Though her friends think Maggie has the perfect life, she's actually perfectly miserable. The former Miss Alabama is worried about how her life has turned out-she's given up on her dream of living in a beautiful home like Crestview, and instead is a real estate agent in Birmingham. But just when Maggie begins to wonder if there's much point in going on, her life takes a wild turn, and she finds herself catapulted into one surprising discovery after the next. As Maggie learns valuable lessons about the nature of friendship, the challenges of modern life, and the dangers of impossible dreams, she starts to see how much more there is to life than what can be listed in a Miss Alabama bio. Bestselling author Fannie Flagg's trademark comic flair is out in full force in this fabulous new novel about the unpredictability of life.

2011 m. dviems Lietuvos leidykloms nutiko įdomus dalykas – gal mėnesio skirtumu pasirodė dvi skirtingos

«Į švyturį» versijos, viena Vagos (vertė Laimantas Jonušys), kita Versus Aureus (vertė Milda Keršienė-Dyke). Knygoje beveik nėra siužeto. Ją sudaro trys dalys. Pirmoje kalbama apie plaukimą į švyturį, o trečioje į jį plaukiama. Antroje dūlėja namas ir numiršta du asmenys. Dar viena dama pirmoje ir trečioje dalyje tapo paveikslą. Ir beveik viskas. Siužeto nėra, bet užtat turinio tiek, kad išeitų kelioms knygoms (grynai Woolf stilius). Į vieną sakinį gali sutilpti visas staiga žmogų apėmęs koks nors gyvenimo suvokimas ir panašiai. Daug apmąstymų, supratimų, pastebėjimų, analizių, įžvalgų, kontempliacijų, reminiscencijų ir taip toliau. Visa tai gali būti labai nuobodu. Jei tuo metu esi įpusėjęs kokį nors šaunų serialą, gali visai nesinorėti skaityti. Be to, sudėtinga (nors neįtikėtinai graži) kalba. Reikia susikaupti, kitaip vis pamesi mintį. Nepavyks skaityti, jei kaimynas darys remontą arba kambariokas už sienos šokinės atlikdamas Insanity treniruotę. Kitaip sakant, snobui čia aukso grynuolis, bet paprastam, nepretenzingam knygų vartotojui romanas gali pasirodyti tik laiko gaišimas. Tiesa, jo yra vos per 200 psl., tad net ir labai vengiant Į švyturį neįmanoma skaityti ilgiau nei savaitę.

To the Lighthouse, romanas; iš anglų kalbos vertė Milda Keršienė-Dyke

The sequel to the classic memoir I Saw Ramallah, I Was Born There, I Was Born Here takes up the story in 1998 when Barghouti returned to the Occupied Territories to introduce his Cairo-born son, Tamim, to his Palestinian family.Ranging freely back and forth in time between the 1990s and the present day, Barghouti weaves into his account of exile poignant evocations of Palestinian history and daily life — the pleasure of coffee arriving at just the right moment, the challenge of a car journey through the Occupied Territories, the meaning of home and the importance of being able to say, standing in a small village in Palestine, 'I was born here', rather than saying from exile, 'I was born there'.Full of life and humour in the face of death, I Was Born There, I Was Born Here is destined, like its predecessor, to become a classic.

In these quirkily imaginative short stories about writing and writers, the scrivener Quartermain (our “Bartleby”) goes her stubborn way haunted by Pauline Johnson, Malcolm Lowry, Robin Blaser, Daphne Marlatt, and a host of other literary forebears. Who is writing whom, these stories ask in their musing reflections — the writer or the written? The thinker or the alphabet? The calligrapher or the pictograms hidden in her Chinese written characters?Intimate jealousies between writers, wagers of courage and ambition, and histories of the colours violet and yellow are some of the subjects in the first section, “Caravan.” Struggles of mothers, fathers, and sisters (and the figures drawn in the Chinese written characters that represent them) unfold as tales of love, death, and revenge in the group of stories in the second section, “Orientalisme.” In “Scriptorium,” the third section, we find out how Bartleby’s father, a Caucasian cook specializing in Chinese cuisine, got Bartleby into writing in the first place. In the fourth series of stories, “How to Write,” we learn how Bartleby loses her I while meeting Allen Ginsberg, Alice Toklas, and a real Chinese cook who works in a fictional house of Ethel Wilson, and how Malcolm Lowry’s life came to an end. The fifth and last section, “Moccasin Box,” investigates how a Sebaldesque Bartleby is silenced by Pauline Johnson.Taking its cue from genre-bending writers like Robert Walser and Enrique Vila-Matas, I, Bartleby cunningly challenges boundaries between fiction and reality.

I, City is a novel about the city of Most in north Bohemia, an ancient city founded on a primeval wetland that was literally "relocated" to get to the brown coal beneath it. The city is the narrator, telling its own story through its inhabitants, who make their "appearances" in fleeting, ghost-like vignettes, Joycean epiphanies straight out of a Bohemian Dubliners. The "I" that purports to be Most seems to be an entire consciousness, at enough of a remove from the town itself that he, she or it can see and can know seemingly everything, past and present. As Most's inhabitants emerge from the pollution, or from the swamp of the town's founding, we find not individuals but representatives. Theirs are historical lives that mistrust history, or that live it at least with typical Czech irony. This abstraction, Brycz's making of archetypes, isn't accomplished in a spirit of abuse. Brycz obviously loves his "small" people, and has more than sympathy — he is one of them. As Brycz makes fictional people say factual things and factual people (Kafka, the Pope, the last president of Communist Czechoslovakia, Gustav Husak) say fictional things, post-modernity via Marquez and other so-called Magical Realists makes its almost requisite — though noiseless — appearance.I, City is many things: a novel-in-stories, a series of lyrical prose sketches in the best easterly European tradition of Danilo Kiš, or Isaac Babel.

Named after the "divine" Sarah Bernhardt, red-haired Sarah Nour El-Din is "wonderful, irresistibly unique, funny, and amazing," raves Amy Tan. Determined to make of her life a work of art, she tries to tell her story, sometimes casting it as a memoir, sometimes a novel, always fascinatingly incomplete."Alameddine's new novel unfolds like a secret… creating a tale…humorous and heartbreaking and always real" (Los Angeles Times). "[W]ith each new approach, [Sarah] sheds another layer of her pretension, revealing another truth about her humanity" (San Francisco Weekly). Raised in a hybrid family shaped by divorce and remarriage, and by Beirut in wartime, Sarah finds a fragile peace in self-imposed exile in the United States. Her extraordinary dignity is supported by a best friend, a grown-up son, occasional sensual pleasures, and her determination to tell her own story. "Like her narrative, [Sarah's] life is broken and fragmented. [But] the bright, strange, often startling pieces…are moving and memorable" (Boston Globe). Reading group guide included.

In this powerful debut novel, three American soldiers haunted by their actions in Afghanistan search for absolution and human connection in family and civilian life.Wintric Ellis joins the army as soon as he graduates from high school, saying goodbye to his girlfriend, Kristen, and to the backwoods California town whose borders have always been the limits of his horizon. Deployed for two years in Afghanistan in a directionless war, he struggles to find his bearings in a place where allies could at any second turn out to be foes. Two career soldiers, Dax and Torres, take Wintric under their wing. Together, these three men face an impossible choice: risk death or commit a harrowing act of war. The aftershocks echo long after each returns home to a transfigured world, where his own children may fear to touch him and his nightmares still hold sway.Jesse Goolsby casts backward and forward in time to track these unforgettable characters from childhood to parenthood, from redwood forests to open desert roads to the streets of Kabul. Hailed by Robert Olen Butler as a “major literary event,” I’d Walk with My Friends If I Could Find Them is a work of disarming eloquence and heart-wrenching wisdom, and a debut novel from a writer to watch.

Twelve-year-old Toulouse “Tull” Trotter lives on his grandfather’s vast Bel-Air parkland estate with his mother, the beautiful, drug-addicted Katrina — a landscape artist who specializes in topiary labyrinths. He spends most of his time with young cousins Lucy, “the girl detective,” and Edward, a prodigy undaunted by the disfiguring effects of Apert Syndrome. One day, an impulsive revelation by Lucy sets in motion a chain of events that changes Tull — and the Trotter family — forever.In this latter-day Thousand and One Nights, a boy seeks his lost father and a woman finds her long-lost love. . while a family of unimaginable wealth learns that its fate is bound up with two fugitives: Amaryllis, a street orphan who aspires to be a saint, and her protector, a homeless schizophrenic, clad in Victorian rags, who is accused of a horrifying crime.

Long before he was the taco seller whose ‘Gringo Dog’ recipe made him famous throughout Mexico City, our hero was an aspiring artist: an artist, that is, till his would-be girlfriend was stolen by Diego Rivera, and his dreams snuffed out by his hypochondriac mother. Now our hero is resident in a retirement home, where fending off boredom is far more gruelling than making tacos. Plagued by the literary salon that bumps about his building’s lobby and haunted by the self-pitying ghost of a neglected artist, Villalobos’s old man can’t help but misbehave.He antagonises his neighbours, tortures American missionaries with passages from Adorno, flirts with the revolutionary greengrocer, and in short does everything that can be done to fend off the boredom of retirement and old age. . while still holding a beer.A delicious take-down of pretensions to cultural posterity, I’ll Sell You a Dog is a comic novel whose absurd inventions, scurrilous antics and oddball characters are vintage Villalobos.

A wry, touching short story from one of New Zealand's best-loved writers.When Uncle Rangiora visits his sister and dances with her in the garden, she knows she has to visit the place where he died, and where he and other of his comrades from the Maori Battalion were buried during the Second World War. His sister is an old woman now, her husband is even older, but that's not going to stop them from setting off across the world alone, to the great consternation of their children who wonder if they will ever get there and back.This moving and entertaining story is a fictionalised version of the trip to Tunisia taken by the author's elderly parents. Musing upon postcolonial politics and perspectives, it also considers the lyrical form the author used at the beginning of his literary career and the wit, style and drama that readers can discover in his newer works.

In her bewitching 30th novel, I'll Take You There, Joyce Carol Oates returns again to neurotic female post-adolescence. The unnamed narrator attends an upstate New York university in the early 1960s. In those times of tightly prescribed femininity, she joins a sorority in a bald attempt to become part of the sisterhood of normalcy. It doesn't work. She reads philosophy, she works for a living, she's asexual, she's an orphan, she's a Jew: "I was a freak in the midst of their stunning, stampeding, blazing female normality." Booted from the sorority, she falls hard for a thirtyish black philosophy student who seems to her to live on a higher plane than the rest of humanity. In the final section, she is called west to the deathbed of someone she thought was lost to her forever. Oates brings together some of her strongest trademark qualities: She writes her character's life as though it were a fairy tale. She sells her material, bringing dramatic tension to the very first page: "They would claim I destroyed Mrs. Thayer… Yet others would claim that Mrs. Thayer destroyed me." And she writes with tender care about the intellectual life of her young protagonist. Some find Oates's obsession with nascent womanhood claustrophobic, but in this heroine she finds a vein of integrity and intellectual probity peculiar to those who are not quite adult. Most writers treat college life as comedy or romance. Oates, on the other hand, seriously explores an age when we are most terribly ourselves. She seems to find something deeply human and pleasingly dramatic in this time wedged between childhood and adulthood.

“A writer without mercy. . this book is like a wire stretched across the throat.” —Oliver StoneIn an epic novel that does for Hollywood what Nashville did for Nashville, I’m Losing You follows the rich and famous and the down and out as their lives intersect in a series of coincidences that exposes the “bigger than life” ferocity of Hollywood — and proves that Bruce Wagner is a talent to be reckoned with. Wagner, author of the novel Dead Stars, examines the psychological complexities of Hollywood reality and fantasy, soaring far beyond the reaches of Robert Stone's Children of Light and Nathaniel West's The Day of the Locust.

Mark Dunn returns for his third novel with MacAdam/Cage with Ibid, a novel written entirely in footnotes. "Being one of those rare birds who actually reads footnotes," comments Dunn, "I often find myself rewarded by my time spent in the margins. Many authors give themselves wonderful license in their footnotes to let their guard down, even get a little frisky and mischievous." And so the idea for Ibid was born. Dunn pushes this propensity to the limit, and has created a full-length hilarious novel entirely upon the margins of a fictitious text. Ibid tells the fictional story of Jonathan Blashette, great American entrepreneur and humanitarian, illuminating his life, 1888–1962, offering, along the way, glimpses into the lives of many of those who populated his expansive world. A comedic Typhoid Mary, Jonathan's life makes us both wince and laugh at those misplaced intentioned and the ideals of a century that perhaps took itself just a little too seriously. Dunn holds up a funhouse mirror at the pedestaled residents of the age and asks why so many of the more famous ones did so many stupid things and rarely got called for them.

A science fiction metaphysical thriller by a writer who has been garnering cult status“I have always admired Anna Kavan among the few writers who dared to explore the nocturnal world of our dreams, fantasies, and imagination.”— Anais Nin, from an unpublished Introduction to Ice“Ice represents one of the high points of science fiction… a catastrophe novel which goes as far beyond Ballard as Ballard is beyond Wyndham, sailing into the chilly air of metaphysics. It looks sideways at its great contemporary among pornographic novels, Pauline Reage’s Story of O. Even more, it is its own self, mysterious… an enigma—like all the greatest science fiction, approaching despair.”— Brian AldissIce was chosen by Brian Aldiss as the best science fiction work of 1967.A brilliant and memorable novel, the narrator and a man known as the warden search for an elusive girl in a surreal landscape of ice and snow, the result of a nuclear disaster. The country has been invaded; it is being run by a secret government and is under imminent threat of total nuclear destruction. With the narrator, the reader is swept into a hallucinatory quest through the interminable and encroaching walls of ice.Written while Kavan was addicted to heroin, it was the last of her novels to be published before she died in 1968.

Icelander is the debut novel from a brilliant new mind, an intricate, giddy romp steeped equally in Nordic lore and pulpy intrigue.

When Shirley MacGuffin is found murdered one day prior to the annual town celebration in remembrance of Our Heroine’s mother — the legendary crime-stopper and evil-thwarter Emily Bean — everyone expects Our Heroine to follow in her mother’s footsteps and solve the case. She, however, has no interest in inheriting the family business, or being chased through steam-tunnels, or listening to skaldic karaoke, or fleeing the inhuman Refurserkir. But evil has no interest in her lack of interest.

A Nabokovian goof on Agatha Christie, a madcap mystery that is part The Third Policeman and part The Da Vinci Code, The Icelander is one thing above all else: a true original.

A debut novel of love, narcissism, and ailing cattle.Idiopathy (ɪdɪˈɒpəθi): a disease or condition which arises spontaneously or for which the cause is unknown.Idiopathy: a novel as unexpected as its title, in which Katherine, Daniel, and Nathan — three characters you won’t forget in a hurry — unsuccessfully try to figure out how they feel about one another and how they might best live their lives in a world gone mad. Featuring a mysterious cattle epidemic, a humiliating stint in rehab, an unwanted pregnancy, a mom — turned — media personality (“Mother Courage”), and a workplace with a bio-dome housing a perfectly engineered cornfield, it is at once a scathing satire and a moving meditation on love and loneliness. With unusual verbal finesse and great humor, Sam Byers neatly skewers the tangled relationships and unhinged narcissism of a self-obsessed generation in a remarkable, uproarious first novel.

"What lies beneath my veiled perfection is the ugly truth—my truth, my reality, my destiny."Vivian Graham has an acceptance letter into Harvard, a badass tattoo, loyal friends, ties to marijuana, a penchant for Dunkin’ Donuts, and her pesky V-card.Everyday she takes the Red Line to her job at The Green Pot in Boston while her friends enter the coveted, black iron gates to higher learning. The ramifications from a tragic accident have put her life on hold while time marches on for everyone around her.After graduating from Harvard Law, Boston native, Oliver Konrad, moves to Portland to start his career and his life. Three years later, after a horrific discovery, he returns home to trade in his three-piece suit for leather work boots and his suburban home for a condo in Cambridge.All he brought back to the East Coast was an aversion to pillows and secrets he keeps hidden behind a mysterious locked door. Oliver’s days are predictable and his nights are lonely until he meets Vivian on the subway. Her long raven hair, green eyes, and mile-long legs are achingly sexy, but the way she "innocently" fingers and licks her Boston Kreme doughnut can only be described in two words—complete torture.When their paths cross at every turn, laughter is abundant, friendship is easy, and love is unintentional. However, their future seems improbable.

A beautifully moving tale of loss and reaching out to the ones we love, of one man’s journey to discover what really matters in modern life.

Our narrator’s days are numbered. Estranged from his family, living alone with only his cat Cabbage for company, he was unprepared for the doctor’s diagnosis that he has only months to live. But before he can set about tackling his bucket list, the Devil appears with a special offer: in exchange for making one thing in the world disappear, he can have one extra day of life. And so begins a very bizarre week…

Because how do you decide what makes life worth living? How do you separate out what you can do without from what you hold dear? In dealing with the Devil our narrator will take himself – and his beloved cat – to the brink. If Cats Disappeared from the World is a story of loss and reconciliation, of one man’s journey to discover what really matters in modern life.

This beautiful tale is translated from the Japanese by Eric Selland, who also translated The Guest Cat by Takashi Hiraide. Fans of The Guest Cat and The Travelling Cat Chronicles will also surely love If Cats Disappeared from the World.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVdwRk5LFTw

A heartfelt and wondrous debut, by a supremely gifted and exciting new voice in fiction.Will has never been to the outside, at least not since he can remember. And he has certainly never gotten to know anyone other than his mother, a fiercely loving yet wildly eccentric agoraphobe who drowns in panic at the thought of opening the front door. Their little world comprises only the rooms in their home, each named for various exotic locales and filled with Will's art projects. Soon the confines of his world close in on Will. Despite his mother's protestations, Will ventures outside clad in a protective helmet and braces himself for danger. He eventually meets and befriends Jonah, a quiet boy who introduces Will to skateboarding. Will welcomes his new world with enthusiasm, his fears fading and his body hardening with each new bump, scrape, and fall. But life quickly gets complicated. When a local boy goes missing, Will and Jonah want to uncover what happened. They embark on an extraordinary adventure that pulls Will far from the confines of his closed-off world and into the throes of early adulthood and the dangers that everyday life offers. If I Fall, if I Die is a remarkable debut full of dazzling prose, unforgettable characters, and a poignant and heartfelt depiction of coming of age.