Bottle Grove
Bottle Grove

Author: Daniel Handler

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2019-08-27

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 1632864282

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A razor-sharp tale of two couples, two marriages, a bar, and a San Francisco start-up from a best-selling, award-winning novelist. This is a story about two marriages. Or is it? It begins with a wedding, held in the small San Francisco forest of Bottle Grove--bestowed by a wealthy patron for the public good, back when people did such things. Here is a cross section of lives, a stretch of urban green where ritzy guests, lustful teenagers, drunken revelers, and forest creatures all wait for the sun to go down. The girl in the corner slugging vodka from a cough-syrup bottle is Padgett--she's keeping something secreted in the woods. The couple at the altar are the Nickels--the bride is emphatic about changing her name, as there is plenty about her old life she is ready to forget. Set in San Francisco as the tech-boom is exploding, Bottle Grove is a sexy, skewering dark comedy about two unions--one forged of love and the other of greed--and about the forces that can drive couples together, into dependence, and then into sinister, even supernatural realms. Add one ominous shape-shifter to the mix, and you get a delightful and strange spectacle: a story of scheming and yearning and foibles and love and what we end up doing for it--and everyone has a secret. Looming over it all is the income disparity between San Francisco's tech community and . . . everyone else.

Blood Grove
Blood Grove

Author: Walter Mosley

Publisher: Mulholland Books

Published: 2021-02-02

Total Pages: 291

ISBN-13: 0316491195

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"Master of craft and narrative" Walter Mosley returns with this crowning achievement in the Easy Rawlins saga, in which the iconic detective's loyalties are tested on the sun-soaked streets of Southern California (National Book Foundation) It is 1969, and flames can be seen on the horizon, protest wafts like smoke though the thick air, and Easy Rawlins, the Black private detective whose small agency finally has its own office, gets a visit from a white Vietnam veteran. The young man comes to Easy with a story that makes little sense. He and his lover, a beautiful young woman, were attacked in a citrus grove at the city’s outskirts. He may have killed a man, and the woman and his dog are now missing. Inclined to turn down what sounds like nothing but trouble, Easy takes the case when he realizes how damaged the young vet is from his war experiences—the bond between veterans superseding all other considerations. The veteran is not Easy’s only unlooked-for trouble. Easy’s adopted daughter Feather’s white uncle shows up uninvited, raising questions and unsettling the life Easy has long forged for the now young woman. Where Feather sees a family reunion, Easy suspects something else, something that will break his heart. Blood Grove is a crackling, moody, and thrilling race through a California of hippies and tycoons, radicals and sociopaths, cops and grifters, both men and women. Easy will need the help of his friends—from the genius Jackson Blue to the dangerous Mouse Alexander, Fearless Jones, and Christmas Black—to make sense of a case that reveals the darkest impulses humans harbor. Blood Grove is a novel of vast scope and intimate insight, and a soulful call for justice by any means necessary.

And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks
And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks

Author: William S. Burroughs

Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Published: 2009-11-10

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 0802198899

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In the summer of 1944, a shocking murder rocked the fledgling Beats. William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, both still unknown, we inspired by the crime to collaborate on a novel, a hard-boiled tale of bohemian New York during World War II, full of drugs and art, obsession and brutality, with scenes and characters drawn from their own lives. Finally published after more than sixty years, this is a captivating read, and incomparable literary artifact, and a window into the lives and art of two of the twentieth century’s most influential writers.

Guide
Guide

Author: Dennis Cooper

Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Published: 2007-12-01

Total Pages: 189

ISBN-13: 1555847749

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A brilliant novel of LA’s underground from the author of Closer, “the last literary outlaw in mainstream American fiction” (Bret Easton Ellis). Chris is a young porn star who wants to experience death at someone else’s hand; Mason has lurid fantasies about members of British pop bands; Sniffles is a teenage runaway whose need for love outweighs his attachment to life. Courtesy of a frankly manipulative author/narrator named Dennis, these characters move through a subterranean Los Angeles where hallucination and reality, sex and suicide, love and indifference run together in terrifying ways. Guide, the fourth novel in a projected five-book cycle, continues to explore the boundaries of experience in the manner that has earned Dennis Cooper comparisons to Poe, Genet, and Baudelaire. “The most seductively frightening, best written novel of contemporary urban life that anyone has attempted in a long time; it’s the funniest, too.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review “With Guide, America’s most daring novelist has given us his masterpiece.” —The Face “Make[s] American Psycho and Lolita seem tame . . . A brilliantly base tale of human self-destruction for the brave.” —The Times (London) “Dante’s Inferno with George Bataille as your escort, damaged yet exhilarating.” —Arena “Though the story is as compelling as it is perverse, Cooper purposefully overrides it with an innovative style and raw, truthful character studies . . . With Guide, Cooper claims his place, alongside Genet and Burroughs, as a master of his own disenfranchised generation.” —Library Journal

About Harry Towns
About Harry Towns

Author: Bruce Jay Friedman

Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic

Published: 2007-12-01

Total Pages: 168

ISBN-13: 0802197450

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This classic comic novel about a midlife man whose life is spiraling out of control is a “heartbreaking delight . . . Nothing less than a joy” (The Washington Post Book World). Screenwriter Harry Towns, a bicoastal playboy with a broken marriage and a child he rarely sees, has been reveling in the freewheeling atmosphere of the early 1970s. But when cracks start to appear in his perfectly constructed life, he has no option but to pick up the scattered pieces of his past and begin anew. From a New York Times–bestselling author and veteran Hollywood screenwriter, About Harry Towns is both a portrait of a particular era and a timeless look at the wrong turns that make up a life—featuring “ a character unique, haunting, and completely memorable” (The Washington Post Book World). “Brilliant.” —The New York Times Book Review

Why We Broke Up
Why We Broke Up

Author: Daniel Handler

Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers

Published: 2011-12-27

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 0316194581

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I'm telling you why we broke up, Ed. I'm writing it in this letter, the whole truth of why it happened. Min Green and Ed Slaterton are breaking up, so Min is writing Ed a letter and giving him a box. Inside the box is why they broke up. Two bottle caps, a movie ticket, a folded note, a box of matches, a protractor, books, a toy truck, a pair of ugly earrings, a comb from a motel room, and every other item collected over the course of a giddy, intimate, heartbreaking relationship. Item after item is illustrated and accounted for, and then the box, like a girlfriend, will be dumped.

Seedlip Cocktails
Seedlip Cocktails

Author: Seedlip

Publisher: Weldon Owen

Published: 2020-01-07

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 1681885107

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Seedlip is the world's first distilled non-alcoholic spirit, solving the ever-growing dilemma of 'what to drink when you're not drinking ®'. It is based on the distilled non-alcoholic remedies from The Art of Distillation written in 1651, and now repurposed to pioneer a new category of drinks. Seedlip is a grown-up non-alchoholic alternative to spirited drinks that balances crisp, delicious flavors and healthy, natural ingredients. This recipe book offers an exclusive collection of Seedlip’s finesse cocktails as well as insight into their ethos, technique, and ingredients. Highly illustrated, with recipes from the world’s best bartenders and newly commissioned images from leading drinks photographer, Rob Lawson, here are the secrets of the Seedlip way.

The Improper Life of Bezellia Grove
The Improper Life of Bezellia Grove

Author: Susan Gregg Gilmore

Publisher: Crown

Published: 2010-08-17

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 0307592332

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Nobody in Nashville has a bigger name to live up to than Bezellia Grove. As a Grove, she belongs to one of city’s most prominent families and is expected to embrace her position in high society. That means speaking fluent French, dancing at cotillions with boys from other important families, and mastering the art of the perfect smile. Also looming large is her given name Bezellia, which has been passed down for generations to the first daughter born to the eldest Grove. The others in the long line of Bezellias shortened the ancestral name to Bee, Zee or Zell. But Bezellia refuses all nicknames and dreams that one day she, too, will be remembered for her original namesake’s courage and passion. Though she leads a life of privilege, being a Grove is far from easy. Her mother hides her drinking but her alcoholism is hardly a secret. Her father, who spends long hours at work, is distant and inaccessible. For as long as she can remember, she’s been raised by Maizelle, the nanny, and Nathaniel, the handyman. To Bezellia, Maizelle and Nathaniel are cherished family members. To her parents, they will never be more than servants. Relationships are complicated in 1960s Nashville, where society remains neatly ordered by class, status and skin color. Black servants aren’t supposed to eat at the same table as their white employers. Black boys aren’t supposed to make conversation with white girls. And they certainly aren’t supposed to fall in love. When Bezellia has a clandestine affair with Nathaniel’s son, Samuel, their romance is met with anger and fear from both families. In a time and place where rebelling against the rules carries a steep price, Bezellia Grove must decide which of her names will be the one that defines her.

This Place You Return to Is Home
This Place You Return to Is Home

Author: Kirsty Gunn

Publisher: Grove Press

Published: 2000-03

Total Pages: 214

ISBN-13: 9780802136824

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Haunted by the past, these melancholy stories explore the paradox of home as a place of both departure and return, comprising a range of voices portrayed with breathtaking skill.

The Collected Shorter Plays
The Collected Shorter Plays

Author: Samuel Beckett

Publisher: Grove Press

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 218

ISBN-13: 0802144381

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Collects over twenty short plays published by the Nobel Prize winning playwright Samuel Beckett. Includes his mimes, radio and television plays, screenplay, and adaptations of other's works.