en-US Sun, 20 Apr 2025 06:27:08 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 216247518 One woman, the performance of a lifetime. Or two. A mesmerizing Mobius strip of a novel that asks who we are to the people we love.

Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She’s an elegant and accomplished actress in rehearsals for an upcoming premiere. He’s attractive, troubling, and young—young enough to be her son. Who is he to her, and who is she to him? In Audition, two competing narratives unspool, rewriting our understanding of the roles we play every day—partner, parent, creator, muse—and the truths every performance masks, especially from those who think they know us best.]]> 208 Katie Kitamura 059385232X Ed 5 3.52 2025
author: Katie Kitamura
name: Ed
average rating: 3.52
book published: 2025
rating: 5
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date added: 2025/04/20
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Read this in about three sittings. Best to come at it cold, don't read any reviews, just dive in...!
]]> 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 4.47 2019
author: Daniel Immerwahr
name: Ed
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2019
rating: 5
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date added: 2025/04/02
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]]> 32596937 0 Ed Park 1536629154 Ed 5 2.38
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.
]]> 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
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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review:

]]> 11334 338 Toni Morrison 140003342X Ed 5 4.15 1977
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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]]> 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.]]> 453 H.P. Lovecraft 0345485726 Ed 5 3.94 1933
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.
]]> 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'.]]> 221 T.S. Eliot 0151189781 Ed 5 4.30 1963
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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]]> 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
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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]]> 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. Combining 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
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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review:
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.
]]> 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
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.
]]> 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
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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]]> 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
author: Andrew Martin
name: Ed
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/21
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]]> 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
author: Roberto Bolaño
name: Ed
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1996
rating: 4
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]]> 190372 544 Helen DeWitt 0786887001 Ed 0 4.12 2000
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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]]> 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
author: Stephen King
name: Ed
average rating: 4.28
book published: 1975
rating: 5
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date added: 2025/01/13
shelves: horror
review:

]]> 2286938 112 John Darnielle 0826428991 Ed 4
This one's more of a pamphlet, but it packs a punch...]]> 4.07 2008
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...
]]> 16360
It was clear to nurse Amy Leatheran that something sinister was going on at the Hassanieh dig, something associated with the presence of ‘Lovely Louise��, 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
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.)
]]> 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 3.91 1976
author: Geoffrey Wolff
name: Ed
average rating: 3.91
book published: 1976
rating: 5
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]]> 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 3.72 2003
author: Nicholson Baker
name: Ed
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2003
rating: 4
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date added: 2024/12/31
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]]> 28229 165 Nicholson Baker 1862070962 Ed 5 3.45 1992
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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]]> 92541 192 Nicholson Baker 0679735755 Ed 5 3.76 1991
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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]]> 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
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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]]> 7069 610 John Irving 0345915593 Ed 5 4.11 1978
author: John Irving
name: Ed
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1978
rating: 5
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date added: 2024/12/27
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]]> 228560 562 William Styron 0679736379 Ed 5 4.18 1979
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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]]> 163200243 0 Ed 4 4.00
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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]]> 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
author: J.D. Salinger
name: Ed
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1951
rating: 5
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]]> 1376768 239 Anthony Powell 0445200553 Ed 5 4.09 1957
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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]]> 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
author: Anthony Powell
name: Ed
average rating: 4.09
book published: 1960
rating: 5
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]]> 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
author: Anthony Powell
name: Ed
average rating: 3.82
book published: 1952
rating: 0
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]]> 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
author: Michael Barber
name: Ed
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2004
rating: 3
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]]> 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
author: Anthony Powell
name: Ed
average rating: 4.29
book published: 1962
rating: 5
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]]> 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
author: Anthony Powell
name: Ed
average rating: 4.27
book published: 1968
rating: 5
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]]> 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
author: Anthony Powell
name: Ed
average rating: 4.23
book published: 1975
rating: 5
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]]> 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 3.94 1977
author: Hilary Spurling
name: Ed
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1977
rating: 4
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]]> 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
author: Anthony Powell
name: Ed
average rating: 4.02
book published: 1984
rating: 5
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]]> 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
author: Hilary Spurling
name: Ed
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2017
rating: 4
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]]> 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
author: Anthony Powell
name: Ed
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1955
rating: 5
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]]> 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
author: Don DeLillo
name: Ed
average rating: 3.44
book published: 2002
rating: 0
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]]> 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 2.66 2020
author: Don DeLillo
name: Ed
average rating: 2.66
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]]> 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
author: Don DeLillo
name: Ed
average rating: 3.30
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rating: 0
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]]> 28703 209 Don DeLillo 0330412744 Ed 0 3.26 2003
author: Don DeLillo
name: Ed
average rating: 3.26
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rating: 0
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]]> 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
author: Don DeLillo
name: Ed
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1988
rating: 4
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]]> 51579 BOOKS 101 Don DeLillo 033037429X Ed 4 3.65 1986
author: Don DeLillo
name: Ed
average rating: 3.65
book published: 1986
rating: 4
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]]> 19022 107 Don DeLillo 033042694X Ed 4 3.42 1999
author: Don DeLillo
name: Ed
average rating: 3.42
book published: 1999
rating: 4
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]]> 28704 212 Don DeLillo 0099928507 Ed 5 3.29 1977
author: Don DeLillo
name: Ed
average rating: 3.29
book published: 1977
rating: 5
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]]> 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
author: Don DeLillo
name: Ed
average rating: 3.48
book published: 1978
rating: 4
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]]> 28701 438 Don DeLillo 009992840X Ed 5 3.51 1976
author: Don DeLillo
name: Ed
average rating: 3.51
book published: 1976
rating: 5
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]]> 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
author: Don DeLillo
name: Ed
average rating: 3.50
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rating: 5
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]]> 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
author: Don DeLillo
name: Ed
average rating: 3.64
book published: 1982
rating: 5
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]]> 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
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name: Ed
average rating: 3.46
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rating: 3
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]]> 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
author: Don DeLillo
name: Ed
average rating: 3.69
book published: 1991
rating: 4
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]]> 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
author: Don DeLillo
name: Ed
average rating: 3.95
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]]> 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
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name: Ed
average rating: 3.77
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rating: 4
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]]> 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
author: Padgett Powell
name: Ed
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2009
rating: 4
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]]> 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
author: Franz Kafka
name: Ed
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1953
rating: 4
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]]> 46182 144 Richard Brautigan 0099437597 Ed 4 3.80 1968
author: Richard Brautigan
name: Ed
average rating: 3.80
book published: 1968
rating: 4
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]]> 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
author: Michael Hingston
name: Ed
average rating: 4.34
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]]> 52782 114 Saul Bellow 0142437611 Ed 5 3.56 1957
author: Saul Bellow
name: Ed
average rating: 3.56
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rating: 5
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]]> 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
author: Sloane Crosley
name: Ed
average rating: 3.47
book published: 2008
rating: 5
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]]> 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,�� 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,�� a man comes to terms with his life, via the passwords he struggles to remember in a moment of extremis. And in “Weird Menace,�� a director and faded movie star discuss science fiction, memory, and lost loves on a commentary track for a film from the ��80s that neither seems to remember all that well. 

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
author: Ed Park
name: Ed
average rating: 4.30
book published: 2025
rating: 5
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The best story collection I ever wrote!
]]> 851047 258 Richard Brautigan 0440087708 Ed 5 3.88 1980
author: Richard Brautigan
name: Ed
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1980
rating: 5
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]]> 6313075 40 Michael Friedman 0935724869 Ed 5 5.00 1996
author: Michael Friedman
name: Ed
average rating: 5.00
book published: 1996
rating: 5
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]]> 1362295 76 Michael Friedman 1930589018 Ed 5 4.70 1999
author: Michael Friedman
name: Ed
average rating: 4.70
book published: 1999
rating: 5
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]]> 12991188 116 Denis Johnson 1250007658 Ed 5 3.91 2002
author: Denis Johnson
name: Ed
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2002
rating: 5
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]]> 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 3.61 2024
author: Jason Rekulak
name: Ed
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2024
rating: 5
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]]> 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
author: Bram Stoker
name: Ed
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1897
rating: 5
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]]> 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
author: Anthony Powell
name: Ed
average rating: 3.71
book published: 1951
rating: 5
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]]> 117468 274 Frederick Exley 039475977X Ed 5 3.50 1974
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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]]> 774032 385 Frederick Exley 0679720766 Ed 5 4.08 1968
author: Frederick Exley
name: Ed
average rating: 4.08
book published: 1968
rating: 5
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]]> 3264608 256 John Langan 0809572494 Ed 5 3.85 2008
author: John Langan
name: Ed
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2008
rating: 5
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]]> 25266832 336 Ed Park 1940450675 Ed 5 3.80 2014
author: Ed Park
name: Ed
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2014
rating: 5
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date added: 2024/08/07
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]]> 16331 288 Agatha Christie 1579126251 Ed 5 4.07 1930
author: Agatha Christie
name: Ed
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1930
rating: 5
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My favorite Christie to date, and definitely the funniest. Marple > Poirot?!
]]> 61827405
* A Good Morning America , TIME , Book Riot, and Kirkus Most-Anticipated Book *  

As the only child of a single mother in Queens, Ava Chin found her family’s origins to be shrouded in mystery. She had never met her father, and her grandparents�� stories didn’t match the history she read at school. Mott Street traces Chin’s quest to understand her Chinese American family’s story. Over decades of painstaking research, she finds not only her father but also the building that provided a refuge for them all.

Breaking the silence surrounding her family’s past meant confronting the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882—the first federal law to restrict immigration by race and nationality, barring Chinese immigrants from citizenship for six decades. Chin traces the story of the pioneering family members who emigrated from the Pearl River Delta, crossing an ocean to make their way in the American West of the mid-nineteenth century. She tells of their backbreaking work on the transcontinental railroad and of the brutal racism of frontier towns, then follows their paths to New York City.

In New York’s Chinatown she discovers a single building on Mott Street where so many of her ancestors would live, begin families, and craft new identities.  She follows the men and women who became merchants, “paper son�� refugees, activists, and heads of the Chinese tong, piecing together how they bore and resisted the weight of the Exclusion laws. She soon realizes that exclusion is not simply a political condition but also a personal one.

Gorgeously written, deeply researched, and tremendously resonant, Mott Street uncovers a legacy of exclusion and resilience that speaks to the American experience, past and present.]]> 400 Ava Chin 0525557377 Ed 5 3.99 2023
author: Ava Chin
name: Ed
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2023
rating: 5
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]]> 121312704
Born in the Bronx, Guy Trebay was raised in an atmosphere of privilege on Long Island’s North shore after his entrepreneurial father struck business gold with Hawaiian Surf, a wildly successful cologne company that capitalized on the optimism of the 1960s as marketed to “an adventurous new breed of men.’�� But behind the facade of material prosperity lay the emotional disarray of a household dominated by a charismatic con artist father, a glamorous yet lost and careless mother, a family haunted by tragedy. By the time Trebay established a foothold at the fringes of Andy Warhol’s Factory and the diverse artistic tribes that thrived in Manhattan in that pre-digital era, his father had lost his fortune, his younger sister had been arrested for armed robbery and fled underground, the family house was in ashes, and his mother was dead.

Unschooled and on his own, Trebay became a striver, wending his way through a seemingly apocalyptic landscape populated by a vibrant cast of characters, including washed-up Hollywood screenwriters of the 30s; Warhol superstars like Jackie Curtis and Candy Darling; fashion geniuses like Charles James; and emerging artists, filmmakers, writers, designers, photographers and deejays who would powerfully influence mainstream culture in the decades to come.]]> 256 Guy Trebay 1524731978 Ed 5 3.52 2024
author: Guy Trebay
name: Ed
average rating: 3.52
book published: 2024
rating: 5
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You don't have to know anything about Trebay, or even have any grounding interest in the era / milieux he covers (70s-80s NYC by way of Long Island), to get a thrill from this memoir. Evocative, even Nabokovian prose that reveals and conceals; cameos from the famous and obscure; family secrets and tragedies; the evolution of a style and a livelihood; wry humor; a highly refined sense of time. You will wonder about the title until the moment comes. A singular read,
]]> 8519058
Over the course of a single night, Mirković visits the sites of these tragedies in his memory and recalls the damage that his own participation in that violence—as a soldier fighting for Croatia during the Balkan Wars—has wreaked in his own life. Mirkovic´ hopes that this night will be his last in the Zone, that this journey will expiate his sins, and that he can disappear with Sashka, the only woman he hasn’t abandoned, forever . . .

One of the truly original books of the decade—and written as a single, hypnotic, propulsive, physically irresistible sentence—Mathias Énard’s Zone provides an extraordinary and panoramic view of the turmoil that has long deviled the shores of the Mediterranean.]]> 517 Mathias Énard 1934824267 Ed 2 4.18 2008
author: Mathias Énard
name: Ed
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2008
rating: 2
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date added: 2024/07/03
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]]> 2467144 214 Anthony Powell 043459900X Ed 5 4.03 1955
author: Anthony Powell
name: Ed
average rating: 4.03
book published: 1955
rating: 5
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date added: 2024/05/24
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]]> 62039164 A delicate, timeless, and breathtaking coming-of-age story.

The critically acclaimed and award-winning cartoonist Keum Suk Gendry-Kim returns with a stunning addition to her body of graphic fiction rooted in Korean history. Adapted from Park Wan-seo’s beloved novel, The Naked Tree paints a stark portrait of a single nation’s fabric slowly torn to shreds by political upheaval and armed conflict.

The year is 1951. Twenty-year-old wallflower Lee Kyung ekes out a living at the US Post Exchange, where goods and services of varying stripe are available for purchase. She peddles hand-painted portraits on silk handkerchiefs to soldiers passing through. When a handsome young northern escapee and erstwhile fine artist is hired despite waning demand, an unlikely friendship blossoms into a young woman’s first brush with desire against the backdrop of the Korean War at its most devastating.

Gendry-Kim brings a masterpiece of world literature to life with bold, expressive lines that capture a denuded landscape brutally forced into transition and the people who must find their way back to each other within it. Available for the first time in English, this edition of The Naked Tree is exquisitely translated by award-winning expert Janet Hong.]]> 316 Keum Suk Gendry-Kim 1770466673 Ed 3 3.79 2020
author: Keum Suk Gendry-Kim
name: Ed
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2020
rating: 3
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date added: 2024/03/22
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A vigorous and evocative adaptation of a novel I haven't read, set amid the Korean War, in which so much is lost by so many. The narrator is a resourceful young woman who oversees a couple of "signies," artists whom American GIs pay to paint (usually on scarves) portraits of their sweethearts back home. My one complaint is the framing device, which makes Park (the original novelist) a character—it's needlessly fussy, and adds a layer of confusion (on the naming level). Sharp and memorable, it's of a piece with Gendry-Kim's two other books published here, GRASS and THE WAITING—together they form a sort of extended threnody on Korea's painful 20th century history.
]]> 103638 288 Frank Conroy 0140044469 Ed 4 3.94 1967
author: Frank Conroy
name: Ed
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1967
rating: 4
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date added: 2024/02/23
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]]> 28434 The Recognitions, that tremendous book which, in the twenty years since its publication, has come to be acknowledged as an American masterpiece. And J R is a book of comparable magnitude, substance, and humor--a rushing, raucous look at money and its influence, at love and its absence, at success and its failures, in the magnificently orchestrated circus of all its larger- and smaller-than-life characters; a frantic, forlorn comedy about who uses -- and misuses -- whom.

At the center: J R, ambitious sixth-grader in torn sneakers, bred on the challenge of "free enterprise" and fired by heady mail-order promises of "success." His teachers would rather be elsewhere, his principal doubles as a bank president, his Long Island classroom mirrors the world he sees around him -- a world of public relations and private betrayals where everything (and everyone) wears a price tag, a world of "deals" where honesty is no substitute for experience, and the letter of the law flouts its spirit at every turn. Operating from the remote anonymity of phone booths and the local post office, with beachheads in a seedy New York cafeteria and a catastrophic, carton-crammed tenement on East 96th Street, J R parlays a deal for thousands of surplus Navy picnic forks through penny stock flyers and a distant textile-mill bankruptcy into a nationwide, hydra-headed "family of companies."

The J R Corp and its Boss engulf brokers, lawyers, Congressmen, disaffected school teachers and disenfranchised Indians, drunks, divorcées, second-hand generals, and a fledgling composer hopelessly entangled in a nightmare marriage of business and the arts. Their bullish ventures -- shaky mineral claims and gas leases, cost-plus defense contracts, a string of nursing homes cum funeral parlors, a formula for frozen music -- burgeon into a paper empire ranging from timber to textiles, from matchbooks to (legalized) marijuana, from prostheses to publishing, inadvertently crushing hopes, careers, an entire town, on a collision course with the bigger world . . . the pragmatic Real World where the business of America is business, where the stock market exists as a convenience, and the tax laws make some people more equal than others . . . the world that makes the rules because it plays to win, and plays for keeps.

Absurdly logical, mercilessly real, gathering its own tumultuous momentum for the ultimate brush with commodity trading when the drop in pork belly futures masks the crumbling of our own, J R captures the reader in the cacophony of voices that revolves around this young captive of his own myths -- voices that dominate the book, talking to each other, at each other, into phones, on intercoms, from TV screens and radios -- a vast mosaic of sound that sweeps the reader into the relentless "real time" of spoken words in a way unprecedented in modern fiction. The disturbing clarity with which this finished writer captures the ways in which we deal, dissemble, stumble through our words -- through our lives -- while the real plans are being made elsewhere makes J R the extraordinary novel that it is.

--From the first-edition dustjacket]]> 752 William Gaddis 0140187073 Ed 5 4.28 1975
author: William Gaddis
name: Ed
average rating: 4.28
book published: 1975
rating: 5
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date added: 2024/02/23
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]]> 142602128 A new novel about a California grape-grower, his family, and the climate disaster that upends their quiet lives.

Since his release from prison after serving an eighteen-month sentence for growing cannabis, Ben Hecht’s life has settled into a familiar routine. On his farm in the foothills of California, he stays busy cultivating a dozen acres of grapes and tending to a flock of mistrustful sheep. Meanwhile, from her desk in their old redwood barn, his novelist wife, Ada, continues to work on what may be her most important book yet. When their only son, Yoel, comes home from Los Angeles for a rare visit, Ben is forced to confront their long troubled relationship, which has continued to degrade in recent years. But before the two of them can truly address their past, a wildfire sweeps through the region, forcing the Hecht family to flee to the coast, and setting into motion a chain of events that will transform them all. 

This is a story about grape growing and wine, financial and familial struggles, and the peculiar characters and unlikely heroes one will always find in small-town California. Through the experiences of the Hechts and the escalating challenges that face their community, Fire in the Canyon is an intimate look at the lives of those already living through the climate crisis.]]> 304 Daniel Gumbiner 1662602421 Ed 5 4.07
author: Daniel Gumbiner
name: Ed
average rating: 4.07
book published:
rating: 5
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date added: 2024/02/23
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]]> 15956698 224 Raymond Queneau 184749241X Ed 5 4.01 1947
author: Raymond Queneau
name: Ed
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1947
rating: 5
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date added: 2024/02/23
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]]> 17208457
It is 2001 in New York City, in the lull between the collapse of the dot-com boom and the terrible events of September 11th. Silicon Alley is a ghost town, Web 1.0 is having adolescent angst, Google has yet to IPO, Microsoft is still considered the Evil Empire. There may not be quite as much money around as there was at the height of the tech bubble, but there’s no shortage of swindlers looking to grab a piece of what’s left.

Maxine Tarnow is running a nice little fraud investigation business on the Upper West Side, chasing down different kinds of small-scale con artists. She used to be legally certified but her license got pulled a while back, which has actually turned out to be a blessing because now she can follow her own code of ethics—carry a Beretta, do business with sleazebags, hack into people’s bank accounts—without having too much guilt about any of it. Otherwise, just your average working mom—two boys in elementary school, an off-and-on situation with her sort of semi-ex-husband Horst, life as normal as it ever gets in the neighborhood—till Maxine starts looking into the finances of a computer-security firm and its billionaire geek CEO, whereupon things begin rapidly to jam onto the subway and head downtown. She soon finds herself mixed up with a drug runner in an art deco motorboat, a professional nose obsessed with Hitler’s aftershave, a neoliberal enforcer with footwear issues, plus elements of the Russian mob and various bloggers, hackers, code monkeys, and entrepreneurs, some of whom begin to show up mysteriously dead. Foul play, of course.

With occasional excursions into the DeepWeb and out to Long Island, Thomas Pynchon, channeling his inner Jewish mother, brings us a historical romance of New York in the early days of the internet, not that distant in calendar time but galactically remote from where we’ve journeyed to since.

Will perpetrators be revealed, forget about brought to justice? Will Maxine have to take the handgun out of her purse? Will she and Horst get back together? Will Jerry Seinfeld make an unscheduled guest appearance? Will accounts secular and karmic be brought into balance?

Hey. Who wants to know?]]> 477 Thomas Pynchon 1594204233 Ed 4 3.61 2013
author: Thomas Pynchon
name: Ed
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2013
rating: 4
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date added: 2024/01/07
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]]> 22444789
Delicious Foods tells the gripping story of three unforgettable characters: a mother, her son, and the drug that threatens to destroy them. In Darlene's haunted struggle to reunite with Eddie, and in the efforts of both to triumph over those who would enslave them, Hannaham's daring and shape-shifting prose not only infuses their desperate circumstances with grace and humor, but also wrestles with timeless questions of love and freedom.]]> 371 James Hannaham 0316284947 Ed 5 3.81 2015
author: James Hannaham
name: Ed
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2015
rating: 5
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date added: 2023/12/20
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]]> 58085233
As Alice roots deeper into Hsieh’s radical use of time—in one piece, the artist confined himself to a cell for a year; in the next, he punched a time clock every hour, on the hour, for a year—and his mysterious disappearance from the art world, her project starts metabolizing events from her own life. She wanders from subway rides to street protests, loses touch with a friend, and tenderly observes her father’s slow decline.

Moving between present-day and 1980s New York City, with detours to Silicon Valley and the Venice Biennale, this vivid debut announces Lisa Hsiao Chen as an audacious new talent. Activities of Daily Living is a lucid, intimate examination of the creative life and the passage of time.]]> 352 Lisa Hsiao Chen 0393881121 Ed 5 3.84 2022
author: Lisa Hsiao Chen
name: Ed
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2022
rating: 5
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date added: 2023/11/20
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]]> 76574 Optic Nerve. Consisting of three xeroxed sheets of paper, and with a print run of twenty-five, it was a less-than-auspicious, largely unnoticed debut. In the following three years, though, Optic Nerve developed at a startlingly rapid pace: the artwork and writing evolved with each story, production quality improved, page counts increased, and by issue seven, sales had reached 6,000. In 1994, Drawn & Quarterly took over the publishing duties of Optic Nerve, and the original seven issues sold out and were left out of print. 32 stories presents these rare, early editions, collected for the first time in a single volume.
]]> 96 Adrian Tomine 1896597009 Ed 5 4.08 1995
author: Adrian Tomine
name: Ed
average rating: 4.08
book published: 1995
rating: 5
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date added: 2023/10/31
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]]> 426504 Ficciones demonstrate the whirlwind of Borges's genius and mirror the precision and potency of his intellect and inventiveness, his piercing irony, his skepticism, and his obsession with fantasy. Borges sends us on a journey into a compelling, bizarre, and profoundly resonant realm; we enter the fearful sphere of Pascal's abyss, the surreal and literal labyrinth of books, and the iconography of eternal return. To enter the worlds in Ficciones is to enter the mind of Jorge Luis Borges, wherein lies Heaven, Hell, and everything else in between.

Part One: The Garden of Forking Paths
Prologue
Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (1940)
The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim (1936, not included in the 1941 edition)
Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote (1939)
The Circular Ruins (1940)
The Lottery in Babylon (1941)
An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain (1941)
The Library of Babel (1941)
The Garden of Forking Paths (1941)
Part Two: Artifices
Prologue
Funes the Memorious (1942)
The Form of the Sword (1942)
Theme of the Traitor and the Hero (1944)
Death and the Compass (1942)
The Secret Miracle (1943)
Three Versions of Judas (1944)
The End (1953, 2nd edition only)
The Sect of the Phoenix (1952, 2nd edition only)
The South (1953, 2nd edition only)]]> 174 Jorge Luis Borges 0802130305 Ed 5 4.46 1944
author: Jorge Luis Borges
name: Ed
average rating: 4.46
book published: 1944
rating: 5
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]]> 702817 "The Camel's Back"
"May Day"
"Porcelain and Pink"
"The Diamond as Big as the Ritz
"The Curious Case of Benjamin Button"
"Tarquin of Cheapside"
"Oh Russet Witch!"
"The Lees of Happiness"
"Mr. Icky"
"Jemina"]]> 319 F. Scott Fitzgerald 1434100014 Ed 5 3.90 1922
author: F. Scott Fitzgerald
name: Ed
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1922
rating: 5
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date added: 2023/10/06
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]]> 139210025
When Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson released Dungeons & Dragons in 1974, they created the first roleplaying game of all time. Little did they know that their humble box set of three small digest-sized booklets would spawn an entire industry practically overnight. In Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground , Stu Horvath explores how the hobby of roleplaying games, commonly known as RPGs, blossomed out of an unlikely pop culture phenomenon and became a dominant gaming form by the 2010s. Going far beyond D&D , this heavily illustrated tome covers more than three hundred different RPGs that have been published in the last five decades.

Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground features (among other things) bunnies, ghostbusters, soap operas, criminal bears, space monsters, political intrigue, vampires, romance, and, of course, some dungeons and dragons. In a decade-by-decade breakdown, Horvath chronicles how RPGs have evolved in the time between their inception and the present day, offering a deep and gratifying glimpse into a hobby that has changed the way we think about games and play.]]> 456 Stu Horvath 0262048221 Ed 5 4.63 2023
author: Stu Horvath
name: Ed
average rating: 4.63
book published: 2023
rating: 5
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date added: 2023/09/13
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A treasure trove �� if you have any fondness for the RPGs of yore, this book is a must. Horvath has an encyclopedic knowledge of the hobby (or is it an art?), a warm and learned prose style, and a sense of humor; he's a terrific photographer to boot. It's a necessary companion to ARTS & ARCANA; if the names Gamma World, Traveler, Runequest, or Call of the Cthulhu make your heartbeat quicken, stop reading this review and go order!
]]> 35297339 A singularly inventive and unforgettable debut novel about love, luck, and the inextricability of life and art, from 2017 Whiting Award winner Lisa Halliday.

Told in three distinct and uniquely compelling sections, Asymmetry explores the imbalances that spark and sustain many of our most dramatic human relations: inequities in age, power, talent, wealth, fame, geography, and justice. The first section, Folly tells the story of Alice, a young American editor, and her relationship with the famous and much older writer Ezra Blazer. A tender and exquisite account of an unexpected romance that takes place in New York during the early years of the Iraq War, Folly also suggests an aspiring novelist’s coming-of-age. By contrast, Madness is narrated by Amar, an Iraqi-American man who, on his way to visit his brother in Kurdistan, is detained by immigration officers and spends the last weekend of 2008 in a holding room in Heathrow. These two seemingly disparate stories gain resonance as their perspectives interact and overlap, with yet new implications for their relationship revealed in an unexpected coda.

A stunning debut from a rising literary star, Asymmetry is an urgent, important, and truly original work that will captivate any reader while also posing arresting questions about the very nature of fiction itself.]]> 277 Lisa Halliday 150116676X Ed 5 3.43 2018
author: Lisa Halliday
name: Ed
average rating: 3.43
book published: 2018
rating: 5
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date added: 2023/09/04
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]]> 4981 Slaughterhouse-Five, an American classic, is one of the world’s great antiwar books. Centering on the infamous World War II firebombing of Dresden, the novel is the result of what Kurt Vonnegut described as a twenty-three-year struggle to write a book about what he had witnessed as an American prisoner of war. It combines historical fiction, science fiction, autobiography, and satire in an account of the life of Billy Pilgrim, a barber’s son turned draftee turned optometrist turned alien abductee. As Vonnegut had, Billy experiences the destruction of Dresden as a POW. Unlike Vonnegut, he experiences time travel, or coming “unstuck in time.��

An instant bestseller, Slaughterhouse-Five made Kurt Vonnegut a cult hero in American literature, a reputation that only strengthened over time, despite his being banned and censored by some libraries and schools for content and language. But it was precisely those elements of Vonnegut’s writing—the political edginess, the genre-bending inventiveness, the frank violence, the transgressive wit—that have inspired generations of readers not just to look differently at the world around them but to find the confidence to say something about it.

Fifty years after its initial publication at the height of the Vietnam War, Vonnegut's portrayal of political disillusionment, PTSD, and postwar anxiety feels as relevant, darkly humorous, and profoundly affecting as ever, an enduring beacon through our own era’s uncertainties.]]> 275 Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Ed 5 4.10 1969
author: Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
name: Ed
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1969
rating: 5
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date added: 2023/09/01
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]]> 79840 Clumsy is the bittersweet story of a year long, long distance relationship, told through snippets of everyday life, drawn in a simple and elegantly awkward style that heightens the emotional impact and leaves you reminiscing about your own past love affairs. Oh, and it also has a lot of sex.]]> 224 Jeffrey Brown 0971359768 Ed 4 3.73 2002
author: Jeffrey Brown
name: Ed
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2002
rating: 4
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date added: 2023/08/20
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]]> 774846 "I will not read it; I should never sleep again"

A doctor performs an experiment on a young woman that goes horribly wrong, and a series of increasingly strange events follow: sinister woodland rituals, disappearances, suicides... Viewed as immoral and decadent on first publication in 1894, Machen's weird tale has since established itself as a classic of its genre and has been described by Stephen King as "one of the best horror stories ever written. Maybe the best in the English language."]]> 82 Arthur Machen 1871592119 Ed 5 3.72 1890
author: Arthur Machen
name: Ed
average rating: 3.72
book published: 1890
rating: 5
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date added: 2023/08/13
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]]> 3077124 Persian Letters is a classic of European literature by Baron de Montesquieu, the brilliant thinker who had a huge influence on the Enlightenment. Through the astute observations of his two fictional Persian travelers in Europe--Usbek and Rica--Montesquieu asks fundamental questions about human nature, the manners and flirtations of polite society, the structures of power, and the hypocrisy of religion-all in a witty, inventive satire that combines travel literature and the epistolary genre. Indeed, this pioneering epistolary novel appeared almost twenty years before Richardson's Pamela. This is the first English translation based on the new, definitive edition of the original French text, revealing this lively work as Montesquieu first intended. The book features an engaging and comprehensive introductory essay, covering a wide range of topics, including the novel's fictional techniques and innovations; travel literature as a genre; historical context and Enlightenment ideas; Orientalism; and other issues. The editor has included full explanatory notes, a useful list of characters, and an invaluable appendix featuring excerpts from Montesquieu's most important sources.

About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.
]]> 320 Montesquieu 0192806351 Ed 5 3.62 1721
author: Montesquieu
name: Ed
average rating: 3.62
book published: 1721
rating: 5
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date added: 2023/07/26
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]]> 764073
In five chapters, each flawlessly executed from a different point of view "the mother receiving the order to evacuate; the daughter on the long train ride to the camp; the son in the desert encampment; the family's return to their home; and the bitter release of the father after more than four years in captivity" she has created a small tour de force, a novel of unrelenting economy and suppressed emotion.

Spare, intimate, arrestingly understated, When the Emperor Was Divine is a haunting evocation of a family in wartime and an unmistakably resonant lesson for our times. It heralds the arrival of a singularly gifted new novelist.

From the Hardcover edition.]]> 144 Julie Otsuka Ed 5 3.80 2002
author: Julie Otsuka
name: Ed
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2002
rating: 5
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date added: 2023/07/12
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]]> 10464963 When the Emperor Was Divine is a tour de force of economy and precision, a novel that tells the story of a group of young women brought from Japan to San Francisco as “picture brides�� nearly a century ago.

In eight incantatory sections, The Buddha in the Attic traces the picture brides�� extraordinary lives, from their arduous journey by boat, where they exchange photographs of their husbands, imagining uncertain futures in an unknown land; to their arrival in San Francisco and their tremulous first nights as new wives; to their backbreaking work picking fruit in the fields and scrubbing the floors of white women; to their struggles to master a new language and a new culture; to their experiences in childbirth, and then as mothers, raising children who will ultimately reject their heritage and their history; to the deracinating arrival of war.]]> 144 Julie Otsuka 0307700003 Ed 5 3.68 2011
author: Julie Otsuka
name: Ed
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2011
rating: 5
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date added: 2023/07/12
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]]> 41880602
But Toby's new life �� liver specialist by day, kids every other weekend, rabid somewhat anonymous sex at night �� is interrupted when his ex-wife suddenly disappears. Either on a vision quest or a nervous breakdown, Toby doesn't know �� she won't answer his texts or calls.

Is Toby's ex just angry, like always? Is she punishing him, yet again, for not being the bread winner she was? As he desperately searches for her while juggling his job and parenting their two unraveling children, Toby is forced to reckon with the real reasons his marriage fell apart, and to ask if the story he has been telling himself all this time is true.]]> 373 Taffy Brodesser-Akner 0525510877 Ed 5 3.61 2019
author: Taffy Brodesser-Akner
name: Ed
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2019
rating: 5
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date added: 2023/07/11
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]]> 22716391      Thus was born a desire to try again, to chronicle her daily life as a fortysomething woman, wife, mother, and writer. The dazzling result is The Folded Clock , in which the diary form becomes a meditation on time and self, youth and aging, betrayal and loyalty, friendship and romance, faith and fate, marriage and family, desire and death, gossip and secrets, art and ambition.
     The Folded Clock is as playful as it is brilliant, a tour de force by one of the most gifted prose stylists in American letters.]]> 304 Heidi Julavits 0385538987 Ed 5 3.70 2015
author: Heidi Julavits
name: Ed
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2015
rating: 5
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date added: 2023/06/30
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]]> 62873257 A sharply observed memoir of motherhood and the self, and a love letter to Maine, by a writer Eula Biss calls witty, sly, critical, inventive and whose mind Leslie Jamison calls electric.

That night, in his bed, I spread my son's palm wide and tried to read it. If the hand was a map that led to a future person, was there any changing the destination?

One day Heidi Julavits sees her son silhouetted by the sun and notices he is at the threshold of what she calls the end times of childhood. When did this happen, she asks herself. Who is my son becoming--and what qualifies me to be his guide?

What follows starts to feel like uncharted waters. Rape allegations rock the university campus where she teaches, unleashing questions of justice and accountability. Julavits begins to wonder how to prepare her son to be the best possible citizen of the world he's about to enter. And what must she learn about herself in order to responsibly steer him.

Looking back to her own childhood in Maine, where she often navigated the coastline in a small boat relying on a decades-old sailing guide, Julavits takes us on an intellectual navigation of the self. Throughout, she intertwines her internal investigation with a wide-ranging exploration of what it means to raise a child in a time full of contradictions and moral complexity. Using the past and present as points of orientation, Directions to Myself examines the messy minutiae of contemporary family life alongside knottier philosophical questions of politics and gender. Through it all, Julavits discovers the beauty and the danger of telling stories as a way to locate ourselves, and help others find us.

Intimate, rigorous, and refreshingly unsentimental about motherhood and parenting, Directions to Myself is a love letter to Maine and a reckoning with the disappearance of childhood--her children's and her own--that cements Julavits' reputation as one of the most engaged and innovative nonfiction writers today.]]> 304 Heidi Julavits 0451498518 Ed 5 3.70 2023
author: Heidi Julavits
name: Ed
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2023
rating: 5
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date added: 2023/06/30
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]]> 9357703 "For the fourth time in as many years they were confronted with the problem of what birthday present to bring a young man who was incurably deranged in his mind..."

Signs and Symbols is a short story centering on the severe mental debility of a young man and on the struggle of his elderly parents to cope with it. It was first published in the May 15, 1948, issue of The New Yorker magazine. Before publishing the story, the editors of the magazine changed the title to "Symbols and Signs." After the story appeared, Nabokov changed the title back to its original wording.

Vladimir Nabokov, also known as Vladimir Sirin, was a Russian-American novelist. Nabokov wrote his first nine novels in Russian, then rose to international prominence as a master English prose stylist. He also made significant contributions to lepidoptery (The study and collection of moths & butterflies), and had a big interest in chess problems. Nabokov's Lolita (1955) is frequently cited as his most important novel, and is at any rate his most widely known one, exhibiting the love of intricate wordplay and descriptive detail that characterized all his works.]]> 16 Vladimir Nabokov Ed 5 3.95 1948
author: Vladimir Nabokov
name: Ed
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1948
rating: 5
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date added: 2023/06/20
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]]> 59551312 528 Daniel Clowes 1683965507 Ed 5 4.50 1997
author: Daniel Clowes
name: Ed
average rating: 4.50
book published: 1997
rating: 5
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date added: 2023/06/18
shelves:
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]]>