Ed's bookshelf: all en-US Wed, 02 Apr 2025 04:48:16 -0700 60 Ed's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg <![CDATA[How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States]]> 40121985 A pathbreaking history of the United States' overseas possessions and the true meaning of its empire

We are familiar with maps that outline all fifty states. And we are also familiar with the idea that the United States is an "empire," exercising power around the world. But what about the actual territories--the islands, atolls, and archipelagos--this country has governed and inhabited?

In How to Hide an Empire, Daniel Immerwahr tells the fascinating story of the United States outside the United States. In crackling, fast-paced prose, he reveals forgotten episodes that cast American history in a new light. We travel to the Guano Islands, where prospectors collected one of the nineteenth century's most valuable commodities, and the Philippines, site of the most destructive event on U.S. soil. In Puerto Rico, Immerwahr shows how U.S. doctors conducted grisly experiments they would never have conducted on the mainland and charts the emergence of independence fighters who would shoot up the U.S. Congress.

In the years after World War II, Immerwahr notes, the United States moved away from colonialism. Instead, it put innovations in electronics, transportation, and culture to use, devising a new sort of influence that did not require the control of space. Rich with absorbing vignettes, full of surprises, and driven by an original conception of what empire and globalization mean today, How to Hide an Empire is a major and compulsively readable work of history.]]> 513 Daniel Immerwahr 0374172145 Ed 5 4.46 2019 How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States
author: Daniel Immerwahr
name: Ed
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2019
rating: 5
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date added: 2025/04/02
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]]> <![CDATA[Hopscotch, Blow-Up, We Love Glenda So Much: Introduction by Ilan Stavans (Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics Series)]]> 20890471 Hopscotch and his unforgettable short stories, Julio Cortázar earned a place among the most innovative authors of the twentieth century. Hopscotch follows the adventures of an Argentinean writer living in Paris with his lover and a circle of bohemian friends, and consists of 155 short chapters that the author advises us to read out of order. Blow-Up brings together the most famous of Cortázar's short fiction--stories where invisible beasts stalk children in their homes, where a man reading a mystery finds out that he is the murderer's intended victim. In Cortázar's work, laws of nature, physics, and narrative all fall away, leaving us with an astonishing new view of the world.]]> 952 Julio Cortázar 0375712666 Ed 0 to-read 4.20 2014 Hopscotch, Blow-Up, We Love Glenda So Much: Introduction by Ilan Stavans (Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics Series)
author: Julio Cortázar
name: Ed
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2014
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/29
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]]> The Library at Mount Char 24579792 A missing God.
A library with the secrets to the universe.
A woman too busy to notice her heart slipping away.
Ěý
Carolyn's not so different from the other people around her. She likes guacamole and cigarettes and steak. She knows how to use a phone. Clothes are a bit tricky, but everyone says nice things about her outfit with the Christmas sweater over the gold bicycle shorts.Ěý

After all, she was a normal American herself once.ĚýĚý

That was a long time ago, of course. Before her parents died. Before she and the others were taken in by the man they called Father.

In the years since then, Carolyn hasn't had a chance to get out much. Instead, she and her adopted siblings have been raised according to Father's ancient customs. They've studied the books in his Library and learned some of the secrets of his power. And sometimes, they've wondered if their cruel tutor might secretly be God.Ěý

Now, Father is missing—perhaps even dead—and the Library that holds his secrets stands unguarded. And with it, control over all of creation.

As Carolyn gathers the tools she needs for the battle to come, fierce competitors for this prize align against her, all of them with powers that far exceed her own.

But Carolyn has accounted for this.

And Carolyn has a plan.

The only trouble is that in the war to make a new God, she's forgotten to protect the things that make her human.]]> 390 Scott Hawkins 0553418610 Ed 0 to-read 4.20 2015 The Library at Mount Char
author: Scott Hawkins
name: Ed
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/27
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]]> Silent Catastrophes: Essays 217114252 From the renowned author of Austerlitz and The Rings of Saturn comes the first English translation of his extraordinary essays on the Austrian writers who shaped his life and work.

Silent Catastrophes brings together the two books W.G. Sebald wrote on the Austrian writers who meant so much to The Description of Misfortune and Strange Homeland, published in Austria in 1985 and 1991.

As a German in self-chosen exile from his country of birth, Sebald found a particular affinity with these writers from a neighboring nation. The traumatic evolution of Austria from vast empire to diminutive Alpine republic, followed by its annexation by Germany, meant that concepts such as "home/land," "borderland" and "exile" occupy a prominent role in its literature, just as they would in Sebald’s own.

Through a series of remarkable close readings of texts by Bernhard, Stifter, Kafka, Handke, Roth, and more, Sebald charts both the pathologies which so often drove their work and the seismic historical forces which shaped them. This sequence of essays will be a revelation to Sebald’s English-language readers, tracing as they do so many of the themes which animate his own literary writings, to which these essays form a kind of prelude. This is an essential new edition from “a writer whose life and work has become a wonderful vindication of literary culture in all its subtle and entrancing complexity� (The Guardian).]]> 544 W.G. Sebald 1400067723 Ed 0 to-read 0.0 1985 Silent Catastrophes: Essays
author: W.G. Sebald
name: Ed
average rating: 0.0
book published: 1985
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/23
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]]> Dark Matter 27833670 A mindbending, relentlessly surprising thriller from the author of the bestselling Wayward Pines trilogy.

Jason Dessen is walking home through the chilly Chicago streets one night, looking forward to a quiet evening in front of the fireplace with his wife, Daniela, and their son, Charlie—when his reality shatters.

"Are you happy with your life?"

Those are the last words Jason Dessen hears before the masked abductor knocks him unconscious.

Before he awakens to find himself strapped to a gurney, surrounded by strangers in hazmat suits.

Before a man Jason's never met smiles down at him and says, "Welcome back, my friend."

In this world he's woken up to, Jason's life is not the one he knows. His wife is not his wife. His son was never born. And Jason is not an ordinary college physics professor, but a celebrated genius who has achieved something remarkable. Something impossible.

Is it this world or the other that's the dream?

And even if the home he remembers is real, how can Jason possibly make it back to the family he loves? The answers lie in a journey more wondrous and horrifying than anything he could've imagined—one that will force him to confront the darkest parts of himself even as he battles a terrifying, seemingly unbeatable foe.

Dark Matter is a brilliantly plotted tale that is at once sweeping and intimate, mind-bendingly strange and profoundly human--a relentlessly surprising science-fiction thriller about choices, paths not taken, and how far we'll go to claim the lives we dream of.]]> 342 Blake Crouch 1101904224 Ed 0 to-read 4.13 2016 Dark Matter
author: Blake Crouch
name: Ed
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/15
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]]> <![CDATA[Charlie Chan is Dead: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Fiction]]> 292042 592 Jessica Hagedorn 0140231110 Ed 0 currently-reading 3.97 1993 Charlie Chan is Dead: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Fiction
author: Jessica Hagedorn
name: Ed
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1993
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/11
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]]> Thérèse Raquin 110871 Therese Raquin is a clinically observed, sinister tale of adultery and murder among the lower classes in nineteenth-century Parisian society.

Set in the claustrophobic atmosphere of a dingy haberdasher's shop in the passage du Pont-Neuf in Paris, this powerful novel tells how the heroine and her lover, Laurent, kill her husband, Camille, but are subsequently haunted by visions of the dead man, and prevented from enjoying the fruits of their crime.

Zola's shocking tale dispassionately dissects the motivations of his characters--mere "human beasts", who kill in order to satisfy their lust--and stands as a key manifesto of the French Naturalist movement, of which the author was the founding father. Published in 1867, this is Zola's most important work before the Rougon-Macquart series and introduces many of the themes that can be traced through the later novel cycle.]]> 201 Émile Zola 0140449442 Ed 0 to-read 3.73 1867 Thérèse Raquin
author: Émile Zola
name: Ed
average rating: 3.73
book published: 1867
rating: 0
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]]> Witchcraft for Wayward Girls 207611566 There’s power in a book�

They call them wayward girls. Loose girls. Girls who grew up too fast. And they’re sent to the Wellwood Home in St. Augustine, Florida, where unwed mothers are hidden by their families to have their babies in secret, give them up for adoption, and most important of all, to forget any of it ever happened.

Fifteen-year-old Fern arrives at the home in the sweltering summer of 1970, pregnant, terrified and alone. Under the watchful eye of the stern Miss Wellwood, she meets a dozen other girls in the same predicament. There’s Rose, a hippie who insists she’s going to find a way to keep her baby and escape to a commune. And Zinnia, a budding musician who knows she’s going to go home and marry her baby’s father. And Holly, a wisp of a girl, barely fourteen, mute and pregnant by no-one-knows-who.

Everything the girls eat, every moment of their waking day, and everything they’re allowed to talk about is strictly controlled by adults who claim they know what’s best for them. Then Fern meets a librarian who gives her an occult book about witchcraft, and power is in the hands of the girls for the first time in their lives. But power can destroy as easily as it creates, and it’s never given freely. There’s always a price to be paid…and it’s usually paid in blood.

In Witchcraft for Wayward Girls, the author of How to Sell a Haunted House and The Final Girl Support Group delivers another searing, completely original novel and further cements his status as a “horror master� (NPR).]]> 482 Grady Hendrix 0593548981 Ed 0 to-read 4.02 2025 Witchcraft for Wayward Girls
author: Grady Hendrix
name: Ed
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/28
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]]> Darkly 208430757
As Dia and her fellow interns delve into the heart of Darkly, they discover hidden symbols, buried clues, and a web of intrigue. Who are these other teens, and what secrets do they keep? Why were any of them really chosen? The answers lie within the twisted labyrinth of Darkly.]]> 399 Marisha Pessl 0593706552 Ed 0 currently-reading 3.71 2024 Darkly
author: Marisha Pessl
name: Ed
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/28
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]]> <![CDATA[Like Cormac McCarthy, But Funny]]> 32596937 0 Ed Park 1536629154 Ed 5 2.38 Like Cormac McCarthy, But Funny
author: Ed Park
name: Ed
average rating: 2.38
book published:
rating: 5
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date added: 2025/02/25
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NB This is an article I wrote - a long appreciation of the great Charles Portis - rather than a “book.� Not sure audio is the best way to experience it. (I was not the reader.) It’s been anthologized a couple times (in READ HARD and ESCAPE VELOCITY), and can also be found on the Believer’s website.
]]> Against the Day 409
With a worldwide disaster looming just a few years ahead, it is a time of unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high places. No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred.

The sizable cast of characters includes anarchists, balloonists, gamblers, corporate tycoons, drug enthusiasts, innocents and decadents, mathematicians, mad scientists, shamans, psychics, and stage magicians, spies, detectives, adventuresses, and hired guns. There are cameo appearances by Nikola Tesla, Bela Lugosi, and Groucho Marx.

As an era of certainty comes crashing down around their ears and an unpredictable future commences, these folks are mostly just trying to pursue their lives. Sometimes they manage to catch up; sometimes it's their lives that pursue them.

Meanwhile, the author is up to his usual business. Characters stop what they're doing to sing what are for the most part stupid songs. Strange sexual practices take place. Obscure languages are spoken, not always idiomatically. Contrary-to-the-fact occurrences occur. If it is not the world, it is what the world might be with a minor adjustment or two. According to some, this is one of the main purposes of fiction.

Let the reader decide, let the reader beware. Good luck.

--Thomas Pynchon

About the Author:
Thomas Pynchon is the author of V., The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity's Rainbow, Slow Learner, a collection of short stories, Vineland and, most recently, Mason and Dixon. He received the National Book Award for Gravity's Rainbow in 1974.]]> 1085 Thomas Pynchon 159420120X Ed 0 currently-reading 4.01 2006 Against the Day
author: Thomas Pynchon
name: Ed
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2006
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/25
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]]> Breakfast of Champions 4980 Alternate cover for this ISBN can be found here

In Breakfast of Champions, one of Kurt Vonnegut’s most beloved characters, the aging writer Kilgore Trout, finds to his horror that a Midwest car dealer is taking his fiction as truth. What follows is murderously funny satire, as Vonnegut looks at war, sex, racism, success, politics, and pollution in America and reminds us how to see the truth.]]> 303 Kurt Vonnegut Jr. 0385334206 Ed 5 4.08 1973 Breakfast of Champions
author: Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
name: Ed
average rating: 4.08
book published: 1973
rating: 5
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date added: 2025/02/18
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]]> Song of Solomon 11334 338 Toni Morrison 140003342X Ed 5 4.15 1977 Song of Solomon
author: Toni Morrison
name: Ed
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1977
rating: 5
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date added: 2025/02/18
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]]> The Wall 59532092
A woman takes a holiday in the Austrian mountains, spending a few days with her cousin and his wife in their hunting lodge. When the couple fails to return from a walk, the woman sets off to look for them. But her journey reaches a sinister and inexplicable dead end. She discovers only a transparent wall behind which there seems to be no life. Trapped alone behind the mysterious wall she begins the arduous work of survival.

This is at once a simple account of potatoes and beans, of hoping for a calf, of counting matches, of forgetting the taste of sugar and the use of one's name, and simultaneously a disturbing dissection of the place of human beings in the natural world.

**PERFECT FOR FANS OF THE YELLOW WALLPAPER, STATION ELEVEN AND THE MARTIAN

VINTAGE EARTH is a collection of novels to transform our relationship with the natural world. Each one is a work of creative activism, a blast of fresh air, a seed from which change can grow. The books in this series reconnect us to the planet we inhabit - and must protect. Discover great writing on the most urgent story of our times.]]> 246 Marlen Haushofer 1784878030 Ed 0 to-read 3.94 1963 The Wall
author: Marlen Haushofer
name: Ed
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1963
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/18
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]]> The Horror in the Museum 1157900 The Horror in the Museum –Locked up for the night, a man will discover the difference between waxen grotesqueries and the real thing.
The Electric Executioner � Aboard a train, a traveler must match wits with a murderous madman.
The Trap � This mirror wants a great deal more than your reflection.
The Ghost-Eater � In an ancient woodland, the past comes to life with a bone-crunching vengeance.
AND TWENTY MORE STORIES OF UNSPEAKABLE EVIL.]]> 480 H.P. Lovecraft 0345485726 Ed 5 3.94 1933 The Horror in the Museum
author: H.P. Lovecraft
name: Ed
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1933
rating: 5
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date added: 2025/02/11
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For one story in particular. I'll tell you about it later.
]]> Collected Poems, 1909-1962 142080
Poet, dramatist, critic, and editor, T. S. Eliot was one of the defining figures of twentieth-century poetry. This edition of Collected Poems 1909-1962 includes his verse from Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) to Four Quartets (1943), and includes such literary landmarks as 'The Waste Land' and 'Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats'.]]> 240 T.S. Eliot 0151189781 Ed 5 4.30 1963 Collected Poems, 1909-1962
author: T.S. Eliot
name: Ed
average rating: 4.30
book published: 1963
rating: 5
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date added: 2025/02/11
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]]> The Book of Disquiet 45974 The Book of Disquiet, an astonishing work that, in George Steiner's words, "gives to Lisbon the haunting spell of Joyce's Dublin or Kafka's Prague." Published for the first time some fifty years after his death, this unique collection of short, aphoristic paragraphs comprises the "autobiography" of Bernardo Soares, one of Pessoa's alternate selves. Part intimate diary, part prose poetry, part descriptive narrative, captivatingly translated by Richard Zenith, The Book of Disquiet is one of the greatest works of the twentieth century.]]> 544 Fernando Pessoa 0141183047 Ed 5 4.46 1982 The Book of Disquiet
author: Fernando Pessoa
name: Ed
average rating: 4.46
book published: 1982
rating: 5
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date added: 2025/02/11
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]]> Hadji Murád 135060 100 Leo Tolstoy 1602060134 Ed 0 to-read 3.90 1912 Hadji Murád
author: Leo Tolstoy
name: Ed
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1912
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/11
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]]> <![CDATA[Victor Halfwit: A Winter's Tale (Seagull World Literature)]]> 9645497 One night in the middle of winter, as deep snow covers the mountains and forests, a doctor is crossing the ridge in Austria from Traich to Föding to see a patient. He stumbles over a body in the darkness and fears it is a corpse. But it’s not a corpse at all. In fact, it’s wooden-legged Victor Halfwit, collapsed, but still very much alive. So begins this simultaneously absurd and tragic tale by celebrated Austrian playwright, novelist, and poet Thomas Bernhard.ĚýCombining the darkly comic voice and vision of Bernhard with the lush and beautiful collages of Indian designer Sunandini Banerjee, Victor Halfwit is a unique and collectible artist’s book. Illustrated in color throughout, this edition imaginatively presents Bernhard’s fable in a distinctive and unconventional style. It is the perfect gift book that will be cherished by fans of Bernhard’s other works and will inspire new interest among visual artists.

]]> 208 Thomas Bernhard 1906497648 Ed 4 3.74 1966 Victor Halfwit: A Winter's Tale (Seagull World Literature)
author: Thomas Bernhard
name: Ed
average rating: 3.74
book published: 1966
rating: 4
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date added: 2025/02/05
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This had been sitting unnoticed on the shelf for years; how it fell into my hands, I'm not sure -- from the publisher, I imagine. I decided to give it a look before (probably) dropping it in the Little Free Library down the street. "Victor Halfwit" is a very short story, blown up to a hilarious length (and trim size). Each page features a few lines of text against a lavish collage. This is minor Bernhard, to be sure, but the parable-like story is told with recognizable Bernhardian anxiety, and I enjoyed the absurd sumptuousness of the package. Four stars is a bit high; this is by no means a must-read. But as a self-proclaimed "winter's tale," it fits the bill, at least for the next few frigid weeks.
]]> The Road 6288
A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don’t know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food—and each other.

The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, “each the other’s world entire,� are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation.]]> 241 Cormac McCarthy 0307265439 Ed 3 3.99 2006 The Road
author: Cormac McCarthy
name: Ed
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2006
rating: 3
read at: 2007/04/01
date added: 2025/02/05
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You can (almost) read this in a sitting. No chapter breaks! No dawdling! The setting is perfectly matched to C. McC.'s style.
]]> Strange Pictures 216670080
A pregnant woman’s sketches on a seemingly innocuous blog conceal a chilling warning.

A child’s picture of his home contains a dark secret message.

A sketch made by a murder victim in his final moments leads an amateur sleuth down a rabbit hole that will reveal a horrifying reality.

Structured around these nine childlike drawings, every one holding a disturbing clue, this novel invites readers to piece together the harrowing truth behind each and the overarching backstory that connects them all. Strange Pictures is the bestselling international debut from mystery-horror YouTube sensation Uketsu—an enigmatic masked figure who has become one of Japan's most talked about contemporary authors.]]> 236 Uketsu 0063433087 Ed 0 to-read 4.05 2022 Strange Pictures
author: Uketsu
name: Ed
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/04
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]]> <![CDATA[The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats]]> 53022 The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats includes all of the poems authorized by Yeats for inclusion in his standard canon. Breathtaking in range, it encompasses the entire arc of his career, from luminous reworking of ancient Irish myths and legends, to passionate meditations on the demands and rewards of youth and old age, from exquisite, occasionally whimsical songs of love, nature, and art to somber and angry poems of life in a nation torn by war and uprising. In observing the development of rich and recurring images and themes over the course of his body of work, we can trace the quest of this century's greatest poet to unite intellect and artistry in a single magnificent vision.

Revised and corrected, this edition includes Yeat's own notes on his poetry, complemented by explanatory notes from esteemed Yeats scholar Richard J. Finneran. The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats is the most comprehensive edition of one of the world's most beloved poets available in paperback.]]> 544 W.B. Yeats 0684807319 Ed 5 4.23 1933 The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats
author: W.B. Yeats
name: Ed
average rating: 4.23
book published: 1933
rating: 5
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date added: 2025/02/03
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]]> Selected Poems 481821
ANNE SEXTON (1928�1974) was an American poet known for her highly personal, confessional verse. A celebrated poet of mid- twentieth century America, Sexton’s impressive body of work continues to be widely read and debated by literary scholars and cultural critics alike. Her poetry explored the many paradoxes within human behavior and motivation.]]> 266 Anne Sexton 0618057048 Ed 0 to-read 4.22 1988 Selected Poems
author: Anne Sexton
name: Ed
average rating: 4.22
book published: 1988
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/03
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]]> The Vampyre 472966 This classic vampire story has inspired generations of authors, from Bram Stoker to Charlaine Harris.

A young English gentleman of means, Aubrey is immediately intrigued by Lord Ruthven, the mysterious newcomer among society’s elite. His unknown origin and curious behavior tantalizes Aubrey’s imagination. But the young man soon discovers a sinister character hidden behind his new friend’s glamorous facade.
Ěý
When the two are set upon by bandits while traveling together in Europe, Ruthven is fatally injured. Before drawing his last breath, he makes the odd request that Aubrey keep his death and crimes secret for a year and a day. But when Ruthven resurfaces in London—making overtures toward Aubrey’s sister—Aubrey realizes this immortal fiend is a vampyre.
Ěý
John William Polidori’s The Vampyre is both a classic tale of gothic horror and the progenitor of the modern romantic vampire myth that has been fodder for artists ranging from Anne Rice to Alan Ball to Francis Ford Coppola. Originally published in 1819, many decades before Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and misattributed to Polidori’s friend Lord Byron, The Vampyre has kept readers up at night for nearly two hundred years.
]]> 72 John William Polidori 1846372828 Ed 0 to-read 3.30 1819 The Vampyre
author: John William Polidori
name: Ed
average rating: 3.30
book published: 1819
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/03
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]]> James 173754979 A brilliant reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—both harrowing and satirical—told from the enslaved Jim's point of view

When Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he runs away until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck has faked his own death to escape his violent father. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond.

Brimming with nuanced humor and lacerating observations that have made Everett a literary icon, this brilliant and tender novel radically illuminates Jim's agency, intelligence, and compassion as never before. James is destined to be a major publishing event and a cornerstone of twenty-first-century American literature.

Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780385550369.]]> 303 Percival Everett Ed 0 to-read 4.47 2024 James
author: Percival Everett
name: Ed
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/02
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]]> At Dusk 40545368 In the evening of his life, a wealthy man begins to wonder if he might have missed the point.

Park Minwoo is, by every measure, a success story. Born into poverty in a miserable neighbourhood of Seoul, he has ridden the wave of development in a rapidly modernising society. Now the director of a large architectural firm, his hard work and ambition have brought him triumph and satisfaction. But when his company is investigated for corruption, he’s forced to reconsider his role in the transformation of his country.

At the same time, he receives an unexpected message from an old friend, Cha Soona, a woman that he had once loved, and then betrayed. As memories return unbidden, Minwoo recalls a world he thought had been left behind � a world he now understands that he has helped to destroy.

In At Dusk, one of Korea's most renowned and respected authors continues his gentle yet urgent project of evaluating Korea’s past, and examining the things, and the people, that have been given up in a never-ending quest to move forward.]]> 192 Hwang Sok-yong 1911617230 Ed 0 to-read 3.68 2015 At Dusk
author: Hwang Sok-yong
name: Ed
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/01
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]]> The Golden Notebook 24100 640 Doris Lessing 006093140X Ed 0 to-read 3.79 1962 The Golden Notebook
author: Doris Lessing
name: Ed
average rating: 3.79
book published: 1962
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/24
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Street-Level Superstar: A Year With Lawrence: 'One of the great Pop biographies' SUNDAY TIMES]]> 213742830 'Will has finally written his masterpiece. I'm glad I could be of assistance' LAWRENCE

'Essential reading' JARVIS COCKER

'Wonderful' BOBBY GILESPIE

'A fascinating tale beautifully told' BRETT ANDERSON

Lawrence is the greatest pop star you have never heard of, his dreams of glory thwarted over the past five decades by bad luck and self-sabotage. At sixty-one, he set off on a new to escape poverty, obscurity and the humiliation of kids at the bus stop laughing at him by writing a smash hit. But what is the cost of a dream?

In 1979, Lawrence formed Felt, who released ten albums and ten singles in ten years before splitting up. In 1991, he reinvented himself with novelty-pop outfit Denim. Signed to EMI, riding the wave of Britpop, in 1997, Denim's song 'Summer Smash' became Radio 1's Single of the Week and looked like a sure-fire hit. Then Princess Diana was killed in a car crash. All copies were melted down. Crushing depression, addiction and homelessness followed... but in the face of it all, Lawrence never gave up.

In Street-Level Superstar, bestselling author and journalist Will Hodgkinson follows Lawrence as he rebuilds his life. He gets mistaken for an old lady by an amorous pensioner, is reduced to dragging sacks of 2p coins to his local bank and wanders through London's distant suburbs in search of lyrical inspiration. As they walk together down rain-soaked streets, Will tells the story of Britain's most eccentric cult star. Will he write the greatest song the world has ever known before the year is out? And was it worth sacrificing everything - family, relationships, health, sanity - for art?]]> 324 HODGKINSON WILL 1785120212 Ed 0 to-read 4.58 Street-Level Superstar: A Year With Lawrence: 'One of the great Pop biographies' SUNDAY TIMES
author: HODGKINSON WILL
name: Ed
average rating: 4.58
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date added: 2025/01/24
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]]> The Philosophy of Translation 210129382 A deep dive into the nature of translation from one of its most acclaimed practitioners
Ěý
Avoiding theoretical debates and clichéd metaphors, award-winning translator Damion Searls has written a fresh, approachable, and convincing account of what translation really is and what translators actually do. As the translator of sixty books from multiple languages, Searls has spent decades grappling with words on the most granular nouns and verbs, accents on people’s names, rhymes, rhythm, “untranslatable� cultural nuances. Here, he connects a wealth of specific examples to larger philosophical issues of reading and perception. Translation, he argues, is fundamentally a way of reading—but reading is much more than taking in information, and translating is far from a mechanical process of converting one word to another. This sharp and inviting exploration of the theory and practice of translation is for anyone who has ever marveled at the beauty, force, and movement of language.]]> 248 Damion Searls 0300247370 Ed 0 to-read 4.41 2024 The Philosophy of Translation
author: Damion Searls
name: Ed
average rating: 4.41
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/22
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]]> Cool for America: Stories 51542107 Expanding the world of his classic-in-the-making debut novel Early Work, Andrew Martin's Cool for America is a hilarious collection of overlapping stories that explores the dark zone between artistic ambition and its achievement

The collection is bookended by the misadventures of Leslie, a young woman (first introduced in Early Work) who moves from New York to Missoula, Montana to try to draw herself out of a lingering depression, and, over the course of the book, gains painful insight into herself through a series of intense friendships and relationships.

Other stories follow young men and women, alone and in couples, pushing hard against, and often crashing into, the limits of their abilities as writers and partners. In one story, two New Jersey siblings with substance-abuse problems relapse together on Christmas Eve; in another, a young couple tries to make sense of an increasingly unhinged veterinarian who seems to be tapping, deliberately or otherwise, into the unspoken troubles between them. In tales about characters as they age from punk shows and benders to book clubs and art museums, the promise of community acts--at least temporarily--as a stay against despair.

Running throughout Cool for America is the characters' yearning for transcendence through art: the hope that, maybe, the perfect, or even just the good-enough sentence, can finally make things right.]]> 272 Andrew Martin 0374108161 Ed 0 3.96 2020 Cool for America: Stories
author: Andrew Martin
name: Ed
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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]]> Amulet 63029 Amulet is a monologue, like Bolano's acclaimed debut in English, By Night in Chile. The speaker is Auxilio Lacouture, a Uruguayan woman who moved to Mexico in the 1960s, becoming the "Mother of Mexican Poetry," hanging out with the young poets in the cafes and bars of the University. She's tall, thin,brand blonde, and her favorite young poet in the 1970s is none other than Arturo Belano (Bolano's fictional stand-in throughout his books). As well as her young poets, Auxilio recalls three remarkable women; the melancholic young philosopher Elena, the exiled Catalan painter Remedios Varo, and Lilian Serpas, a poet who once slept with Che Guevara. And in the course of her imaginary visit to the house of Remedios Varo, Auxilio sees an uncanny landscape, a kind of chasm. This chasm reappears in a vision at the end of the book; an army of children is marching toward it, singing as they go. The children are the idealistic young Latin Americans who came to maturity in the 70s, and the last words of the novel are; "And that song is our amulet."]]> 192 Roberto Bolaño 0811216640 Ed 0 to-read 3.87 1999 Amulet
author: Roberto Bolaño
name: Ed
average rating: 3.87
book published: 1999
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Nazi Literature in the Americas]]> 1178230 Nazi Literature in the Americas was the first of Roberto Bolaño’s books to reach a wide public. When it was published by Seix Barral in 1996, critics in Spain were quick to recognize the arrival of an important new talent. The book presents itself as a biographical dictionary of American writers who flirted with or espoused extreme right-wing ideologies in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It is a tour de force of black humor and imaginary erudition. Nazi Literature in the Americas is composed of short biographies, including descriptions of the writers� works, plus an epilogue (“for Monsters�), which includes even briefer biographies of persons mentioned in passing. All of the writers are imaginary, although they are all carefully and credibly situated in real literary worlds. Ernesto Pérez Masón, for example, in the sample included here, is an imaginary member of the real Orígenes group in Cuba, and his farcical clashes with José Lezama Lima recall stories about the spats between Lezama Lima and Virgilio Piñera, as recounted in Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s Mea Cuba. The origins of the imaginary writers are diverse. Authors from twelve different countries are included. The countries with the most representatives are Argentina (8) and the USA (7).]]> 227 Roberto Bolaño 0811217051 Ed 4 3.93 1996 Nazi Literature in the Americas
author: Roberto Bolaño
name: Ed
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1996
rating: 4
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]]> Monsieur Pain 211365800 Franz Mesmer, um médico do século XVIII, desenvolveu um método de tratamento de doenças humanas servindo-se do magnetismo animal - uma técnica precursora da hipnose que ficou mais conhecida pelo conto Revelação mesmérica, de Edgar Allan Poe. Um dos discípulos do mesmerismo, Pierre Pain, é o protagonista deste romance de Roberto Bolaño, escrito no início dos anos 1980.
Na Paris do entreguerras, Pain é contratado por madame Reynaud para ajudar um sul-americano chamado Vallejo, que sofre de um soluço incurável. Outros médicos avaliaram o homem e nada descobriram.
No entanto, logo o protagonista se encontra envolvido em uma conspiração muito maior do que imaginava. Perseguido por dois homens misteriosos que ele julga serem espanhóis, o mesmerista embarca em uma viagem alucinante pelas ruas de Paris, deparando com artistas de vanguarda, filmes raros de ficção científica e complexos labirintos dignos da imaginação de Jorge Luis Borges.
Monsieur Pain, um dos primeiros romances escritos por Bolaño, é uma peça rara em sua obra: um livro atmosférico, repleto de temas caros à literatura de gênero, como o ocultismo, a busca detetivesca e a confusão entre sonho e realidade. Enquanto Pain se deixa levar pelo mistério, as fronteiras entre o que é real e o que é imaginação se dissolvem.
A revelação final, óbvia para os leitores familiarizados com poesia latino-americana, de que o paciente com soluço se trata do famoso poeta peruano César Vallejo, adiciona ainda mais camadas interpretativas a esta estranha história. As circunstâncias da morte de Vallejo, por sinal, continuam enigmáticas até hoje. Por fim, o epílogo adianta uma técnica narrativa que seria depois consagrada por Bolaño: muitas vozes buscando documentar a vida de pessoas, algumas reais, outras fictícias.]]> 144 Roberto Bolaño 1250898145 Ed 0 to-read 3.38 1999 Monsieur Pain
author: Roberto Bolaño
name: Ed
average rating: 3.38
book published: 1999
rating: 0
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]]> The Death of Virgil 27426
Begun while Broch was imprisoned in a German concentration camp, The Death of Virgil is part historical novel and part prose poem - and always an intensely musical and immensely evocative meditation on the relation between life and death, the ancient and the modern.]]> 493 Hermann Broch 0679755489 Ed 0 to-read 4.14 1945 The Death of Virgil
author: Hermann Broch
name: Ed
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1945
rating: 0
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]]> Nude In Mink 9828128 Sax Rohmer Ed 0 to-read 3.20 1950 Nude In Mink
author: Sax Rohmer
name: Ed
average rating: 3.20
book published: 1950
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/18
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]]> We Do Not Part 205436018 Han Kang’s most revelatory book since The Vegetarian, We Do Not Part tells the story of a friendship between two women while powerfully reckoning with a hidden chapter of Korean history.

One winter morning, Kyungha receives an urgent message from her friend Inseon to visit her at a hospital in Seoul. Inseon has injured herself in an accident, and she begs Kyungha to return to Jeju Island, where she lives, to save her beloved pet—a white bird called Ama.

A snowstorm hits the island when Kyungha arrives. She must reach Inseon’s house at all costs, but the icy wind and squalls slow her down as night begins to fall. She wonders if she will arrive in time to save the animal—or even survive the terrible cold that envelops her with every step. Lost in a world of snow, she doesn't yet suspect the vertiginous plunge into the darkness that awaits her at her friend's house.

Blurring the boundaries between dream and reality, We Do Not Part powerfully illuminates a forgotten chapter in Korean history, buried for decades—bringing to light the lost voices of the past to save them from oblivion. Both a hymn to an enduring friendship and an argument for remembering, it is the story of profound love in the face of unspeakable violence—and a celebration of life, however fragile it might be.]]> 256 Han Kang 0593595459 Ed 0 to-read 3.88 2021 We Do Not Part
author: Han Kang
name: Ed
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/18
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]]> Bina: A Novel in Warnings 52536305 The extraordinary bestselling novel from the acclaimed writer whose previous book, Martin John, was shortlisted for the Giller Prize, and whose debut, Malarky, won the Amazon First Novel Award.

"My name is Bina and I'm a very busy woman. That's Bye-na, not Beena. I don't know who Beena is, but I expect she's having a happy life. I don't know who you are, or the state of your life. But if you've come all this way here to listen to me, your life will undoubtedly get worse. I'm here to warn you ..."

So begins this "novel in warnings"--an unforgettable tour de force in the voice of an ordinary-extraordinary woman who has simply had enough. Through the character of Bina, who is writing out her story on the backs of discarded envelopes, Anakana Schofield filters a complex moral universe filled with humour and sadness, love and rage, and the consolations, obligations and mysteries of lifelong friendship. A work of great power, skill, and transformative empathy from a unique and astonishing writer.

"Anakana Schofield's Bina is a fiction of the rarest and darkest kind, a work whose pleasures must be taken measure for measure with its pains. Few writers operate the scales of justice with more precision, and Schofield is no less exacting in what she chooses to weigh. The novel's themes--male violence, the nature of moral courage, the contemporary problems of truth and individuality, the status of the female voice--could hardly be more timely or germane. Schofield's sense of injustice is unblinking and without illusion, yet her writing is so vivacious, so full of interest and lust for life: she is the most compassionate of storytellers, wearing the guise of the blackest comedian." --Rachel Cusk, Giller Prize-shortlisted author of Outline and Transit

"Intimate, disarming, and riotous, Bina is a searing exploration of one woman's soul that unwinds like a reluctant confession. Whether Bina is rescuing a ne'er-do-well from a ditch, taking a hammer to a plane or considering the dark request of her best friend, Schofield has created a compelling, practical everywoman--someone who has had enough and is ready to make a spectacle." --Eden Robinson, Giller Prize-shortlisted author of Son of a Trickster and Monkey Beach

"Insightful. Inventive. Hilarious. Genius." --Eimear McBride, author of A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing, winner of the Bailey's Prize for Women's Fiction, and The Lesser Bohemians, winner of the James Tait Memorial Prize]]> 336 Anakana Schofield 0735273227 Ed 0 to-read 3.32 2019 Bina: A Novel in Warnings
author: Anakana Schofield
name: Ed
average rating: 3.32
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/15
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]]> The Last Samurai 190372 544 Helen DeWitt 0786887001 Ed 0 4.12 2000 The Last Samurai
author: Helen DeWitt
name: Ed
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2000
rating: 0
read at: 2008/07/19
date added: 2025/01/14
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]]> 'Salem's Lot 5413 Also contains: One For the Road, Jerusalem's Lot. For standalone novel see ISBN 9780450031069.

Stephen King's second novel, the classic vampire bestseller 'Salem's Lot, tells the story of evil in small-town America. For the first time in a major trade edition, this terrifying novel is accompanied by previously unpublished material from King's archive, two short stories, and eerie photographs that bring King's fictional darkness and evil to vivid life.

When Stephen King’s classic thriller 'Salem's Lot hit the stands in 1975, it thrilled and terrified millions of readers with tales of demonic evil in small-town America. Now, thirty years later and still scaring readers witless, 'Salem's Lot reemerges in a brilliant new edition, complete with photographs, fifty pages of deleted and alternate scenes, and two short stories related to the events of the novel.

While the original edition of 'Salem's Lot will forever be a premier horror classic, 'Salem's Lot: Illustrated Edition, with the inclusion of material from King’s archive, is destined to become a classic in its own right and a must-have for all Stephen King fans. In this edition, the hair-raising story of Jerusalem’s Lot, a small town in Maine whose inhabitants succumb to the evil allure of a new resident, is told as the author envisioned it, complete with fifty pages of alternate and deleted scenes. With a new introduction by the author, two short stories related to the events and residents of Jerusalem’s Lot, the lavishly creepy photographs of Jerry Uelsmann, and a stunning new page design, this edition brings the story to life in words and pictures as never before.

No library will be complete without this ideal collector’s item for any King aficionado, the definitive illustrated edition of the great 'Salem's Lot.]]> 594 Stephen King 0385516487 Ed 5 horror 4.28 1975 'Salem's Lot
author: Stephen King
name: Ed
average rating: 4.28
book published: 1975
rating: 5
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date added: 2025/01/13
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]]> Master of Reality 2286938 112 John Darnielle 0826428991 Ed 4
This one's more of a pamphlet, but it packs a punch...]]> 4.07 2008 Master of Reality
author: John Darnielle
name: Ed
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2008
rating: 4
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date added: 2025/01/07
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Highly recommended! Not your average 33 1/3 book....

This one's more of a pamphlet, but it packs a punch...
]]> <![CDATA[Murder in Mesopotamia (Hercule Poirot, #14)]]> 16360
It was clear to nurse Amy Leatheran that something sinister was going on at the Hassanieh dig, something associated with the presence of â€Lovely Louiseâ€�, the wife of the celebrated archaeologist Dr. Leidner. But she couldn't pinpoint it.

In a few days� time Hercule Poirot was due to drop in at the excavation site. With Louise suffering terrifying hallucinations, and tension within the group becoming almost unbearable, Poirot might just be too late…]]> 264 Agatha Christie 0007113803 Ed 4 3.92 1936 Murder in Mesopotamia (Hercule Poirot, #14)
author: Agatha Christie
name: Ed
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1936
rating: 4
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date added: 2025/01/05
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I like books written by characters who claim not to be writers. Also: Is there another series in which the main character (Poirot) is observed by a *different* narrator each time out? (I know, not all HP novels are done in the first person.)
]]> Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 49944931
Kim Jiyoung is a sister made to share a room while her brother gets one of his own.

Kim Jiyoung is a female preyed upon by male teachers at school. Kim Jiyoung is a daughter whose father blames her when she is harassed late at night. Ěý

Kim Jiyoung is a good student who doesn’t get put forward for internships. Kim Jiyoung is a model employee but gets overlooked for promotion. Kim Jiyoung is a wife who gives up her career and independence for a life of domesticity.

Kim Jiyoung has started acting strangely.

Kim Jiyoung is depressed.

Kim Jiyoung is mad.

Kim Jiyoung is her own woman.

Kim Jiyoung is every woman.

Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 is the South Korean sensation that has got the whole world talking. The life story of one young woman born at the end of the twentieth century raises questions about endemic misogyny and institutional oppression that are relevant to us all.

Riveting, original and uncompromising, this is the most important book to have emerged from South Korea since Han Kang’s The Vegetarian. ĚýĚý

Ěý]]> 163 Cho Nam-Joo Ed 0 to-read 4.18 2016 Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982
author: Cho Nam-Joo
name: Ed
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/04
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]]> Universality 214269374 Remember—words are your weapons, they’re your tools, your currency: a twisty, slippery descent into the rhetoric of truth and power from a "powerful new voice in British Literature� (The Sunday Times).

Late one night on a Yorkshire farm, in the midst of an illegal rave, a young man is nearly bludgeoned to death with a solid gold bar.

An ambitious young journalist sets out to uncover the truth surrounding the attack, connecting the dots between an amoral banker landlord, an iconoclastic columnist, and a radical anarchist movement that has taken up residence on the farm. She solves the mystery, but her viral exposé raises more questions than it answers, Who wrote it? Why? And how much of it is true? Through a voyeuristic lens, and with a simmering power, the book focuses in on what we say, how we say it, and what we really mean.

The thrilling novel from one of the most acclaimed and incisive young novelists working today, Universality is a compelling, unsettling celebration of the spectacular, appalling force of language. It dares you to look away.]]> 176 Natasha Brown 0593977300 Ed 0 to-read 3.47 2025 Universality
author: Natasha Brown
name: Ed
average rating: 3.47
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/03
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]]> Spent: A Comic Novel 217896244
Meanwhile, Alison’s first graphic memoir about growing up with her father, a taxidermist who specialized in replicas of Victorian animal displays, has been adapted into a highly successful TV series. It’s a phenomenon that makes Alison, formerly on the cultural margins, the envy of her friend group (recognizable as characters, now middle-aged and living communally in Vermont, from Bechdel’s beloved comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For).

As the TV showĚýDeath and TaxidermyĚýracks up Emmy after Emmy—and when Alison’s Pauline Bunyanesque partner Holly posts an instructional wood-chopping video that goes viral—Alison’s own envy spirals.ĚýWhy couldn’t she be the writer for a critically lauded and wildly popular reality TV show…likeĚýQueer Eye...showing people how to free themselves from consumer capitalism and live a more ethical life?

Spent’s rollicking and masterful denouement—making the case for seizing what’s true about life in the world at this moment, before it’s too late—once again proves that “nobody does it better� (New York Times Book Review) than the real Alison Bechdel.]]> 272 Alison Bechdel 0063278928 Ed 0 to-read 3.95 2025 Spent: A Comic Novel
author: Alison Bechdel
name: Ed
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/03
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]]> <![CDATA[Black Sun: The Brief Transit and Violent Eclipse of Harry Crosby]]> 254007 Includes an afterword by the author

Harry Crosby was the godson of J. P. Morgan and a friend of Ernest Hemingway. Living in Paris in the twenties and directing the Black Sun Press, which published James Joyce among others, Crosby was at the center of the wild life of the lost generation. Drugs, drink, sex, gambling, the deliberate derangement of the senses in the pursuit of transcendent revelation: these were Crosby's pastimes until 1929, when he shot his girlfriend, the recent bride of another man, and then himself.

Black Sun is novelist and master biographer Geoffrey Wolff's subtle and striking picture of a man who killed himself to make his life a work of art.]]> 379 Geoffrey Wolff 1590170660 Ed 5 3.92 1976 Black Sun: The Brief Transit and Violent Eclipse of Harry Crosby
author: Geoffrey Wolff
name: Ed
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1976
rating: 5
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date added: 2025/01/01
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]]> A Box of Matches 28231
Nicholson Baker’s extraordinary ability to describe and celebrate life in all its rich ordinariness has never been so beautifully achieved.]]> 192 Nicholson Baker 0375706038 Ed 4 3.73 2003 A Box of Matches
author: Nicholson Baker
name: Ed
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2003
rating: 4
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date added: 2024/12/31
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]]> Vox 28229 165 Nicholson Baker 1862070962 Ed 5 3.45 1992 Vox
author: Nicholson Baker
name: Ed
average rating: 3.45
book published: 1992
rating: 5
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date added: 2024/12/31
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]]> U and I 92541 192 Nicholson Baker 0679735755 Ed 5 3.76 1991 U and I
author: Nicholson Baker
name: Ed
average rating: 3.76
book published: 1991
rating: 5
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date added: 2024/12/31
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]]> <![CDATA[The Anthologist (The Paul Chowder Chronicles #1)]]> 6364068 The Anthologist is narrated by Paul Chowder -- a once-in-a-while-published kind of poet who is writing the introduction to a new anthology of poetry. He's having a hard time getting started because his career is floundering, his girlfriend Roz has recently left him, and he is thinking about the great poets throughout history who have suffered far worse and deserve to feel sorry for themselves. He has also promised to reveal many wonderful secrets and tips and tricks about poetry, and it looks like the introduction will be a little longer than he'd thought. What unfolds is a wholly entertaining and beguiling love story about poetry: from Tennyson, Swinburne, and Yeats to the moderns (Roethke, Bogan, Merwin) to the staff of The New Yorker, what Paul reveals is astonishing and makes one realize how incredibly important poetry is to our lives. At the same time, Paul barely manages to realize all of this himself, and the result is a tenderly romantic, hilarious, and inspired novel.]]> 245 Nicholson Baker 1416572449 Ed 5 3.77 2009 The Anthologist (The Paul Chowder Chronicles #1)
author: Nicholson Baker
name: Ed
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2009
rating: 5
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date added: 2024/12/31
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]]> <![CDATA[Playing at the World, Vol. 1: The Invention of Dungeons & Dragons (Game Histories)]]> 201632570
This new edition of Playing at the World is the first of two volumes that update the 720-page original tome of the same name from 2012. This first volume is The Invention of Dungeons & Dragons, which explores the publication of that iconic game. (The second volume is The Three Pillars of Role-Playing Games, a deeper dive into the history of the setting, system, and character of D & D.) In this first volume, Jon Peterson distills the story of how the wargaming clubs and fanzines circulating around the upper Midwest in the 1970s culminated in Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson’s seminal role-playing game, D & D. It augments the research of the original editions with new insights into the crucial period in 1972�3 when D & D began to take shape.

Drawing from primary sources ranging from eighteenth-century strategists to modern hobbyists, Playing at the World explores the origins of wargames and roleplaying through the history of conflict simulations and the eccentric characters who drove the creation of a signature cultural innovation in the late twentieth century. Filled with unparalleled archival research (from obscure fanzines to letters, drafts, and other ephemera), this new edition of Playing at the World is the ultimate geek’s guide to the original RPG. As such, it is an indispensable resource for academics and game fans exploring the origins of the hobby.]]> 392 Jon Peterson 0262548771 Ed 0 currently-reading 4.50 2024 Playing at the World, Vol. 1: The Invention of Dungeons & Dragons (Game Histories)
author: Jon Peterson
name: Ed
average rating: 4.50
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/27
shelves: currently-reading
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]]> The World According to Garp 7069 610 John Irving 0345915593 Ed 5 4.11 1978 The World According to Garp
author: John Irving
name: Ed
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1978
rating: 5
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]]> Sophie’s Choice 228560 562 William Styron 0679736379 Ed 5 4.18 1979 Sophie’s Choice
author: William Styron
name: Ed
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1979
rating: 5
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date added: 2024/12/27
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]]> <![CDATA[Slaves of Christo (Another Booklyn Chapbook, Issue One)]]> 163200243 0 Ed 4 4.00 Slaves of Christo (Another Booklyn Chapbook, Issue One)
author: Julia Hall; Chrissy Leggio; Peter Spagnuolo; Booklyn Artists Alliance
name: Ed
average rating: 4.00
book published:
rating: 4
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date added: 2024/12/27
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]]> The Catcher in the Rye 5107 It's Christmas time and Holden Caulfield has just been expelled from yet another school...

Fleeing the crooks at Pencey Prep, he pinballs around New York City seeking solace in fleeting encounters—shooting the bull with strangers in dive hotels, wandering alone round Central Park, getting beaten up by pimps and cut down by erstwhile girlfriends. The city is beautiful and terrible, in all its neon loneliness and seedy glamour, its mingled sense of possibility and emptiness. Holden passes through it like a ghost, thinking always of his kid sister Phoebe, the only person who really understands him, and his determination to escape the phonies and find a life of true meaning.

The Catcher in the Rye is an all-time classic in coming-of-age literature- an elegy to teenage alienation, capturing the deeply human need for connection and the bewildering sense of loss as we leave childhood behind.

J.D. Salinger's (1919�2010) classic novel of teenage angst and rebellion was first published in 1951. The novel was included on Time's 2005 list of the 100 best English-language novels written since 1923. It was named by Modern Library and its readers as one of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. It has been frequently challenged in the court for its liberal use of profanity and portrayal of sexuality and in the 1950's and 60's it was the novel that every teenage boy wants to read.]]> 277 J.D. Salinger 0316769177 Ed 5 3.81 1951 The Catcher in the Rye
author: J.D. Salinger
name: Ed
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1951
rating: 5
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]]> <![CDATA[At Lady Molly's (A Dance to the Music of Time, #4)]]> 1376768 239 Anthony Powell 0445200553 Ed 5 4.09 1957 At Lady Molly's (A Dance to the Music of Time, #4)
author: Anthony Powell
name: Ed
average rating: 4.09
book published: 1957
rating: 5
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date added: 2024/12/26
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]]> <![CDATA[Casanova's Chinese Restaurant (A Dance to the Music of Time, #5)]]> 1052987 A Dance to the Music of Time � his brilliant 12-novel sequence, which chronicles the lives of over three hundred characters, is a unique evocation of life in twentieth-century England.

The novels follow Nicholas Jenkins, Kenneth Widmerpool and others, as they negotiate the intellectual, cultural and social hurdles that stand between them and the “Acceptance World.”]]> 228 Anthony Powell 0099472449 Ed 5 4.09 1960 Casanova's Chinese Restaurant (A Dance to the Music of Time, #5)
author: Anthony Powell
name: Ed
average rating: 4.09
book published: 1960
rating: 5
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]]> <![CDATA[A Buyer's Market (A Dance to the Music of Time, #2)]]> 1006997 'He is, as Proust was before him, the great literary chronicler of his culture in his time.' GUARDIAN

A Dance to the Music of Time is universally acknowledged as one of the great works of English literature. Reissued now in this definitive edition, it stands ready to delight and entrance a new generation of readers.

In this second volume, Nick Jenkins is struggling to establish himself in London after graduating from university. As old friends come and go � Stringham takes the leap into marriage, Templer heads into the world of business and Widmerpool, confident in his own importance, begins a career in law � Nick starts to make new acquaintances, and throws himself into society life. In this new world of glamorous Debutante balls and leisurely country visits, Nick has his first encounter with love and its disappointments.]]> 274 Anthony Powell 0099472392 Ed 0 3.82 1952 A Buyer's Market (A Dance to the Music of Time, #2)
author: Anthony Powell
name: Ed
average rating: 3.82
book published: 1952
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]]> Anthony Powell: A Life 16112
The son of an army officer, educated at Eton and Balliol, Powell chose as his closest friends people like Malcolm Muggeridge and the composer, Constant Lambert, who were not out ot the top drawer or the one below it. And, although happily married for over sixty years to Lady Violet Pakenham, the daughter of an earl, he admitted that he had "always been attracted by girls who looked as they'd slept under a bush for a week". Powell believed that creative writing was, like alchemy, a mysterious, indefinable proces by which experience became art.

Michael Barberfocuses on the experience that provided Powell with his raw material. He pays particular attention to the "entre-deux-guerres", that sharply divided cultural interlude when the artists and good-timers with whom Powell identified in the twenties were followed, in the thirties, by the politicians and the prigs.]]> 352 Michael Barber 1585677108 Ed 3 3.59 2004 Anthony Powell: A Life
author: Michael Barber
name: Ed
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2004
rating: 3
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]]> <![CDATA[A Dance to the Music of Time: 2nd Movement (A Dance to the Music of Time, #4-6)]]> 16115
In the background of this second volume of A Dance to the Music of Time, the rumble of distant events in Germany and Spain presages the storm of World War II. In England, even as the whirl of marriages and adulteries, fashions and frivolities, personal triumphs and failures gathers speed, men and women find themselves on the brink of fateful choices.

Includes these novels:
At Lady Molly's
Casanova's Chinese Restaurant
The Kindly Ones]]> 722 Anthony Powell 0226677168 Ed 5 4.29 1962 A Dance to the Music of Time: 2nd Movement (A Dance to the Music of Time, #4-6)
author: Anthony Powell
name: Ed
average rating: 4.29
book published: 1962
rating: 5
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]]> <![CDATA[A Dance to the Music of Time: 3rd Movement (A Dance to the Music of Time, #7-9)]]> 16114 In this third volume of A Dance to the Music of Time, we again meet Widmerpool, doggedly rising in rank; Jenkins, shifted from one dismal army post to another; Stringham, heroically emerging from alcoholism; Templer, still on his eternal sexual quest. Here, too, we are introduced to Pamela Flitton, one of the most beautiful and dangerous women in modern fiction. Wickedly barbed in its wit, uncanny in its seismographic recording of human emotions and social currents, this saga stands as an unsurpassed rendering of England's finest yet most costly hour.

Includes these novels:
The Valley of Bones
The Soldier's Art
The Military Philosophers

"Anthony Powell is the best living English novelist by far. His admirers are addicts, let us face it, held in thrall by a magician."�Chicago Tribune

"A book which creates a world and explores it in depth, which ponders changing relationships and values, which creates brilliantly living and diverse characters and then watches them grow and change in their milieu. . . . Powell's world is as large and as complex as Proust's."—Elizabeth Janeway, New York Times

"One of the most important works of fiction since the Second World War. . . . The novel looked, as it began, something like a comedy of manners; then, for a while, like a tragedy of manners; now like a vastly entertaining, deeply melancholy, yet somehow courageous statement about human experience."—Naomi Bliven, New Yorker
]]> 715 Anthony Powell 0226677176 Ed 5 4.27 1968 A Dance to the Music of Time: 3rd Movement (A Dance to the Music of Time, #7-9)
author: Anthony Powell
name: Ed
average rating: 4.27
book published: 1968
rating: 5
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]]> <![CDATA[A Dance to the Music of Time: 4th Movement (A Dance to the Music of Time, #10-12)]]> 16111
In this climactic volume of A Dance to the Music of Time, Nick Jenkins describes a world of ambition, intrigue, and dissolution. England has won the war, but now the losses, physical and moral, must be counted. Pamela Widmerpool sets a snare for the young writer Trapnel, while her husband suffers private agony and public humiliation. Set against a background of politics, business, high society, and the counterculture in England and Europe, this magnificent work of art sounds an unforgettable requiem for an age.

Includes these novels:
Books Do Furnish a Room
Temporary Kings
Hearing Secret Harmonies ]]> 793 Anthony Powell 0226677184 Ed 5 4.23 1975 A Dance to the Music of Time: 4th Movement (A Dance to the Music of Time, #10-12)
author: Anthony Powell
name: Ed
average rating: 4.23
book published: 1975
rating: 5
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]]> <![CDATA[Invitation To The Dance: A Handbook to Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time]]> 848641 A Dance to the Music of time is a literary landmark of twentieth-century writing. As the reader cavorts through the 12-volume novel alongside the narrator Nicholas Jenkins, it soon becomes apparent that he inevitably confuses dates and events, but Hilary Spurling tidies up the most minute detail into its proper place.
More than a simple glossary, Invitation to the Dance contains extensive Character, Book, Painting and Place indices, creating a magnificent database of Powell's imagination and England's cultural landscape. This is a masterpiece of 'extreme ingenuity' detailing over four hundred characters and one million words of Powell's lively fifty-year dance of fiction and fact.
'Hilary Spurling's exhaustive analysis of the novel's characters supplies a master-key for the reader' -- Anthony Powell]]> 330 Hilary Spurling 0099484366 Ed 4 3.95 1977 Invitation To The Dance: A Handbook to Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time
author: Hilary Spurling
name: Ed
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1977
rating: 4
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]]> <![CDATA[To Keep the Ball Rolling: The Memoirs of Anthony Powell]]> 16118
Powell did eventually reveal himself in four volumes of memoirs, published between 1976 and 1982. This edition of Anthony Powell's Memoirs is an abridged and revised version of those volumes, a version that has never before been published in this form in the United States. The result is not only a fascinating view of Powell as a man and an author but also a unique history of British literary society and the social elite Powell lampooned and moved within from the twenties through the eighties. From Eton and Oxford to his life as a novelist and critic, Powell observes all—the obscenity trial sparked by Lady Chatterley's Lover ; Shirley Temple's libel suit after Graham Greene reviewed Wee Willie Winkie "with even more than his usual verve"—and paints vivid portraits of Kingsley Amis, V.S. Naipaul, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and countless others. Most importantly, Powell's lively memoirs banish all thought of the man as a relic of the British gentry. He was a modernist, a Tory, and more than a little interested in genealogy and peerage, but a man who, according to Ferdinand Mount, "miraculously knew what life was like."]]> 472 Anthony Powell 0226677214 Ed 5 4.02 1984 To Keep the Ball Rolling: The Memoirs of Anthony Powell
author: Anthony Powell
name: Ed
average rating: 4.02
book published: 1984
rating: 5
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]]> <![CDATA[Anthony Powell: Dancing to the Music of Time]]> 36978223 The author of the award-winning, two-volume Matisse: A Life, now gives us the long-awaited, definitive biography of literary master Anthony Powell--the critic, editor, and novelist known as "the English Proust"-- that, at the same time, takes us deep into twentieth-century London literary life.

Anthony Powell (1905-2000), best known for his twelve-volume comic masterpiece, A Dance to the Music of Time, was also the author of sixteen earlier novels, plays, and biographies, five memoirs, and three volumes of journals. He was a prolific literary critic and book reviewer. Between the two world wars, before making his name, he kept company with rowdy, hard-up writers and painters--and painters' models--in the London where Augustus John and Wyndham Lewis loomed large. He counted Evelyn Waugh and Henry Green among his lifelong friends, and his circle included the Sitwells, Graham Greene, George Orwell, Philip Larkin, and Kingsley Amis, among many others. Now, drawing on his letters, diaries, and interviews, Hilary Spurling--herself a longtime friend of Powell's-- has written a fresh and masterful portrait of the man, his work, and his time. Insightful, poignant, and cinematic in scope, this biography is as much a brilliant tapestry of a seminal moment in London's literary life as it is a revelation of an iconic literary figure.]]> 480 Hilary Spurling 0525521348 Ed 4 4.13 2017 Anthony Powell: Dancing to the Music of Time
author: Hilary Spurling
name: Ed
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2017
rating: 4
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]]> <![CDATA[A Dance to the Music of Time: 1st Movement (A Dance to the Music of Time, #1-3)]]> 16113 Time as "brilliant literary comedy as well as a brilliant sketch of the times," A Dance to the Music of Time opens just after World War I. Amid the fever of the 1920s and the first chill of the 1930s, Nick Jenkins and his friends confront sex, society, business, and art. In the second volume they move to London in a whirl of marriage and adulteries, fashions and frivolities, personal triumphs and failures. These books "provide an unsurpassed picture, at once gay and melancholy, of social and artistic life in Britain between the wars" (Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.). The third volume follows Nick into army life and evokes London during the blitz. In the climactic final volume, England has won the war and must now count the losses.

Four very different young men on the threshold of manhood dominate this opening volume of A Dance to the Music of Time. The narrator, Jenkins—a budding writer—shares a room with Templer, already a passionate womanizer, and Stringham, aristocratic and reckless. Widermerpool, as hopelessly awkward as he is intensely ambitious, lurks on the periphery of their world. Amid the fever of the 1920s and the first chill of the 1930s, these four gain their initiations into sex, society, business, and art. Considered a masterpiece of modern fiction, Powell's epic creates a rich panorama of life in England between the wars.

Includes these novels:
A Question of Upbringing
A Buyer's Market
The Acceptance World]]> 718 Anthony Powell 0226677141 Ed 5 3.94 1955 A Dance to the Music of Time: 1st Movement (A Dance to the Music of Time, #1-3)
author: Anthony Powell
name: Ed
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]]> Love-Lies-Bleeding 11766 Love-Lies-Bleeding, Don DeLillo's third play, is a daring, profoundly compassionate story about life, death, art and human connection.

Three people gather to determine the fate of the man who sits in a straight-backed chair saying nothing. He is Alex Macklin, who gave up easel painting to do land art in the southwestern desert, and he is seventy now, helpless in the wake of a second stroke. The people around him are the bearers of a complicated love, his son, his young wife, the older woman—his wife of years past—who feels the emotional tenacity of a love long-ended.

It is their question to answer. When does life end, and when should it end? In this remote setting, without seeking medical or legal guidance, they move unsteadily toward last things.

Luminous, spare, unnervingly comic and always deeply moving, Love-Lies-Bleeding explores a number of perilous questions about the value of life and how we measure it.]]> 112 Don DeLillo 0743273060 Ed 0 3.44 2002 Love-Lies-Bleeding
author: Don DeLillo
name: Ed
average rating: 3.44
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]]> The Silence 53879204
Don DeLillo completed this novel just weeks before the advent of Covid-19. The Silence is the story of a different catastrophic event. Its resonances offer a mysterious solace.

It is Super Bowl Sunday in the year 2022. Five people, dinner, an apartment on the east side of Manhattan. The retired physics professor and her husband and her former student waiting for the couple who will join them from what becomes a dramatic flight from Paris. The conversation ranges from a survey telescope in North-central Chile to a favorite brand of bourbon to Einstein's 1912 Manuscript on the Special Theory of Relativity.

Then something happens and the digital connections that have transformed our lives are severed.

What follows is a dazzling and profoundly moving conversation about what makes us human. Never has the art of fiction been such an immediate guide to our navigation of a bewildering world. Never have DeLillo's prescience, imagination, and language been more illuminating and essential.]]> 117 Don DeLillo 1982164557 Ed 0 2.67 2020 The Silence
author: Don DeLillo
name: Ed
average rating: 2.67
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]]> The Body Artist 11767 The Body Artist begins with normality: breakfast between a married couple, Lauren and Rey, in their ramshackle rented house on the New England coast. Recording their delicate, intimate, half-complete thoughts and words, Don DeLillo proves himself a stunningly unsentimental observer of our idiosyncratic relationships. But after breakfast, Rey makes a decision that leaves Lauren utterly alone, or seems to.

As Lauren, the body artist of the title, becomes strangely detached from herself and the temporal world, the novel becomes an exploration of a highly abnormal grieving process; a fascinating exposé of 'who we are when we are not rehearsing who we are'; and a rarefied study of trauma and creativity, absence and presence, isolation and communion.]]> 128 Don DeLillo 0743203968 Ed 0 3.30 2001 The Body Artist
author: Don DeLillo
name: Ed
average rating: 3.30
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rating: 0
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]]> Cosmopolis 28703 209 Don DeLillo 0330412744 Ed 0 3.26 2003 Cosmopolis
author: Don DeLillo
name: Ed
average rating: 3.26
book published: 2003
rating: 0
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]]> Libra 400
In this powerful, unsettling novel, Don DeLillo chronicles Lee Harvey Oswald's odyssey from troubled teenager to a man of precarious stability who imagines himself an agent of history. When "history" presents itself in the form of two disgruntled CIA operatives who decide that an unsuccessful attempt on the life of the president will galvanize the nation against communism, the scales are irrevocably tipped.

A gripping, masterful blend of fact and fiction, alive with meticulously portrayed characters both real and created, Libra is a grave, haunting, and brilliant examination of an event that has become an indelible part of the American psyche.]]> 480 Don DeLillo 0140156046 Ed 4 4.05 1988 Libra
author: Don DeLillo
name: Ed
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1988
rating: 4
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]]> The Day Room 51579 BOOKS 101 Don DeLillo 033037429X Ed 4 3.65 1986 The Day Room
author: Don DeLillo
name: Ed
average rating: 3.65
book published: 1986
rating: 4
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]]> Valparaiso 19022 107 Don DeLillo 033042694X Ed 4 3.42 1999 Valparaiso
author: Don DeLillo
name: Ed
average rating: 3.42
book published: 1999
rating: 4
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]]> Players 28704 212 Don DeLillo 0099928507 Ed 5 3.29 1977 Players
author: Don DeLillo
name: Ed
average rating: 3.29
book published: 1977
rating: 5
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]]> Running Dog 404 Running Dog, originally published in 1978, follows Moll Robbins, a New York city journalist trailing the activities of an influential senator. In the process she is dragged into the black market world of erotica and shady, infatuated men, where a cat-and-mouse chase for an erotic film rumored to 'star' Adolf Hitler leads to trickery, maneuvering, and bloodshed. With streamlined prose and a thriller's narrative pace, Running Dog is a bright star in the modern master's early career.]]> 256 Don DeLillo 0679722947 Ed 4 3.48 1978 Running Dog
author: Don DeLillo
name: Ed
average rating: 3.48
book published: 1978
rating: 4
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]]> Ratner's Star 28701 438 Don DeLillo 009992840X Ed 5 3.51 1976 Ratner's Star
author: Don DeLillo
name: Ed
average rating: 3.51
book published: 1976
rating: 5
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]]> Great Jones Street 407
Bucky Wunderlick is a rock and roll star. Dissatisfied with a life that has brought fame and fortune, he suddenly decides he no longer wants to be a commodity. He leaves his band mid-tour and holes up in a dingy, unfurnished apartment in Great Jones Street. Unfortunately, his disappearing act only succeeds in inflaming interest. As faithful fans await messages, Bucky encounters every sort of roiling force he is trying to escape.

DeLillo’s third novel is more than a musical satire: it probes the rights of the individual, foreshadows the struggle of the artist within a capitalist world and delivers a scathing portrait of our culture’s obsession with the lives of the few.]]> 272 Don DeLillo 0140179178 Ed 5 3.50 1973 Great Jones Street
author: Don DeLillo
name: Ed
average rating: 3.50
book published: 1973
rating: 5
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]]> The Names 408 The Names is considered the book which began to drive "sharply upward the size of his readership" (Los Angeles Times Book Review). Among the cast of DeLillo's bizarre yet fully realized characters in The Names are Kathryn, the narrator's estranged wife; their son, the six-year-old novelist; Owen, the scientist; and the neurotic narrator obsessed with his own neuroses. A thriller, a mystery, and still a moving examination of family, loss, and the amorphous and magical potential of language itself, The Names stands with any of DeLillo's more recent and highly acclaimed works.

"The Names not only accurately reflects a portion of our contemporary world but, more importantly, an original world of its own is created."--Chicago Sun-Times

"DeLillo sifts experience through simultaneous grids of science and poetry, analysis and clear sight, to make a high-wire prose that is voluptuously stark."--Village Voice Literary Supplement

"DeLillo verbally examines every state of consciousness from eroticism to tourism, from the idea of America as conceived by the rest of the world, to the idea of the rest of the world as conceived by America, from mysticism to fanaticism."--New York Times]]> 339 Don DeLillo 0679722955 Ed 5 3.64 1982 The Names
author: Don DeLillo
name: Ed
average rating: 3.64
book published: 1982
rating: 5
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]]> Point Omega 6595144
Don DeLillo has been "weirdly prophetic about twenty-first-century America" (The New York Times Book Review). In his earlier novels, he has written about conspiracy theory, the Cold War and global terrorism. Now, in Point Omega, he looks into the mind and heart of a "defense intellectual", one of the men involved in the management of the country's war machine.

Richard Elster was a scholar—an outsider—when he was called to a meeting with government war planners, asked to apply "ideas and principles to such matters as troop deployment and counterinsurgency".

We see Elster at the end of his service. He has retreated to the desert, "somewhere south of nowhere", in search of space and geologic time. There he is joined by a filmmaker, Jim Finley, intent on documenting his experience. Finley wants to persuade Elster to make a one-take film, Elster its single character�"Just a man and a wall."

Weeks later, Elster's daughter Jessica visits—an "otherworldly" woman from New York, who dramatically alters the dynamic of the story. The three of them talk, train their binoculars on the landscape, and build an odd, tender intimacy, something like a family. Then a devastating event throws everything into question.

In this compact and powerful novel, it is finally a lingering human mystery that haunts the landscape of desert and mind.]]> 117 Don DeLillo 1439169950 Ed 3 3.46 2010 Point Omega
author: Don DeLillo
name: Ed
average rating: 3.46
book published: 2010
rating: 3
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]]> Mao II 402 The New York Times), Don DeLillo presents an extraordinary new novel about words and images, novelists and terrorists, the mass mind and the arch-individualist. At the heart of the book is Bill Gray, a famous reclusive writer who escapes the failed novel he has been working on for many years and enters the world of political violence, a nightscape of Semtex explosives and hostages locked in basement rooms. Bill's dangerous passage leaves two people stranded: his brilliant, fixated assistant, Scott, and the strange young woman who is Scott's lover—and Bill's.]]> 241 Don DeLillo 0140152741 Ed 4 3.69 1991 Mao II
author: Don DeLillo
name: Ed
average rating: 3.69
book published: 1991
rating: 4
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]]> Underworld 11761
Underworld opens with a breathlessly graceful prologue set during the final game of the Giants-Dodgers pennant race in 1951. Written in what DeLillo calls "super-omniscience" the sentences sweep from young Cotter Martin as he jumps the gate to the press box, soars over the radio waves, runs out to the diamond, slides in on a fast ball, pops into the stands where J. Edgar Hoover is sitting with a drunken Jackie Gleason and a splenetic Frank Sinatra, and learns of the Soviet Union's second detonation of a nuclear bomb. It's an absolutely thrilling literary moment. When Bobby Thomson hits Branca's pitch into the outstretched hand of Cotter—the "shot heard around the world"—and Jackie Gleason pukes on Sinatra's shoes, the events of the next few decades are set in motion, all threaded together by the baseball as it passes from hand to hand.

"It's all falling indelibly into the past," writes DeLillo, a past that he carefully recalls and reconstructs with acute grace. Jump from Giants Stadium to the Nevada desert in 1992, where Nick Shay, who now owns the baseball, reunites with the artist Kara Sax. They had been brief and unlikely lovers 40 years before, and it is largely through the events, spinoffs, and coincidental encounters of their pasts that DeLillo filters the Cold War experience. He believes that "global events may alter how we live in the smallest ways," and as the book steps back in time to 1951, over the following 800-odd pages, we see just how those events alter lives. This reverse narrative allows the author to strip away the detritus of history and pop culture until we get to the story's pure elements: the bomb, the baseball, and the Bronx. In an epilogue as breathless and stunning as the prologue, DeLillo fast-forwards to a near future in which ruthless capitalism, the Internet, and a new, hushed faith have replaced the Cold War's blend of dread and euphoria.

Through fragments and interlaced stories—including those of highway killers, artists, celebrities, conspiracists, gangsters, nuns, and sundry others—DeLillo creates a fragile web of connected experience, a communal Zeitgeist that encompasses the messy whole of five decades of American life, wonderfully distilled.]]> 827 Don DeLillo 0330369954 Ed 5 3.95 1997 Underworld
author: Don DeLillo
name: Ed
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1997
rating: 5
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]]> End Zone 17794654 This is an alternate cover edition for ISBN 0140085688.

At Logos College in West Texas, huge young men, vacuum-packed into shoulder pads and shiny helmets, play football with intense passion. During an uncharacteristic winning season, the perplexed and distracted running back Gary Harkness has periodic fits of nuclear glee; he is fueled and shielded by his fear of and fascination with nuclear conflict. Among oddly afflicted and recognizable players, the terminologies of football and nuclear war—the language of end zones—become interchangeable, and their meaning deteriorates as the collegiate year runs its course. In this triumphantly funny, deeply searching novel, Don DeLillo explores the metaphor of football as war with rich, original zeal.]]> 242 Don DeLillo Ed 4 3.77 1972 End Zone
author: Don DeLillo
name: Ed
average rating: 3.77
book published: 1972
rating: 4
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]]> The Interrogative Mood 6601408 The Interrogative Mood is a wildly inventive, jazzy meditation on life and language by the novelist that Ian Frazier hails as “one of the best writers in America, and one of the funniest, too.� A novel composed entirely of questions, it is perhaps the most audacious literary high-wire act since Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine or David Foster Wallace’s stories; a playful and profound book that, as Jonathan Safran Foer says, “will sear the unlucky volumes shelved on either side of it. How it doesn’t, itself, combust in flames is a mystery to me.”]]> 165 Padgett Powell 0061859419 Ed 4 3.66 2009 The Interrogative Mood
author: Padgett Powell
name: Ed
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2009
rating: 4
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]]> The Blue Octavo Notebooks 59336527
The Blue Octavo Notebooks have thus remained little known yet are among the most characteristic of Kafka’s work. In addition to otherwise unpublished material, the notebooks contain some of Kafka’s most famous aphorisms in their original context. This edition of the English translation has been corrected with reference to the German text for certain omissions and discrepancies of sequence.]]> 120 Franz Kafka Ed 4 3.97 1953 The Blue Octavo Notebooks
author: Franz Kafka
name: Ed
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1953
rating: 4
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]]> In Watermelon Sugar 46182 144 Richard Brautigan 0099437597 Ed 4 3.80 1968 In Watermelon Sugar
author: Richard Brautigan
name: Ed
average rating: 3.80
book published: 1968
rating: 4
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]]> <![CDATA[The 2024 Short Story Advent Calendar]]> 220911833 This is the special edition slipcase of the calendar. For the standard edition slipcase please go here.

The 2024 Short Story Advent Calendar is a deluxe box set of individual short stories from some of the best writers in North America and beyond.

When the first Short Story Advent Calendar launched, in 2015, we frankly had no clue we’d still be sitting here today, continuing to offer up batches of tasty stories fresh from the oven. To celebrate this milestone, we’ve packed the 10th SSAC with a mix of new and familiar names—ideal company for those chilly winter nights ahead.

Contributors to the 2024 Short Story Advent Calendar include:

- Jennifer Croft (The Extinction of Irena Rey)
- Carmen Maria Machado (In the Dream House)
- Ed Park (Same Bed Different Dreams)
- Casey Plett (On Community)
- Robin Sloan (Moonbound)

and 20 more!

(This is a collection of literary, non-religious short stories for adults.)]]> 352 Michael Hingston 1738266834 Ed 5 4.34 The 2024 Short Story Advent Calendar
author: Michael Hingston
name: Ed
average rating: 4.34
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]]> Seize the Day 52782 114 Saul Bellow 0142437611 Ed 5 3.56 1957 Seize the Day
author: Saul Bellow
name: Ed
average rating: 3.56
book published: 1957
rating: 5
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]]> <![CDATA[I Was Told There'd Be Cake: Essays]]> 2195289 From the author of the novel, The Clasp, hailed by Michael Chabon, Heidi Julavits, and J. Courtney Sullivan. Wry, hilarious, and profoundly genuine, this debut collection of literary essays from Sloane Crosley is a celebration of fallibility and haplessness in all their glory.

From despoiling an exhibit at the Natural History Museum to provoking the ire of her first boss to siccing the cops on her mysterious neighbor, Crosley can do no right despite the best of intentions -- or perhaps because of them. Together, these essays create a startlingly funny and revealing portrait of a complex and utterly recognizable character who aims for the stars but hits the ceiling, and the inimitable city that has helped shape who she is. I Was Told There'd Be Cake introduces a strikingly original voice, chronicling the struggles and unexpected beauty of modern urban life.

The pony problem --
Christmas in July --
The ursula cookie --
Bring your machete to work day --
The good people of this dimension --
Bastard out of Westchester --
The beauty of strangers --
Fuck you, Columbus --
One-night bounce --
Sign language for infidels --
You on a stick --
Height of luxury --
Smell this --
Lay like broccoli --
Fever faker]]> 230 Sloane Crosley 159448306X Ed 5 3.47 2008 I Was Told There'd Be Cake: Essays
author: Sloane Crosley
name: Ed
average rating: 3.47
book published: 2008
rating: 5
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]]> The Kindly Ones 3755250

Named one of the "100 Best Books of the Decade" by The Times of London

"Oh my human brothers, let me tell you how it happened."

A former Nazi officer, Dr. Maximilien Aue has reinvented himself, many years after the war, as a middle-class family man and factory owner in France. An intellectual steeped in philosophy, literature, and classical music, he is also a cold-blooded assassin and the consummate bureaucrat. Through the eyes of this cultivated yet monstrous man we experience in disturbingly precise detail the horrors of the Second World War and the Nazi genocide of the Jews. Eichmann, Himmler, Göring, Speer, Heydrich, Höss—even Hitler himself—play a role in Max's story. An intense and hallucinatory historical epic, The Kindly Ones is also a morally challenging read. It holds a mirror up to humanity—and the reader cannot look away.

]]> 984 Jonathan Littell 0061353450 Ed 0 to-read 3.90 2006 The Kindly Ones
author: Jonathan Littell
name: Ed
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2006
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/19
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]]> <![CDATA[An Oral History of Atlantis: Stories]]> 220998994 A deadpan, wildly imaginative collection of stories that slices clean through the mundanity and absurdity of modern life, from the author of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize–winner and Pulitzer Prize finalist Same Bed Different Dreams

In “Machine City,â€� a college student’s role in a friend’s movie causes lines to blur between his character and his true self. In “Slide to Unlock,â€� a man comes to terms with his life, via the passwords he struggles to remember in a moment of extremis. And in “Weird Menace,â€� a director and faded movie star discuss science fiction, memory, and lost loves on a commentary track for a film from the â€�80s that neither seems to remember all that well.Ěý

In Ed Park’s utterly original collection, An Oral History of Atlantis, characters question the fleetingness of youth and art, reckon with the consequences of the everyday, and find solace in the absurd, the beautiful, and the sublime. Throughout, Park deploys his trademark wit to create a world both strikingly recognizable and delightfully other. All together, these sixteen stories have much to say about the meaning—and transitory nature—of our lives. And they are proof positive that Ed Park is one of the most insightful and imaginative writers working today.]]> 224 Ed Park 0812998995 Ed 5 4.30 2025 An Oral History of Atlantis: Stories
author: Ed Park
name: Ed
average rating: 4.30
book published: 2025
rating: 5
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date added: 2024/12/18
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The best story collection I ever wrote!
]]> Miss MacIntosh, My Darling 60218853
Miss MacIntosh, My Darling is written with oceanic music moving at many levels of consciousness and perception; but the toughly fibred realistic fabric is always there, in the happenings of the narrative, the humor, the precise details, the definitions of the characters. Miss MacIntosh herself, who hails from What Cheer, Iowa, and seems downright and normal, with an incorruptible sense of humor and the desire to put an end to phantoms; Catherine Cartwheel, the opium lady, a recluse who is shut away in a great New England seaside house and entertains imaginary guests; Mr. Spitzer, the lawyer, musical composer and mystical space traveler, a gentle man, wholly unsure of himself and of reality; his twin brother Peron, the gay and raffish gambler and virtuoso in the world of sports; Cousin Hannah, the horsewoman, balloonist, mountain-climber and militant Boston feminist, known as Al Hamad through all the seraglios of the East; Titus Bonebreaker of Chicago, wild man of God dreaming of a heavenly crown; the very efficient Christian hangman, Mr. Weed of the Wabash River Valley; a featherweight champion who meets his equal in a graveyard--these are a few who live with phantasmagorical vividness in the pages of Miss MacIntosh, My Darling.

The novel touches on many aspects of life--drug addiction, woman's suffrage, murder, suicide, pregnancy both real and imaginary, schizophrenia, many strange loves, the psychology of gambling, perfectionism; but the profusion of this huge book serves always to intensify the force of the central question: "What shall we do when, fleeing from illusion, we are confronted by illusion?" What is real, what is dream? Is the calendar of the human heart the same as that kept by the earth? Is it possible that one may live a secondary life of which one does not know?

In every aspect, Miss MacIntosh, My Darling stands by itself--in the lyric beauty of its prose, its imaginative vitality and cumulative emotional power. It is the work of a writer of genius.

"This is a search for reality through a maze of illusions and fantasy and dreams, ultimately asserting in the words of Calderon: 'Life is a dream.'" - Anais Nin

"Marguerite Young is unquestionably a genius." - Kurt Vonnegut

"A work of stunning magnitude and beauty. . . . The book's mysterious readability is effected through enchantment and hypnosis. Its force is cumulative; its method is amassment, as in the great styles of Joyce or Hermann Broch or Melville or Faulkner. . . . One of the most arresting literary achievements in our last 20 years. . . . It is a masterwork." - William Goyen, New York Times Book Review, 9/12/65

"An extraordinary book by a woman possessed of a breathtaking verbal virtuosity. She also has quality of heart. . . . There are times when her pages surge and beat on the heart and imagination like great music; other times when it shimmers motionless like an ancient Hindu painting." - Lillian Smith, Chicago Tribune

"The prose is lyric, striking and memorable." - Michael Dirda, Washington Post Book World, 3/21/93

This encyclopedic novel addresses the question of illusion, as Young--whose epic vision and exquisite prose are truly awesome--dissects the essence of reality and ruminates on where it can be found." - L.A. Reader, 2/93

"[A]n ambitious work of gorgeous fiction, written in wanes of lush, imagistic, even humorous language. . . . This is a work of genius." - Belles Lettres, Winter 1993]]> 1321 Marguerite Young 1628973951 Ed 0 to-read 4.41 1965 Miss MacIntosh, My Darling
author: Marguerite Young
name: Ed
average rating: 4.41
book published: 1965
rating: 0
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]]> THE TOKYO-MONTANA EXPRESS 851047 258 Richard Brautigan 0440087708 Ed 5 3.89 1980 THE TOKYO-MONTANA EXPRESS
author: Richard Brautigan
name: Ed
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1980
rating: 5
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date added: 2024/12/14
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]]> Arts & Letters 6313075 40 Michael Friedman 0935724869 Ed 5 5.00 1996 Arts & Letters
author: Michael Friedman
name: Ed
average rating: 5.00
book published: 1996
rating: 5
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date added: 2024/12/12
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]]> Species 1362295 76 Michael Friedman 1930589018 Ed 5 4.70 1999 Species
author: Michael Friedman
name: Ed
average rating: 4.70
book published: 1999
rating: 5
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date added: 2024/12/12
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]]> Carmilla 48037
But as Carmilla becomes increasingly strange and volatile, prone to eerie nocturnal wanderings, Laura finds herself tormented by nightmares and growing weaker by the day� Pre-dating Dracula by twenty-six years, Carmilla is the original vampire story, steeped in sexual tension and gothic romance.]]> 108 J. Sheridan Le Fanu 0809510839 Ed 0 to-read 3.88 1872 Carmilla
author: J. Sheridan Le Fanu
name: Ed
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1872
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/12
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]]> Train Dreams 12991188 Train Dreams is an epic in miniature, one of his most evocative and poignant fictions. It is the story of Robert Grainier, a day laborer in the American West at the start of the twentieth century---an ordinary man in extraordinary times. Buffeted by the loss of his family, Grainer struggles to make sense of this strange new world. As his story unfolds, we witness both his shocking personal defeats and the radical changes that transform America in his lifetime. Suffused with the history and landscapes of the American West, this novella captures the disappearance of a distinctly American way of life.]]> 116 Denis Johnson 1250007658 Ed 5 3.91 2002 Train Dreams
author: Denis Johnson
name: Ed
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2002
rating: 5
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date added: 2024/12/06
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]]> The Last One at the Wedding 203579177 From the bestselling author of Hidden Pictures comes a breathtaking work of suspense about a father trying to save his daughter from a life-altering decision that will put everything he loves on the line.

Frank Szatowski is shocked when his daughter, Maggie, calls him for the first time in three years. He was convinced that their estrangement would become permanent. He’s even more surprised when she invites him to her upcoming wedding in New Hampshire. Frank is ecstatic, and determined to finally make things right.

He arrives to find that the wedding is at a private estate—very secluded, very luxurious, very much out of his league. It seems that Maggie failed to mention that she’s marrying Aidan Gardner, the son of a famous tech billionaire. Feeling desperately out of place, Frank focuses on reconnecting with Maggie and getting to know her new family. But it’s difficult: Aidan is withdrawn and evasive; Maggie doesn’t seem to have time for him; and he finds that the locals are disturbingly hostile to the Gardners. Frank needs to know more about this family his daughter is marrying into, but if he pushes too hard, he could lose Maggie forever.

An edge-of-your-seat thriller that delves deep into the heart of one family, The Last One at the Wedding is a work of brilliant suspense from a true modern master.]]> 338 Jason Rekulak 1250895782 Ed 5 3.62 2024 The Last One at the Wedding
author: Jason Rekulak
name: Ed
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2024
rating: 5
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date added: 2024/11/15
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]]> Dracula 588495
For this completely updated edition, Maurice Hindle has revised his introduction, list of further reading and notes, and added two appendices: Stoker's essay on censorship and his interview with Winston Churchill, both published in 1908. Christopher Frayling's preface discusses Stoker's significance and the influences that contributed to his creation of the Dracula myth.]]> 454 Bram Stoker 014143984X Ed 5 3.83 1897 Dracula
author: Bram Stoker
name: Ed
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1897
rating: 5
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date added: 2024/09/13
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]]> <![CDATA[A Question of Upbringing (A Dance to the Music of Time, #1)]]> 16116 A Dance to the Music of Time.

Discover the extraordinary life of Anthony Powell � captured by acclaimed biographer Hilary Spurling in Anthony Powell: Dancing to the Music of Time]]> 214 Anthony Powell 0445200103 Ed 5 3.71 1951 A Question of Upbringing (A Dance to the Music of Time, #1)
author: Anthony Powell
name: Ed
average rating: 3.71
book published: 1951
rating: 5
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date added: 2024/09/13
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]]> <![CDATA[Last Notes from Home (A Fan's Notes, #3)]]> 117467 397 Frederick Exley 0679724567 Ed 0 to-read 3.47 1988 Last Notes from Home (A Fan's Notes, #3)
author: Frederick Exley
name: Ed
average rating: 3.47
book published: 1988
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/03
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]]> <![CDATA[Pages from a Cold Island (A Fan's Notes, #2)]]> 117468 274 Frederick Exley 039475977X Ed 5 3.50 1974 Pages from a Cold Island (A Fan's Notes, #2)
author: Frederick Exley
name: Ed
average rating: 3.50
book published: 1974
rating: 5
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date added: 2024/09/03
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]]>