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Reviews

Reviews

by Richard Price - Fiction

East Harlem, 2008. In an instant, a five-story tenement collapses into a fuming hill of rubble, pancaking the cars parked in front and coating the street with a thick layer of ash. As the city’s rescue services and media outlets respond, the surrounding neighborhood descends into chaos. At day’s end, six bodies are recovered, but many of the other tenants are missing. In LAZARUS MAN, Richard Price, one of the greatest chroniclers of life in urban America, creates intertwining portraits of a group of compelling and singular characters whose lives are permanently impacted by the disaster.

by Eliza Clark - Fiction, Short Stories

A woman welcomes a parasite into her body. A teenager longs for perfect skin. A scientist tends to fragile alien flora. A young man takes the night into his own hands. Unsettling, revelatory and laced with her signature dark humor, Eliza Clark’s debut short story collection plumbs the depths of that most basic human feeling: hunger.

by Kimberly Brock - Fiction, Historical Fiction, Women's Fiction

Southern mythology and personal reckoning collide in this sweeping story inspired by the little-known history of Cumberland Island when a once-in-a-century storm threatens the natural landscape. Faced with a changing world, two timelines and the perspectives of three women intersect where a folktale meets the truth to reveal what Cumberland Island has hidden all along.

by Betsy Lerner - Fiction, Women's Fiction

It is said that when one person in a family is unstable, the whole family is destabilized. Meet the Shreds. Olivia is the sister in the spotlight until her stunning confidence becomes erratic and unpredictable. Younger sister Amy, cautious and studious to the core, believes in facts, proof and the empirical world. None of that explains what’s happening to Ollie, whose physical beauty and charisma mask the mental illness that will shatter Amy’s carefully constructed life. As Amy comes of age and seeks to find her place --- first in academics, then New York publishing, and through a series of troubled relationships --- every step brings collisions with Ollie, who slips in and out of the Shred family without warning. Yet for all that threatens their sibling bond, Amy and Ollie cannot escape or deny the inextricable sister knot that binds them.

by Ina Garten - Memoir, Nonfiction

Here, for the first time, Ina Garten presents an intimate, entertaining and inspiring account of her remarkable journey. Ina’s gift is to make everything look easy, yet all her accomplishments have been the result of hard work, audacious choices and exquisite attention to detail. In her unmistakable voice (no one tells a story like Ina), she brings her past and her process to life in a high-spirited and no-holds-barred memoir that chronicles decades of personal challenges, adventures (and misadventures) and unexpected career twists, all delivered with her signature combination of playfulness and purpose.

written by Pedro Almodóvar, translated by Frank Wynne - Fiction, Nonfiction, Short Stories

With this debut collection, two-time Academy Award-winning writer and director Pedro Almodóvar delivers a tantalizing glimpse into his world, formed by 12 stories carefully selected from his personal writings dating from the late ‘60s to the present. Almodóvar writes: “I’ve been asked to write my autobiography more than once, and I’ve always refused…. I’ve never kept a diary, and whenever I’ve tried, I’ve never made it to page two; in a sense, then, this book represents something of a paradox. It might be best described as a fragmentary autobiography, incomplete and a little enigmatic.” Each entry reflects Almodóvar's most intimate obsessions, as well as his evolution as an artist.

written by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones - Fiction, Gothic, Historical Fiction, Horror

September 1913. A young Pole suffering from tuberculosis arrives at Wilhelm Opitz’s Guesthouse for Gentlemen in the village of Görbersdorf, a health resort in the Silesian mountains. Every evening the residents gather to imbibe the hallucinogenic local liqueur and debate the great issues of the day: Monarchy or democracy? Do devils exist? Are women born inferior? War or peace? Meanwhile, disturbing things are happening in the guesthouse and the surrounding hills. Someone --- or something --- seems to be watching, attempting to infiltrate this cloistered world. Little does the newcomer realize, as he tries to unravel both the truths within himself and the mystery of the sinister forces beyond, that they have already chosen their next target.

by Rumaan Alam - Fiction

Brooke wants. She isn’t in need, but there are things she wants. A sense of purpose, for instance. She wants to make a difference in the world, to impress her mother along the way, to spend time with friends and secure her independence. Her job assisting an octogenarian billionaire in his quest to give away a vast fortune could help her achieve many of these goals. It may inspire new desires as well: proximity to wealth turns out to be nothing less than transformative. What is money, really, but a kind of belief?

by Rachel Kushner - Fiction

CREATION LAKE is about a secret agent --- a 34-year-old American woman of ruthless tactics, bold opinions and clean beauty --- who is sent to do dirty work in France. “Sadie Smith” is how the narrator introduces herself to her lover, to the rural commune of French subversives on whom she is keeping tabs, and to the reader. Sadie has met her love, Lucien, a young and well-born Parisian, by “cold bump” --- making him believe the encounter was accidental. Like everyone Sadie targets, Lucien is useful to her and used by her. In this region of centuries-old farms and ancient caves, Sadie becomes entranced by a mysterious figure named Bruno Lacombe, a mentor to the young activists who communicates only by email. Bruno believes that the path to emancipation from what ails modern life is not revolt, but a return to the ancient past.

by Elif Shafak - Fiction

In the ancient city of Nineveh, on the bank of the River Tigris, King Ashurbanipal of Mesopotamia --- erudite but ruthless --- built a great library that would crumble with the end of his reign. From its ruins, however, emerged a poem, the Epic of Gilgamesh, that would infuse the existence of two rivers and bind together three lives. THERE ARE RIVERS IN THE SKY entwines these outsiders with a single drop of water, a drop that remanifests across the centuries. Both a source of life and a harbinger of death, rivers --- the Tigris and the Thames --- transcend history, transcend fate: “Water remembers. It is humans who forget.”