The Gospel of Anarchy
Taylor Justin
In landlocked Gainesville, Florida, in the hot, fraught summer of 1999, a college dropout named David sleepwalks through his life — a dull haze of office work and Internet porn — until a run-in with a lost friend jolts him from his torpor. He is drawn into the vibrant but grimy world of Fishgut, a rundown house where a loose collective of anarchists, burnouts, and libertines practice utopia outside society and the law. Some even see their lifestyle as a spiritual calling. They watch for the return of a mysterious hobo who will — they hope — transform their punk oasis into the Bethlehem of a zealous, strange new creed.In his dark and mesmerizing debut novel, Justin Taylor ("a master of the modern snapshot" — Los Angeles Times) explores the borders between religion and politics, faith and fanaticism, desire and need — and what happens when those borders are breached.
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The Gradual Disappearance of Jane Ashland
Houm Nicolai
Even those who have lost everything, still have something to lose. An American woman wakes up alone in a tent in the Norwegian mountains. Outside a storm rages and the fog is dense. Her phone is dead. She has no map, no compass, and no food. How she ended up there, and the tragic details of her life, emerge over the course of this novel. We discover that Jane is a novelist with a bad case of writer’s block—she had come to Norway to seek out distant relatives and family history, but when her trip went awry, she tethered herself to a zoologist she met by chance on the plane, joining him on a trek to see the musk oxen of the Dovrefjell mountain range. At once elegant and gripping, The Gradual Disappearance of Jane Ashland moves seamlessly between Jane’s life in America and the extraordinary landscape of the Norwegian mountains. As we gradually unpack the emotional debris of her past—troubled Midwestern parents, a loving courtship in New York, and a cruel, sudden tragedy that rearranged everything—we begin to understand what led her to this lonely landscape. |
The Grass is Singing
Lessing Doris
Set in Rhodesia, this is the story of Dick, a failed white farmer and his wife, Mary, dependent and disappointed. Both are trapped by poverty, and in the heat of the brick and tin house, hemmed in by the bush, Mary finds herself seeking solace in the arms of the houseboy.***The Grass Is Singing is Doris Lessing's classic first novel.It is the story of the murder of a poor white woman by her black houseboy. It is a portrait of the woman's marriage to a luckless farmer, a union doomed to failure before they had even met. And it is an evocation of the country in which they lived – Rhodesia.In The Grass Is Singing, the harsh, majestic beauty and the remorseless social values of white Southern Africa come violently, brilliantly to life.'Original and striking… full of those terrifying touches of truth, seldom mentioned but instantly recognized' – NEW STATESMAN'A first novel of astonishing accomplishment' – DAILYTELEGRAPH
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The Gravedigger’s Daughter
Oates Joyce Carol
In 1936 the Schwarts, an immigrant family desperate to escape Nazi Germany, settle in a small town in upstate New York, where the father, a former high school teacher, is demeaned by the only job he can get: gravedigger and cemetery caretaker. After local prejudice and the family's own emotional frailty result in unspeakable tragedy, the gravedigger's daughter, Rebecca, begins her astonishing pilgrimage into America, an odyssey of erotic risk and imaginative daring, ingenious self-invention, and, in the end, a bittersweet-but very "American"-triumph. "You are born here, they will not hurt you"-so the gravedigger has predicted for his daughter, which will turn out to be true.In The Gravedigger's Daughter, Oates has created a masterpiece of domestic yet mythic realism, at once emotionally engaging and intellectually provocative: an intimately observed testimony to the resilience of the individual to set beside such predecessors as The Falls, Blonde, and We Were the Mulvaneys.
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The Graveyard
Hlasko Marek
“History has no use for witnesses.”When Marek Hłasko sent this novel to publishers in Poland in the mid-1950s, it was uniformly rejected. When he asked why, he was told: “This Poland doesn’t exist.”Long out of print, The Graveyard is Hłasko’s portrait of a system built on such denial and willful blindness. Factory worker Franciszek Kowalski is on his way home one evening after drinking with an old friend from the People’s Army when he unthinkingly yells some insults at a policeman. His outburst is taken as criticism of the government, and he is arrested and then expelled from the Party.Kowalski attempts to rehabilitate himself by gathering testimonies from the men he had fought alongside, but each meeting with his former comrades takes him further into the underworld that he realizes has been there all along.Written midway through Hłasko’s meteoric career, The Graveyard set its author and the Polish Communist government implacably against each other, and it’s easy to see why: Hłasko pulls no punches in portraying a regime that is maintained by constant surveillance, intimidation, and profound psychological manipulation.A classic novel of political disillusionment from one of Poland’s seminal writers, an original “Angry Young Man” who lived fast, died young, and wrote brilliantly.
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The Gray House
Petrosyan Mariam
The Gray House is an astounding tale of how what others understand as liabilities can be leveraged into strengths. Bound to wheelchairs and dependent on prosthetic limbs, the physically disabled students living in the House are overlooked by the Outsides. Not that it matters to anyone living in the House, a hulking old structure that its residents know is alive. From the corridors and crawl spaces to the classrooms and dorms, the House is full of tribes, tinctures, scared teachers, and laws — all seen and understood through a prismatic array of teenagers' eyes. But student deaths and mounting pressure from the Outsides put the time-defying order of the House in danger. As the tribe leaders struggle to maintain power, they defer to the awesome power of the House, attempting to make it through days and nights that pass in ways that clocks and watches cannot record. |
The Gray House
Петросян Мариам Сергеевна
The Gray House is an astounding tale of how what others understand as liabilities can be leveraged into strengths. Bound to wheelchairs and dependent on prosthetic limbs, the physically disabled students living in the House are overlooked by the Outsides. Not that it matters to anyone living in the House, a hulking old structure that its residents know is alive. From the corridors and crawl spaces to the classrooms and dorms, the House is full of tribes, tinctures, scared teachers, and laws — all seen and understood through a prismatic array of teenagers' eyes. But student deaths and mounting pressure from the Outsides put the time-defying order of the House in danger. As the tribe leaders struggle to maintain power, they defer to the awesome power of the House, attempting to make it through days and nights that pass in ways that clocks and watches cannot record. |
The Great Concert of the Night
Buckley Jonathan
‘A mosaic-like novel about love, loss and looking. A quietly brilliant writer, almost eccentric in his craftsmanship.’ The Sunday Times In the small hours of January 1st, a man begins to write, having watched Le Grand Concert de la Nuit, a film in which a former lover – Imogen – plays a major role. For the next year, he writes something every day. His journal is a ritual of commemoration and an investigation of the character of Imogen and her relationships – with himself; with her family and friends; with other lovers. Imogen is an elusive subject, and The Great Concert of the Night is an intricate text, mixing scenes from the writer’s memory and the present day, and scenes from Imogen’s films, with observations on a range of subjects, from the visions of female saints to the history of medicine and the festivals of ancient Rome. But one subject comes to occupy him above all: what happens when a person becomes a character on the page. |
The Great Indian Novel
Tharoor Shashi
A fictionalized account of Indian history over the past 100 years. It aims to remain true to the original events, including characters such as Gandhi and Mountbatten but it also utilizes characters, incidents and issues from the Indian epic, the Mahabharata.
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The Great Leader
Harrison Jim
Author Jim Harrison has won international acclaim for his masterful body of work, including Returning to Earth, Legends of the Fall and over thirty books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. In his most original work to date, Harrison delivers an enthralling, witty and expertly-crafted novel following one man's hunt for an elusive cult leader, dubbed "The Great Leader.'On the verge of retirement, Detective Sunderson begins to investigate a hedonistic cult, which has set up camp near his home in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. At first, the self-declared Great Leader seems merely a harmless oddball, but as Sunderson and his sixteen-year-old sidekick dig deeper, they find him more intelligent and sinister than they realized. Recently divorced and frequently pickled in alcohol, Sunderson tracks his quarry from the woods of Michigan to a town in Arizona, filled with criminal border-crossers, and on to Nebraska, where the Great Leader's most recent recruits have gathered to glorify his questionable religion. But Sunderson's demons are also in pursuit of him.Rich with character and humor, The Great Leader is at once a gripping excursion through America's landscapes and the poignant story of a man grappling with age, lost love and his own darker nature.
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The great love of Michael Duridomoff
Довлатов Марк
Майкл Дуридомов продолжает свои поиски чувственных удовольствий, начатые в предыдущем рассказе. Он стал старше и опытней, он уже почти Мастер. Лишь одна идея не дает ему покоя: соединить жизнь с соцсетью и получить максимум наслаждения.
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The Great Man
Christensen Kate
Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.Oscar Feldman, the renowned figurative painter, has passed away. As his obituary notes, Oscar is survived by his wife, Abigail, their son, Ethan, and his sister, the well-known abstract painter Maxine Feldman. What the obituary does not note, however, is that Oscar is also survived by his longtime mistress, Teddy St. Cloud, and their daughters.As two biographers interview the women in an attempt to set the record straight, the open secret of his affair reaches a boiling point and a devastating skeleton threatens to come to light. From the acclaimed author of The Epicure's Lament, a scintillating novel of secrets, love, and legacy in the New York art world.
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The Great Night
Adrian Chris
Chris Adrian’s magical third novel is a mesmerizing reworking of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. On Midsummer’s Eve 2008, three brokenhearted people become lost in San Francisco’s Buena Vista Park, the secret home of Titania, Oberon, and their court. On this night, something awful is happening in the faerie kingdom: in a fit of sadness over the end of her marriage and the death of her adopted son, Titania has set loose an ancient menace, and the chaos that ensues upends the lives of immortals and mortals alike in a story that is playful, darkly funny, and poignant.
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The Great Railway Bazaar
Theroux Paul
Paul Theroux is a vocal proponent of rail travel over air travel, which he likens to traveling by submarine for all that goes unseen and not experienced by its adherents. The Great Railway Bazaar, his 1975 account of a four month railroad journey through Europe and Asia begins, "I sought trains, I found passengers." It is certainly the individuals that Theroux meets along the way, rather than the cities, buildings, or sites of touristic import, to which he devotes his most generous descriptions.Beginning in Victoria Station with Duffill, an older man with a tweed cap, ill-fitting clothes, and mysterious business in Istanbul (Duffill's name later becomes synonymous with being left behind at a railway station), Theroux's journeys brim with a huge cast of colorful characters. From ashram-bound hippies to devout Kali-worshiping Tamils to Vassily Prokofyevich, the drunken Russian dining car manager on the Trans-Siberian Express, Theroux richly details his varied encounters, paying particular attention to the bizarre along the bazaar.In Calcutta, "a city of mutilated people (where) only the truly monstrous looked odd," the author encounters "the hopping man," who with only one muscular leg, hops himself through the urban detritus; on the Saigon to Bien Hoa train, a Vietnamese woman thrusts an American baby upon him, expecting Theroux to keep and raise the child; and in Japan, where the cleanliness, efficiency, and quiet of the passenger trains provide striking contrast to what the author had up until that point become accustomed to, he finds the cultural undercurrent of sadistic pornography disturbingly unquestioned.Paul Theroux had already established himself as a novelist at the time of his four month journey; The Great Railway Bazaar, today a travel writing classic, was preceded by ten books, six of which were novels. In fact, his four month long excursion seems to have been funded or at least justified, by the lecture engagements the author had arranged all along his route.The first of many in this genre from Theroux, including Dark Star Safari (2002) and Ghost Train to the Eastern Star (2008), The Great Railway Bazaar is at once a timeless narrative of humans and travel and a distinctly historical slice of global affairs as viewed by one decidedly motion-bound writer.The journey however is a long one and while masterfully wrought, it is often the incidental passage of time in a railway compartment that is thus rendered, and by the end of it even Theroux has tired of his travels. Snippets of brilliance exist throughout, but they are intermittent as you might expect, as when viewed from a passing train.
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The Great World
Malouf David
Every city, town and village has its memorial to war. Nowhere are these more eloquent than in Australia, generations of whose young men have enlisted to fight other people's battles — from Gallipoli and the Somme to Malaya and Vietnam. In THE GREAT WORLD, his finest novel yet, David Malouf gives a voice to that experience. But THE GREAT WORLD is more than a novel of war. Ranging over seventy years of Australian life, from Sydney's teeming King's Cross to the tranquil backwaters of the Hawkesbury River, it is a remarkable novel of self-knowledge and lost innocence, of survival and witness.
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The Green Road
Enright Anne
Spanning thirty years and three continents, The Green Road tells the story of Rosaleen, matriarch of the Madigan family, and her four children.Ardeevin, County Clare, Ireland. 1980. When her oldest brother Dan announces he will enter the priesthood, young Hanna watches her mother howl in agony and retreat to her room. In the years that follow, the Madigan children leave one by one: Dan for the frenzy of New York under the shadow of AIDS; Constance for a hospital in Limerick, where petty antics follow simple tragedy; Emmet for the backlands of Mali, where he learns the fragility of love and order; and Hanna for modern-day Dublin and the trials of her own motherhood. When Christmas Day reunites the children under one roof, each confronts the terrible weight of family ties and the journey that brought them home. The Green Road is a major work of fiction about the battles we wage for family, faith, and love."Enright's razor-sharp writing turns every ordinary detail into a weapon, to create a story that cuts right to the bone". New York Review of Books
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The Greenhouse
Ólafsdóttir Auður Ava
Young Lobbi was preparing to leave his childhood home, his autistic brother, his octogenarian father, and the familiar landscape of mossy lava fields for an unknown future. Soon before his departure, he received an awful phone call: his mother was in a car accident. She used her dying words to offer calm advice to her son, urging him to continue their shared work in the greenhouse tending to the rare Rosa candida. Prior to his mother’s death, in that very same greenhouse, Lobbi made love to Anna, a friend of a friend, and just as he readies his departure he learns that in their brief night together they conceived a child. He is still reeling from this chain of events when he arrives at his new job, reinstating the rare eight-petaled rose in the majestic forgotten garden of an ancient European monastery. In focusing his energy cultivating the rarest rose, he also learns to cultivate love, with the help of a film buff monk and his newborn daughter, Flora Sol.
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The Guard
Terrin Peter
Winner of the European Union Literature Prize, Peter Terrin's The Guard is a haunting novel of perceived oppression by the an omnipresent, but unknown, authority.In the near future, Harry and Michel live in the basement of a luxury apartment block, guarding the inhabitants. No one goes outside. The world might be at war, it might even have been plunged into nuclear winter. No one knows.But one weekend, all of the residents leave the block, one by one. All but the man on floor 29. Harry and Michel stick to their posts. All they know, all they can hope for, is that if they are vigilant, the "Organization" will reward them with a promotion to an elite cadre of security officers. But what if there were no one left to guard?Playing on our darkest fears, The Guard is a tautly observed novel by a writer of striking and stylish originality.Winner of the European Union Literature Prize, Peter Terrin's The Guard is a haunting novel of perceived oppression by the an omnipresent, but unknown, authority.In the near future, Harry and Michel live in the basement of a luxury apartment block, guarding the inhabitants. No one goes outside. The world might be at war, it might even have been plunged into nuclear winter. No one knows.But one weekend, all of the residents leave the block, one by one. All but the man on floor 29. Harry and Michel stick to their posts. All they know, all they can hope for, is that if they are vigilant, the "Organization" will reward them with a promotion to an elite cadre of security officers. But what if there were no one left to guard?Playing on our darkest fears, The Guard is a tautly observed novel by a writer of striking and stylish originality.
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The Guest
Sok-Yong Hwang
Based on actual events, The Guest is a profound portrait of a divided people haunted by a painful past, and a generation's search for reconciliation.During the Korean War, Hwanghae Province in North Korea was the setting of a gruesome fifty-two day massacre. In an act of collective amnesia the atrocities were attributed to American military, but in truth they resulted from malicious battling between Christian and Communist Koreans. Forty years later, Ryu Yosop, a minister living in America returns to his home village, where his older brother once played a notorious role in the bloodshed. Besieged by vivid memories and visited by the troubled spirits of the deceased, Yosop must face the survivors of the tragedy and lay his brother's soul to rest.Faulkner-like in its intense interweaving narratives, The Guest is a daring and ambitious novel from a major figure in world literature.
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The Guild of Saint Cooper
Scanlon Shya
An obscure author, drawn in by the mysterious Guild of St. Cooper, must rewrite the history of a dying city. But the changes become greater than those he set out to make, and the story quickly unspools backward into an alternate history — a world populated by giant rhododendrons, space aliens, and TV's own Special Agent Dale Cooper.An editor at The Nervous Breakdown and co-founder of Monkey Bicycle, Shya Scanlon won the John Hawkes Prize in Fiction at Brown University, where he received his MFA. He lives in New York.
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