A New York Times Notable BookNuanced and smart . . . Serber knows that neglect or disconnect doesn t always turn into trauma or damage. Life isn t algebra. Which events lead to pain, and which to growth and awareness, remains unpredictable. The one reliable truth is that mistakes illuminate the most, albeit with fractured light.The New York Times Book Review Mothers and daughters ride a familial tide of joy, pride, regret, guilt, and love in these acclaimed stories of flawed, resilient women. Wheat bread and plain yogurt become weapons in a battle between a teenage daughter and her mother. An aimless college student, married to her much older professor, sneaks cigarettes while caring for their newborn son. On the eve of her husband s fiftieth birthday, a pilfered fifth of rum, rogue teenagers, and an unexpected tattoo has a woman questioning her place in her children s lives. And we follow through two decades the family created when capricious, magnetic Ruby, an ambitious college student, becomes a single mother to cautious daughter Nora in 1970s California. Shout Her Lovely Name is a funny, bittersweet (Vanity Fair) book that announces the arrival of a stunning new writer.Powerful and disquieting . . . Serber writes with exquisite patience and sensitivity, and is an expert in the many ways that love throws people together and splits them apart, often at the same time.The Wall Street JournalAlways, Serber's writing sparkles: practical, strong, brazenly modern, marbled with superb descriptions . . . Take my word: Shout Her Lovely Name will reach inside readers and squeeze. On second thought, don't take my word. Read these lovely stories.San Francisco Chroniclewww.natalieserber.com "
From an award-winning humorist, a touching memoir and manifesto that reveals the deep secrets of fan jinxes, hexes, and charms Did you know there is a secret to winning ballgames? It's not the players, managers, money, or luck. It's juju, and no one knows it better than Hart Seely. Seely has spent a lifetime practicing the art of juju from his living room. And winning ballgames for the New York Yankees. He paces floors. He yells at defenseless TVs. He rallies the team like Churchill addressing the collective British soul. But what he is really doing is harnessing juju energy to influence the outcome of games. And it works. In this uproarious, unforgettable fan confessional, Seely shares the basics of juju for the beginner??Setting the Table,? asking for a called strike instead of a walk-off homer?to advanced juju??Bringing the Neg,? predicting bad events to keep them from actually happening?to the deepest, darkest formulas of this age-old art. Along the way readers come to know Hart and his hilarious band of fellow juju practitioners, a secret club of friends whose fandom bonds them across decades, not to mention won/loss columns. Nostalgic, heartwarming, and laugh-out-loud funny, The Juju Rules is a memoir of a life well-lived in service to one's team that shows how love can be a powerful passion in the best way.
No one can completely cover the game of golf like Bill Pennington and no book can comprehensively tell the story of the sport with the same wit, wisdom and knowledge like On Par. " Jim Nantz, CBS SportsBill Pennington, the voice of the everyday golfer, has traveled the globe in search of golf s essentials those basic principles, those ultimate truths (and, who are we kidding, any trick or quick fix he can pick up along the way) that will improve anyone s game. He has consulted elite golf instructors as well as countless caddies, groundskeepers, parking lot attendants, and bartenders. He has played rounds with Tiger Woods, Annika Sorenstam, and Justin Timberlake. He has spoken with psychiatrists, economists, and Zen masters. On a particularly bad outing, he even discoursed on the fickleness of golf with a wise raccoon.In On Par, Pennington distills this wisdom in an insightful guide to the game. From equipment to the language of golf, from camaraderie to the short-game/long-game debate, Pennington informs and entertains readers as he gets to the essence of the game, including that Holy Grail, the hole in one. Part instruction, part therapy, and shot through with Pennington s trademark wit and humor, this is a book for everyone who has felt the game s distinct pull and slice.A phenomenal guide . . . As all golfers know, the sport is about more than being able to hit a good shot and this book takes you through the journey, arming you with everything you need to know. Annika SorenstamIf you like golf, you ll like [this book] . . . On Par blends practical advice for beginners . . . golf history . . . trivia . . . and Pennington s entertaining dispatches from out on the course. NPR s Only a Game"
?Do you know what it took for Socrates' enemies to make him stop pursuing the truth???Hemlock.?Storied, fiercely competitive Mariana Academy was founded with a serious honor code; its reputation has been unsullied for decades. Now a long-dormant secret society, Prisom's Party, threatens its placid halls with vigilante justice, exposing students and teachers alike for even the most minor infraction. Iris Dupont, a budding journalist whose only confidant is the chain-smoking specter of Edward R. Murrow, feels sure she can break into the ranks of The Devil's Advocate, the Party's underground newspaper, and there uncover the source of its blackmail schemes and vilifying rumors. Some involve the school's new science teacher, who also seems to be investigating the Party. Others point to an albino student who left school abruptly ten years before, never to return. And everything connects to a rare book called Marvelous Species. But the truth comes with its own dangers, and Iris is torn between her allegiances, her reporter's instinct, and her own troubled past. The Year of the Gadfly is an exhilarating journey of double-crosses, deeply buried secrets, and the lifelong reverberations of losing someone you love. Following in the tradition of classic school novels such as A Separate Peace, Prep, and The Secret History, it reminds us how these years haunt our lives forever.
"Leisurely and absorbing . . . a series to be savoured."--The Guardian (UK)When Great War veteran Laurence Bartram arrives in Easton Deadall, he is struck by the beauty of the crumbling manor, venerable church, and memorial to the village's soldiers. But despite this idyllic setting, Easton Deadall remains haunted by tragedy. In 1911, five-year-old Kitty Easton disappeared from her bed and has not been seen since.While Lawrence is visiting, a young maid vanishes in a sinister echo of Kitty's disappearance. And when a body is discovered in the manor's ancient church, Laurence is drawn into the grounds' forgotten places, where deadly secrets lie in wait."Speller's follow-up to her acclaimed debut, The Return of Captain John Emmett, is a well-crafted mystery with intriguing historical details and measured pacing that creates suspense. Fans of Jacqueline Winspear's Maisie Dobbs series and readers who enjoy well-drawn characters in historicals will add this to their wish list."--Library Journal
"Was she a saint or a witch? A visionary or a madwoman? Or an extraordinary peasant girl who, at God's bidding, led an army, saved France, and paid the price by burning alive? . . . Kimberly Cutter's portrait of 'Jehanne' as a strange, gritty teenage tomboy and true believer is compelling." --USA TodayIt is the fifteenth century, and the tumultuous Hundred Years' War rages on. France is under siege, English soldiers tear through the countryside destroying all who cross their paths, and Charles VII, the uncrowned king, has neither the strength nor the will to rally his army. And in the quiet of her parents' garden in Domremy, a peasant girl sees a spangle of light and hears a powerful voice speak her name: Jehanne.The story of Jehanne d'Arc, the visionary and saint who believed she had been chosen by God, who led an army and saved her country, has captivated our imaginations for centuries. But the story of Jehanne--the girl whose sister was murdered by the English, who sought an escape from a violent father and a forced marriage, who taught herself to ride and to fight, and who somehow found the courage and tenacity to persuade first one, then two, then thousands to follow her--is at once thrilling, unexpected, and heartbreaking. Rich with unspoken love and battlefield valor, The Maid is a novel about the power and uncertainty of faith and the exhilarating and devastating consequences of fame."Impressive . . . Cutter evokes the novel's medieval world with striking details." --New York Times Book Review"Joan of Arc, the teenage peasant girl who commanded a French army, was burned at the stake, and eventually declared a saint, exists in our collective imagination as more myth than human being . . . Cutter strips away the romanticism in favor of a more complex portrayal that raises some provocative questions." --O Magazine
"A gripping chronicle of how a fear-frozen society finally topples its oppressors with the help of social media." - San Francisco ChronicleWael Ghonim was a little-known, thirty-year-old Google executive in the summer of 2010 when he anonymously launched a Facebook page to protest the death of one Egyptian man at the hands of security forces. The page's following expanded quickly and moved from online protests to a nonconfrontational movement. On January 25, 2011, Tahrir Square resounded with calls for change. Yet just as the revolution began in earnest, Ghonim was captured and held for twelve days of brutal interrogation. After he was released, he gave a tearful speech on national television, and the protests grew more intense. Four days later, the president of Egypt was gone.In this riveting story, Ghonim takes us inside the movement and shares the keys to unleashing the power of crowds. In Revolution 2.0, we can all be heroes."Revolution 2.0 is an engaging read, and it offers a sharply detailed look from the inside of an uprising that owed almost as much to social media connections as it did to anti-Mubarak passions." - Los Angeles Times"Revolution 2.0 excels in chronicling the roiling tension in the months before the uprising, the careful organization required and the momentum it unleashed." - NPR.org
"Wonderfully detailed and keenly researched, it is a moving portrait of a courageous woman caught between a disastrous affair with a charismatic revolutionary and the draconian laws of the land that would put her to death because of it." Kathleen Kent
"Ward Just is not merely America's best political novelist. He is America's greatest living novelist."-Susan Zakin, Lithub "An achievement . . . [that] fuses the romanticism of the early Kerouac and his mentor, Thomas Wolfe, with the wry humor of Richard Yates."-New York Times Book Review Tommy Ogden, an outsized character holding court in his mansion outside robber-baron-era Chicago, declines to give his wife the money to commission a bust of herself from the French master Auguste Rodin, and instead announces his intention to endow a boys' school. His decision reverberates years later in the life of Lee Goodell, whose coming of age is at the heart of Ward Just's emotionally potent novel. Lee's life in the small town of New Jesper, Illinois, is irrevocably changed by the rape of one of his high school classmates. His father, a local judge and a member of "the Committee" of civic leaders that runs the town, votes to suppress the crime in the name of protecting their community. His mother responds by forcing a move to Chicago's North Shore, where Lee enrolls in the private Ogden Hall School for Boys. Both the crime and the school come to profoundly shape Lee's knowledge of how the world works. Years later, Lee meets his victimized classmate. Their charged encounter is a confirmation of his understanding that how and what we remember lies at the heart of life.
Eavesdrop on one of the most celebrated literary friendships in American letters"An epistolary feast for literary fans [and] a confidence booster for aspiring writers everywhere. A-" --Entertainment Weekly"If friendship is an art, this volume is its masterpiece." --Lee Smith"A remarkable testimony to friendship, literature, and an abiding love of life." --Richmond Times-DispatchWhat There Is to Say We Have Said bears witness to Welty and Maxwell's more than fifty years of friendship and their lives as writers and readers. It serves as a chronicle of their literary world, their talk of Katherine Anne Porter, Salinger, Dinesen, Updike, Percy, Cheever, and more. Through more than three hundred letters, Marrs brings us the story of a true, deep friendship and an homage to the forgotten art of letter writing."A vivid picture of twentieth-century intellectual life and a record of a remarkable friendship... Glorious." --Houston Chronicle"Full of great tidbits about The New Yorker back in the day ... Charming." --The New Yorker"These letters evoke a lost world when events moved a bit more slowly, and friends could take the time to be both eloquently witty and generous with each other, and letters were unobtrusively artful about daily life. Welty and Maxwell are like two birds of the same species, calling to each other across the distances." --Charles Baxter
?The place to go if you're really interested in this version of the quest for creating Artificial Intelligence (AI).??Seattle Times For centuries, people have dreamed of creating a machine that thinks like a human. Scientists have made progress: computers can now beat chess grandmasters and help prevent terrorist attacks. Yet we still await a machine that exhibits the rich complexity of human thought?one that doesn't just crunch numbers, or take us to a relevant Web page, but understands us and gives us what we need. With the creation of Watson, IBM's Jeopardy! playing computer, we are one step closer to that goal. But how did we get here? In Final Jeopardy, Stephen Baker traces the arc of Watson's ?life,? from its birth in the IBM labs to its big night on the podium. We meet Hollywood moguls and Jeopardy! masters, genius computer programmers and ambitious scientists, including Watson's eccentric creator, David Ferrucci. We see how a new generation of Watsons could transform medicine, the law, marketing, even science itself, as machines process huge amounts of data at lightning speed, answer our questions, and possibly come up with new hypotheses. As fast and fun as the game itself, Final Jeopardy shows how smart machines will fit into our world?and how they'll disrupt it. ?Like Tracy Kidder's Soul of a New Machine, Baker's book finds us at the dawn of a singularity. It's an excellent case study, and does good double duty as a Philip K. Dick scenario, too.??Kirkus Reviews ?Baker's narrative is both charming and terrifying . . . an entertaining romp through the field of artificial intelligence?and a sobering glimpse of things to come.??Publishers Weekly, starred review
?Astonishing . . . Moving.? ?People ?The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary is an unflinching, visceral look at the emotional and physical damage?actual, real damage done to specific, individual apes?in some of America's most notorious biomedical research labs. It is also the story of humans who were driven to provide them with refuge, retirement . . . and, ultimately, their inherent right to dignity.? ?Sara Gruen, author of Water for ElephantsIN THE CANADIAN WILDERNESS, Gloria Grow has created a rehabilitation center like none other. Thirteen chimpanzees, rescued from zoos and medical testing laboratories, now call Fauna Sanctuary home. After decades of cruelty and deprivation, these resilient primates are finally free to eat, sleep, play, and roam in peace?all while fighting their personal demons. Primatologist and author Andrew Westoll lived and worked at Fauna one remarkable summer, and The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary is his poignant testimony to the capacity of these animals to heal?and to learn to be chimps again. This is an absorbing, bighearted story about the species more closely related to us than any other. ?There is plenty of moral outrage in this book, but there is also plenty of wonder . . . Impassioned and well reasoned.? ?Cleveland Plain Dealer
An improbably funny account of how the purchase and restoration of a disaster of a fixer-upper saves a young marriageWhen a season of ludicrous loss tests the mettle of their marriage, Matthew Batt and his wife decide not to call it quits. They set their sights instead on the purchase of a dilapidated house in the Sugarhouse section of Salt Lake City. With no homesteading experience and a full-blown quarter-life crisis on their hands, these perpetual grad students/waiters/nonprofiteers decide to seek salvation through renovation, and do all they can to turn a former crack house into a home. Dizzy with despair, doubt, and the side effects of using the rough equivalent of napalm to detoxify their house, they enter into full-fledged adulthood with power tools in hand.Heartfelt and joyous, Sugarhouse is the story of how one couple conquers adversity and creates an addition to their family, as well as their home.
"Bakopoulos has invented a man for all rainy seasons--a horny, heartbroken cousin of Richard Ford's Frank Bascombe." --Tom Piazza"A winning distraction, a smart entertainment." --New York Times Book Review A clairvoyant when it comes to the Starbucks orders, a renegade when it comes to bureaucracy, Zeke asks almost everybody he meets, "Why are you so unhappy?" The answers he receives--a mix of true sadness and absurd complaint--become the core of an obsessive project, "The Inventory of American Unhappiness," a project that becomes all the more personally meaningful as he follows steps outlined in a women's magazine on finding the perfect mate. Incisively tapping the voice of one of the most charming--and deluded--narrators to come along in years, Dean Bakopolous captures our zeitgeist with lacerating wit and a big heart, confirming Jonathan Miles's (author of Dear American Airlines) claim that "there's no such thing as unhappiness when you're holding a Dean Bakopolous novel.""Hilarious and heartfelt . . . This funny-sad novel seems to take elements of the author's own life . . . and twists them in a funhouse mirror--with delightful results." --NPR
"A brilliant essayist, [O'Hagan] constructs sentences that pierce like pinpricks." - Publishers Weekly, starred reviewFor more than two decades, Andrew O'Hagan has been publishing celebrated essays on both sides of the Atlantic. The Atlantic Ocean highlights the best of his clear-eyed, brilliant work, including his first published essay, a reminiscence of his working-class Scottish upbringing; an extraordinary piece about the lives of two soldiers, one English, one American, both of whom died in Iraq on May 2, 2005; and a piercing examination of the life of William Styron. O'Hagan's subjects range from the rise of the tabloids to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, from the trajectory of the Beatles to the impossibility of not fancying Marilyn Monroe.The Atlantic Ocean - an engrossing and important collection.
"Bass creates a slice of music history from the ground up, from the backwoods and front porches all the way to Elvis." ?Los Angeles Times1959: the Brown siblings are the biggest thing in country music. Their inimitable harmony will give rise to the polished sound of the multibillion-dollar country music industry we know today. But when the bonds of family begin to fray, the flame of their celebrity proves as brilliant as it is fleeting. In this arresting novel, acclaimed author Rick Bass draws poignant portraits of their lives, lived both in and out of the limelight. Masterfully jumping between the Browns' once auspicious past and the heartbreaking present, Nashville Chrome is the richly imagined story of this forgotten family and an unflinching portrait of an era in American music. "An empathic, breath-catching, mythic and profoundly American tale of creation, destruction and renewal." ?Kansas City Star "Splendid . . . Rick Bass's best." ?Dallas Morning News
?A beautifully written and masterfully told story full of wicked intrigue, gripping suspense, stirring action, deft plot twists, and incredibly rich and compelling characters ... destined to be a classic series of nautical adventure.? ?Eric Jay Dolin, author of Leviathan and Fur, Fortune, and EmpireHaving sunk the first ship he commanded off the coast of Ireland, Captain Matthew Quinton is determined to complete his second mission without loss of life or honor. Rebellion is stirring in the Scottish Isles, and King Charles II needs loyal officers to sail north and face the threat. But aboard His Majesty's Ship the Jupiter, the young ?gentleman captain? leads a resentful crew and has but few on whom he can rely. As they approach the wild coast of Scotland, Quinton begins to learn the ropes and win the respect of his fellow officers and sailors. But he has other worries: a suspicion that the previous captain of the Jupiter was murdered, a feeling that several among his crew have something to hide, and a growing conviction that betrayal lies closer to home than he had thought. ?A delightful tale.? ?Kirkus Reviews?As fascinating an account of Restoration politics as it is of the Restoration Navy.? ?Seth Hunter, author of The Winds of Folly
?Thanks to its wicked style and pacing, Mule lets me forget I'm reading serious literature while I follow its terrifying story into the land of the all-American damned.? ? Walter Kirn, author of Up in the Air ?Mule is swift, taut, and relentless, both a rip-roaring drug tale and a fascinating portrait of a decent human being whose morals slowly disintegrate under unbearable financial strain.? ? Lauren Groff, author of The Monsters of Templeton James and Kate are golden children of the late twentieth century, flush with opportunity. But an economic downturn and an unexpected pregnancy send them searching for a way to make do. A friend in California's Siskiyou County grows prime-grade marijuana; if James transports just one load from Cali to Florida, he'll pull down enough cash to survive for months. And so begins the life of a mule. A page-turning, Zeitgeist-capturing novel that plunges us into the criminal underworld with little chance to take a breath, Mule is about young people trying to make do in a moment when the American Dream they never had to believe in ? because it was handed to them, fully wrapped and ready to go at the takeout window ? suddenly vanishes from the menu. ?With adrenaline-infused sentences and a seat-gripping story line, Mule is a novel that illuminates contemporary American desperation, both its dangerous precipices and its thrilling, overwhelming freedom.? ? Dean Bakopoulos, author of My American Unhappiness
?Haunting . . . Written in the author's classic, clear style, these narratives enchant.??Boston GlobeThe need for love?obsessive, self-destructive, unpredictable?takes us to forbidden places, as in the chilling world of Give Me Your Heart, a new collection of stories by the inimitable Joyce Carol Oates. In ten razor-sharp stories, children veer beyond their parents' control, wives and husbands wake up to find that they hardly know each other, haunted pasts intrude upon uncertain futures, and those who bring us the most harm may be the nearest at hand.?Dread, in fiction, can be a magnificent thing . . . Oates isn't writing horror fiction, but she might as well be. Her stories pack the same kind of visceral wallop.??Los Angeles Times
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