Showing results for "Suicide" in Literature & Fiction

This nationally best-selling novel from Pulitzer Prize-winner Jeffrey Eugenides was adapted into an acclaimed film by Academy Award-winner Sofia Coppola. A haunting yet wickedly funny tale, The Virgin Suicides has captivated countless readers with its intoxicating portrait of lost innocence. A brilliant fusion of dark humor and tragedy, it is an atmospheric, allegorical masterpiece about five oppressed, suicidal sisters and the boys who dream of rescuing them.

Life has the capacity of great moments and attainment, of lives well lived, fulfilling for ourselves and for those we touch. But for others life is arduous. There is no spark to ignite the curiosity, to explore and achieve a stability and a growth to their lives. Indeed their lives, in their own eyes, become almost meaningless, their sense of themselves subsumed under a myriad of problems, whether real or imagined. Seismic events in a life might crush them; the loss of a loved one for instance. Coping is difficult, support hard to find and isolation abounds.

Inside the walls of Indiana’s elite Westmont Preparatory High School, expectations run high and rules are strictly enforced. But in the woods beyond the manicured campus and playing fields sits an abandoned boarding house that is infamous among Westmont’s students as a late-night hangout. Here, only one rule applies: don’t let your candle go out - unless you want the Man in the Mirror to find you....

Just outside of Tokyo lies Aokigahara, a vast forest and one of the most beautiful wilderness areas in Japan...and also the most infamous spot to commit suicide in the world. Legend has it that the spirits of those many suicides are still roaming, haunting deep in the ancient woods. When bad weather prevents a group of friends from climbing neighboring Mt. Fuji, they decide to spend the night camping in Aokigahara. But they get more than they bargained for when one of them is found hanged in the morning - and they realize there might be some truth to the legends after all.  

Ariel needed money, and Joseph Hortha had it. Bound by gratitude toward the late Chilean president and a persistent need to know whether murder or suicide ended his life during the 1973 coup, the two men embark on an investigation that will take them from Washington DC and New York, to Santiago and Valparaíso, and finally to London.

A suicide-attempt survivors' group pursues an unorthodox therapy. McSweeney's is a literary journal based in San Francisco.

LibriVox volunteers bring you 18 recordings of A Ballade of Suicide by G. K. Chesterton. This was the Fortnightly Poetry project for May 20, 2012.Gilbert Keith Chesterton was an English writer. He published works on philosophy, ontology, poetry, plays, journalism, public lectures and debates, literary and art criticism, biography, Christian apologetics, and fiction, including fantasy and detective fiction. Chesterton has been called the "prince of paradox". Time magazine, in a review of a biography of Chesterton, observed of his writing style: "Whenever possible Chesterton made his points with...

Laos, 1981: When an unofficial mailman drops off a strange bilingual diary, Dr. Siri is intrigued. Half is in Lao, but the other half is in Japanese, which no one Siri knows can read; it appears to have been written during the Second World War. Most mysterious of all, it comes with a note stapled to it: Dr. Siri, we need your help most urgently. But who is “we”, and why have they left no return address?    

Playwright, poet, and novelist Ntozake Shange originally composed for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf in as a mesmerizingly original choreopoem. The New York Post called it "rich with the author's special voice: by turns bitter, funny, ironic, and savage; fiercely honest and personal." Now a new audiobook, it chronicles the interconnected lives of a group of women facing shatteringly difficult issues, and evokes the indomitable power of enduring hope and joy.

Hurt people hurt people. Say there was a novel in which Holden Caulfield was an alcoholic and Lolita was a photographer's assistant and, somehow, they met in Bright Lights, Big City. He's blinded by love. She by ambition. Diary of an Oxygen Thief is an honest, hilarious, and heartrending novel...

"[A] glorious, glittery saga of friendship and loss... I read The Air You Breathe in two nights. (One might say I inhaled it.)." --NPR "Echoes of Elena Ferrante resound in this sumptuous saga."--O, The Oprah Magazine "Enveloping...Peebles understands the shifting currents of female friendship...

Some time in the near future, thanks to medical technology HealthTechTM, immortality is now within humanity's grasp. But faced with declining economic productivity, falling birth rates and a severely aging population, the Ministry has become the all-powerful arbiter of how healthcare resources are allocated. Resources accrue to 'lifers', those predisposed for a life expected to be lived healthily well beyond a hundred years old. Some factors that determine lifer status are genetically incidental - but there are other, more intangible factors that are within individuals' control: the degree to which they are 'life-loving' and self-caring. 

Ana and Nan are lost after the death of their mother, a renowned author who seemingly killed herself by jumping out of a window. Everyone knows who drove Elena to suicide - her long-time literary critic, Eben. But the twins need proof if they're going to get their revenge. When Eben requests access to Elena's diaries at the National Library where the twins work, desperate to clear his name, they see an opportunity. With careful planning and just a little outside help, the twins lock down the labyrinthine building, trapping their colleagues, the public and most importantly Eben inside.

A 23-year-old law student commits suicide in broad daylight in Moscow's Alexander Gardens. Fandorin is put on the case to find out what drove him to it, a case that deepens as he discovers that the young man was the son of a rich and influential factory owner. The story is enhanced by its authentic backdrop of 19th century Russia. After all, it's difficult to keep your mind on a case when the new Dostoyevsky novel has just hit the shops.

Wolf Walker is the director of the Suicide Academy. Troubled individuals come to his school for just one day and must decide whether to end their lives. As for Wolf himself, he is suffering a kind of death-in-life. The Academy’s board members have involved him in a policy skirmish, and the depressed employee he had an affair with is not getting any better. When his ex-wife, Jewel, and her husband come on the scene, ostensibly to make a film about the Academy, he is racked by old jealousies.

We'll live to fight another day! With those words, a hero rose to the challenge and a family found the strength within themselves to face the unthinkable. The forces of evil have descended upon Armstrong Ranch. The family had worked this ranch since the 1800s and now invaders from a faraway land had plans to take it away. Will the Armstrongs persevere in the face of a well-trained, deadly enemy which intends to steal their home and end their lives?

Eli Hagin can’t finish anything. He hates his job, but can’t seem to quit. He doesn’t want to be with his girlfriend, but doesn’t know how end things with her, either. Eli wants to write a novel, but he’s never taken a story beyond the first chapter. Eli also has trouble separating reality from fiction. When his best friend kills himself, Eli is motivated, for the first time in his life, to finally end something himself, just as Mike did. Except sessions with his therapist suggest that Eli’s most recent ‘first chapters’ are not as fictitious as he had intended.

Amerika, Anfang der achtziger Jahre, ein College an der Ostküste. Madeleine Hanna studiert die »Liebeshandlung« viktorianischer Romane. Während sie über den uralten Beweggründen des Herzens brütet, bricht das wirkliche Leben in Gestalt zweier junger Männer über sie herein. Leonard taucht Tabak kauend in einem Seminar auf, und schon bald verstrickt sich Madeleine in eine erotisch und intellektuell aufgeladene Beziehung. Zur selben Zeit lässt sich ihr alter Freund Mitchell wieder blicken, besessen von dem Gedanken, Madeleine sei für ihn bestimmt und er für sie.

Laurel Marks is a stunning, repressed seventeen-year-old schoolgirl. She also has a weakness for older men, most of all her father, whom she'll do anything to impress. After his sudden death, Laurel is sent off to a boarding school where she shortly latches onto a new love-object: her English teacher, Mr. Hugh Steadman. Following an encounter in the woods, a flirtation develops between the two, marked by hopeful highs and suicidal lows, on Laurel's part.

“As far as I know, you can only die once…” But when Aetna Simmons disappears from her lonely Bermuda cottage, she leaves behind not one but ten suicide notes. Ten different suicide notes. And no other trace to speak of, not even a corpse, as if she’d never existed. Drafts of a Suicide Note is the darkly enigmatic love letter of Kenji Okada-Caines, a petty criminal who once exposited on English literary classics and now, marooned on his native isle, nurtures an obsession with Aetna’s writing.