Chimes of a Lost Cathedral

Chimes of a Lost Cathedral

Author: Janet Fitch

Publisher: Little, Brown

Published: 2019-07-02

Total Pages: 703

ISBN-13: 0316510068

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A young Russian woman comes into her own in the midst of revolution and civil war in this "brilliant" novel set in "a world of furious beauty" (Los Angeles Review of Books). After the loves and betrayals of The Revolution of Marina M., young poet Marina Makarova finds herself alone amid the devastation of the Russian Civil War -- pregnant and adrift, forced to rely on her own resourcefulness to find a place to wait out the birth of her child and eventually make her way back to her native city, Petrograd. After two years of revolution, the city that was once St. Petersburg is almost unrecognizable, the haunted, half-emptied, starving Capital of Once Had Been, its streets teeming with homeless children. Moved by their plight, though hardly better off herself, she takes on the challenge of caring for these orphans, until they become the tool of tragedy from an unexpected direction. Shaped by her country's ordeals and her own trials -- betrayal and privation and inconceivable loss -- Marina evolves as a poet and a woman of sensibility and substance hardly imaginable at the beginning of her transformative odyssey. Chimes of a Lost Cathedral is the culmination of one woman's s journey through some of the most dramatic events of the last century -- the epic story of an artist who discovers her full power, passion, and creativity just as her revolution reveals its true direction for the future.


Paint It Black

Paint It Black

Author: Janet Fitch

Publisher: Hachette+ORM

Published: 2006-08-01

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 075956812X

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Josie Tyrell, art model, runaway, and denizen of LA's rock scene finds a chance at real love with Michael Faraday, a Harvard dropout and son of a renowned pianist. But when she receives a call from the coroner, asking her to identify her lover's body, her bright dreams all turn to black. As Josie struggles to understand Michael's death and to hold onto the world they shared, she is both attracted to and repelled by his pianist mother, Meredith, who blames Josie for her son's torment. Soon the two women are drawn into a twisted relationship that reflects equal parts distrust and blind need. With the luxurious prose and fever pitch intensity that are her hallmarks, Janet Fitch weaves a spellbinding tale of love, betrayal, and the possibility of transcendence. "A dark, crooked beauty that fulfills all the promise of White Oleander and confirms that Janet Fitch is an artist of the very highest order."-Los Angeles Times Book Review "Lushly written, dramatically plotted. . . Fitch's Los Angeles is so real it breathes."-Atlantic Monthly "There is nothing less than a stellar sentence in this novel. Fitch's emotional honesty recalls the work of Joyce Carol Oates, her strychnine sentences the prose of Paula Fox."-Cleveland Plain Dealer "A page-turning psychodrama. . . . Fitch's prose penetrates the inner lives of [her characters] with immediacy and bite."-Publishers Weekly "Fitch wonderfully captures the abrasive appeal of punk music, the bohemian, sometimes squalid lifestyle, the performers, the drugs, the alienation. This is crackling fresh stuff you don't read every day."-USA Today "In dysfunctional family narratives, Fitch is to fiction what Eugene O'Neill is to drama."-Chicago Sun-Times "Riveting. . . . An uncommonly accomplished page-turner."-Elle


White Oleander

White Oleander

Author: Janet Fitch

Publisher: Little, Brown

Published: 2006-09-01

Total Pages: 386

ISBN-13: 0759568170

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The unforgettable story of a young woman's odyssey through a series of Los Angeles foster homes on her journey to redemption. Astrid is the only child of a single mother, Ingrid, a brilliant, obsessed poet who wields her luminous beauty to intimidate and manipulate men. Astrid worships her mother and cherishes their private world full of ritual and mystery - but their idyll is shattered when Astrid's mother falls apart over a lover. Deranged by rejection, Ingrid murders the man, and is sentenced to life in prison. White Oleander is the unforgettable story of Astrid's journey through a series of foster homes and her efforts to find a place for herself in impossible circumstances. Each home is its own universe, with a new set of laws and lessons to be learned. With determination and humor, Astrid confronts the challenges of loneliness and poverty, and strives to learn who a motherless child in an indifferent world can become. Oprah Winfrey enjoyed this gripping first novel so much that she not only made it her book club pick, she asked if she could narrate the audio release.


Cleopatra's Shadows

Cleopatra's Shadows

Author: Emily Holleman

Publisher: Hachette+ORM

Published: 2017-09-05

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 0316383007

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Page-turning historical fiction that reimagines the beginnings of Cleopatra's epic saga through the eyes of her younger sister. Before Caesar and the carpet, before Antony and Actium, before Octavian and the asp, there was Arsinoe. Abandoned by her beloved Cleopatra and an indifferent father, young Arsinoe must fight for her survival in the bloodthirsty royal court when her half-sister Berenice seizes Egypt's throne. Even as the quick-witted girl wins Berenice's favor, a new specter haunts her days-dark dreams that have a habit of coming true. To survive, she escapes the palace for the war-torn streets of Alexandria. Meanwhile, Berenice confronts her own demons as she fights to maintain power. When their deposed father Ptolemy marches on the city with a Roman army, both daughters must decide where their allegiances truly lie, and Arsinoe grapples with the truth, that the only way to survive her dynasty is to rule it.


Confessions of a Gay Priest

Confessions of a Gay Priest

Author: Tom Rastrelli

Publisher: University of Iowa Press

Published: 2020-04-15

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 1609387090

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Tom Rastrelli is a survivor of clergy-perpetrated sexual abuse who then became a priest in the early days of the Catholic Church’s ongoing scandals. Confessions of a Gay Priest divulges the clandestine inner workings of the seminary, providing an intimate and unapologetic look into the psychosexual and spiritual dynamics of celibacy and lays bare the “formation” system that perpetuates the cycle of abuse and cover-up that continues today. Under the guidance of a charismatic college campus minister, Rastrelli sought to reconcile his homosexuality and childhood sexual abuse. When he felt called to the priesthood, Rastrelli began the process of “priestly discernment.” Priests welcomed him into a confusing clerical culture where public displays of piety, celibacy, and homophobia masked a closeted underworld in which elder priests preyed upon young recruits. From there he ventured deeper into the seminary system seeking healing, hoping to help others, and striving not to live a double life. Trained to treat sexuality like an addiction, he and his brother seminarians lived in a world of cliques, competition, self-loathing, alcohol, hidden crushes, and closeted sex. Ultimately, the “formation” intended to make Rastrelli a compliant priest helped to liberate him.


Chicago Catholic Churches

Chicago Catholic Churches

Author: Harrison Fillmore

Publisher: Arcadia Publishing

Published: 2022-02-21

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 1439674523

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It began as the hobby of a lifelong Chicagoan. Twenty-five years and more than three hundred freehand church sketches later, it acts as an archive for centuries of architectural and religious history. The pen-and-ink drawings meticulously capture the details of each individual church down to the bullet holes Al Capone's hit men put in the façade of Holy Name Cathedral. The comprehensive collection also includes structures that were razed or repurposed, their memories lost save for the loyal parishioners who remember their roots. From St. Adalbert to St. Willibrord, Harrison Fillmore traces the unmistakable profiles of Chicago's Catholic churches into a single gallery of heartfelt art.


Jacob's Ladder

Jacob's Ladder

Author: Ludmila Ulitskaya

Publisher: Macmillan + ORM

Published: 2019-07-09

Total Pages: 563

ISBN-13: 0374715904

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From a Man Booker International Prize nominee, “a century of tangled Russian family history in [a] lucid saga . . .a challenging yet rewarding epic.” ―Publishers Weekly “Ulitskaya continues the tradition of prerevolutionary Russian literature and demonstrates why she’s one of the most popular novelists in today’s Russia.” –The New York Times. Jumping between the diaries and letters of Jacob Ossetsky in Kiev in the early 1900s and the experiences of his granddaughter Nora in the theatrical world of Moscow in the 1970s and beyond, Jacob’s Ladder guides the reader through some of the most turbulent times in the history of Russia and Ukraine, and draws suggestive parallels between historical events of the early twentieth century and those of more recent memory. Spanning the seeming promise of the prerevolutionary years, to the dark Stalinist era, to the corruption and confusion of the present day, Jacob’s Ladder is a pageant of romance, betrayal, and memory. With a scale worthy of Tolstoy, it asks how much control any of us have over our lives—and how much is in fact determined by history, by chance, or indeed by the genes passed down by the generations that have preceded us into the world. “An expansive novel about the complications of human lives and repeating generational patterns, set against a backdrop that skips across a century of tumultuous Russian and Soviet history.” ―Booklist “A sweeping, ambitious story reminiscent at times of Pasternak in its grasp of both history and tragedy.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review


A Little History of the World

A Little History of the World

Author: E. H. Gombrich

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2014-10-01

Total Pages: 401

ISBN-13: 0300213972

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E. H. Gombrich's Little History of the World, though written in 1935, has become one of the treasures of historical writing since its first publication in English in 2005. The Yale edition alone has now sold over half a million copies, and the book is available worldwide in almost thirty languages. Gombrich was of course the best-known art historian of his time, and his text suggests illustrations on every page. This illustrated edition of the Little History brings together the pellucid humanity of his narrative with the images that may well have been in his mind's eye as he wrote the book. The two hundred illustrations—most of them in full color—are not simple embellishments, though they are beautiful. They emerge from the text, enrich the author's intention, and deepen the pleasure of reading this remarkable work. For this edition the text is reset in a spacious format, flowing around illustrations that range from paintings to line drawings, emblems, motifs, and symbols. The book incorporates freshly drawn maps, a revised preface, and a new index. Blending high-grade design, fine paper, and classic binding, this is both a sumptuous gift book and an enhanced edition of a timeless account of human history.


Out Of Control

Out Of Control

Author: Kevin Kelly

Publisher: Basic Books

Published: 2009-04-30

Total Pages: 666

ISBN-13: 078674703X

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Out of Control chronicles the dawn of a new era in which the machines and systems that drive our economy are so complex and autonomous as to be indistinguishable from living things.