Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
The lives of four unlikely friends intersect on the backstreets of New Orleans. Living amid poverty and violence, these fragile heroes of the American underclass redefine our notions of family, redemption, and love.
A killer strikes on a sail training ship half way across the Atlantic Ocean. Communications with shore have been severed. The killer can be anyone on board. Can Captain John Otter weather the storm, keep his students safe, and find the killer in time?Show book
Fearless, candid, and incredibly funny, Lauren Holmes is a newcomer who writes like a master. She tackles eros and intimacy with a deceptively light touch, a keen awareness of how their nervous systems tangle and sometimes short-circuit, and a genius for revealing our most vulnerable, spirited selves. In "Desert Hearts," a woman takes a job selling sex toys in San Francisco rather than embark on the law career she pursued only for the sake of her father. In "Pearl and the Swiss Guy Fall in Love," a woman realizes she much prefers the company of her pit bull-and herself-to the neurotic foreign fling who won't decamp from her apartment. In "How Am I Supposed to Talk to You?" a daughter hauls a suitcase of lingerie to Mexico for her flighty, estranged mother to resell there, wondering whether her personal mission-to come out-is worth the same effort. And in "Barbara the Slut," a young woman with an autistic brother, a Princeton acceptance letter, and a love of sex navigates her high school's toxic, slut-shaming culture with open eyes. With heart, sass, and pitch-perfect characters, Barbara the Slut is a head-turning debut from a writer with a limitless career before her.Show book
"An impoverished French family awaits the prodigal return of their long vanished Uncle Jules from his travels in America.From his letters it would appear that he has made his fortune and when he returns the family hopes their fortunes will change too.A boat trip to Jersey provides the opporunity for a reunion...but nobody could anticipate the twist in events."Show book
In these two famous short novels, Leo Tolstoy takes readers to the brink of despair. At the end of life, worldly ambition offers no consolation for the spiritually empty soul, but Tolstoy is the master of themes and redemption. He turns his morbid topic into hope, leading toward spiritual awakening. Tolstoy offers his readers a lifetime of perspective on death. Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich is a small book with singular depth of insight. The book was published in 1886, breaking a nine-year literary silence after the publication of Anna Karenina. It is considered to be one of the great explorations of death and dying in all of Western Literature. No author in so few words summons so many emotions into the reader's soul. This masterpiece has been paired here with another of Tolstoy's short novels, Master and Man, which too examnes the human response to mortality. Together these two stories will ultimately offer encouragement to the spiritually hungry.An EChristian, Inc production.Show book
”Gloriously imaginative and utterly hypnotizing short stories” inspired by vintage twentieth-century postcards, from a Pulitzer Prize-winning author (Booklist, starred review). For many years, author Robert Olen Butler has collected picture postcards from the early twentieth century—not so much for the pictures on the fronts but for the messages written on the backs, little bits of the captured souls of people long since passed away. Using these brief messages of real people from another age, Butler here creates fully imagined stories that speak to the universal human condition. In “Up by Heart,” a Tennessee miner is called upon to become a preacher, and then asked to complete an altogether more sinister task. In “The Ironworkers’ Hayride,” a young man named Milton embarks on a romantic adventure with a girl with a wooden leg. From the deeply moving “Carl and I,” in which a young wife writes a postcard in reply to a card from her husband who is dying of tuberculosis, to the eerily familiar “The One in White,” in which a newspaper reporter covers an incident of American military adventurism in a foreign land, these short stories are intimate and fascinating glimpses into the lives of ordinary people in an extraordinary age. “A wonderful collection.”—The Atlantic MonthlyShow book
A Picador Paperback OriginalTessa Hadley's stories trace the currents of desire, desperation, and mischief that that lie hidden inside domestic relationships.A mother hears her son's confession that he's cheating on his girlfriend; a student falls in love with a professor and initiates an affair with a man who looks just like him. A boy on a seaside vacation realizes that a grown-up woman is pressing dangerously close.In Tessa Hadley's Sunstroke and Other Stories, everyone conspires to hold the loving and stable surface of family life together, as old secrets and new appetites threaten to blow it apart.Show book
