Showing results for "blackstone" in Contemporary Fiction

In this incandescent novel, V.S. Naipaul takes us deeply into the life of one man, an Indian who, uprooted by the bloody tides of Third World history, has come to live in an isolated town at the bend of a great river in a newly independent African nation. Naipaul gives us the most convincing and disturbing vision yet of what happens in a place caught between the dangerously alluring modern world and its own tenacious past and traditions.

Mysterious, funny, insightful, and heartbreaking, these are tales of expatriates and exiles, wise children and straying saints. They compose a secret history, both intimate and panoramic, of modern times, and offer a kaleidoscopic impression of the world within a world that is Paris.

Winner of the National Book Award when it was first published in 1964, Herzog traces five days in the life of a failed academic whose wife has recently left him for his best friend. Through the device of letter writing, Herzog movingly portrays both the internal life of its eponymous hero and the complexity of modern consciousness.

It’s seven years after the events of Sideways. Miles has written a novel that has been made into a wildly successful movie, and the movie has changed his life. Jack, contrarily, is divorced, has a kid, and is on the skids. Phyllis, Miles’ mom, has suffered a stroke that’s left her wheelchair-bound and wasting away in assisted living. She desperately wants to live with her sister in Wisconsin. When Miles gets invited to be master of ceremonies at the International Pinot Festival in Oregon, he hatches a harebrained road trip.

From dark and humble beginnings, a master musician rises to take the world by storm. Nick Raze, a violin virtuoso, exists at the height of popularity, while his life remains a well-protected mystery. A year of artist-in-residency in Chicago introduces him to a man who offers him his first friendship and a woman who offers him his first taste of love. Now Nick must make a choice to fight against the bonds of his past in order to escape the isolation of his heart.

Dr Katarina 'Kitty' Holliday thought that once she finished medical school and found gainful employment at one of Sydney's best teaching hospitals that her dream was just beginning. The hard years, she thought, were finally over. But Kitty is in for a rude shock. Between trying to survive on the ward, in the operating theatre and in the emergency department without killing any of her patients or going under herself, Kitty finds herself facing situations that rock her very understanding of the vocation to which she intends to devote her life.

Hootenville, Pennsylvania: It looks like any conventional company town, but beneath its placid surface throbs a network of violence, blackmail, and murder. It takes an ex-Army spy to coolly fit together the puzzle and expose the game of terror, intrigue, and cunning known as industrial espionage. Someone at Hooten Plastics Corporation has been selling its manufacturing secrets.

Albert Corde is a professor of journalism and dean of students at a Chicago university. He and his wife, Minna, travel to Bucharest, Romania, where Minna's mother has suffered a stroke and is lying semiconscious in the local state hospital. As Corde tries to adapt to life in his mother-in-law's small apartment and cope with her relations and friends, news filters through to him of problems he left behind in Chicago: one of his students has been murdered.

Pru Marlowe isn't your ordinary animal psychic. A tough girl on the run from her own gift, Pru left the big city to return to her picturesque Berkshires hometown looking for a little peace. Too bad that her training as an animal behaviorist got her mixed up with Lily, a rescue dog, and Charles, the dog’s guardian. Now Charles is dead, and Lily appears to be headed for the same end, for after all, Lily is a pit bull, a fighting-ring dropout.

Small, almost imperceptible changes are rippling through the New England village of Grandville, altering it in ways its inhabitants cannot yet imagine. Laced through a narrative of one recent year in Grandville's history are stories that reach back to a 17th century family in Rotterdam, and 18th century migration by a farmer's lonely son in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and a 19th century underground railway journey by a gifted runaway slave.

Ben Riller is the most successful producer on Broadway, but his newest production is in danger of closing before it opens. In his stressed-out condition, Ben is hearing the voice of his long-dead father, and they're having a running argument about life, love, and other people's money.

The Bottom of the Sky is an aching rags to riches family saga that surges from rural squalor into the opulent power chambers of Wall Street and Silicon Valley. The story contrasts the 30-year struggles of an abused sister and brother who seek to reclaim themselves from their abhorrent past. One is abandoned to a life of sexual desecration and addiction. The other escapes with his demons to wield fragile, uncanny genius and unrelenting ambition to amass staggering wealth.

Hell - part mystery, part domestic meditation, part horror story - is a brilliantly eerie novel in which three households coexist in a single restless vision: a dollhouse; a dysfunctional family in 1950s Philadelphia; and the cottage home of Edwina Moss, a 19th-century expert on domestic management. While the inhabitants of the dollhouse are powerless to shape their destiny, the four members of the Philadelphia family dedicate themselves to mutual vigilance. Edwina Moss concedes domestic control to the imagination and, finally, to the spirit of Antonin Careme.

It is the morning of Pacote's last fight, the finale of a great career. The city of Sevilla waits, heavy with anticipation. But Pacote finds he is afraid and fears disgrace in the ring. Time, once his friend, now presses him on to the moment when the gate opens and the first bull enters the ring.

It was all too frighteningly familiar. For the second time in his life, Alex Penn wakes up in an alcoholic daze in a cheap hotel room off Times Square and finds himself lying next to the savagely mutilated body of a young woman. After the first death, he was convicted of murder and imprisoned, then released on a technicality. But this time he has to find out what happened during the blackout and why, before the police do.

The men she recruited to run her Amazon empire of drugs and death called her the White Angel. The ultra-secret US agency known as the Committee called her the most dangerous woman in the world. The blonde had skin of peaches and cream, cornflower-blue eyes, and legs that went all the way to heaven. She looked like an angel, but no man or woman ever killed more ruthlessly - or enjoyed it more. Killing her was Sam Borne’s next assignment.

Auchincloss' tale of a New York family dynasty opens with the suicide of Geraldine Brevoort, a woman whose pride and envy fed her alcoholism and kept her alone, and leads the listener through an odyssey of love, marriage, and adultery.

This latest plunge in to the psyche of the lone American male by author Lysa Williams brings us three men struggling in the war against dysfunction: a high-school student who rides the NYC subway each night in search of that perfect moment of beauty; a narcoleptic painter, the erotic Vermeer, who falls asleep on contact; and a psychic male prostitute who spends his off hours creating miniature models of the seven wonders of the world.

Michael and Kristen Harper are overwhelmed with financial burden. After being introduced to network marketing, Michael believes he may have found a way out. When his three best friends try to discredit the industry, Michael is tempted to trust their opinions. Fortunately, he recalls an encounter he had at his father's funeral with a high school dropout turned multimillionaire named Blake Easton. After discussing it with his wife, Michael decides to call Blake and ask him for financial advice. Little does he know that one simple phone call will send the Harpers on a life-altering journey.

To Tim Anderson, playing the guitar is as natural - and just about as important - as breathing. He’s already decided he’s going to be a musician. But his father has other career plans for him - all involving college. And now, because Tim is on the verge of flunking math, he’s been forbidden even to touch his guitar. It couldn’t have happened at a worse time. A top record company has just announced a nationwide contest for teenage rock groups - with a recording contract as first prize. Tim is sure his group, The Silver Sunshine, has a good chance of winning.