Four Treasures of the Sky

Four Treasures of the Sky
Title Four Treasures of the Sky PDF eBook
Author Jenny Tinghui Zhang
Publisher Flatiron Books
Total Pages 292
Release 2022-04-05
Genre Fiction
ISBN 1250811791

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A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK · A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITOR'S CHOICE · REVIEWED ON THE FRONT COVER · INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER “Zhang’s blend of history and magical realism will appeal to fans of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Water Dancer as well as Amy Tan's The Valley of Amazement.” —Booklist (starred review) "Engrossing...Epic" (The New York Times Book Review) · "Transporting" (Washington Post) · "Propulsive" (Oprah Daily) · "Surreal and sprawling" (NPR) · "An absolute must-read" (BuzzFeed) · "Radiant" (BookPage) A dazzling debut novel set against the backdrop of the Chinese Exclusion Act, about a Chinese girl fighting to claim her place in the 1880s American West Daiyu never wanted to be like the tragic heroine for whom she was named, revered for her beauty and cursed with heartbreak. But when she is kidnapped and smuggled across an ocean from China to America, Daiyu must relinquish the home and future she imagined for herself. Over the years that follow, she is forced to keep reinventing herself to survive. From a calligraphy school, to a San Francisco brothel, to a shop tucked into the Idaho mountains, we follow Daiyu on a desperate quest to outrun the tragedy that chases her. As anti-Chinese sentiment sweeps across the country in a wave of unimaginable violence, Daiyu must draw on each of the selves she has been—including the ones she most wants to leave behind—in order to finally claim her own name and story. At once a literary tour de force and a groundbreaking work of historical fiction, Four Treasures of the Sky announces Jenny Tinghui Zhang as an indelible new voice. Steeped in untold history and Chinese folklore, this novel is a spellbinding feat.

Corpus Christi

Corpus Christi
Title Corpus Christi PDF eBook
Author Bret Anthony Johnston
Publisher Random House Trade Paperbacks
Total Pages 290
Release 2005-06-14
Genre Fiction
ISBN 0812971876

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From an acclaimed and award-winning young writer comes an intensely moving debut collection set in the eye of life’s storms. In Corpus Christi, Texas—a town often hit by hurricanes— parents, children, and lovers come together and fall apart, bonded and battered by memories of loss that they feel as acutely as physical pain. A car accident joins strangers linked by an intimate knowledge of madness. A teenage boy remembers his father’s act of sudden and self-righteous violence. A “hurricane party” reunites a couple whom tragedy parted. And, in an unforgettable three-story cycle, an illness sets in profound relief a man’s relationship with his mother and the odd, shifting fidelity of truth to love. Told in fresh, lyrical voices and taut, inventive styles, these narratives explore the complex volatility of love and intimacy, sorrow and renewal—and expose how often these experiences feel like the opposite of themselves. From the woman whose young son’s uncanny rapport with snakes illuminates her own missed opportunities to the man confronting his wife and her lover in a house full of illegal exotic birds, all the characters here face moments of profound decision and recognition in which no choice is clearly or completely right. Writing with tough humor, deep humanity, and a keen eye for the natural environment, Bret Anthony Johnston creates a world where where cataclysmic events cut people loose from their “regular lives, floating and spiraling away from where we had been the day before.” Corpus Christi is a extraordinarily ambitious debut. It marks the arrival of an important, exquisitely talented voice to American fiction.

Stone Fruit

Stone Fruit
Title Stone Fruit PDF eBook
Author Lee Lai
Publisher Fantagraphics Books
Total Pages 234
Release 2021-05-11
Genre Comics & Graphic Novels
ISBN 1683964268

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Bron and Ray are a queer couple who enjoy their role as the fun weirdo aunties to Ray’s niece, six-year-old Nessie. Their playdates are little oases of wildness, joy, and ease in all three of their lives, which ping-pong between familial tensions and deep-seeded personal stumbling blocks. As their emotional intimacy erodes, Ray and Bron isolate from each other and attempt to repair their broken family ties ― Ray with her overworked, resentful single-mother sister and Bron with her religious teenage sister who doesn’t fully grasp the complexities of gender identity. Taking a leap of faith, each opens up and learns they have more in common with their siblings than they ever knew. At turns joyful and heartbreaking, Stone Fruit reveals through intimately naturalistic dialog and blue-hued watercolor how painful it can be to truly become vulnerable to your loved ones ― and how fulfilling it is to be finally understood for who you are. Lee Lai is one of the most exciting new voices to break into the comics medium and she has created one of the truly sophisticated graphic novel debuts in recent memory.

The Four Corners of the Sky

The Four Corners of the Sky
Title The Four Corners of the Sky PDF eBook
Author Michael Malone
Publisher Sourcebooks, Inc.
Total Pages 560
Release 2010-04-01
Genre Fiction
ISBN 1402249578

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"There's humor and action aplenty, but Four Corners is also a warmhearted look at how we love and forgive. Five hundred and forty-four pages never seemed so short"—People, 4 stars, People Pick The Four Corners of the Sky is master storyteller Michael Malone's new novel of love, secrets, and the mysterious bonds of families. Malone brings characters to life as only he can, exploring the questions that defy easy answers: Is love a choice or a calling? Why do the ties of family bind so tightly? And is forgiveness a gift to others...or a gift we give ourselves? In small towns between the North Carolina Piedmont and the coast the best scenery is often in the sky. On flat sweeps of red clay and scrub pine the days move monotonously, safely, but above, in the blink of an eye, dangerous clouds can boil out of all four corners of the sky...The flat slow land starts to shiver and anything can happen. In such a storm, on Annie Peregrine's seventh birthday, her father gave her the airplane and minutes later drove out of her life. Thus begins an enchanting novel that bursts with energy from the first pages, and sweeps you off on a journey of unforgettable characters, hilarious encounters, and haunting secrets. Praise for The Four Corners of the Sky: "Devoted Michael Malone fans have been waiting more than twenty years for another Handling Sin, perhaps the greatest road novel since Tom Jones. The wait is over..."— Bill Ott, editor-in-chief, Booklist "Secrets and intrigues among the honeysuckle: a sun-washed yarn of the New South, affectionately told." —Kirkus starred review "The Four Corners of the Sky is the best thing I have read in years and you can imagine how much I read. Truly, I couldn't put it down. I loved it."—Kathy Ashton, The King's English Bookshop BONUS READING GROUP GUIDE INCLUDED

The Sweet Relief of Missing Children

The Sweet Relief of Missing Children
Title The Sweet Relief of Missing Children PDF eBook
Author Sarah Braunstein
Publisher W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages 384
Release 2012-02-07
Genre Fiction
ISBN 0393340759

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Two seemingly separate stories from different points in time interconnect and provide clues to the disappearance of a missing New York City girl.

Hall of Small Mammals

Hall of Small Mammals
Title Hall of Small Mammals PDF eBook
Author Thomas Pierce
Publisher Penguin
Total Pages 304
Release 2015-01-08
Genre Fiction
ISBN 0698144929

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A wild, inventive ride of a short story collection from a distinctive new American storyteller. The author of the forthcoming novel, The Afterlives. The stories in Thomas Pierce’s Hall of Small Mammals take place at the confluence of the commonplace and the cosmic, the intimate and the infinite. A fossil-hunter, a comedian, a hot- air balloon pilot, parents and children, believers and nonbelievers, the people in these stories are struggling to understand the absurdity and the magnitude of what it means to exist in a family, to exist in the world. In “Shirley Temple Three,” a mother must shoulder her son’s burden—a cloned and resurrected wooly mammoth who wreaks havoc on her house, sanity, and faith. In “The Real Alan Gass,” a physicist in search of a mysterious particle called the “daisy” spends her days with her boyfriend, Walker, and her nights with the husband who only exists in the world of her dreams, Alan Gass. Like the daisy particle itself—“forever locked in a curious state of existence and nonexistence, sliding back and forth between the two”—the stories in Thomas Pierce’s Hall of Small Mammals are exquisite, mysterious, and inextricably connected. From this enchanting primordial soup, Pierce’s voice emerges—a distinct and charming testament of the New South, melding contemporary concerns with their prehistoric roots to create a hilarious, deeply moving symphony of stories.

Battleborn

Battleborn
Title Battleborn PDF eBook
Author Claire Vaye Watkins
Publisher Penguin
Total Pages 306
Release 2012
Genre Fiction
ISBN 1594488258

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The extraordinary debut collection from the Guggenheim Award-winning author of the forthcoming Gold Fame Citrus Winner of the 2012 Story Prize Recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters 2013 Rosenthal Family Foundation Award Named one of the National Book Foundation's "5 Under 35" fiction writers of 2012 Winner of New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award NPR Best Short Story Collections of 2012 A Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, and Time Out New York Best Book of the year, and more . . . Like the work of Cormac McCarthy, Denis Johnson, Richard Ford, and Annie Proulx, Battleborn represents a near-perfect confluence of sensibility and setting, and the introduction of an exceptionally powerful and original literary voice. In each of these ten unforgettable stories, Claire Vaye Watkins writes her way fearlessly into the mythology of the American West, utterly reimagining it. Her characters orbit around the region's vast spaces, winning redemption despite - and often because of - the hardship and violence they endure. The arrival of a foreigner transforms the exchange of eroticism and emotion at a prostitution ranch. A prospecting hermit discovers the limits of his rugged individualism when he tries to rescue an abused teenager. Decades after she led her best friend into a degrading encounter in a Vegas hotel room, a woman feels the aftershock. Most bravely of all, Watkins takes on - and reinvents - her own troubled legacy in a story that emerges from the mayhem and destruction of Helter Skelter. Arcing from the sweeping and sublime to the minute and personal, from Gold Rush to ghost town to desert to brothel, the collection echoes not only in its title but also in its fierce, undefeated spirit the motto of her home state.