Pete Dexter0.0 Train is a 18-year-old black caddy at an exclusive L.A. country club. He is a golf prodigy, but the year is 1953 and there is no such thing as a black golf prodigy. Nevertheless, Train draws the interest of Miller Packard, a gambler whose smiling, distracted air earned him the nickname “the Mile Away Man.” Packard’s easy manner hides a proclivity for violence, and he remains an enigma to Train even months later when they are winning high stakes matches against hustlers throughout the country. Packard is also drawn to Norah Still, a beautiful woman scared in a hideous crime, a woman who finds Packard’s tendency toward violence both alluring and frightening. In the ensuing triangular relationship kindness is never far from cruelty.
In Train, National Book Award-winning Pete Dexter creates a startling, irresistibly readable book that crackles with suspense and the live-wire voices of its characters.
Мишель Хуневен0.0 How do people live in this world? is a question that seems to hover, alongside the Hollywood sign, over the neighborhood of Los Feliz. Certainly Pete Ross wonders as much, his run as a successful chef, husband, and father having imploded so spectacularly as to land him back in the fraught care of his mother. Similarly, Alice Black’s life–hinging as it does on a married boyfriend–is yet pending, and Helen Harland’s ministry has thus far failed to enchant her new congregants. Meanwhile, at the retirement home down the street, Alice’s aunt Kate lives in a world whose most vivid presence is her distinguished ancestor William James.
Each of them, then, is trying to divine who or what is both missing and essential. They encounter one another–and several significant others besides–at Helen’s midweek service, and amidst the quotidian tumult their particular desires gradually dovetail in a quest not just for romance and friendship but also for deeper meaning in what one of them calls “the variety show of religious experience.”
Hilarious, surprising, and powerfully engaging, Jamesland displays Michelle Huneven’s subtle understanding of our steadfast hopes and irregular impulses, a humane comedy she shapes with–as the Los Angeles Times wrote of her first novel–“moral nerve, sharp wit, and uncommon generosity.”
Джумпа Лахири4.1 Ашок Гангули выжил в железнодорожной катастрофе, потому что в момент крушения не спал, а читал любимую книгу томик Гоголя.
Спустя годы, эмигрировав с женой в США, он назвал сына Гоголем, скрыв от мальчика истинную причину своего странного выбора. Америка стала для детей Гангули настоящей и единственной родиной, где каждый может добиться успеха. Но почему же тезке великого русского писателя так трудно почувствовать себя счастливым?
Роман лауреата Пулитцеровской премии Джумпы Лахири трогательная семейная драма, которая поднимает близкие автору темы: столкновение разных культур, конфликт поколений, взаимоотношения молодых людей, стремящихся утвердиться в этом мире.
Tobias Wolff4.0 The protagonist of Tobias Wolff’s shrewdly—and at times devastatingly—observed first novel is a boy at an elite prep school in 1960. He is an outsider who has learned to mimic the negligent manner of his more privileged classmates. Like many of them, he wants more than anything on earth to become a writer. But to do that he must first learn to tell the truth about himself.
The agency of revelation is the school literary contest, whose winner will be awarded an audience with the most legendary writer of his time. As the fever of competition infects the boy and his classmates, fraying alliances, exposing weaknesses, Old School explores the ensuing deceptions and betrayals with an unblinking eye and a bottomless store of empathy. The result is further evidence that Wolff is an authentic American master.
Sherman Alexie4.2 Sherman Alexie offers nine poignant and emotionally resonant stories about Native Americans who find themselves at personal and cultural crossroads. In "The Life and Times of Estelle Walks Above", an intellectual feminist Spokane Indian woman saves the lives of dozens of white women all around her, to the bewilderment of her only child. In "Do You Know Where I Am?" two college sweethearts rescue a lost cat - a simple act that has profound moral consequences for the rest of their lives together. In "What You Pawn I Will Redeem", a homeless Indian man must raise $1,000 in twenty-four hours to buy back the fancy dance outfit stolen from his grandmother fifty years earlier. Even as they often make us laugh, Sherman Alexie's stories are driven by a haunting lyricism and naked candour that cut to the heart of the human experience.
Джордж Пелеканос0.0 Bleak, gritty and moving, Soul Circus superbly brings to life a devastating story of life and death in Washington's black ghettos.
Private Investigator Derek Strange and his partner, Terry Quinn, are running a detective business in the seedy underbelly of Washington, DC when they are approached by a young man asking them to find his girlfriend who has gone missing. And so Strange and Quinn find her.
Just another day? Not quite. In the grimy underworld inhabited by Strange, nothing is that simple. For Strange and Quinn's efforts have led to a young mother being brutally murdered--a devastating discovery that causes them both to question the morality by which they live. And yet at the same time they need to continue the search for another missing girl, a teenage runaway who shows up in a porn video. And who hasn't been seen since.
Step by step, Strange and his partner are drawn into the darkness, confronting gunrunners, crime lords, drug dealers, and ordinary people caught up in the ruthless violence of the business. Soul Circus is a heart-stopping thriller that could only have been written by George Pelecanos, the writer who "has gone from cult favorite to acknowledged master" (Booklist).
Дженнифер Доннелли4.4 1906 год. Матильде 16 лет, и больше всего на свете она любит читать. Однако ей предстоит провести всю жизнь на ферме в Северных Лесах, хлопотать по хозяйству, стать женой и матерью, заботиться о семье. О другой судьбе нечего и мечтать. Зря учительница говорит, что у Мэтти есть талант и ей нужно уехать в Нью-Йорк, поступить в университет, стать писательницей…
Устроившись на лето поработать в отель «Гленмор», Мэтти неожиданно становится хранительницей писем Грейс Браун, загадочно исчезнувшей девушки. Может ли быть, что, размышляя о жизни Грейс, Матильда решится изменить свою?
Генри Винцек0.0 A major new biography of Washington, and the first to explore his engagement with American slavery
When George Washington wrote his will, he made the startling decision to set his slaves free; earlier he had said that holding slaves was his "only unavoidable subject of regret." In this groundbreaking work, Henry Wiencek explores the founding father's engagement with slavery at every stage of his life--as a Virginia planter, soldier, politician, president and statesman.
Washington was born and raised among blacks and mixed-race people; he and his wife had blood ties to the slave community. Yet as a young man he bought and sold slaves without scruple, even raffled off children to collect debts (an incident ignored by earlier biographers). Then, on the Revolutionary battlefields where he commanded both black and white troops, Washington's attitudes began to change. He and the other framers enshrined slavery in the Constitution, but, Wiencek shows, even before he became president Washington had begun to see the system's evil.
