Lesley's bookshelf: all en-US Tue, 15 Oct 2024 01:06:20 -0700 60 Lesley's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg <![CDATA[The Complete Fiction of Bruno Schulz: The Street of Crocodiles, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass]]> 244267 The Street of Crocodiles in the Polish city of Drogobych is a street of memories and dreams where recollections of Bruno Schulz's uncommon boyhood and of the eerie side of his merchant family's life are evoked in a startling blend of the real and the fantastic. Most memorable - and most chilling - is the portrait of the author's father, a maddened shopkeeper who imports rare birds' eggs to hatch in his attic, who believes tailors' dummies should be treated like people, and whose obsessive fear of cockroaches causes him to resemble one.

Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass is the second and final work of Bruno Schulz, the acclaimed Polish writer killed by the Nazis during World War II. In the words of Isaac Bashevis Singer, "What he did in his short life was enough to make him one of the most remarkable writers who ever lived." Weaving myth, fantasy, and reality, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, is, to quote Schulz, "an attempt at eliciting the history of a certain family...by a search for the mythical sense, the essential core of that history.]]> 324 Bruno Schulz 0802710913 Lesley 0 to-read 4.42 The Complete Fiction of Bruno Schulz: The Street of Crocodiles, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass
author: Bruno Schulz
name: Lesley
average rating: 4.42
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/15
shelves: to-read
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]]> Valentines 7468916 The Journey Home comes a haunting collection of thematically linked stories that traverse the twelve months of a year. The stories in Valentines capture the most candid moments between lovers, husbands and wives, parents and children, when truths and true feelings surge to the surface and everything changes. A wife realizes her closest confidante is much more than that. A father tries to make his new lover into the image of his late wife. A husband, a wife, a child, a boating accident: no harm done . . . or is there? Olaf Olafsson's fans will recognize the perfect restraint and precision—and quick wit—with which he explores these dark epiphanies, when the heart is suddenly laid bare, whether by love or betrayal, disenchantment or the shock of loss. Valentines is a powerful work of fiction from one of our most gifted and subtle international writers at work today.


From the Trade Paperback edition.]]> 226 Olaf Olafsson 0375424849 Lesley 5 you-should-totally-read-these 4.00 2006 Valentines
author: Olaf Olafsson
name: Lesley
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2006
rating: 5
read at: 2011/10/08
date added: 2024/09/29
shelves: you-should-totally-read-these
review:

]]> The Journey Home 8291836 Olaf Olafsson's The Journey Home is constructed in tight succinct fragments, like journal entries. Shuttling between past and present, it's about reckoning with grief and bad memories in the face of death. Diagnosed with a terminal illness, Disa knows she needs to make a journey back to Iceland, a place that reflects the past back to her: a mother who abandoned her, a fiancé eventually killed by the Nazis.

Although not much directly happens in this novel, great tension develops between the pull of memory and the push of the moment. In Disa, Olafsson (Absolution) has created a vibrant character who wants to overcome sadness by plunging into the sensual. She's always cooking up fantastic meals, and the descriptions of food are truly mouthwatering: trout "fried with a sprinkling of ground almonds," apples "which I love to bake after they have soaked in port for a long, quiet afternoon." The powerful smells and sights of life rescue Disa from fear--if she doesn't quite believe in God, she believes in the immediacy of the world. This is the novel's subtly redemptive tendency, laid out piece by piece in Disa's soothing melancholy voice: "Sometimes you have to get a grip on yourself to keep your thoughts under control, but it's worth it. The reward is just around the next corner, whether it is a clutch of perfect eggs in a basket or the sound of birdsong on a still day. The soul can take delight in small things if one's dreams only leave it in peace long enough." --Emily White

]]> 306 Olaf Olafsson 0307428788 Lesley 0 to-read 3.84 1999 The Journey Home
author: Olaf Olafsson
name: Lesley
average rating: 3.84
book published: 1999
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Girl's Guide to Homelessness]]> 11212809 344 Brianna Karp 1459201671 Lesley 3 3.39 2011 The Girl's Guide to Homelessness
author: Brianna Karp
name: Lesley
average rating: 3.39
book published: 2011
rating: 3
read at: 2011/10/08
date added: 2024/09/27
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf]]> 14946
Woolf continually used stories and sketches to experiment with narrative models and themes for her novels. This collection of nearly fifty pieces brings together the contents of two published volumes, A Haunted House and Mrs. Dalloway’s Party; a number of uncollected stories; and several previously unpublished pieces. Edited and with an Introduction by Susan Dick.]]> 345 Virginia Woolf 0156212501 Lesley 0 to-read 4.15 1921 The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf
author: Virginia Woolf
name: Lesley
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1921
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/07
shelves: to-read
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]]> Truck 75848 Geek Love, Katherine Dunn, takes us on a journey into the mind of a feisty, adventurous adolescent named Jean "Dutch" Gillis. Dutch goes "trucking" from Portland, Oregon, to Los Angeles on a quest in search of herself, which, like the river trek of Deliverance, is filled with discoveries and sudden violence.

With boyish-looking Dutch is her friend Heydorf, a shadowy character who has his own secrets to hide. With her, too, is the confusion and volatile feelings of youth, when sex is a mystery waiting to be understood...and death seems remote until it brushes close with a breath-stopping suddenness. Truck, perhaps better than any other fictional account about a runaway, is a brilliantly convincing portrait of the archetypal teen rebel, and both the excitement and the terrible betrayals in the world she explores.]]> 214 Katherine Dunn 0446391530 Lesley 0 to-read 3.35 1971 Truck
author: Katherine Dunn
name: Lesley
average rating: 3.35
book published: 1971
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/03/22
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Ketchikan: A Short Story from Legend of a Suicide]]> 9545669 37 David Vann Lesley 0 to-read 4.09 2010 Ketchikan: A Short Story from Legend of a Suicide
author: David Vann
name: Lesley
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2010
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/11/29
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Another Country 38474
Stunning for its emotional intensity and haunting sensuality, this book depicts men and women, blacks and whites, stripped of their masks of gender and race by love and hatred at the most elemental and sublime.]]> 448 James Baldwin 0141186372 Lesley 0 to-read 4.32 1962 Another Country
author: James Baldwin
name: Lesley
average rating: 4.32
book published: 1962
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/07/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Book of Zines: Readings from the Fringe]]> 447215 178 Chip Rowe 0805050833 Lesley 5 you-should-totally-read-these i had so much fun reading this that i tried to ration it out. make it last. of course zines are super random depending on whom makes them, so there were so many different subjects talked about that it was brilliant. super nerdy. hilarious. fascinating. you name it.
plus it seemed to be a good way to either get into zine making or else see what is already out there. and if you fancied any of the ones in particular, you could order them via the index at the back. ]]> 3.79 2006 The Book of Zines: Readings from the Fringe
author: Chip Rowe
name: Lesley
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2006
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2021/08/06
shelves: you-should-totally-read-these
review:
now this is what a collection of zines looks like!
i had so much fun reading this that i tried to ration it out. make it last. of course zines are super random depending on whom makes them, so there were so many different subjects talked about that it was brilliant. super nerdy. hilarious. fascinating. you name it.
plus it seemed to be a good way to either get into zine making or else see what is already out there. and if you fancied any of the ones in particular, you could order them via the index at the back.
]]> The Complete Cosmicomics 6018080
In Italo Calvino’s cosmicomics, primordial beings cavort on the nearby surface of the moon, play marbles with atoms, and bear ecstatic witness to Earth’s first dawn. Exploring natural phenomena and the origins of the universe, these beloved tales relate complex scientific concepts to our common sensory, emotional, human world.

Now, The Complete Cosmicomics brings together all of the cosmicomic stories for the first time. Containing works previously published in Cosmicomics, t zero, and Numbers in the Dark, this single volume also includes seven previously uncollected stories, four of which have never been published in translation in the United States.This “complete and definitive collection� (Evening Standard) reconfirms the cosmicomics as a crowning literary achievement and makes them available to new generations of readers.]]> 402 Italo Calvino 1846141656 Lesley 0 to-read 4.17 1997 The Complete Cosmicomics
author: Italo Calvino
name: Lesley
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1997
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2020/09/19
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Cast a Giant Shadow: The Inspirational Life Story of Sandy Allen "The World's Tallest Living Woman"]]> 64909 Book by Kleiman, John 120 John Kleiman 0759681058 Lesley 5 4.12 2001 Cast a Giant Shadow: The Inspirational Life Story of Sandy Allen "The World's Tallest Living Woman"
author: John Kleiman
name: Lesley
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2001
rating: 5
read at: 2011/05/16
date added: 2017/07/17
shelves:
review:

]]> Niagara Falls All Over Again 202913 Niagara Falls All Over Again chronicles a flawed, passionate friendship over thirty years, weaving a powerful story of family and love, grief and loss. In it, McCracken introduces her most singular and affecting hero: Mose Sharp � son, brother, husband, father, friend ... and straight man to the fat guy in baggy pants who utterly transforms his life.

To the paying public, Mose Sharp was the arch, colorless half of the comedy team Carter and Sharp. To his partner, he was charmed and charming, a confirmed bachelor who never failed at love and romance. To his father and sisters, Mose was a prodigal son. And in his own heart and soul, he would always be a boy who once had a chance to save a girl’s life � a girl who would be his first, and greatest, loss.

Born into a Jewish family in small-town Iowa, the only boy among six sisters, Mose Sharp couldn’t leave home soon enough. By sixteen Mose had already joined the vaudeville circuit. But he knew one thing from the start: “I needed a partner,� he recalls. “I had always needed a partner.�

Then, an ebullient, self-destructive comedian named Rocky Carter came crashing into his life � and a thirty-year partnership was born. But as the comedy team of Carter and Sharp thrived from the vaudeville backwaters to Broadway to Hollywood, a funny thing happened amid the laughter: It wasMose who had all the best lines offstage.

Rocky would go through money, women, and wives in his restless search for love; Mose would settle down to a family life marked by fragile joy and wrenching tragedy. And soon, cracks were appearing in their complex relationship ... until one unforgivable act leads to another and a partnership begins to unravel.

In a novel as daring as it is compassionate, Elizabeth McCracken introduces an indelibly drawn cast of characters � from Mose’s Iowa family to the vagabond friends, lovers, and competitors who share his dizzying journey � as she deftly explores the fragile structures that underlie love affairs and friendships, partnerships and families.

An elegiac and uniquely American novel, Niagara Falls All Over Again is storytelling at its finest � and powerful proof that Elizabeth McCracken is one of the most dynamic and wholly original voices of her generation.]]> 308 Elizabeth McCracken 0965293726 Lesley 4 3.67 2001 Niagara Falls All Over Again
author: Elizabeth McCracken
name: Lesley
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2001
rating: 4
read at: 2013/04/07
date added: 2015/03/04
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[One Square Inch of Silence: One Man's Quest to Preserve Quiet]]> 6948716 In the visionary tradition of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, One Square Inch of Silence alerts us to beauty that we take for granted and sounds an urgent environmental alarm.

Natural silence is our nation’s fastest-disappearing resource, warns Emmy-winning acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton, who has made it his mission to record and preserve it in all its variety—before these soul-soothing terrestrial soundscapes vanish completely in the ever-rising din of man-made noise. Recalling the great works on nature written by John Muir, John McPhee, and Peter Matthiessen, this beautifully written narrative, co-authored with John Grossmann, is also a quintessentially American story—a road trip across the continent from west to east in a 1964 VW bus.

But no one has crossed America like this. Armed with his recording equipment and a decibel-measuring sound-level meter, Hempton bends an inquisitive and loving ear to the varied natural voices of the American landscape—bugling elk, trilling thrushes, and drumming, endangered prairie chickens. He is an equally patient and perceptive listener when talking with people he meets on his journey about the importance of quiet in their lives. By the time he reaches his destination, Washington, D.C., where he meets with federal officials to press his case for natural silence preservation, Hempton has produced a historic and unforgettable sonic record of America.

With the incisiveness of Jack Kerouac’s observations on the road and the stirring wisdom of Robert Pirsig repairing an aging vehicle and his life, One Square Inch of Silence provides a moving call to action. More than simply a book, it is an actual place, too, located in one of America’s last naturally quiet places, in Olympic National Park in Washington State.]]> 368 Gordon Hempton 1416559108 Lesley 3 3.84 2009 One Square Inch of Silence: One Man's Quest to Preserve Quiet
author: Gordon Hempton
name: Lesley
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2009
rating: 3
read at: 2011/12/17
date added: 2015/02/24
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[What I Didn't See: and Other Stories]]> 13237039 Shirley Jackson Awards shortlist
Locus Award shortlist
Story Prize Notable Books
Frank O’Connor Award longlist

"Beautifully written and subtly discomforting stories."—Nancy Pearl

"An exceptionally versatile author."�St. Louis Post-Dispatch

In her moving and elegant new collection, New York Times bestseller Karen Joy Fowler writes about John Wilkes Booth's younger brother, a one-winged man, a California cult, and a pair of twins, and she digs into our past, present, and future in the quiet, witty, and incisive way only she can.

The sinister and the magical are always lurking just below the surface: for a mother who invents a fairy-tale world for her son in "Halfway People"; for Edwin Booth in "Booth’s Ghost," haunted by his fame as "America’s Hamlet" and his brother’s terrible actions; for Norah, a rebellious teenager facing torture in the World Fantasy and Shirley Jackson Award winner "The Pelican Bar" as she confronts Mama Strong, the sadistic boss of a rehabilitation facility; for the narrator recounting her descent in "What I Didn't See."

With clear and insightful prose, Fowler's stories measure the human capacities for hope and despair, brutality and kindness. This collection, which includes two Nebula Award winners and some stories which have been significantly rewritten since first publication, is sure to delight readers, even as it pulls the rug out from underneath them.

Karen Joy Fowler is the author of five novels, including Wit's End, Sister Noon, Sarah Canary, and The New York Times bestseller The Jane Austen Book Club. Fowler and her husband, who have two grown children, live in Santa Cruz, California.

Contents:
The Pelican Bar (2009)
Booth's Ghost (2010)
The Last Worders (2007)
The Dark (1991)
Always (2007)
Familiar Birds (2006)
Private Grave 9 (2003)
The Marianas Islands (1996)
Halfway People (2010)
Standing Room Only (1997)
What I Didn't See (2002)
King Rat (2003)]]> 256 Karen Joy Fowler 1931520488 Lesley 0 to-read 3.77 2002 What I Didn't See: and Other Stories
author: Karen Joy Fowler
name: Lesley
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2002
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2014/12/11
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World]]> 433775
“The best book I know of for talented but unacknowledged creators. . . . A masterpiece.� —Margaret Atwood

“No one who is invested in any kind of art . . . can read The Gift and remain unchanged.� —David Foster Wallace


By now a modern classic, The Gift is a brilliantly orchestrated defense of the value of creativity and of its importance in a culture increasingly governed by money and overrun with commodities. This book is even more necessary today than when it first appeared.

An illuminating and transformative book, and completely original in its view of the world, The Gift is cherished by artists, writers, musicians, and thinkers. It is in itself a gift to all who discover the classic wisdom found in its pages.]]> 464 Lewis Hyde 0307279502 Lesley 0 later 3.83 1979 The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World
author: Lewis Hyde
name: Lesley
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1979
rating: 0
read at: 2010/12/12
date added: 2014/03/26
shelves: later
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Best Creative Nonfiction, Vol. 2]]> 3280380 (Vanity Fair), and the staff of the landmark literary journal Creative Nonfiction comes this fresh collection of fact-based personal narratives, mined from literary blogs, 'zines, and other fringe publications.

In "My Glove: A Biography," Stefan Fatsis, author of Word Freak and a Wall Street Journal reporter, traces the history of his baseball glove�"the one thing I would be devastated to lose, my last, best connection to the baseball that defined my life as a kid"—as he relinquishes it to the glove designer at Rawlings for an overhaul.

Heidi Julavits, editor of The Believer, imagines a future in which book-related fatalities�"Death of the intellect is one thing, but actual death is quite another"—revolutionize the writer's market.

This new volume of The Best Creative Nonfiction continues to engage and delight with exceptional work from writers old and new.]]> 364 Lee Gutkind 0393330249 Lesley 4 3.74 The Best Creative Nonfiction, Vol. 2
author: Lee Gutkind
name: Lesley
average rating: 3.74
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2011/08/28
date added: 2014/03/11
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Best Creative Nonfiction, Vol. 3]]> 6701664 272 Lee Gutkind 0393330257 Lesley 4 3.76 2009 The Best Creative Nonfiction, Vol. 3
author: Lee Gutkind
name: Lesley
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2009
rating: 4
read at: 2011/08/28
date added: 2014/03/11
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Toads' Museum of Freaks and Wonders (New Issues Poetry & Prose)]]> 7577074 321 Goldie Goldbloom 1930974884 Lesley 5 you-should-totally-read-these 4.00 2009 Toads' Museum of Freaks and Wonders (New Issues Poetry & Prose)
author: Goldie Goldbloom
name: Lesley
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2009
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2013/11/30
shelves: you-should-totally-read-these
review:
pretty much everything about this book made me a giant wave of strong feeling. you know its good when its breaking your heart but you still keep reading.
]]> Eleanor and Park 15795357
Bono met his wife in high school, Park says.So did Jerry Lee Lewis, Eleanor answers.I’m not kidding, he says.You should be, she says,we’re 16.What about Romeo and Juliet?Shallow, confused, then dead.I love you,Park says.Wherefore art thou,Eleanor answers.I’m not kidding,he says.You should be.

Set over the course of one school year in 1986,this is the story of two star-crossed misfits—smart enough to know that first love almost never lasts, but brave and desperate enough to try. When Eleanor meets Park, you’ll remember your own first love—and just how hard it pulled you under.

ձ> 336 Rainbow Rowell 1250031214 Lesley 0 currently-reading 4.08 2012 Eleanor and Park
author: Rainbow Rowell
name: Lesley
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2012
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2013/10/23
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Big Sleep (Philip Marlowe, #1)]]> 2052
This is an alternate cover edition.]]> 231 Raymond Chandler 0394758285 Lesley 2 3.96 1939 The Big Sleep (Philip Marlowe, #1)
author: Raymond Chandler
name: Lesley
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1939
rating: 2
read at: 2013/10/23
date added: 2013/10/23
shelves:
review:

]]> Collected Stories 10978
These tales are set not only in Yoknapatawpha County but in Beverly Hills and in France during World War I; they are populated by such characters as the Faulknerian archetypes Flem Snopes and Quentin Compson (“A Justice�) as well as ordinary men and women who emerge in these pages so sharply and indelibly that they dwarf the protagonists of most novels.
--back cover

Contains:
Barn burning --
Shingles for the Lord --
The tall men --
A bear hunt --
Two soldiers --
Shall not perish --
A rose for Emily --
Hair --
Centaur in brass --
Dry September --
Death drag --
Elly --
Uncle Willy --
Mule in the yard --
That will be fine --
That evening sun --
Red leaves --
A justice --
A courtship --
Lo! --
Ad Astra --
Victory --
Crevasse --
Turnabout --
All the dead pilots --
Wash --
Honor --
Dr. Martino --
Fox hunt --
Pennsylvania Station --
Artist at home --
The brooch --
My Grandmother Millard --
Golden land --
There was a queen --
Mountain victory --
Beyond --
Black music --
The leg --
Mistral --
Divorce in Naples --
Carcassonne.]]> 900 William Faulkner Lesley 0 to-read 4.26 1950 Collected Stories
author: William Faulkner
name: Lesley
average rating: 4.26
book published: 1950
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2013/10/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Bigness of the World 6519571
In the eleven stories in The Bigness of the World we see that wherever you are in the world, where you came from is never far away.]]> 232 Lori Ostlund 082033409X Lesley 5 3.84 2009 The Bigness of the World
author: Lori Ostlund
name: Lesley
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2009
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2013/10/23
shelves: currently-reading, you-should-totally-read-these
review:
i've not like a collection of short stories so much in a long time! worth it i think for the very first story in the collection. heartbreaking. and hilarious.
]]> Ghana Must Go 15811505
Moving with great elegance through time and place, Ghana Must Go charts the Sais� circuitous journey to one another. In the wake of Kweku’s death, his children gather in Ghana at their enigmatic mother’s new home. The eldest son and his wife; the mysterious, beautiful twins; the baby sister, now a young each carries secrets of his own. What is revealed in their coming together is the story of how they came the hearts broken, the lies told, the crimes committed in the name of love. Splintered, alone, each navigates his pain, believing that what has been lost can never be recovered—until, in Ghana, a new way forward, a new family, begins to emerge.

Ghana Must Go is at once a portrait of a modern family, and an exploration of the importance of where we come from to who we are. In a sweeping narrative that takes us from Accra to Lagos to London to New York, Ghana Must Go teaches that the truths we speak can heal the wounds we hide.]]> 336 Taiye Selasi 1594204497 Lesley 0 currently-reading 3.82 2013 Ghana Must Go
author: Taiye Selasi
name: Lesley
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2013/10/23
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> <![CDATA[A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman: Complete Short Stories]]> 8760088 256 Margaret Drabble 0547550405 Lesley 0 currently-reading 3.74 2011 A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman: Complete Short Stories
author: Margaret Drabble
name: Lesley
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2013/10/23
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> The New Yorker Stories 7841455 The New Yorker in the mid-seventies, she emerged with a voice so original, and so uncannily precise and prescient in its assessment of her characters� drift and narcissism, that she was instantly celebrated as a voice of her generation. Her name became an adjective: Beattiesque. Subtle, wry, and unnerving, she is a master observer of the unraveling of the American family, and also of the myriad small occurrences and affinities that unite us. Her characters, over nearly four decades, have moved from lives of fickle desire to the burdens and inhibitions of adulthood and on to failed aspirations, sloppy divorces, and sometimes enlightenment, even grace.

Each Beattie story, says Margaret Atwood, is "like a fresh bulletin from the front: we snatch it up, eager to know what’s happening out there on the edge of that shifting and dubious no-man’s-land known as interpersonal relations." With an unparalleled gift for dialogue and laser wit, she delivers flash reports on the cultural landscape of her time. Ann Beattie: The New Yorker Stories is the perfect initiation for readers new to this iconic American writer and a glorious return for those who have known and loved her work for decades.

]]> 528 Ann Beattie 1439168741 Lesley 0 currently-reading 3.85 2010 The New Yorker Stories
author: Ann Beattie
name: Lesley
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2010
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2013/10/23
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> Sourland 7829065 A gripping and moving new collection of stories that reimagines the meaning of loss—through often unexpected and violent means

Joyce Carol Oates is not only one of our most important novelists and literary critics, she is also an unparalleled master of the short story. Sourland—sixteen previously uncollected stories that explore how the power of violence, loss, and grief shape both the psyche and the soul—shows us an author working at the height of her powers.

With lapidary precision and an unflinching eye, Oates maps the surprising contours of "ordinary" life. From a desperate man who dons a jack-o'-lantern head as a prelude to a most curious sort of courtship, to a "story of a stabbing" many times recounted in the life of a lonely girl; from a beguiling young woman librarian whose amputee state attracts a married man and father, to a girl hopelessly in love with her renegade, incarcerated cousin; from a professor's wife who finds herself tragically isolated at a party in her own house, to the concluding title story of an unexpectedly redemptive love rooted in radical aloneness and isolation, each story in Sourland resonates beautifully with Oates's trademark fascination for the unpredictable amid the prosaic—the commingling of sexual love and violence, the tumult of family life—and shines with her predilection for dark humor and her gift for voice.]]> 373 Joyce Carol Oates 0061996521 Lesley 0 currently-reading 3.46 2010 Sourland
author: Joyce Carol Oates
name: Lesley
average rating: 3.46
book published: 2010
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2013/10/23
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> Astray 13366241
With rich historical detail, the celebrated author of Room takes us from puritan Massachusetts to revolutionary New Jersey, antebellum Louisiana to the Toronto highway, lighting up four centuries of wanderings that have profound echoes in the present. Astray offers us a surprising and moving history for restless times.

"The Hunt" was short-listed for the 2012 Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award.]]> 274 Emma Donoghue 0316206296 Lesley 0 to-read 3.57 2012 Astray
author: Emma Donoghue
name: Lesley
average rating: 3.57
book published: 2012
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2013/10/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Further Adventures in the Restless Universe: Stories]]> 6516070
The 21 stories in Further Adventures in the Restless Universe are about fathers, daughters, mothers, sisters, husbands, wives, strangers, lovers, sons, neighbors, kings, death, faith, astronomical phenomena, and the way the heart warps time.]]> 100 Dawn Raffel 0976717794 Lesley 0 to-read 3.61 2010 Further Adventures in the Restless Universe: Stories
author: Dawn Raffel
name: Lesley
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2010
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2013/10/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> One More River 12809963 From the author of Home in the Morning comes this National Jewish Book Award Finalist: the sweeping story of a father and son, and of the loves that transform them amid the turbulence of the American South

Bernard Levy was always a mystery to the community of Guilford, Mississippi. He was even more of a mystery to his son, Mickey Moe, who was just four years old when his father died in World War II. Now it's 1962 and Mickey Moe is a grown man, who must prove his pedigree to the disapproving parents of his girlfriend, Laura Anne Needleman, to win her hand in marriage. With only a few decades-old leads to go on, Mickey Moe sets out to uncover his father's murky past, from his travels up and down the length of the Mississippi River to his heartrending adventures during the Great Flood of 1927. Mickey Moe's journey, taken at the dawn of the civil rights era, leads him deep into the backwoods of Mississippi and Tennessee, where he meets with danger and unexpected revelations at every turn. As the greatest challenge of his life unfolds, he will finally discover the gripping details of his father's life--one filled with loyalty, tragedy, and heroism in the face of great cruelty from man and nature alike. A captivating follow-up to Mary Glickman's bestselling Home in the Morning, One More River tells the epic tale of ordinary men caught in the grip of calamity, and inspired to extraordinary acts in the name of love.]]> 266 Mary Glickman 1453219463 Lesley 0 to-read 3.54 2011 One More River
author: Mary Glickman
name: Lesley
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2011
rating: 0
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date added: 2013/10/23
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]]> <![CDATA[Blasphemy: New and Selected Stories]]> 13590740 The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven to his most recent PEN/Faulkner award-winning War Dances, have established him as a star in modern literature.

A bold and irreverent observer of life among Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest, the daring, versatile, funny, and outrageous Alexie showcases all his talents in his newest collection, Blasphemy, where he unites fifteen beloved classics with fifteen new stories in one sweeping anthology for devoted fans and first-time readers.

Included here are some of his most esteemed tales, including "What You Pawn I Will Redeem," "This is What it Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona,� "The Toughest Indian in the World,� and "War Dances.� Alexie’s new stories are fresh and quintessential—about donkey basketball leagues, lethal wind turbines, the reservation, marriage, and all species of contemporary American warriors.

An indispensable collection of new and classic stories, Blasphemy reminds us, on every thrilling page, why Sherman Alexie is one of our greatest contemporary writers and a true master of the short story.
]]> 465 Sherman Alexie 0802120393 Lesley 5 you-should-totally-read-these 4.16 2012 Blasphemy: New and Selected Stories
author: Sherman Alexie
name: Lesley
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2012
rating: 5
read at: 2013/10/23
date added: 2013/10/23
shelves: you-should-totally-read-these
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]]> <![CDATA[Survivors: True Tales of Endurance]]> 599207 464 John B. Letterman 0743245474 Lesley 1 3.59 2003 Survivors: True Tales of Endurance
author: John B. Letterman
name: Lesley
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2003
rating: 1
read at: 2013/10/23
date added: 2013/10/23
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]]> The Color Master: Stories 17262213
Truly beloved by readers and critics alike, Aimee Bender has become known as something of an enchantress whose lush prose is “moving, fanciful, and gorgeously strange� ( People ), “richly imagined and bittersweet� ( Vanity Fair ), and “full of provocative ideas� ( The Boston Globe ). In her deft hands, “relationships and mundane activities take on mythic qualities� ( The Wall Street Journal ).

In this collection, Bender’s unique talents sparkle brilliantly in stories about people searching for connection through love, sex, and family—while navigating the often painful realities of their lives. A traumatic event unfolds when a girl with flowing hair of golden wheat appears in an apple orchard, where a group of people await her. A woman plays out a prostitution fantasy with her husband and finds she cannot go back to her old sex life. An ugly woman marries an ogre and struggles to decide if she should stay with him after he mistakenly eats their children. Two sisters travel deep into Malaysia, where one learns the art of mending tigers who have been ripped to shreds.

In these deeply resonant stories—evocative, funny, beautiful, and sad—we see ourselves reflected as if in a funhouse mirror. Aimee Bender has once again proven herself to be among the most imaginative, exciting, and intelligent writers of our time.]]> 222 Aimee Bender 0385534892 Lesley 3 3.84 2013 The Color Master: Stories
author: Aimee Bender
name: Lesley
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2013
rating: 3
read at: 2013/10/23
date added: 2013/10/23
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]]> <![CDATA[The Happiest Man in the World: An Account of the Life of Poppa Neutrino]]> 213447
Inspired by Thor Heyerdahl and Kon-Tiki, Neutrino is the only man ever to build a raft from garbage he found on the streets of New York and sail it across the North Atlantic.
The New York Daily News described the accomplishment as “the sail of the century.� National Geographic broadcast an account of the trip as part of its series on extreme adventures. And now he is on a quest to cross the Pacific on a raft. If he makes it, he plans to continue around the world. No one has ever sailed around the world on a raft. Meanwhile, he has invented the Neutrino Clock Offense, an unstoppable football play, which a former coach of the New York Jets describes as being as innovative as the forward pass.

The philosophical underpinnings of Neutrino’s existence are what he calls Triads, a concept worked out after years of reading and reflection. He believes that each person, to be truly happy, must define his or her three deepest desires and pursue them remorselessly. Freedom, Joy, and Art are Neutrino’s three.
The Happiest Man in the World is a lavish, exotic, funny, and deeply serious book about a man who has led a life of profound engagement and ceaseless adventure.]]> 320 Alec Wilkinson 1400065437 Lesley 0 to-read 3.59 2007 The Happiest Man in the World: An Account of the Life of Poppa Neutrino
author: Alec Wilkinson
name: Lesley
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2007
rating: 0
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date added: 2013/10/23
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Circling the Sacred Mountain: A Spiritual Adventure Through the Himalayas]]> 492636 368 Robert A.F. Thurman 0553378503 Lesley 0 to-read 3.73 1999 Circling the Sacred Mountain: A Spiritual Adventure Through the Himalayas
author: Robert A.F. Thurman
name: Lesley
average rating: 3.73
book published: 1999
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2013/10/23
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[The Best of Outside: The First 20 Years]]> 476228
Along the way, many of America'sbest journalists and storytellers--including such writers as Jon Krakauer, Tim Cahill, E. Annie Proulx, Edward Abbey, Thomas McGuane, David Quammen, and Jane Smiley--have made the magazine a venue for some of their most compelling work. The Best of Outside represents the finest the award-winning magazine has to thirty stories that range from high action to high comedy.Whether it's Jonathan Raban sailing the open sea, Susan Orlean celebrating Spain's first female bullfighter, or Jim Harrison taking the wheel on a cross-country road trip, each piece can be characterized in a unforgettable.Commemorating Outside magazine's twentieth anniversary, The Best of Outside is one of the most entertaining and provocative anthologies of the decade.]]> 432 Outside Magazine Editors 0375703136 Lesley 0 to-read 3.99 1997 The Best of Outside: The First 20 Years
author: Outside Magazine Editors
name: Lesley
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1997
rating: 0
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date added: 2013/10/23
shelves: to-read
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]]> Don't Cry 4267835 Following the extraordinary success of her novel Veronica, Mary Gaitskill returns with a luminous new collection of stories � her first in more than ten years.

Beginning with a story of young people adrift in the college town of Ann Arbor on the cusp of the Reagan era and ending with the complex quest of a middle-aged woman to adopt a child in Addis Ababa, Gaitskill works across a broad backdrop of American life and brilliantly delivers her signature pleasures: prose as taut as a high-tension line, a supreme command of the interior landscape, and characters as real as the secret faces that peer back at us from the mirror. Each story is charged with her powerful, original language and the dramatic engagement of the intelligent mind with the craving body � or the intelligent body with the craving mind � that is characteristic of Gaitskill's fiction. Her settings are a surprising mix of real and surreal: in the urban fairy tale "Mirror Ball" a young man steals a girl's soul during a one-night stand, while in the stunning "The Arms and Legs of the Lake" the fallout of the Iraq War becomes painfully immediate for a group of characters who collide by chance on a train going up the Hudson River.

As spirited and intense as the now-classic Bad Behavior, Don't Cry shows us how our social conscience has evolved while basic truths � "the crude cinder blocks of male and female down in the basement, holding up the house," as one character puts it � remain unchanged.]]> 240 Mary Gaitskill 0375424199 Lesley 5 you-should-totally-read-these 3.63 2009 Don't Cry
author: Mary Gaitskill
name: Lesley
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2009
rating: 5
read at: 2013/10/23
date added: 2013/10/23
shelves: you-should-totally-read-these
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]]> <![CDATA[Journey On the Crest: Walking 2600 Miles from Mexico to Canada]]> 658171 320 Cindy Ross 0898861462 Lesley 3 3.68 1987 Journey On the Crest: Walking 2600 Miles from Mexico to Canada
author: Cindy Ross
name: Lesley
average rating: 3.68
book published: 1987
rating: 3
read at: 2013/10/23
date added: 2013/10/23
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]]> <![CDATA[Starting from Scratch: How to Correct Behavior Problems in Your Adult Cat]]> 1306987 The award-winning author of Think Like a Cat tells how to turn problem cats into purr- fect pets

Certified Animal Behavior Consultant Pam Johnson-Bennett, author of Think Like a Cat, is back to help readers bring out their pet's inner pussycat regardless of the cat's age. Geared specifically for owners of adult cats, be they recently adopted or long time family pets, this book illustrates how it's never too late to correct behavior problems. With her trademark wit and common sense, Pam covers every aspect of a cat's lifestyle, behavior, and environment and gives cat owners specific techniques to help seemingly set-in-their-ways cats change for the better. Authoritative and entertaining, Starting from Scratch is the next best thing to a house call from the world's top feline behaviorist.

]]> 376 Pam Johnson-Bennett 0143112503 Lesley 2 4.04 2007 Starting from Scratch: How to Correct Behavior Problems in Your Adult Cat
author: Pam Johnson-Bennett
name: Lesley
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2007
rating: 2
read at: 2013/10/23
date added: 2013/10/23
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]]> <![CDATA[The Cactus Eaters: How I Lost My Mind and Almost Found Myself on the Pacific Crest Trail]]> 2767943 400 Dan White 0061376930 Lesley 2 3.41 2008 The Cactus Eaters: How I Lost My Mind and Almost Found Myself on the Pacific Crest Trail
author: Dan White
name: Lesley
average rating: 3.41
book published: 2008
rating: 2
read at: 2013/10/23
date added: 2013/10/23
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]]> A Cookie Mueller Encyclopedia 18686904 536 Mallory Curley Lesley 0 to-read 4.79 2010 A Cookie Mueller Encyclopedia
author: Mallory Curley
name: Lesley
average rating: 4.79
book published: 2010
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2013/10/18
shelves: to-read
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]]> Wind, Sand and Stars 8837 ]]> 229 Antoine de Saint-Exupéry 0156027496 Lesley 0 currently-reading 4.18 1939 Wind, Sand and Stars
author: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
name: Lesley
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1939
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2013/09/14
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> The God of War 2381953 288 Marisa Silver 1416563164 Lesley 0 currently-reading 3.76 2008 The God of War
author: Marisa Silver
name: Lesley
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2008
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2013/09/14
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> No Direction Home: A Novel 420252 306 Marisa Silver 0393328740 Lesley 0 currently-reading 3.69 2005 No Direction Home: A Novel
author: Marisa Silver
name: Lesley
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2005
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2013/09/14
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Tom Brown's Field Guide to Wilderness Survival]]> 129543
Here, in one essential volume, are the basics of wilderness survival. The most ancient and important skills, preserved for generations, are presented in a simple, easy-to-use format with clear illustrations and instructions. A complete must-have companion to the great outdoors.

� How to build natural shelters in plains, woods, or deserts
•How to get safe drinking water from plants, trees, the sun, or Earth Herself
•How to make fire without matches and maintain it in any weather
•How to find, stalk, kill, and prepare animals for food
•The "big four" edible plants, and hundreds of others useful for both nutrition and medicine

TOM BROWN'S FIELD America's most popular nature reference books, Tom Brown's bestselling field guides are specially designed for both beginners and experienced explorers. Fully illustrated and comprehensive, each volume includes practical information, time-tested nature skills, and exciting new ways to rediscover the earth around us.]]> 288 Tom Brown Jr. 0425105725 Lesley 0 currently-reading 4.26 1983 Tom Brown's Field Guide to Wilderness Survival
author: Tom Brown Jr.
name: Lesley
average rating: 4.26
book published: 1983
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2013/09/14
shelves: currently-reading
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]]> <![CDATA[A Handbook for Wilderness Survival]]> 295356 254 Robert Harris 0871317877 Lesley 0 currently-reading 0.0 1996 A Handbook for Wilderness Survival
author: Robert Harris
name: Lesley
average rating: 0.0
book published: 1996
rating: 0
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date added: 2013/09/14
shelves: currently-reading
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]]> The Childhood of Jesus 15799416
Simón finds a job in a grain wharf. The work is unfamiliar and backbreaking, but he soon warms to his stevedore comrades, who during breaks conduct philosophical dialogues on the dignity of labour, and generally take him to their hearts.

Now he must set about his task of locating the boy’s mother. Though like everyone else who arrives in this new country he seems to be washed clean of all traces of memory, he is convinced he will know her when he sees her. And indeed, while walking with the boy in the countryside Simón catches sight of a woman he is certain is the mother, and persuades her to assume the role.

David's new mother comes to realise that he is an exceptional child, a bright, dreamy boy with highly unusual ideas about the world. But the school authorities detect a rebellious streak in him and insist he be sent to a special school far away. His mother refuses to yield him up, and it is Simón who must drive the car as the trio flees across the mountains.]]> 288 J.M. Coetzee 1846557267 Lesley 0 currently-reading 3.46 2013 The Childhood of Jesus
author: J.M. Coetzee
name: Lesley
average rating: 3.46
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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date added: 2013/09/14
shelves: currently-reading
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]]> <![CDATA[The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration]]> 8171378
Wilkerson tells this interwoven story through the lives of three unforgettable protagonists: Ida Mae Gladney, a sharecropper’s wife, who in 1937 fled Mississippi for Chicago; sharp and quick-tempered George Starling, who in 1945 fled Florida for Harlem, and Robert Foster, a surgeon who left Louisiana in 1953 in hopes of making it in California.

Wilkerson brilliantly captures their first treacherous cross-country journeys by car and train and their new lives in colonies in the New World. The Warmth of Other Suns is a bold, remarkable, and riveting work, a superb account of an “unrecognized immigration� within our own land. Through the breadth of its narrative, the beauty of the writing, the depth of its research, and the fullness of the people and lives portrayed herein, this book is a modern classic.]]> 622 Isabel Wilkerson 0679444327 Lesley 0 currently-reading 4.45 2010 The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration
author: Isabel Wilkerson
name: Lesley
average rating: 4.45
book published: 2010
rating: 0
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date added: 2013/09/14
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Long Goodbye (Philip Marlowe, #6)]]> 2054 379 Raymond Chandler 0394757688 Lesley 0 to-read 4.20 1953 The Long Goodbye (Philip Marlowe, #6)
author: Raymond Chandler
name: Lesley
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1953
rating: 0
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date added: 2013/09/14
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2012]]> 13429606 First, Best, and Best-Selling

The Best American series is the premier annual showcase for the country’s finest short fiction and nonfiction. Each volume’s series editor selects notable works from hundreds of magazines, journals, and websites. A special guest editor, a leading writer in the field, then chooses the best twenty or so pieces to publish. This unique system has made the Best American series the most respected � and most popular � of its kind.

The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2012 includes

Kevin Brockmeier, Judy Budnitz, Junot Díaz, Louise Erdrich,
Nora Krug, Julie Otsuka, Eric Puchner, George Saunders,
Adrian Tomine, Jess Walter, and others]]> 432 Dave Eggers 0547595964 Lesley 3 3.89 2011 The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2012
author: Dave Eggers
name: Lesley
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2011
rating: 3
read at: 2013/09/14
date added: 2013/09/14
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]]> The Barbarian Nurseries 10898140
The great panoramic social novel that Los Angeles deserves—a twenty-first century, West Coast Bonfire of the Vanities by the only writer qualified to capture the city in all its glory and complexity

With The Barbarian Nurseries, Héctor Tobar gives our most misunderstood metropolis its great contemporary novel, taking us beyond the glimmer of Hollywood and deeper than camera-ready crime stories to reveal Southern California life as it really is, across its vast, sunshiny sprawl of classes, languages, dreams, and ambitions.

Araceli is the live-in maid in the Torres-Thompson household—one of three Mexican employees in a Spanish-style house with lovely views of the Pacific. She has been responsible strictly for the cooking and cleaning, but the recession has hit, and suddenly Araceli is the last Mexican standing—unless you count Scott Torres, though you’d never suspect he was half Mexican but for his last name and an old family photo with central L.A. in the background. The financial pressure is causing the kind of fights that even Araceli knows the children shouldn’t hear, and then one morning, after a particularly dramatic fight, Araceli wakes to an empty house—except for the two Torres-Thompson boys, little aliens she’s never had to interact with before. Their parents are unreachable, and the only family member she knows of is Señor Torres, the subject of that old family photo. So she does the only thing she can think of and heads to the bus stop to seek out their grandfather. It will be an adventure, she tells the boys. If she only knew . . .

With a precise eye for the telling detail and an unerring way with character, soaring brilliantly and seamlessly among a panorama of viewpoints, Tobar calls on all of his experience—as a novelist, a father, a journalist, a son of Guatemalan immigrants, and a native Angeleno—to deliver a novel as broad, as essential, as alive as the city itself.
]]> 432 Héctor Tobar 0374108994 Lesley 0 to-read 3.66 2011 The Barbarian Nurseries
author: Héctor Tobar
name: Lesley
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2011
rating: 0
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date added: 2013/09/14
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Cutting Season 13623785
Just after dawn, Caren walks the grounds of Belle Vie, the historic plantation house in Louisiana that she has managed for four years. Today she sees nothing unusual, apart from some ground that has been dug up by the fence bordering the sugar cane fields. Assuming an animal has been out after dark, she asks the gardener to tidy it up. Not long afterwards, he calls her to say it's something else. Something terrible. A dead body. At a distance, she missed her. The girl, the dirt and the blood. Now she has police on site, an investigation in progress, and a member of staff no one can track down. And Caren keeps uncovering things she will wish she didn't know. As she's drawn into the dead girl's story, she makes shattering discoveries about the future of Belle Vie, the secrets of its past, and sees, more clearly than ever, that Belle Vie, its beauty, is not to be trusted.

A magnificent, sweeping story of the south, The Cutting Season brings history face-to-face with modern America, where Obama is president, but some things will never change. Attica Locke once again provides an unblinking commentary on politics, race, the law, family and love, all within a thriller every bit as gripping and tragic as her first novel, Black Water Rising.]]> 384 Attica Locke 0061802050 Lesley 0 to-read 3.58 2012 The Cutting Season
author: Attica Locke
name: Lesley
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2012
rating: 0
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date added: 2013/09/14
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau]]> 2228859
Classics of the environmental imagination—the essays of Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, and John Burroughs; Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac; Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring—are set against the inspiring story of an emerging activist movement, as revealed by newly uncovered reports of pioneering campaigns for conservation, passages from landmark legal opinions and legislation, and searing protest speeches. Here are some of America’s greatest and most impassioned writers, taking a turn toward nature and recognizing the fragility of our situation on earth and the urgency of the search for a sustainable way of life. Thought-provoking essays on overpopulation, consumerism, energy policy, and the nature of “nature� join ecologists� memoirs and intimate sketches of the habitats of endangered species. The anthology includes a detailed chronology of the environmental movement and American environmental history, as well as an 80-page color portfolio of illustrations.]]> 1047 Bill McKibben 1598530208 Lesley 3 4.24 2008 American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau
author: Bill McKibben
name: Lesley
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2008
rating: 3
read at: 2013/09/14
date added: 2013/09/14
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]]> <![CDATA[Another City: Writing from Los Angeles]]> 742139

Stories, chronicles, and poems by both well-established and up-and-coming young writers about how it was to come to LA or what it was like to grow up there, about the ocean and the desert, the entertainment industry and earthquakes, riots and racism, fires and freaks.

Contributors include: Jervey Tervalon, Aimee Bender, Benjamin Weissman, Sesshu Foster, Richard Rayner, Jeffrey McDaniel, Amy Uyematsu, Russell Leong, Aleida Rodríguez, Luis Alfaro, Bia Lowe, Amy Gerstler, and others.

David Ulin has lived in Los Angeles since 1991. From 1993-6 he was the book editor of the LA Weekly. He is currently on the board of the National Book Critics Circle, and writes regularly for the LA Weekly, Chicago Tribune, Newsday, and the Los Angeles Times.

]]> 304 David L. Ulin 0872863913 Lesley 2 3.46 2001 Another City: Writing from Los Angeles
author: David L. Ulin
name: Lesley
average rating: 3.46
book published: 2001
rating: 2
read at: 2013/09/14
date added: 2013/09/14
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]]> Good Kings Bad Kings 17086109 336 Susan Nussbaum 1616202637 Lesley 5 you-should-totally-read-these 3.94 2013 Good Kings Bad Kings
author: Susan Nussbaum
name: Lesley
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2013
rating: 5
read at: 2013/09/14
date added: 2013/09/14
shelves: you-should-totally-read-these
review:

]]> CivilWarLand in Bad Decline 28747 179 George Saunders 0099595818 Lesley 3 4.25 1996 CivilWarLand in Bad Decline
author: George Saunders
name: Lesley
average rating: 4.25
book published: 1996
rating: 3
read at: 2013/09/14
date added: 2013/09/14
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]]> Stories: All-New Tales 7637398 “The joy of fiction is the joy of the imagination…�

The best stories pull readers in and keep them turning the pages, eager to discover more—to find the answer to the question: “And then what happened?� The true hallmark of great literature is great imagination, and as Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio prove with this outstanding collection, when it comes to great fiction, all genres are equal.

Stories is a groundbreaking anthology that reinvigorates, expands, and redefines the limits of imaginative fiction and affords some of the best writers in the world—from Peter Straub and Chuck Palahniuk to Roddy Doyle and Diana Wynne Jones, Stewart O’Nan and Joyce Carol Oates to Walter Mosley and Jodi Picoult—the opportunity to work together, defend their craft, and realign misconceptions. Gaiman, a literary magician whose acclaimed work defies easy categorization and transcends all boundaries, and “master anthologist� (Booklist) Sarrantonio personally invited, read, and selected all the stories in this collection, and their standard for this “new literature of the imagination� is high. “We wanted to read stories that used a lightning-flash of magic as a way of showing us something we have already seen a thousand times as if we have never seen it at all.”�

Joe Hill boldly aligns theme and form in his disturbing tale of a man’s descent into evil in “Devil on the Staircase.� In “Catch and Release,� Lawrence Block tells of a seasoned fisherman with a talent for catching a bite of another sort. Carolyn Parkhurst adds a dark twist to sibling rivalry in “Unwell.� Joanne Harris weaves a tale of ancient gods in modern New York in “Wildfire in Manhattan.� Vengeance is the heart of Richard Adams’s “The Knife.� Jeffery Deaver introduces a dedicated psychologist whose mission in life is to save people in “The Therapist.� A chilling punishment befitting an unspeakable crime is at the dark heart of Neil Gaiman’s novelette “The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountains.�

As it transforms your view of the world, this brilliant and visionary volume—sure to become a classic—will ignite a new appreciation for the limitless realm of exceptional fiction.



“Introduction: Just Four Words� Neil Gaiman
“Blood� Roddy Doyle
“Fossil Figures� Joyce Carol Oates
“Wildfire in Manhattan� Joanne Harris
“The Thah Is a Cave in the Black Mountains� Neil Gaiman
“Unbelief� Michael Marshall Smith
“The Stars Are Falling� Joe R. Lansdale
“Juvenal Nyx� Walter Mosley
“The Knife� Richard Adams
“Weights and Measures� Jodi Picoult
“Goblin Lake� Michael Swanwick
“Mallon the Guru� Peter Straub
“Catch and Release� Lawrence Block
“Polka Dots and Moonbeams� Jeffrey Ford
“Loser� Chuck Palahniuk
“Samantha’s Diary� Diana Wynne Jones
“Land of the Lost� Stewart O’Nan
“Leif in the Wind� Gene Wolfe
“Unwell� Carolyn Parkhurst
“A Life in Fictions� Kat Howard
‘Let the Past Begin� Jonathan Carroll
“The Therapist� Jeffery Deaver
“Parallel Lines� Tim Powers
“The Cult of the Nose� Al Sarrantonio
“Human Intelligence� Kurt Andersen
“Stories� Michael Moorcock
“The Maiden Flight of McCauley’s Bellerophon� Elizabeth Hand
“The Devil on the Staircase� Joe Hill
About the Contributors]]> 428 Neil Gaiman 0061230928 Lesley 3 3.73 2010 Stories: All-New Tales
author: Neil Gaiman
name: Lesley
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2010
rating: 3
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date added: 2013/09/14
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]]> <![CDATA[A Christmas Memory, One Christmas, & The Thanksgiving Visitor]]> 3092143 107 Truman Capote Lesley 5 4.28 2008 A Christmas Memory, One Christmas, & The Thanksgiving Visitor
author: Truman Capote
name: Lesley
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2008
rating: 5
read at: 2011/11/09
date added: 2013/08/19
shelves:
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]]> The Hill Bachelors 599553
His first collection since the bestselling After Rain , William Trevor's The Hill Bachelors is a heartbreaking book about men and women and their missed four people live in a suburban house, frozen in a conspiracy of silence that prevents love's consummation; a nine-year-old dreams that a part in a movie will heal her fragmented family life; a brother and sister forge a new life amid the chaos of Ireland after the Rebellion; and in the title story, a young man chooses between his longtime love and a life of solitude on the family farm. These beautifully rendered tales reveal Trevor's compassion for the human condition and confirm once again his position as one of the premier writers of the short story.]]> 256 William Trevor 0141002174 Lesley 0 currently-reading 4.04 2000 The Hill Bachelors
author: William Trevor
name: Lesley
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2000
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2013/08/02
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Off Ramp: Adventures and Heartache in the American Elsewhere]]> 249720 320 Hank Stuever 0312424884 Lesley 3 3.84 2004 Off Ramp: Adventures and Heartache in the American Elsewhere
author: Hank Stuever
name: Lesley
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2004
rating: 3
read at: 2013/08/02
date added: 2013/08/02
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]]> <![CDATA[Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal]]> 13615414
Like all of Roach’s books, Gulp is as much about human beings as it is about human bodies.]]> 348 Mary Roach 0393081575 Lesley 3 3.91 2013 Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal
author: Mary Roach
name: Lesley
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2013
rating: 3
read at: 2013/08/02
date added: 2013/08/02
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]]> <![CDATA[The Supremes at Earl's All-You-Can-Eat]]> 15742642
Earl’s All-You-Can-Eat is home away from home for this inseparable Plainview, Indiana, trio. Dubbed “the Supremes� by high school pals in the tumultuous 1960s, they weather life’s storms together for the next four decades. Now, during their most challenging year yet, dutiful, proud, and talented Clarice must struggle to keep up appearances as she deals with her husband’s humiliating infidelities. Beautiful, fragile Barbara Jean is rocked by the tragic reverberations of a youthful love affair. And fearless Odette engages in the most terrifying battle of her life while contending with the idea that she has inherited more than her broad frame from her notorious pot-smoking mother, Dora.

Through marriage, children, happiness, and the blues, these strong, funny women gather each Sunday at the same table at Earl’s diner for delicious food, juicy gossip, occasional tears, and uproarious banter.

With wit and love, style and sublime talent, Edward Kelsey Moore brings together four intertwined love stories, three devoted allies, and two sprightly earthbound spirits in a big-hearted debut novel that embraces the lives of people you will never forget.]]> 307 Edward Kelsey Moore 0307959929 Lesley 4 3.92 2013 The Supremes at Earl's All-You-Can-Eat
author: Edward Kelsey Moore
name: Lesley
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2013
rating: 4
read at: 2013/08/01
date added: 2013/08/01
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]]> <![CDATA[When Women Stop Hating Their Bodies: Freeing Yourself from Food and Weight Obsession]]> 439907
In this revolutionary new book, bestselling authors Carol Munter and Jane Hirschmann explore the myriad reasons why women cling to diets despite overwhelming evidence that diets don’t work . In fact, diets turn us into compulsive eaters obsessed with food and weight.

Munter and Hirschmann call this syndrome “Bad Body Fever� and demonstrate how “bad body thoughts� are clues to our emotional lives. They explore the difficulties women encounter replacing dieting with demand feeding. And finally, they teach us how to think about our problems rather than eat about them—so that food can resume its proper place in our lives.

“Many women will find in these pages exactly what they determined, optimistic, and resourceful coaches, pausing at the right moments to acknowledge the difficulty of change, then passionately urging them to press on.”—Susan C. Wooley, Ph.D., Professor of Psychology, Codirector, Eating Disorder Center University of Cincinnati Medical Center]]> 384 Jane R. Hirschmann 044991058X Lesley 4 4.03 1995 When Women Stop Hating Their Bodies: Freeing Yourself from Food and Weight Obsession
author: Jane R. Hirschmann
name: Lesley
average rating: 4.03
book published: 1995
rating: 4
read at: 2013/08/01
date added: 2013/08/01
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]]> <![CDATA[Had a Good Time: Stories from American Postcards]]> 354407 288 Robert Olen Butler 0802142044 Lesley 4 3.64 2004 Had a Good Time: Stories from American Postcards
author: Robert Olen Butler
name: Lesley
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2004
rating: 4
read at: 2013/08/01
date added: 2013/08/01
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]]> <![CDATA[The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America]]> 26
And, as soon as Bill Bryson was old enough, he left. Des Moines couldn't hold him, but it did lure him back. After ten years in England, he returned to the land of his youth, and drove almost 14,000 miles in search of a mythical small town called Amalgam, the kind of trim and sunny place where the films of his youth were set.

Instead, his search led him to Anywhere, USA; a lookalike strip of gas stations, motels and hamburger outlets populated by lookalike people with a penchant for synthetic fibres. Travelling around thirty-eight of the lower states - united only in their mind-numbingly dreary uniformity - he discovered a continent that was doubly lost; lost to itself because blighted by greed, pollution, mobile homes and television; lost to him because he had become a stranger in his own land.

The Lost Continent is a classic of travel literature - hilariously, stomach-achingly funny, yet tinged with heartache - and the book that first staked Bill Bryson's claim as the most beloved writer of his generation.]]> 299 Bill Bryson 0060920084 Lesley 1 3.82 1989 The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America
author: Bill Bryson
name: Lesley
average rating: 3.82
book published: 1989
rating: 1
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]]> <![CDATA[My Friend Dahmer: A Graphic Novel]]> 12959045 Derf Backderf, “Jeff� was a much more complex figure: a high school friend with whom he had shared classrooms, hallways, and car rides.

In My Friend Dahmer, a haunting and original graphic novel, writer-artist Backderf creates a surprisingly sympathetic portrait of a disturbed young man struggling against the morbid urges emanating from the deep recesses of his psyche � a shy kid, a teenage alcoholic, and a goofball who never quite fit in with his classmates. With profound insight, what emerges is a Jeffrey Dahmer that few ever really knew, and one readers will never forget.]]> 224 Derf Backderf 1419702173 Lesley 3 3.91 2012 My Friend Dahmer: A Graphic Novel
author: Derf Backderf
name: Lesley
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2012
rating: 3
read at: 2013/08/01
date added: 2013/08/01
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]]> <![CDATA[The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Other Jazz Age Stories (Penguin Classics)]]> 3302841 How can a boring girl become more popular, a careless young woman become more sensible, or a cut-glass bowl destroy a married woman's life?
What does a young man do to save the girl that he likes from an evil ghost, or to forget old feelings for a woman when she marries another man?
Read this collection of short stories by one of America's finest storytellers to find out.]]> 464 F. Scott Fitzgerald 0143105493 Lesley 3 3.57 1922 The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Other Jazz Age Stories (Penguin Classics)
author: F. Scott Fitzgerald
name: Lesley
average rating: 3.57
book published: 1922
rating: 3
read at: 2013/07/19
date added: 2013/07/19
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]]> Severance 291103 264 Robert Olen Butler 0811856143 Lesley 2 3.64 2006 Severance
author: Robert Olen Butler
name: Lesley
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2006
rating: 2
read at: 2013/07/19
date added: 2013/07/19
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]]> <![CDATA[The Kings of Cool (Savages, #1)]]> 13544841
Now, in this high-octane prequel, Winslow reaches back in time to tell the story of how Ben, Chon, and O became the people they are. Spanning from 1960s Southern California to the recent past, The Kings of Cool is a breathtakingly original saga of family in all its forms—fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, friends and lovers. As the trio at the center of the book does battle with a cabal of drug dealers and crooked cops, they come to learn that their future is inextricably linked with their parents� history. A series of breakneck twists and turns puts the two generations on a collision course, culminating in a stunning showdown that will force Ben, Chon, and O to choose between their real families and their loyalty to one another.

Fast-paced, provocative, and wickedly funny, The Kings of Cool is a spellbinding love story for our times from a master novelist at the height of his powers. It is filled with Winslow’s trademark talents—complex characters, sharp dialogue, blistering social commentary—that have earned him an obsessive following. The result is a book that will echo in your mind and heart long after you’ve turned the last page.]]> 336 Don Winslow 1451665342 Lesley 0 to-read 3.96 2012 The Kings of Cool (Savages, #1)
author: Don Winslow
name: Lesley
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2012
rating: 0
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date added: 2013/07/19
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain]]> 261601 Robert Olen Butler's lyrical and poignant collection of stories about the aftermath of the Vietnam War and its impact on the Vietnamese was acclaimed by critics across the nation and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993.

Now Grove Press is proud to reissue this contemporary classic by one of America's most important living writers, in a new edition of 'A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain' that includes two subsequently published stories -- "Salem" and "Missing" -- that brilliantly complete the collection's narrative journey, returning to the jungles of Vietnam.]]> 269 Robert Olen Butler 0802137989 Lesley 5 you-should-totally-read-these 3.95 1992 A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain
author: Robert Olen Butler
name: Lesley
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1992
rating: 5
read at: 2013/07/19
date added: 2013/07/19
shelves: you-should-totally-read-these
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]]> <![CDATA[Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia]]> 46815
Why would a talented young girl go through the looking glass and step into a netherworld where up is down and food is greed, where death is honor and flesh is weak? Why enter into a love affair with hunger, drugs, sex and death? Marya Hornbacher sustained both anorexia and bulimia through five lengthy hospitalizations, endless therapy, the loss of family, friends, jobs and, ultimately, any sense of what it meant to be "normal."

In this vivid, emotionally wrenching memoir, she re-creates the experience and illuminates the tangle of personal, family and cultural causes that underlie eating disorders. Hornbacher's story gathers intensity with each passing year. By the time she is in college and working for a news service in Washington, DC, she is in the grip of a such a horrifying bout with anorexia that it will forever put to rest the romance of wasting away. Down to 52 pounds and counting, Hornbacher's body becomes a the death instinct with the drive to live, mind and body locked in mortal combat.

Wasted is the story of one woman's travels to the darker side of reality, and her decision to find her way back -- on her own terms. A landmark book from a 23-year-old writer of virtuoso prose, Wasted takes us inside the experience of anorexia and bulimia in a way that no one else has ever done.]]> 298 Marya Hornbacher 0060858796 Lesley 5 4.02 1998 Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia
author: Marya Hornbacher
name: Lesley
average rating: 4.02
book published: 1998
rating: 5
read at: 2013/07/11
date added: 2013/07/11
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]]> <![CDATA[Disabled, Female, and Proud!: Stories of Ten Women with Disabilities]]> 731186 144 Harilyn Rousso 0897893581 Lesley 0 to-read 3.40 1988 Disabled, Female, and Proud!: Stories of Ten Women with Disabilities
author: Harilyn Rousso
name: Lesley
average rating: 3.40
book published: 1988
rating: 0
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date added: 2013/07/11
shelves: to-read
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]]> The History of White People 6919721 A mind-expanding and myth-destroying exploration of “whiteness”—an illuminating work on the history of race and power.

Eminent historian Nell Irvin Painter tells perhaps the most important forgotten story in American history. Beginning at the roots of Western civilization, she traces the invention of the idea of a white race—often for economic, scientific, and political ends. She shows how the origins of American identity in the eighteenth century were intrinsically tied to the elevation of white skin into the embodiment of beauty, power, and intelligence; how the great American intellectuals� including Ralph Waldo Emerson—insisted that only Anglo Saxons were truly American; and how the definitions of who is “white� and who is “American� have evolved over time.

A story filled with towering historical figures, The History of White People closes an enormous gap in a literature that has long focused on the nonwhite, and it forcefully reminds us that the concept of “race� is an all-too-human invention whose meaning, importance, and reality have changed according to a long and rich history. 70 illustrations.]]> 512 Nell Irvin Painter 0393049345 Lesley 0 to-read 4.05 2010 The History of White People
author: Nell Irvin Painter
name: Lesley
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2010
rating: 0
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]]> Too Much Happiness: Stories 6464937
Ten superb new stories by one of our most beloved and admired writers—the winner of the 2009 Man Booker International Prize.

In the first story a young wife and mother receives release from the unbearable pain of losing her three children from a most surprising source. In another, a young woman, in the aftermath of an unusual and humiliating seduction, reacts in a clever if less-than-admirable fashion. Other stories uncover the “deep-holes� in a marriage, the unsuspected cruelty of children, and how a boy’s disfigured face provides both the good things in his life and the bad. And in the long title story, we accompany Sophia Kovalevsky—a late-nineteenth-century Russian émigré and mathematician—on a winter journey that takes her from the Riviera, where she visits her lover, to Paris, Germany, and, Denmark, where she has a fateful meeting with a local doctor, and finally to Sweden, where she teaches at the only university in Europe willing to employ a female mathematician.

With clarity and ease, Alice Munro once again renders complex, difficult events and emotions into stories that shed light on the unpredictable ways in which men and women accommodate and often transcend what happens in their lives.

Dimensions --
Fiction --
Wenlock edge --
Deep-holes --
Free radicals --
Face --
Some women --
Child's play --
Wood --
Too much happiness]]> 304 Alice Munro 0307269760 Lesley 4 3.87 2009 Too Much Happiness: Stories
author: Alice Munro
name: Lesley
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2009
rating: 4
read at: 2013/07/11
date added: 2013/07/11
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]]> <![CDATA[The True Story of Hansel and Gretel]]> 216408 A poignant and suspenseful retelling of a classic fairy tale set in a war-torn world.

In the last months of the Nazi occupation of Poland, two children are left by their father and stepmother to find safety in a dense forest. Because their real names will reveal their Jewishness, they are renamed "Hansel" and "Gretel." They wander in the woods until they are taken in by Magda, an eccentric and stubborn old woman called "witch" by the nearby villagers. Magda is determined to save them, even as a German officer arrives in the village with his own plans for the children. Louise Murphy's haunting novel of journey and survival, of redemption and memory, powerfully depicts how war is experienced by families and especially by children.

"Lyrical, haunting, unforgettable." --Kirkus Reviews

"No reader who picks up this inspiring novel will put it down until the final pages, in which redemption is not a fairy tale ending but a heartening message of hope." --Publishers Weekly]]> 297 Louise Murphy 0142003077 Lesley 0 to-read 4.01 2003 The True Story of Hansel and Gretel
author: Louise Murphy
name: Lesley
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2003
rating: 0
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date added: 2013/07/11
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]]> Both Flesh and Not: Essays 13528351 Brilliant, dazzling, never-before-collected nonfiction writings by "one of America's most daring and talented writers." (Los Angeles Times Book Review).

Both Flesh and Not gathers fifteen of Wallace's seminal essays, all published in book form for the first time.

Never has Wallace's seemingly endless curiosity been more evident than in this compilation of work spanning nearly 20 years of writing. Here, Wallace turns his critical eye with equal enthusiasm toward Roger Federer and Jorge Luis Borges; Terminator 2 and The Best of the Prose Poem; the nature of being a fiction writer and the quandary of defining the essay; the best underappreciated novels and the English language's most irksome misused words; and much more.

Both Flesh and Not restores Wallace's essays as originally written, and it includes a selection from his personal vocabulary list, an assembly of unusual words and definitions.]]> 328 David Foster Wallace 0316182370 Lesley 0 to-read 3.86 2012 Both Flesh and Not: Essays
author: David Foster Wallace
name: Lesley
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2012
rating: 0
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date added: 2013/07/11
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]]> Ex Utero (Harvest Book) 1063662 208 Laurie Foos 015600464X Lesley 4 3.30 1995 Ex Utero (Harvest Book)
author: Laurie Foos
name: Lesley
average rating: 3.30
book published: 1995
rating: 4
read at: 2013/07/11
date added: 2013/07/11
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]]> The Stuff of Life 1115237 224 Karen Karbo 1582344450 Lesley 3 4.16 2008 The Stuff of Life
author: Karen Karbo
name: Lesley
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2008
rating: 3
read at: 2012/03/31
date added: 2013/05/31
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]]> <![CDATA[Seek: Reports from the Edges of America and Beyond]]> 107284 256 Denis Johnson 0060930470 Lesley 0 to-read 3.86 2001 Seek: Reports from the Edges of America and Beyond
author: Denis Johnson
name: Lesley
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2001
rating: 0
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date added: 2013/04/30
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything]]> 6346975 The blockbuster phenomenon that charts an amazing journey of the mind while revolutionizing our concept of memory

An instant bestseller that is poised to become a classic, Moonwalking with Einstein recounts Joshua Foer's yearlong quest to improve his memory under the tutelage of top "mental athletes." He draws on cutting-edge research, a surprising cultural history of remembering, and venerable tricks of the mentalist's trade to transform our understanding of human memory. From the United States Memory Championship to deep within the author's own mind, this is an electrifying work of journalism that reminds us that, in every way that matters, we are the sum of our memories.]]> 307 Joshua Foer 159420229X Lesley 4 3.86 2011 Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything
author: Joshua Foer
name: Lesley
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2011
rating: 4
read at: 2013/04/07
date added: 2013/04/07
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]]> Cry, the Beloved Country 6150 Cry, the Beloved Country, the most famous and important novel in South Africa’s history, was an immediate worldwide bestseller in 1948. Alan Paton’s impassioned novel about a black man’s country under white man’s law is a work of searing beauty.

Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child that is the inheritor of our fear. Let him not love the earth too deeply. Let him not laugh too gladly when the water runs through his fingers, nor stand too silent when the setting sun makes red the veld with fire. Let him not be too moved when the birds of his land are singing, nor give too much of his heart to a mountain or valley. For fear will rob him of all if he gives too much.

The eminent literary critic Lewis Gannett wrote, “We have had many novels from statesmen and reformers, almost all bad; many novels from poets, almost all thin. In Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country the statesman, the poet and the novelist meet in a unique harmony.�

Cry, the Beloved Country is the deeply moving story of the Zulu pastor Stephen Kumalo and his son, Absalom, set against the background of a land and a people riven by racial injustice. Remarkable for its lyricism, unforgettable for character and incident, Cry, the Beloved Country is a classic work of love and hope, courage and endurance, born of the dignity of man.]]> 316 Alan Paton 074326195X Lesley 0 to-read 3.91 1948 Cry, the Beloved Country
author: Alan Paton
name: Lesley
average rating: 3.91
book published: 1948
rating: 0
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date added: 2013/04/07
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]]> <![CDATA[Later Poems Selected and New: 1971�2012]]> 13707605 The final volume of poems assembled by America’s most powerful and distinctive voice.

Adrienne Rich's Later Poems: Selected and New, 1971 - 2012 displays the strong trajectory of the work of one of the most distinguished artists of American letters. After her death in March 2012, Rich left behind a manuscript of mature work that speaks for her concern with a poetics of relation along with a passionate attention to craft.

In addition to her selections from twelve volumes of published work, Later Poems: Selected and New contains ten powerful new poems. Among these, From Strata is a kind of archaeology of the present day; Itinerary searches for an indefinite future in a menaced landscape; For the Young Anarchists offers a trope of skilled labor for political action; and the haunting voice of the Teethsucking Bird reminds us of what we have been told to forget.

These and other poems look back into history and forward into the future while engaging with contemporary moments. Rich s singular command of language continues to the end.]]> 530 Adrienne Rich 0393089568 Lesley 4 4.26 2012 Later Poems Selected and New: 1971–2012
author: Adrienne Rich
name: Lesley
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2012
rating: 4
read at: 2013/04/07
date added: 2013/04/07
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]]> <![CDATA[The Earth Moved: On the Remarkable Achievements of Earthworms]]> 299960 The Earth Moved, Amy Stewart takes us on a journey through the underground world and introduces us to one of its most amazing denizens. The earthworm may be small, spineless, and blind, but its impact on the ecosystem is profound. It ploughs the soil, fights plant diseases, cleans up pollution, and turns ordinary dirt into fertile land. Who knew?

In her witty, offbeat style, Stewart shows that much depends on the actions of the lowly worm. Charles Darwin devoted his last years to the meticulous study of these creatures, praising their remarkable abilities. With the august scientist as her inspiration, Stewart investigates the worm's subterranean realm, talks to oligochaetologists—the unsung heroes of earthworm science—who have devoted their lives to unearthing the complex life beneath our feet, and observes the thousands of worms in her own garden. From the legendary giant Australian worm that stretches to ten feet in length to the modest nightcrawler that wormed its way into the heart of Darwin's last book to the energetic red wigglers in Stewart's compost bin, The Earth Moved gives worms their due and exposes their hidden and extraordinary universe. This book is for all of us who appreciate Mother Nature's creatures, no matter how humble.]]> 240 Amy Stewart Lesley 0 to-read 3.91 2004 The Earth Moved: On the Remarkable Achievements of Earthworms
author: Amy Stewart
name: Lesley
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2004
rating: 0
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date added: 2013/04/07
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]]> Smilla's Sense of Snow 124509
It happened in the Copenhagen snow. A six-year-old boy, a Greenlander like Smilla, fell to his death from the top of his apartment building. While the boy's body is still warm, the police pronounce his death an accident. But Smilla knows her young neighbor didn't fall from the roof on his own. Soon she is following a path of clues as clear to her as footsteps in the snow. For her dead neighbor, and for herself, she must embark on a harrowing journey of lies, revelation and violence that will take her back to the world of ice and snow from which she comes, where an explosive secret waits beneath the ice....]]> 480 Peter Høeg 0385315147 Lesley 0 to-read 3.77 1992 Smilla's Sense of Snow
author: Peter Høeg
name: Lesley
average rating: 3.77
book published: 1992
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2013/04/07
shelves: to-read
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]]> In the Grave 17733307 Jeanine Deibel Lesley 0 to-read 5.00 2013 In the Grave
author: Jeanine Deibel
name: Lesley
average rating: 5.00
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2013/04/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby: Scary Fairy Tales]]> 6490566 The literary event of Halloween: a book of otherworldly power from Russia's preeminent contemporary fiction writer

Vanishings and apparitions, nightmares and twists of fate, mysterious ailments and supernatural interventions haunt these stories by the Russian master Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, heir to the spellbinding tradition of Gogol and Poe. Blending the miraculous with the macabre, and leavened by a mischievous gallows humor, these bewitching tales are like nothing being written in Russia-or anywhere else in the world-today.]]> 206 Ludmilla Petrushevskaya 0143114662 Lesley 0 to-read 3.64 2009 There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby: Scary Fairy Tales
author: Ludmilla Petrushevskaya
name: Lesley
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2009
rating: 0
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date added: 2013/04/05
shelves: to-read
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]]> Total Immersion: Stories 28938
Total Immersion

In these and other exquisite stories, Allegra Goodman fills rooms with laughter and voices, captures dinner parties, seaside picnics, academic grudges, shul politics, and the kind of hurts that only families and lovers can know. Featuring two new stories previously published in The New Yorker, Total Immersion is Allegra Goodman's first collection of short fiction—a masterful work from one of the most powerful and eloquent voices on the American literary landscape.]]> 304 Allegra Goodman 0385332998 Lesley 3 3.35 1989 Total Immersion: Stories
author: Allegra Goodman
name: Lesley
average rating: 3.35
book published: 1989
rating: 3
read at: 2013/03/07
date added: 2013/03/07
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]]> <![CDATA[Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values (Phaedrus, #1)]]> 629 Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is an examination of how we live, a meditation on how to live better set around the narration of a summer motorcycle trip across America's Northwest, undertaken by a father & his young son.]]> 540 Robert M. Pirsig 0060589469 Lesley 0 to-read, later 3.78 1974 Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values (Phaedrus, #1)
author: Robert M. Pirsig
name: Lesley
average rating: 3.78
book published: 1974
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2013/03/07
shelves: to-read, later
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Birds of a Lesser Paradise: Stories]]> 12188594
From a prizewinning young writer whose stories have been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and New Stories from the South comes a heartwarming and hugely appealing debut collection that explores the way our choices and relationships are shaped by the menace and beauty of the natural world.

Megan Mayhew Bergman's twelve stories capture the surprising moments when the pull of our biology becomes evident, when love or fear collide with good sense, or when our attachment to an animal or wild place can't be denied. In "Housewifely Arts," a single mother and her son drive hours to track down an African Gray Parrot that can mimic her deceased mother's voice. A population control activist faces the ultimate conflict between her loyalty to the environment and her maternal desire in "Yesterday's Whales." And in the title story, a lonely naturalist allows an attractive stranger to lead her and her aging father on a hunt for an elusive woodpecker.

As intelligent as they are moving, the stories in Birds of a Lesser Paradise are alive with emotion, wit, and insight into the impressive power that nature has over all of us.]]> 224 Megan Mayhew Bergman 1451643357 Lesley 4 3.86 2012 Birds of a Lesser Paradise: Stories
author: Megan Mayhew Bergman
name: Lesley
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2012
rating: 4
read at: 2013/03/07
date added: 2013/03/07
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]]> Dear Life 13530981
Alice Munro's peerless ability to give us the essence of a life in often brief but always spacious and timeless stories is once again everywhere apparent in this brilliant new collection. In story after story, she illumines the moment a life is forever altered by a chance encounter or an action not taken, or by a simple twist of fate that turns a person out of his or her accustomed path and into a new way of being or thinking. A poet, finding herself in alien territory at her first literary party, is rescued by a seasoned newspaper columnist, and is soon hurtling across the continent, young child in tow, toward a hoped-for but completely unplanned meeting. A young soldier, returning to his fiancée from the Second World War, steps off the train before his stop and onto the farm of another woman, beginning a life on the move. A wealthy young woman having an affair with the married lawyer hired by her father to handle his estate comes up with a surprising way to deal with the blackmailer who finds them out.

While most of these stories take place in Munro's home territory - the small Canadian towns around Lake Huron - the characters sometimes venture to the cities, and the book ends with four pieces set in the area where she grew up, and in the time of her own childhood: stories "autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact." A girl who can't sleep imagines night after wakeful night that she kills her beloved younger sister. A mother snatches up her child and runs for dear life when a crazy woman comes into her yard.]]> 336 Alice Munro 0771064861 Lesley 5 you-should-totally-read-these 3.75 2011 Dear Life
author: Alice Munro
name: Lesley
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2011
rating: 5
read at: 2013/02/18
date added: 2013/02/18
shelves: you-should-totally-read-these
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]]> Missing Women and Others 1325779 196 June Spence 1573220981 Lesley 4 3.73 1998 Missing Women and Others
author: June Spence
name: Lesley
average rating: 3.73
book published: 1998
rating: 4
read at: 2013/02/12
date added: 2013/02/12
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]]> Book of Mercy 158008
Internationally celebrated for his writing and his music, Leonard Cohen is revered as one of the great writers, performers, and most consistently daring artists of our time. Now beautifully repackaged, the poems in Book of Mercy brim with praise, despair, anger, doubt and trust. Speaking from the heart of the modern world, yet in tones that resonate with an older devotional tradition, these verses give voice to our deepest, most powerful intuitions.
ձ> 112 Leonard Cohen 0771021828 Lesley 2 4.00 1984 Book of Mercy
author: Leonard Cohen
name: Lesley
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1984
rating: 2
read at: 2013/02/07
date added: 2013/02/07
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]]> Miles from Nowhere 2895061 289 Nami Mun 1594488541 Lesley 5 you-should-totally-read-these 3.59 2008 Miles from Nowhere
author: Nami Mun
name: Lesley
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2008
rating: 5
read at: 2013/02/07
date added: 2013/02/07
shelves: you-should-totally-read-these
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]]> Mr. Peanut 6893663
David Pepin has been in love with his wife, Alice, since the moment they met in a university seminar on Alfred Hitchcock. After thirteen years of marriage, he still can’t imagine a remotely happy life without her—yet he obsessively contemplates her demise. Soon she is dead, and David is both deeply distraught and the prime suspect.

The detectives investigating Alice’s suspicious death have plenty of personal experience with conjugal enigmas: Ward Hastroll is happily married until his wife inexplicably becomes voluntarily and militantly bedridden; and Sam Sheppard is especially sensitive to the intricacies of marital guilt and innocence, having decades before been convicted and then exonerated of the brutal murder of his wife.

Still, these men are in the business of figuring things out, even as Pepin’s role in Alice’s death grows ever more confounding when they link him to a highly unusual hit man called Mobius. Like the Escher drawings that inspire the computer games David designs for a living, these complex, interlocking dramas are structurally and emotionally intense, subtle, and intriguing; they brilliantly explore the warring impulses of affection and hatred, and pose a host of arresting questions. Is it possible to know anyone fully, completely? Are murder and marriage two sides of the same coin, each endlessly recycling into the other? And what, in the end, is the truth about love?

Mesmerizing, exhilarating, and profoundly moving, Mr. Peanut is a police procedural of the soul, a poignant investigation of the relentlessly mysterious human heart—and a first novel of the highest order.]]> 335 Adam Ross 030727070X Lesley 3 3.23 2010 Mr. Peanut
author: Adam Ross
name: Lesley
average rating: 3.23
book published: 2010
rating: 3
read at: 2013/02/01
date added: 2013/02/01
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]]> <![CDATA[The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg]]> 7786087 Transactions in a Foreign Currency (1986), Under the 82nd Airborne (1992), All Around Atlantis (1997) and her most recent collection-Twilight of the Superheroes (2006).

“One of America’s finest writers.”�San Francisco Chronicle “Concentrated bursts of perfection.”�The Times (London) “Shimmering stories that possess the power and charm to move us.� �The New York Times “E󾱱پԲ.Ũ�Harper’s Magazine “OܳٲٲԻ徱Բ.Ũ�Christian Science Monitor “Eisenberg simply writes like no one else.”�Elle “Eisenberg’s stories possess all the steely beauty of a knife wrapped in velvet.”�The Boston Globe ಹԲ.Ũ�Time Out New York “M.Ũ�Newsweek “Comic, elegant and pitch perfect.”�Vanity Fair “One of the great fiction writers living in America today.”�The Dallas Morning News “There aren’t many contemporary novels as shudderingly intimate and mordantly funny as Eisenberg’s best stories.”�The New York Times Book Review

ձ> 992 Deborah Eisenberg 0312429894 Lesley 4 4.13 2008 The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg
author: Deborah Eisenberg
name: Lesley
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2008
rating: 4
read at: 2013/02/01
date added: 2013/02/01
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]]> <![CDATA[Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times: A Collection of All Original Essays from Today's (and Tomorrow's) Young Authors on the State of the Art -- ... Hustle -- in the Age of Information Overload]]> 862912 Bookmark Now boldly addresses the significance of the production of literature in the twenty-first century. Or simply, “How do we talk about writing and reading in an age where they both seem almost quaint?”The book features authors in their twenties and thirties—those raised when TV, video games, and then the Internet supplanted books as dominant cultural mediums—and their intent is to examine: (1) how this generation came to writing as a calling, (2) what they see as literature’s relevance when media consumption and competition have reached unprecedented levels, and (3) how writing and reading fit in with the rest of our rapid, multitasking world. The result will offer a voyeuristic peek into the private, creative lives of today’s writers and shed light on what their work means at a time when the book business is changing, yet—almost paradoxically—a time when storytelling as a means of both self-realization and community building (be it via e-mail, weblogs, or “This American Life�) seems more relevant than ever before.Edited by Kevin Smokler, a Bay Area entrepreneur who has devoted himself to fostering literary culture and cultivating fresh talent, Bookmark Now is a collection that both captures the state of the art and provides inspiration to aspiring writers at all levels.]]> 304 Kevin Smokler 0465078443 Lesley 5 you-should-totally-read-these 3.58 2005 Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times: A Collection of All Original Essays from Today's (and Tomorrow's) Young Authors on the State of the Art -- ... Hustle -- in the Age of Information Overload
author: Kevin Smokler
name: Lesley
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2005
rating: 5
read at: 2013/02/01
date added: 2013/02/01
shelves: you-should-totally-read-these
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Lulu in the Sky: A Daughter of Cambodia Finds Love, Healing, and Double Happiness]]> 12611686 330 Loung Ung 0062091913 Lesley 0 to-read 4.14 2012 Lulu in the Sky: A Daughter of Cambodia Finds Love, Healing, and Double Happiness
author: Loung Ung
name: Lesley
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2012
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2013/02/01
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[In Youth is Pleasure & I Left My Grandfather’s House]]> 526518 265 Denton Welch 1878972138 Lesley 0 to-read 4.25 1994 In Youth is Pleasure & I Left My Grandfather’s House
author: Denton Welch
name: Lesley
average rating: 4.25
book published: 1994
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2013/01/19
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Mondo and Other Stories 9984736


Haunting and beautiful, these stories speak to a universal longing for a life beyond the confines and trappings of modern existence. In each tale it is a child who can see and appreciate these places filled with wonder and knowledge. Mondo is a little boy whose connection to the beauty in everything unites a seaside town. Little Cross perturbs the order of things with her “What is blue ? Daniel flees his stifling school and absent parents for the sea. All these children, like the wise billy goat in the collection’s final story, understand “so many things, not the things you find in books that men like to talk about but silent, strong things, things full of beauty and mystery.� And in the end, so do we.]]> 248 J.M.G. Le Clézio 0803230001 Lesley 4 3.58 1978 Mondo and Other Stories
author: J.M.G. Le Clézio
name: Lesley
average rating: 3.58
book published: 1978
rating: 4
read at: 2013/01/19
date added: 2013/01/19
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]]> Venus Drive 764051 178 Sam Lipsyte 1890447250 Lesley 2 3.79 2000 Venus Drive
author: Sam Lipsyte
name: Lesley
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2000
rating: 2
read at: 2013/01/19
date added: 2013/01/19
shelves:
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]]> <![CDATA[The Best American Short Stories 2010]]> 7661067 421 Richard Russo 0547055323 Lesley 3 3.96 2010 The Best American Short Stories 2010
author: Richard Russo
name: Lesley
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2010
rating: 3
read at: 2013/01/19
date added: 2013/01/19
shelves:
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]]>