Plugging My Friends� Books
If you’re looking for some summer reading, here are some awesome books to consider, with official copy:
In this powerful debut novel, three American soldiers haunted by their actions in Afghanistan search for absolution and human connection in family and civilian life.
Wintric Ellis joins the Army as soon as he graduates from high school, saying goodbye to his girlfriend, Kristen, and to the backwoods California town whose borders have always been the limits of their horizon. Deployed in Afghanistan two years into a directionless war, he struggles to find his bearings in a place where allies could, at any second, turn out to be foes. Two seasoned soldiers, Dax and Torres, take Wintric under their wing.
Together, these three men face an impossible choice: risk death or commit a harrowing act of war. The aftershocks echo long after each returns home to a transfigured world, where his own children may fear to touch him and his nightmares still hold sway.
This richly textured novel telescopes through time to track these unforgettable characters from childhood to parenthood, from redwood forests to open desert roads to the streets of Kabul. Throughout, Jesse Goolsby tackles questions we all face: What is the price of forgiveness? Where can we turn for companionship and understanding? Most of all, what responsibility do we bear toward others: friends, parents, lovers, children, strangers halfway across the world? When violence threatens to sever the links between us, we must strive for connection � at any cost.
Both a timely meditation on the weight of war and a humane tale of family, friendship, and love, ±õ’d Walk with My Friends If I Could Find Them is a novel of disarming eloquence and heart-wrenching wisdom, and the debut of a bold new voice in fiction.
An excerpt:
your house becomes an angry mouth
and the front porch buckles into teeth / the basement salivates like the nile / derek clutches to an empty keg and floats desperate up the stairs / his guitar becomes an oar / jake scales the shelves trying to catch flies with his jaws / sings: nobody knows the trouble / the chimney boards itself closed / the fire groans and chokes / colin writes suicide letters on the bathroom mirror / threatens to hang himself from the lip of the gutters / tyler says farewell and mark says nothing / you and i hide the ladder and find the last bowl of chili waiting in the kitchen / it speaks after weeks of growing its own being and a taste for riddling: / what is a home but not your home? / not the cupboard filled with starving / the walls aching under pressure / the two of us toss around in the stomach of your bedroom like we are rotten / like this house is sick enough to spit us out / like the sink still dripping / i cannot help myself
“How can the world be anything but a music made out of what we are, a jagged tune, a knife song, a wild blood and bone aria? In Rob Talbert’s energetic, frightening, human, kinetic collection we can hear every note. I want to download this book into the musical score it is and listen to it whenever I’m alone but desperately need the world.� �Matthew Dickman
“Rob Talbert’s Jagged Tune is a gorgeous post-industrial lyric hymn to minimum-wage jobs: from corrections officer to pawn shop employee to cruise ship attendant to insurance certificate specialist to retail clerk to unemployed and back again, Talbert’s poems—hewn from life experience—contrast the constraints of work with the ecstasy of nightclubs, their “feral engine� and “deep recess of liquor techno.� “My life depends on night,� he writes, and this is a nocturnal book that embraces the wonder of darkness, its broken song. I am awed by these poems—their unyielding eye, their deft music, their capacity for wisdom, and all the ways in which they illuminate facets of the American experience that we rarely see.� �Erika Meitner
Two women come to Maine in search of family, and find more love, heartbreak, and friendship, than they’d ever imagined one little fishing town could hold.
When Leah, a young New York reporter, meets Henry, she falls in love with everything about him: his freckles, green thumb, and tales of a Maine childhood. They marry quickly and Leah convinces Henry to move back to Menamon. As Leah builds a life there, reporting for The Menamon Star and vowing to be less of an emotional screw-up, the newlyweds are shocked to discover that they don’t know each other nearly so well as they thought they did.
When Quinn’s mother dies, she tracks down the famous folk-singer father she’s never known, in Menamon. Scrappy and smart-mouthed, Quinn gets a job at the local paper, an apartment above the town diner, and tries to shore up the courage to meet her father. But falling in love with her roommate, Rosie, was never part of the plan.
These two unruly women’s work relationship at The Star deepens into best-friendship when they stumble onto a story that shakes sleepy Menamon—and holds damaging repercussions for Leah’s husband and Quinn’s roommate both. As the town descends into turmoil, both women must decide what kind of lives they are willing to fight for.
