Cover of The House on Mango Street

The House on Mango Street

Sandra Cisneros

Book Info

Publisher
Vintage (1991), 132 pages
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9780679734772
Publisher Description

A collection of essays exploring various aspects of Sandra Cisneros' novel "The House on Mango Street." (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of Água Viva

Água Viva

Clarice Lispector

Book Info

Publisher
New Directions Publishing (2012), 105 pages
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9780811219907
Publisher Description

Lispector at her most philosophically radical. (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of The Hour of the Star (Second Edition)

The Hour of the Star (Second Edition)

Clarice Lispector

Book Info

Publisher
New Directions Publishing (2011), 97 pages
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9780811219495
Publisher Description

Clarice Lispector died of cancer at the age of fifty-six on 9th December 1977. "The Hour of the Star" was published that same year and acclaimed by the critics as 'a regional allegory' of extraordinary awareness and insight. Lispector herself defined "The Hour of the Star" as a book 'made without words ... a mute photograph ... a silence ... a question'. The tale of Macabea can be read at different levels and lends itself to various interpretations. The book's subtle interplay of fiction and philosophy sums up Lispector's unique talent as a writer and her lasting influence on contemporary Brazilian writing. (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of The Fifth Child

The Fifth Child

Doris Lessing

Book Info

Publisher
Vintage (1989), 148 pages
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9780679721826
Publisher Description

Doris Lessing's contemporary gothic horror story—centered on the birth of a baby who seems less than human—probes society's unwillingness to recognize its own brutality.Harriet and David Lovatt, parents of four children, have created an idyll of domestic bliss in defiance of the social trends of late 1960s England. While around them crime and unrest surge, the Lovatts are certain that their old-fashioned contentment can protect them from the world outside—until the birth of their fifth baby. Gruesomely goblin-like in appearance, insatiably hungry, abnormally strong and violent, Ben has nothing innocent or infant-like about him. As he grows older and more terrifying, Harriet finds she cannot love him, David cannot bring himself to touch him, and their four older children are afraid of him. Understanding that he will never be accepted anywhere, Harriet and David are torn between their instincts as parents and their shocked reaction to this fierce and unlovable child whose existence shatters their belief in a benign world. (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of Bonjour Tristesse

Bonjour Tristesse

A Novel

Francoise Sagan

Book Info

Publisher
Harper Collins (2008), 164 pages
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9780061440793
Publisher Description

Endearing, self-absorbed, seventeen-year-old Cécile is the very essence of untroubled amorality. Freed from the stifling constraints of boarding school, she joins her father—a handsome, still-young widower with a wandering eye—for a carefree, two-month summer vacation in a beautiful villa outside of Paris with his latest mistress, Elsa. Cécile cherishes the free-spirited moments she and her father share, while plotting her own sexual adventures with a "tall and almost beautiful" law student. But the arrival of her late mother's best friend, Anne, intrudes upon a young girl's pleasures. And when a relationship begins to develop between the adults, Cécile and her lover set in motion a plan to keep them apart...with tragic, unexpected consequences. The internationally beloved story of a precocious teenager's attempts to understand and control the world around her, Françoise Sagan's Bonjour Tristesse is a beautifully composed, wonderfully ambiguous celebration of sexual liberation, at once sympathetic and powerfully unsparing. (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Stories

The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Stories

Carson McCullers

Book Info

Publisher
Mariner Books (1951), 152 pages
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9780618565863
Publisher Description

Six stories including "Wunderkind," "A Domestic Dilemma," and "The Sojourner" accompany the novella about shattered dreams in a small Southern town. (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of The Wallcreeper

The Wallcreeper

Nell Zink

Book Info

Publisher
New York Review of Books (2014), 202 pages
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9780989760713
Publisher Description

The incredible breakout novel by one of the sharpest, funniest, most inventive writers of our time. “Who is Nell Zink? She claims to be an expatriate living in northeast Germany. Maybe she is; maybe she isn’t. I don’t know. I do know that this first novel arrives with a voice that is fully formed: mature, hilarious, terrifyingly intelligent, and wicked. The novel is about a bird-loving American couple that moves to Europe and becomes, basically, eco-terrorists. This is strange, and interesting, but in between is some writing about marriage, love, fidelity, Europe, and saving the earth that is as funny and as grown-up as anything I’ve read in years. And there are some jokes in here that a young Don DeLillo would kill to have written. I hope he doesn’t kill Nell Zink.” (Keith Gessen) (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the East

A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the East

László Krasznahorkai

Book Info

Publisher
New Directions Publishing Corporation (2022), 144 pages
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9780811234474
Publisher Description

A quiet, poetic, and exquisitely gorgeous novel describing a wandering mythic figure in a Kyoto monastery, by the 2019 National Book Award winner (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of CivilWarLand in Bad Decline

CivilWarLand in Bad Decline

Stories and a Novella

George Saunders

Book Info

Publisher
Random House Trade Paperbacks (2016), 226 pages
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9780812987683
Publisher Description

Since its publication in 1996, George Saunders’s debut collection has grown in esteem from a cherished cult classic to a masterpiece of the form, inspiring an entire generation of writers along the way. In six stories and a novella, Saunders hatches an unforgettable cast of characters, each struggling to survive in an increasingly haywire world. With a new introduction by Joshua Ferris and a new author’s note by Saunders himself, this edition is essential reading for those seeking to discover or revisit a virtuosic, disturbingly prescient voice. Praise for George Saunders and CivilWarLand in Bad Decline “It’s no exaggeration to say that short story master George Saunders helped change the trajectory of American fiction.”—The Wall Street Journal “Saunders’s satiric vision of America is dark and demented; it’s also ferocious and very funny.”—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times “George Saunders is a writer of arresting brilliance and originality, with a sure sense of his material and apparently inexhaustible resources of voice. [CivilWarLand in Bad Decline] is scary, hilarious, and unforgettable.”—Tobias Wolff “Saunders makes the all-but-impossible look effortless.”—Jonathan Franzen “Not since Twain has America produced a satirist this funny.”—Zadie Smith “An astoundingly tuned voice—graceful, dark, authentic, and funny—telling just the kinds of stories we need to get us through these times.”—Thomas Pynchon (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of Hunger (World's Classics Series)

Hunger (World's Classics Series)

Knut Hamsun and George Egerton

Book Info

Publisher
OK Publishing (2022)
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9788027273577
Publisher Description

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Cover of The Dry Heart

The Dry Heart

Natalia Ginzburg

It may not be possible to start The Dry Heart and not finish the book before closing it. It is as if this intimate, unsparing account of a marriage's unraveling gets right under your skin and there's nothing to do about it but to keep reading as if scratching a phantom itch. The clarity and directness of its prose feels at first like an unbearably and intensely focused light... it reveals all, like a the lamp of an operating room. Another metaphor, from the title, is even better: this text is dry and desiccated in a breathtakingly clarifying way. What a title. What a first line.

Book Info

Publisher
New Directions Publishing Corporation (2019)
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9780811228787
Publisher Description

Finally back in print, a frighteningly lucid feminist horror story about marriage (Publisher's Description)

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Also on these shelves
Cover of Agostino

Agostino

Alberto Moravia

Book Info

Publisher
New York Review of Books (2014), 129 pages
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9781590177235
Publisher Description

Thirteen-year-old Agostino is spending the summer at a Tuscan seaside resort with his beautiful widowed mother. When she takes up with a cocksure new companion, Agostino, feeling ignored and unloved, begins hanging around with a group of local young toughs. Though repelled by their squalor and brutality, and repeatedly humiliated for his weakness and ignorance when it comes to women and sex, the boy is increasingly, masochistically drawn to the gang and its rough games. He finds himself unable to make sense of his troubled feelings. Hoping to be full of manly calm, he is instead beset by guilty curiosity and an urgent desire to sever, at any cost, the thread of troubled sensuality that binds him to his mother. Alberto Moravia’s classic, startling portrait of innocence lost was written in 1942 but rejected by Fascist censors and not published until 1944, when it became a best seller and secured the author the first literary prize of his career. Revived here in a new translation by Michael F. Moore, Agostino is poised to captivate a twenty-first-century audience. (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of Another Brooklyn

Another Brooklyn

A Novel

Jacqueline Woodson

Book Info

Publisher
Amistad (2017)
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9780062359995
Publisher Description

A Finalist for the 2016 National Book Award New York Times Bestseller A SeattleTimes pick for Summer Reading Roundup 2017 A Bustle Fall Roundup pick for 2017 The acclaimed New York Times bestselling and National Book Award–winning author of Brown Girl Dreaming delivers her first adult novel in twenty years. Running into a long-ago friend sets memory from the 1970s in motion for August, transporting her to a time and a place where friendship was everything—until it wasn’t. For August and her girls, sharing confidences as they ambled through neighborhood streets, Brooklyn was a place where they believed that they were beautiful, talented, brilliant—a part of a future that belonged to them. But beneath the hopeful veneer, there was another Brooklyn, a dangerous place where grown men reached for innocent girls in dark hallways, where ghosts haunted the night, where mothers disappeared. A world where madness was just a sunset away and fathers found hope in religion. Like Louise Meriwether’s Daddy Was a Number Runner and Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina, Jacqueline Woodson’s Another Brooklyn heartbreakingly illuminates the formative time when childhood gives way to adulthood—the promise and peril of growing up—and exquisitely renders a powerful, indelible, and fleeting friendship that united four young lives. (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of Speedboat

Speedboat

Renata Adler

Book Info

Publisher
New York Review of Books (2013), 193 pages
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9781590176139
Publisher Description

Winner of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, this is one of the defining books of the 1970s, an experimental novel about a young journalist trying to navigate life in America. When Speedboat burst on the scene in the late ’70s it was like nothing readers had encountered before. It seemed to disregard the rules of the novel, but it wore its unconventionality with ease. Reading it was a pleasure of a new, unexpected kind. Above all, there was its voice, ambivalent, curious, wry, the voice of Jen Fain, a journalist negotiating the fraught landscape of contemporary urban America. Party guests, taxi drivers, brownstone dwellers, professors, journalists, presidents, and debutantes fill these dispatches from the world as Jen finds it. A touchstone over the years for writers as different as David Foster Wallace and Elizabeth Hardwick, Speedboat returns to enthrall a new generation of readers. (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of True Grit

True Grit

A Novel

Charles Portis

Book Info

Publisher
Harry N. Abrams (2012)
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9781468306293
Publisher Description

True Grit tells the story of Mattie Ross, who is just fourteen years of age when a coward going by the name of Tom Chaney shoots her father down in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and robs him of his life, his horse, and $150 in cash. Mattie leaves home to avenge her father's blood. With the one-eyed Rooster Cogburn, the meanest available U.S. Marshal, by her side, Mattie pursues the homicide into Indian Territory. True Grit is eccentric, cool, straight, and unflinching, like Mattie herself. From a writer of true status, this is an American classic through and through. This mass-market edition includes an afterword by award-winning Donna Tartt, author of The Little Friend and The Secret History. (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of The Red Notebook

The Red Notebook

True Stories

Paul Auster

Book Info

Publisher
New Directions Publishing (2002), 114 pages
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9780811214988
Publisher Description

Contains: The red notebook -- Why write? -- Accident report -- It don't mean a thing. (Publisher's Description)

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