Рафи Забор0.0 The hero of Rafi Zabor's first novel is an alto saxophone virtuoso trying to evolve a personal style out of Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, and Ornette Coleman. He also happens to be a walking, talking, Shakespeare-and Blake-quoting bear whose keen sense of irony protects him from the double loneliness of the artist and animal in an underappreciative metropolis.The scion of a long line of European circus bears (and the product of an amazing roll of the genetic dice), the Bear, when we first meet him, is eking out a living doing a routinely humiliating street dancing art with his friend and keeper, Jones. But what the Bear is really best at -- besides making himself cosmically miserable -- is playing the alto with his world-calls set of chops. One day he makes a bold foray from their apartment to jam with Arthur Blythe and Lester Bowie -- real-life musicians rub elbows with fictional counterparts throughout the novel -- at a New York club, thus beginning a musical and romantic odyssey. A nightclub bust followed by long dark nights of the soul in New York City's dankest jail. Freedom, a recording contract, underground fame, a road tour that is alternately hilarious, scary, ridiculous, and inspiring. A vexed, physically passionate, and anatomically correct interspecies love affair with a beautiful woman named Iris. And, finally, a triumphant return to a jazz club inside the Brooklyn Bridge, where the Bear plays a solo where it all comes together for him, and blows him all the way back home.
Джина Беррио0.0 This remarkable collection received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the Rea Award for the Short Story, a gold medal from the Commonwealth Club of California, and the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award. For four decades Gina Berriault has been writing short stories praised for their elegance, compassion, range, and psychological intelligence. Writers from Raymond Carver to Andre Dubus have championed her work, which has been published in magazines from The Paris Review to Harpers Bazaar. Though she has received many fellowships and prizes, she has been too often overlooked.Suddenly, however, this has changed. In 1997, Berriault captured four of this countrys most prestigious awards: The National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Rea Award for the Short Story, and a gold medal from the Commonwealth Club of California. In addition, the book reviewers in her home state of California bestowed upon her the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award. Brigitte Frase, writing for Newsday, seemingly had a premonition when she wrote in December of 1996, Gina Berriault has been writing superbly for [forty] years. Its time she became an overnight sensation.Berriaults deep understanding of human emotions and human predicaments draws us into her stories--a librarian pursued by a homeless man searching for the meaning of his life, a daughter listening to her father as he speaks awkwardly to his heartbroken mistress, a son reintroducing himself to his parents after many years of absence. From her first lines (When Milo Jukovich was 19, he introduced himself to his father) to her last (She heard his breath take over for him and, in that secretive way the sleeper knows nothing about, carry on his life) her narrative sense and her eye for detail astound.She is a writer of uncommon range, her moods sometimes distanced and ironic, other times achingly raw and direct. She has said that she is indebted to the Russians--Chekhov, Gogol, Tolstoy,and Turgenev--for her literary inheritance, but she rejects every way of categorizing her writing. I find my sustenance in the outward, she says, in the wealth of humankind everywhere, and do not wish to be thought of as a Jewish writer or a feminist writer or as a Californian writer or as a leftwing writer or categorized by any interpretation. I find it liberating to roam wherever my heart and my mind guide me.
Ричард Форд3.6 Этот роман, получивший Пулитцеровскую премию и Премию Фолкнера, один из самых важных в современной американской и мировой литературе. Экзистенциальная хроника, почти поминутная, о нескольких днях из жизни обычного человека, на долю которого выпали и обыкновенное счастье, и обыкновенное горе и который пытается разобраться в себе, в устройстве своего существования, постигнуть смысл собственного бытия и бытия страны. Здесь циничная ирония идет рука об руку с трепетной и почти наивной надеждой. Фрэнк Баскомб ступает по жизни, будто она – натянутый канат, а он – неумелый канатоходец. Он отправляется в нескончаемую и одновременно стремительную одиссею, смешную и горькую, чтобы очистить свое сознание от наслоений пустого, добраться до самой сердцевины самого себя. Ричард Форд создал поразительной силы образ, вызывающий симпатию, неприятие, ярость, сочувствие, презрение и восхищение. «День независимости» – великий роман нашего времени.
Дэвид Гутерсон4.1 В водах залива Пьюджет-Саунд найдено тело одного из местных рыбаков. Подозрение падает на американца японского происхождения Миямото Кабуо.
Роман английского писателя Дэвида Гутерсона - это история жизни обитателей маленького острова, сосуществующих в замкнутом пространстве и вынужденных пересматривать некоторые принципы ради мира и покоя.
Philip Roth4.0 What if a lookalike stranger stole your name, usurped your biography, and went about the world pretending to be you?
In this tour de force of fact and fiction, Philip Roth meets a man who may or may not be Philip Roth. Because someone with that name has been touring the State of Israel, promoting a bizarre exodus in reverse of the Jews. Roth decides to stop him - even if that means impersonating his impersonator.
Suspenseful, hilarious, hugely impassioned, pulsing with intelligence and narrative energy, Operation Shylock is at once a spy story, a political thriller, a meditation on identity, and a confession.
Энни Пру3.7 В 1944 году Лоял Блад тайно хоронит тело случайно убитой им подруги на каменистом склоне холма в Вермонте и пускается в бега...
Вся его дальнейшая жизнь — бессмысленные и бесцельные скитания по американскому Западу длиной в сорок лет, случайные заработки, панический страх полюбить, остепениться…
Единственный контакт с семьей и прошлым — открытки без обратного адреса. Лоял шлет их снова и снова, даже не зная, насколько все изменилось на его родине и есть ли еще, кому читать эти открытки...
Дон Делилло3.8 Дон Делилло (р.1936) - американский писатель и драматург, лауреат ряда престижных премий. За роман "Мао II" (1991 г.) был удостоен премии "ПЕН\Фолкнер". Спустя десять лет, когда рухнули башни в Нью-Йорке, Делилло объявили пророком.
Эта книга об эпохе, когда будущее принадлежит толпам, а шедевры создаются с помощью гексогена. Ее герой - легендарный американский писатель, много лет проживший отшельником, - оказывается ключевой фигурой в игре ближневосточных террористов.
Джон Эдгар Вайдман0.0 From “one of America’s premier writers of fiction” (New York Times) comes this novel inspired by the 1985 police bombing of a West Philadelphia row house owned by the back-to-nature, Afrocentric cult known as Move. The bombing killed eleven people and started a fire that destroyed sixty other houses. At the center of the story is Cudjoe, a writer and exile who returns to his old neighborhood after spending a decade fleeing from his past, and his search for the lone survivor of the fire — a young boy who was seen running from the flames.
An impassioned, brutally honest journey through the despair and horror of life in urban America, "Philadelphia Fire isn't a book you read so much as one you breathe" (San Francsisco Chronicle).
Эдгар Л. Доктороу3.8 Роман "Билли Батгейт" - жемчужина современной американской прозы, в 1989 г. был удостоен престижной премии "ПЕН-Фолкнер" и экранизирован режиссером Робертом Бентономв 1991 г.
Нью-Йорк, 1930-е. Пятнадцатилетний сирота Билли Батгейт связывается с легендарным гангстером Немцем Шульцем, и банда, по сути, становится для мальчишки приемной семьей. Перед Билли открываются тайные тропы уголовного мира, которые могут привести на вершину криминального успеха - босс видит в способном ученике своего преемника. Но, влюбившись в его новую подружку, парень невольно задумывается: а так ли уж завидна судьба крестного сына мафии?
James Salter0.0 First published nearly a quarter-century ago and one of the very few short-story collections to win the PEN/Faulkner Award, this is American fiction at its most vital - each narrative a masterpiece of sustained power and seemingly effortless literary grace. Two New York attorneys newly flush with wealth embark on a dissolute tour of Italy; an ambitious young screenwriter unexpectedly discovers the true meaning of art and glory; a ruder, far off in the fields, is involved in an horrific accident - night is falling, and she must face her destiny alone. These stories confirm James Salter as one of the finest writers of our time.
T. C. Boyle0.0 Haunted by the burden of his family's traitorous past, woozy with pot, cheap wine and sex, and disturbed by a frighteningly real encounter with some family ghosts, Walter van Brunt is about to have a collision with history.
It will lead Walter to search for his lost father. And it will send the story into the past of the Hudson River Valley, from the late 1960's back to the anticommunist riots of the 1940's to the late seventeenth century, where the long-hidden secrets of three families--the aristocratic van Warts, the Native-American Mohonks, and Walter's own ancestors, the van Brunts--will be revealed.
Ричард Уайли0.0 It’s Tokyo, 1941. Teddy Maki and Jimmy Yakamoto are Japanese-American friends and jazz musicians playing Tokyo’s lively nightclub scene. Stranded in Japan after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Teddy and Jimmy are drafted into the
Питер Тейлор0.0 From the grand master of the American short story, these fourteen tales of domestic life in the South during the thirties and forties explore that extraordinary world of manners, expectations and unspoken understanding. The reader is drawn as if by magnetic force into a world rendered in breathtaking, painterly detail. These stories are marvelous entertainments, rich with amusement, yet Taylor renders his characters truly and understands them in a profoundly meaningful way.
Tobias Wolff0.0 The Barracks Thief is the story of three young paratroopers waiting to be shipped out to Vietnam. Brought together one sweltering afternoon to stand guard over an ammunition dump threatened by a forest fire, they discover in each other an unexpected capacity for recklessness and violence. Far from being alarmed by this discovery, they are exhilarated by it; they emerge from their common danger full of confidence in their own manhood and in the bond of friendship they have formed.
This confidence is shaken when a series of thefts occur. The author embraces the perspectives of both the betrayer and the betrayed, forcing us to participate in lives that we might otherwise condemn, and to recognize the kinship of those lives to our own
Джон Эдгар Вайдман0.0 Reimagining the black neighborhood of his youth Homewood, Pittsburgh -Wideman creates a dazzling and evocative milieu. From the wild and uninhibited 1920s to the narcotized 1970s, "he establishes a mythological and symbolic link between character and landscape, language and plot, that in the hands of a less visionary writer might be little more than stale sociology" (New York Times Book Review).
Тоби Олсон0.0 The action of Toby Olson’s PEN/Faulkner Award-winning novel Seaview sweeps eastward, following three men and two women across a wasted American continent to an apocalyptic confrontation on Cape Cod. Melinda hopes to reach the seaside where she was born before she dies of cancer. Allen, her husband, earns their way back by golf hustling, working the links en route. Outside of Tucson, the two meet up with a Pima Indian also headed toward the Cape to help a distant relative who has claims on a golf course there that is laid out on tribal grounds. Throughout the journey, Allen knows he is being stalked by a former friend, Richard, a drug-pusher whom he has crossed and who is now determined to murder him. The tortured lives of Richard and his wife Gerry stand as a dream of what might have become of Allen and Melinda had things been otherwise. The lines that draw these people together converge at Seaview Links, and on the mad battlefield that this golf course becomes, the novel reaches its complex ending. Seaview’s vibrant language and fateful plot make this study of an America on the edge an unforgettable read.
Дэвид Брэдли0.0 The legends say something happened in Chaneysville. The Chaneysville Incident is the powerful story of one man's obsession with discovering what that something was--a quest that takes the brilliant and bitter young black historian John Washington back through the secrets and buried evil of his heritage. Returning home to care for and then bury his father's closest friend and his own guardian, Old Jack Crawley, he comes upon the scant records of his family's proud and tragic history, which he drives himself to reconstruct and accept. This is the story of John's relationship with his family, the town, and the woman he loves; and also between the past and the present, between oppression and guilt, hate and violence, love and acceptance.
