The acclaimed author of The Lost Art of Desire explores grief and longing in the face of illness in this “delicate, atmospheric” story collection (Kirkus). In the ten spare yet surprising stories in this collection, Robin Beeman delves into the inner lives of ordinary women, revealing their passions and frustrations with the limitations of life. In “Life Signs,” a dying woman spends her final days camping on a beach with her husband. A man facing the death of his dog relives the traumatic loss of his father in “Secrets.” And in the title novella, a married librarian gets romantically involved with an insurance salesman whose wife is struggling with cancer.
In her study of the married couple as the smallest political unit, Phyllis Rose uses the marriages of five Victorian writers who wrote about their own lives with unusual candor: Charles Dickens, John Ruskin, Thomas Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, and George Eliot--née Marian Evans.
This collects six wildly inventive short comics stories that might collectively be dubbed “speculative memoir.” Schrauwen’s deadpan depictions of his and his offspring's upcoming lives include alien abduction, dialogue with future agents, and coded messages in envelopes at breakfast.
What do Scientists Say About Time Travel? It's fair to say that most scientists today will tell you that time travel is impossible. Three of today's top physicists - Charles Liu, Brian Green and Michio Kaku - all hold that time travel is, if not impossible, unlikely in the extreme. However, one of the most brilliant minds of our time, physicist Stephen Hawking, disagrees - although only partially. He believes that time travel is theoretically possible, but only into the future. …. But What Do Real People Experience? The opinion of science, however, has never stopped thousands of people around the world from reporting what they firmly believe are actual experiences of spontaneous time travel! Still others insist that time travel is not only possible, but they have already done it as part of top secret government programmes. Claims for time travel range from the highly flaky to the astoundingly believable. They are especially difficult to dismiss when time travel reports come from absolutely ordinary, rock-solid people who have nothing to gain by proclaiming they travelled in time. Many people who report time travel experiences don't necessarily believe it themselves. What happened to them was so strange, so unexpected, yet so real; they simply have no other good explanation for their experience. You will meet a number of such individuals in this book, most of their stories straight out of the headline of local newspapers. No doubt, a story or two will strike the reader as pure balderdash. On the other hand, some of these cases of time travel are tantalizing and unexplainable. They also come with a certain amount of solid evidence, such as stopped clocks, frozen machines and electromagnetic devices acting in inexplicable ways. Physicist and NASA scientist Tom Campbell said that scientific advances always 'come from the fringe.' Thus, even if you consider some of these stories stepping dangerously 'out there' onto that fringy edge, remember that many of yesterday's fringe theories are today's scientific fact. At the very least, it doesn't hurt to approach the idea of time travel with an open mind and a sense of wonder.
In this poignant and powerful memoir, David B. Bohl reveals the inner turmoil and broad spectrum of warring emotions--shame, anger, triumph, shyness, pride--he experienced growing up as a "relinquished" boy. Adopted at birth by a prosperous family, Bohl battled throughout his earlier years to keep up a good front and surpass expectations as he tried desperately to fit in. An over-achiever at everything he undertook, whether in sailing, academics, or life as a trader on the Chicago Exchange floor, he continued his search for happiness, often finding it in a bottle or pill, and ultimately becoming a raging and wealthy alcoholic. Not until David marries and has children of his own does he feel compelled to search for his birth parents to discover if genetics played a role in the well-being of his offspring. "Baby Boy Bender," as he was labeled in the adoption papers, had been born to a red-haired co-ed who struggled with alcoholism and an athlete who later died of a brain tumor. After several severe seizures and frequent blackouts, it was time to make a drastic change and admit his addiction. Raised with no religious teachings, David struggled with traditional recovery fellowships and sought out secular supports, where he finally fit in. This support allowed him to learn the stark facts about mental health and addiction, as well as the monumental issues many "relinquishees" need to overcome to find peace and a quality of life they deserve.
Four friends from wildly different backgrounds have bonded over Dungeons & Dragons since the sixth grade. Now they're facing senior year and a major shift in their own universes. Math whiz Archie is struggling with his parents' divorce after his dad comes out as gay. Mari is terrified of her adoptive mother's life-altering news. Dante is carrying around a huge secret that is proving impossible to keep hidden. And when Sam gets dumped by the love of his life, everyone is ready to join him on a cross-country quest to win her back. The four quickly discover that the road is not forgiving, and that real life is no game. They must face a test of friendship where the stakes are more than just a roll of the dice--they are life and death.
In 1989, the memorable year when the Wall came down, a university student in Berlin on his early morning run finds a corpse lying on a park bench and alerts the authorities. This classic police-procedural scene opens an extraordinary novel, a masterwork that traces the fate of myriad Europeans - Hungarians, Jews, Germans, Gypsies - across the treacherous years of the mid-twentieth century. The social and political circumstances of their lives may vary richly, their sexual and spiritual longings may seem to each of them entirely unique, yet Peter Nádas's magnificent tapestry unveils uncanny, reverberating parallels that link them across time and space. Three unusual men are at the heart of Parallel Stories: Hans von Wolkenstein, whose German mother is linked to dark secrets of fascist-Nazi collaboration during the 1940s, Ágost Lippay-Lehr, whose influential father has served Hungary's different political régimes for decades, and Andras Rott, who has his own dark record of dark activities abroad. They are friends in Budapest when we eventually meet them in the spring of 1961, a pivotal time in the postwar epoch and in their clandestine careers. But the richly detailed, dramatic memories and actions of these men, like those of their friends, lovers and family members, range from Berlin and Moscow to Switzerland and Holland, from the Mediterranean to the North Sea, and of course, across Hungary. The ever-daring, ever-original episodes of Parallel Lives explore the most intimate, most difficult human experiences in a prose glowing with uncommon clarity and also with mysterious uncertainty - as is characteristic of Nadas's subtle, spirited art. The web of extended dramas in Parallel Stories reaches not just forward to the transformative year of 1989 but back to the spring of 1939, with Europe trembling on the edge of war; to the bestial times of 1944-45, when Budapest was besieged, the final solution devastated Hungary's Jews, and the war came to an end; and to the cataclysmic Hungarian Revolution of October 1956. But there is much more to Parallel Stories than that: it is a daring, demanding, and very moving exploration of humanity at its most constrained and its most free.
Literary Nonfiction. Criminal Law. Here is a unique bringing together of nonfiction (the lawyer's perspective) and fiction (the writer's view) on a topic of devastating concern to victims and the accused. Alex Landon (the lawyer) and Elaine Halleck (the writer) explore a particularly difficult topic, the effect of laws enacted in the aftermath of brutal child abductions and murders on those accused of lesser sexual crimes or those falsely accused and on society as a whole.
In a parallel universe where the fantastical creatures imagined in our world are real, a detective of the greatest detective agency in the world, The Poe Detective Agency, must, with the help of his zombie girlfriend, undertaker best friend, and a famous three-headed dog, defeat a rich man using the greatest magic of his world and ours, money, to destroy the detective and conquer the detective's beloved home city.
The depictions of librarians in over 374 novels, short stories, and plays in English are the focus of this fully annotated reference work. Librarians, no less than other professionals, want to know how they are depicted in fiction. The stereotypical or fictional librarian--the one with the bun, comfortable shoes, and dour demeanor--may be fading, but fiction teaches a lesson about public perception. Actually, story librarians are often described as adaptable, knowledgeable, shrewd, tactful, tender and intelligent--traits that the authors, and by extension the readers, look for in their librarians. All entries include complete bibliographic data, followed by a lengthy annotation that discusses how the librarian fits into the story and gives insight to how he or she is depicted. Title and author indexes are provided for further utility.
