Оскар Хокеа0.0 A moving and deeply engaging debut novel about a young Native American man struggling to find strength in his familial identity, from a stellar new voice in literary fiction.
Told in a series of voices, Calling for a Blanket Dance takes us into the life of Ever Geimausaddle through the multigenerational perspectives of his family as they soldier through a myriad of difficulties: his father's sudden kidney failure and subsequent disability, his mother's struggle to hold on to her job and care for her husband, the constant resettlement of the family, and Ever's own bottled-up rage at the instability all around him. Meanwhile, all of Ever's relatives have ideas about who he is and who he should be. His Cherokee grandmother urges the family to move across the state to find security; his dying grandfather hopes to reunite him with his heritage through traditional gourd dances; his Kiowa cousin reminds him that he's connected to an ancestral past. And once an adult, Ever must take the strength given to him by his relatives to save not only himself, but also the next generation of family.
How will this young man visualize a place for himself when the world hasn't given him a place to start with? Honest, heartbreaking, and ultimately uplifting, Calling for a Blanket Dance is the story of how Ever Geimausaddle found his way to home.
Торри Питерс4.1 A whipsmart debut about three women--transgender and cisgender--whose lives collide after an unexpected pregnancy forces them to confront their deepest desires around gender, motherhood, and sex.
Reese almost had it all: a loving relationship with Amy, an apartment in New York City, a job she didn't hate. She had scraped together what previous generations of trans women could only dream of: a life of mundane, bourgeois comforts. The only thing missing was a child. But then her girlfriend, Amy, detransitioned and became Ames, and everything fell apart. Now Reese is caught in a self-destructive pattern: avoiding her loneliness by sleeping with married men.
Ames isn't happy either. He thought detransitioning to live as a man would make life easier, but that decision cost him his relationship with Reese--and losing her meant losing his only family. Even though their romance is over, he longs to find a way back to her. When Ames's boss and lover, Katrina, reveals that she's pregnant with his baby--and that she's not sure whether she wants to keep it--Ames wonders if this is the chance he's been waiting for. Could the three of them form some kind of unconventional family--and raise the baby together?
This provocative debut is about what happens at the emotional, messy, vulnerable corners of womanhood that platitudes and good intentions can't reach. Torrey Peters brilliantly and fearlessly navigates the most dangerous taboos around gender, sex, and relationships, gifting us a thrillingly original, witty, and deeply moving novel.
Каваи Стронг Уошбёрн3.5 1995-й, Гавайи. Отправившись с родителями кататься на яхте, семилетний Ноа Флорес падает за борт. Когда поверхность воды вспенивается от акульих плавников, все замирают от ужаса — малыш обречен. Но происходит чудо — одна из акул, осторожно держа Ноа в пасти, доставляет его к борту судна. Эта история становится семейной легендой. Семья Ноа, пострадавшая, как и многие жители островов, от краха сахарно-тростниковой промышленности, сочла странное происшествие знаком благосклонности гавайских богов. А позже, когда у мальчика проявились особые способности, родные окончательно в этом уверились. Однако со временем эта божественная милость становится причиной распада семьи.
Ноа работает фельдшером в Портленде. Его старший брат Дин учится в элитарном колледже, куда его приняли из-за успехов в баскетболе. Младшая сестра Кауи поступает в университет на материке, чтобы отыскать собственный путь, не связанный с семейными легендами. Но однажды трагическое событие возвращает Флоресов на родной остров...
Ручика Томар4.0 "Sometimes characters come along that demand a new kind of novel. The young women at the center of Ruchika Tomar's A Prayer for Travelers - elusive Penny and wounded Cale - are two spirits hitchhiking through geographies of dislocation and desire. The human collisions in Tomar's novel are emotionally seismic, and they leave us haunted and unsettled."
--Adam Johnson, author of The Orphan Master's Son
Cale, a bookish loner of mysterious parentage, was abandoned by her mother and raised by her grandfather in a loving, if codependent, household. One pivotal summer, her life is upended by the discovery of a devastating secret that will change her life forever.
Set adrift for the first time in her life, Cale starts waitressing at the local diner, where she reconnects with Penélope Reyes, a charismatic former classmate and all-around hustler. Penny exposes Cale to the reality that exists beyond their small town, and the girls become inseparable - until one terrifying act of violence shatters their world. When Penny vanishes without a trace, Cale must set off on a dangerous quest across the desert to find her friend, and discover herself. Told in short, deftly interweaving chapters, A Prayer for Travelers explores the complicated legacy of the American West and the trauma of female experience.
Томми Ориндж3.6 Литература и кино сформировали романтизированный образ индейцев, живущих в полной гармонии с природой. Но коренное население Америки – народ, который прошел трагический путь и был загнан в резервации. Это история двенадцати индейцев, родившихся в больших городах. Каждый из них пытается найти свое место в жизни и справиться с вызовами современного общества. У них разные судьбы, и только неугасающая связь с предками помогает сохранить свою идентичность в этом мире.
Вайке Ванг3.5 Named a “Most Anticipated Novel of 2017” by Entertainment Weekly, The Millions, and Bustle
A luminous coming-of-age novel about a young female scientist who must recalibrate her life when her academic career goes off track; perfect for readers of Lab Girl and Celeste Ng's Everything I Never Told You.
Three years into her graduate studies at a demanding Boston university, the unnamed narrator of this nimbly wry, concise debut finds her one-time love for chemistry is more hypothesis than reality. She's tormented by her failed research--and reminded of her delays by her peers, her advisor, and most of all by her Chinese parents, who have always expected nothing short of excellence from her throughout her life. But there's another, nonscientific question looming: the marriage proposal from her devoted boyfriend, a fellow scientist, whose path through academia has been relatively free of obstacles, and with whom she can't make a life before finding success on her own. Eventually, the pressure mounts so high that she must leave everything she thought she knew about her future, and herself, behind. And for the first time, she's confronted with a question she won't find the answer to in a textbook: What do I really want? Over the next two years, this winningly flawed, disarmingly insightful heroine learns the formulas and equations for a different kind of chemistry--one in which the reactions can't be quantified, measured, and analyzed; one that can be studied only in the mysterious language of the heart. Taking us deep inside her scattered, searching mind, here is a brilliant new literary voice that astutely juxtaposes the elegance of science, the anxieties of finding a place in the world, and the sacrifices made for love and family.
Yaa Gyasi4.5 A novel of breathtaking sweep and emotional power that traces three hundred years in Ghana and along the way also becomes a truly great American novel. Extraordinary for its exquisite language, its implacable sorrow, its soaring beauty, and for its monumental portrait of the forces that shape families and nations, Homegoing heralds the arrival of a major new voice in contemporary fiction.
Two half-sisters, Effia and Esi, are born into different villages in eighteenth-century Ghana. Effia is married off to an Englishman and lives in comfort in the palatial rooms of Cape Coast Castle. Unbeknownst to Effia, her sister, Esi, is imprisoned beneath her in the castle’s dungeons, sold with thousands of others into the Gold Coast’s booming slave trade, and shipped off to America, where her children and grandchildren will be raised in slavery. One thread of Homegoing follows Effia’s descendants through centuries of warfare in Ghana, as the Fante and Asante nations wrestle with the slave trade and British colonization. The other thread follows Esi and her children into America. From the plantations of the South to the Civil War and the Great Migration, from the coal mines of Pratt City, Alabama, to the jazz clubs and dope houses of twentieth-century Harlem, right up through the present day, Homegoing makes history visceral, and captures, with singular and stunning immediacy, how the memory of captivity came to be inscribed in the soul of a nation.
Generation after generation, Yaa Gyasi’s magisterial first novel sets the fate of the individual against the obliterating movements of time, delivering unforgettable characters whose lives were shaped by historical forces beyond their control. Homegoing is a tremendous reading experience, not to be missed, by an astonishingly gifted young writer.
Отесса Мошфег3.5 Эйлин Данлоп всегда считала себя несчастной и обиженной жизнью. Ее мать умерла после тяжелой болезни; отец, отставной полицейский в небольшом городке, стал алкоголиком, а старшая сестра бросила семью. Сама Эйлин, работая в тюрьме для подростков, в свободное время присматривала за своим полубезумным отцом. Часто она мечтала о том, как бросит все, уедет в Нью-Йорк и начнет новую жизнь. Однако мечты эти так и оставались пустыми фантазиями закомплексованной девушки. Но однажды в Рождество произошло то, что заставило Эйлин надеть мамино пальто, достать все свои сбережения, прихватить отцовский револьвер, запрыгнуть в старый семейный автомобиль - и бесследно исчезнуть...
Арна Бонтемпс Хеменуэй0.0 Winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction
Barnes & Noble 2014 Discover Great New Writers Selection, Third Place
The stories in Elegy on Kinderklavier explore the profound loss and intricate effects of war on lives that have been suddenly misaligned. A diplomat navigates a hostile political climate and an arranged marriage in an Israeli settlement on a newly discovered planet; a small town in Kansas shuns the army recruiter who signed up its boys as troops are deployed to Iraq, falling in helicopters and on grenades; a family dissolves around mental illness and a child's body overtaken by cancer. The moment a soldier steps on an explosive device is painfully reproduced, nanosecond by nanosecond. Arna Bontemps Hemenway's stories feel pulled out of time and place, and the suffering of his characters seem at once otherworldly and stunningly familiar. Elegy on Kinderklavier is a disquieting exploration of what it is to lose and be lost.
NoViolet Bulawayo3.1 Darling is only ten years old, and yet she must navigate a fragile and violent world. In Zimbabwe, Darling and her friends steal guavas, try to get the baby out of young Chipo's belly, and grasp at memories of Before. Before their homes were destroyed by paramilitary policemen, before the school closed, before the
But Darling has a chance to escape: she has an aunt in America. She travels to this new land in search of America's famous abundance only to find that her options as an immigrant are perilously few. NoViolet Bulawayo's debut calls to mind the great storytellers of displacement and arrival who have come before her - from Junot Diaz to Zadie Smith to J.M.Coetzee - while she tells a vivid, raw story all her own.
Кевин Пауэрс4.0 A novel written by a veteran of the war in Iraq, The Yellow Birds is the harrowing story of two young soldiers trying to stay alive.
"The war tried to kill us in the spring." So begins this powerful account of friendship and loss. In Al Tafar, Iraq, twenty-one-year old Private Bartle and eighteen-year-old Private Murphy cling to life as their platoon launches a bloody battle for the city. Bound together since basic training when Bartle makes a promise to bring Murphy safely home, the two have been dropped into a war neither is prepared for.
In the endless days that follow, the two young soldiers do everything to protect each other from the forces that press in on every side: the insurgents, physical fatigue, and the mental stress that comes from constant danger. As reality begins to blur into a hazy nightmare, Murphy becomes increasingly unmoored from the world around him and Bartle takes actions he could never have imagined.
With profound emotional insight, especially into the effects of a hidden war on mothers and families at home, The Yellow Birds is a groundbreaking novel that is destined to become a classic.
Теджу Коул3.8 По улицам Манхэттена бродит молодой нигерийский врач-психиатр по имени Джулиус, размышляя о своих отношениях, недавнем разрыве с подругой, о своем настоящем и прошлом. Он встречает людей разных культур и классов, которые помогут ему разобраться в том путешествии, которое приведет его в Брюссель, в Нигерию его юности и в самые непознаваемые грани его собственной души.
Единственный роман фотографа, эссеиста и куратора Теджу Коула был восторженно принят критикой, закономерно сравнивавшей этот текст с прозой Зебальда. Однако в том неприметном зазоре между фактом и выдумкой, который возникает между рассказчиком и автором, таится отнюдь незебальдовский сюжетный поворот, заставляющий читателя по-новому взглянуть на обманчивую слабость голосов меньшинства.
Брандо Скайхорс0.0 We slipped into this country like thieves, onto the land that once was ours.
With these words, spoken by an illegal Mexican day laborer, The Madonnas of Echo Park takes us into the unseen world of Los Angeles, following the men and women who cook the meals, clean the homes, and struggle to lose their ethnic identity in the pursuit of the American dream.
When a dozen or so girls and mothers gather on an Echo Park street corner to act out a scene from a Madonna music video, they find themselves caught in the crossfire of a drive-by shooting. In the aftermath, Aurora Esperanza grows distant from her mother, Felicia, who as a housekeeper in the Hollywood Hills establishes a unique relationship with a detached housewife.
The Esperanzas’ shifting lives connect with those of various members of their neighborhood. A day laborer trolls the streets for work with men half his age and witnesses a murder that pits his morality against his illegal status; a religious hypocrite gets her comeuppance when she meets the Virgin Mary at a bus stop on Sunset Boulevard; a typical bus route turns violent when cultures and egos collide in the night, with devastating results; and Aurora goes on a journey through her gentrified childhood neighborhood in a quest to discover her own history and her place in the land that all Mexican Americans dream of, "the land that belongs to us again."
Heralding a new young ethnic literary talent: Brando Skyhorse's first novel gives voice to the Mexican-American community in Echo Park, CA.
Бриджит Пасулька0.0 On the eve of World War II, in a place called Half-Village, a young man nicknamed the Pigeon falls in love with a girl fabled for her angelic looks. To court Anielica Hetmanská he offers up his "golden hands" to transform her family’s modest hut into a beautiful home, thereby building his way into her heart.
Then war arrives to cut short their courtship, delay their marriage, and wreak havoc in all their lives, even sending the young lovers far from home to the promise of a new life in Kraków.
Nearly fifty years later, their granddaughter, Beata, repeats their postwar journey, seeking a new life in the fairy-tale city of her grandmother’s stories. But when she arrives in Kraków, instead of the whispered prosperity of the New Poland, she discovers a city caught between its future and its past, and full of frustrated youths. Taken in by her toughtalking cousin Irena and Irena’s glamorous daughter Magda, Beata struggles to find her own place in 1990s Kraków and in the constellation of Irena and Magda’s fierce love. But unexpected events-- tragedies and miracles-- can change lives and open eyes. And Beata may just find a new way of seeing her family's and her country's history-- as well as a vision for her own role in the New Poland.
Whimsical, wise, beautiful, magical, and sometimes even heartbreaking, A Long, Long Time Ago and Essentially True weaves together two remarkable stories, reimagining half a century of Polish history through the legacy of one unforgettable love affair.
Майкл Дали0.0 Arthur Camden's greatest talents are for packing and unpacking suitcases, making coleslaw, and second-guessing every decision in his life. When his business fails and his wife leaves him-to pursue more aggressive men-Arthur finds that he has none of the talents and finesse that everyone else seems to possess for navigating New York society.
Arthur tries to reinvigorate his life with comic and tragic results: He dates women with no interest in him, burns down his Catskills fly-fishing club, runs afoul of the law in France, and disgraces himself before family members. Just when Arthur hits the depths of despair, an eccentric suitor (a woman who happens to resemble the model on Arthur's vitamin bottles) helps him take a leap into a wonderful unknown.
Michael Dahlie's novel digs into the consciousness of a self-doubting everyman-a man who, with a little inspiration, just might become something of a brilliant success.
Joshua Ferris3.2 No one knows us quite the same way as the men and women who sit beside us in department meetings and crowd the office refrigerator with their labeled yogurts. Every office is a family of sorts, and the ad agency Joshua Ferris brilliantly depicts in his debut novel is family at its strangest and best, coping with a business downturn in the time-honored way: through gossip, pranks, and increasingly frequent coffee breaks.
With a demon's eye for the details that make life worth noticing, Joshua Ferris tells a true and funny story about survival in life's strangest environment--the one we pretend is normal five days a week.
Рави Ховард0.0 LIKE TREES, WALKING examines an old tale in the New South. Based on the true story of the 1981 lynching of Michael Donald in Mobile, Alabama, the novel follows the lives of Paul and Roy Deacon, teenagers and childhood friends of Michael Donald, as they cope with the aftermath of his hanging. It is Paul Deacon who discovers the body, and the experience leaves him forever changed.
The Deacons have operated a funeral home in the city for over 100 years. When the family is asked to conduct the services for Michael, Roy Deacon must examine whether a life in the family tradition is where he belongs.
The story explores the vivid history and landscape of the Gulf Coast community and takes readers down the wooden–bricked streets of turn of the century Mobile with its Spanish architecture and its tree–lined avenues that host the annual Mardi Gras parades.
Readers experience the complexities of the American South–the beauty of the landscape mixed with the ugliness of its racial history–as the characters cope with a tragic chapter in the unfolding story of the New South.
Бен Фонтейн0.0 The well-intentioned protagonists of Brief Encounters with Che Guevara are caught -- to both disastrous and hilarious effect -- in the maelstrom of political and social upheaval surrounding them. In "Near-Extinct Birds of the Central Cordillera," an ornithologist being held hostage in the Colombian rain forest finds that he respects his captors for their commitment to a cause, until he realizes that the Revolution looks a lot like big business. In "The Good Ones Are Already Taken," the wife of a Special Forces officer battles a Haitian voodoo goddess with whom her husband is carrying on a not-entirely-spiritual relationship. And in "The Lion's Mouth," a disillusioned aid worker makes a Faustian bargain to become a diamond smuggler for the greater good. With masterful pacing and a robust sense of the absurd, each story in Brief Encounters with Che Guevara is a self-contained adventure, steeped in the heady mix of tragedy and danger, excitement and hope, that characterizes countries in transition.
Through Fountain's rounded and novelistic prose, these intelligent and keenly observed stories are painted in provocative and vibrant detail across a global canvas. Brief Encounters with Che Guevara marks the arrival of a striking and resonant new voice that speaks adeptly to the intimate connection between the foreign, the familiar, and the inescapably human.
Near-extinct birds of the central Cordillera --
Rêve haitien --
The good ones are already taken --
Asian tiger --
Bouki and the cocaine --
The lion's mouth --
Brief encounters with Che Guevara --
Fantasy for eleven fingers
Yiyun Li0.0 Brilliant and original, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers introduces a remarkable new writer whose breathtaking stories are set in China and among Chinese Americans in the United States. In this rich, astonishing collection, Yiyun Li illuminates how mythology, politics, history, and culture intersect with personality to create fate. From the bustling heart of Beijing, to a fast-food restaurant in Chicago, to the barren expanse of Inner Mongolia, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers reveals worlds both foreign and familiar, with heartbreaking honesty and in beautiful prose.
“Immortality,” winner of The Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize for new writers, tells the story of a young man who bears a striking resemblance to a dictator and so finds a calling to immortality. In “The Princess of Nebraska,” a man and a woman who were both in love with a young actor in China meet again in America and try to reconcile the lost love with their new lives.
“After a Life” illuminates the vagaries of marriage, parenthood, and gender, unfolding the story of a couple who keep a daughter hidden from the world. And in “A Thousand Years of Good Prayers,” in which a man visits America for the first time to see his recently divorced daughter, only to discover that all is not as it seems, Li boldly explores the effects of communism on language, faith, and an entire people, underlining transformation in its many meanings and incarnations.
These and other daring stories form a mesmerizing tapestry of revelatory fiction by an unforgettable writer.
Крис Абани0.0 This novel is set in Maroko, a sprawling, swampy, crazy and colorful ghetto of Lagos, Nigeria, and unfolds against a backdrop of lush reggae and highlife music, American movies and a harsh urban existence. Elvis Oke, a teenage Elvis impersonator spurred on by the triumphs of heroes in the American movies and books he devours, pursues his chosen vocation with ardent single-mindedness. He suffers through hours of practice set to the tinny tunes emanating from the radio in the filthy shack he shares with his alcoholic father, his stepmother and his stepsiblings. He applies thick makeup that turns his black skin white, to make his performances more convincing for American tourists and hopefully net him dollars. But still he finds himself constantly broke. Beset by hopelessness and daunted by the squalor and violence of his daily life, he must finally abandon his dream.
With job prospects few and far between. Elvis is tempted to a life of crime by the easy money his friend Redemption tells him is to be had in Lago's underworld. But the King of the Beggars, Elvis's enigmatic yet faithful adviser, intercedes. And so, torn by the frustration of unrealizable dreams and accompanied by an eclectic chorus of voices, Elvis must find a way to a Graceland of his own making.
Graceland is the story of a son and his father, and an examination of postcolonial Nigeria, where the trappings of American culture reign supreme.
Дженнифер Хей0.0 The award-winning debut novel from Jennifer Haigh, author of Baker Towers, The Condition, and Faith, tells the story of Birdie, Joan, and Dinah, three women who marry the same charismatic, predatory, and enigmatic opportunist: Ken Kimble. Resonating with emotional intensity and narrative innovation reminiscent of Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto, Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible, and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Haigh’s Mrs. Kimble is a timeless story of grief, passion, heartache, deception, and the complex riddle of love.
Габриэль Браунштейн0.0 Nine Salingeresque stories about New Yorkers and their marvelous eccentricities.
This brilliantly inventive first collection captures the disparate lives of the residents of Manhattan's West 89th Street. Five stories are set in one apartment building, where young Davie Birnbaum watches his neighbors' lives unfold. The title story reworks F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," whose hero is born as an old man and ages in reverse; Brownstein's Button lives on the third floor, fading away toward infancy. In apartment 7E, a lawyer named Zauberman reenacts the life of Hawthorne's Wakefield: he abandons his family so that he can spy on them. Meanwhile, the proctologist in the penthouse plays Icarus and Daedalus with his misfit son.
These are tales of literary voyeurism, as the narrators look in on other people's everyday victories and misfortunes—marriages, car accidents, love affairs, and adoptions—and make sense of what they see by thinking about the stories they know best. Winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award; Finalist for the Book-of-the-Month Club First Fiction Award; Chosen as a 2002 Book to Remember by the New York Public Library.
Джастин Кронин0.0 Mary and O’Neil frequently marveled at how, of all the lives they might have led, they had somehow found this one together. When they met at the Philadelphia high school where they’d come to teach, each had suffered a profound loss that had not healed. How likely was it that they could learn to trust, much less love, again?
Justin Cronin’s poignant debut traces the lives of Mary Olson and O’Neil Burke, two vulnerable young teachers who rediscover in each other a world alive with promise and hope. From the formative experiences of their early adulthood to marriage, parenthood, and beyond, this novel in stories illuminates the moments of grace that enable Mary and O’Neil to make peace with the deep emotional legacies that haunt them: the sudden, mysterious death of O’Neil’s parents, Mary’s long-ago decision to end a pregnancy, O’Neil’s sister’s battle with illness and a troubled marriage. Alive with magical nuance and unexpected encounters, Mary and O’Neil celebrates the uncommon in common lives, and the redemptive power of love.
Джумпа Лахири3.8 Эти девять историй волнуют душу не страшными семейными трагедиями, а щемящей сердце драмой повседневности: исчерпавшая себя любовь, неприкаянность человека, оторванного от родного дома, несбывшиеся надежды и томительное ожидание перемен, неожиданные повороты судьбы, которые могут обернуться как бедой, так и счастьем...
Лаконичный стиль и глубокий психологизм Джумпы Лахири рисуют внутренний мир героев с такой проникновенностью, сочувствием и тончайшим юмором, что незначительные, на первый взгляд, события из жизни вполне заурядных людей обретают высокий смысл и наполняют трепетным сопереживанием.
Розина Липпи0.0 The most moving debut novel of the year, shortlisted for the 2001 Orange Prize for Fiction.
Homestead is simply one of the most beautifully written and moving books it’s been our privilege to publish in years. It is also perfectly constituted to be a word-of-mouth bestseller (and its fate in the US bears this out; from very small beginnings at an obscure press in 1998, that is what is has gone to become, picking up the prestigious PEN/Hemingway Prize on its way to regional bestsellerdom in paperback).
Its focus is on the women of a remote Alpine village, where life revolves around farming – and more particularly, around milk and cheese – in a way it has done for generations. Though the sense of place is acute in the book, equally the experiences and emotions of the women at the heart of it are timeless. This community of a few hundred souls, where everyone not only knows but is related to everyone else, is, of course, the kind of environment that is fast disappearing in Europe – reminiscent of remote sheep-farming communities in mid-Wales or the Cumbrian hills or the Scottish highlands. This self-contained, traditional world is evoked with tenderness but without sentimentality or blinkers. The real world creeps up the mountain to the village all too often – for example, carrying off its menfolk to war, and blighting the women with more work still, and less aid. The book spans more or less the entire twentieth century, and puts at the heart of each chapter a different woman. The casual brilliance of Lippi’s storytelling can be devastating; the reader passes by a seemingly innocuous sentence, only to turn back and see blood and fire everywhere in it.
