Red Car - Stories

Sallie Bingham

Summary

A dozen “vibrant . . . strikingly perceptive” stories about love—romantic, familial, comedic, and tragic, by the celebrated novelist and playwright (Booklist). Crossing a range of landscapes and eras, spanning age and gender, and circling taboos with a sly wit, “these 12 luminous stories . . . feature narrators who find mature, often solitary forms of reckoning, and even happiness. There is not a false note in Bingham’s striking collection” (Publishers Weekly). In “A Gift for Burning” a woman regrets wasting all her energy on getting married, getting unmarried, and getting married again; “That Winter” introduces us to a woman writer in a Colorado cabin, isolated by the brutal weather, and liberated by a mysterious guest; in “Sagesse,” an American family gets a startling awakening while vacationing on the beaches of Normandy after World War II; the fearsome and tiring demands of matrimony are exposed in “Porn”; “Sweet Peas” exquisitely seizes on one single precious moment that destroys a couple’s budding romance; and in the title story, the eponymous ‘65 Pontiac comes to symbolize the inevitable end of a marriage. Praised for her “skillfully suggestive amalgam of Katherine Mansfield and Eudora Welty . . . and their “unblinking gaze”, Red Car is Sallie Bingham at her masterful best (The New York Times Book Review).

Available since: 04/01/2008.

Print length: 194 pages.

Other books that might interest you

Sword Song

Bernard Cornwell

The fourth installment of Bernard Cornwell’s bestselling series chronicling the epic saga of the making of England, “like Game of Thrones, but real” (The Observer, London)—the basis for The Last Kingdom, the hit BBC America television series.
The year is 885, and England is at peace, divided between the Danish kingdom to the north and the Saxon kingdom of Wessex in the south. Uhtred, the dispossessed son of a Northumbrian lord—warrior by instinct, Viking by nature—has finally settled down. He has land, a wife and two children, and a duty given to him by King Alfred to hold the frontier on the Thames. But then trouble stirs: a dead man has risen, and new Vikings have arrived to occupy the decayed Roman city of London. Their dream is to conquer Wessex, and to do it they need Uhtred’s help.
Alfred has other ideas. He wants Uhtred to expel the Viking raiders from London. Uhtred must weigh his oath to the king against the dangerous turning tide of shifting allegiances and deadly power struggles. And other storm clouds are gathering: Alfred’s daughter is newly married, but by a cruel twist of fate, her very existence now threatens Alfred’s kingdom. It is Uhtred—half Saxon, half Dane—whose uncertain loyalties must now decide England’s future.
Sword Song is Cornwell’s finest work yet—vivid with period detail, this breathtaking adventure throroughly reimagines one of the most fascinating tales in all of history—the birth of England—and breathes life into the brilliant king who made it possible: Alfred the Great.

Show book

The Black Tower - A Novel

Louis Bayard

Vidocq! Master of disguise and chief of a newly created plainclothes police force, Vidocq is a man whose name sends terror rippling through the Parisian underworld of 1818—and the inconsequential life of Hector Carpentier is violently shaken when Vidocq storms into it. A former medical student living in his mother's Latin Quarter boardinghouse, Hector finds himself dragged into a dangerous mystery surrounding the fate of the dauphin, the ten-year-old son of King Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette presumed to have suffered a cruel death years earlier in Paris's dreaded Temple. But the truth of what happened may be even more shocking—and it will fall to an aimless young man and the most feared detective in Paris to see justice done for a frightened little boy in a black tower . . . no matter what the cost.

Show book

Gato

Margaret Elphinstone

An unusual love story set in the Middle Ages, Gato is the story of a young child brought up in a mill. The quiet hardworking lives of the people at the mill are disturbed by the arrival of a wandering Spanish Friar. What is going on between the miller and his wife, and the Friar? The child at the centre of the story tries to understand.The only creatures the child is close to are the mill cats. After the Friar's stay, there is always one called Gato, Spanish for 'cat'.

Show book

Goldsmith's Friend Abroad Again

Mark Twain

This satire on the U.S.A.'s myth of being the "Home of the Oppressed, where all men are free and equal", is unrelenting in its pursuit of justice through exposure. It draws a scathingly shameful portrait of how Chinese immigrants were treated in 19th century San Francisco. (Introduction by John Greenman)

Show book

In the Shadow of the Prophet

A faf

In the Shadow of the Prophet is a novel set in the Middle East, during the time of transition from paganism to Islam. The novel chronicles the stories of two sisters, Noor and Sawdah, whose lives are transformed by their personal experiences and by the dramatic changes in the world around them.

Show book

The Man from Berlin

Luke McCallin

In war-torn Yugoslavia, a beautiful young filmmaker and photographer-a veritable hero to her people-and a German officer have been brutally murdered. Assigned to the case is military intelligence officer Captain Gregor Reinhardt. Already haunted by his wartime actions and the mistakes he's made off the battlefield, he soon finds that his investigation may be more than just a murder, and that the late Yugoslavian heroine may have been much more brilliant-and treacherous-than anyone knew. Maneuvering his way through a minefield of political, military, and personal agendas and vendettas, Reinhardt knows that someone is leaving a trail of dead bodies to cover their tracks. But those bloody tracks may lead Reinhardt to a secret hidden within the ranks of the powerful that they will do anything to keep. And his search for the truth may kill him before he ever finds it.

Show book