Great Circle
Title | Great Circle PDF eBook |
Author | Maggie Shipstead |
Publisher | Knopf |
Total Pages | 609 |
Release | 2021-05-04 |
Genre | Fiction |
ISBN | 0525656979 |
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A TODAY SHOW #ReadWithJenna BOOK CLUB PICK • The unforgettable story of a daredevil female aviator determined to chart her own course in life, at any cost: an “epic trip—through Prohibition and World War II, from Montana to London to present-day Hollywood—and you’ll relish every minute” (People). After being rescued as infants from a sinking ocean liner in 1914, Marian and Jamie Graves are raised by their dissolute uncle in Missoula, Montana. There--after encountering a pair of barnstorming pilots passing through town in beat-up biplanes--Marian commences her lifelong love affair with flight. At fourteen she drops out of school and finds an unexpected and dangerous patron in a wealthy bootlegger who provides a plane and subsidizes her lessons, an arrangement that will haunt her for the rest of her life, even as it allows her to fulfill her destiny: circumnavigating the globe by flying over the North and South Poles. A century later, Hadley Baxter is cast to play Marian in a film that centers on Marian's disappearance in Antarctica. Vibrant, canny, disgusted with the claustrophobia of Hollywood, Hadley is eager to redefine herself after a romantic film franchise has imprisoned her in the grip of cult celebrity. Her immersion into the character of Marian unfolds, thrillingly, alongside Marian's own story, as the two women's fates--and their hunger for self-determination in vastly different geographies and times--collide. Epic and emotional, meticulously researched and gloriously told, Great Circle is a monumental work of art, and a tremendous leap forward for the prodigiously gifted Maggie Shipstead.
How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America
Title | How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America PDF eBook |
Author | Kiese Laymon |
Publisher | Scribner |
Total Pages | 176 |
Release | 2020-11-10 |
Genre | Social Science |
ISBN | 1982170824 |
A New York Times Notable Book A revised collection with thirteen essays, including six new to this edition and seven from the original edition, by the “star in the American literary firmament, with a voice that is courageous, honest, loving, and singularly beautiful” (NPR). Brilliant and uncompromising, piercing and funny, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America is essential reading. This new edition of award-winning author Kiese Laymon’s first work of nonfiction looks inward, drawing heavily on the author and his family’s experiences, while simultaneously examining the world—Mississippi, the South, the United States—that has shaped their lives. With subjects that range from an interview with his mother to reflections on Ole Miss football, Outkast, and the labor of Black women, these thirteen insightful essays highlight Laymon’s profound love of language and his artful rendering of experience, trumpeting why he is “simply one of the most talented writers in America” (New York magazine).
Great Circle
Title | Great Circle PDF eBook |
Author | Conrad Aiken |
Publisher | |
Total Pages | 358 |
Release | 1985 |
Genre | |
ISBN |
A profound examination of the mysteries of memory and perception from one of the twentieth century's most admired literary artists The train races from New York to Boston. For Andrew Cather, it is much too fast. He will return home three days early, and he is both terrified and intrigued by what he may find there. He pictures himself unlocking the door to his quiet Cambridge house, padding silently through its darkened halls, and finally discovering the thing he both fears and yearns to see: his wife in the arms of another man. Cather knows that what he finds in Cambridge may destroy his life, yet finally set him free. A masterful portrait of an average man at the edge of a shocking precipice, "Great Circle" is a triumph of psychological realism. One of Sigmund Freud's favorite novels, it is a probing exploration of the secrets of consciousness.
Great Circle of Mysteries
Title | Great Circle of Mysteries PDF eBook |
Author | Misha Gromov |
Publisher | Birkhäuser |
Total Pages | 202 |
Release | 2018-08-11 |
Genre | Mathematics |
ISBN | 3319530496 |
This visionary and engaging book provides a mathematical perspective on the fundamental ideas of numbers, space, life, evolution, the brain and the mind. The author suggests how a development of mathematical concepts in the spirit of category theory may lead to unravelling the mystery of the human mind and the design of universal learning algorithms. The book is divided into two parts, the first of which describes the ideas of great mathematicians and scientists, those who saw sparks of light in the dark sea of unknown. The second part, Memorandum Ergo, reflects on how mathematics can contribute to the understanding of the mystery of thought. It argues that the core of the human mind is a structurally elaborated object that needs a creation of a broad mathematical context for its understanding. Readers will discover the main properties of the expected mathematical objects within this context, called ERGO-SYSTEMS, and readers will see how these “systems” may serve as prototypes for design of universal learning computer programs. This is a work of great, poetical insight and is richly illustrated. It is a highly attractive read for all those who welcome a mathematical and scientific way of thinking about the world.
Astonish Me
Title | Astonish Me PDF eBook |
Author | Maggie Shipstead |
Publisher | Vintage |
Total Pages | 272 |
Release | 2014-04-08 |
Genre | Fiction |
ISBN | 0307962911 |
From the bestselling author of Great Circle—for years Joan has been trying to forget her past, to find peace and satisfaction in her role as wife and mother. Few in her drowsy California suburb know her thrilling history: as a young American ballerina in Paris, she fell into a doomed, passionate romance with Soviet dance superstar Arslan Rusakov. After playing a leading role in his celebrated defection, Joan bowed out of the spotlight for good, heartbroken by Arslan and humbled by her own modest career. But when her son turns out to be a ballet prodigy, Joan is pulled back into a world she thought she'd left behind—a world of dangerous secrets, of Arslan, and of longing for what will always be just out of reach. “The inner lives of [Shipstead’s] characters feel as real and immediate as the shifting settings they inhabit: still-gritty mid-1970s Manhattan, shabbily elegant Paris, the sunbaked suburban sprawl of Southern California.” —Entertainment Weekly
American Harvest
Title | American Harvest PDF eBook |
Author | Marie Mutsuki Mockett |
Publisher | Graywolf Press |
Total Pages | 416 |
Release | 2020-04-07 |
Genre | Biography & Autobiography |
ISBN | 1644451166 |
An epic story of the American wheat harvest, the politics of food, and the culture of the Great Plains For over one hundred years, the Mockett family has owned a seven-thousand-acre wheat farm in the panhandle of Nebraska, where Marie Mutsuki Mockett’s father was raised. Mockett, who grew up in bohemian Carmel, California, with her father and her Japanese mother, knew little about farming when she inherited this land. Her father had all but forsworn it. In American Harvest, Mockett accompanies a group of evangelical Christian wheat harvesters through the heartland at the invitation of Eric Wolgemuth, the conservative farmer who has cut her family’s fields for decades. As Mockett follows Wolgemuth’s crew on the trail of ripening wheat from Texas to Idaho, they contemplate what Wolgemuth refers to as “the divide,” inadvertently peeling back layers of the American story to expose its contradictions and unhealed wounds. She joins the crew in the fields, attends church, and struggles to adapt to the rhythms of rural life, all the while continually reminded of her own status as a person who signals “not white,” but who people she encounters can’t quite categorize. American Harvest is an extraordinary evocation of the land and a thoughtful exploration of ingrained beliefs, from evangelical skepticism of evolution to cosmopolitan assumptions about food production and farming. With exquisite lyricism and humanity, this astonishing book attempts to reconcile competing versions of our national story.
Friends and Strangers
Title | Friends and Strangers PDF eBook |
Author | J. Courtney Sullivan |
Publisher | Vintage |
Total Pages | 498 |
Release | 2020-06-30 |
Genre | Fiction |
ISBN | 0525520600 |
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A TODAY SHOW #ReadWithJenna BOOK CLUB PICK • An insightful and compulsively readable novel about a complicated friendship between two women who are at two very different stages in life, from the best-selling author of Maine and Saints for All Occasions. "Once again, Sullivan has shown herself to be one of the wisest and least pretentious chroniclers of modern life."—The Washington Post Elisabeth, an accomplished journalist and new mother, is struggling to adjust to life in a small town after nearly twenty years in New York City. Alone in the house with her infant son all day (and awake with him much of the night), she feels uneasy, adrift. She neglects her work, losing untold hours to her Brooklyn moms' Facebook group, her "influencer" sister's Instagram feed, and text messages with the best friend she never sees anymore. Enter Sam, a senior at the local women's college, whom Elisabeth hires to babysit. Sam is struggling to decide between the path she's always planned on and a romantic entanglement that threatens her ambition. She's worried about student loan debt and what the future holds. In short order, they grow close. But when Sam finds an unlikely kindred spirit in Elisabeth's father-in-law, the true differences between the women's lives become starkly revealed and a betrayal has devastating consequences. A masterful exploration of motherhood, power dynamics, and privilege in its many forms, Friends and Strangers reveals how a single year can shape the course of a life.