"In 1905, a tourist agent and amateur antiques collector named Armand de Potter mysteriously disappeared off the coast of Greece. His body is never recovered and his wife is left to manage his affairs on her own. But as she starts to piece together his life, she realizes that everything was not as he had said. Infused with details from letters and diary entries, the [book] twists forward and backward through time, revealing a lost world of fake identities, underground antiques networks, and a husband who wasn't what he seemed"--Amazon.com.
Fresh perspectives and eye-opening discussions of contemporary American fiction In The Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction: 1980-2020, a team of distinguished scholars delivers a focused and in-depth collection of essays on some of the most significant and influential authors and literary subjects of the last four decades. Cutting-edge entries from established and new voices discuss subjects as varied as multiculturalism, contemporary regionalisms, realism after poststructuralism, indigenous narratives, globalism, and big data in the context of American fiction from the last 40 years. The Encyclopedia provides an overview of American fiction at the turn of the millennium as well as a vision of what may come. It perfectly balances analysis, summary, and critique for an illuminating treatment of the subject matter. This collection also includes: An exciting mix of established and emerging contributors from around the world discussing central and cutting-edge topics in American fiction studies Focused, critical explorations of authors and subjects of critical importance to American fiction Topics that reflect the energies and tendencies of contemporary American fiction from the forty years between 1980 and 2020 The Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction: 1980-2020 is a must-have resource for undergraduate and graduate students of American literature, English, creative writing, and fiction studies. It will also earn a place in the libraries of scholars seeking an authoritative array of contributions on both established and newer authors of contemporary fiction.
Nic de Potter is co-author of six kids in Brussels and six books in Bruges. - His intelligence agency investigated families during twenty years. - He uncovered best stories out of the millenium (1050-2050). - Eleventh century Graal quest with King Godfrey in Ardennes - Heroïc Celtic craftsmen Tournai, 12thC. - French textile heretics in Renaix, 13thC. - Tough rebels to bloody Duke of Alba in Brabant, 15thC. - Dutch secret support during the great sickness, 16thC. - Brilliant Flemish scouts in Bruges, 17thC. - Brave Belgian revolution leader, 18thC. - Forgotten American migrants, 19thC. - German WW1 escape, 20thC. - Vanishing of Brussels, 21thC!? - Amazing true illustrated adventures! More info and sources: www.potter.c.la
Joanna Scott (b. 1960) has been one of America’s leading writers since the 1990s. Both critically acclaimed and winner of numerous prestigious awards, Scott’s unique and probing vision and masterful writing has inspired readers to adjust their perceptions of life and of themselves. Her fiction jolts and illuminates, frequently exposing the degree to which the perverse is natural and the ordinary is twisted and demented. Conversations with Joanna Scott presents eighteen interviews that span two decades and are as much about the process of reading as they are about writing. Witty, probing, wide-ranging, and insightful, Scott’s off-the-cuff observations about literature and life are as thought-provoking as some of the most memorable lines and scenes in her fiction. Not only shedding new light on Scott’s fiction, Conversations with Joanna Scott also illuminates enduring areas of inquiry, like the challenge of trying to make art out of sentences; the effort to recover and imagine lost stories from the past; the changing status of the literary imagination; fictional portraiture and the productive possibilities that come from blending biography and fiction; and concerns about literacy. Joanna Scott has made her name through brilliant, award-winning novels, but this volume clarifies why she is also one of America’s leading public intellectuals and an astute critic of literature and culture.
Ernie Coleman survived the worst open-sea defeat in US Navy history. But he paid a price and buried the horrific memories for decades. In the manner of Mitch Albom’s highly successful Tuesdays with Morrie, 22 Minutes is a searing account of a survivor coming to terms with an incident he had suppressed for sixty years and the writer who painstakingly put together the clues about what had happened. Author Jeff Spevak was confronted with a dilemma: How do you tell the story of a man who can’t bring himself to talk about the most epic moment of his life? A clever fellow who’d scrapped to survive in a fashion that seems quaint today, Coleman tested himself as a teenager by swimming across lakes, building homes from foraged lumber, running a Navy carpentry shop as though he were a member of the scamming crew of McHale’s Navy. He was a self-taught sailor who’d become a legend on Lake Ontario. At age 96, Ernie was still sailing. Ernie Coleman talked of his life frankly – his honest remembrances of brawls and regrets. But he refused to talk about the one thing that had haunted him for decades: the sinking of his ship the Vincennes and his nightmares of men screaming in the burning sea, of incinerated corpses still manning the anti-aircraft guns. Through interviews with Coleman's family and others who knew Coleman, and arduous research Spevak finally put together what had occurred the night of the horrendous loss of his ship, the USS Vincennes, a cruiser sunk during the World War II Battle of Savo Island off Guadalcanal. Four big ships and more than 1,000 sailors were lost that night in a 22-minute battle, the worst open-sea defeat in the history of the United States Navy. Gripping, moving, highly personal, 22 Minutes is Coleman’s story of the incident he had buried for more than 60 years. Did Ernie pursue sailing with such intensity, at a time when most men his age are sitting in front of the television, waiting for the end, so that he did not have to close his eyes and remember that night on the Vincennes? “I know why those kids come back from Afghanistan and shoot themselves,” he said sadly one morning, sitting on the shady patio at his home. “You lay awake at night, reacting, reacting, reacting. Because it’s so real.” 22 Minutes has enormous potential to match some of the best-selling first-hand World War II memoirs published in recent years.
First published in 1968, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country established William Gass as one of America’s finest and boldest writers of fiction, and nearly fifty years later, the book still stands as a landmark of contemporary fiction. The two novellas and three short stories it contains are all set in the Midwest, and together they offer a mythical reimagining of America’s heartland, with its punishing extremes of heat and cold, its endless spaces and claustrophobic households, its hidden and baffled desires, its lurking threat of violence. Exploring and expanding the limits of the short story, Gass works magic with words, words that are as squirming, regal, and unexpected as the roaches, boys, icicles, neighbors, and neuroses that fill these pages, words that shock, dazzle, illumine, and delight.
On a summer day in 1946 Sally Werner, the precocious young daughter of hardscrabble Pennsylvania farmers, secretly accepts her cousin's invitation to ride his new motorcycle. Like so much of what follows in Sally's life, it's an impulsive decision with dramatic and far-reaching consequences. Soon she abandons her home to begin a daring journey of self-creation, the truth of which she entrusts only with her granddaughter and namesake, six decades later. But when young Sally's father -- a man she has never known -- enters her life and offers another story altogether, she must uncover the truth of her grandmother's secret history. Boldly rendered and beautifully told, in Follow Me Joanna Scott has crafted a paean to the American tradition of re-invention and a sweeping saga of timeless and tender storytelling.
