Known for her roles on ER and The Good Wife , Julianna Margulies had an unconventional childhood that taught her to seek order in chaos and find sunshine even in dark places. This honest portrait of her faith, fate and resilience as she finds her way in the world as both a woman and an actor is deeply personal and relatably universal. Twins Jeanie and Julius, 51, live insular lives with their mother Dot in the rural English countryside, until she dies suddenly and leaves them with a financial mess and long-buried secrets.
The two have to find their way in the world for the first time, in a quiet tale of loss and survival. The political powerhouse is also a fantastic novelist, as evidenced by this juicy legal thriller that takes us inside the hallowed halls of the Supreme Court. When a pivotal justice falls into a coma and names his clerk as his legal guardian, she discovers a controversy that may prove downright dangerous.
As she races against time to solve the clues to the conspiracy her boss uncovered, you'll find yourself holding your breath too.
Isaac and his neighbor Lorrie are both single parents, mourning the tragic loss of their teenaged sons and the shadow of a heinous act one of them committed. When a pregnant teen named Evangeline shows up on Isaac's doorstep, Lorrie steps up to help out when he retreats to his Quaker faith. Her presence forces them all to reckon with their pasts and take a hard look at what they want for their futures.
One of Peynado's stories plays on the "thoughts and prayers" that echoes across the Internet after every school shooting, another features floating children who eat rocks to stay grounded. In still another, people's appendages begin to dissapear and with them, their rights. Spanning time, space, and magical possibility, this collection is achingly beautiful and hauntingly prescient. But then she meets Jane, a punk-rock chick who jump-starts her heart.
After a sexual assault throws her into turmoil, Ashley finally learns what he did to land there, setting off a whole new reckoning. Not a light read, but a gorgeously poignant one. A sharp, often wryly funny, sometimes heart-wrenching look into parenting, queer marriage and growing up, this searing novel feels like walking across a lawn gone crispy in the sun.
It's deeply satisfying and a little painful, all at once. For over a decade, preacher Luke Nolan has led the Hope congregation with his wife and daughters Abigail and Caroline dutifully by his side.
In a series of deeply emotive linked stories, a young man struggles to find his way among a cast of artists in the Midwest all reckoning with their bonds to one another. Sisters Marie and Dara are toxically intertwined with one another and Charlie, Dara's husband, and the fallout reveals itself over the course of this disturbing and gripping read.
Luca's struggling to find his way amidst the literati of New York City, broke but all too aware of his privilege. Meanwhile, his best friend Zara throws herself into the rising social justice movement as Luca gets entangled in the lives of a glam older married couple he befriends. Lyrical but uncomfortably real, this novel invites readers to take a hard look at our ideals and what we will or won't do to uphold them. In short, her life is in shambles, all because of debilitating nerve pain from the accident that ended her stage career.
These immersive short stories offer readers a sweeping, often funny, look into a Cambodian American community in California.
Characters struggle with the shadow of the Khmer Rouge genocide, their own sexuality and conflicts related to family and friendship. The snippets of life in all its complexity resonate long after the last page. This lyrical memoir told in essays and snippets of verse, follows as the narrator explores what it means to grow up a woman, as well as all of the societal pressures, uncertainties and challenges that brings.
Shifting between time, place and perspective, it will feel familiar to those who have also traveled a wandering path toward the person they want to become. Product Reviews. Home Ideas. United States. Type keyword s to search. Today's Top Stories.
The Rise of the Cleanfluencer. Advertisement - Continue Reading Below. Pamela Dorman Books. Ashley Audrain amazon. Una Mannion amazon. Joan Didion amazon. And to be fair. But even so, I was wrong to resist, and so are you if you missed this one. Throughout, the writing is perfectly calibrated, shifting in tenor between characters but always elevated, even lovely. But the most impressive feat is the empathy with which Haslett unravels this family, and the tenderness with which he writes about love in all of its forms.
This is a striking novel, and one of the best examples in recent memory of a certain literary mode: quiet, moving, immersive, beautiful. Much has been made of Richard Powers evocation of arboreal deep time. As ecologists and botanists and field biologists having been trying to tell us for decades, trees are alive in ways far closer to what we think of as sentience than anyone thought. Yes and no. Here is a novel that contains within it layers of sadness and quiet hope; its concerns are ours, its characters are us.
Deep time for dark times. And though Diaz clearly has a copy of the Cormac McCarthy family bible, its brimstone and blood, there is tenderness buried at the borders of this novel, just waiting for a little rain to draw it to the surface.
Now, the spoilers. The first section of the novel begins at a performing arts school in the s, a love story between Sarah and David, friends from opposite sides of the tracks, that suffer through their teenage years, their drama amplified by being sensitive, ambitious theater kids. The shift in part two is that this first story is, in fact, the story within the story, a book written by an adult Sarah who is not actually called Sarah , being read now by a secondary character from the first story, someone named Karen who is likewise not actually called Karen.
The premise of Trust Exercise is that teenagers are real people, not just unformed adults, with real concerns and emotional intelligence; they, too, are worthy of great literature.
Already deemed odd for her habit of walking the dangerous streets with her nose in a book, the attentions of the older man—he shows up at random in his white van—has people talking but always just out of earshot, the curtains quickly drawn. Milkman is all menace and mood, its ambiguities like dark corners, places of concealment, its violence latent throughout, ready to explode.
Listen, haters. But I loved this book for its sheer postmodern ambition, its obsessions—with hearing and mishearing, communication and miscommunication, associative thinking—and its arch coldness. C is a rigorous inquiry into the meaning of meaning : our need to find it in the world around us and communicate it to one another; our methods for doing so; the hubs and networks and skeins of interaction that result. Gone is the minimalist restraint he employed in Remainder ; here, he fuses a Pynchonesque revelry in signs and codes with the lush psychedelics of William Burroughs to create an intellectually provocative novel that unfurls like a brooding, phosphorescent dream.
Which is perfectly reasonable. I, however, will continue to delight in its self-conscious, hyper-intellectual handwringing. I love that sort of thing. The Gold Rush-era story of two bounty-hunters, the philosophical Eli and his rowdier, more impulsive brother Charlie, it unfolds slowly as they head from Oregon to California to kill a prospector-alchemist named Hermann Kermit Warm at the behest of a shady figure known as the Commodore.
As they make their way south, in a picaresque-fashion they stumble from one often gritty misadventure to the next, and eventually wind up teaming up with Warm when they finally find him.
The best part of the novel is the narration—Eli is the ambivalent moral compass normally absent from Westerns, a kind of extreme normalcy and humanity amidst a desolate and unforgiving landscape and livelihood. He is ever-loving towards his cruel and reckless brother, a little anxious about his weight, and gets extremely excited when he purchases a toothbrush for the first time. His considerate, soft-spoken-ness is jarringly interrupted by unsettling usually gruesome, sometimes disgusting moments of gore—sometimes violence, sometimes other nauseating things.
The imagery is stunning—there are passages here and there, both horrifying and not, that have stuck with me since I read it. On a different note, it also has the single best title of a fictional work, possibly ever. In my opinion. If I could, I would quote the entire first page because it establishes one of the most powerful and memorable feminist voices I have ever read in fiction: urgent and chillingly true.
The quietly seething protagonist of The Woman Upstairs, Nora Eldridge, is a teacher who has sidelined her art, because she is a rule-follower who fears risk and uncertainty. She is unmarried, single, without kids; intelligent, experienced, and incisive enough to pierce societal facades and expose the enduring gender conventions, stereotypes, and pressures that imprison women.
In each of the Shahids Nora glimpses the revival of a life she thought to be long lost. With their flattery and tacit permission she returns to her art, sharing a studio with Sirena who is preparing for an upcoming art show in Paris; she engages in intellectual discussion with Skandar though he talks and she mostly listens ; and as she gets to know Reza, finding him the perfect child, she wishes she were his mother.
She is filled with promise, until they betray her. Messud has struck the finest balance between showing and telling: she has delivered one version of the tale of the modern woman that no one can ignore. Time stutters. His entire hand what? You read the phrase four times, trying to catch up, the way you tried to catch up when you were a kid and Henry, the teenager from next door, told a bunch of you a story about his finger and a girl. Then a flood of understanding horrified you, shamed and excited you, trailed you back into the house to the kitchen where dinner was ready, where your chicken potpie was waiting to be pierced with your fork and you stared at it.
I could not tell you what this book is about, because this book is an experience—closest to a dream, maybe, or a memory. An enchantment. It considers teenage girls deadly serious, and deadly seriously. It is a suburban American fantasy of the highest order—though Davis herself might balk at this description. It is expansive and engaging and deeply enjoyable.
It insists on the multiplicity of immigrant experiences, including the idea that an immigrant who has found success in the US might return to her country of origin, as its female protagonist Ifemelu does. Born in Nigeria, Ifemelu comes to the US for college, and struggles to earn money, unhappily doing sex work at one point, but ultimately thrives as a writer, winning a fellowship at Princeton and writing a popular blog about her experience of race in the US as a black African.
When the novel opens, she is preparing to return home. Americanah does not shy away from either social critique or pure, satisfying romance. It is about identity, in both the capital and lowercase senses, and it succeeds in its precise drawing the humanity of its characters as well as the nuances of its cultures.
If you have any comments, suggestions, or corrections please feel free to e-mail me. Swann's Way, the first part of A la recherche de temps perdu, Marcel Proust's seven-part cycle, was published in In it, Proust introduces the themes that run through the entire work. The narr Ulysses chronicles the passage of Leopold Bloom through Dublin during an ordinary day, June 16, Alonso Quixano, a retired country gentleman in his fifties, lives in an unnamed section of La Mancha with his niece and a housekeeper.
He has become obsessed with books of chivalry, and believes th One of the 20th century's enduring works, One Hundred Years of Solitude is a widely beloved and acclaimed novel known throughout the world, and the ultimate achievement in a Nobel Prize—winning car The novel chronicles an era that Fitzgerald himself dubbed the "Jazz Age". Following the shock and chaos of World War I, American society enjoyed unprecedented levels of prosperity during the "roar First published in , Melville's masterpiece is, in Elizabeth Hardwick's words, "the greatest novel in American literature.
Epic in scale, War and Peace delineates in graphic detail events leading up to Napoleon's invasion of Russia, and the impact of the Napoleonic era on Tsarist society, as seen through the eyes of fi The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, or more simply Hamlet, is a tragedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written between and The play, set in Denmark, recounts how Pri The Odyssey is one of two major ancient Greek epic poems attributed to Homer.
It is, in part, a sequel to the Iliad, the other work traditionally ascribed to Homer. The poem is fundamental to the m For daring to peer into the heart of an adulteress and enumerate its contents with profound dispassion, the author of Madame Bovary was tried for "offenses against morality and religion.
Belonging in the immortal company of the great works of literature, Dante Alighieri's poetic masterpiece, The Divine Comedy, is a moving human drama, an unforgettable visionary journey through the The book is internationally famous for its innovative style and infamous for its controversial subject: the protagonist and unreliable narrator, middle aged Humbert Humbert, becomes obsessed and se Dostoevsky's last and greatest novel, The Karamazov Brothers, is both a brilliantly told crime story and a passionate philosophical debate.
The dissolute landowner Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov is mur It is a murder story, told from a murder;s point of view, that implicates even the most innocent reader in its enormities. It is a cat-and-mouse game between a tormented young killer and a cheerful The narrative is non-linear, involving several flashbacks, and two primary narrators: Mr. Lockwood and Ellen "Nelly" Dean. The novel opens in , with Mr. Lockwood arriving at Thrushcross Grange, The Catcher in the Rye is a novel by J.
Originally published for adults, the novel has become a common part of high school and college curricula throughout the English-speaking wo The book is narrated in free indirect speech following the main character Elizabeth Bennet as she deals with matters of upbringing, marriage, moral rightness and education in her aristocratic socie Revered by all of the town's children and dreaded by all of its mothers, Huckleberry Finn is indisputably the most appealing child-hero in American literature.
Unlike the tall-tale, idyllic worl Soon, I hope. Makina sets off from her village in Mexico with a package from a local gangster and a message for her brother, who has been gone for three years. The story of her crossing to the US examines the blurring of boundaries, the commingling of languages and the blending of identities that complicate the idea of an eventual return.
System One makes judgments quickly, intuitively and automatically, as when a batsman decides whether to cut or pull. System Two is slow, calculated and deliberate, like long division. But psychologist Kahneman argues that, although System Two thinks it is in control, many of our decisions are really made by System One.
In this existential eco-thriller, a William Blake-obsessed eccentric investigates the murders of men and animals in a remote Polish village. More accessible and focused than Flights , the novel that won Tokarczuk the Man International Booker prize, it is no less profound in its examination of how atavistic male impulses, emboldened by the new rightwing politics of Europe, are endangering people, communities and nature itself. In this savagely beautiful novel set during the Indian wars and American civil war, a young Irish boy flees famine-struck Sligo for Missouri.
There he finds lifelong companionship with another emigrant, and they join the army on its brutal journey west, laying waste to Indian settlements. Viscerally focused and intense, yet imbued with the grandeur of the landscape, the book explores love, gender and survival with a rare, luminous power. Los Angeles Times journalist Barbara Demick interviewed around North Korean defectors for this propulsive work of narrative non-fiction, but she focuses on just six, all from the north-eastern city of Chongjin — closed to foreigners and less media-ready than Pyongyang.
North Korea is revealed to be rife with poverty, corruption and violence but populated by resilient people with a remarkable ability to see past the propaganda all around them. An agenda-setting book that is devastating about the extent to which big tech sets out to manipulate us for profit. At the time when Ware won the Guardian first book award, no graphic novel had previously won a generalist literary prize. Emotional and artistic complexity are perfectly poised in this account of a listless year-old office dogsbody who is thrown into an existential crisis by an encounter with his estranged dad.
Sheba, a middle-aged teacher at a London comprehensive, begins an affair with her year-old student - but we hear about it from a fellow teacher, the needy Barbara, whose obsessive nature drives the narrative. With shades of Patricia Highsmith, this teasing investigation into sex, class and loneliness is a dark marvel.
The Spanish master examines chance, love and death in the story of an apparently random killing that gradually reveals hidden depths. The master of the cold war thriller turned his attention to the new world order in this chilling investigation into the corruption powering big pharma in Africa. Based on the case of a rogue antibiotics trial that killed and maimed children in Nigeria in the s, it has all the dash and authority of his earlier novels while precisely and presciently anatomising the dangers of a rampant neo-imperialist capitalism.
In a world still at war, it has chilling contemporary resonance. A theoretical physicist opens a window on to the great questions of the universe with this page overview of modern physics.
The deliciously dark US crime thriller that launched a thousand imitators and took the concept of the unreliable narrator to new heights. Her cells, taken without her knowledge during a biopsy, went on to change medical history, being used around the world to develop countless drugs.
The fourth of the autobiographical Patrick Melrose novels finds the wealthy protagonist — whose flight from atrocious memories of child abuse into drug abuse was the focus of the first books — beginning to grope after redemption.
Elegant wit and subtle psychology lift grim subject matter into seductive brilliance. A man drives his three sons into a deep pond and swims out, leaving them to drown. But was it an accident? From swimmers to sewage workers, boatbuilders to bailiffs, salmon fishers to ferryman, the voices are varied and vividly brought to life.
Carson charts the course of a doomed marriage in loose-limbed lines that follow the switchbacks of thought and feeling from first meeting through multiple infidelities to arrive at eventual divorce. Their own adventures are as exciting and highly coloured as the ones they write and draw in this generous, open-hearted, deeply lovable rollercoaster of a book.
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