffles the boy, as he is unsure of the technology, but the sound that emerges stays with him. What he initially heard as an odd mix of tunes soon translates into feelings of love, freedom, and power—the comfort he had been missing in his life. The warmth the young boy feels from the music sets him on a mission to find Bob

  • Valeria Luiselli: Lost Children Archive
    Summary: WINNER OF THE DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD AND THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE AND THE WOMEN'S PRIZE The moving, powerful and urgent English-language debut from one of the brightest young stars in world literature Suppose you and Pa were gone, and we were lost. What would happen then? A family in New York packs the car and sets out on a road trip. A mother, a father, a boy and a girl, they head south west, to the Apacheria, the regions of the US which used to be Mexico. They drive for hours through desert and mountains. They stop at diners when they're hungry and sleep in motels when it gets dark. The little girl tells surreal knock knock jokes and makes them all laugh. The little boy educates them all and corrects them when they're wrong. The mother and the father are barely speaking to each other. Meanwhile, thousands of children are journeying north, travelling to the US border from Central America and Mexico. A grandmother or aunt has packed a backpack for them, putting in a bible, one toy, some clean underwear. They have been met by a coyote: a man who speaks to them roughly and frightens them. They cross a river on rubber tubing and walk for days, saving whatever food and water they can. Then they climb to the top of a train and travel precariously in the open container on top. Not all of them will make it to the border. In a breath-taking feat of literary virtuosity, Lost Children Archive intertwines these two journeys to create a masterful novel full of echoes and reflections – a moving, powerful, urgent story about what it is to be human in an inhuman world

  • David Moloney: Barker House
    Af David Moloney (2020)
    Summary: "HERE is a voice to listen to! Moloney's voice is as true as a voice can be. Concise, with the right details rendered perfectly, these sentences come to the reader with marvelous straight forwardness, clean as a bone."—Elizabeth Strout Olive Kitteridge meets The Mars Room in this powerfully unsentimental work of fiction—a portrait of nine lives behind the concrete walls of a New Hampshire jail. David Moloney's Barker House follows the story of nine unforgettable New Hampshire correctional officers over the course of one year on the job. While veteran guards get by on what they consider survival strategies—including sadistic power-mongering and obsessive voyeurism—two rookies, including the only female officer on her shift, develop their own tactics for facing "the system." Tracking their subtly intertwined lives, Barker House reveals the precarious world of the jailers, coming to a head when the unexpected death of one in their ranks brings them together. Timely and universal, this masterfully crafted debut adds a new layer to discussions of America's criminal justice system, and introduces a brilliant young literary talent

  • César Aira: Birthday
    Af César Aira (2019)
    Summary: Birthday is among the very best of Aira—it will surprise readers new to his work, and will deeply satisfy his many fans Before you know it you are no longer young, and by the way, while you were thinking about other things, the world was changing—and then, just as suddenly you realize that you are fifty years old. Aira had anticipated his fiftieth—a time when he would not so much recall years past as look forward to what lies ahead—but the birthday came and went without much ado. It was only months later, while having a somewhat banal conversation with his wife about the phases of the moon, that he realized how little he really knows about his life. In Birthday Aira searches for the events that were significant to him during his first fifty years. Between anecdotes ,and memories, the author ponders the origins of his personal truths, and meditates on literature meant as much for the writer as for the reader, on ignorance, knowledge, and death. Finally, Birthday is a little sad, in a serene, crystal-clear kind of way, which makes it even more irresistible

  • Anthony Burgess: One Hand Clapping
    Af Anthony Burgess (2013)
    Summary: Janet Shirley was always impressed by her husband. Even before he began using his special talent to change their lives beyond recognition. The thing is, Janet doesn't want their lives to change that much - she's quite happy, working at the supermarket, cooking for Howard three times a day, watching quiz shows in the evening. But once Howard unleashes his photographic brain on the world, the once modest used-car salesman can't seem to stop. And what he sees as the logical conclusion isn't something Janet can agree to. She will not consent to Howard's grand gesture. Written out of Burgess' disgust at western decadence and degradation, One Hand Clapping casts a jaded eye over our values, drawing a conclusion that still resonates fifty years on

  • Sebastián Martínez Daniell: Two Sherpas
    Summary: Mount Everest, and all it means to royalty, explorers, imperialists, and two sherpas, perched on a cliffside, waiting for a man on the ledge below to move. A British climber has fallen from a cliffside in Nepal, and lies inert on a ledge below. Two sherpas kneel at the edge, stand, exchange the odd word, waiting for him to move, to make a decision, to descend. In those minutes, the world opens up to Kathmandu, a sun-bleached beach town on another continent, and the pages of Julius Caesar. Mountaineering, colonialism, obligation—in Sebastián Martínez Daniell's effortless prose each breath is crystalline, and the whole world is visible from here

  • Angie Cruz: How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water : A Novel
    Af Angie Cruz (2022)
    Summary: A NEW YORK TIMES EDITOR'S CHOICE · A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW NOTABLE BOOK · REVIEWED ON THE FRONT COVER From GMA BOOK CLUB PICK and WOMEN'S PRIZE FINALIST Angie Cruz, author of Dominicana , an electrifying new novel about a woman who has lost everything but the chance to finally tell her story "Will have you LAUGHING line after line...Cruz AIMS FOR THE HEART, and fires." — Los Angeles Times "An endearing portrait of a FIERCE, FUNNY woman." — The Washington Post Cara Romero thought she would work at the factory of little lamps for the rest of her life. But when, in her mid-50s, she loses her job in the Great Recession, she is forced back into the job market for the first time in decades. Set up with a job counselor, Cara instead begins to narrate the story of her life. Over the course of twelve sessions, Cara recounts her tempestuous love affairs, her alternately biting and loving relationships with her neighbor Lulu and her sister Angela, her struggles with debt, gentrification and loss, and, eventually, what really happened between her and her estranged son, Fernando. As Cara confronts her darkest secrets and regrets, we see a woman buffeted by life but still full of fight. Structurally inventive and emotionally kaleidoscopic, How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water is Angie Cruz's most ambitious and moving novel yet, and Cara is a heroine for the ages

  • Agur Schiff: Professor Schiff's Guilt
    Af Agur Schiff (2023)
    Summary: "A writer contends with slavery's legacy, and his own link to it . . . Daring in both scope and imagination." —The New York Times A stellar novel rendered into a darkly comic, unforgettable narrative by Booker International Prize winning translator Jessica Cohen. An Israeli professor travels to a fictitious West African nation to trace a slave-trading ancestor, only to be imprisoned under a new law barring successive generations from profiting off the proceeds of slavery. But before departing from Tel Aviv, the protagonist falls in love with Lucile, a mysterious African migrant worker who cleans his house. Entertaining and thought-provoking, this satire of contemporary attitudes toward racism and the legacy of colonialism examines economic inequality and the global refugee crisis, as well as the memory of transatlantic chattel slavery and the Holocaust. Is the professor's passion for Africa merely a fashionable pose and the book he's secretly writing about his experience there nothing but a modern version of the slave trade?

  • Guadalupe Nettel: Still Born
    Summary: Still Born, Guadalupe Nettel's fourth novel, explores one of life's most consequential decisions – whether or not to have children – with her signature charm and intelligence. Alina and Laura are independent and career-driven women in their mid-thirties, neither of whom have built their future around the prospect of a family. Laura has taken the drastic decision to be sterilized, but as time goes by Alina becomes drawn to the idea of becoming a mother. When complications arise in Alina's pregnancy and Laura becomes attached to her neighbour's son, both women are forced to reckon with the complexity of their emotions. In prose that is as gripping as it is insightful, Still Born explores maternal ambivalence with a surgeon's touch, carefully dissecting the contradictions that make up the lived experiences of women

  • Riku Onda: Honeybees and Distant Thunder : A Novel
    Af Riku Onda (2023)
    Summary: THE MILLION-COPY AWARD-WINNING JAPANESE BESTSELLER Tender and intense, Honeybees and Distant Thunder is the unflinching story of love, courage, and rivalry as three young people come to understand what it means to truly be a friend. In a small coastal town just a stone's throw from Tokyo, a prestigious piano competition is underway. Over the course of two feverish weeks, three students will experience some of the most joyous—and painful—moments of their lives. Though they don't know it yet, each will profoundly and unpredictably change the others, forever. Aya was a child prodigy who abruptly gave up performing after the death of her mother, and is now trying for a comeback; Masaru, a childhood friend of Aya who came to the piano through her insistence that he learn to play, is now reunited with her after many years, and is equally invested in both his and her success; Akashi, who is older and married, works in a music store and is the "old man" of the competitors, hoping for a final chance at success; and Jin, a sixteen-year-old prodigy, the free spirited son of a beekeeper who travels constantly, and has no formal training (and doesn't even own a piano) yet whose mesmerizing insight into music has brought him to the attention of one of the world's most celebrated pianists, the late Maestro Von Hoffman. Each of them will break the rules, awe their fans and push themselves to the brink. But at what cost? Beloved in Japan, Riku Onda immerses us in the world of music—from piano masterpieces to the buzz of bees and the rumble of thunder—which crescendos to a surprising ending in this rich and vibrant novel

  • Paul Auster: Baumgartner
    Af Paul Auster (2023)
    Summary: A tender masterpiece of love, memory and loss from one of the world's great writers. The life of Sy Baumgartner - noted author, and soon-to-be retired philosophy professor - has been defined by his deep, abiding love for his wife, Anna. Now Anna is gone, and Baumgartner is embarking on his seventies whilst trying to live with her absence. But Anna's voice is everywhere still, in every spiral of memory and reminiscence, in each recalled episode of the passionate forty years they shared. Rich with compassion, wit and an eye for beauty in the smallest, most transient episodes of ordinary life, Baumgartner is one of Auster's most luminous works - a tender late masterpiece of the ache of memory. What readers are saying: ***** Perfect, subtle, charming, funny and sad. **** Well-written and compelling but also comforting, like catching up with an old friend. **** This is a concise, beautifully-written and intelligent piece of understated introspective fiction from Auster